The Mythcreant Podcast 497 – Cliffhangers: Fantastic Hooks or Just Annoying?
I’d love to tell you what the topic is this week, but then what reason would you have to keep reading the rest of this blurb? Obviously, the best option is to string you along by abruptly ending each sentence without really giving you any information or closure. At least, that’s the strategy behind cliffhangers, which is what we’re talking about today. Advice around these can get pretty weird, and if there’s one thing we hope you take away from this podcast, it’s to not treat your audience as the enemy. Also, we’re upset at the streaming model even though we will never willingly go back to the way things used to be.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Orie. With me today is…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: And…
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: Oh, no! This podcast is going to end without saying what the topic is. I’d better say it now! The topic is… Thank you for listening. Please do the Patreon stuff and like that smash button and share/scribe to all of your friends and yeah, that’s… I think we can call it, guys. That was a good podcast.
Bunny: Yeah, if we don’t do that, why would people listen to the next episode?
Oren: Yeah, come back next time and you’ll find out what today’s topic is.
Bunny: It was a princess with a shiny tail… I don’t know the closing theme as well. I definitely won’t be too mad to continue if we do that.
Oren: Yeah, it’ll work right. Everything’s fine. Nothing bad is going to happen here. I wouldn’t worry about it.
Chris: It’s only a cliffhanger if they’re literally hanging off a cliff. Otherwise, it’s sparkling dissatisfaction.
Oren: That’s good. That’s good. We need to get into term policing of cliffhangers.
Bunny: That was going to be how I was going to start.
Oren: Yeah. So today we’re talking about cliffhangers and whether they are a good idea or a bad idea. And if you’ve read my previous coverage of the topic, you probably won’t be surprised which side I take. We do first have to answer what is a cliffhanger. So I discovered, having published a book… Oh, I published a book. Buy my book. That’s my whole personality now.
Chris: Ooh!
Oren: …that people are way more liberal with the description of what a cliffhanger is than I thought, because I had several people tell me that my book ended on a cliffhanger, and I didn’t think it did!
Chris: No, that is not…
Oren: I don’t think that’s a cliffhanger, guys! I didn’t think it was one, but, you know, they didn’t like it. It was annoying. So, you know, the customer’s always right to a certain extent, I guess.
Bunny: Yeah. Customer is always pedantic. I don’t think that counts.
Chris: Granted, you can’t always expect all the people online to be… It’s like with the unreliable narrators. People now use that for all kinds of things that are not unreliable narrator, and we can’t necessarily expect people on the internet to be very particular about the way they use terms.
Oren: And I don’t want to make it sound like I’m putting people who read my book on blast if they didn’t like the ending, and that’s perfectly legitimate. Maybe the ending’s bad, who knows? But I don’t think it was a cliffhanger because, without any spoilers, it leaves a plot thread unresolved, but it doesn’t end in the middle of a fight, which is what I would consider a cliffhanger.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: I would consider a cliffhanger something that ends in the middle of an open, urgent conflict. So it could be literally hanging off a cliff, it could be an argument, it could be a fight. That’s what I would consider a cliffhanger.
Chris: Yeah, I think so. In most cases, there’s something new that arises, some new urgent threat that becomes last minute, and then it’ll cut off immediately after it happens. Like someone breaking in, and then lifting a knife to stab the protagonist! And then cut, go to black, would be something that is a typical cliffhanger. It’s something new, but it’s also annoyingly urgent, so it gives you a feeling of annoyance. Whereas we talk about hooks a lot, and we recommend those to end with, because people… I’ve heard a lot of people recommend, “Oh, you just end chapters with cliffhangers.” That is not my opinion, but I do often recommend having a little hook, and the difference is just… Again, it’s not something that you feel like has to be addressed that second, so the… For instance, the protagonist might learn the villain broke into a place and stole powerful weapons. Like yeah, they will probably use that weapon in the future, it is going to cause trouble, but they are not currently aiming that weapon at somebody, about to shoot that.
