SyFy's Being Human is an expert in taking a cliffhanger and resolving it as blandly as possible

Yay Being Human is back on SyFy. Above: Family Portrait of ghost, two werewolves
and a really old and powerful vampire. Do you know which is which? This series
is all about family values, only the family they have is not anything like the kind
you or I can relate to (at least I hope that's the case).

Yay, Being Human is back on SyFy. As much as I love this series, however, I have one small bone to pick: it's an expert in taking a good cliffhanger and resolving it as "meh" as possible. This is not how cliffhangers should pan out people! If you blow up a planet, the next season shouldn't be, "Now that was just a hologram. Good thing it didn't really happen..."

Allow me to explain further:

Last season, the American Being Human series ended with ghost Sally being dragged into what looked a lot like Hell by the witch Donna. This left me on the edge of my seat shaking my fist at the screen. And seriously that's where it ended. It was just as bad as season 3's ending that had Aiden buried in the ground, Sally lost in Limbo with her voice coming over the radio, and Josh in a fatal gunfight with the werewolf that made him.

I guess I should just celebrate that Sally is back. Only I wish it had been just a LITTLE harder.

I waited a whole year for the resolution, and this is what I got: Sally's consciousness basically couldn't handle the purgatory in which she got imprisoned with Donna so naturally she created a "happy place" that resembled a day spa where she could get massages and lounge by the hot pools. So there had to be some trick to escape from this horrible place, right? Well it turns out...not so much.

See, Sally is a very "powerful" ghost (as expert witch Donna has labeled her) and all she had to do to get out of said place was come to the realization that she had all this power and could leave anytime she wanted. Just like that, she found the exit and got away from Donna. And thus we are off to a whole slew of new episodes and plot lines. Sadly, Sally's dilemma is resolved in like five minutes (if it even took that long) and I'm feeling very unsatisfied.

The writers behind Being Human are far from "inventing the wheel" on taking the easy way out to what looks like a difficult situation. Author George R.R. Martin made the most infamous cliffhanger in fantasy when he wrote (in A Feast For Crows) that Arya wakes up blind.

Martin seriously did this and then made us (the patient readers of the world) wait eight fucking years for the conclusion in A Dance With Dragons! The answer (major spoiler ahead) was that it was only temporary. Meh. She gets her eyesight back in just a few pages because it's induced by this stuff she drinks in the House of Black and White in Braavos (which is training her to be an assassin).

I LOATHE this kind of cliffhanger: the kind where the stakes are so high that it seems everything in the world has now changed yet is resolved in one paragraph of text.

If you still can't relate to what I'm saying, imagine reading the following words of a beloved character: "The woman clutched her chest, fell back, and her face filled with intense pain." Only to turn the page a year later and read, "A horsefly bit her, she squashed it, and went back to drying the dishes."

What the hell? Who does this? Why are writers using these kind of cliffhangers? I'm at a loss to explain the phenomenon, but it really is starting to bother me. Could it be that they have no ideas in their heads and want to write something so that it comes across way more interesting than it actually is?

Can you think of other examples of cliffhangers that turned out to be way over-hyped and anticlimactic? Does this kind of thing bother you or am I the only one?

As a side note, I do like the whole Ladyhawke-esque thing that SyFy is doing with their version of Being Human. In Josh's storyline, the role of his human part has flipped 180-degrees with his wolf part and he is now "human" only once a month, and this single day just happens to coincide with the only day his wife must turn into a wolf. So they can only be together for 30 minutes. The heart aches with how awful this must be, which is why I must watch the entire season to see if Aidan, Sally, and Nora can find a solution for poor Josh.

Ladyhawke. I hope that you guys have seen this show.

Oh and I'm also glad that Kenny is back and isn't the horrible monstrous looking Kenny and back to being cute. I just hope he isn't a bad guy. He seemed like a really sweet person last season and maybe it's time that something went right in his life. But if I know this series, no one can stay happy for very long.