Diabolus ex Machina (Demon from the Machine) is the Evil Counterpart of Deus ex Machina: the introduction of an unexpected new event, character, ability or object designed to ensure that things suddenly get much worse for the protagonists, much better for the villains, or both.
Observers of this trope should note three things:
Diabolus ex Machina is often brought in simply because if the villain were to lose, the fictional story would be over. Like the Deus Ex Machina, it only applies if it comes out of left field.
Like the Deus Ex Machina, a Diabolus Ex Machina does not necessarily occur at the end. Though it often overlaps with Ending Tropes, it should not be confused for one.
Darker than Black. What was that? You thought Havock was going to get a happy end? ...Don't be a fool.
MS IGLOO Episode 5 The very young recruit, Erwin, has survived the sortie, and talked his opponent into being taken prisoner rather than dying needlessly when a blast of laser fire from a distant Salamis kills them both.
Something happens like this in the Gundam Side-Story Space, to the End of a Flash, where the pilot of the Gundam Unit 5 survives the battle of A Baoa Qu and is returning to the ship... only to be shot in the back by a barely alive Gelgoog.
And again in the Gundam Evolve story involving the Dendrobrium Orchis, where the pilot is shot by a dying Zaku when he back was turned just as they were cutting to the credits
Then there's Mobile Suit Gundam SEED where Kira rescues the escape craft that Flay's in... only for one of the Providence Gundam's DRAGOON bits to shoot it in front of him, killing her.
Angel Sanctuary seems to fall into this trope. Especially when Setsuna finally reunites with his loved sister, a wacko angel girl shoots her and enrages Setsuna, causing The End of the World as We Know It. (The manga goes well past this point. Still plenty of Deus Angst Machina, though.)
Code Geass. Oh so very much. Sure, Mao showed us that a Geass grows stronger with repeated use and a careless user runs the risk of losing control of it. Of course, Zero's Geass just had to backfire at the "everything will get better now" moment, and in the most inconveniently nasty way ever, to boot. (And Lelouch saying the worst possible thing at the worst possible time, to the worst possible person, made it even worse.) Season 2 surpasses it when Lelouch commanding Suzaku to "live" in season 1 caused Suzaku to nuke Tokyo when it activated, heavily implying the death of Nunnally. It's like an Up to Eleven version of Season 1. In both seasons, pretty much every time the Order of Black Knights seems to be winning a battle, you can set your watch to some new Britannian super-Knightmare Frame showing up and sending everything to hell.
What makes the "kill all Japanese" incident SO much worse is that Lelouch clearly was about to confess all his wrongdoings to Euphemia and leave his villainous ways behind. Only to slip up and stumble right into the Moral Event Horizon without even wanting to. After this you just know there will be no happy ending for Lulu.
Given the number of times Lelouch has horrible events happen right in his moment of triumph, one might expect that he leaves an open place setting at his dinner table just for Diabolus.
Weiss KreuzGluhen never promises better than a Bittersweet Ending, but the final scene of the series is pure Diabolus Ex Machina; having cut ties with everyone he ever knew and left Japan, Aya goes walking down a sidewalk in New York and Diabolus, in the form of a scruffy little boy, runs up and stabs him in the gut. He ends up collapsed against a mailbox, having a flashback of his former teammates, while the pedestrians walking past pay no attention to the guy apparently bleeding to death all over the sidewalk.
End Of Evangelion, or even Evangelion in general loves this. In EoEAsuka finally snaps out of her depression coma and gets a Crowning Moment of Awesome when she kills nine Mass Produced Evas in three minutes. She barely finishes, but it's looking up. The Seele army has been driven out, Rei, Shinji and Asuka are alive, Ritsuko's plan to detonate the entire complex failed, Shinji isn't in his psychopathic mother and Instrumentality has been averted. Then 0 , who simply regenerated the wounds Asuka inflicted on them, and skewered to death by even more fake Lances; Shinji gets in Unit 01 and Rei fuses with Lilith, becomes a giant white god and turns all of humanity into orange juice on Shinji's orders.
While in normal Eva, everything is going fine, if not a tad angsty. Shinji's social skills are improving, Asuka's teamwork is going well and Rei is beginning to show some humanity. A few episodes later and Asuka's been Mind Raped, Shinji is catatonic and Rei is dead, replaced by a clone.
A similar scene occurs in L/R. The bad guys are defeated and one of the partners of the title agency has fallen in love and is all set to live happily ever after. Unfortunately, while walking down the street near his office, one of the villains of the series pops into view and shoots him dead. Instantly. He doesn't even get a poignant flashback.
