The Badly-Plotted Deus Ex

How many stories fall into the badly-plotted Deus Ex Machina ending? A miraculous resolution to a seemingly doom-laden ending, the Deus Ex neatly resolves the plot to no one’s satisfaction.

Originating from ancient Greek drama, this is literally the appearance of ‘a god from the machine.’ It’s a theatrical device where a supernatural figure is winched up, down or sideways onto the stage to fix the plot by divine intervention. In Medea, the sun god sends a golden chariot to rescue the protagonist. This trope of Greek drama is now a dreaded cliché. The Deus Ex ending continues to this day in movies and books.

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the light of God from the ark destroys the Nazis. HG Wells attributes humanity’s salvation in The War of the Worlds to “God in his wisdom.” The bacteria that wipe out the Martians don’t get an opinion.

‘Just in the nick of time interventions’ are also in the Deus Ex category. For Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, a navy ship arrives in the nick of time to prevent the protagonist’s imminent death.

In Tolkien’s The Two Towers, the cavalry arrives on the fifth day, led by the demi-god wizard Gandalf’s magic light. In The Return of the King, the eagles arrive to airlift Frodo and Sam from the active volcano Mount Doom. This is after Aragorn co-opts an army of ghosts to break the siege of Gondor. That’s two Deus Ex interventions for the price of one.

Why is the Deus Ex ending so derided?

You can see from the examples the Deus Ex takes many forms. It may not be an actual god. Ghosts, eagles, bacteria, the expedient navy ship and the Rohirim cavalry all fulfill the same role.

Timing also plays a part. Often, the Deus Ex is the equivalent of a random person arriving with a pair of wire cutters to stop the countdown clock with one second left before the bomb explodes. Perhaps it’s an even more ludicrous example? Some insignificant side character has an unmentioned past as a bomb disposal tech? The waitress in the diner took an online course in bridge demolition?

In all of these Deus Ex interventions, our protagonist becomes a passive bystander and makes no active choices. This is excusable if they’re a child, without the kind of life skills, physique or education to resolve the crisis themselves. As an early try-fail episode, this is a valuable learning experience. But for the climax of a story? It’s poor.

Pixar recognises the Deus Ex in the Twenty-two rules of story telling:

19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

Troubles without Decisions

Usually an unsolvable conflict or point of tension is instantly resolved by the unexpected appearance of an implausible character, object, action, ability, or event. It has nothing to do with the character’s best efforts, skills, or actions and thereby robs them of agency. At best it’s a cheap trick, at worst it undermines all the reader’s emotional investment in those characters. What was the point of all that struggle if a giant foot comes down and flattens the antagonist at the moment of their triumph? The Deus Ex engineers a swift, convenient ending that is unearned. It’s a kind of betrayal.

Savvy modern audiences see through this stuff right away.

If the solution to Ender’s Game is a super-smart AI that figures out the winning war strategy, what’s the point of Ender Wiggin going through all that misery in the war academy? There’s no moral crisis if a machine pushes the holocaust button in his place.

Flipping the Deus Ex

How do you resolve the unresolvable plot without resort to the disappointing, unearned Deus Ex?

Give the characters back their agency.

What’s the point of an ‘unresolvable’ climax? Make a path? A favourite Next Generation episode has the warrior member of the crew acknowledge they can’t fight their way past the enemy. His pivot point? “Guile.”

Your characters have to find that one weakness, that chink in the armour, the flaw in the plan. In Avengers: Endgame, it’s the one-in-fourteen-million possible futures.

Give the protagonist a trait or skill they can deploy in an unexpected or creative way to escape their impending doom. James Kirk hacked the wargame simulator so that he could beat the no-win Kobyashi Maru scenario. In doing so, he ducked the valuable life lesson in that no-win exercise, so there can also be consequences.

Crucially, a protagonist who’s a bystander isn’t a protagonist, they have to protag (new verb c/o Brandon Sanderson).

Working Backwards

If the plot has to resolve by an external hand, foreshadow it. Set up the no-win scenario, then reverse-engineer the solution.

Seed the solution in a hanging plot thread way earlier in the story, then bring it into play for the finale:

• Give a side character a special (secondary) skill that opens the path to a resolution.
• Utilize a previous skill, fact or plot point. Maybe it’s a trivia quiz answer, a technique borrowed from a hobby, an heirloom or some other incidental and forgotten object. The equivalent of Chekov’s gun hanging on the wall in the first scene.

It’s not a Deus Ex if it was there all along.

No such thing as coincidence

This is one of the rules of mystery writing; plant your clues early so the revelation at the end of the third act is an “a-ha!” moment not a WTF? Readers don’t feel cheated if the groundwork is done in the run up to the climax. They’ll forgive a little bit of misdirection if the answer pops out of a previous plot point they paid no mind.

Beware not to overstretch these plants past the readers credibility. A fine line divides a cunning setup from a honking seal with a trumpet and a bow tie. You don’t want the reader to close the book muttering “really, that was it?!”

I get to have fun with my protagonist’s Second Sight; all those visions of possible futures, some unreliable, some incompatible. The key is that the reader suspends their disbelief and accepts Second Sight as a real phenomenon. I can then play around with the reliability and point of view to setup and subvert all kinds of doom-scenarios. The character is forced to make choices as a result.

Defy the Deus; break the machine.