1.
Who survived the last episode of Twin Peaks? (Twin Peaks)
TV
shows that center on unfolding mysteries face a frustrating conundrum: Solve
those mysteries too soon, and the audience is likely to lose interest and
wander off. But string the questions out too long, and the audience is just as
likely to leave out of irritation. Worse yet, if the mystery lasts long enough,
odds are good that the show will be cancelled before answers are forthcoming.
Every one of these scenarios came into play with David Lynch's Twin Peaks, a groundbreaking show
that helped pave the way for several other long-arc, unfolding-weirdness shows
on this list. In the second season, the show finally answered its central
question, "Who killed Laura Palmer?" But when it was cancelled at the end of
the season, it was still hanging onto a lot of unanswered questions, such as
what exactly was up with the Log Lady and her soothsaying log, and what exactly
happened to Josie Packard, who apparently died of fright and had her spirit
trapped in the wood of a hotel dresser. Or something. But the biggest questions
were the ones raised by a series of deliberate, "screw you, audience"
cliffhangers that placed half the cast in mortal danger: Ben Horne with his
head smashed against a fireplace, his daughter Audrey and a handful of other
characters stuck in a bank when a bomb went off, and above all, Agent Cooper
apparently possessed by Bob. Fan outcry wasn't enough to bring the show back
and answer the questions, and the subsequent movie spin-off/prequel really
didn't help much.
2.
Did Keith Mars become sheriff, or go to jail? (Veronica Mars)
Even though Veronica Mars mastermind Rob Thomas had
a pretty good idea that his show was going to be cancelled—and had even
begun planting the seeds for a spin-off that would have had the lead character
working as an FBI agent—he still ended the series on a heart-stopper.
After a up-and-down third season, Veronica Mars finished strong with a
two-parter in which Veronica (Kristen Bell) tries to track down who made and
released a sex tape of her and her boyfriend. In the process, she runs up
against an old enemy and jeopardizes her father's chances to win the election
for sheriff. All the series' themes—family ties, class conflict, public
shame, and broken trust—run through the finale, making it a series peak.
And yet it ends with Keith Mars in disgrace and Veronica voting for him
anyway—a moving but unsatisfying way to wrap up one of the best shows of
the '00s.
3.
What happened to Tony Soprano? (The Sopranos)
Leading
up to the series finale, many Sopranos fans speculated over whether series
protagonist Tony would meet one of three ends: death, jail, or a status-quo of
mob rule into perpetuity. What they got was everything, or nothing, depending
on how the controversial, instantly iconic final scene was interpreted. There
Tony sat in a diner with Carmela and Anthony Jr., munching on onion rings and
listening to Journey, when the screen suddenly cut to black. Was Tony dead?
Some viewers pointed to a mysterious man in a Members Only jacket walking past
Tony's table to the bathroom right before the abrupt cut. Did he leave the
bathroom and whack Tony, Godfather style? HBO spokesman Quentin
Schaffer later
confirmed that a scene from an earlier episode where Tony and brother-in-law
Bobby Bacala talk about how "everything just goes black" when you're killed was
a "legitimate hint" about the ending. But series creator David Chase refused to
give a clear-cut explanation, leaving some viewers to forever wonder whether
one of TV's greatest anti-heroes made it out of that diner alive.
4.
Did Michael and his family escape from their house? (Now And Again)
In
the 22nd and final episode of CBS' one-season-and-done sci-fi/action series, a
government-engineered superhuman—implanted with the brain of a tubby,
middle-aged insurance agent—has finally revealed his predicament to his
former family, and is about to take them with him on a cross-country fugitive
run. But first? They have to get out of their house, which is surrounded by
soldiers edging closer, closer, and…The End. No renewal, no answers. While the
cast of Now And Again—including Without A Trace's Eric Close and 24 and The Unit's Dennis
Haysbert—have landed on their feet, the show's fans still desperately
hope for a DVD set with a commentary or a featurette to tell us what would've
happened next.
5.
Will Alf ever make it back to Melmac or find the Tanners? (Alf)
Alf's fourth-season finale, "Consider Me Gone," finds
the alien puppet torn between staying with his adopted family, the Tanners, or
returning home to planet Melmac. He opts for Melmac, but his homecoming is
delayed when the government's Alien Task Force comes after him, and the show
wraps up on a cliffhanger. The 1996 TV movie Project: Alf offered a half-assed
resolution by revisiting Alf in government custody six years later (under the
watchful eye of Martin Sheen) where he's simply told that the Tanners have been
put in the witness-protection program, news he takes with uncharacteristic
stoicism. According to series co-creator Paul Fusco on the Project: Alf commentary, it was hoped
that the TV movie would launch a new Alf series, so it, too, ends without
offering any real Alf-ish closure. And let's just not talk about the animated
series at all.
