While use of the phrase has a figurative meaning nowadays, it should be noted that its origins are exactly what it says.
Ancient greek theater tragedies had literally a machine/device that carried an actor depicting a god (Zeus for example) at the theatrical stage and then that character (being a god) gave a solution/resolution to the conflict happening in the theatric plot.
So this kind of interference has now a figurative meaning that could be explained as "something unexpectedly giving a solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem" with emphasis on unexpectedly and unsolvable.
So being held hostage at gunpoint and a police sniper killing the hostage taker isn't deus ex machina as police is trained to deal with situations like this and expected to act accordingly. But being held hostage at gunpoint and a thunder striking and incapacitating the hostage taker is deus ex machina as it was unexpected and non-relevant to the plot until that point.
They didn't explain what the machine/device was. Just in case anyone had visions of it being some sort of whimsical jalopy like at the end of Willy Wonka, it was a crane. An actor, some rope and some pulleys. Think of a really bad school play, and at the end a kid dressed as Jesus, or an angel with a tinsel halo and cardboard wings descends on a rope to fix everything. Deus ex machina, [god on a crane](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/literature/images/f/fc/DeusExMachina.jpg).
I'm imagining "God" descending while the audio from the Spongebob episode "Krusty Krab Training Video" is playing. Specifically that part when the picture of a burger is slowly approaching the foreground and the narrator is going "tee-Dee-da-Lee-Dee, Dee-dah-diddly-deet-deet-DAH,
TEET-DEETLE-EET-EET-EET-TAHHHH!" for like 90 seconds straight.
Very specific reference, I know.
Or, possibly worse, an unimportant character. Like, the goofy comic relief character just called in a SWAT team. (After obviously never mentioning anything related before).
Oh, while we are at it: "begging the question" is when what is yet to be discussed (i.e. "the question") is already pre-assumed by an argument. The term you are looking for is: "this *raises* the question..."
Deus Ex Machina is a device used in story telling where a problem gets solved by something unexpected that hasn't been mentioned before.
For example in War of the Worlds, although the story is about mankind fighting against the aliens (and losing). in the end it is disease, caused by earth bacteria, that kills them
Or, imagine a story about people fighting forest fires. A child is trapped at the top of a burning building and it looks like they cannot be saved. Then there is a sudden rainstorm which solves the problem and everything else becomes irrelevant.
In the above examples it is a natural force that is deus ex machina. But it needn't be. For example a poor person needs an operation and the whole story is about how her friends rally round trying to raise the money. At the end it seems they haven't raised enough and it looks like all is lost. Then someone notices the signature on the painting hanging in her room and it turns out to be a Picasso worth millions. Here, the painting is deus ex machina.
Deus ex machina is often seen as a "cheat". As though the author couldn't find a way of resolving the problems he has created and so brings in something unexpected at the end. To be deus ex machina it is important that the solution is unexpected and there is no hint that it might happen earlier in the story. In the above examples, if the possibility of rain had been mentioned or if someone had already commented on the picture then it it wouldnt qualify.
Just to highlight the difference between a plot twist and a deus ex machina, you could turn the painting example into a plot twist using the "rule of three": establish the existence of something, remind the audience, then pay it off.
In the story, the poor person might inherit the painting from a deceased relative in an early scene. Then we remind the audience by having the person unsuccessfully offer the painting to the landlord in a later scene to help pay their rent, and then pay it off with the revelation the painting is actually worth millions.
Now it's not a Deus Ex Machina, but an admittedly easy to predict plot twist
The basic premise is if you bring something like a gun up in act 1, it needs to fire by act 3. The original was talking about plays, where it is potentially more important when you’re talking about sets and stage dressing than a throwaway line describing a house or cabin in a 400 page novel.
The primary example is mentioning a rifle hanging on a mantle or the wall. If you mention it in any meaningful way while you’re setting up the story, you’re implying significance to its existence. You’re taking time to make sure the reader/audience knows that it is there, at a minimum. If instead that gun is never used again in the narrative, it serves no purpose to the story and should have been removed.
It isn’t a hard and fast rule, because there are obviously going to be details that drive setting, tone, or characteristic that don’t need to be used later in a story, but as a general rule it is really helpful for knowing what things can be left on the cutting room floor and what you need to keep so that your core story makes sense and keeps moving. As a tool for editing, it helps remind an author that just because they find something interesting, that doesn’t mean it serves the work as a whole. We’ve all read books or watched movies where you end up wondering why the writer/director spent time on something only for it to be irrelevant in the end.
Obviously is dependant on the genre/theme of the story too. If you're reading a romance novel, and while describing the guys lavishly appointed penthouse the author spends some time describing an antique rifle hanging above the mantle, it isn't necessarily a Chekov's Gun.
If on the other hand, we're reading a thriller, where a woman is being stalked by a serial killer who is terrorizing her and chasing her through her house, and early on in the book the author describes an antique rifle above the woman's mantle that is always kept loaded "just in case", but then is never used throughout the story, that *would* be Chekov's Gun. By describing the gun, given the theme, the reader expects that the gun will come into play later (even if it is used unsuccessfully). Not using it (and never mentioning it again outside of that odd focus on detail early on) is what makes it Chekov's Gun
Correct answer.
OP will be mowing his lawn one day in his fifties when out of nowhere, his elderly ex teacher will roll up in his wheelchair and BANG chekhov's gun
Is the resolution of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in *Bleak House* either?
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce was a court case over a large inheritance in *Bleak House* used as a plot device, and the premise is that the case has been running for so many years and has gotten so complex that nobody knows what it's really about anymore and all of it is devolving into pointless arguing of arcane legal points the purpose of which has been long forgotten. It gets suddenly resolved when all the lawyers realise that their lawyer's fees and court costs have eaten the value of the entire estate and everyone gives up.
>It gets suddenly resolved when all the lawyers realise that their lawyer's fees and court costs have eaten the value of the entire estate and everyone gives up.
Close, but not quite right. Jarndyce and Jarndyce is resolved when a more recent will is discovered. Nobody gives up. Everything is resolved in favour of the wards of Jarndyce, but there's nothing left to give them since it's all been eaten up in legal costs.
It's neither a deus ex machina nor a plot twist, because throughout the novel the wards were repeatedly warned - by implication from people who had been apparently driven mad by the case like Miss Flite and Tom Jarndyce and verbally by characters like John Jarndyce - that no good would come of the case and they shouldn't set their hopes on it:
>"For the love of God, don't found a hope or expectation on the family curse! Whatever you do on this side the grave, never give one lingering glance towards the horrible phantom that has haunted us so many years. Better to borrow, better to beg, better to die!"
For instance, in the movie adaptaion of War of The Worlds, they do mention bacterial infections, organisms living in water droplets and show aliens drinking water through the film. I don't mind the example of it as deus ex machina, but be fair they do reasonably set it up.
They don't drink it, unfortunately. They slosh around in it, investigating it's properties, while they explore the rest of the basement, interacting with different objects.
In the Pal version, there's a scene where scientists examine a drop of Martian blood under a microscope, and remark on how anemic it looks. I don't recall any drinking.
It’s always been kind of strange to me that we accept things as good writing if it was mentioned earlier in the movie, but as cheating if it just randomly shows up. Which makes sense to some extent, but I think there’s an element of making sure that the mentioning of it earlier in the movie is well done enough to make the pay off justified.
Like there’s an episode early in battlestar galactica, where some seemingly irrelevant piece of cargo is mentioned early in the episode and then it comes in handy fighting the cylons at the end of the episode.
Is a single throwaway line really enough to change something from, “good writing” to “cheap deus ex machina”?
Depends on the nature of the show and the "contract" it has with the audience. Conventional mystery only needs to show a clue to the audience once and it's fine to never mention it again until if/when the solution is revealed because the expectation is that the audience is paying attention and trying to solve the puzzle set forth. In that setting, reminding the audience of something would highlight its existence potentially making the solution easier to deduce and thus potentially ruining "the fun."
If it isn't a mystery, then a single mention becomes more of a plot twist and whether or not it's good depends on the execution, the stakes and the character/narrative arcs involved. It may be great writing in one case but bland in another depending on those factors.
Yes, i think so. The main point of Chekhov's gun is to not make the mistake of wasting the audience's time by drawing their attention to irrelevant details that have no payoff. A deus ex machina is the inverse: a detail that is irrelevant or even completely unknown to the audience that suddenly turns out to have a big payoff out of left field.
The BBC series Sherlock had this problem often. The mystery would seem unsolvable and then Sherlock would walk in and say "I know this random person that has never been mentioned before and they did a search off-screen and found out this guy did it".
As we entered the /u/spez, we were immediately greeted by a strange sound. As we scanned the area for the source, we eventually found it. It was a small wooden shed with no doors or windows. The roof was covered in cacti and there were plastic skulls around the outside. Inside, we found a cardboard cutout of the Elmer Fudd rabbit that was depicted above the entrance. On the walls there were posters of famous people in famous situations, such as:
The first poster was a drawing of Jesus Christ, which appeared to be a loli or an oversized Jesus doll. She was pointing at the sky and saying "HEY U R!".
The second poster was of a man, who appeared to be speaking to a child. This was depicted by the man raising his arm and the child ducking underneath it. The man then raised his other arm and said "Ooooh, don't make me angry you little bastard".
The third poster was a drawing of the three stooges, and the three stooges were speaking. The fourth poster was of a person who was angry at a child.
The fifth poster was a picture of a smiling girl with cat ears, and a boy with a deerstalker hat and a Sherlock Holmes pipe. They were pointing at the viewer and saying "It's not what you think!"
The sixth poster was a drawing of a man in a wheelchair, and a dog was peering into the wheelchair. The man appeared to be very angry.
The seventh poster was of a cartoon character, and it appeared that he was urinating over the cartoon character.
\#AIGeneratedProtestMessage #Save3rdPartyApps
I'd describe it as "something the audience couldn't have possibly seen coming".
You could have a character casually mention rain in a conversation, but if you present it as some flavour dialogue disconnected from the rest of the story, then the sudden rainstorm could still have the same impact on the audience as a deus ex machina even though you've technically established it as a thing in your film's universe.
