I fully agree with your last point: ending a season with a cliffhanger is not essentially a bad thing but just letting it go without any kind of closure whatsoever is always a horrible decision. The viewer needs to get some kind of fulfillment at the end just to be able to take in the whole thing he/she just watched as something coherent. One could argue that at least Scorpion and Sub-Zero got a closure but this is hardly true because the actual conflict was not resolved in any shape or form.
However there's one thing I really liked: the first two episodes were constructed in a fine way and handling Liu Kang as a negative character is a very fresh and appropriate element to the franchise and actually has some depth in it. The idea of too strong righteusness turning into hate and evil was portrayed pretty well and that's not like what we are used to see in martial art movies. The dialogue where Shang Tsung convinced Liu Kang to switch sides was very poorly written sadly which kinda ruined this aspect for me but still I can't argue with the fact that the Kung Lao / Liu Kang parts were the strongest moments of the season.
It's also a good thing that fatalities were included. This is something the first film and every other motion picture adaptations of MK lacked so far so it was great to see them.
At the bottom line this is why I think it was the worst MK motion picture ever: making a simple and coherent story about a group of people beating up another group of people is not nuclear physics. It's not a question of budget, it's not a question of time, it's simply a question of common sense. There are a lot of scenes and characters (they include Stryker and tell us nothing about him?) I could cut after a second of thinking after seeing them written in the script because they doesn't serve fleshing out the concept of the season: the tournament. We didn't need to see a scene where Liu Kang murders a bunch of random people, we didn't need to see Johnny Cage in the can after what happened in the first season, we didn't need to see Kitana and Mileena arguing with each other because after watching their backstory in season one we knew this would happen, we knew she was betrayed by Khan and we knew for sure she'll switch sides. Hell, we don't even have to see when they go back to the backstory of Scorpion / Sub-Zero, that was already established so why spend a full episode on Sub-Zero learning one thing?
You can handle these things through dialogue or a bit of narration so you can focus your money and time on the tournament itself which is basically the foundation that is meant to hold the whole thing together. Instead of focusing on the backstory you can have the fighters interact with each other in the present so we can at least feel they are on the same team. You can give a tournament what a tournament begins with: an opening speech by Shang Tsung where you meet the new fighters and learn what the MK tournament is all about. A bunch of people wandering around on an empty island filled with MK flags and chasing around each other is not really a tournament to me. If they decide the fate of the world in these circumstances that's kinda lame.
Ultimately this ruined the whole thing for me.
And as I've said, this is a very simple way of storytelling, even a 12 year old could do it after watching Enter the Dragon, the first MK film or even that good awful Dead or Alive movie. Messing up a thing so simple is a very, VERY huge flaw and is actually inexcusable.
So just to have a score at the end, it's 2.5-3 out of 10 in my opinion.