A non-death example... Ojamajo Doremi Naisho: Hazuki has taken an unlikely lead in the final leg of a relay to decide a swim meet... then she suddenly gets a cramp on the way back, allowing the other room to easily win the race.
A few arcs of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni have this tendency, although they always have long threads of justification for it. Particular arcs that come to mind are Onikakushi-hen, in which after finally getting rid of two girls who had been trying to murder him the entire arc, the main character dies by "randomly" clawing his throat out; Watanagashi-hen, in which, after the main character manages to escape two different attempts on his life (one involving a freaking Torture Cellar), finally dies from a heart attack after seeing the girl who tried to kill him and was previously declared dead come back from the dead to kill him by nailing his hands to the bed; and Tsumihoroboshi-hen, in which after preventing one of the girls from blowing up the school and bringing her back from her paranoia, the entire town dies when poisonous gases roll through town.
Higurashi Kai does even better than that. In Minagoroshi-hen, Rika has spent more than a hundred years of constantly repeating the same month, knowing that she's going to die a horrendous, bloody death at the end. However, there is one world that Keiichi manages to change in the slightest way. A tiny little change leads to a string of minor miracles, with many a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming. Then, right before the club can finally save Rika, the Big Bad reveals herself and shoots them all in the face. Then she ritualistically disembowels Rika and goes on to initiate the aforementioned poison gas attack on the village. Although that chapter title (It translates to Everyone-killing chapter) is a bit of a tip-off...
Palm goes to Higurashi Rei. Rika finally manages to end the endless loops of death. She's so happy that she gets all careless and runs into a truck, dying in the process and ending up in a perfect world where everybody is happy and there is no Watanagashi tragedy, but in which she has no good friends (Satoko is a bitch and Hanyuu just isn't there in that world) and the village will be destroyed due to the dam project. She finally gets back to the old world by killing her own mother.
Occurs in the Buu Saga of Dragon Ball Z, when Mr. Satan/Hercule, of all people, manages to stop Buu by befriending him. Just when things are about to calm down, two gun-toting assholes show up and shoot both Mr. Satan/Hercule and the puppy Buu adopted, pissing him off and forming the Evil Buu, which starts the next part of the arc up.
The anime changed this a bit so it wasn't completely out of left field: Mr. Satan did stop them before when they shot the puppy, but one of the goons came back for vengeance. The timing of the whole thing does feel a little contrived though.
Also part of the final saga of Dragonball GT. Following the defeat of Super Android 17 when the gang gathers the Dragonballs, they discover that the massive amount of usage from the beginning up till that point caused the balls of overload with negative energy, giving birth to seven evil dragons. Despite the debate on GT's canonicity in the franchise, the foreshadowing of Old Kai in Dragon Ball Z might have been a hint of things to come. Furthermore, they do show the balls cracking during the Super Android 17 fight and the characters mention said cracks when collecting them, so it's not like it comes ENTIRELY out of nowhere.
Also during the Saiyan Saga during Goku's fight with Vegeta. Pretty quickly Goku finds that the only chance he has of winning is to use Kaioken attack at levels where physically hurts him. After their famous Beam-O-War, Goku finds the only way he'll win using the spirit bomb, despite Vegeta losing said struggle. Vegeta reveals a previously unmentioned way to turn into a Oozaru and promptly crushes Goku within an inch of his life. One wonders why his flunky Nappa didn't use this.
Because 1. He probably didn't have this skill, and 2. They were expecting the Earth's natural moon to show up if things ever went south. Of course, Piccolo blew it up expecting them to do this. Still, Vegeta using this ability came out of nowhere.
In the Frieza saga, this appears, though is more so in the anime. Piccolo is fighting Frieza in what is presumed to be his true form, losing, then powers up to full strength. Whether or not this would have made a difference because Frieza reveals he has two more transformations, transforms into the first one and demolishes Piccolo. In the anime, Piccolo manages to take the upper hand, then Frieza transforms.
The ending of GaoGaiGar Final is all lined up for the happy ending we were all expecting from the generally upbeat tone of the series, then kills off literally everyone except Mamoru, Kaido, and the background characters still on earth in the last five minutes of the last episode for absolutely no reason at all.
There was originally a sequel in development that got canned that would've linked the GGG verse with Betterman more. Part of the development involved Genesic GaoGaiGar erupting out of the Sun.