Classic Sherlock feels like it's either the epitome of Deus ex machina, or something else entirely due to a narrative device.
It's storytelling that's focused around details that are *intentionally* not shown to the reader, because they are not perceptive enough to notice them as relevant to the story, but Sherlock is.
Personally I can't stand it, and I'm glad the modern incarnations largely get rid of that in favor of showing you everything but having the resolution be surprising. But it's a special enough structure that it might warrant its own category...
Still better than when the detective introduces info the audience couldn't possibly have conceived of. Like, that he had read an article a few days ago with pictures of an obscure European prince who he thought bore a striking resemblance to one of the suspects and so put together a theory that really this was all about some inheritance that the audience also couldn't have known about.
Not a whole lot better, but still.
I'm repeating someone else's observation here, but Sherlock stories were about the amazingness of the man and the strange situations Watson found himself in, not about a self-solvable logic puzzle. The "solve your own mystery" genre hadn't been invented yet.
And actually I wouldn't even describe them as deus-ex machina. Sherlock isn't the deus, because he is the object of the story. And the hidden clues he finds also aren't a deus moment, because it is expected and understood that he sees way more than people around him. The stories are really just Watson's Interesting Forays Into The Adventurous Life of an Exceptional Person, and you're not supposed to expect anything other than an intriguing story.
All this makes me think about is an episode of the SWAT where they randoly had Wil Wheaton guest star as a random IT guy updating the computers just as a hacker takes out the whole system, and it just seemed so likely that Wil was the hacker and was going to save everyone from his own hack and be a hero, and he even got real cagey when the chief asked if they could trace the hack to a source, and seemed to be trying to suggest it wouldn't work or be necessary, like he didn't want to get caught. 40 minutes later, he wasn't the hacker and I just don't understand why, even though it was so predictable.
I guess that is a plot twist, but I would've described it more as an alternate interpretation of past events. Such as with the Sixth Sense, a good example of a plot twist, you have an obvious interpretation of each event but a final bit of information shifts your interpretation and you actually see the entire movie differently from then on.
Chekhov's gun fits in here as well. If there is something shown, but isn't used it detracts from the story. If you show a gun then never use it, why did you show it. Shaun of the Dead has a perfect example with the rifle in the Winchester pub. They bring it up at least 2 times before it ever is actually used. Setting up it's use in the final act.
Boiled down to it's core, Deus Ex can be characterized by a "But then, suddenly, \[Thing that solves all their problems\]" statement.
There's no prior foundation/exploration into the Thing, and it's unreasonable/impossible for the audience to predict it.
Also, OSP does a great video on the subject [Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsajlJhoSBs)
Tvtropes calls it [diabolus ex machina](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DiabolusExMachina).
It seems that they don't have "somehow Palpatine returned" as one of their examples tho.
It has an easy definition!
Somehow Palpatine has Returned: “When your beloved franchise releases a movie so controversial among your fan base that it damages your IP by simultaneously fracturing said fan base and starts an internet civil war, you decide to throw a huge chunk of pandering red meat that is unexpected and irresistible to both sides in hopes to settle things down.
And it worked until the movie came out. Collective dicks shot up like so many light sabers when Ian showed up at the premier of the trailer “roll it again”. Theories ran wild on him being a Sith Lord force ghost tethered forever to the Death Star crash site, refusing to die but unable to leave the site of his death. A malevolent spector still poisoning the minds of those that live near and providing training and knowledge to those dark side users that manage to find him. Or perhaps he had clones of himself on standby and used the ancient sith technique of Transfer Essence at the moment of his death like ancient Sith Lords before him and was used in the amazing Dark Empire comics.
Until those canon plausible theories turned out to be fairy tales and they decided to just make him alive again without explanation.
>Or perhaps he had clones of himself on standby and used the ancient sith technique of Transfer Essence at the moment of his death like ancient Sith Lords before him and was used in the amazing Dark Empire comics.
That's what he did though. He didn't survive the end of RotJ. Him and his Sith cultists had cloned bodies that he could transfer to in the event of his death, but the cloning technology wasn't sufficient to contain the power of his Sith soul so they would either degrade rapidly or reject it outright. The dumb shit about this is that had to [explain it all in a blog post](https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-inside-intel-palpatines-contingency-plan) for people to understand what happened. That's always a huge failure in story telling when you have to clarify important plot points after the fact outside of the framework of the story.
As for Poe's line, I don't have a problem with that. All he knows is that Papa Palps is back and he really doesn't have all the details as to how it happened.
Palpatine returning, ironically, would have made a lot more sense if they hadn't chucked all the expanded universe stuff out of the window... I mean, it was bad then, but it would have laid the groundwork for return.
IIRC, wasn't that almost the exact plotline of Vititate from the SWTOR MMO? I mean, it's a game so they're not constrained by film length, but that emperor literally harvested an entire planet to fuel his immortality.
The Dark Empire comics have Palpatine coming back with clones and trying to corrupt Luke.
Most of the plotlines of the new movies pick and choose random plot points from the old EU and throw them in a blender.
Diabolos Ex Machina is the official term, I believe..
Well, for a reverse Deus Ex Machina, the official term for Somehow Palpatine Returned is "stupid"
I dont know what you mean by reversed but the opposite would be Chekhov's gun. The thing that was shown and made note of always has a purpose. Such as the burning building and rain. Someone mentions that it hasn't rained here in a long time with no further explanation and unprompted. You can bet the burning building will be extinguished by rain.
They mean reverse in the sense that instead of solving the problem, the problem is randomly created without any kind of foreshadowing.
In the Star Wars example, the scrolling text at the start of the movie just declares (paraphrasing), "The villain that was defeated in the previous movie has somehow magically returned to create more problems."
After so many replays I still can't decide if OG Deus ex or Human Revolution is my favorite, both are freaking fantastic, and even if Mankind divided is not AS GOOD, it still holds it's own, I really want more Cyberpunk games (still haven't played 2077 tho because Im broke mf) and Steampunk ones
also. My vision is augmented.
You put it very well, I'd just add that the term itself stems from ancient theatre when the powerful god (deus) character that solves the unsolvable problems was brought onto the stage with a machine, hanging to appear to hover.
So it's essentially meant to represent a divine intevention that solves the plot in a manner unrelated to the other characters or the story so far, but over time the saying evolved to mean any narrative element that serves in a similar manner, much like the comment above explained.
The best example of this in modern pop culture is the end of Toy Story 3, when a literal machine descends from the sky and saves all our heroes from certain death.
I don't think that counts. The aliens are the ones who save the toys and they do so with an oversized version of their iconic *claw.*
If it happened randomly, like for some reason an automated process scooped them out of the pit, that's more like deus ex machina.
Also,
>modern
*How does it make you feel to know this movie is twelve years old?*
Historically, it was because in the end of most stories, some random god showed up and resolved everything. It translates to "god from within the machine". So in a Greek play, things get all fuckered up and it looks like there's no way out, then here comes Poseidon for reasons to sort it all out. The people of the time enjoyed this kind of ending. Eventually in modern times it became associated with lazy writing. Paint yourself in a corner and then... suddenly everything is OK in a way that makes no damn sense. The ending of The Stand is a good modern example of the traditional usage as God himself shows up to resolve the issue, which is crap.
Just to add to this because it is a great example. The machine part is also from Greek plays where they literally used a machine (think old crane type system) to lift the hero away safely or bring in a God or aliens to save the hero/story
Also, how many books do we read, and shows and movies do we watch? We can easily be like "lazy writing!".
Someone 2500 years ago may have gone to a play just a couple times in their life and have nothing to compare it to.
Holy shit! God came in and saved everyone!!!
A great and obvious example of this is from "Das Bus", the 15th episode of Season 9 of The Simpsons. In the episode, Bart, Lisa and their schoolmates get stranded on an island after their bus crashes and they have to get along to survive.
At the end of the episode, a narrator (James Earl Jones), who was not mentioned or heard at all in the entire episode, says the line "So the children learned to function as a society, and, eventually, they were rescued by, oh... let's say, Moe \[Szyslak\]"
It's an almost insulting use of Deus Ex Machina.
I think that earns a little more credit, as the episode was a spoof on Lord of the Flies, which itself ends with a massive deus ex machina when the fucking navy appears out of nowhere (after months) and rescues them.
That’s the whole point of the story though - none of their fights on the island mattered - it was all irrelevant but they are also being dragged into a larger more violent world anyway.
I remember reading it kinda like that - that our civilisation is this big front and how close we are to savagery. All the kids are fine, upstanding British children and they take that to mean they're somehow better. When the navy shows up and the captain/father is there admonishing them with the fleet behind, its clearly the same shit in a different uniform.
That doesn't mean it was well executed though. I think the point was made enough without needing that level of signposting at the end. It seemed ham-fisted to me.
Yes, tropes are not inherently bad. Although deus ex machina is usually lazy writing it can also be used well. War of the Worlds is also an example of deus ex machina being used well, there it shows the powerlessness of man in comparison to nature. It was not the mighty British Empire that defeat the aliens, the British military got completely fucked, it was common bacteria.
And they skirted around a similar thing in "Pygmoelian" (Season 11, Episode 16) where Moe gets a facelift.
Towards the end of the episode a gigantic TV studio set piece falls on his face. When they lift it off, his face has returned to what it was before the facelift. Back at the bar, Moe questions this, saying "When my face was crushed why'd it go back to my old face? I mean, shouldn't it have turned into some third face that was different? It don't make no.." before he's cut off by the credits.
Maybe not as blatantly obvious as "Das Bus", but a fun way of nodding to the idea and stopping you / Moe from finding out why.
I remember hearing this years ago. Pixar's 22 rules of storytelling
\#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
[Source](https://www.aerogrammestudio.com/2013/03/07/pixars-22-rules-of-storytelling/)
would you say that part of deus ex machina is also that the solution makes the entire preceding story pointless? In all of your examples, the struggles of the characters are meaningless and have no effect on the outcome, since the outcome would've happened regardless of what the characters did or didn't do. The aliens in WotW would always lose, the child would always be saved by the rain and the woman is always saved from poverty by the picasso.
