.

Now, I am not talking about chapters that end in cliffhangers or individual episodes that leaving you on tenterhooks until the next week. I am talking about the end of novels and the end of season crap where the story is not completed and the reader or audience has to wait for the next book or season, which sometimes never arrives, to see resolution of the character’s current crisis.

I am of the firm belief that a novel or a movie or even a season of a television show should present a complete story. The Discworld or Hornblower novels are great examples of a series that executes this flawlessly. Each book is its own tale, complete with establishment, conflict, and resolution but leaves enough in the air, enough unwoven threads that new stories can arise from them.

A Season for Slaughter the fourth book in an SF series by David Gerrold left the main character stranded in the jungle in dire danger and the fifth book, some 32 years later, still has not been released.

Severance, the Apple TV+ series, appears to be telling a complete story over multiple seasons but ended the first on a cliffhanger and I suspect that they are going to do so with the second. (I know the second has concluded but I haven’t reached it yet.) I do not expect all the answers to be presented by the end of the second season, but I want more than one or two. If the series is going to present mystery upon mystery without resolution, then I am going to drop it.