Bunny: Yeah, it seems like it’s a cliffhanger if you’re justified in using the Dun Dun Duuuun music.
Chris: Yeah, that… That’s a good measure.
Oren: And people also describe endings where a sudden new thing shows up, even if it’s not necessarily a conflict. You’ve spent the whole book with the protagonist doing stuff and having an adventure, and then the book ends, and in the final scene, their long-dead spouse walks in the door and then you cut to ending. People might describe that as a cliffhanger. And even though there’s not a fight, right? they’re not like… As far as we know, there’s no reason to think that the spouse is attacking anyone. But the extreme curiosity of, “What, hang on, I thought the spouse was dead. What’s happening?” That could be considered a cliffhanger, maybe.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Bunny: Yeah. And I think also what counts as a cliffhanger can also depend on the scale that it’s appearing at. So something that might count as a cliffhanger at the end of a story would be less of one if it was simply ending a chapter, just because one happens on a smaller scale than another one. At the very least, that’ll change how the audience takes it.
Chris: Yeah, I would say that if it’s something that’s designed to make it so that the audience cannot rest at a place that is normally designed for them to take a break, including chapter endings, that it could qualify as a cliffhanger. But I would say that, generally, the type of hooks that people would have as end of chapter often would not be as large. They could be as large as the end of the book, but often just because that’s a smaller break.
Oren: So the way that I look at it is that cliffhangers at the end of chapters, or the end of scenes, to a certain extent, are probably inevitable if your book has interesting high-tension conflicts, just ’cause you do want to end those with a hook; you don’t want to feel like the story is over. And those don’t have to be cliffhangers, but they probably will be sometimes. Like, that’ll just be the most convenient thing you’ve got to hand. It’s like, “Man, I’ve been going for a while, I need a stopping point, but I’m about to start another fight.” I could put in a new, completely different hook, or I could just have the fight be about to start. “All right, I’m calling it, this chapter needs to be ended at some point.” So that’s probably going to happen. I would say don’t do it a lot, but a few times it’s probably not going to kill your story.
Chris: I would also say, if it’s a hook, it’s more likely to be accompanied by some kind of satisfying resolution, and that’s more usable because we fulfilled some of our promises to readers, but at the same time left something open for interest instead of closing up nothing.
Oren: Right.
Bunny: Right.
Chris: Or, for instance, I think it was Demon Hunter, the anime that just had this really annoying habit of always ending an episode right before a fight started. The actual story arcs were deliberately misaligned with where episodes would end.
Bunny: That’s obnoxious.
Chris: So that you always felt like you had to watch the next one, and then they would actually resolve the arcs in the middle of the episode and then open new ones.
Bunny: See, I feel like the reason people, and by people I think I mean us, because by now I feel like our standpoints on this are pretty clear, the reason that cliffhangers are so annoying is because they tend to be used for things like commercial breaks, for instance, where it’s really disingenuous: “Watch this commercial about Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, the sponsor of today’s podcast, to learn where things are going next.” And I think about cliffhangers the same way I think about jump scares: It works, but it’s a cheap trick, and sure, it can be done well, I suppose, and some people really like jump scares, and true, it affects me the way it’s supposed to, I jump when I’m jump-scared, but it’s not a pleasant experience.
Oren: It has been fascinating to look at streaming shows over the years as they evolved from regular TV shows, which had commercial breaks built into them, because everyone knew what the commercial breaks were going to be approximately, and so they would build those into the episode, and so you had these obvious breaks for commercial, and they were often cliffhangers, right? because commercials are annoying. “Don’t change the channel! You have to come back.” And then streaming shows came out and they had those same breaks for a while, even though they didn’t have any commercials. And then those went away and streaming shows stopped having those breaks ’cause they didn’t need them. But now all the streamers have commercials again, and a lot of their shows haven’t caught up. So a lot of the breaks for commercials are in very awkward places.
