Deus ex machina

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For information about the similarly titled album, see Deus Ex Machinae. For the opera by Elodie Lauten see The Deus Ex Machina Cycle.

Deus ex machina (god from the machine) is a Latin phrase that refers to an unexpected, artificial, or improbable character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction or drama to resolve a situation or untangle a plot. The phrase has been extended to refer to any resolution to a story which does not pay due regard to the story's internal logic and is so unlikely it challenges suspension of disbelief; allowing the author to conclude the story with an unlikely, but more palatable ending. In modern terms the Deus ex machina has also come to describe a person or thing that suddenly arrives and solves a seemingly insoluble difficulty. While in storytelling this might seem unfulfilling, in real life this type of figure might be welcome and heroic.

The notion of Deus ex machina can also be applied to a revelation within a story experienced by a character which involves the individual realizing that the complicated, sometimes perilous or mundane and perhaps seemingly unrelated sequence of events leading up to this point in the story are joined together by some profound concept. Thus the unexpected and timely intervention is aimed at the meaning of the story rather than a physical event in the plot.

The Greek tragedian Euripides is notorious for using this plot device.

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Linguistic considerations

The Latin phrase (deus ex māchinā, plural deī ex māchinīs) is a calque from the Greek Template:Polytonic ápo mēchanēs theós, (pronounced in Ancient Greek Template:IPA). It originated with Greek and Roman theater, when a mechane would lower actors playing a god or gods on stage to resolve a hopeless situation. The phrase is often translated as "god comes from the machine", where the machine referred to is the crane device employed in the task.

The pronunciation of the phrase may be a problem in English. The Latin phrase would originally have been pronounced something like Template:IPA, in other words with machina stressed on the first syllable, and with the ch similar to an English k, but English-speaking people may be influenced by the modern English machine (Template:IPA), resulting in a mixed pronunciation. Some English speakers face further difficulties in pronouncing the e in Deus Template:IPA, which is only approximately rendered as [AY] and is much closer to the e in bed. See also Latin spelling and pronunciation.

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Examples

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
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Literature and comics