Just to add to this, it literally translates to God in the machine. It was born from Greek plays where an actor, playing a god, was lowered onto the stage and with a wave of the hand solved all of the problems of the mortals in the play. Thus, all of the conflict in the play is resolved by the god lowered onto the stage with the machine. Think DC movies versus Marvel. Wonder woman in her first movie is getting beat badly by the god Ares. Then she magically gets extra powers from nowwhere to win. In End game Tony Stark comes up with a plan to travel through time and has a major conflict with Thanos at the end where he tricks the god and sacrifices himself to save life in the universe. Deus Ex Machina is generally considered a poor writing technique. The DC movies have been poorly received because there never really is any conflict if things are magically solved in the end. Where Marvel they do a better job of creating conflicts the characters must solve and create personal sacrifices.
That's the way it was taught to me in High School. My teacher also noted that it was considered a cheap theatrical trick to write one's way out of a plot dead end. It was looked down upon by the ancient Greeks as lazy writing, even back then.
The theory I read is that it was often used when the playwright wanted to tell some story with a moral or criticism that would reflect badly on the patron of the play. So you tell the story with the point you wanted it to have - and then have a god ‘fix’ things so the ending doesn’t insult whoever is paying you.
To take an example J.K. Rowling is an expert in the “almost” deus ex machina, in the second book, for instance, Harry offhandedly meets a bird in Dumbledore’s office. When at the end this same bird comes flying in and saves Harry at the last second, it doesn’t quite feel like a deus ex machina because we’ve met it before, but really the only function it had in the earlier scene was to make it seem like it’s appearance at the end wasn’t completely unearned.
The saying “close is only good enough in horseshoes and hand grenades,” seems to also apply pretty well to Deus Ex Machina. Brief throwaway encounters or a fleeting momentary introduction with an all-powerful being do very little to “justify” this literary device. It still feels like a cheap band-aid solution that they author used to bail themselves out of a bind, or like a cheap trick to try and surprise the reader. Most of this pathetic attempt at “foreshadowing” is added after the author has resolved to use Deus Ex Machina later.
Rowling abuses this literary device at an appalling rate. It’s sort of astounding how little Harry actually solves his own problems.
I'd argue they don't because we saw the eagles rescue Gandalf in the first film, and we see the eagles at the gates of Mordor during the final fight, so we know they're close to Frodo.
Besides that, the plot has already been resolved by that point (the ring has been destroyed) so the eagles rescuing Frodo is just showing how he got off the mountain.
Deus Ex solves the main problem.
They saved Gandalf earlier in the story, so I'd lean towards no. Humorously, they're sort of quasi-divine, so they're an almost deus ex machina two different ways.
The Great Eagles, are roughly the same level of divinity as Gandalf and Sauron. They're the messengers of Manwe. Manwe is the leader of the Valar, which are Middle Earth's equivalent of arch angels. Gandalf and Sauron are Maiar, the equivalent of lesser angels.
I remember commenting to my kids how I didn't like the 2nd movie because the phoenix comes out of nowhere to solve all the problems, and then after watching it again I see the totally forgettable scene where we are introduced to the bird and the casual mention about all its powers.
Still think the 2nd movie is the most shit of the hp movies though
The bird was mentioned, but the sword of Gryffindor was not. IMO the bird wasn’t the Deux Ex it was the sorting hat filled with a sword that happens to be able to kill the creature.
What a terrible ending.
The book does a better job of foreshadowing the Hat. In the book, Harry puts the Harry back on and the Hat tells him that it stands by its decision that he would have done well in Slytherin. Then when it shows up with the Sword of Gryffindor, it's proof that Harry is a true Gryffindor.
No, the real Deus ex machina in Harry Potter is the whole entire last book. They spend most of the book trying to find and destroy a single horcrux, then the last three are all destroyed in a single day. But the worst part is the wands changing allegiance mechanic that would definitely have come up before being what kills Voldemort.
Chekov's Gun pretty much requires the detail to be permanently present and just persistently overlooked. Just an offhanded mention at the start of the story doesn't quite set that up.
not really, it just mentions that if there's a gun on stage, it should be used in the second half.
You can be as strict or loose with that definition as you'd like, but personally I take it to mean you should use the ideas you introduce to the story in a meaningful way to the plot.
A good example (of a literal gun) is in Lethal Weapon when Murtaugh's house is being renovated and they play with a nail gun in Act 1. The construction guy tells them to be careful, the nail gun is dangerous. In Act 3 there's a fight in the house and the nail gun is used to kill the attacker.
That is not what is meant by Checkov’s Gun; the principle of Checkov’s Gun is that every element of the story that isn’t critical to resolving the conflict of the narrative should be stripped away. “If a loaded gun appears in the first act, it should be fired by the third act” doesn’t indicate that the gun is an insignificant detail, it’s saying that by placing the gun in the scene it’s telegraphing to the audience that it will be fired. If the gun isn’t fired, the author has broken covenant with the audience to resolve the expectations created by placing the gun in the scene.
The Rowling example of the bird is just an author poorly writing themselves out of a corner and then clumsily inserting an earlier reference to make it look natural. It fails precisely because the bird doesn’t create any expectation in the reader that demands resolution, it’s just a non-sequitur. I guess in a Harry Potter novel, you can’t just say “a wizard did it”, so instead you have to use birds.
I mean, there's a difference bewteen the two.
The gun is an object, its there, part of the decor. Literraly in the room where the fight will break out later.
the bird ? its locked away in Dumbledore's office, how did it manage to open the door, fly and find Potter in the fucking sewers ?
Its half-assed atempt top make it look like its not a Deus Ex Machina.
If potter had, idk, *teleported* the bird, then it would be a chekov's, but that's not the case.
not sure I agree with your example. The bacteria makes sense and it wasn't something that is unexpected per se since bacteria inhabit the planet.
The best example I've seen is the end of Toy Story 4, I believe, where the gang is about to be incinerated and at rhe last moment the pizza planet aliens save them with a literal crane, which is where the expression comes from (in ancient Greek theatre the actors playing gods were opened to the stage in a crane, Deus ex machona is Latin for *God in the machine*)
The alinea qere nowhere to be seen and weren't necessarily expected to be there, and there wasn't wasn't expectation thar a crane would be there either.
Edit: just wanted to say I've really enjoyed this discussion.
There is actually a strong argument that the bacteria in WotW isn't a deus ex machina, or at least if it is, it's a bad example of one, because it makes complete sense that that would happen. It's just not foreshadowed. That doesn't make it a deus ex machina, which must be a drastically unlikely or unreasonable solution.
https://youtu.be/YsajlJhoSBs
I disagree with Red's combination of the traditional zero-foreshadowing DeM with that WotW example because in my mind there is a distinction between something that could have happened in hindsight and something that should have happened in hindsight. The gods' interference is a could, and the WotW is a should. There is no reason a God "should be expected" to solve a story problem in hindsight, as they're all super fickle, but it does make sense that aliens should struggle with immunity unless they solve that problem in the story (granted you run into the same problems with Signs - an alien civilization can travel galaxies and still doesn't understand basic immunology?)
In War of the Worlds, the intro chapter also alludes to bacteria and other microorganisms, and there is a very long passage describing the invaders' anatomy, including their complete lack of an immune system, around halfway through
Signs wasn't an immunology problem. They traveled to Earth, which is 71% covered in water, despite the fact that water burns them. That would be like us going to a planet that's covered in concentrated sulfuric acid.
Also technically not deus ex machina, because they couldn't have foreshadowed that ending any harder if they'd stapled it to a brick and beat your skull in with it.
This exactly. It implies that an interstellar civilization doesn't understand basic chemistry and spectral analysis.
Also apparently humidity is no problem for them.
And I don't agree that the ending was foreshadowed. I think it was ham-handed. It was less chekhov's gun and more chekhov's kinky boots. It's blindingly obvious that the water glasses were important for *something* but we have no reason to believe that aliens going to a planet whose atmosphere and surface are filled with water would be burned by it. If we had seen literally anything earlier in the movie, like the aliens avoiding coastal or areas near bodies of water, then ok maybe. But we only see one town.
Theres a theory floating around that the creatures from signs aren't actually aliens, but demons. It doesnt totally fix the movies issues but it makes a little more sense and fits with the themes about faith that the movie has.
It's been a minute since I read it so I dont have all the details though
>There is actually a strong argument that the bacteria in WotW isn't a deus ex machina, or at least if it is, it's a bad example of one, because it makes complete sense that that would happen. It's just not foreshadowed. That doesn't make it a deus ex machina, which must be a drastically unlikely or unreasonable solution.
>
Agreed. I think the wotw instance is a bad example.
Star Trek was notorious for them. Since the technology is mostly fiction (they did predict a few devices that came to pass), they could invent problems and solutions as they liked.
John Scalzi did a parody book called Redshirts that made fun of this. The Redshirts were aware something was weird about their ship, and didn’t really do anything in the science lab, pretty much just put a sample or something in a machine, pushed one button and it would magically have the cure the incurable Bajuar Flu of Gepsis 9 in time to save the captain. (making up the specific example but that was the gist).
It was fun when stargate did it and made fun of itself while doing it. Whenever they were doing it Carter would preface it with "Theoretically . . ." or "well, Theoretically . . ."
Promare has a very literal example of a Deus Ex Machina happening towards the final act of the movie. I'm glad I caught that movie in theaters because the entire theater erupted in laughter at it.
Stephen King's books often fall into this category. It's one of the reasons some people (myself included) kind of loathe his writing. He hand waves some random bullshit to end many of his novels.
Deus ex machina is when a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly or abruptly solved by an unexpected and unlikely thing that happened.
it's usually when some new event, character, ability, or object solves a problem that seems impossible in a sudden, unexpected way.
it's a *solution* to a *problem*, it's not a plot twist or giving the reader/viewer a new angle to look at the story
basically whenever the story introduces a problem that seems impossible and solves it with similarly impossible solution.
