# Laziest and cheapest plot contrivances and cop-outs you've ever seen. **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [October 30, 2007, 8:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554 "2007-10-30T08:07:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Illuminatiprimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/illuminatiprimus/32/11520_2.png) [@Illuminatiprimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Illuminatiprimus)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/21 "2007-10-30T15:44:23Z")
_Adds Justin Bailey to his death list_ ---
**Author:** ![well\_he\_s\_back](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/3ab097/32.png) [@well\_he\_s\_back](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/well_he_s_back)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/22 "2007-10-30T15:47:44Z")
quick note - neither the Balrog nor Army of the Dead were quick cop-outs in the LOTR books. I agree, they were made to feel that way in the movies. Eagles are perhaps another matter. ---
**Author:** ![Sitnam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Sitnam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sitnam)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 3:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/23 "2007-10-30T15:54:28Z")
**War of the Worlds** - Our species is so advanced we can travel across the universe intending to invade and conquer a world we knew about before we left. No need to take any precautions to prevent diseases, theres no chance an alien race which evolved completely independently would have anything our biology couldn’t handle. **The Sign** - The only way to truly invade a planet is to first make bizarre shapes in corn fields to scare hick conspiracy theorists. This planet’s surface is 70% blue, there’s no way it’s water, a chemical that will kill us. ---
**Author:** ![John\_DiFool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_difool/32/19543_2.png) [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/24 "2007-10-30T16:02:34Z")
[QUOTE=Sage Rat] 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. [/QUOTE] Not really a cop-out because the first danger is replaced by an even greater danger. The orc’s terrified behavior helps to underline this fact. **smiling bandit** outlined how the book handled it. Now, don’t get me started on the Army of the Dead, which doesn’t work as a dramatic development OR as a special effect. My worst cop-out has to be the ST-TNG episode when Data is taken prisoner by that collector guy (who later moves to Earth in the past and becomes Daphne’s fiance on _Frasier_). Data finally realizes that the guy’s reign of terror must be stopped, and shoots him-while at the exact same moment Geordi beams him up to the Enterprise. Then we get some lame line from Data (after the transporter “deactivated” the weapon) to the effect that it was just a simple malfunction in the weapon, thus neatly avoiding the very interesting question as to whether android (artificial) organisms have free will. Of course TNG was notorious for this kind of issue evading and button resetting. ---
**Author:** ![KneadToKnow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kneadtoknow/32/3999_2.png) [@KneadToKnow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KneadToKnow)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/25 "2007-10-30T16:03:41Z")
_24_, season 1. To quote **Astorian** ’s inadvertant post to that year’s [no-spoilers thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=97411&page=2&pp=50): > [@](#): > > Amnesia!?! ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/26 "2007-10-30T16:16:03Z")
[QUOTE=Wee Bairn] The worst of all time- Mystic River 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. [/QUOTE] Yes. That ruined the movie for me. I was surprised after seeing it, I read the reviews and they were pretty much universally good. I just couldn’t get past the ridiculous coincidence the entire plot hangs on. ---
**Author:** ![Ogre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/ecb155/32.png) [@Ogre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ogre)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/27 "2007-10-30T16:40:30Z")
Computer virus. Independence Day. Puuuuuhhhleeze. ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/28 "2007-10-30T16:41:00Z")
Every book in the **Sword of Truth** series from #2 onward. Just when Things Look Really Hopeless, Richard pulls some entirely new bit of warwizard magic (that he didn’t even know he could do) out of his ass and saves the world for Ayn Rand. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/29 "2007-10-30T16:50:01Z")
[QUOTE=Hypno-Toad] 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. [/QUOTE] Well, technically he was quite paralyzed. The amazing Klingon backup system is what allowed him to survive spine-repairing surgery, though not after lying dead for several minutes first. That entire episode was truly awful, especially when Crusher gives the dramatic “you have no right to risk your patients’ lives in the name of advancing medicine” while sitting in her office surrounded by 24th-century medical technology. I wanted the guest character to seriously bitch-slap some sense into her. The same pattern appears anywhere some writer wants to make a chest-beating populist point about “caring”, as though knowledge was something only uncaring, evil people pursued, stomping on the backs of the working man to chase it. Anyway, the end of _The Last Starfighter_: Oh, me? I was just dormant while my body repaired itself. That’s what “next dimension” means in my culture. Yeah… dimension. ---
**Author:** ![Chimera](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Chimera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chimera)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/30 "2007-10-30T17:33:10Z")
[QUOTE=smiling bandit] 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.” [/QUOTE] Ahem. The ENTIRE Harry Potter series is one long series of deux ex machina endings. Book 1: Harry’s touch KILLS Professor Quirrell. How convenient. Book 2: Falkes shows up out of nowhere, blinds the Basilisk, gives Harry the sorting hat (which gives him the sword from out of nowhere) and then heals him when he’s been fatally poisoned _and_ flies the entire bunch out of the Chamber of Secrets. :rolleyes: Need I continue? ---