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Examples in plot

  • In William Golding's novel The Lord of the Flies, just as the protagonist Ralph is about to be killed by the band of "hunters" at the end of the story, a naval ship appears from nowhere onto the island. One of the ship's officers rescues Ralph, he and the rest of the boys are then taken away from the island.
  • In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the kidnapping of Hamlet by pirates allows him to escape his orchestrated death in England.
  • In Shakespeare's As You Like It, Hymenaios comes to the mass wedding to sort out the problems of Rosalind's stay and disguise in the Forest of Arden.
  • In the Edgar Allan Poe story The Pit and the Pendulum, the unnamed narrator has just been pushed over the edge of the bottomless pit when he reaches up and grabs the arm of the French general who has seized the fortress where the narrator has been imprisoned.
  • The final issue of Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man was titled Deus Ex Machina, and the same title would later be used for the trade paperback collecting his final story arc. The issue itself involves a quite literal example of a deus ex, as Buddy "Animal Man" Baker is finally brought face to face with Morrison himself, who reveals to Baker that his life is a comic book and that he is his (soon-to-depart) writer, before eventually growing tired of his own attempts at preaching and sending Baker home, resurrecting his previously-murdered family in the process.
  • Many comic book characters can be seen as walking dei ex machinas Lifeguard, from the X-Men, is widely considered by her detractors to be the ultimate deus ex. Her mutant ability is to manifest any necessary ability to save lives, which makes her a quick fix for the writers if any characters are stuck in a tight spot.
  • Perhaps the most famous superhero to be labelled a deus ex is Superman himself, as his writers had a tendency to inflate his powers over the years to constantly trump his previous successes. Kryptonite, Superman's only weakness, then became a sort of reverse deus ex machina, which would be called in whenever the writer wanted to explore a conflict which he didn't want Superman to resolve in one punch.
  • In Molière's The School for Wives, Agnès is suddenly found out to have been betrothed all along to another man, which spares her from having to marry Arnolphe.
  • Tintin's encounters in The Adventures of Tintin involve coincidences that spare his life: heavy weights replaced by wood, a solar eclipse, explosive mines not working, etc.
  • In Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, scientists race to find a way to contain an extremely dangerous extraterrestrial virus. In the end, they fail and the virus escapes into the atmosphere, but conveniently for mankind the virus mutates into a completely harmless form.
  • In Richard Adams' Watership Down, after freeing the local farm dog to attack the Efrafans, Hazel is pinned by the farm cat and about to be killed until a young girl from the farm intervenes by ordering the cat to back away. She then takes Hazel into the country to a location which is coinicidentally near his warren. The chapter in which the buildup for this event occurs is indeed titled Dea ex Machina (goddess, in this case).
  • In Sharon Shinn's Novels of Samaria, God really is in the machine when it is revealed that the sender of the rain, medicine and seeds from the sky is in fact a highly advanced spaceship named Jehovah that has been instructed to answer the 'prayers' of the genetically engineered Angels.
  • In Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, the location of the antimatter is seemingly revealed by a vision from God, however it is later revealed to be a deception by the novel's villain.
  • Clive Cussler, the author of the Dirk Pitt adventure novels, has introduced himself into the plot of a number of his stories so that he may rescue his characters from hopeless situations.
  • In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Antonio's entire life rests on whether or not his ships come to port. It is heard throughout the story that they have all crashed. Yet in the end Portia tells him all his ships have come home, with no explanation as to how they survived the storms or why people believed them all to have crashed.
  • In Hajime Kanzaka's novel Shirogane no Majū (白銀の魔獣, which form the basis for the anime series Slayers), Lina Inverse uses a powerful spell known as "Ragna Blade" to defeat Zanaffar. The reader is never informed of the existence of this spell until she casts it, whereupon Lina reveals that she created the spell herself several days beforehand, which places it within the timeline of the rest of the book and therefore could have been mentioned.
  • In the Japanese manga-drama Kashimashi, the main protagonist is told out of the blue by an alien lifeform that "you will die in 30 days." Previous to this statement there had been no indication that the main protagonist would have such a sudden death, thus effectively becoming a plot device.
  • In Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, the convict who Pip owed his gentleman's life to, was Pip's crush's father.
  • In The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket, The Baudelaires make a motar dissolver to escape from jail.
  • In The War of the Worlds the invading Martians, undefeated by humanity's weapons, conquer Earth, only to be slain by terrestrial bacteria.
  • In Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, after Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect are thrown into deep space by the Vogons, they are rescued by the Heart of Gold (spaceship), as a side effect of the ship's Infinite Improbability Drive.
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References to the phrase

  • In the Lance Tooks graphic novel The Devil on Fever Street, Satan falls in love with a mortal woman; order is restored when the saintly Black Lily Baptiste is mortally struck by a driverless truck bearing the words "Dusek's Machines" printed on its side.
  • In Bored of the Rings, Frito and Spam are rescued by Deus Ex Machina Airlines (parodying Frodo and Sam being rescued by eagles at Mount Doom, in the original Lord of the Rings stories).
  • In Isaac Asimov's I, Robot it is used as a part of the description of the relationship between humans and robots.
  • In the webcomic, Metroid: Third Derivative, Samus called the degenerated space pirate Joey "Deus ex Machina" after saving her from a near-fatal encounter with Dark Samus.
  • Lemony Snicket's The Vile Village (part of the A Series of Unfortunate Events series) the three Baudelaires are caught in the local jail. Klaus makes reference to the term, and this is built upon when Violet uses a loaf of bread, a jug of water and a wooden bench to escape the cell.
  • In Futurama comic #10, The planet express crew escape death only to be faced with a life of slavery, prompting Fry to say "Aww man, where's a day-ooze ex machinehead when you need one?"
  • In the Thursday April, 20th edition of the New York Times, the authors use the term in both a literal and metaphorical reference to the emergency evacuation of passengers from the Roosevelt Island Tram. "Two hours later, a hydraulic all-terrain crane rumbled down First Avenue, a contract was hastily signed on the street and engineers set to work figuring how to turn the crane into a modern-day deus ex machina."
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Cinema and television

