Cliffhanger
In literature, a cliffhanger was a literary device where a story ended in a precarious situation.

Chapters of serials from the 1930s often ended in cliffhangers. According to Tom Paris, this was to bring people back into theaters. He designed cliffhangers into the chapter ends of his holonovel The Adventures of Captain Proton, including one that stated "Chaotica fires his fiendish death ray! Certain death for Proton, as his rocket ship bursts into flames!!!"   Harry Kim pointed out that the recap was inaccurate and that they did not burst into flame at the end of the last adventure. Paris stated that cliffhangers were "the lost art of a hyperbole." ()

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Background information 

Star Trek itself has of course used many cliffhangers, typically signified by the intertitle baring the fourth wall-breaking caveat "to be continued...", or in the case of the first and only  cliffhanger, , "to be concluded next week". The first episode to air after the cliffhanger was typically recapped by a narrator, or in the case of , a narration disguised as a captain's log.

While not a cliffhanger in the truest sense,  left the door open to future productions with the intertitle stating "...And The Adventure Continues...".

The first season ending cliffhanger was for the production of the TNG Season 3 finale . Since then, cliffhangers have been introduced for mid-season two-parters and during episode arcs. 

The next such iteration would not return until the finale of the TNG Season 3 cliffhanger finale , which appeared with a simple black screen and the words "". This same title card was repeated for  and , however the spacing of the words on the card used in the latter was noticeably wider.

Seventeen years after TBOBW, Family Guy satirized its ending by using the same title card font and cliffhanger music (both scored by Ron Jones) for its cliffhanger episode "". 

In many cases, later TNG and DS9 cliffhangers generally overlaid the words on a black screen.

In other cases, they were overlaid over the final frame of the scene.

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Literary devices