At cliff's edge

Our dashing hero is fearlessly chasing down a crew of bandits, horses thundering across the desert. The leader of the bandits turns to shoot: Bang! Bang! Bang! Our hero ducks, but remains unharmed. Suddenly, the bandits veer away, revealing that the hero is hurtling straight for the edge of a canyon! He manages to pull his horse into a stop, but the momentum of the chase sends him flying off his mount and, after a desperate scrabble, over the canyon's edge...

But then what? Is our beloved hero doomed, or will he make a miraculous escape? Thanks to this rather literal cliffhanger, we won't know until the next episode. How frustrating!

As annoying as cliffhangers might sometimes be to an audience, we must admit that they are an effective way to keep us coming back to a series. It's a technique that has become entirely ubiquitous in television, with varying degrees of usage and severity; they range from tense pre-commercial-break moments to dramatic life-or-death season enders in inevitable bids for renewal. Soap operas are particularly notorious for cliffhangers, which add to the heightened drama and tension inherent to the genre, but you'll find plenty of cliffhangers present in any kind of show with an ongoing storyline or multi-episode plots.

Of course, it isn't just television using them. Serialised films often end on cliffhangers between instalments, and novels in a series will regularly do so as well. It's a technique that has been used for centuries to build suspense, and when serialised fiction started becoming more widely published in the Victorian period the use of cliffhangers boomed, and has continued to be a standard part of storytelling.

The anatomy of a cliffhanger is pretty basic: the story sets up an urgent and/or important question regarding the character(s), which is immediately followed by a break, rather than the answer to the question. In most cases, the storyline will resume by answering the question in the next chapter, book, episode, etc., thereby resolving the cliffhanger, but some stories deliberately remain unresolved (such as Inception or The Sopranos). A series might also unintentionally end on a cliffhanger if it remains permanently unfinished.

The question posed by a cliffhanger is often about the physical safety of the protagonists, as in the example I used at the start of the post. Alternatively, it might be tied to emotional stakes, such as a will-they-won't-they relationship, or an unexpected reveal that could change everything. In any case, the stakes need to be high enough for readers or audiences to be invested in finding out what happens. Specifically, the stakes need to be something that the characters involved care about (unless you're doing something clever with dramatic irony, but even so the stakes will be important to someone within the story). If the answer to the question is unimportant, the necessary tension won't be generated and the cliffhanger won't be effective.

There are dangers in going too far the other way, though; if cliffhangers are overused or unlikely to the point of stretching credulity, the stakes start feeling less vital and will pack less and less of a punch each time. When Batman and Robin get caught in traps at the end of every odd episode and get out of them at the start of every even episode, you don't exactly worry about them when you finish episode 27. Cliffhangers also tend to lose interest if they feel really artificial or like they're only there for the sake of having them. Readers and audiences like to be immersed in fiction, and a cliffhanger that doesn't fit within the flow of the story is a surefire way to jolt them out of that immersiveness.

Leave a comment below with your most memorable cliffhangers! Which ones worked well, and which fell flat? Personally, I don't know if anything can top the drama of this most infamous moment in New Zealand television.