Yes, it appears to come out of nowhere. But that alone is not enough to make a deus ex machina. Just to be sure I wasn’t misremembering, I went and rewatched the episode.
Spock is attacked offscreen. At no point are we in any suspense about him being attacked, since we just find out after the fact that it happened. The comment about his blood is just quick aside for why he survived. It has no bearing whatsoever on the plot itself.
A deus ex machina actually resolves the plot. Right then and there, the plot is resolved. But the resolution of the plot is not for another three minutes. And it happens because the Salt Vampire attacks Kirk, which finally gets through to McCoy that he can’t allow it to live.
Sure, Spock does come in and attack it in an attempt to get McCoy to fire, but that doesn’t resolve the plot,. And, even if it did, that’s not the fact that he has green blood. The fact that Spock has green blood did not resolve the plot.
Now, if Spock was the guy who goes and tries to kill the Salt Vampire, and it attacks and seemingly kills him, but he suddenly survives and kills it, and then says “I guess it didn’t like my green blood,” that’s deus ex machina territory.
A DEM can also resolve a lessor plot complication. If a character falls off a cliff and, without explanation, grows wings (girl Gelflings) it really doesn’t have much to do with the real plot of the movie, but it is DEM-ish.
I would agree, though, that Spock’s copper-based blood is not a DEM in “The Man Trap,” because the problem isn’t really a plot or character complication of any sort. People didn’t spend a lot of time wondering, “But why did Spock survive?” The question is asked and answered, one-two. In contrast, Spock’s blindness in the episode with the flying fried eggs was set up as a fairly hefty character complication: he’d just attained a brand new major handicap.
(Too bad this was before the era of story-arcs. Having Spock blind for a few episodes would have been an interesting idea!)
I’m sorry to be such a pill…but, no, I can’t even agree with this.
He’s a plot complication. He’s a contrivance that makes the real story possible. That’s not lazy writing: it’s plotting. It’s the “beginning” part of the traditional beginning/middle/end of the dramatic swoosh.
Abraham Lincoln wasn’t lazy writing. Weird, but not lazy. The writer had a vision in mind, and justified it by creating the premises to support it. It’s backwards writing: starting with what you want, and then making up reasons for it to happen.
Wesley Crusher and “Just reverse the polarity” – that’s lazy writing!
The dictionary definition you used also doesn’t say anything about a godlike being. (Which the Guardian isn’t, anyway. It’s a time machine. It’s no more godlike than Doc Brown’s DeLorean, although it is a fair bit more articulate.) Your dictionary also doesn’t define a DEM as a source of exposition: it describes it as a resolution to an apparently insoluable difficulty. The Guardian does not resolve any problems in the episode: it creates them.
You are correct that a DEM does not necessarily have to appear at the end of a story. It does, however, have to arrive at the end of a conflict - because the purpose of a DEM is to resolve a conflict. A plot element introduced at the beginning of a story by definition cannot be a DEM, because that means it’s appeared before any conflict can be established.
The fact that the Guardian does not appear in any other Star Trek episodes is immaterial: Star Trek was created as episodic television with each episode being largely self-contained. An individual episode of Star Trek almost never makes any references to any other episode of Star Trek. As such, the series as a whole cannot be approached as a single coherent story. The function of the Guardian needs to be understood within the context of the story in which it appeared, and it’s function there is as a provocateur, creating the conflict that drives the story, not (again) resolving it.
DEMs in general are not about “fitting into the universal order.” The term comes from Greek drama, where the “god” was often literally a deity. Zeus suddenly shows up, out of nowhere, and fixes the problem for the protagonist. To a Greek audience, you don’t need to establish that Zeus is part of the universal order - that’s an assumption they’re going to have going into the play. If you’re writing a crime drama set in contemporary America, it’s a given that there’s a president of America out there somewhere. If, in the third act, you have the president suddenly show up and issue the main character a pardon, without at any point establishing that there’s any sort of federal interest in the case, that’s a deus ex machina - even though the entire audience already knows that there’s an American president somewhere in the story’s setting.
Likewise, motivation is entirely unrelated to the concept of a DEM. Q was written with a great motivation. However, if, in an episode that’s entirely about the Enterprise dealing with Klingons, with no indication that it’s a Q episode until the last ten minutes when Q appears out of nowhere and turns the Klingons into Tribbles, that’s a DEM, even if Q has a strong motivation for his action. Hell, even though Q has appeared in previous episodes of Star Trek. If that particular story doesn’t have any mention of Q, until he shows up to fix the story’s central conflict, then Q is a deus ex machina.
I find this particular comment hard to process, because without the Guardian, there is no story. How would you propose the episode be rewritten to fix the “problem” of the Guardian? You need to introduce a mechanic by which the protagonists travel back in time. Since Star Trek is not (particularly in the first series) a time travel show, you’ll need to introduce a new plot element to explain how and why they travel back in time. It’ll have to be new to this episode, to explain why they haven’t used it before. And it’ll have to not show up again later, else you have to explain why they don’t use it to fix all of their problems in future episodes. And you need some way to explain why they’re traveling back in time, and what the stakes are if they fail. All of these roles are held by the Guardian in this episode: does parceling them out to other characters actually fix anything? If Spock builds a time machine at the beginning of the episode, and Scotty explains why they need to go back in time and rescue McCoy, how does this improve the episode? How does this resolve the problems you’ve perceived in the episode?
If Ellison resolved it the way I said, it would be lazy writing. But he didn’t.
Now if you mean the Guardian not caring enough to show the history of the Earth, then there would be no plot since McCoy would jump through the hole and land on his ass on the other side. But once you establish that McCoy could go back in time, then it logically follows that Kirk and Spock can also.
I’ve been trying to explain what a DEM would look like in this story - and why what the story actually is does not include one.
By robot I assume you mean Data. But Data does not play the typical robot role. Data is far more like Spock - a nonhuman intelligence trying to understand and be understood by humans, and showing human foibles by his difference. Spock resists being human, though he could easily fall into human emotions, while Data tries as hard as he can to be human, but has trouble because of his construction.
Now children I give you.
He does, unfortunately serve as comic relief, as Robby the Robot did in Forbidden Planet. Data was a Spock replacement, as Picard and Riker were Kirk replacements, covering the fan complaint that “Real naval Captains don’t go on landing parties.”
But not only as comic relief. Data had slightly more depth as a character than Robby. (To put it mildly.) The comic relief mostly came from the character, and it was good, since even Nimoy as Spock had more humor than Stewart and Frakes put together.