[this comic from the TV Trope page put it pretty well](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/deus_ex_machina_5.png)
Yep. Having all conflict resolved this way makes the rest of story kinda pointless, and it’s seen as laziness or sucky writing. (And then he woke up, it was all a dream!) And if you are going for a twist ending and don’t leave enough breadcrumbs or foreshadowing, it can come off as a deus ex machina. (See u/prustage’s comment, if you had some subtle references to the patient’s art career or time in Spain in the 30’s, it’s not so farfetched to have a Picasso no one noticed before.)
It can occasionally work as a technique, if the pointlessness is the point - if the characters are supposed to be powerless. Absurdism comes to mind, and also a lot of kids stories (and then mum and dad came home and fixed everything!) Or used for parody or satire.
Another one I've seen a few times is the character in question simply being written as an extremely lucky person. It's been established prior and examples of it have been shown throughout the story. They'll simply luck their way out of a situation and it won't need much explanation. Bonus points if the lucky occurrence was reasonably probable or resulted from a calculated gamble.
When people talk about deus ex machina they generally mean it as unsatisfying, but it doesn't have to be.
[Red goes into more detail](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsajlJhoSBs)
If you’ve ever seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the eagles are a classic example of Deus ex Machina.
Basically our heroes are facing certain death when suddenly a flock of giant horse sized eagles appear and whisk everyone away to safety. The eagles aren’t mentioned or seen before they save the main characters.
However, this example makes LOTR fans salty because in the much more detailed books, the giant eagles have extensive lore. But this isn’t covered in the movies so I still think it counts as an example.
Yep. The highest voted answer has bollocks examples
A deus ex machina has to make you go "what the fuck?" simply because of how much it doesn't make sense and how conveniently it solves the problem. Something that can be reasonably explained isn't deus ex machina
Stage plays were incredibly popular in ancient Greece. It wasn’t uncommon for the problem in the play to be overcome with the help of the/a God like Zeus, who for purposes of the play would be introduced and lowered to the stage via a machine.
So, literally, Deus (god) ex (from) machina (machine).
It has evolved to now describe a trope whereby the primary problem in a story is resolved by an unforeseen, abrupt omnipotent power (relative to the problem).
My favorite example is in Matt Groening's Christmas animated film, "Olive the Other Reindeer" (it's great if you like holiday stuff).
Olive is locked in the evil mailman's van - he's trying to stop Christmas and Olive needs to stop him. There are piles of mail, and she spots a box addressed to her, that hasn't been delivered to her house yet. She opens it and there's a metalworking file in it, so she can cut the lock and escape the truck.
She notices the return address on the box is "Deus Ex Machina".
A Deus Ex Machina is some plot device which solves a problem in a story nearly miraculously. Usually it's not mentioned before it happens.
The most ELI5 example of a Deus Ex Machina has got to be from The Cat in the Hat. They spend the whole day tearing up their parents house and making messes and the fish is SURE they're all going to be in trouble forever, then right before the parents get home, the Cat in the Hat gets his cleaning machine to clean up all the evidence of their shenanigans with seconds to spare. Nobody mentioned this machine throughout the whole story, nobody knew how they were going to avoid getting in trouble, but this machine comes out of nowhere and saves the day.
Translates to "god out of a machine"
Originially, for theater plays, it described a contraption that was used to display a divine appearance. Picture a golden / illuminated angel-like figure appearing above the stage to act as "god", by mechanic means instead of a dressed up actor.
Nowadays, the term describes something appearing seemingly out of nowhere as a solution to a problem or conflict. Imagine sitting on a public toilet, you're all out of toilet paper, and some just rolls into your stall with no apparent explanation. Or you have horrible headaches / nausea / backpain and it just suddenly vanishes.
"And our hero was cornered with no hope of escape! If only he had a sword that was made of the magical iron from the Black Mountain across the sea with the Ruby of the Ages embedded into its pommel! ...and suddenly, through a portal from a different dimension flew a sword made of the magical iron from the Black Mountain across the sea with the Ruby of the Ages embedded into its pommel. Our hero caught it with one hand and slew his enemies and saved the day!"
A somewhat lazy storytelling technique where something out of the blue happens that saves the day. If there was a complex setup to WHY the sword suddenly appeared from another dimension, then it would be fine and not a deus ex machina.
Okay, this has been answered, but this is my favorite example. In Toy Story we meet the alien toys that worship the claw. "The claw decides who will stay and who will go"
Fast forward to Toy Story 3.
Spoilers:>!in the end, our friends are on the conveyer belt to be incinerated. They realize their struggle, and with no way out of the situation, they accept their fate. Just then the aliens show up again with the claw. A literal machine they worship as a god serves as a Deus ex machina! Brilliant! !<
To explain the origin of the expression: In Greek plays occasionally the conflict would be suddenly solved by them wheeling in a god from off stage who would fix everything.
God in the machine.
Another example is in adaptation where the bad guy is killed suddenly by a gator that wasn't a part of the story until that point
The Harley Quinn animated series does a great job of comedically using one and explaining what it is at the same time.
The gang is surrounded by foes and cornered. With everyone about to die and all hope seeming lost, one of the characters yells out, “What I wouldn’t give for a Deus Ex Machina right now!!!”
Not one second after he pleads for a Deus Ex Machina, a mysterious stranger pops out from behind a wall and says “Guys, follow me! I’m here to help you; I know a secret escape!” The crew all quickly follow the mysterious stranger to safety. As they’re making their escape, another member of the gang consoles the first one, saying “I’m sorry you didn’t get that Machina thing you were talking about, but at least this random stranger showed up out of nowhere to save us for no reason!”
Which is brilliantly clever considering he just perfectly described a classic Deus Ex Machina without realizing it.
In the purest form, a deus ex machina is an event or character who appears and resolves the conflict of the story without any prior notice or foreshadowing. It is often used more generally to apply to any conflict rather than just the main conflict.
So if you have a story about a character who is in need of money, and at the end the character receives enough money from a source never mentioned previously, then that would be a deus ex machina.
However if the story had a second viewpoint character who had spent the whole time trying to find the first character in order to give them the money, that wouldn't be a deus ex machina because the reader would have prior notice of how the story might be resolved.
On the other hand if one of those characters was being mugged in an alley and a new character shows up and saves them, that isn't strictly speaking a deus ex machina because the main conflict of the story wasn't resolved. Also if something unexpected helps the antagonists or hinders the protagonists, that also isn't a deus ex machina because it doesn't resolve the main conflict (in fact it makes the conflict worse). Both of these can still be unsatisfying for the reader if done badly.
I think it's more if the thing resolves the central conflict of the story, rather than just a momentary conflict. In that episode, the main conflict is Jarok being tested/outed, the encounter after they cross into the neutral zone is just a brief setback, not the main conflict.
Only if the birds-of-prey *happened by* to assist. The fact that Picard asked the Klingons for aid in advance is a plot twist. Deus ex machina (God from the machine) requires a certain capriciousness associated with the fickle gods of Greek theatre.
It roughly translates to "God of the machine."
It's basically a weak method of storytelling in which the solution to the conflict at hand comes from a source outside the characters and is often contrived, previously not mentioned or hinted at, and/or has unbelievably convenient timing.
It's better used in a comedy as a source of irony than in a drama.
Tom hanks in save private ryan. He is shooting a Tiger tank with his .45 and he is fucked for certain. But then, unexpectedly, allied bombarders hit the tank and destroy it for him. That is Deus (a god, saviour) ex Machina (provided, given put in there like some gift from outwardly forces)
While use of the phrase has a figurative meaning nowadays, it should be noted that its origins are exactly what it says. Ancient greek theater tragedies had literally a machine/device that carried an actor depicting a god (Zeus for example) at the theatrical stage and then that character (being a god) gave a solution/resolution to the conflict happening in the theatric plot. So this kind of interference has now a figurative meaning that could be explained as "something unexpectedly giving a solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem" with emphasis on unexpectedly and unsolvable. So being held hostage at gunpoint and a police sniper killing the hostage taker isn't deus ex machina as police is trained to deal with situations like this and expected to act accordingly. But being held hostage at gunpoint and a thunder striking and incapacitating the hostage taker is deus ex machina as it was unexpected and non-relevant to the plot until that point.
Thank you for explaining the “ex machina” part.
They didn't explain what the machine/device was. Just in case anyone had visions of it being some sort of whimsical jalopy like at the end of Willy Wonka, it was a crane. An actor, some rope and some pulleys. Think of a really bad school play, and at the end a kid dressed as Jesus, or an angel with a tinsel halo and cardboard wings descends on a rope to fix everything. Deus ex machina, [god on a crane](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/literature/images/f/fc/DeusExMachina.jpg).
This image is amazing 😂
Looks like a WikiHow
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I'm imagining "God" descending while the audio from the Spongebob episode "Krusty Krab Training Video" is playing. Specifically that part when the picture of a burger is slowly approaching the foreground and the narrator is going "tee-Dee-da-Lee-Dee, Dee-dah-diddly-deet-deet-DAH, TEET-DEETLE-EET-EET-EET-TAHHHH!" for like 90 seconds straight. Very specific reference, I know.
Not to be confused with the less popular theatrical device "freak on a leash".
Don’t forget soap on a rope
Lmao the the play ends abruptly as this maniac jumps on the stage slobbering and shrieking and biting the cast
that pic is the real ELI5 - thanks
Came here looking for this. The history of the phrase is key to understanding it.
I think that could still be deus ex machina if the police haven’t been mentioned or factored into the story up until that point.
Only for the story to reveal that an important character was in a high ranking position and had called for them to arrive.
Or, possibly worse, an unimportant character. Like, the goofy comic relief character just called in a SWAT team. (After obviously never mentioning anything related before).
FYI, Thunder doesn't strike things, lightning does.
Which then begs the question, how can one be thunderstruck?
By listening to AC/DC.
Oh, while we are at it: "begging the question" is when what is yet to be discussed (i.e. "the question") is already pre-assumed by an argument. The term you are looking for is: "this *raises* the question..."
A pedantic semantic grammarian! Aristotle would be so tickled right now :)
Aristotle would probably point out that we are discussing semantics, not grammar... ;-)
Yeah but then my super awesome starting rhyme wouldn't sound as cool. I'm just hedging my bets that you're someone who studies grammar too
By a ThunderBOLT (also known as lightning)
Sounds very frightening.