Bunny: Ugh, the villain turn.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I do think, again, hooks are good, and there is definitely a fuzzy boundary between a hook and a cliffhanger where it gets more annoying. I do think that a lot of cliffhangers, especially if the storyteller is in the habit of always using a cliffhanger at the end of everything, in effort to bring the audience back, I feel a little like that starts to get into Black Hat storytelling, where our purpose is no longer to actually serve our audience and give them the best experience we can, but instead to manipulate them for our benefit. And that’s the thing that I don’t like. I think that I want to win, but I also want them to win. I don’t want to feel like I’m in competition or playing against my audience, right?
Bunny: I think I have genuinely quit shows before because I reached a place where the episode didn’t end on a cliffhanger and a thing got resolved and things seemed to be okay, and I’m like, “I know if I keep watching, I’ll start hitting those anxiety-causing cliffhanger endings again and just be dragged along,” and it gets exhausting. I would rather end here in the middle of the show where there’s a semblance of resolution than continue being dragged along.
Oren: That is the best way. If we could all get the audiences for all shows together and convince them to do that, that would stop writers from putting in annoying cliffhangers. So, hang on. I’ve got my new organizational platform ready.
Bunny: I’ll sign up.
Chris: Yeah.
Bunny: Yeah, where’s the dotted line?
Chris: I do think there’s a real chance that cliffhangers give a short-term boost, right? where people are more likely to read the next installment, but at the cost of a long-term following. And because, again, short-term gains are always just so much easier to measure than long-term loss or gain, but we don’t really know, I think for sure. But I have also, you know, I quit Orphan Black because of the cliffhanger at the end of the season. I felt very cheated by that. I felt like that was what was supposed to resolve at the end of the season, so even though I had been mostly enjoying the show, I decided not to continue for that reason. So it can cause people to leave. It’s possible. The numbers are hard to tell, right?
Oren: Yeah. One of the reasons I quit Foundation over on Apple was the same reason, although Foundation wasn’t a great show in other ways, but…
Chris: Oh, Foundation was the absolutely… like, when I think of the ultimate worst cliffhanger I have ever seen, it’s the Foundation show.
Oren: Yeah. Spoilers for Foundation if anyone cares. So there’s an episode where we discover that someone we thought was a good guy has murder-knifed another good guy, and they’re all dead and it’s all terrible and bloody. And our protagonist sees this and is like, “Why did you do this? What’s going to happen?”
Chris: And to be clear about the emotional investment here, it’s the protagonist’s boyfriend who kills their mentor.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So this is like a group of three who are very tight-knit as far as we know. They’ve been getting along great; we have no reason why he would just suddenly turn around and murder the mentor, so it’s very bewildering.
Oren: And then the murderer throws the protagonist into an escape pod, and she is sent off into the void, and episode ends. Okay, I guess we gotta come back next episode to find out what that was about. Next episode we’re like, “Hey, we’ve jumped to the future. You don’t get to find out what that was about.”
Bunny: Ugh, that’s awful.
Chris: Yeah, now we’re at the colony with other people now, and it’s three episodes of that before we get back to her, and even when we get back to her, we don’t get answers, right? She’s now in the future. So it’s just… it’s awful.
Bunny: And that’s the problem that… A very similar thing happens when you do too many cliffhangers in your chapters, especially if you have multiple points of view. Again, I’ve had books do this to me where a chapter will end on a cliffhanger and then it switches to another character’s point of view and I… I just… I skip that chapter because I know that chapter is going to end on another cliffhanger, and so I just read the chapters out of order.
Oren: Man, Feast for Crows ends… Spoilers for Feast for Crows, I guess; it’s a billion years old now, one of its endings is this big cliffhanger of whether Brienne is still alive or not. We had to wait six years for the next book, and in the next book she’s maybe alive. It’s actually unclear if the character we see claiming to be Brienne is actually her. And then that book ends. So we never even found out. And we never will.
Bunny: Oh my gosh.
Oren: Which is the biggest danger of ending your show, book, or whatever on a cliffhanger, because you might not ever get back to it. If you’re an author, you might just lose steam and not ever write the next one. And if you’re a television show creator, especially now, where it just seems like they murder shows left and right because the streaming bubble is collapsing, there’s an even higher chance that you’ll never come back to finish the show. So it’s… oof, it is a… Man, that is a gamble you are taking.
