Cliffhangers

~ Liz Charnes

Okay, so I’m writing this post about Cliffhangers because I hate them.

I get it. They’re a tried and true plot devise to keep people coming back and whatever. If you’re trying to build interest in a new series, or gain readers, cliffhangers are a way to do it. I have even been known to employ a cliffhanger or two every now and them.

Ashamed

There was even a show called Cliffhangers on T.V. a long, long, long time ago. I think it ran a season.

All I know is that whoever played the vampire was smokin’.

What? He was.

Back to cliffhangers.

It’s like this.  I’m watching this new show called Cloak and Dagger, and it’s pretty good.

(SPOILER ALERT, BTW)

It’s another Marvel Universe story about these two kids, Tandy and Ty, who have special powers.

That’s not a spoiler. It’s Marvel. Everybody’s got special powers in Marvel-Verse.

So Tandy and Ty have problems. (Again, not a spoiler)

There’s this big bad corporation called EXXO… I mean ROXXON (any similarities to any other corporations with two XXs in their corporate names is just a coincidence) that’s doing something nefarious along New Orleans’s Gulf Coast that involves drilling and rigs. But not oil. Got that? Not. Oil.

Anyhoo, Tandy’s father is killed by a rig explosion (NOT OIL, OKAY? I’M SERIOUS, IT’S NOT OIL) after picking her up from ballet class. (It was a big explosion). AT THE VERY SAME TIME, Ty witnesses his brother being shot to death by a bad cop.

AT THE VERY SAME TIME both Ty and Tandy fall into water tainted by some glowy goo (NOT OIL) and POOF! Superpowers.

Freakin’ glowy goo. Does it every time.

So, as I was saying, Tandy and Ty survive, but now they got problems.

Tandy’s all homeless (but not the real kind of homeless, the boho and glam kind of homeless that makes it look like a really cool lifestyle choice… really, my only serious criticism of the show is how it handles her homelessness. Homelessness is a serious problem among teenagers suffering from neglected or abusive parents. It’s not glamorous. It’s not boho. Homelessness means you don’t have a place to regularly wash, your clothes aren’t newly purchased Forever 21, and you don’t have a model beautiful loving and forgiving boyfriend who’ll gladly hand over his life savings when it looks like you might be going to jail… )

Cloak and dagger
This is homelessness in Cloak and Dagger.

Whoops. Got a little off subject there. We’re talking about cliffhangers.

Anyhoo, Ty’s still grieving his brother because the blue wall of silence protected the cop who did it. (This is well done, BTW. Plus, they got a red head playing the cop who looks like a fatter guy from the one in CSI Miami. Maybe it is the one from CSI Miami. I don’t know. I’m talking about cliffhangers).

EMMA LAHANA, J.D. EVERMORE
This guy. The girl’s the other cop, but she’s a good cop determined to root out the corruption.  This show has a lot of layers.

Back to Tandy because. She decides to take on ROXXON because she’s now a superhuman, but then finds out her memories of her long dead father aren’t the truth of him, so she decides to take accept ROXXON’s offer to buy her silence in cash (????????????????????) and then it gets STOLEN (second time in the series, BTW, this girl is too naive to be homeless) and then she comes home and there’s an assassin holding a gun to her mother’s head because she took on EXXO… I mean ROXXON…

AAAARRRRGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!11!!!!!11

So now, I gotta wait until Hulu loads up the next episode? I mean, I figure Tandy’s fine, but Mom? And poor Ty. Then there’s zombies. That’s right. Zombies. I’m not even going into that. Here’s a promo:

The point is, cliffhangers suck.

Liz. Out.

11 thoughts on “Cliffhangers”

  1. I enjoyed the _Cloak & Dagger_ comics when I was a teen, especially the ones that crossed over with my favorite series at the time, _The New Mutants_. I’m superexcited about the _New Mutants_ movie due out next year. I had not yet heard about the _Cloak & Dagger_ series and am sad that it’s on Hulu. I can only hope it comes to Netflix eventually.

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  2. The worst of all cliffhangers is when the author dies before they finish the book. That happened with a series that I used to read called the Wheel of Time. They had to get another author to finish it using the first authors journals. It wasn’t the same. 🙂

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    1. I got so invested in this one series, and it was a serious series, only to learn after I finished the second book that the author was, like, nah. I’m done. I don’t think I’ve been the same since.

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      2. I can’t even remember the name of the series, or I’d warn you about it. All I remember is that it’s about five or ten years old, two books, and It’s about a brother and a sister living with a peculiar aunt. Turns out she’s a god, and they’re divine twins. It’s got this super Dante-esque thing going on, and the author knew his mythology. The second one was better than the first. There’s this war between the old devils and the new, and the boy is basically the devil who gets together this awesome rock band of Hendricks, Joplin… omigod, why am I even going on about this book? *wanders off muttering senselessly

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      4. I don’t know!! These are long books, incredibly well-written, researched, and mythologically sound. Maybe publisher problems? Who knows.

        The more I think about it, it was their mother, not aunt. She was a Greek goddess, one of the fates, and she had an affair with the fallen angel Lucifer, and the children were the result of that. It was a war for their souls, so to speak. Both had weapons… the boy becomes a Duke of Hell… the girl is a powerful warrior and actually the moral superior of the pair (something about the younger son, man, what is that?)… author’s name is Eric something or other. The first two books are so good, but keep in mind that it ends on a cliffhanger and there’s never going to be a third. And you will spend the rest of your life muttering about what happens to these kids…

        Mortal Coils! That’s it! Mortal Coils!

        Turns out there may have been problems between the author and the publisher that stopped production of a third. All I know, is that I’m still waiting… and waiting… and waiting…

        *wanders off, mumbling senselessly

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