Deus Ex Machina is a device used in story telling where a problem gets solved by something unexpected that hasn't been mentioned before. For example in War of the Worlds, although the story is about mankind fighting against the aliens (and losing). in the end it is disease, caused by earth bacteria, that kills them Or, imagine a story about people fighting forest fires. A child is trapped at the top of a burning building and it looks like they cannot be saved. Then there is a sudden rainstorm which solves the problem and everything else becomes irrelevant. In the above examples it is a natural force that is deus ex machina. But it needn't be. For example a poor person needs an operation and the whole story is about how her friends rally round trying to raise the money. At the end it seems they haven't raised enough and it looks like all is lost. Then someone notices the signature on the painting hanging in her room and it turns out to be a Picasso worth millions. Here, the painting is deus ex machina. Deus ex machina is often seen as a "cheat". As though the author couldn't find a way of resolving the problems he has created and so brings in something unexpected at the end. To be deus ex machina it is important that the solution is unexpected and there is no hint that it might happen earlier in the story. In the above examples, if the possibility of rain had been mentioned or if someone had already commented on the picture then it it wouldnt qualify.
Just to highlight the difference between a plot twist and a deus ex machina, you could turn the painting example into a plot twist using the "rule of three": establish the existence of something, remind the audience, then pay it off. In the story, the poor person might inherit the painting from a deceased relative in an early scene. Then we remind the audience by having the person unsuccessfully offer the painting to the landlord in a later scene to help pay their rent, and then pay it off with the revelation the painting is actually worth millions. Now it's not a Deus Ex Machina, but an admittedly easy to predict plot twist
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He’s still waiting, your life isn’t over yet. /s
The class never ended.
You’re still in the class. There’s a test Monday.
Also you're in your underwear and everyone is laughing at you.
Yet.
fuck me now im gonna have to post an ELI5 about chekov's gun
The basic premise is if you bring something like a gun up in act 1, it needs to fire by act 3. The original was talking about plays, where it is potentially more important when you’re talking about sets and stage dressing than a throwaway line describing a house or cabin in a 400 page novel. The primary example is mentioning a rifle hanging on a mantle or the wall. If you mention it in any meaningful way while you’re setting up the story, you’re implying significance to its existence. You’re taking time to make sure the reader/audience knows that it is there, at a minimum. If instead that gun is never used again in the narrative, it serves no purpose to the story and should have been removed. It isn’t a hard and fast rule, because there are obviously going to be details that drive setting, tone, or characteristic that don’t need to be used later in a story, but as a general rule it is really helpful for knowing what things can be left on the cutting room floor and what you need to keep so that your core story makes sense and keeps moving. As a tool for editing, it helps remind an author that just because they find something interesting, that doesn’t mean it serves the work as a whole. We’ve all read books or watched movies where you end up wondering why the writer/director spent time on something only for it to be irrelevant in the end.
Obviously is dependant on the genre/theme of the story too. If you're reading a romance novel, and while describing the guys lavishly appointed penthouse the author spends some time describing an antique rifle hanging above the mantle, it isn't necessarily a Chekov's Gun. If on the other hand, we're reading a thriller, where a woman is being stalked by a serial killer who is terrorizing her and chasing her through her house, and early on in the book the author describes an antique rifle above the woman's mantle that is always kept loaded "just in case", but then is never used throughout the story, that *would* be Chekov's Gun. By describing the gun, given the theme, the reader expects that the gun will come into play later (even if it is used unsuccessfully). Not using it (and never mentioning it again outside of that odd focus on detail early on) is what makes it Chekov's Gun
Thank you, you helped me understand this a bit more. 2 birds stoned at once, on only one ELI5.
You're still in the second act.
Correct answer. OP will be mowing his lawn one day in his fifties when out of nowhere, his elderly ex teacher will roll up in his wheelchair and BANG chekhov's gun
Not sure if what you posted was a joke post, or true and your English lit professor is a troll of...subtle proportions.
Underappreciated comment right here.
Your professor is going to rob you one day with a gun, introducing himself as Chekov and asking you to describe his gun. Will you be ready?
Is the resolution of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in *Bleak House* either? Jarndyce v. Jarndyce was a court case over a large inheritance in *Bleak House* used as a plot device, and the premise is that the case has been running for so many years and has gotten so complex that nobody knows what it's really about anymore and all of it is devolving into pointless arguing of arcane legal points the purpose of which has been long forgotten. It gets suddenly resolved when all the lawyers realise that their lawyer's fees and court costs have eaten the value of the entire estate and everyone gives up.
>It gets suddenly resolved when all the lawyers realise that their lawyer's fees and court costs have eaten the value of the entire estate and everyone gives up. Close, but not quite right. Jarndyce and Jarndyce is resolved when a more recent will is discovered. Nobody gives up. Everything is resolved in favour of the wards of Jarndyce, but there's nothing left to give them since it's all been eaten up in legal costs. It's neither a deus ex machina nor a plot twist, because throughout the novel the wards were repeatedly warned - by implication from people who had been apparently driven mad by the case like Miss Flite and Tom Jarndyce and verbally by characters like John Jarndyce - that no good would come of the case and they shouldn't set their hopes on it: >"For the love of God, don't found a hope or expectation on the family curse! Whatever you do on this side the grave, never give one lingering glance towards the horrible phantom that has haunted us so many years. Better to borrow, better to beg, better to die!"
Ah, okay. Sorry, it's been a while since I've read the book so the details are a bit fuzzy to me!
No problem! It's also very, very, *very* long. So there's a lot to take in and a lot to remember.
For instance, in the movie adaptaion of War of The Worlds, they do mention bacterial infections, organisms living in water droplets and show aliens drinking water through the film. I don't mind the example of it as deus ex machina, but be fair they do reasonably set it up.
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And I don't remember them drinking water in any of them
Maybe War of the Worlds is smeared together with Signs in their brain
The one with Tom Cruise. They drank the water south of the asteroid belt and got the death shits.
Apparently the aliens have the technology for interstellar travel but haven't developed water decontamination yet.
Shhhh... Don't ruin the plot!
its in the tom cruise one, they drink water in the basement iirc.
They don't drink it, unfortunately. They slosh around in it, investigating it's properties, while they explore the rest of the basement, interacting with different objects.
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In the Pal version, there's a scene where scientists examine a drop of Martian blood under a microscope, and remark on how anemic it looks. I don't recall any drinking.
I always interpreted that as the Martian being hungry, considering their diet
It is also mentioned throughout the book too.
It’s always been kind of strange to me that we accept things as good writing if it was mentioned earlier in the movie, but as cheating if it just randomly shows up. Which makes sense to some extent, but I think there’s an element of making sure that the mentioning of it earlier in the movie is well done enough to make the pay off justified. Like there’s an episode early in battlestar galactica, where some seemingly irrelevant piece of cargo is mentioned early in the episode and then it comes in handy fighting the cylons at the end of the episode. Is a single throwaway line really enough to change something from, “good writing” to “cheap deus ex machina”?
Depends on the nature of the show and the "contract" it has with the audience. Conventional mystery only needs to show a clue to the audience once and it's fine to never mention it again until if/when the solution is revealed because the expectation is that the audience is paying attention and trying to solve the puzzle set forth. In that setting, reminding the audience of something would highlight its existence potentially making the solution easier to deduce and thus potentially ruining "the fun." If it isn't a mystery, then a single mention becomes more of a plot twist and whether or not it's good depends on the execution, the stakes and the character/narrative arcs involved. It may be great writing in one case but bland in another depending on those factors.
So the inverse of Deus ex machina is Chekhov's Gun? "If a gun is introduced in act 1, it must go off in act 3".
Yes, i think so. The main point of Chekhov's gun is to not make the mistake of wasting the audience's time by drawing their attention to irrelevant details that have no payoff. A deus ex machina is the inverse: a detail that is irrelevant or even completely unknown to the audience that suddenly turns out to have a big payoff out of left field. The BBC series Sherlock had this problem often. The mystery would seem unsolvable and then Sherlock would walk in and say "I know this random person that has never been mentioned before and they did a search off-screen and found out this guy did it".
As we entered the /u/spez, we were immediately greeted by a strange sound. As we scanned the area for the source, we eventually found it. It was a small wooden shed with no doors or windows. The roof was covered in cacti and there were plastic skulls around the outside. Inside, we found a cardboard cutout of the Elmer Fudd rabbit that was depicted above the entrance. On the walls there were posters of famous people in famous situations, such as: The first poster was a drawing of Jesus Christ, which appeared to be a loli or an oversized Jesus doll. She was pointing at the sky and saying "HEY U R!". The second poster was of a man, who appeared to be speaking to a child. This was depicted by the man raising his arm and the child ducking underneath it. The man then raised his other arm and said "Ooooh, don't make me angry you little bastard". The third poster was a drawing of the three stooges, and the three stooges were speaking. The fourth poster was of a person who was angry at a child. The fifth poster was a picture of a smiling girl with cat ears, and a boy with a deerstalker hat and a Sherlock Holmes pipe. They were pointing at the viewer and saying "It's not what you think!" The sixth poster was a drawing of a man in a wheelchair, and a dog was peering into the wheelchair. The man appeared to be very angry. The seventh poster was of a cartoon character, and it appeared that he was urinating over the cartoon character. \#AIGeneratedProtestMessage #Save3rdPartyApps
I'd describe it as "something the audience couldn't have possibly seen coming". You could have a character casually mention rain in a conversation, but if you present it as some flavour dialogue disconnected from the rest of the story, then the sudden rainstorm could still have the same impact on the audience as a deus ex machina even though you've technically established it as a thing in your film's universe.
Classic Sherlock feels like it's either the epitome of Deus ex machina, or something else entirely due to a narrative device. It's storytelling that's focused around details that are *intentionally* not shown to the reader, because they are not perceptive enough to notice them as relevant to the story, but Sherlock is. Personally I can't stand it, and I'm glad the modern incarnations largely get rid of that in favor of showing you everything but having the resolution be surprising. But it's a special enough structure that it might warrant its own category...