Chris: Yeah, I was going to say, Isn’t that what happened to… uh, I think it was called First Kill, where it ended at least on a very low note and then it didn’t get renewed?
Oren: No, I wouldn’t… Okay. I wouldn’t say quite that with First Kill.
Chris: I think First Kill still resolved a lot of things that were mainly addressed in the season. It just opened up another big hook for the next season. I think that was a little more reasonable.
Bunny: Ah, okay.
Oren: Yeah. For spoilers for the end of First Kill, but it’s like a Romeo and Juliet-type story, and it ends with the two of them running off together. I think that’s what happens, right, Chris?
Chris: Yeah. But then, I think, one of their brothers has got some bad evil plans of some kind. It’s been a while.
Oren: Yeah, it’s clearly laying a big hook for season two, and it’s disappointing that that was never made. I liked First Kill. But I’m thinking of something more like the show Dark Matter, or I should say one of the shows called Dark Matter. This is the sci-fi one that tried to be Firefly and it ends with an evil alien fleet from another dimension warping in. And that’s it. Show over.
Bunny: Wow.
Chris: I mean, they were probably trying to do a TNG, which I can sympathize because The Next Generation, Best of Both Worlds, again, if you’ve only seen it in reruns, you may not know how torturous this cliffhanger was, because Best of Both Worlds, that two-parter was three months apart.
Oren: Yeah. Although I have to be honest: I’ve joked about that, but nowadays, three months apart for a show cliffhanger feels like nothing. I used to joke, “Oh, we had it so much worse.” I actually realized: no, it’s worse now!
Chris: Yeah!
Oren: It takes two years, if you’re lucky, for a show to get another season now. It’s ridiculous!
Chris: And honestly, those streaming service shows are really relentless with trying to do all the cliffhangers and fancy doodads. Honestly, they just get too elaborate with their stories and try too many reveals. Just tell a good story, come on. But in any case, we got only eight episodes that are two years apart, and I just… I’m just waiting for streaming servicess to realize, “Oh, we need to keep our subscribers, not just to get them to subscribe in the first place. So we should actually have a 22-episode season now.”
Oren: Yeah, someone can suggest, “Hey, what if we spent less money per episode so we could have more episodes?” And they can call it, like, Disruptive Micro-Prestige Television. And it’s not really that simple, there are other reasons why streaming seasons are so short, but one of the reasons is the arms race of spending so much money per episode. Not the only reason, but it’s a big one.
Bunny: And the gaps between seasons and stuff like that is one of the reasons I just can’t really get into television, I’ve found. Because not even necessarily… and I think cliffhangers are a big part of it, but not necessarily the only part, is because you’re never guaranteed to get a satisfying outcome to anything that happens.
Chris: Especially if it’s a mystery box show.
Bunny: And an incomplete TV show. Yeah, no, exactly.
Chris: Yeah, that’s true.
Oren: I could complain about what TV is like now for the next five hours, but moving back into the realm of books, because I think most people who listen to this are probably more likely to be writing books than TV shows…
Chris: That’s right, those things.
Oren: Those weird, like, collections of pages. Who knows?
Chris: Going back to just when cliffhangers work personally, regardless of the medium (books, shows, graphic novels), I am much more sympathetic to a cliffhanger if it’s the end of the penultimate installment. So if we have a series of any kind where it’s the second-to-last episode of the season, or the second-to-last issue in a series of comics, or the second-to-last book in a series, I’m just much more sympathetic to having a cliffhanger on those ones, because I feel like that kind of helps escalate and generate excitement for the finale, so it just feels more appropriate to me.
Oren: Yeah. One thing that I would strongly recommend for anyone who’s thinking of adding a cliffhanger, regardless of where you’re adding it, is make sure you can actually follow up on the cliffhanger.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: Because sometimes that’s harder than it sounds, and there are a number of cliffhangers that are more annoying than normal because they end with, like, “Oh no, what’s going to happen?” And then they come back and it’s like, “Oh, it wasn’t actually a big deal. Don’t worry about it.”