The Wham Episode in Mai-Otome throws one of these in toward the end. At the end of the previous episode, Arika, Nina and Erstin are ready to take on their quests to become great Otomes as a team, even in the wake of Schwarz's hostile takeover of Windbloom. However, there's still air time left to kill, so along comes John Smith to spoil the party by revealing Erstin as one of their moles, and forcing her to fight against her new friends. At around the same time, Sergey comes by to congratulate Nina on a stellar year, he drops a custom-made handkerchief given to him by Arika, which sends Nina into a jealous rage, sparking a fight that ends with her killing Erstin. As later episodes show, it doesn't get much better for Nina from there, either.
It'd be a shame to leave out Ga-Rei -Zero-. Most of the major events that occur only happen in order to screw up everyone's lives even more than they were before. It always gets worse, save for a little spot of hope that Kagura ends up dealing relatively well with her duty fighting against monsters in the epilogue.
Occurs in the second season of Magic Knight Rayearth, to complete the Hope Spot for Hikaru and Eagle —having defeated Nova and saved Lantis, the Knights and Eagle return to Cephiro only for Debonair to show up out of nowhere to kill the Autozam commander. Especially jarring since Debonair had never actually attacked anyone directly until this moment.
Used quite well to make a point in Black Jack when Dr. Kiriko first appears. A woman with a terminal, inoperable condition has requested that Kiriko euthanize her. As this runs directly counter to Black Jack's principles, he begins meeting with the woman in an attempt to figure out a cure. He and Kiriko meet with each other, and Black Jack delivers a speech about how wrong Kiriko is to do what he does. After the operation goes through, with Kiriko present, Black Jack asks after the patient. She and her entire family were killed when a car slammed into their ambulance after the surgery. All of Black Jack's work - and all of his sermonizing to Kiriko - means nothing.
Kiriko laughs? Black Jack curses the heavens. In fact, thanks to the new releases of Black Jack manga, it can be seen that just about one fourth of his cases end like this. A running theme seems to be that even the world's best doctor isn't omnipotent.
This isn't just restricted to Black Jack, either- many of Osamu Tezuka's works feature such occasions. The 1980 Astro Boy anime, for instance, has many bit characters who exist only to die so that Astro can question why humans made robots this way.
Mai-Hime actually had a Diabolus with a name: Miroku, the sentient (and malevolent) spirit inhabiting Mikoto's sword for most the series. Given that Miroku controlled Mikoto's berserker activations, as well as her CHILD's actions, and then finally was the sentience behind the seal on Kagutsuchi's power, there were quite a few horrific things that happened directly because of it, including the death of at least three CHIL Ds (Fumi, Midori, and Shiho's). However, the ending actually has the Hime collectively nuking the Hime Star and thus Miroku, causing the first ever destruction of Diabolus by the direct actions of the protagonists.
Faust from Shaman King has the unfortunate distinction of getting one in his origin story. He works for years to save his wife from a terminal disease, finally succeeding a few months before a burglar shoots her.
At the end of Cowboy Bebop, Spike finally finds his lost love Julia, only for her to be shot dead by a random mook when the Red Dragon makes their move on them both, setting off Spike's final Storming the Castle moment and the final showdown with Vicious.
Subverted in Fist of the North Star. When Kenshiro gains the upper hand on Shin during their final battle, Shin attempts to discourage him by stabbing Ken's fiancee Yuria in the chest. Later Ken finds out that the Yuria stabbed by Shin was actually a mannequin and that the real Yuria was no longer with him.
Kurokami ends in this way, in the last minutes of last episode everyone discovers that final sacrifice is required, even if nobody dies.
Tsukihime. "And then Arcuied blew Roa into tiny pieces. Her and Shiki have a long, happy life in store as Shiki shows her all of the things she never thought to experience, and their mutual love is sure to last fore- SLICE."
But then it's countered by a deus ex machina where she just says "Yeah, I got better after you killified him." Which doesn't necessarily turn out to be much better, though, depending on Shiki's actions afterward.
In the FRLG arc of Pokémon Special, yay! The good guys defeat the bad guys, stop an airship from crashing into Vermillion, free Deoxys to let it go where ever it wants, have a happy reunion of sorts... then WHAM! They get Taken for Granite.
Several in Rave Master. Gale, after failing to talk down King, asks to government to arrest him, but they shoot down his family instead. King and Gale manage to end the cycle of war between the Raregroove and Symphonia family with a Heroic Sacrifice, only for King's Axe Crazy son to turn up and start the cycle back up. In order to defeat Endless Elie not only has to fake her death and leave her time period but must also kill her love interest, Haru. Etc.