**Author:** ![AuntiePam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f19dbf/32.png) [@AuntiePam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AuntiePam)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/31 "2007-10-30T17:38:49Z")
**Knead to Know** ’s post reminded me of a book I’d like to forget – **The Historian** by Elizabeth Kostova. She used amnesia to make one of the characters forget that he had impregnated the heroine’s mother. He totally forgot the mother, not just that he got her pregnant – he forgot she existed! The amnesia wasn’t brought on by a brain tumor or a bump on the head. Nope. It was Greek liquor caused the amnesia. Of course he remembered everything else. I was unable to finish the book, but many Amazon reviewers listed other plot contrivances that I didn’t pick up on. Oh! One was that the characters couldn’t find a copy of Dracula, a book that’s been in print for what, a hundred years? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/32 "2007-10-30T18:39:55Z")
[QUOTE=Hypno-Toad] 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. [/QUOTE] Or Vulcans about to die can park their souls someplace else. Right. We can call all these Spock ex machina. Most old serials had examples every episode. Flash is about to be killed? Oh, we never showed you Barin aiming the protection ray at him. ---
**Author:** ![Malvert\_P.Redd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ba0ec/32.png) [@Malvert\_P.Redd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malvert_P.Redd)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/33 "2007-10-30T18:47:37Z")
_V: The Final Battle_ had an ending that was complete and utter horseshit. How are we going to culminate 10 hours of two minseries? Let’s set a bomb to destroy the earth, only to be saved at the last second by the half-human half-lizard kid putting her mystical hands on the device, somehow short-circuiting it. Um, fuck you. ---
**Author:** ![TLDRIDKJKLOLFTW](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/51bf81/32.png) [@TLDRIDKJKLOLFTW](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TLDRIDKJKLOLFTW)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/34 "2007-10-30T19:44:23Z")
[QUOTE=Illuminatiprimus] 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. [/QUOTE] Nate and Lisa are married mainly because Brenda is out of Nate’s life and he wants to “do the right thing” for he and Lisa’s child. Then they start having some marital difficulties, but they work through them and find a happy, working equilibrium - but then Brenda comes back into the picture. Instead of having to deal with a nuanced and complicated situation, whoopsie! - Lisa vanishes and is found dead, apropos of _nothing_. She may as well have been hit by a meteor. So the next season is trucking along and Brenda has found a stable relationship with a new man, while she keeps sleeping with Nate. So basically the situation is reversed; suddenly Brenda “can’t handle commitment and stuff” and that guy’s just immediately written out of the show so that she can Nate can get back together, instead of the writers making it a complicated and interesting three-way situation with real people. THEN, to create some mild dramatic tension, there’s a whole plot that arises about how Lisa’s sister and her husband are going to somehow take Nate’s baby away. Things are looking grim, until Nate goes to confront the husband who, _for no apparent reason at all_ decides to suddenly confess a comically complicated backstory about how he and Lisa were having an affair and he killed her, THEN he pulls out a gun that conveniently happens to be right in his desk and blows his brains out. WHAT?! Embarrassing, sub-_Guiding Light_ turn of events. ---
**Author:** ![cmkeller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmkeller/32/118_2.png) [@cmkeller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmkeller)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/35 "2007-10-30T20:01:47Z")
Desperate Housewives, season 3: The cancer was a very contrived way of fixing Lynette and Tom’s rift (over Rick). And the simultaneous accidental death of Alma Hodge and permanent paralysis of Gloria Hodge was WAY too convenient. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/36 "2007-10-30T20:08:25Z")
[QUOTE=Sage Rat] 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. [/quote] Well, it’s not quite that way in the book, if that makes you feel better; they’re never surrounded by the Orcs, but rather fight off a reasonable-sized sortie before running to escape the Balrog. (As for the movie you claim to have seen, I’ve decided to go back to my position that no such entity exists and the rest of you hallucinated it..) ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 8:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/37 "2007-10-30T20:10:31Z")
[QUOTE=Tuckerfan] “Luke, I am your father.” [/QUOTE] 😕 This I don’t get. The revelation that Vader was Luke’s father didn’t help the situation; it made things much, much worse. How is that a lazy plot contrivance? ---
**Author:** ![recessiveMeme](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/46a35a/32.png) [@recessiveMeme](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/recessiveMeme)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/38 "2007-10-30T20:18:07Z")
[QUOTE=stolichnaya] 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. [/quote] \The Balrog is a fricken’ demon from the First Age. They were the fricken’ go-to guys for Morgoth. We don’t need to see some piddly little goblins running from the _fricken’ Balrog_ to understand that he’s badass.\ Also, the movie _Signs_ is pretty much a continuous chain of plot contrivances and cop-outs. ---
**Author:** ![Sean\_Factotum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/50afbb/32.png) [@Sean\_Factotum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sean_Factotum)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/39 "2007-10-30T20:23:31Z")
[QUOTE=Sitnam] **The Sign** - The only way to truly invade a planet is to first make bizarre shapes in corn fields to scare hick conspiracy theorists. This planet’s surface is 70% blue, there’s no way it’s water, a chemical that will kill us. [/QUOTE] [General in South Park]That’s not a plan, that’s a twist![/GiSP] ---
**Author:** ![Geek\_Mecha](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ecae2f/32.png) [@Geek\_Mecha](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Geek_Mecha)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554/40 "2007-10-30T20:24:18Z")
I loathed the movie ending of The Firm. Instead of painstakingly photocopying all of the firm’s incriminating documents in a sleazy motel in the Caymans, they realize they can nail the law firm on billions of counts of mail fraud! Why, that will do the job just as well! What a revelation! Gah. Thank god I saw that movie on cable and didn’t pay to watch it. In The X Files, I didn’t care for Mulder and Scully hooking up and having a baby. I liked it better when there was just the possibility of a romance happening. The near-kiss in the movie was dumb, too, out of freaking nowhere. If the romance had to happen, it could have been handled much better in the show. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laziest-and-cheapest-plot-contrivances-and-cop-outs-youve-ever-seen/424554.md?page=3)