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Examples in plot

  • Possibly the least satisfactory deus ex machina to the audience is the revelation that all or large parts of what has gone before were "all a dream". This was perhaps most notoriously used in Dallas, where an entire season was "unwritten" to allow the resurrection of the character Bobby Ewing who had been killed off.
  • In The Wizard of Oz, just before Dorothy and her companions reach the Emerald City, the Wicked Witch of the West produces a giant field of poppies that puts Dorothy, Toto and the Cowardly Lion to sleep. The Scarecrow and the Tin Man cry for help, and Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, produces a snow shower that wakes everyone up. Also, in the scene where Dorothy misses the Wizard's balloon, Glinda appears and tells Dorothy she had the power to return home the entire time, meaning the Silver Slippers in the book, Ruby Slippers in the film adaptation. When the Scarecrow asks in disbelief why didn't Glinda tell Dorothy about the Slippers, Glinda casually responds that Dorothy "would not have believed her and had to learn it for herself".
  • In the film Adaptation., Charlie Kaufman is cautioned explicitly by screenwriting guru Robert McKee not to use a deus ex machina as a plot device, which he then later does, twice. First, McKee himself gives the character of Kaufman the final hint to escape from his screenwriting misery, which means McKee himself is used as a "Deus ex Machina". Ironically "McKee" could be suspected a "telling name" (McKee => "machina") but he is an actual writing instructor. Second, the alligator that dives into the swamp to attack John Laroche prevents him from shooting and killing Charlie.
  • In the film Jurassic Park 3, when the main characters are fleeing and at the end of the film, as soon as they arrive at the beach, the US Navy arrives to stablize the situation and kill the dinosaurs.
  • In the episode "Operation: Annihilate!" from the first season of Star Trek: The Original Series, Spock is infected by an alien parasite which has overwhelmed a Federation colony world. Discovering that intense light will kill the parasites, Spock volunteers to be exposed to this light. He is cured, but also blinded. In the end, he miraculously recovers his sight, explaining that as a Vulcan he has nictitating membranes that protect his eyes from the intense solar radiation on his homeworld.
  • In Yugioh, Deus ex machina are very much a staple of the show. Often when a character (usually Yugi Muto, or another hero) has the odds against them, and they are about to lose, they draw the perfect card and win. Sometimes this card is a real card, but often it is a brand-new, never before seen card that, as an added effect, will perhaps never be used again. This is called 'The Heart of the Cards' in the English adaptation, meaning that the duelist's deck feels their need to win, and gives them the card they need. In actuality, it simply plain dumb luck, and sometimes even rewrites the established rules of a card (such as the Flute of Summoning Dragon). The Winged Dragon of Ra could arguably be the most famous Deux ex machina of the series: every time it is played, it demonstrates some sort of new special ability.
  • The seventh (and final) season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer concludes with a series of unlikely events to save the world from the near-impossible to stop evil. Buffy receives an amulet from Angel which Spike uses conveniently to destroy the Hellmouth and the scythe used to activate every slayer is introduced by having the villains dig it up.
  • In V: The Final Battle mini-series, when the mothership is about to destroy Earth, a young half-alien/half-human girl suddenly reveals her powers by taking the controls of the ship and piloting it out of the atmosphere.
  • At the end of the anime Mai-HiME the previously "dead" characters are brought back to life in order to fight the final battle by Mashiro, whose powers were supposedly sealed and under the control of the Dark Lord.
  • In the season 5 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled "The Game", the crew of the Enterprise are influenced to do the bidding of an alien race as a result of a psychotropic reaction caused by an addictive game introduced to the ship. They are rescued at the end of the episode when Data, who had until this point been deactivated by members of the crew already under the aliens' influence, enters and uses a flashing light to remove the addictive psychotropic effects of the game, and thus cure the entire crew.
  • In Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey God literally provides the deus ex machina by giving Bill S. Preston Esq. and Ted Theodore Logan access to Station, who in turn build the "good robot uses". This allows everything to be resolved.
  • In the movie Ocean's 12, director Steven Soderburg introduces the FBI official to be Matt Damon's character's mother. She signs their release forms and allows them to escape custody.
  • Near the end of Ice Age, Diego shows up alive and well, after a previous scene where he had died and been left behind. Diego explains his sudden miraculous recovery as "nine lives."
  • The end of Shaun of the Dead finds the two lead characters Shaun and Liz in an apparently hopeless situation, surrounded by hundreds of zombies with little or no chance of escape. Suddenly, seemingly from nowhere, the army descend upon the zombies, attacking and destroying them and rescuing Shaun and Liz.
  • In both the movie and the novel A Time to Kill, the character of Ellen Roark, who turns up quite unexpectedly, is a kind of deus (or rather dea) ex machina because without her Jake Brigance would be completely at a loss as to how to win the case.
  • In the Batman TV series, Batman's utility belt usually contains something unexpected which extricates him from a seemingly inescapable situation, as evidenced by his can of Bat-Shark Repellant Spray.
  • In the biblical story of Jonah and the Whale, the Whale appears in the sea to swallow Jonah up when he is tossed off the boat he is on. The whale is deus ex machina.
  • In Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, Just as Darth Vader is about to deliver a fatal blow on Luke Skywalker's X-Wing, Han Solo and Chewbacca fly the Millenium Falcon in, shooting and destroying one of Vader's wingmen. Panicked, the second wingman attempts to take evasive action, but his fighter hits Vader's and sends it flying out of control into deep space, while the wingman's own fighter crashes into the Death Star. Luke, hearing Obi-Wan's voice, turns off his targeting computer of the Rebel fighter, and successfully launches torpedoes down the shaft, destroying the Death Star and scoring a huge victory for the Rebellion against the Empire.
  • In "Mars Attacks," right when the human race seems to have lost, a weapon is found in the song "Indian Love Call" by Slim Whitman which causes the Martians' brains to explode.
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Examples for comic effect in plot