At the end of the Super Robot anime Space Warrior Baldios, the hero Marin and his allies can only watch as the Big Bad, Zeo Gattler, unleashes his "Final Weapon" which triggers a cataclysmic series of gigantic tsunamis that ravage the surface of the earth. The last shot of the series is a freeze-frame of a tsunami wave, with the word "End" appearing next to it. Thankfully, there was a movie afterwards that improved the situation a bit, but things still didn't get completely better.
In episode 278 of Bleach, we have Wonderweiss coming out of nowhere unfreezing Halibel from her icy death, putting out the flames that are keeping Aizen out of combat, and stabbing Ukitake making it so he is unable to fight.
Death Note: At the end of the Yotsuba Arc, Higuchi's been captured, Aizawa and Ide are back, Light has no memory of ever being Kira, and everyone's content with a job well done. Then Soichiro takes the Note, sees Rem, panics and the Note is taken to the helicopter where L and Light are sitting. Light regains his memories — Just as Planned — and promptly has everyone who knows anything about the case (bar himself, Misa and the police contingent of the Task Force) slaughtered within weeks, and the series continues.
In Pokémon: Sinnoh League Victors, Ash is finally so skilled a trainer that only 3 of his League matches are shown, the rest briefly touched on in a montage. Just as he narrowly wins against Paul in a 6-on-6 full battle, in comes Tobias, aka the Darkrai Trainer, who proceeds to curbstomp Ash thoroughly in minutes. This serves no purpose to the plot whatsoever, other than to keep Ash from winning a League tournament.
Happens almost everytime. Indigo League, Team Rocket actually picks a very bad time to interfere making Ash work with an exhausted team, Johto faces a Blaziken from a region he hasn't even heard of, Unova Cameron has a much stronger team than one would give him credit for including a Hydreigon and his Riolu evolves midfight.
In the opening two-parter of Pokémon: Best Wishes, Zekrom appears purely in order to shock Pikachu and screw up his ability to use Electric attacks (catching both him and Ash off-guard and causing him to lose to a newbie), provide a 'climactic' cliff-hanger which is resolved within the first minute of the next episode, and then disappear.
In Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, right after defeating the Big Bad Corset via a seeming Deus ex Machina from a giant heavenly being that is either God or P&S's mother, Stocking makes an off-handed comment, wondering if Heavenly weapons can kill angels. She then proceeds to slice Panty into 666 pieces, reveal that she was a demon spy the entire time, and walks off with Corset (who just resurrected himself from Brief's penis) to another city to try and open another gate to hell, leaving Garterbelt, Brief, and Chuck to gather Panty's pieces while chasing after her.
Shin Mazinger has a pretty brutal one at the end. Kouji confronts and defeats Dr. Hell in one last climatic battle and it seems that Mazinger-Z stands triumphant. However, it turns out to be been planned by Baron Ashura, who sacrifices his/herself to allow the Mycene Empire to arrive on Earth. Cue Cliff Hanger Ending.
This is based on the ending to the original Mazinger Z, which had the Mycene Empire come out of nowhere to wreck the titular robot, only for Great Mazinger to equally come out of nowhere and save Kouji.
Fairy Tail ends the Nirvana arc by arresting the reformed Hoteye and Jellal, and heavily implying that the latter will be executed (he does get a deah sentence later too), then proceeds to top that by revealing that everybody the Token Mini Moe grew up knowing, with the exception of one man who was Dead All Along were just illusions created to keep her company and she'll never see them again. Never one to out do itself, Fairy Tail then ends the S-Class arc with a dragon coming out of nowhere and leaving the entire core cast presumed dead, and even when they're recovered seven years later the world has changed tremendously in their absence.
One of the more controversial examples of this is in Eureka Seven Ao. A Human/Coralian hybrid couldn't survive in a high density trapar environment as it triggers the body cells of human and coralian to repel each other, leading to Renton and Eureka losing their firstborn daughter, effectively motivating both to antagonise the Scub Coral, a being they both once helped to protect. It sets up a chain of events that led to the events happening in the TV sequel.
It's also a favorite of The Walking Dead. Was it really necessary for Rick to lose his hand, his wife, and his newborn daughter? Not really, but it makes everyone reading it feel horrible.
A pretty stupid one from W.I.T.C.H.. Early in the series, the team's defeated Nerissa and, as an added bonus, made sure Will's deadbeat dad doesn't try to swindle money from her or her mom. As Will and her mother go to celebrate being safe from the latter, Will's dormouse races out of the house and gets ran over by a car. It's kind of hard to not presume Will's next quote, "Why does this keep happening?" wasn't a massive Lampshade Hanging to all of her problems at the time.
