One that never encountered such things before.
I don’t know - that is actually pretty plausible. Why should Earth bacteria affect aliens at all? Bacteria and virus have evolved alongside and step by step with other animals, constantly interacting.
If you took modern humans and went back in time on a geological/evolutionary time scale (say over 50 million years), would that ancient bacteria have as much effect on humans?
Going to another planet with a completely independently evolved ecosystem, how likely is it that their equivalent of bacteria would even be detectable or noticed by our immune systems? I have no idea, but maybe in War of the Worlds the aliens had previously gone to other worlds without problems, so they didn’t anticipate any problems with Earth.
There’s also his Fallen Dragon. You were told the God was there, true, but once he was needed all problems were resolved.
Germ theory was a pretty fresh idea when H. G. Wells was writing War of the Worlds. Rewritten now, you’d expect Mars and Earth to perhaps share the same biological basis because rocks from Mars (with possible bacteria) have landed on Earth and one can imagine rocks from Earth maybe made the same trip.
In “The Jerk”, Navin (Steve Martin) goes from rags, to riches, to rags again. While he’s destitute at the end of the movie, and with no hope for the future, his adoptive family, suddenly wealthy through careful investing, come driving up to save him.
Navin: How’d you find me?
Father: Well, I don’t know - this is the first place we looked!
That’s what she said.
I don’t understand how that fits the situation I described. A closer Pratchett example would be in The Fifth Elephant, where Colon takes over the Watch while Vimes is off in Bonk.
Sounds like the plot of “The Sorceror’s Apprentice.”
Thanks, you stupid, slef-important, bitch. I didn’t see no spoilers and shit.
And you kick my ass off this board and keep these ignorant fucks.
Whom have you been fighting since '73?
Word on that shit.
The thread is about the endings of stories, so it’s obvious there are going to be spoilers in here. Anyway you’re being a jerk and you’re not allowed to insult other posters in this forum. This is a formal warning, so please don’t do this again.
I thought the major Deus ex Machina in Avatar was the sudden ability to transfer a human’s consciousness into an Avatar body. The Na’vi hated humans so why in the world would they have this ability? Star Trek III had the same plot hole, a ritual that exists for the sole purpose of bringing a main character back from the dead.
The 1956 film version of The Bad Seed had the villianous main character apparently getting away with multiple murders. She goes to a pond on a rainy night to search for some sort of token… …she killed killed a boy for. Suddenly she’s struck by lightning and the movie ends. I remember my girlfriend at the time finding it hilarious because you hardly ever see an ending so blatantly tacked on.
You’re right, that is a better fit.
Well you are remembering it slightly wrong. The cop and the serial killer are the same species but I don’t believe they were aliens just a life form that evolved on earth but kept their presence a secret. There is some foreshadowing that the cop isn’t exactly normal.
Both the cop and the killer are shapeshifters the cop is just a much better one and turns himself into a membrane and smothers the killer.
My least favorite is the ending of The Stand.
The Superflu caused so much pain, oh!
And with evil a raging volcano
Flagg’s triumph seemed certain
Until King rang the curtain
By pulling a Deus ex ano!
What? How is Colon taking over the Watch and mismanaging it chronically in the absence of Vimes/Carrot a deux ex machina? Or are you referring to Carrot telling him politely to GTFO when they all come back from Bonk? Even so I’m not getting it.
A few of mine are:
The carpet people
When the battle hangs in the balance suddenly the wights show up and pitch in, even though they have always remained neutral in conflicts (and indeed it is only in one world out of millions of possible ones do they do this).
Deep Space Nine
[spoiler]At the start of series six when they retake the station the incoming Dominion fleet from the Gamma quadrant is simply “disappeared” by the Prophets - a fairly literal deus ex machina there 
Similarly in the show’s finale Odo links with the female changeling to cure her of the disease affecting the shapeshifters and at the same time shares the experience of his friends fighting to save him which she didn’t believe would ever happen. As soon as the link is broken off she realises the war is wrong and agrees to surrender[/spoiler]
Battlestar Galactica
If you can think of a more literal act of god than Starbuck randomly transporting Galactica to earth and simultaneously nuking the colony then by all means please tell me!
Is it a Deus ex Machina if the plot device does the exact opposite of saving the day, but still comes out of nowhere? Diabolus ex Machina?
If so, how about the ending of Dirty Mary Crazy Larry.
My favorite is from a book called Child 44. It’s set in the Stalin-era Soviet Union, and by the end of the book you’re convinced that there can’t possibly be a happy ending for the protagonist – he wil inevitably wind up tortured and killed by the KGB, or rotting in the Gulag. And then Stalin dies, and the whole political order of the Soviet Union is upended, and the protagonist comes out a hero. It’s the only time I’ve encountered a deux ex machina ending that I found both truly surprising and yet plausible.
Damn. I thought I’d made it up.