10 Greatest Star Trek Cliffhanger Episodes

The season one finale of (Star Trek:) Enterprise opens with a dramatic, and quite literal, rendering of the episode title. Tucker, T'Pol, Archer, and Reed are in a shuttlepod descending down to Paraagan II, a planet with dangerously high levels of tetrazine in its atmosphere requiring a strict protocol to be followed by the Enterprise crew to avoid setting the world on fire and killing all its inhabitants. Health and safety gone mad! Suddenly, a huge explosion rocks the shuttlepod and the shockwave lays waste to the Paraagan colony. Mission cancelled, go home!

Fortunately, formerly-KIA, and wealth of information for a cloud of vapour, crewman Daniels has a sit-down in the past with 'I've-forgotten-Trip's-catchphrase' Captain Archer to clear up a few things and pass on some handy quantum engineering tips. Enterprise didn't cause the explosion, a faction in the Temporal Cold War, namely the Suliban working for the shadowy Humanoid Figure, did. The writers were considering disclosing the identity of the Humanoid Figure in the two-parter, but as Branon Braga noted in Star Trek: Communicator, issue 139, "It just seemed too soon". Well, as we know, it eventually got too late for any such revelations.

It's some other Daniels time-travel meddling that gives us the shocking final scene. As Archer goes to surrender himself to the Suliban, whose cell ships are surrounding Enterprise, Daniels snatches him out of the turbolift onto 31st century Earth. Slight hiccough in transporting Archer to the future – bear with… bear with… – Daniels has inadvertently and radically altered the timeline. Earth has been laid waste to long ago; there are no more time portals to get Archer home, and in the 22nd century the Suliban are targeting Enterprise's warp core. As the "To Be Continued…" rolls, the camera zooms out over a city in ruins, and Archer is standing on the edge of a destroyed skyscraper. Can you get more cliffhanger-y without a cliff?