Chris: Which I think is another issue with this whole mentality, that every chapter needs to end on a cliffhanger, is writers try to push it too much and it’s like, “Oh, I don’t really have a cliffhanger here.” Okay, does this make up something that doesn’t actually work?
Bunny: It’s definitely like… If you watch a lot of old serials (not the food, the serial shorts and stuff like that), where it’ll feature some hero doing heroics and stuff like that, like the old Batman shorts or something, it’ll always end on a cliffhanger because they want you to watch the next installment or whatever. And so it’ll be like, “Oh, the hero’s in a car, and the car went over a cliff and it crashed. And it exploded. How will the hero escape?” And then the next episode, it’s like the hero got out of the car before it went over the cliff. And they weren’t actually in any danger, and that’s the worst way to pay off a cliffhanger.
Chris: That happens a lot with the “Oh, I know! Let’s create a threat by making a character that does not actually mean any harm/look threatening,” or having them end on a dramatic line that suggests they’re mad when they’re not actually angry.
Oren: My favorite is when it’s just like, “Yeah, it was just the thing you guessed it probably was, but we’re going to pretend like that was a surprise.” In Red Seas Under Red Skies, which is a novel I otherwise actually like a lot, but it starts with this flash-forward of, “Oh no, my friend is betraying me!” And of course, as you’re reading, you’re like, “Okay, these characters are tricksters and they all are constantly pretending to betray each other.” So he’s probably only pretending to betray you ’cause you’ve done that several times at this point. And then you catch up to that point in the story ’cause it’ll flash-forward and yeah, he was pretending to betray you. Whoa, whoa!
Chris: Yeah, there’s a lot of places in books where I can tell a line is just too dramatic, and so the storyteller is definitely just inflating a hook because there’s just no way that they can follow up on that. I think a good example is in The Alchemist. There’s this chapter that ends with saying this character “saw something and realized that the world would never be the same again.” And it’s like, “Okay, what? I very much doubt…” And then the next chapter it’s like, oh, he saw some people robbing the shop. That’s what it was. That’s your chapter hook.
Oren: The worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone.
Chris: World will never be the same!
Bunny: It’s like the trademark trailer lines that are just like in there to have a soundbite that sounds intriguing and dramatic but doesn’t actually have much to do with anything.
Oren: It’s like lines that don’t make sense in context if they actually make it into the show or the movie.
Chris: Right. Sometimes they don’t.
Oren: In season two of Discovery, they have Pike say, “We’re going to go exploring and have a little fun along the way,” and you think, you stop for a second, you’re like, “Why would he say that?” That is a weird line in context. That doesn’t sound like something he would say to his crew. But the reason he says it is that in the trailers, they’re trying to let us know that season two will be less grimdark than season one.
Chris: And it was a lie.
Oren: Yeah, it was kind of a lie. But they knew that we thought it was too grimdark. So there was marketing about how it was going to be less grimdark this time, and that’s why that line exists.
Bunny: I didn’t see him do a sarcastic eyeroll and finger quotes. “Let’s have some ‘fun.’”
Oren: Oh, another one that is just one of the most annoying kinds of cliffhangers ever is when it seems like the story is over, and then, to create a cliffhanger, the author undoes the victories that the protagonists just won.
Chris: Rude of you to attack Stranger Things 4 that way.
Oren: Yeah, rude of me, except I’ll never apologize ’cause I was right to do it.
Bunny: It’s the anti-resolution.
Oren: It’s like, Stranger Things 4, they go through this whole thing of blowing up the bad guys and doing all the stuff, and they win and they have their hard-fought victory. And then at the end, oh no, the bad guy did the thing he was trying to do anyway. I guess he just did it after you left. Good job, everybody.
Bunny: Oops. Should have stuck around another five minutes.
Oren: Yeah. Come back in five years and you’ll maybe see a resolution to this. All of the children will be in their late twenties by then.
