‘9-1-1,’ ‘Fire Country,’ ‘The Rookie’ & More Cliffhangers We Can’t Stop Thinking About
Spoiler Alert
When it comes to season finales, something we’ve come to expect is at least half a dozen or more shows ending on a cliffhanger. Is a character dead? Will a couple get together? What does some big change mean for the show going forward? The 2023-2024 season, though shortened for most shows (due to the 2023 strikes), was no different.
9-1-1 went into the finale with the life of its captain, Bobby Nash (Peter Krause), hanging in the balance, and the episode ended with a major concern for the entire firehouse. Fire Country left us wondering just what the future holds after the finale wedding. Found brought a character’s worst nightmare right into her home … not that she knew it yet. NCIS: Hawai’i left fans with a major cliffhanger that will never be resolved because it was canceled.
Below, we take a look at those and more shows that have left us hanging, for now or for good. After checking out our picks, let us know which cliffhangers you’ll be thinking about in the coming months.
9-1-1
Amidst the joy of Bobby’s survival and decision to no longer leave the LAFD, the captain forgot one thing: He did quit. The finale ended with him returning to work, only to find the station’s previous captain, Gerrard (Brian Thompson), who made life hell for the firefighters (including Aisha Hinds‘ Hen and Kenneth Choi‘s Chimney), there. As he put it, there are some concerns downtown of a leadership deficit in the house, so he agreed to come back and put things in order.
Krause isn’t sure what’s next as Bobby works his way back to leading the 118 (which we all know has to happen). “I’m assuming he has to go through some physical tests or something. It was a little strange for me playing that at the end,” he admitted to TV Insider. “I thought, oh, I guess he just assumes that he can go back. Did he suffer a little minor amnesia like Chimney and not realize that he’d turned in his resignation? So that was sort of a leap, I think that he just had to think that he would show up at the firehouse and then he could go right back to work.” But what will happen at the 118 before he’s able to regain control?
Chicago Fire
Well, we finally found out why Damon (Michael Bradway) had been acting sketchy—and eager to talk with and impress Severide (Taylor Kinney)—since arriving at 51 as a floater. He reacted to the way that a father treated his son on a call (like dirt) because he had a father like that, too: Benny Severide (the late Treat Williams). He’s Severide’s half-brother! What’s this going to mean for Severide going forward? And how is Kidd (Miranda Rae Mayo) going to handle it, considering she very much wants him off Truck?
Fire Country
Did Gabriela (Stephanie Arcila) get married? Bode (Max Thieriot) walked out, unable to watch more of her wedding to Diego (Rafael de la Fuente), before we saw her answer. He had been planning to tell her he loves her before a conversation with her father (Kevin Alejandro) stopped him right before the ceremony, then Gabriela kept looking at Bode (not her fiancé) once she stood in front of everyone. “We will deliver all the answers in the Season 3 premiere,” promised executive producer Tia Napolitano.
And as for Bode and Gabriela in Season 3, she teased, “Regardless of whether they’re together or not, their chemistry, their bond, the way they keep being magnetically drawn to one another is not going to go away.”
Found
With Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) free and Gabi (Shanola Hampton) knowing her former kidnapper and the man she’d had chained in her basement will never stop hunting her, she confessed to her team—Lacey (Gabrielle Walsh), Margaret (Kelli Williams), and Zeke (Arlen Escarpeta), with Dhan (Karan Oberoi) having previously learned the truth—and those three walked out on her. Once home, Gabi realized Sir used poison from her kitchen on Lacey’s dog, and Lacey—who, too, had been a victim of Sir’s—didn’t answer her calls … not realizing Sir was hiding in her apartment! What’s his plan? And how is Lacey going to react upon coming face-to-face with him?
When TV Insider spoke with executive producer Nkechi Okoro Carroll after the finale, she was careful about discussing what that cliffhanger means for Season 2, but she did note, “There is such a dark fan fiction love of Sir and just this whole, is that kind of attention bad and he’s so good looking, he’s so charming, and I’m like, ladies, I need higher standards. I need the bar to be a little bit higher of what we’re looking for for our crushes. But I will say that Sir’s charm and Sir’s gifts are his biggest tool of manipulation, so the truth of the matter is, even if people think they know where Sir’s line in the sand is and he would do this but not this, you actually don’t.”