This is not specifically the use of the device in comedy, but the specific comedic use of a deus ex machina that at least some of the audience is expected to appreciate as such.

  • Monty Python and the Holy Grail employs the device, in combination with "breaking the fourth wall" in several places. While attempting to enter a cave, the knights of the Round Table are attacked by a bloodthirsty rabbit which they can't overcome, but they manage to kill it with the Holy Hand-Grenade of Antioch, which has been heretofore unmentioned. Having entered the cave the knights are then attacked by the Ravenous Black Beast of Argh, with no apparent hope of survival. At this point, it is revealed by the narrator that the film's animator suffered a fatal heart attack, obliterating the animated monster. Later, the film's final battle sequence is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the police, who immediately arrest the entire on-screen principal cast of medieval characters, allegedly for murder.
  • Monty Python's Life of Brian also utilises the deus ex machina for comedic effect. In one scene Brian falls from the top of a high tower, only to be saved by an alien spaceship that happened to be passing. He is taken on a joy ride through the solar system before the space ship is shot down and crashes at the foot of the very tower he had just fallen from. A bystander who witnesses all this remarks, "Ooh, you lucky bastard!"
  • In the cartoon The Angry Beavers, at the end of the episode "Moby Dopes", during which the two main characters are terrorised by a Killer Whale in their pond, it is suddenly eaten by a Tyrannosaurus rex. The character Norbert then exclaims "Where in the name of deus ex machina did that T-Rex come from?"
  • In the Futurama episode Godfellas, Bender is returned to Earth by God after being stranded in space with no hope of rescue. He crashes to Earth a few feet in front of Fry and Leela, provoking the response "This is by a wide margin the least likely thing that has ever happened" from Leela.
  • In the British sitcom Bottom, Ritchie and Eddie are trapped atop a crumbling ferris wheel. Facing certain death they pray for their lives - literally. God's hand promptly appears and Ritchie and Eddie, looking stunned climb aboard. Normality is restored when they announce to the audience they don't believe in God; the hand disappears and they fall to their doom.
  • In the Disney movie The Emperor's New Groove, a chase occurs where the Emperor Kuzco (who has been turned into a llama) and his friend Pacha are being pursued back to the palace by Kuzco's evil advisor Yzma and her assistant Kronk. During the chase, Yzma and Kronk are struck by lightning, and fall into a gorge, leaving Kuzco and Pacha seemingly free to return to the palace. Upon their return, they discover that Yzma and Kronk are already there, and when Kuzco asks Yzma how they got back before they did, she looks confused and asks Kronk. Kronk pulls out a map of the chase and says "Beats me. By all accounts it doesn't make sense.", showing the characters' awareness of the deus ex machina that has just been perpetrated.
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References to the phrase

