10 Most Shocking Finale Cliffhangers: ‘Chicago Fire,’ ‘NCIS,’ ‘The Rookie’ & More
With the end of another broadcast season comes finales that leave fans wanting — and needing — more. Such was the case with the 2025-2026 season.
Some finales left lives hanging in the balance in such a way that we have no idea who, if anyone, was hurt or killed, such as Chicago Fire leaving most of 51 in danger and NCIS ending with a face-off between an agent and a teammate’s son. 9-1-1: Nashville left off in the middle of Blythe (Jessica Capshaw) and Dixie’s (LeAnn Rimes) fight. NCIS: Origins and The Rookie‘s finales both ended with members of their teams kidnapped, and for one, it’s a mystery who’s behind it.
The good news? All of these shows will be back as part of the 2026-2027 season. However, two of them — High Potential and The Rookie — will return in the midseason, meaning a January 2027 or later premiere date. Those waits are going to feel so much longer.
Scroll down for our picks for the most shocking finale cliffhangers this season, then head to the comments section below with yours.
9-1-1: Nashville
With Dixie using her diss tracks to tell the world about Blythe’s past, Don (Chris O’Donnell) decided to try to help his wife out by agreeing to his ex-girlfriend’s terms … which included sleeping with her. He did ultimately not go through with it, returning home to talk to Blythe after the two had argued, but she had already gone to see Dixie. And once Dixie delightfully showed her the texts she’d exchanged with her husband, well, their conflict turned physical. The finale ended right in the middle of it.
“We will pay it off in Season 2, but we may make the audience wonder a little bit for a while about exactly what happened, how injured everybody was, and what happened after,” showrunner Rashad Raisani told TV Insider. “So, we’ll do a very small time jump in Season 2, but allow people to kind of wonder and then answer the question about what happened.”
Boston Blue
The first season of this Blue Bloods spinoff ended with Danny’s (Donnie Wahlberg) partner, Lena (Sonequa Martin-Green) getting shot but recovering at the end of the finale. What she didn’t know was her boyfriend Brian’s (Ryan Broussard) life was left hanging in the balance. After he stopped on the way to dinner with her family, a truck drove into his car and pushed it — with him inside! — into the river.
“We can tease that at the start of Season 2, Danny, Lena, and the rest of the Silvers and Boston police in general are on the hunt for the driver of that gray truck and that we will pick up where that case is when we return in Season 2,” executive producer Brandon Margolis told TV Insider.
Chicago Fire
The entire Season 14 finale was framed around one structure fire incident that ultimately left almost all of 51 inside battling the fire or on the ladder as a fireball engulfed it. Pascal (Dermot Mulroney), in town visiting and helping to maintain the scene outside the building, and paramedics Violet (Hanako Greensmith) and Novak (Jocelyn Hudon) could only watch and listen to the Mayday call.
For most of the finale, we were worried about Herrmann (David Eigenberg), since he renewed his vows with Cindy (Robyn Coffin) and a lot of what both said seemed to foreshadow a tragic ending. But there were also moments to worry about Mouch (Christian Stolte) and Cruz (Joe Minoso) as well, with glimpses of their wives during the ending montage. The episode itself reminded us quite a bit of the Season 2 finale, and when the series returned for Season 3, Shay (Lauren German) died. Uh-oh?
High Potential
From the moment Steve Howey‘s character, Wagner, was introduced, there were questions about whether or not he could be trusted. It seemed like he could as he joined in the investigation into Roman’s disappearance with Morgan (Kaitlin Olson) and the others. That led to his own father (Clancy Brown) and Willa Quinn (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Wagner went to meet someone, telling Morgan a time later than planned when she insisted on joining, and by the time she got there, he was seemingly bleeding out. But will Wagner die?!
“We don’t know. There’s probably a hospital close by, but boy, was he stabbed a lot [with] lots of blood,” Olson told us after the finale.
Marshals
Not only did the Yellowstone spinoff centered on Kayce (Luke Grimes) end its first season with a gunshot and we don’t know who was hit — Cal (Logan Marshall-Green) or Belle (Arielle Kebbel) — but the Dutton’s son Tate (Brecken Merrill) was also kidnapped by Tom (Chris Mulkey).
“I didn’t see it coming, to be completely honest,” Marshall-Green told us. “I think [showrunner Spencer Hudnut] overall does a great job of doling out story and it keeps even the cast guessing, which is the best part about TV.”
He added of his character, “If he survives this attack that you leave him on, I hope that Spencer and the writers will take him to task.”