6.
Why and how was Dan traveling through time? (Journeyman)
NBC's
2007 freshman series Journeyman was a fantasy-adventure superior to the network's
more heavily hyped Bionic Woman and Chuck, yet it died before its creators could
even explain the premise. Over the course of 13 episodes—the last few of
which only aired because of the writers' strike—viewers watched San
Francisco reporter Dan Vasser (played by Kevin McKidd) jump into the past for
indeterminate stretches of time, in order to right cosmic wrongs. Then, when he
came back to the present, he'd discover that in his absence, his job,
friendships and marriage had been jeopardized, and that some of his changes to
the timeline had adjusted his life in unpleasant ways. (In one painful episode,
he came home to discover that he had an entirely different child.) By the end
of episode 13, the writers were able to restore some basic order to Dan's life,
but they never answered one fundamental question: Why is this happening to Dan?
(Fans similarly complained about Quantum Leap, which offered its
protagonist a final resolution of sorts, but never answered the big question
that kept them bitching: Was it Sam's body or just his soul that was traveling
through time?)
7. Was the future ever saved? (The 4400)
Science-fiction series tend to paint themselves
into corners when they don't have logical endpoints, and The 4400, which aired on USA for
four seasons before being cancelled in 2007, was no exception. It started with
a clever premise: 4400 people who had been missing for varying lengths of time
are mysteriously returned to Earth, and they haven't aged a day. Many begin
developing superpower-like abilities—which is where the obvious X-Men comparisons come
in—which eventually divides the world into factions, debating whether the
4400 were a threat or a boon to mankind. Even the mutants were fighting each
other. (Sound familiar?) But the inner circle on the show got the inside story:
A faction from the future kidnapped the 4400, empowered them, and plunked them
back down in the past, and their powers were meant to change history in a
myriad of complicated ways that would stave off a future apocalypse. Then
another time-traveling future-faction started interfering with the plan,
wanting their present to stay as it was. Season four ended with a jury-rigged
"then everything changes" resolution, in the form of a huge outbreak of the
"disease" that causes mutations, err, abilities; several hundred thousand were
poised to gain special powers. The government turned control of Seattle over to
the leader of one of the 4400 factions, just as chaos was about to rain down.
But what happened next? As so often happens in these cases, fans are hoping a
TV movie will wrap things up.
8. Who won the big standoff between Seth
Bullock and George Hearst? (Deadwood)
For
instance, after a full season of buildup that went exactly nowhere, fans
remained convinced that Deadwood creator David Milch was going to use a couple of
TV movies to wrap up the conflict between Deadwood's primary hero, Seth
Bullock, and its eventual villain, George Hearst. The two spent a full third of
the series marshalling their defenses and making moves against their other
enemies, while gradually falling more and more in hate with each other. After
building the tension to the breaking point, the show let it go with a fizzle,
with Hearst placidly headed out of Deadwood, and the worst supposedly
yet to come, except that neither a fourth season nor the promised movies ever
materialized.
9.
Did Brother Justin make it back from the dead, and did Sofie assume her mantle
as the Omega? (Carnivale)
One
of the most pure-blooded descendents of Twin Peaks to come climbing down the
family tree, HBO's Carnivale was a fantastically rich series with a
frustratingly dense mythology involving avatars of good and evil finding their
natures and facing off in a big cosmic battle. That battle was almost resolved in the final
episode of the second season, in which good-avatar Ben Hawkins stabs
evil-avatar Brother Justin with a consecrated weapon, seemingly killing him. But
the final shot of the series—cancelled a full four seasons before it
would have concluded properly, according to creator Daniel Knauf—has
Justin's daughter Sofie finding him and pretty clearly trying to use her newly
discovered powers to raise him from the dead, unbeknownst to any of the good
guys. Again, fans were hoping for a TV-movie wrap-up, but Knauf reportedly
demurred, saying that he had too much material left for a single film to
resolve the story. Instead, he's offered some teasers about the immediate fates
of Brother Justin, Sofie, and fan-favorite Jonesy, who was shot and left in an
unclear condition in that final episode.
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10. Did Dave and Matthew ever join the rest of the WNYX crew
in New Hampshire? (NewsRadio)
Though
it's hardly the most gripping cliffhanger in TV history, the fifth season of
the cult sitcom NewsRadio ended with WNYX station owner Jimmy James (played
by the inimitable Stephen Root) buying a station in rural New Hampshire and
trying to figure out which WNYX staffer he could bring along with him.