  • At the end of the film Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, the treasure chest containing the main character's gambling winnings has the phrase "Deus ex Machina" written on it.
  • Deus Ex Machina is the name of the ship Joel Robinson uses to escape from the Satellite of Love on the television show Mystery Science Theater 3000.
  • An episode of Stargate SG-1 is called "Ex Deus Machina". This is a play on words to mean "former god".
  • In Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water Deus Ex Machina is the name of one of the flying ships that Gargoiles from the Neo-Atlantides used to attack the Neo-Nautilus.
  • The 19th episode of the TV show Lost is called "Deus Ex Machina". In the episode Locke dreams about a crashed plane, located somewhere on the island. He believes that if he finds the plane, the answer to his problems will present themselves, specifically how to open a mysterious hatch buried under the ground. The plane is found, but does not directly reveal any answers, and instead leads to the death of Boone; however, at the end of the episode a bright light shines from the hatch. The suggestion is that Boone has been "sacrificed" to the island, in the fashion of an angry god.
  • With intentional irony, the machine figurehead in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions is named the Deus Ex Machina.
  • In The Simpsons episode "Thank God It's Doomsday", after the rapture occurs and Homer Simpson is taken to heaven, he asks God to reverse what has happened. God agrees, then proclaims "Deus ex Machina" and normality is restored magically.
  • In Olive, the Other Reindeer, a movie by Matt Groening, Olive finds a package marked, "To: Olive, From: Deus ex Machina". It contains a metal file which she uses to free herself from captivity in the back of the evil postman's truck.
  • In The Daily Show segment, "This Week in God", Rob Corddry uses "The God Machine" (also called the Machina Ex Deus) as a physical, floating button to introduce the topics.
  • In Donnie Darko, Donnie gasps 'Deus ex Machina' near the end of the movie when he and Gretchen are attacked by two thieves. Donnie says the phrase as an approaching car scares away the thieves.
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Video games

