It’s the most wonderful – and deadly – time of the year in Ferndale. Tara Ward watches the 2025 Shortland Street Christmas cliffhanger.
Dr Poppy Achari was elbow deep in a human brain, with no idea that her evil boyfriend had killed her best friend, threatened her mother and was about to crash a helicopter into a hospital. Had Poppy ever drilled into a human brain in the middle of a busy corridor during a pandemic outbreak before? “I did it once in medical school,” she assured her Shortland Street colleagues, just as Libby Jeffries – yes, that Libby Jeffries – popped by with an old Black & Decker cordless number, just in case. It was just another day in Ferndale, and just another annual cliffhanger for Shortland Street, as tonight the nation’s long-running soap screened its final episode for 2025.
This year has been a challenging time for the beloved soap, with the series being forced to adapt to a tough commercial environment and changing audience habits. Now kept alive by funding from NZ On Air, Shortland Street returned last February with a reduced number of episodes each week (three, down from five), new sets, a smaller cast and a fresh approach to storytelling. It transformed from a sometimes awkward soap into a slick and intense medical drama that centred on dark, moody storytelling, centred around four different themed “seasons” through the year that determined the dramatic action.
Shortland Street did what it needed to survive, but as we wrote in March, these changes meant a shift away from the show’s traditional heart and humour. There were no more plotlines about Chris Warner’s beard or Conan O’Brien cameos, but story after story about the medical trauma of strangers. In recent months, the show returned to lighter, more familiar territory (Dawn’s return in particular seemed to unblock a welcome stream of comedic one-liners), and in the episodes leading up to tonight’s cliffhanger episode, Shortland Street did what it does best, by focusing on the complex relationships between a group of New Zealand medical professionals.
But how would Shortland Street approach its annual end-of-year cliffhanger, the episode that defines the year and is traditionally it’s most dramatic, outrageous and emotional? Could it still deliver the same explosive level of chaos and tension, or would this year’s challenges mean that Shortland Street had lost its ability to sign off with a bang?
Good news: Shortland Street’s 2025 cliffhanger was a humdinger, a classic of the genre. It had all the big, explosive moments you’d expect in an hour-long Christmas special, like a deadly disease running rampant through the hospital, gang members seeking revenge and Chris Warner being a hero. The patients were feral, and the medical professionals weren’t much better. “Can you find me a cranial drill?” Poppy shouted as she prepared to perform emergency brain surgery on her infectious colleague Mana, who had suffered a head injury after being hit by a vengeful patient who had just stabbed another doctor in the lift. Better work stories, everyone.
Between the assaults and the arguments, there were also quieter moments that reminded us that emotional relationships are the beating heart of Shortland Street. Drew realised he had feelings for the woman who once had an affair with his dead wife. A jealous Zoya told Naz that he wasn’t the father of Monique’s baby, right in the middle of operating on some poor bastard’s lacerated liver. Logan took a helicopter to Hamilton (fun) with the villainous Hendrix (not so fun) to pick up life-saving antiviral medicines, only to realise mid-flight that his fellow passenger had thrown Dr Cleo off the top of Shortland Street several weeks ago and made it look like suicide. Making a helicopter lose control and plummet into the CEO’s top-floor office was all in a day’s work for Hendrix.
It’s not the first time a helicopter has crashed into Shortland Street, but this cliffhanger didn’t feel like we’d seen it before. Instead, it delivered one of New Zealand’s most impressive and ambitious hours of television this year. Ridiculous? Absolutely. Gripping? Incredibly. Amid the betrayal, blood spurts and brain drilling, this suspenseful episode pulled off the perfect balance of light and dark, humour and horror. The pacing was brilliant, with the show pulling numerous story threads from the year together – in fact, there was perhaps too much happening – to leave us with a delicious uncertainty about what kind of drama and death toll we’ll come back to in the new year.
Tonight’s climatic cliffhanger was Shortland Street at its best. With the soap already renewed for 2026, viewers can head into the festive season knowing that at least some of their favourite characters will live to pash another day in 2026. But in this tricky climate, where making television is becoming more challenging and audience attention is harder to fight for, perhaps the greatest survival story of 2025 is Shortland Street itself.
Shortland Street streams on TVNZ+ and returns to TVNZ2 and TVNZ+ on 16 February 2026.