Ultimately, he got everyone to go, with the exception of news director Dave
and—in a surprise twist—the station's most annoying employee,
Matthew. NewsRadio
producer Paul Simms had planned to carry this storyline into season six, with
the whole gang moving to New Hampshire and interacting with yokels, but NBC
dropped the axe before that could happen, leaving poor Dave Foley in an empty
office with Andy Dick for all eternity.
11.
Will Mulder and Scully elude the government? (The X-Files)
Overextended storylines, cast changes, and
unpredictable shifts in tone had eroded the quintessential '90s TV phenomenon
by the time of its 2002 finale. Erstwhile fans tuning in for closure found
their frustration renewed by the two-parter "The Truth," which largely focused
on the imprisonment and kangaroo-court trail of a hallucinating Fox Mulder
(David Duchovny, who sat out most of the final two seasons). The final sequence
leaves Mulder and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) on the lam, and other major
characters fates' unresolved. Whether a forthcoming movie sequel will tie up
any of these loose ends remains to be seen.
12.
Will Benson be elected governor? (Benson)
Has any TV character enjoyed such a steady rise in
stature as Robert Guillaume's Benson DuBois? Introduced on Soap, he's first seen as a
butler to Katherine Helmond. Then he spun off his own series, where he served
as the head of household affairs for James Noble's Governor Gatling. In later
seasons, he became budget director, then Lieutenant Governor of Noble's unnamed
state. Finally, he wound up as a gubernatorial candidate, running against his
boss. In the finale of the seventh season, the two old friends turned political
rivals sit down together to watch the election results, which reveal that the
winner is… who knows? The show never returned for an eighth season.
13.
What was up with that nuke? (Sledge Hammer!)
Obviously many series with unresolved mysteries
wrapped up with cliffhangers, but the cult-favorite series Sledge Hammer! sandwiched a cliffhanger
into its center. Producer Alan Spencer didn't expect a second season for his
send-up of tough cop shows, which starred David Rasche as a thick-skulled,
gun-loving detective with an oft-deployed catchphrase: "Trust me. I know what
I'm doing." So he ended the first season with a nuclear explosion, and the
words "To be continued next season?" It was. Sort of. When Sledge Hammer! returned in the fall, it
made no mention of the explosion, and carried on as if the previous season's
finale had never happened.
[Note: We could only find a German-language
version of this scene, but wanted to share its awesomeness anyway.]
14. What was the truth behind Harsh Realm? (Harsh
Realm)
As The X-Files began its swirl down the
toilet bowl, creator Chris Carter poured some of his mental energy into Harsh
Realm, a
clever series that failed to catch a fan base—it was yanked from the air
after just three episodes. (A DVD set of nine complete episodes was eventually
released.) The supposed plot: The U.S. military has created a virtual-reality
simulator to see what a post-apocalyptic America would look like, but the
simulation has been hijacked by Terry O'Quinn (yup, Locke from Lost), who plans to break out
of the simulation and destroy the real world so that only Harsh Realm exists.
Our hero, Thomas Hobbes (hello, direct historical allusions!), must kill him in
order to save the world. But even a few minutes into the first episode, the
series was already throwing out hints that everything Hobbes had been told was
a lie, and that a much bigger conspiracy was at work, both in the real world
and in Harsh Realm. Sadly, the show barely got enough episodes in to establish
the questions, let alone the answers.
15. What was Shepherd Book's story? (Firefly)
Joss Whedon's aborted science-fiction series Firefly packed every significant
character with unresolved issues and big reveals, but many of them at least got
some screen time by the time the show was abruptly cancelled. Several of the
remaining ones, particularly those dealing with Summer Glau's character, River
Tam, were later resolved in the big-screen spin-off, Serenity. But fans are still
grinding their teeth about Ron Glass' mild-mannered clergyman, who revealed
offhandedly in the last episode of the series that he was neither mild-mannered
nor a clergyman. So who was he, and what was his story? Just to twist the knife
a little further, Serenity killed him off with his questions further
unaddressed.
16.
Will Mork and Mindy be forever stuck in time? (Mork And Mindy)
Mork And Mindy was never known for its
tense storylines, which makes the decision to wind down its fourth season with
the three-part episode "Gotta Run," in which Mork (Robin Williams) and Mindy
(Pam Dawber) are menaced by future Murphy Brown star Joe Regalbuto, all
the stranger. The season had previously focused mostly on Mork and Mindy's
marriage and the arrival of their child Mearth, who, like all Orkans, ages
backwards. (Which let Williams' hero Jonathan Winters play the role.) But after
being threatened by Regalbuto, an outer-space enemy of the Orkans, and forced
to go public with Mork's identity, Mork and Mindy are forced to abandon Mearth,
and they subsequently get stuck traveling in time. In spite of the cliffhanger,
the show finished off its season with one last, unrelated episode, then faded
into memory.