Chris: In the category of having a cliffhanger and then skipping over the actual resolution to that cliffhanger in the story, which happens for a couple reasons, I think, and sometimes it happens just because the story doesn’t really have anything to do there, like a character walks dramatically in, is like, “We need to talk,” and then they just skip the conversation ’cause they didn’t have anything for them to say. Like in The Last of Us, where the characters are in a really tough situation to get out of, you know, as they’ve just been shot, and we end there, and then, “Oh, look, they’ve arrived at safety when we open the next episode, please forget where they left off.”
Oren: There is another kind, and you can argue whether this is a cliffhanger or not, but it’s certainly related, and this is where you end the story, not on a new conflict, but right before the resolution of your conflict. So, like, the conflict is over, but you haven’t seen the resolution yet, and that is especially awkward because you can’t start the next story with resolution, ’cause that’s boring. That means the next story would start off on a really boring note. But it also means that the next story, if it doesn’t have that resolution, then it will make the first one feel unsatisfying. And I’m not just talking about the first two Star Wars sequel movies, but I am definitely talking about them, right? Because The Force Awakens, the whole movie is spent trying to find Luke, theoretically. And we find him, and then the movie ends before we can get the resolution. And Rian Johnson gets a lot of flak for having Luke just toss his lightsaber away and having that be the opening of Last Jedi. Or not the opening, but that’s like where it starts with Rey, right? But on the other hand, what else was he supposed to do? Like, just have the Rey sequence be, “Alright, you found me. Now we’re going to do uncomplicated training”? No, that should have been the result of the last movie.
Bunny: Yeah, it’s definitely… I feel like that plays into the sort of weird, staggering thing that you talked about earlier, where things resolve in the middle because you want to constantly have cliffhangers at the end.
Oren: Yeah. Gotta keep bullying me into coming back, ’cause you couldn’t just make the show good.
Bunny: That’s hard, Oren.
Oren: You gotta withhold satisfaction from me.
Chris: It might be worth giving some tips for. Okay: if we do want something at the end of the chapter, then we create it without something that’s annoying. I do think that just having a resolution first helps, again, so people get some satisfaction. Having it so that you have, for instance, a chapter plot arc that actually ends before you bring up something can be helpful. A lot of times I don’t think you necessarily need to add a new problem to create a hook; you just have to remind people of the plot that’s already there that hasn’t been resolved yet. So if you have your big throughline for your story, whether it’s defeating the big bad or going through a dangerous journey, right? talk about what step is next and why that step is going to be dangerous. That can help. You can raise questions that are not somebody dead walking in the door, but then just be like, “Hey. I thought back about this. How come this happened? Or why did this person do that?” to bring a little curiosity in without having a huge twist right at the end.
Bunny: Yeah. I feel like the biggest one is just keep it relevant. Don’t completely pivot. It should have something to do with what you’ve already done and where you’re going.
Oren: Admittedly, the current project that I’m trying to work on, I do really want to end it with the long-dead spouse walking through the door, but I probably shouldn’t. The urge is real.
Bunny: You’re putting it on record saying you think that is bad and should not be done.
Oren: Do as I say, not as I do!
Bunny: You’re shaming your future self into avoiding the worst temptations.
Chris: I do think, as storytellers, we’re naturally drawn to the big, dramatic things. In addition to things that are clever, of course.
Oren: We do love to be shocking and clever at the same time.
Chris: Yeah, I think often a little hook is just about advertising what’s next, right? Because presumably you’ll continue to have cool, exciting things in the next section of the story. So if you have the ability to bring those things up and remind readers of them, that can be a good way to do it.
Bunny: Yeah, really, if you have that, you shouldn’t need cliffhangers per se. Like, you can have them, but if you’ve got this other stuff going on, you shouldn’t need them to get the reader invested in continuing to read or watch or whatever.
Oren: All right, with those words of wisdom, I think we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you felt satisfied rather than annoyed by this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Yeah, and before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons who have never left us hanging. First, there’s Aman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Music]
Outro: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.