Rufus is arguably the show’s most lovable character, the kind of figure you just don’t kill, not in season two, not even in a time-travel show. As the team grieves in our present, having left the body of a friend in the past, there’s a commotion. A time-machine pops out of nowhere, right next to a slightly younger version of itself, and out of it emerge a bearded Wyatt and a battle-hardened Lucy, staring down frankly at themselves. “Timeless” has, like almost all time-travel shows, some rules it doesn’t break. Not crossing into your own life is the biggest of them; another, not changing past events, got tossed out the window more and more often as the characters grew impatient with injustices they couldn’t right. So when future Wyatt and Lucy show up, it’s a cannonball through the center of the series, a complete rejiggering of the rules, landscape, and intent of the whole shebang.

On one side of the break, a dead friend, a losing team, and a bunch of rules. On the other, nothing but potential.

When “The Good Place” debuted in 2016, it demonstrated its affinity for cliffhangers right away. Creator Michael Schur famously talked to Damon Lindelof as he was developing his philosophical afterlife sitcom, and it shows—cliffhangers and complications are as much a part of the DNA of “The Good Place” as they were of “LOST.” In hindsight, each of those cliffhangers—flying shrimp, Jason Mendoza, Eleanor’s confession, the Medium Place, and so on—was laying the groundwork for the big one. “Michael’s Gambit” is one of the great season finales of the century, both because it’s a terrific episode and because its cliffhanger, like the “Timeless” season two cliffhanger, offers not questions and withheld answers, but endless possibility. It’s an episode that sent many (this writer included) back to the pilot to see how many clues we’d missed—the same is true, to a lesser extent, of “Timeless”—but “Michael’s Gambit” also spurred endless speculation about what was coming next.

And here’s the important distinction between finales like those discussed above and many others: The speculation isn’t guesswork, it’s imagination. Sure, it’s still possible to make a prediction about what finally convinces the Time Team to make such a trip, or about how Eleanor would figure out the secret of where she really was. But even those questions have big, fat, messy answers, or more accurately, lots of small ideas that may or may not add up to anything resembling the truth.

Nussbaum wrote that the cliffhanger “makes visible the storyteller’s connection to his audience—like a bridge made out of lightning.” Some of those bridges are gorgeous straight lines, like the identity of J.R.’s killer, or when Riker fires on the Borg in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” But for my money, the best show you where the bridge begins, but when you look up, there are dozens of walkways, like the branches of a vast tree stretching over the chasm of hiatus. Such things aren’t easily accomplished. “Alias” pulled it off at the end of its second season, in which all hell broke loose before Sydney found herself alone and two years in the future; “Breaking Bad” got there when Hank sat down on that toilet. “The Good Place” nailed it, and now, “Timeless” has, too.

