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| Sure, Booth is in jail, but not for long. |
Last spring I began
writing a piece about how infuriating last May’s Castle cliffhanger was and how
much better Bones’s cliffhanger had been.
For various reasons that post didn’t get finished, but the new season is well under way and both shows have resolved their respective cliffhangers in ways
that have changed my views, so I’d like to revisit the subject and discuss
where each show succeeded and failed in piquing the audience’s interest.
About a year ago I tore Under the Dome apart for utterly failing in its attempt to craft a
thrilling season-ending cliffhanger, the primary problem of which was its utter
lack of resolution. When the show came
back nine months later, it only exacerbated the problem by wrapping up every
hanging question within the first five minutes without an ounce of it affecting
anything in the future. In fact, the
only character to die in the second season premiere was Angie, who was not in
any danger at the conclusion of the previous season.
Castle had a
similar misfire with its season-ending cliffhanger in May, when Rick, on his
way to get married, has his car apparently run off the road and set on fire
with him in it. Mind you, we don’t
actually see this happen, we just see his fiancée Kate running up to a car
already engulfed in flames.
This cliffhanger fails for two reasons. The first is that it is entirely dependent on
dramatic irony. Castle isn’t dead and
the audience knows this. The show is
called “Castle” for Christ’s
sake. The only drama available is
derived, not from our reaction to his “death,” but from Kate’s, and we don’t
get much. This isn’t to say that
dramatic irony can never be used effectively but, in this particular case, it’s
a well the show has gone to before, when Kate was shot in the season
three finale.
The other problem is that the episode provides no resolution
to the primary story. For 55 minutes, the
show is leading up to a wedding, trying desperately to solve all of the
problems that arise. Then, the end comes
and there’s no wedding and no emotional resolution at all. Sure, the characters solve the maguffin,
which involves rescuing Kate’s ex-boyfriend/husband so they can have their
marriage annulled, but that wasn’t a real story, it was just a collection of
tropes – specifically, the “Oops, I forgot I was married” and the “New old flame” tropes. Because the plots on Castle are generally so trite, we rely on the characters’
relationships to keep us invested and here we were deprived of any great
character moments.
Like Under the Dome,
Castle capped its season by dropping
the curtain before the end of the act.
Even worse, it left the audience with no real mystery as to where the
story is going. We know Castle isn’t
dead. We know he’ll come back at some
point in the near future. Maybe we’ll
have a couple of episodes where Kate thinks he’s dead. But I can pretty much guarantee that at some
point in 2014, we will see Castle and Beckett wed. So this cliffhanger is just delaying the
inevitable because television writers seem to have an intense aversion to
writing for happy couples. We see it all
the time. I even wrote about it in the
context of both Bones and Castle at the beginning of last season. For whatever reason, the writers
for Castle are unwilling to let Rick
and Kate be a normal, happy couple. And
the more they use plot contrivances to create drama, as opposed to using character
development, the less interesting the primary relationship becomes.
Let’s compare, then, the lackluster Castle cliffhanger to that from Bones’s
May finale. In “The Recluse in the
Recliner,” Booth and Brennan investigate the murder of a conspiracy theorist,
which ultimately ties into a conspiracy to destroy Booth’s career and blackmail
high-ranking governmental officials. The
season ends with Booth killing three mercenaries sent to kill him, only to be
framed for their deaths when they are revealed to be FBI agents (or at least
fake FBI agents).
This cliffhanger is extremely effective because, while the
episode still provides closure (the main case solved reasonably conclusively), it
leaves open a number of questions including why Booth was targeted, who is
behind the conspiracy, and what will happen to Booth. None of these questions has obvious,
immediate answers and, more importantly, the audience is left wondering what
will happening next, as opposed to just not knowing why it happened.
Bones could have
gone anywhere with this cliffhanger.
They could have picked up right where they left off. They could have had a time-jump, with Booth
having spent time in jail or on trial (the show has previously used small
time-jumps to pretty good effect). Or
they could have gone another direction entirely. Good cliffhangers leave open many options,
and that’s what “The Recluse in the Recliner” did.