Remember at the end of Watchmen when the good guys have Ozymandias cornered?
Ozymandias: Do it? Dan, I'm not a Republic Serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago.
Subverted, in that it's heavily implied that Ozymandias' plan is doomed to fail.
Although that might be even worse. He wiped out a huge portion of New York and it's all going to be for naught. When it's revealed what he's done, the reader hopes that at least it worked.
Messiah Complex. The X-Men have finally defeated all of their enemies and Scott has given the mutant baby to Cable to take into the future. Everything seems great. Until Bishop, who's been trying to kill the baby to prevent his horrible future, shoots at the baby and Cable. And Cable is already disappearing from that point in time, leaving the shot to go through and hit Professor X in the head. It really sucks to be a mutant. Granted he got better since this is a comic book and Professor X missing at the end was a hint.
Uncanny X-Force reveals that the Age Of Apocalypse reality had been positively slammed with this, and off-panel no less, since we last saw it. The eponymous dictator was dead and everyone seemed to be starting to rebuild their lives... and then the Celestials showed up, judging that Earth must be destroyed. Wolverine cuts a deal with the Celestials: he will function as their agent on Earth if they spare the planet. The Celestials accept and transform Wolverine with their technology. Now, who was the last guy they did this to? Oh, right, Apocalypse himself. Needless to say, it doesn't end well: pogroms against baseline humans are initiated, Rogue and Magneto's preteen son is eaten by a villain, and by the end of the arc that reveals all this, only two of the reality's X-Men are left alive.
The much-maligned One More Day storyline Spider Man on the run from both the law and criminals with his identity exposed and Aunt May on the verge of death from a bullet meant for Spidey. Then Mephisto, a literal devil (the Marvel Universe has several devils) shows up and offers to fix it, but his condition is that to do it, he'll rewrite history so that Spidey and his wife, Mary Jane, will never have gotten married, but on some unconscious level they'll always know they were supposed to. Mary Jane accepts. Technically it's also a Deus ex Machina, because it does solve their immediate problems, but it's made clear that it's the worst possible decision the couple could have made (or else Mephisto wouldn't have made the offer).
The cheesy yet fairly popularHalf-Life fanfic series, Half Life Full Life Consequences, uses this as a Sequel Hook: The first installment ends with "the next boss" coming out of nowhere and stepping on Gordon Freeman, setting up for a sequel that centers around John Freeman hunting down the next boss. Adding to the bizarreness, our heroes had just defeated the "Final Boss", which by all rights should preclude any more bosses showing up.
To be continued...?
And the second installment, after the defeat of the evil boss, ends with the dead Gordon Freeman becoming a zombie goast.
This is followed up with a glorious Deus ex Machina in the third chapter, when even further into the future, John Freeman descends from the heavens to assist his son in defeating the Combines and sending them back to science and outer space.
Star Trek: Voyager Virtual Season 8 uses one of these after the crew is almost home, getting them lost again in order to fix a few plot holes as well as to set up a more satisfying climactic battle in Virtual Season 9.
In the Daria fanfic Triumph Of The Retart, Daria and her new boyfriend, Author Avatar David MacAllister, are finally settling down after surviving David's run for Student Government President, during which he was the target of beatings and an assassination attempt. Just as it seems that they've earned their happy ending, David is killed by a suicide bomber.
Film
Carlito's Way. The producers and bigwigs actually allow the main character Charlie Brigante to die as he's about to escape to paradise. In the commentary, the filmmakers joke about whether or not to shoot the "Bullet Proof Vest Scene" before even showing the current cut to their higher-ups for approval.
City of Angels. Less than a day after a fallen angel has given up his immortality to be with the mortal woman he's fallen in love with, she's inexplicably run over by a truck driven by the Diabolus Ex Machina. One might suspect his fellow angels of having summoned it in order to teach him a lesson...
Then again, this does seem to follow naturally from the premise that Blofeld, as shown throughout the movie, is an enormous dick.
Director Peter Hunt said that originally the film was to end with the wedding and then the next would start with the assassination and follow from there. However since Lazenby gave up doing the sequels, it wound up in OHMSS. The following movie, Diamonds Are Forever, opens with Bond searching for Blofeld, presumably to avenge the ruined marriage.
At the beginning of For Your Eyes Only, Bond is visiting his wife's grave, complete with "We have all the time in the world." MI6 pick him up by helicopter, except it's remote controlled by... a bald man with a cat, who tortures Bond the way he tortured Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever.
