BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER.
Season 7 finale CHOSEN. Angel shows up with a mystic amulet that saves the day.
I’m gonna argue with you on that one, audit1.
Shanshu was already mentioned in season one of Angel. It’s just that everyone assumed Angel was the “vampire with a soul” in the prophecy. Assuming made an ass of, uh, them.
Wow, who knew how subjective this was? I think the key words in the wikipedia definition are; “Does not pay due regard to the story’s internal logic”. IMO there is a difference between a crappy/lazy/unsatisfying ending and an incongruous ending.
I’d like to add that the ending of Signs is a DEM simply because it was (literally) intended as one. It didn’t “come out of nowhere”, it was the whole stupid point of the movie.
the adam west BATMAN tv show. Batman and Robin are strapped under two giant magnifying glasses, being fried by the suns glare. But suddenly a solar eclipse occurs which gives our heroes the time they needed to escape.
or
Batman and Robin are stuck to a magnetic buoy in the ocean and Penquin has fired a torpedo. Is this the end of the caped crusaders. NO. a dolphin intercepts the torpedo and our heroes escape.
Either example woulnd not be a DEX if a)the script had mentioned an upcoming eclipse or b) dolphins nearby.
Robert Heinlein’s Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
The heroes, Richard and Gwen, get into a shoot-em-up with the bad guys, cannot escape, and are about to be mowed down. All the sudden, a hole opens up in the space-time continuum and Richard and Gwen get rescued by their future descendants via time travel.
How about HG Wells, THE WAR OF THE WORLDS. the collapse of the Martian invasion, is due not to any heroic action by any of the characters but some of Gods most insignifcant creatures.
Gollum biting the Ring off is not a deux ex machina. That ending was carefully prepared for throughout the rest of the book. Sam does want to kill Gollum at first, but Frodo won’t let him, both on moral grounds and because he can’t bear to – he knows that what’s happened to Gollum is happening to him. As the movie puts it quite explicitly, “I have to believe he can come back.” When Sam gets his chance to kill Gollum later, he can’t do it for the same reason.
So no deux ex machina there: all that action proceeds entirely from well-explained personal motivations and the corrupting power of the Ring. The eagles, on the other hand …
A Deus Ex Machina is when the major conflict of a story is resolved by a random occurence, something totally unexpected and never previously hinted at.
A DEX doesn’t necessarily violate a story’s internal logic, but it does use random fate to take the task of resolving the conflict out of the hands of the protagonist.
Anything else is just plain shitty storytelling. (As opposed to extra special deus ex ma-shitty storytelling!)
It’s been a while since I read WotW (so long I’ve forgotten almost all of the details 
) but if the possibility that the Martians might be vulerable to human illness is never even hinted at until the end, then yes it’s a deus ex machina.
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Interestingly, as Stephen King himself pointed out in either On Writing or Danse Macabre, DEXs happen all the time in real life, though of course using them to end a story is pretty much verboten.
IIRC, he mentioned as example a time when he and his wife were still dirt poor and his kids were sick. They didn’t know how they were going to get the money for the required antibiotics, and voila! A check came in the mail for a story he’d submitted to some magazine (I think) several weeks earlier.
The same type of thing has happened to me many times. Of course, I wouldn’t write it into a story. Still, it’s an interesting point.
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I was going to mention War of the Worlds, but the narrator does mention the lack of any bacteria on Mars (which leads to their vulnerability on Earth) in the second chapter of the second book.
“The last salient point in which the systems of these creatures differed from ours was in what one might have thought a very trivial particular. Micro-organisms, which cause so much disease and pain on earth, have either never appeared upon Mars or Martian sanitary science eliminated them ages ago.”
Still, though, I agree that it’s a pretty conveniant way to end the novel.
I guess the film sorted that out IIRC they get a sample of blood after attacking a Martian outside of his ship and its mentioned that they are anemic and so could be vunerable to biological attack.
KGS “Deus ex machina” is Latin and it means “God from a machine”.
I am surprised with all these postings that no one has mentioned the #1 deus ex machina of all time - it was all a dream !!
The original “Invaders From Mars” ended this way along with the classic Dick Van Dyke episode “It May Look Like a Walnut” and God knows how many other movies, TV shows, books, etc have used this “trick”.
The best postings (IMHO) of deus ex machina examples are
Brian Ekars - “Dirty Mary & Crazy Larry”
eunoia - “History of the World (Part 1)”
and Lumpy - "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"
Adding one more, this is from Steve Martin’s “The Man With Two Brains”.
The elevator killer turns out to be Merv Griffin !!! This is really out of left field because his only previous appearance in the movie is 10 seconds of his talk show on a television.
Near the beginning of the film, Indy is looking at a book (possibly the bible) and he sees a drawing of the ark being opened showing people looking at it being killed by beams of light.
But the identity of the elevator killer isn’t a DEM because finding out his identity wasn’t the point of the movie. He was just a force who did rather conveintly kill the right person for steve martin close to the end.
Though it was a comedy, so you can overlook it as much as the police easily getting a battering ram.
Not a movie, but the Book “Jurassic Park” ends with a DEM. Pretty much all is lost and all of a sudden a bunch of helicopter gunships from the Costa Rican military arrive to rescue them and firebomb the island. Nobody called the mainland to tell them this, and Costa Rica doesn’t have a military of that caliber.
Oh, and “Monty Python’s Now for Something Completely different” had a nice DEM. At one point “The Killer Cars” are killing everyone in London and all of a sudden a giant monster cat(“A Miracle of Atomic Mutation”) comes in and scares off the cars, but then starts to destory the city. Then you see a man in a chair reading to his kid and describing how “Thousands of Knights on horseback of many different colors filled the streets in a display which could never in your life be shown in a low budget film such as this(notice my mouth isn’t moving either). They fought the cat and then suddenly the earth opened up and” and then there’s a piece of animation about the monster cat being sucked into the sewers.
Very much a DEM, but it works being a Python movie.
audit 1, you reminded me of a scene from the Adam West Batman movie of 1964 (I think). It’s not the end of the movie, so it’s not technically a DEM, but it’s a long the same lines. At some point in their investigation, Batman and Robin get attacked by the Killer Rubber Shark of Doom[sup]TM[/sup]. Things look bad for our heroes until - PRESTO! - Batman yanks a can of Killer Rubber Shark Repellant[sup]TM[/sup] off his utility belt and gives the polymer monstrosity a big ol’ dose to the face. Disaster averted, our heroes can continue their mission.
The book Olive The Other Reindeer was a charming story. The made-for-TV musical movie was a different story entirely, as well as being heaps of fun to watch.
When Olive is kidnapped (okay, dognapped) from the diner by the evil Letter Carrier, locked in the back of his mail truck, and driven ever further from her ultimate destination of the North Pole, things are looking rather grim. But Wait! Olive finds a parcel in the back of the truck addressed to her! Because the mail is addressed to her, the evil Letter Carrier is powerless to prevent her from opening it, and so she does. Inside the parcel she finds a hacksaw, which she uses to saw through the locks that are keeping her imprisoned, allowing her to escape and resume her journey to help Santa and save Christmas.
So what does this have to do with Deus Ex Machina? Merely that that was the name on the return address of Olive’s parcel.
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
GRELBY, if Batman whips out Bat-anti shark repellent ™ from his utility belt. it is not a DEM since we have previously established his utility belt has everything he needs in it. If he has to rely on a convenient dolphin to come along and save him that is a DEM.