What both Castle
and Bones seem to have forgotten with
their new seasons is that cliffhangers also need resolutions. And by that I don’t mean they need to resolve
their plots. Cliffhangers need to have a
meaningful impact on the characters. Unfortunately,
neither show figured out how to do that.
Instead, both decided to turn their cliffhangers into season-long
mystery arcs. Bones probably had the more egregious sin, as the “Booth in prison”
arc is basically wrapped up in fifteen minutes when Brennan blackmails a judge
with evidence from their previous investigation. That’s it.
All charges are dropped. Booth
immediately gets his job back, even in spite of the fact that he did still kill
three people. What should have been an
interesting dramatic story arc about how Booth can survive prison or how his
relationship with Brennan is strained by separation was instead cut short
before the third commercial break.
Instead, the show went for a shocking death and a long-running
conspiracy storyline in an attempt to make up for any real emotional consequence
from the cliffhanger.
Castle, meanwhile,
still hasn’t really resolved its cliffhanger.
Sure, Rick is back, as we all knew he would be. But he has no memory of where he was and
apparently that’s how he wants it. I
don’t really care about the conspiracy storyline, though I suppose with the
investigation into the death of Kate’s mother largely over, some long-term arc
has to take its place. Far more
infuriating, though, is how the show yada-yada’d the most emotionally engaging
aspect of the cliffhanger: Kate’s reaction.
Obviously, the lack of a body in Castle’s car changes the
stakes, but that puts the show, and Kate, immediately into investigation mode,
turning what could have been a great emotional story arc into a rather trite plot
arc that, as with Bones, is basically
resolved within the first episode. The
season is now several episodes in and things are completely back to normal, with
no real lasting consequences for any of the characters and a wedding on the near horizon yet again.
The best television cliffhangers, hell even the decent ones,
stick with us as much for their payoffs as for their setups. Think of Buffy killing Angel and leaving town
in the second season finale of Buffy the
Vampire Slayer or just straight up dying
in the fifth season finale. Those
cliffhangers were powerful not because they had shock value, but because they
had emotional stakes and they stick with us because the show followed up on
those stakes. Angel didn’t return from
the dead immediately and, when he did, things didn’t immediately go back to
normal. And the show spent the better
part of a season (for good or for ill) dealing with the fallout from Buffy
dying and being brought back to life.
The Buffy cliffhangers may be abnormal because they rely
more on character and emotional arcs than “shock value,” but even the best
“shocking” cliffhangers leave the audience asking not “What just happened?” but
“What’s going to happen next”? Think of
Lost’s “We have to go back, Kate,” or Battlestar Galactica’s “On behalf of the
people of the Twelve Colonies, I surrender,” or the gunshot at the end of Breaking Bad’s third season. These
cliffhangers are effective for their shock value because they all signal
extreme paradigm shifts. Some people got
off the island. The Cylons won. Walt and Jesse essentially declared war on
Gus. All of these cliffhangers
indicated, with no uncertainty, that when the show returned, nothing would be
the same.
If the best cliffhangers, then, require either the
characters or the story to change dramatically, maybe satisfying cliffhangers
are simply impossible in traditional procedurals, whose entire raison d’etre is based on stability. Procedurals make their bones (no pun
intended) on presenting the same people week in and week out
doing the same things week in and week out.
Changes are minor. Relationships
will begin and end but are often kept in the background unless, of course, it’s
the two main characters whose “will they/won’t they” tension is the emotional
engine of the show. It’s easy to
threaten to kill a character or put somebody in jail when you don’t have to
follow through on the threat. But the
trick only works so often, and after enough fakeouts, the audience is going to
stop falling for it.
Maybe it’s time to stop expecting satisfying cliffhangers
(especially in resolution) from procedural dramas. Without the possibility of real change, any
threats made in a season finale are going to be entirely empty. And maybe it’s time for procedurals to
abandon the idea of season-ending cliffhangers.
After all, if you can’t do something right, maybe it’s best to just not
do it at all.
Tyler Williams is a
professional librarian and an amateur television critic. You can reach him at TyTalksTV AT gmail DOT
com or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.
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