Spoiler box at your own discretion. I consider anything over a few years old fair game.
I’m watching Six Feet Under on DVD, and the writers have already pulled several ridiculously lazy deus ex machina solutions to plot situations that would have been better solved by them actually writing nuanced characters and dealing with difficult and complex situations. I mean, three characters end up in a sort of love triangle with a lot of complexities and vagaries of the relationships between the three of them; the guy’s married to a woman but isn’t happy, and he’s drawn to his ex, and since he and his ex are basically the main characters of the show, what do the writers do? Just kill off the wife, magically. Whoosh! She’s just gone, dead. Now there doesn’t need to be any complex or nuanced writing - he and his ex can just get back together, nice and tidy! LAME. Total cop-out, amateur writing. I expect more from cartoons.
What particularly lazy, contrived, cheap cop-outs have you encountered in fiction?
Malazan series - in the first three books, while the majority of the characters are relatively mundane, virtually every major storyline except the Chain of Dogs is resolved through the direct intervention of gods or demigods. (The fourth book seems to be a lot better in this regard so far).
I think it was in the movie (and possibly the book), The Fellowship of the Ring (but maybe it was the second one), where they’re going through an old Dwarven tunnel network that ends up being filled with big ugly evil guys. So they get surrounded by all the BUEG, slaughter imminent, when magically a big ugly evil fire giant starts stomping after them at 10 feet per minute, causing all of the lesser uglies to flee.
A similar scene in the anime Betterman, there’s this giant pack of a billion insects that are indestructible and totally kicking all of the good guys’ asses, when…! All the insects join together into a single giant robot that is easily stomped, and for some unknown reason can’t just separate into individual insects again.
I’ll always point to The Curse of Clifton by Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth (19th Century America’s most popular writer). You had a man and a woman falling in love and, for purposes of the plot, she had to become pregnant. Naturally, they couldn’t have sex without getting married. So:
The man, who was best man at his friend’s upcoming wedding, happened to have an extra signed blank marriage license (he didn’t know what name the bride and groom wanted to use, so asked for an extra blank one in case he chose the wrong name).
The woman points out an old hermit in a cabin they happen to be passing who was once a priest but who quit – yet was still ordained.
Note these two revelations came immediately after the two decided to get married.
The odds of your daughter being killed- one in 50,000 (?)
The odds of your daughter being killed the same night your best friend kills a paedophile, whose body is never found, so now you think your best friend killed your daughter- incalcuable.
We’ve successfully cloned not just one dinosaur, but many different species of dinosaur. Let’s not tell anybody, turn them lose on an island and rely on an electric fence with no backup system to keep the dangerous ones penned in. We could make it an amusement park.
Sorry, but as the certified biggest SFU fan in the whole world I now need to track you down and kill you for you blasphemy. I don’t know what you’re referring to with “several” lazy deus ex machina solutions, care to name a few? And the whole disappearance/death of Lisa fed into the storyline in series 4 about finding out what happened to her - it’s not like she just vanished and was never mentioned again.
Vulcans suddenly having a second eyelid to keep Spock from being blind. Along the same lines, Worf having a Klingon McGuffin in his physique to keep him from becoming paralyzed when his back is broken.
The book handles this much better. The Fellowship kills the first wave of goblins, then flees out the side door. Gandalf holds the horde off, and is quite shocked when some creature starts matching his spells. Eventually, the door explodes under the weight of competing spells, and Gandalf flees in the confusion. The Balrog only manages to catch up to them by the bridge, and the goblins really didn’t.
I’d also like to mention Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. About halfway through it got to be a system of “guess the deus ex machina.” I mean, we had characters foreseeing things nobody could foresee plus completely new aspects of magic never yet mentioned before they were conveniently needed. And the entire book was one gigantic quasi-Macguffin quasi-deus ex machina.
I don’t have a problem with most of the things mentioned here, but this one really bugs me. Add to it the various “time travel and now we’re back to where we started but for some reason we’re going to take a different path” solutions. (I’m looking at you Captain Janeway.)
I agree with VCO3. Six Feet Under season 3 was just bad. And killing off Lisa was a huge mistake because she was one of the only decent characters left at that point.
And this is basically where Nate makes the final turn from “angsty whiner” to “ass hole of the highest order.” SFU season 5 spoilers:
The fact that the last season was even mildly entertaining is a miracle. A miracle that I attribute to Nate being dead most of the season.
Yeah, it seems to me that you’re supposed to think that the Balrog is a greater threat than the BUEGs, because they flee at its approach. It’s a device to make the Balrog seem badassier. Not a unique device, but a device all the same.