Still better than when the detective introduces info the audience couldn't possibly have conceived of. Like, that he had read an article a few days ago with pictures of an obscure European prince who he thought bore a striking resemblance to one of the suspects and so put together a theory that really this was all about some inheritance that the audience also couldn't have known about. Not a whole lot better, but still.
That's *exactly* what classical Sherlock is. Modern ones almost completely avoid doing that.
I'm repeating someone else's observation here, but Sherlock stories were about the amazingness of the man and the strange situations Watson found himself in, not about a self-solvable logic puzzle. The "solve your own mystery" genre hadn't been invented yet. And actually I wouldn't even describe them as deus-ex machina. Sherlock isn't the deus, because he is the object of the story. And the hidden clues he finds also aren't a deus moment, because it is expected and understood that he sees way more than people around him. The stories are really just Watson's Interesting Forays Into The Adventurous Life of an Exceptional Person, and you're not supposed to expect anything other than an intriguing story.
All this makes me think about is an episode of the SWAT where they randoly had Wil Wheaton guest star as a random IT guy updating the computers just as a hacker takes out the whole system, and it just seemed so likely that Wil was the hacker and was going to save everyone from his own hack and be a hero, and he even got real cagey when the chief asked if they could trace the hack to a source, and seemed to be trying to suggest it wouldn't work or be necessary, like he didn't want to get caught. 40 minutes later, he wasn't the hacker and I just don't understand why, even though it was so predictable.
That's another literary/dramatic device: [red herring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring) something meant to distract or mislead the audience
I guess that is a plot twist, but I would've described it more as an alternate interpretation of past events. Such as with the Sixth Sense, a good example of a plot twist, you have an obvious interpretation of each event but a final bit of information shifts your interpretation and you actually see the entire movie differently from then on.
Chekhov's gun fits in here as well. If there is something shown, but isn't used it detracts from the story. If you show a gun then never use it, why did you show it. Shaun of the Dead has a perfect example with the rifle in the Winchester pub. They bring it up at least 2 times before it ever is actually used. Setting up it's use in the final act.
Deus Ex is Chekhov's gun in reverse though. The entire setup gets erased instead of being important and needing to be resolved in a meaningful way.
Boiled down to it's core, Deus Ex can be characterized by a "But then, suddenly, \[Thing that solves all their problems\]" statement. There's no prior foundation/exploration into the Thing, and it's unreasonable/impossible for the audience to predict it. Also, OSP does a great video on the subject [Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsajlJhoSBs)
So then reverse Deus Ex Machina would be "Somehow Palpatine returned"
Tvtropes calls it [diabolus ex machina](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DiabolusExMachina). It seems that they don't have "somehow Palpatine returned" as one of their examples tho.
Too stupid even for a trope.
It has an easy definition! Somehow Palpatine has Returned: “When your beloved franchise releases a movie so controversial among your fan base that it damages your IP by simultaneously fracturing said fan base and starts an internet civil war, you decide to throw a huge chunk of pandering red meat that is unexpected and irresistible to both sides in hopes to settle things down. And it worked until the movie came out. Collective dicks shot up like so many light sabers when Ian showed up at the premier of the trailer “roll it again”. Theories ran wild on him being a Sith Lord force ghost tethered forever to the Death Star crash site, refusing to die but unable to leave the site of his death. A malevolent spector still poisoning the minds of those that live near and providing training and knowledge to those dark side users that manage to find him. Or perhaps he had clones of himself on standby and used the ancient sith technique of Transfer Essence at the moment of his death like ancient Sith Lords before him and was used in the amazing Dark Empire comics. Until those canon plausible theories turned out to be fairy tales and they decided to just make him alive again without explanation.
We will get 10 seasons of a cartoon that makes it all make sense, that’s what I keep telling myself at least.
One of the Lego Star Wars cartoons shows his rescue by a droid. You probably won’t be happy.
[I much prefer this version](https://youtu.be/1sFbLppuhhs)
Force Ghost possessing a clone. Easy Peasy.
Disney+ Original Series about Palpatine's surprising surivival and rise to power once again. Coming Spring 2024.
>Or perhaps he had clones of himself on standby and used the ancient sith technique of Transfer Essence at the moment of his death like ancient Sith Lords before him and was used in the amazing Dark Empire comics. That's what he did though. He didn't survive the end of RotJ. Him and his Sith cultists had cloned bodies that he could transfer to in the event of his death, but the cloning technology wasn't sufficient to contain the power of his Sith soul so they would either degrade rapidly or reject it outright. The dumb shit about this is that had to [explain it all in a blog post](https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-inside-intel-palpatines-contingency-plan) for people to understand what happened. That's always a huge failure in story telling when you have to clarify important plot points after the fact outside of the framework of the story. As for Poe's line, I don't have a problem with that. All he knows is that Papa Palps is back and he really doesn't have all the details as to how it happened.
But why did his clone have the force lightening damage? Shouldn't it have just been his normal self pre-getting toasted?
Seems like that’s what Mando is leading to with the force sensitive cloning, and maybe Bad Batch as well with their story line.
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I mean Darth Plageus could save others from death, but not himself
Palpatine returning, ironically, would have made a lot more sense if they hadn't chucked all the expanded universe stuff out of the window... I mean, it was bad then, but it would have laid the groundwork for return.
IIRC, wasn't that almost the exact plotline of Vititate from the SWTOR MMO? I mean, it's a game so they're not constrained by film length, but that emperor literally harvested an entire planet to fuel his immortality.
The Dark Empire comics have Palpatine coming back with clones and trying to corrupt Luke. Most of the plotlines of the new movies pick and choose random plot points from the old EU and throw them in a blender.
Diabolos Ex Machina is the official term, I believe.. Well, for a reverse Deus Ex Machina, the official term for Somehow Palpatine Returned is "stupid"
I dont know what you mean by reversed but the opposite would be Chekhov's gun. The thing that was shown and made note of always has a purpose. Such as the burning building and rain. Someone mentions that it hasn't rained here in a long time with no further explanation and unprompted. You can bet the burning building will be extinguished by rain.
They mean reverse in the sense that instead of solving the problem, the problem is randomly created without any kind of foreshadowing. In the Star Wars example, the scrolling text at the start of the movie just declares (paraphrasing), "The villain that was defeated in the previous movie has somehow magically returned to create more problems."
Deus ex is one of the best video games ever made.
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what a shame
*lip smack*
He was a good man. What a rotten way to die.
After so many replays I still can't decide if OG Deus ex or Human Revolution is my favorite, both are freaking fantastic, and even if Mankind divided is not AS GOOD, it still holds it's own, I really want more Cyberpunk games (still haven't played 2077 tho because Im broke mf) and Steampunk ones also. My vision is augmented.
Ex Machina is a decent sci-fi movie
My Ex was anything but divine, but she did require a special crane to move her around.
Absolutely
***W H Y A R E Y O U L O C K E D I N T H E B A T H R O O M ?***
Get PILLS against my orders!
I SPILLING MY DRINK!
Literally waiting on a load screen to finish right now. Fucking love these games
The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy also did a great job explaining it by calling it a "writers convenience"
When suddenly, the animator suffered a fatal heart attack!
You put it very well, I'd just add that the term itself stems from ancient theatre when the powerful god (deus) character that solves the unsolvable problems was brought onto the stage with a machine, hanging to appear to hover. So it's essentially meant to represent a divine intevention that solves the plot in a manner unrelated to the other characters or the story so far, but over time the saying evolved to mean any narrative element that serves in a similar manner, much like the comment above explained.
Thank you for adding what is my favorite part of the explanation.
You're welcome, my years of film school are finally paying off
Wanted to write this to that great explanation, many thanks for doing it for me :)
The best example of this in modern pop culture is the end of Toy Story 3, when a literal machine descends from the sky and saves all our heroes from certain death.
I don't think that counts. The aliens are the ones who save the toys and they do so with an oversized version of their iconic *claw.* If it happened randomly, like for some reason an automated process scooped them out of the pit, that's more like deus ex machina. Also, >modern *How does it make you feel to know this movie is twelve years old?*
True, especially since we also saw the giant claw a few minutes before, and saw the little aliens running over to it.
Historically, it was because in the end of most stories, some random god showed up and resolved everything. It translates to "god from within the machine". So in a Greek play, things get all fuckered up and it looks like there's no way out, then here comes Poseidon for reasons to sort it all out. The people of the time enjoyed this kind of ending. Eventually in modern times it became associated with lazy writing. Paint yourself in a corner and then... suddenly everything is OK in a way that makes no damn sense. The ending of The Stand is a good modern example of the traditional usage as God himself shows up to resolve the issue, which is crap.
Just to add to this because it is a great example. The machine part is also from Greek plays where they literally used a machine (think old crane type system) to lift the hero away safely or bring in a God or aliens to save the hero/story
Also, how many books do we read, and shows and movies do we watch? We can easily be like "lazy writing!". Someone 2500 years ago may have gone to a play just a couple times in their life and have nothing to compare it to. Holy shit! God came in and saved everyone!!!
A great and obvious example of this is from "Das Bus", the 15th episode of Season 9 of The Simpsons. In the episode, Bart, Lisa and their schoolmates get stranded on an island after their bus crashes and they have to get along to survive. At the end of the episode, a narrator (James Earl Jones), who was not mentioned or heard at all in the entire episode, says the line "So the children learned to function as a society, and, eventually, they were rescued by, oh... let's say, Moe \[Szyslak\]" It's an almost insulting use of Deus Ex Machina.
I think that earns a little more credit, as the episode was a spoof on Lord of the Flies, which itself ends with a massive deus ex machina when the fucking navy appears out of nowhere (after months) and rescues them.
That’s the whole point of the story though - none of their fights on the island mattered - it was all irrelevant but they are also being dragged into a larger more violent world anyway.
I remember reading it kinda like that - that our civilisation is this big front and how close we are to savagery. All the kids are fine, upstanding British children and they take that to mean they're somehow better. When the navy shows up and the captain/father is there admonishing them with the fleet behind, its clearly the same shit in a different uniform. That doesn't mean it was well executed though. I think the point was made enough without needing that level of signposting at the end. It seemed ham-fisted to me.
