Movement chains are delimited by criterial position: when a moved phrase meets a criterion we observe a freezing effect, and the phrase is no longer available to further movement. In this article I will discuss and analyze several examples of freezing effects in simple and complex configurations resulting from wh-movement in an indirect question. Exploring freezing properties will also lead, among other things, to a discussion of the conditions under which a NP can be extracted from a DP, which will be addressed through the tools offered by phase theory. The final part of the paper will be devoted to the possibility of deducing the freezing effects from the labeling algorithm and a maximality principle.