Worst TV Cliffhangers

For much of its first season, Heroes looked like a dumb, fun antidote to LOST's occasionally frustrating mind games and withheld answers and, for a while, it was.

After building up to a massive, mostly unseen battle between the heroic Peter and villainous Sylar, however, the show didn't even have the guts to kill its bad guy, opting instead to tease us with a trail of blood where his dead body was supposed to be. That's nothing compared to the Season 2 preview featuring Hiro stuck in feudal Japan, a plot no one looked forward to. With such an unpromising cliffhanger, Heroes proved that instead of being dumb fun, it was just plain dumb, and it assumed you were too.

We realize people watch Glee. Having seen a little ourselves, we understand the desire to watch something silly and uplifting and occasionally funny. It's not the kind of show, however, that should have life or death cliffhangers. It's just not.

Nevertheless, that's what Glee tried to pull off with its recent mid-season cliffhanger, in which cheerleader turned glee-leader, Quinn, gets in a horrific wreck while texting while driving. Her fate is currently up in the air. We're guessing that if she pulls through she'll sing "I Will Survive" from her hospital bed. If she dies, she'll sing Nirvana's "All Apologies" from the afterlife.

We love Community but Season 2's cliffhanger threat that Pierce was leaving the study group never stirred our concern as much as the show intended it to. For one thing, Pierce spent most of Season 2 being so evil, you'd think everyone would be happy to get away from him. More than that, however, there's just no way a show this cuddly at its core would cast a main character, played by arguably the show's most famous actor, into the ensemble's outer fringe with Dean Pelton and Senor Chang. A cliffhanger requires tension to work, and there was never any doubt that this disruption of the status quo would last.

The final episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers' third season ends on one of the dumbest cliffhangers ever. After acquiring the cleverly named Orb of Doom, the episode ends with Rita Repulsa turning the Power Rangers and all their friends into children. As a near universal love for The Phantom Menace and Dragon Ball GT can attest, there's nothing people like more than seeing their favorite badasses as whiny kids.

Amazingly enough, instead of resolving this immediately, the show just replaced the kid rangers with Mighty Morphin Alien Rangers the next season. It takes guts to write yourself out of a corner by simply inventing a whole new show. Well, guts and a desire to sell more toys.