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Examples in plot

  • In Deus Ex, part of the story concerns an artificial intelligence (known as Helios) that believes its destiny is to rule mankind as an omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent being. Thus it is truly the titular god from a machine. Another interpretation is that the main character JC Denton by changing the world (i.e. curing the plague) is the 'god from the machine' that changed the world for the better. Also since he is cybernetically enhanced and genetically engineered, he is literally a god from a machine.
  • In the Tekken series of video games, several members of the Mishima family have been the victims of acts of violence that would kill almost any human being, and very often that would be the resolution of the conflict which the game was based around. For the character Kazuya in Tekken 4, the Deus Ex Machina is the G Corporation, had "brought him back to life" after being thrown into an active volcano. The other example is the so-called Devil Gene, that apparently renders the bearer immortal.
  • In Metal Gear Solid, the ending finds Solid Snake and a companion trapped under a crashed Jeep after attempting to escape Liquid Snake and the bombing of the island. Liquid, armed with an assault rifle, staggers forward, about to kill the two. A virus known as "FOX-DIE", unknowingly injected into Solid Snake to spread throughout the base, activates, causing Liquid to suffer a fatal heart attack. It is later revealed in a special section of the sequel, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, that Naomi Hunter, the woman who programmed FOX-DIE to kill Solid Snake because he killed her brother, Gray Fox, set FOX-DIE to randomly activate at no predictable time after it came into contact with Snake's DNA. Liquid and Solid were both clones of the same man, and therefore genetic twins.
  • The ending to Conker's Bad Fur Day is a deus ex machina. In order to defeat the "alien", Conker gets help from an imaginary game programmer who gives him weapons.
  • Throughout the Resident Evil series, a recurring theme is that the character receives a rocket launcher or a similarly powerful weapon from an ally while fighting against an otherwise indestructible creature (usually the game's final boss). In the original Resident Evil, the player receives a rocket launcher from a helicopter pilot (Brad Vickers) while fighting against the final boss, the Tyrant. Likewise, in Resident Evil 2, during either of the "2nd scenarios", the player receives a rocket launcher from Ada while fighting the Tyrant 003 (a homage to this scene was featured in Resident Evil 4). Resident Evil 3: Nemesis and Resident Evil Code: Veronica featured similar situations, in which a weapon needed by the player was conveniently located nearby during the final battle (a railcannon and linear launcher respectively). During the events of Resident Evil 4, Leon and Ashley are implanted with the "Las Plagas" parasites by the main villain, Saddler, and it isn't until the very end of the game that the existence of a machine which destroys the parasites internally is revealed.
  • At the end of Half-Life 2, Gordon Freeman is saved by the mysterious G-Man who freezes time, seconds after Gordon destroyed the Combine citadel with him and his allies still in the building.
  • In Mega Man Zero, Zero is seemingly unable to defeat a boss, but an unknown spirit gives him a sword that can.
  • In Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, The Prince, after killing Kaileena for the first time, seems desperate and angsty. Suddenly, while wandering the caverns beneath the Island of Time he finds a mural that shows he can go back and time and change his fate using an artifact called the Mask of the Wraith.
  • In Star Fox Assault, Peppy Hare crashes the Great Fox into the aparoid homeworld's shield, in order for the Star Fox team to get through. The Great Fox is shown exploding, seemingly with no way out for Peppy, but in the epligoue, it was revealed that Peppy miraculously escaped through some sort of escape pod.
  • In Freespace:The Great War, a Shivan superdestroyer, the Lucifer, is equipped with an energy shield that renders it impervious to all Terran and Vasudan weapons. As the Lucifer closes on Earth, survivors from a destroyed Vasudan science station land on a planet where they discover technology that will enable them to track the Lucifer into subspace where its shields will not work.
  • In Fire Emblem, three Fire Dragons are summoned near the end. When all seems hopeless, Brammimond appears and revives Ninian, whom Eliwood manslaughered earlier in the story. She then summons an ice storm which kills two Fire Dragons and severely weakens the other.
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References to the phrase

  • A strange and in some ways groundbreaking game called Deus Ex Machina, created by a company called Automata was released for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum in October 1984, and ported to other platforms (ex., Commodore 64) later.
  • In Maken X, on the opening screen the words "deus ex machina" are heard, and the premise is a sword with the ability to control people and take any form, everyone it "brain jacks" is left in a sort of purgatory within the sword itself.
  • In Star Wars: Republic Commando, the final level aboard the Acclamator-class assault transport Prosecutor is called Deux Ex Machina. The player's commando team is required to defend itself against incoming droid squads, while slicing several computer terminals. Slicing the terminals turns on the Prosecutor's automated turbolaser turrets, enabling the Republic ship to defend herself against a Trade Federation Droid Control Ship.
  • In Armored Core 2, Deus Ex Machina is the name of an enemy 'AC' that you fight in arena mode.
  • In Mega Man X: Command Mission, the enemy boss Great Redips possesses an attack called Deus Ex Machina, which hurls several meteors on the player's party.
  • In World of Warcraft, the Paladin class of characters possesses an ability termed Divine Intervention, which both nominally and functionally references deus ex machina. The ability sacrifices the paladin to protect the targeted player from harm and remove the targeted player from combat. This ability represents the interference of an external force to effectively save a player from otherwise certain death.
  • In Advance Wars: Dual Strike, the main antagonist (Von Bolt) uses a Super CO Power called Ex Machina, which causes 3HP of damage in a small area and prevents affected units from moving..
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Music

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See also

de:Deus ex machina es:Deus ex machina fi:Deus ex machina fr:Deus ex machina he:דאוס אקס מכינה it:Deus ex machina nl:Deus ex machina pl:Deus ex machina pt:Deus ex machina ja:デウス・エクス・マキナ sv:Deus ex machina

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