text: Season 5 cliffhanger: Earlier in the season, Cliff had J.R. facing a financial mess, when J.R.'s plan to blackmail the Farlows into handing over John Ross, by stockpiling 5 million barrels of the Farlows' crude oil, backfired on J.R., when the market price of crude oil started to plummet. In order to stockpile the Farlows' crude oil, J.R. had taken out a $200,000,000 loan and used $50,000,000 worth of Ewing Oil assets as collateral. Cliff, along with Jordan Lee (Don Starr), Andy Bradley (Paul Sorensen) and Wade Luce (Robert Ackerman), then worked with Vaughn Leland (Dennis Patrick) in order to buy into the notes owed by J.R., and they planned to foreclose. With Cliff seemingly putting one over on J.R., Miss Ellie (Barbara Bel Geddes) bailed Ewing Oil out of this mess by agreeing to a deal with Clayton (Howard Keel) that Clayton would pay the price that he would have paid at the time that the oil was stockpiled. By the season's end, J.R. and Cliff's situations had turned sharply in the opposite direction, as Sue Ellen, with whom Cliff had had an off-and-on relationship, decided to return to J.R., planning to marry him again. In addition, J.R. had set a trap for Cliff by making sure that a fake geological report would convince Cliff to invest millions of dollars in buying property on supposedly oil rich land which was actually bone dry. Cliff was then fired by his mother Rebecca Barnes Wentworth (Priscilla Pointer) from running Wentworth Tool & Die, due to Cliff's embezzlement of company funds. Cliff attempts suicide with an overdose of pills, and a guilt-ridden Sue Ellen rushes to his bedside as Cliff lies in a coma. J.R. tries to convince Sue Ellen that it was not anybody's fault but Cliff's for what happened, but Sue Ellen disagrees and says she does not know if she can remarry J.R. if Cliff dies. Cliff's life hangs in the balance as the season ends.