NCIS
Earlier in Season 23, McGee (Sean Murray) and fans were shocked when it was revealed that he has an 18-year-old son, Mateo (Patrick Keleher). Since then, the two started getting to know each other, with Mateo touring NCIS in the finale. He seemed to decide against a cyber internship and the agency, only for Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) to learn that he did use a workstation to supposedly fill out an application … that was nowhere to be founding the system. When Torres confronted Mateo, the teen was armed and was worried that “they could be watching.” Someone fired a shot, but we didn’t see who at the end of the episode.
“Someone was hit. I can confirm that. I sort of had my fill this season, all of us, of killing people. So I can rule that out,” showrunner Steven D. Binder told TV Insider. “And also, there’s not a lot of fun there. When someone’s dead, they’re dead. It’s much more interesting — I’ll think back to when Gibbs shot McGee. It’s much more fun when someone’s alive and been shot than when they’re dead. And by fun, I mean, interesting.”
NCIS: Origins
On the one hand, this finale did see Gibbs (Austin Stowell) and Lala (Mariel Molino) finally kiss. But while they were having their rom-com moment, their teammate Randy (Caleb Foote) was kidnapped! It’s related to the work he’s been doing digitizing NIS’ case files (the agency rebrands in the finale to NCIS).
“We talk about the finale in the very first weeks that we get into the room when we’re talking about the season. And I think that’s one of the things that separates us from other procedurals is that we really are tracking the emotional arcs of our characters and we know we want to set them at the end of the season so we can build to it. And so for Randy, yeah, we knew he was doing this computer thing. We knew at the end of the season, we wanted him to get kidnapped, so we were able to build toward that,” showrunner Gina Lucita Monreal told us.
As for whether this is connected to a case we’ve already seen or not, showrunner David J. North said, “We don’t want to reveal that because it’d be such an important part of Season 3.”
R.J. Decker
It was R.J. (Scott Speedman) vs. corrupt politician Victor (David Zayas) in the Season 1 finale, and among those on the former’s side was the latter’s daughter, Emi (Jaina Lee Ortiz). They won that round, though the episode ended with Victor dead in his pool. There will be a long list of suspects to dive into in Season 2.
“Victor was constructed to go away in a ninth and final episode. … It felt like it would open us up to some bigger things when we roll into a second season,” showrunner Rob Doherty told us.
He continued, “The people closest to him will have to find themselves under a magnifying glass. I think Emi in our finale was part of a cabal to bring him down. If you look at that from another angle, it could look like she was acting against him, and maybe this was something — certain parties may come to believe that Emi had a hand in what happened. Beyond that, as we mentioned in the finale, Victor copped to being a shady politician, which I hear is a very rare thing. But he confessed to Emi that he maintains relationships with a lot of people that on paper he should not, but he has decided that it’s for the greater good. It makes Fort Lauderdale a safer city and Florida a safer state. So we’ll have to pick our way through some of those people, too. That’ll take some digging for sure. Who was Victor in bed with, and could they have done him in?”
The Rookie
The Season 8 finale gave Chenford fans the moment they’d been waiting for — Tim (Eric Winter) proposed to Lucy (Melissa O’Neil) — before both were kidnapped! “Heath Everett says payback is a bitch,” they were told. Everett (Jeffrey Vincent Parise) is the international crime boss who escaped their custody then was back in it by the end of the episode.
When it comes to Tim and Lucy’s fates, “I think we should be worried for sure. I mean, as a show, we definitely push the envelope with some of our characters and stuff like that. And there are real stakes on the show. That said, I also don’t want to send the internet scrambling and freaking out too much, but I do think that, yes, that the stakes are real, that ultimately where we would find them in Season 9,” showrunner Alexi Hawley told TV Insider. “But there is a reason they were taken and not killed.”
Sheriff Country
Surprise: Mickey’s (Morena Baccarin) mom isn’t dead! That was the bombshell dropped on the sheriff and her father, Wes (W. Earl Brown) in the final moments of the Season 1 finale when the DEA’s Santos (Rachel Ticotin) gathered them in her office for a joint op involving the Bulgarian cartel and him going undercover.
“One of the things we’ll unpack at the beginning of Season 2 is to what extent was Eva Santos trying to learn what kind of person her daughter is. She has been cut off from her daughter for years for reasons that we’ll get into and will become very clear. And I think the decision that she made all those years ago to leave Wes and Mickey, while it was a brutally hard decision and one that I think Eva has regrets about to this day, when the audience sees all the reasons that went into it, it’s not as simple as black and white. She was dealt a very bad hand of cards and she played it the best she could and believed she was doing what was best for her daughter. And we can question that decision and Mickey will question it,” showrunner Matt Lopez told TV Insider.
“I think now we’ll really get to know [Eva] and we’ll really dimensionalize her. I think for example, Mickey, who has a lot of hostility toward her mother when the season starts, will have to acknowledge there’s certain aspects of Eva that are not only quite admirable but remind Mickey of herself and that makes for some just great sort of character storytelling,” he continued.
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