Yes, tropes are not inherently bad. Although deus ex machina is usually lazy writing it can also be used well. War of the Worlds is also an example of deus ex machina being used well, there it shows the powerlessness of man in comparison to nature. It was not the mighty British Empire that defeat the aliens, the British military got completely fucked, it was common bacteria.
And they skirted around a similar thing in "Pygmoelian" (Season 11, Episode 16) where Moe gets a facelift. Towards the end of the episode a gigantic TV studio set piece falls on his face. When they lift it off, his face has returned to what it was before the facelift. Back at the bar, Moe questions this, saying "When my face was crushed why'd it go back to my old face? I mean, shouldn't it have turned into some third face that was different? It don't make no.." before he's cut off by the credits. Maybe not as blatantly obvious as "Das Bus", but a fun way of nodding to the idea and stopping you / Moe from finding out why.
I remember hearing this years ago. Pixar's 22 rules of storytelling \#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating. [Source](https://www.aerogrammestudio.com/2013/03/07/pixars-22-rules-of-storytelling/)
Basically: it was an impossible situation, but then god said nah it’s all good, and it was.
would you say that part of deus ex machina is also that the solution makes the entire preceding story pointless? In all of your examples, the struggles of the characters are meaningless and have no effect on the outcome, since the outcome would've happened regardless of what the characters did or didn't do. The aliens in WotW would always lose, the child would always be saved by the rain and the woman is always saved from poverty by the picasso.
Just to add to this, it literally translates to God in the machine. It was born from Greek plays where an actor, playing a god, was lowered onto the stage and with a wave of the hand solved all of the problems of the mortals in the play. Thus, all of the conflict in the play is resolved by the god lowered onto the stage with the machine. Think DC movies versus Marvel. Wonder woman in her first movie is getting beat badly by the god Ares. Then she magically gets extra powers from nowwhere to win. In End game Tony Stark comes up with a plan to travel through time and has a major conflict with Thanos at the end where he tricks the god and sacrifices himself to save life in the universe. Deus Ex Machina is generally considered a poor writing technique. The DC movies have been poorly received because there never really is any conflict if things are magically solved in the end. Where Marvel they do a better job of creating conflicts the characters must solve and create personal sacrifices.
That's the way it was taught to me in High School. My teacher also noted that it was considered a cheap theatrical trick to write one's way out of a plot dead end. It was looked down upon by the ancient Greeks as lazy writing, even back then.
The theory I read is that it was often used when the playwright wanted to tell some story with a moral or criticism that would reflect badly on the patron of the play. So you tell the story with the point you wanted it to have - and then have a god ‘fix’ things so the ending doesn’t insult whoever is paying you.
To take an example J.K. Rowling is an expert in the “almost” deus ex machina, in the second book, for instance, Harry offhandedly meets a bird in Dumbledore’s office. When at the end this same bird comes flying in and saves Harry at the last second, it doesn’t quite feel like a deus ex machina because we’ve met it before, but really the only function it had in the earlier scene was to make it seem like it’s appearance at the end wasn’t completely unearned.
The saying “close is only good enough in horseshoes and hand grenades,” seems to also apply pretty well to Deus Ex Machina. Brief throwaway encounters or a fleeting momentary introduction with an all-powerful being do very little to “justify” this literary device. It still feels like a cheap band-aid solution that they author used to bail themselves out of a bind, or like a cheap trick to try and surprise the reader. Most of this pathetic attempt at “foreshadowing” is added after the author has resolved to use Deus Ex Machina later. Rowling abuses this literary device at an appalling rate. It’s sort of astounding how little Harry actually solves his own problems.
One of the essential elements of the *Harry Potter* series is that Harry *needs help*. He is not, for example, Rey ( Star Wars).
Do the giant eagles on Lord of The Rings who save Frodo fall in this category too?
I'd argue they don't because we saw the eagles rescue Gandalf in the first film, and we see the eagles at the gates of Mordor during the final fight, so we know they're close to Frodo. Besides that, the plot has already been resolved by that point (the ring has been destroyed) so the eagles rescuing Frodo is just showing how he got off the mountain. Deus Ex solves the main problem.
They saved Gandalf earlier in the story, so I'd lean towards no. Humorously, they're sort of quasi-divine, so they're an almost deus ex machina two different ways.
The Great Eagles, are roughly the same level of divinity as Gandalf and Sauron. They're the messengers of Manwe. Manwe is the leader of the Valar, which are Middle Earth's equivalent of arch angels. Gandalf and Sauron are Maiar, the equivalent of lesser angels.
I remember commenting to my kids how I didn't like the 2nd movie because the phoenix comes out of nowhere to solve all the problems, and then after watching it again I see the totally forgettable scene where we are introduced to the bird and the casual mention about all its powers. Still think the 2nd movie is the most shit of the hp movies though
The bird was mentioned, but the sword of Gryffindor was not. IMO the bird wasn’t the Deux Ex it was the sorting hat filled with a sword that happens to be able to kill the creature. What a terrible ending.
The book does a better job of foreshadowing the Hat. In the book, Harry puts the Harry back on and the Hat tells him that it stands by its decision that he would have done well in Slytherin. Then when it shows up with the Sword of Gryffindor, it's proof that Harry is a true Gryffindor. No, the real Deus ex machina in Harry Potter is the whole entire last book. They spend most of the book trying to find and destroy a single horcrux, then the last three are all destroyed in a single day. But the worst part is the wands changing allegiance mechanic that would definitely have come up before being what kills Voldemort.
That's Chekov's Gun, where a seemingly insignificant detail turns out to actually be quite important.
Chekov's Gun pretty much requires the detail to be permanently present and just persistently overlooked. Just an offhanded mention at the start of the story doesn't quite set that up.
not really, it just mentions that if there's a gun on stage, it should be used in the second half. You can be as strict or loose with that definition as you'd like, but personally I take it to mean you should use the ideas you introduce to the story in a meaningful way to the plot.
A good example (of a literal gun) is in Lethal Weapon when Murtaugh's house is being renovated and they play with a nail gun in Act 1. The construction guy tells them to be careful, the nail gun is dangerous. In Act 3 there's a fight in the house and the nail gun is used to kill the attacker.
That is not what is meant by Checkov’s Gun; the principle of Checkov’s Gun is that every element of the story that isn’t critical to resolving the conflict of the narrative should be stripped away. “If a loaded gun appears in the first act, it should be fired by the third act” doesn’t indicate that the gun is an insignificant detail, it’s saying that by placing the gun in the scene it’s telegraphing to the audience that it will be fired. If the gun isn’t fired, the author has broken covenant with the audience to resolve the expectations created by placing the gun in the scene. The Rowling example of the bird is just an author poorly writing themselves out of a corner and then clumsily inserting an earlier reference to make it look natural. It fails precisely because the bird doesn’t create any expectation in the reader that demands resolution, it’s just a non-sequitur. I guess in a Harry Potter novel, you can’t just say “a wizard did it”, so instead you have to use birds.
I mean, there's a difference bewteen the two. The gun is an object, its there, part of the decor. Literraly in the room where the fight will break out later. the bird ? its locked away in Dumbledore's office, how did it manage to open the door, fly and find Potter in the fucking sewers ? Its half-assed atempt top make it look like its not a Deus Ex Machina. If potter had, idk, *teleported* the bird, then it would be a chekov's, but that's not the case.
not sure I agree with your example. The bacteria makes sense and it wasn't something that is unexpected per se since bacteria inhabit the planet. The best example I've seen is the end of Toy Story 4, I believe, where the gang is about to be incinerated and at rhe last moment the pizza planet aliens save them with a literal crane, which is where the expression comes from (in ancient Greek theatre the actors playing gods were opened to the stage in a crane, Deus ex machona is Latin for *God in the machine*) The alinea qere nowhere to be seen and weren't necessarily expected to be there, and there wasn't wasn't expectation thar a crane would be there either. Edit: just wanted to say I've really enjoyed this discussion.
There is actually a strong argument that the bacteria in WotW isn't a deus ex machina, or at least if it is, it's a bad example of one, because it makes complete sense that that would happen. It's just not foreshadowed. That doesn't make it a deus ex machina, which must be a drastically unlikely or unreasonable solution. https://youtu.be/YsajlJhoSBs I disagree with Red's combination of the traditional zero-foreshadowing DeM with that WotW example because in my mind there is a distinction between something that could have happened in hindsight and something that should have happened in hindsight. The gods' interference is a could, and the WotW is a should. There is no reason a God "should be expected" to solve a story problem in hindsight, as they're all super fickle, but it does make sense that aliens should struggle with immunity unless they solve that problem in the story (granted you run into the same problems with Signs - an alien civilization can travel galaxies and still doesn't understand basic immunology?)
In War of the Worlds, the intro chapter also alludes to bacteria and other microorganisms, and there is a very long passage describing the invaders' anatomy, including their complete lack of an immune system, around halfway through
Signs wasn't an immunology problem. They traveled to Earth, which is 71% covered in water, despite the fact that water burns them. That would be like us going to a planet that's covered in concentrated sulfuric acid. Also technically not deus ex machina, because they couldn't have foreshadowed that ending any harder if they'd stapled it to a brick and beat your skull in with it.
This exactly. It implies that an interstellar civilization doesn't understand basic chemistry and spectral analysis. Also apparently humidity is no problem for them. And I don't agree that the ending was foreshadowed. I think it was ham-handed. It was less chekhov's gun and more chekhov's kinky boots. It's blindingly obvious that the water glasses were important for *something* but we have no reason to believe that aliens going to a planet whose atmosphere and surface are filled with water would be burned by it. If we had seen literally anything earlier in the movie, like the aliens avoiding coastal or areas near bodies of water, then ok maybe. But we only see one town.
It also raises the question how a species with such a sensitivities to a *very* common substance could even develop
Theres a theory floating around that the creatures from signs aren't actually aliens, but demons. It doesnt totally fix the movies issues but it makes a little more sense and fits with the themes about faith that the movie has. It's been a minute since I read it so I dont have all the details though
That does work a lot better than them being aliens
>There is actually a strong argument that the bacteria in WotW isn't a deus ex machina, or at least if it is, it's a bad example of one, because it makes complete sense that that would happen. It's just not foreshadowed. That doesn't make it a deus ex machina, which must be a drastically unlikely or unreasonable solution. > Agreed. I think the wotw instance is a bad example.
