TV cliffhangers are a lost art

polygon.com:

TV writers have a saying: Skrull me once, shame on you. Skrull me twice? Shame on me.

[Ed. note: Spoilers for the latest episode of Secret Invasion follow.]

Last week’s episode of Secret Invasion ended on twin cliffhangers: Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir) killing G’iah (Emilia Clarke), and Nick Fury’s (Samuel L. Jackson) secret wife Priscilla (Charlayne Woodard) receiving instructions to a secret meeting, presumably with the Bad Guys.

This week’s episode, “Beloved,” immediately resolves both of these, the first poorly, the latter less so.

In a move that feels obvious, G’iah is not dead, and her “killing” serves mostly as an excuse to reveal that she’s infected herself with Extremis, which heals her shortly after Gravik leaves her body in the woods.

As for Priscilla, she’s “working” for James Rhodes (Don Cheadle), who is in fact a Skrull. Fury suspects something is amiss, bugs their meeting, and afterward sits down with Priscilla to have a conversation about where they stand — which is, they decide, with each other. This isn’t as troublesome a resolution, though it’s still a little undercooked. Priscilla is a new character and an unknown quantity, and Secret Invasion’s writers are right to leave viewers guessing about her loyalties — they just don’t have the run time to play up any paranoia. The question is simply raised and answered an episode later.

G’iah’s fake-out death, however, just gets more annoying by the time “Beloved” ends, as the episode’s final beat is Gravik stabbing Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), presumably to his death.

The question I have for Secret Invasion is this: Is that all we have here? To leave characters’ lives in limbo two episodes in a row?

Cliffhanger deaths and death fake-outs are TV tropes as old