It's very carefully structured to be open to the interpretation that it leads on from either You Only Live Twice or On Her Majesty's Secret Service. For one, it opens in Japan, where most of the action of the former occurred. Take that as you will.
The ending of Easy Rider was already on its way to being interpreted as a Downer Ending, with Fonda telling Hopper that, despite their financial success, they failed at their goals from a moral and spiritual standpoint. But even that was too ambiguous, so the movie sent a couple of truckers with a shotgun to shoot them both dead for no good reason in the last two minutes of the movie. Closure!
The reasons were simple: They were killed by hippie-hating rednecks who knew they could do it.
The Sean Penn-helmed The Pledge had a particularly brutal example of this, and it also proves that you can make a Downer Ending out of the death of the antagonist. The child-murderer being pursued by Jack Nicholson's character dies in a fiery car wreck, drawing his full share of karma down on his head but ensuring that Jack never fulfills his titular pledge to find him, meaning that all he's risked in the movie, including winning the trust of the mother of the killer's next planned victim, is for nothing (other than the fact that the killer never makes his next hit). We last see Jack's character sitting in front of the rural gas station he owns, rapidly fading into self-hatred and senility.
The brilliant French film Z does this with the ending titles. The bad guys have been caught and are all going to jail, the heroes have won out, freedom is on the march again in Greece, and then we get a news broadcaster discussing how the bad guys all got off light, some of the good guys went to jail for nothing, and, instead of the credits, ending titles listing all the things the military junta banned afterwards in Greece: "long hair on males; mini-skirts; Sophocles; Tolstoy; Euripedes; smashing glasses after drinking toasts; labor strikes; Aristophanes; Ionesco; Sartre; Albee; Pinter; freedom of the press; sociology; Beckett; Dostoyevsky; modern music; popular music; the new mathematics; and the letter "Z", which in ancient Greek means "He is alive!" The book is based on Real Life, and this more or less how things actually ended for Greece after WWII.
Diabolus' fickle finger can also be detected in the end of Forrest Gump; simple Forrest has finally achieved all he ever wanted in winning the heart of his troubled childhood sweetheart Jenny, who herself has finally fallen in love with a good man who loves her completely and unconditionally and can give her a good life... so Diabolus gives her a terminal illness.. She's perfectly fine at the end of the book, however, though this is remedied in the sequel 'Gump and Co.'
Jenny's terminal illness is the reason why she wrote him the letter that brought him to her apartment in the first place. On that very day she told him about being HIV positive and told him that he was little Forrest's father, and asked him to marry her, presumably so that when she died their son would be able to grow up with him.
In Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, the airborne viral agent Caesar used to make the apes smart is lethal to humans, and is spreading across the world.
The ending of the Canadian horror film Cube: The female lead, one of two sympathetic characters in the whole movie, evades every trap, figures out how to escape, is right on the threshold of getting out... and is killed by the villain, who is Not Quite Dead. She dies, the villain dies, and only the mentally deficient guy escapes. To make this worse, the probability of the villain to be able to get to her is about 20,000 to 1. The moral? Uh...
Cube 2. After surviving many perils, the heroine, who turns up to be a special agent, manages to escape the Hypercube and return to the normal world... where her superior has her summarily shot in the back of the head for no apparent reason. The worst is that she obviously knows what's coming, but merely closes her eyes instead of trying anything.
The ending of Pitch Black. The out-of-nowhere alien grabs the female lead just as she's about to escape. This is played as somewhat karmic, since she killed some people to save herself and the ship. To atone, she refuses to leave without saving someone, which ultimately gets her killed.
The SAW series of movies is chock full of Diaboli Ex Machina, some coming within seconds of the protagonist thinking he's found a way out of the nightmare.
The third movie is particularly sadistic, but actually gives an explanation for it. The traps in the 3rd movie weren't actually designed by Jigsaw. They were designed by his ridiculously Ax Crazy apprentice, Amanda, whose philosophy differed from Jiggy's in that she thought the people were irredeemable and explicitly deserved an unpleasant death. She catches a bullet to the neck.
The ending of Saw VI also counts: William, the health insurance exec protagonist has been put through utter hell and has apparently learned his lesson about the true implications of deciding who lives and who dies based on greed and advances to the final game...and finds himself face to face with the wife and daughter of a man who died because William cancelled his coverage. And it's their game, not his. Cue the son flipping a switch which injects William with gallons of acid.
The Final Destination movies are built around Diabolus hunting down people who escaped his clutches the first time around and dispatching them in a variety of unpleasant and unlikely ways.