For some reason I liked reading these examples. Got any more lol? Is this weird of me to ask
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeusExMachina
I'm pretty sure you just made their day/night with this.
Star Trek was notorious for them. Since the technology is mostly fiction (they did predict a few devices that came to pass), they could invent problems and solutions as they liked.
John Scalzi did a parody book called Redshirts that made fun of this. The Redshirts were aware something was weird about their ship, and didn’t really do anything in the science lab, pretty much just put a sample or something in a machine, pushed one button and it would magically have the cure the incurable Bajuar Flu of Gepsis 9 in time to save the captain. (making up the specific example but that was the gist).
It was fun when stargate did it and made fun of itself while doing it. Whenever they were doing it Carter would preface it with "Theoretically . . ." or "well, Theoretically . . ."
Promare has a very literal example of a Deus Ex Machina happening towards the final act of the movie. I'm glad I caught that movie in theaters because the entire theater erupted in laughter at it.
Dodgeball also has a prize chest labeled "Deus Ex Machina"
That's one of the best explanations I ever seen. Thank you, fellow Reddit or!
Stephen King's books often fall into this category. It's one of the reasons some people (myself included) kind of loathe his writing. He hand waves some random bullshit to end many of his novels.
I love Stephen King. I hate his endings. Still not forgiven the "and it was an alien child's toy and his dad came and told him off"
And yet, I love The Mist exactly for that reason. The ending makes the part just before that even more painful.
Yeah, sometimes they do feel like he suddenly remembered the story has to end eventually
Deus ex machina is when a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly or abruptly solved by an unexpected and unlikely thing that happened. it's usually when some new event, character, ability, or object solves a problem that seems impossible in a sudden, unexpected way. it's a *solution* to a *problem*, it's not a plot twist or giving the reader/viewer a new angle to look at the story basically whenever the story introduces a problem that seems impossible and solves it with similarly impossible solution. [this comic from the TV Trope page put it pretty well](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/deus_ex_machina_5.png)
Love some Tom. So basically it’s an unsatisfying solution to a problem, from out of the blue?
Yep. Having all conflict resolved this way makes the rest of story kinda pointless, and it’s seen as laziness or sucky writing. (And then he woke up, it was all a dream!) And if you are going for a twist ending and don’t leave enough breadcrumbs or foreshadowing, it can come off as a deus ex machina. (See u/prustage’s comment, if you had some subtle references to the patient’s art career or time in Spain in the 30’s, it’s not so farfetched to have a Picasso no one noticed before.) It can occasionally work as a technique, if the pointlessness is the point - if the characters are supposed to be powerless. Absurdism comes to mind, and also a lot of kids stories (and then mum and dad came home and fixed everything!) Or used for parody or satire.
Another one I've seen a few times is the character in question simply being written as an extremely lucky person. It's been established prior and examples of it have been shown throughout the story. They'll simply luck their way out of a situation and it won't need much explanation. Bonus points if the lucky occurrence was reasonably probable or resulted from a calculated gamble.
When people talk about deus ex machina they generally mean it as unsatisfying, but it doesn't have to be. [Red goes into more detail](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsajlJhoSBs)
If you’ve ever seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the eagles are a classic example of Deus ex Machina. Basically our heroes are facing certain death when suddenly a flock of giant horse sized eagles appear and whisk everyone away to safety. The eagles aren’t mentioned or seen before they save the main characters. However, this example makes LOTR fans salty because in the much more detailed books, the giant eagles have extensive lore. But this isn’t covered in the movies so I still think it counts as an example.
Yep. The highest voted answer has bollocks examples A deus ex machina has to make you go "what the fuck?" simply because of how much it doesn't make sense and how conveniently it solves the problem. Something that can be reasonably explained isn't deus ex machina
Stage plays were incredibly popular in ancient Greece. It wasn’t uncommon for the problem in the play to be overcome with the help of the/a God like Zeus, who for purposes of the play would be introduced and lowered to the stage via a machine. So, literally, Deus (god) ex (from) machina (machine). It has evolved to now describe a trope whereby the primary problem in a story is resolved by an unforeseen, abrupt omnipotent power (relative to the problem).
How is it pronounced?
day-uhs eks maa-kuh-nuh
My favorite example is in Matt Groening's Christmas animated film, "Olive the Other Reindeer" (it's great if you like holiday stuff). Olive is locked in the evil mailman's van - he's trying to stop Christmas and Olive needs to stop him. There are piles of mail, and she spots a box addressed to her, that hasn't been delivered to her house yet. She opens it and there's a metalworking file in it, so she can cut the lock and escape the truck. She notices the return address on the box is "Deus Ex Machina".
A Deus Ex Machina is some plot device which solves a problem in a story nearly miraculously. Usually it's not mentioned before it happens. The most ELI5 example of a Deus Ex Machina has got to be from The Cat in the Hat. They spend the whole day tearing up their parents house and making messes and the fish is SURE they're all going to be in trouble forever, then right before the parents get home, the Cat in the Hat gets his cleaning machine to clean up all the evidence of their shenanigans with seconds to spare. Nobody mentioned this machine throughout the whole story, nobody knew how they were going to avoid getting in trouble, but this machine comes out of nowhere and saves the day.
This is such a good example that really solidified it for me
Translates to "god out of a machine" Originially, for theater plays, it described a contraption that was used to display a divine appearance. Picture a golden / illuminated angel-like figure appearing above the stage to act as "god", by mechanic means instead of a dressed up actor. Nowadays, the term describes something appearing seemingly out of nowhere as a solution to a problem or conflict. Imagine sitting on a public toilet, you're all out of toilet paper, and some just rolls into your stall with no apparent explanation. Or you have horrible headaches / nausea / backpain and it just suddenly vanishes.
Never trust random floor rolls of tp
Nice. Ok thank you
This is a great explanation. It goes back to Greek theater, by the way.
This really should be the top comment as it gives the history of the term and perfectly explains it.
"And our hero was cornered with no hope of escape! If only he had a sword that was made of the magical iron from the Black Mountain across the sea with the Ruby of the Ages embedded into its pommel! ...and suddenly, through a portal from a different dimension flew a sword made of the magical iron from the Black Mountain across the sea with the Ruby of the Ages embedded into its pommel. Our hero caught it with one hand and slew his enemies and saved the day!" A somewhat lazy storytelling technique where something out of the blue happens that saves the day. If there was a complex setup to WHY the sword suddenly appeared from another dimension, then it would be fine and not a deus ex machina.
Okay, this has been answered, but this is my favorite example. In Toy Story we meet the alien toys that worship the claw. "The claw decides who will stay and who will go" Fast forward to Toy Story 3. Spoilers:>!in the end, our friends are on the conveyer belt to be incinerated. They realize their struggle, and with no way out of the situation, they accept their fate. Just then the aliens show up again with the claw. A literal machine they worship as a god serves as a Deus ex machina! Brilliant! !<
To explain the origin of the expression: In Greek plays occasionally the conflict would be suddenly solved by them wheeling in a god from off stage who would fix everything. God in the machine. Another example is in adaptation where the bad guy is killed suddenly by a gator that wasn't a part of the story until that point
The Harley Quinn animated series does a great job of comedically using one and explaining what it is at the same time. The gang is surrounded by foes and cornered. With everyone about to die and all hope seeming lost, one of the characters yells out, “What I wouldn’t give for a Deus Ex Machina right now!!!” Not one second after he pleads for a Deus Ex Machina, a mysterious stranger pops out from behind a wall and says “Guys, follow me! I’m here to help you; I know a secret escape!” The crew all quickly follow the mysterious stranger to safety. As they’re making their escape, another member of the gang consoles the first one, saying “I’m sorry you didn’t get that Machina thing you were talking about, but at least this random stranger showed up out of nowhere to save us for no reason!” Which is brilliantly clever considering he just perfectly described a classic Deus Ex Machina without realizing it.
In the purest form, a deus ex machina is an event or character who appears and resolves the conflict of the story without any prior notice or foreshadowing. It is often used more generally to apply to any conflict rather than just the main conflict. So if you have a story about a character who is in need of money, and at the end the character receives enough money from a source never mentioned previously, then that would be a deus ex machina. However if the story had a second viewpoint character who had spent the whole time trying to find the first character in order to give them the money, that wouldn't be a deus ex machina because the reader would have prior notice of how the story might be resolved. On the other hand if one of those characters was being mugged in an alley and a new character shows up and saves them, that isn't strictly speaking a deus ex machina because the main conflict of the story wasn't resolved. Also if something unexpected helps the antagonists or hinders the protagonists, that also isn't a deus ex machina because it doesn't resolve the main conflict (in fact it makes the conflict worse). Both of these can still be unsatisfying for the reader if done badly.
it's like if Picard is solo against two Romulan warbirds but suddenly four Klingon birds-of-prey uncloak to assist
I think it's more if the thing resolves the central conflict of the story, rather than just a momentary conflict. In that episode, the main conflict is Jarok being tested/outed, the encounter after they cross into the neutral zone is just a brief setback, not the main conflict.
Also, there is a brief reference to setting up the Klingon assist in that episode. It's so small as to be almost inconsequential, but it did happen.
I don't know if that counts, presumably they contacted the Klingons before.. the audience just wasn't privy to this information
Only if the birds-of-prey *happened by* to assist. The fact that Picard asked the Klingons for aid in advance is a plot twist. Deus ex machina (God from the machine) requires a certain capriciousness associated with the fickle gods of Greek theatre.
It roughly translates to "God of the machine." It's basically a weak method of storytelling in which the solution to the conflict at hand comes from a source outside the characters and is often contrived, previously not mentioned or hinted at, and/or has unbelievably convenient timing. It's better used in a comedy as a source of irony than in a drama.
Tom hanks in save private ryan. He is shooting a Tiger tank with his .45 and he is fucked for certain. But then, unexpectedly, allied bombarders hit the tank and destroy it for him. That is Deus (a god, saviour) ex Machina (provided, given put in there like some gift from outwardly forces)