"I'll just watch the first two minutes"

There's a compromise the cliff offers, and it feels reasonable. You won't watch the next one. You'll just watch the first two minutes, to see what was behind the door, and then you'll switch off and go up.

Look at what's in the first two minutes of an episode built to follow a cliff. The door is opened, the thing behind it is shown, and the need from minute forty-four is met. Then, within the same scene, something else happens. A phone rings, a face changes, a car is seen outside. The writers know that the resolution of a cliff is the point at which a viewer might leave, and they've put a new hook in the same breath as the old answer, because a two-minute peek that satisfies is a viewer lost. The two minutes are built to prevent the very thing you're using them for.

So the peek isn't a peek. It's the next one, started, with a new reason to continue arriving before the old reason has been paid off, and a person who's watched the first two minutes is a person watching episode four with the remote on the far arm of the sofa. In my observation, and it's only observation, the two-minute peek ends at the credits of the episode it started, nearly every time, and the person who took it says "I just wanted to see" at twenty to midnight as though the wanting had been the plan.

The belief also gives away something about the cliff. If two minutes are enough to resolve it, the cliff was two minutes deep. It was never a thing you needed to sleep on. It was a small manufactured question with a small manufactured answer, and the answer would be just as small at half past nine tomorrow, when it would come at the start of an evening rather than the start of a night.

The method's answer is the one from chapter 21's cliff test. Will I still be able to find out tomorrow? Yes. Then the credits are the stop, and the two minutes are tomorrow's first two minutes, and tomorrow's evening starts with the door and not with the alarm. If the peek is irresistible, the remote across the room and autoplay off make it cost a stand and a menu, and a stand and a menu is usually enough for the wanting to be seen for what it is, which is minute forty-four, still working.