North Dallas 40: Long before the demons stuffed Carney and Anderson's kicks (which see below), it had Dallas bungling the snap on the point-after after we hear the commentator talk of the kicker being called "Mr. Automatic" for having successfully converted several consecutive previous attempts, thus preventing Nick Nolte's last-gasp TD from tying the game. New Orleans Saints fans might find that last bit familiar... As might Tony Romo (who co-incidentally ALSO played for the real Dallas on his fateful play).
Epic Movie parodies this in one of its few actually funny jokes by having a waterwheel run over the orphans just before the start of the closing credits, and having "Borat" making an observation. Unfortunately, it ruins it by him turning around and slapping his almost bare butt.
Averted by Clerks, which originally ended with a robber killing Dante, but after the distributor complained that this was pointlessly violent and tragic, the scene was removed.
The allied bombing raid at the end of Das Boot. Sure, it was hardly an Ass Pull, what with World War II going on, but it's still just mean as hell.
Night of the Living Dead, in which the only survivor of the zombie attack is shot on sight by the rescue party.
Echoed in the end of Dead Men Walking, where the sole survivor makes it out of the zombie-filled prison, only to be shot dead by one of the snipers sent to keep the zombies from escaping.
The film Whoops Apocalypse! follows a desperate attempt to stop a nuclear war, which would have succeeded were it not for a hypnotist routine being disturbed - a navy officer is programmed to believe there is a large fire in progress when the hypnotist snaps his fingers (desperately yelling 'FIRE!'). Owing to an unfortunate intervention, this is never undone. When the officer receives the good news that the missiles don't have to be fired, he is so relieved that he doesn't respond to the questions being asked - leading to somebody snapping their fingers to get his attention....
The Wages Of Fear has the only surviving driver from the deadly nitroglycerine convoy plunging to his death on his way home for no readily apparent reason.
Cloverfield. The three surviving protagonists get on an evac helicopter headed out of New York before a massive bombing run to obliterate the beastie, but Clovie takes down the copter, eats Hud, and forces the last two to take shelter under a bridge, awaiting annihilation in the impending bombing run. Arguably the monster serves as this trope for the whole movie, since it's inexplicably always running into the main characters.
Adam Sandler delivers this on himself in the middle of Eight Crazy Nights, by explaining his hate for the holidays with a flashback where a younger version of himself sparks a Miracle Rally for his basketball team. They win the game, but younger Sandler finds out that his parents were absent because they were too busy being dead. The game was played during Hanukkah, hence his holiday hate.
In the Korean melodrama Failan, the male protagonist decides to honor his wife's memory (who he wed for purely financial reasons, and had neglected until her death) by turning his back on his gangster wannabe lifestyle, even turning down a request from a fellow gangster to take the fall for a murder and serve his subsequent prison sentence. He ends up being garroted by that same gangster in an unexpected act of reprisal, while he sees his deceased wife (through the videos he was watching before the attack) as the life slowly drains from him (symbolized by the picture in the video gradually losing its color).
Pay It Forward, both infamously and egregiously. That came out of nowhere. AND served NO point. Except to ruin any good feelings you had. And arguably to break the film's aesop.
Halloween Resurrection changes the end of Halloween H 20 Twenty Years Later by indicating that Laurie Strode did not, in fact, decapitate Michael Myers, but rather a paramedic with whom Michael switched clothes with. All so the franchise can continue.
Parodied in Wayne's World. Just as everything is going smoothly, a series of increasingly unlikely disasters occur, culminating in an electrical fire that destroys Wayne's house and kills Garth while the slimeball villain gets the girl. Fortunately, Wayne and Garth turn out to have other ideas...
In The Blue Lagoon, a movie based primarily around emotional and physical self-discovery, Diabolus is personified in the form of a three-year-old boy. Richard is exploring one of the islands in the archipelago while Emmeline is watching over their son. Emmeline nods off to sleep in their rowboat and while doing so, their son Paddy throws one of the oars overboard. Richard swims out from the island and retrieves the oar, but is spotted by a shark. Emmeline throws the other oar at the shark to distract it and Richard is forced to abandon the other one to escape, and their boat is swept out to sea. To make matters worse, Paddy has gotten his hands on a bunch of dead-and-berries, swallowing a handful before his parents stop him. With a dying baby and no hope of rescue, Richard and Emmeline eat the remaining berries...barely hours before a ship with Richard's father (Emmeline's uncle), who had been searching for them for several years, happens upon their boat.