She added, “There is more of Gabi in Lacey than I think even Lacey realizes and she’s been on a journey, and I think we’re going to see the culmination of that journey and in a very surprising, shocking way.”
Ghosts
Not only did the Ghosts finale not end with Isaac (Brandon Scott Jones) and Nigel (John Hartman) married—the former realized it wasn’t what he wanted—but it also left one of the spirits in quite the precarious position! Isaac was dragged off by Patience, the Puritan ghost he’d previously left behind in the dirt on the property. What’s Patience going to do to him? And how long will it take for the others to realize what happened?
“I have no idea what the writers are planning and how they’re planning to handle that situation, but I do think after that episode, it’s kind of nice to see him get his ‘just deserts’ from my perspective, you know what I mean?” Jones told us. “He’s left somebody in the dirt and he abandoned them. So I’m sure however it plays out, I hope I’m a part of it. But I guess the reassurance that I’ll be back is nobody’s told me that I’m not coming back.”
The Irrational
The drama closed the book on one mystery—the church bombing that left Alec (Jesse L. Martin) scarred and searching for answers—and opened another on a new one in its first season finale. After a time jump of six weeks, Alec’s love interest, Rose (Karen David), was kidnapped and thrown into a van, just after she gets off the phone with him. Who took her?
“We knew for a long time how we wanted to wrap up the church bombing story. In terms of what tag we were going to give viewers to come back and tune in next season, we batted around a lot of different things for a while. It wasn’t until we started breaking the finale that we landed on that piece of it,” showrunner Arika Lisanne Mittman shared after the finale.
Law & Order: Organized Crime
Oh, Joe, Joe, Joe. Michael Trotter‘s character, Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) young brother, just kept getting in more and more trouble this past season, ending with him in quite the dangerous position. Arms dealer Julian Emery (Tom Payne) successfully escaped with the NYPD on scene at the airport, and Joe went with him. And while the Organized Control Crime Bureau thought they’d secured all of the deadly nerve agent that Emery had, well, it turned out he had another suitcase full of it—and he cuffed it to Joe! We couldn’t have gotten all those Stablers this season to just lead to them losing one of their own … right?
NCIS
The team might look a bit different in NCIS Season 22. In the latest finale, Jessica Knight (Katrina Law) was offered a new job—Chief REACT Training Officer in California—and by the end of the episode, she’d accepted! Her boyfriend, Dr. Jimmy Palmer (Brian Dietzen), wasn’t happy upon hearing she’d even been considering it, and their future looked pretty bleak.
However, “the writers said that they were going to bring me back, but they lie sometimes, so we’ll see what happens,” Law told us as part of NCIS: Case Closed, our weekly aftershow. “Maybe she goes and takes this job and realizes that she truly loves her NCIS team, or maybe she just wants to be back in a relationship with Jimmy full time. Maybe something happens with the NCIS team that calls her back. I think there’s a whole plethora of reasons that could make her either come back or stay.” So what will this mean for Knight in Season 22? And what about Knight and Palmer’s relationship?
NCIS: Hawai'i
Sadly, this is one we’ll likely never get an answer to unless an executive producer decides to reveal what would have happened next. The drama was canceled just ahead of its two-part finale, the end of which teed up a fourth season we’ll never see. Jane (Vanessa Lachey) arrived home to find not her daughter waiting for her, as she expected, but her former mentor-turned-fugitive, Maggie (Julie White), who told her, “you’re probably going to need a drink for what’s coming next.” But what was coming next?
The Rookie
Uh-oh, there’s some trouble coming for some of our favorite characters! Not only did Oscar (Matthew Glave) escape from prison, but he also took Jason (Steve Kazee), Bailey’s (Jenna Dewan) ex-husband, along with him—just as she and Nolan (Nathan Fillion) are figuring out how kids can be part of their future.
“The stakes are there. Obviously there’s a danger lurking,” executive producer Alexi Hawley told us. With Monica (Bridget Regan), Oscar, and Jason all out there, “I think Jason’s probably the most immediate problem. I can’t necessarily comment on Oscar and Monica yet, but I think obviously Jason is the one with the most specific, the most harmful intent towards anybody on our show at the moment,” he said.
So Help Me Todd
The CBS legal dramedy may have ended after two seasons on a cliffhanger, with Margaret (Marcia Gay Harden) framed for the crimes of Merritt Folding as he was just about to be seen, but at least creator Scott Prendergast detailed what would have come next for us—through the series finale in Season 7!
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