Walk Hard's Dewey Cox dies 3 minutes after his last performance.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail ends with our heroes assembling an army to fight the dastardly French and reclaim the Grail once and for all. Just as the army begins its assault, modern-day police vans hove into view and arrest everybody, including the cameraman, thus ending the film.
This an actually more of a Brick Joke shaped aversion, as the police investigation of the knights is a Running Gag for most of the film.
The Phantasm sequels all end with the heroes defeating the Tall Man, only for him to come back and devastate them. In the fourth film, he kills Mike, one of the franchise's two leads... a death followed by a flashback to Mike as a kid, with no idea what's coming.
Dumb and Dumber plays this for laughs. The girl the duo went halfway across the country to return a briefcase to turns out to be married, and in the final scene, when they encounter a bus full of swimsuit models looking for a pair of assistants to travel with them and oil them up for photo sessions, they (being idiots) direct them to the nearest town.
Lloyd: "Do you realize what you've done!" [runs off and flags down the bus] "You'll have to excuse my friend. He's a little slow. The town is back that way."
Twenty Twelve: Tamara and Gordon: After all the sexual tension, the hinted pairings and each of their respective Crowning Moments of Awesome, Gordon is pulled into the Arc's gears, and Tamara is drowned when water floods into a room she's trapped in, even though the room next door (the one with the main characters! Imaginethat!) has an air pocket, and yet everyone else lives. Gordon gets forgotten quickly (did anyone actually ask about him?), though Tamara kinda saves the girl and her dog, but other than that, they are both just killed and forgotten about.
Just to make it worse, Tamara's death doesn't make any sense. The reason she gets trapped is that water is pouring into the ship through the stern hatch, and several bulkhead doors slide shut to contain the flooding. Given that there is only one way for water to get into the ship and the watertight bulkheads are working properly, there is no reason for her compartment to keep filling up.
To say nothing of Sasha successfully landing their plane, only for the ice to collapse from underneath the front of it.
At the end of the pre-Bond Daniel Craig vehicle Layer Cake, the protagonist has killed his treacherous boss, gotten the Serbian head-chopping war criminal off his back, made a pretty penny double-crossing the wealthy crime-lord-turned-tycoon, established his friends as London's new crime lords, gotten the girl, and plans to retire to a life of leisure. Then he walks out of the club and is immediately shot dead by a minor character with no previously shown propensity for violence.
Subverted in Cabin Fever, in that the one guy who apparently survives is the Jerk Ass, and just as you're thinking, "You mean the asshole lived?" he gets cut in half by machine gun fire.
Remember Me had Robert Pattinson, playing the angsty Tyler, finally bonding with his father. While Tyler is waiting in his father's office, it seems everything will be fine... until he gets killed in the September 11 attacks in said office.
If you think a bit more about Knowing, the survivors from the plane crash and later subway accident weren't so lucky after all. For those who haven't seen the movie, the sun incinerates Earth and all life on it a few days later. Bonus points for the whole world learning about its upcoming inevitable demise with several hours to spare...
Toward the end of the Eddie Murphy - Martin Lawrence movie Life, the two find out that the warden's hunting friend is the same corrupt, racist sheriff who had them sentenced to life in prison, and the warden basically declares that he screwed them over and "gave the state of Mississippi 50 years of free labor" which the warden overheard and literally shot him out of disgust. The warden then tells them that he'll sign the papers to release them the next day. That night he died on the toilet before he could sign the papers the next day.
At the end of the 50s B-Movie, The Mole People, Love Interest Adad inexplicably runs back towards the cave entrance during an earth tremor and ends up getting crushed by a collapsing pillar. It turns out this massive Idiot Ball moment was the result of Executive Meddling: Studio execs forced them to kill off Adad because they thought Adad and Dr. Patrick (played by John Agar) would constitute a "mixed marriage" and wanted to avoid encouraging "miscegenation." The woman on the movie poster is Adad, by the way.
Haywire has a particularly bizarre one where, in a movie that otherwise strives for realism, the heroine manages to outmanoeuvre her opponents in a car chase only for the car to crash anyway because a freaking deer jumped into it.
In the last minute of The Cube, the man finds out that his escape was an illusion and he's still in the cube.
Scream 1996: Tatum manages to really hold her own against the killer when her time seems to have come. She manages to knock him on his ass twice, and puts up the best fight so far. One might think she could escape to warn Sidn- wait why is she crawling through the cat flap?
Flight: In order to make sure that Denzel Washington's character is forced to pay for his crime (even if he might have managed to detox all on his own), the door to the next hotel room over just so happens to be unlocked (actually, locked open), and the balcony open so that the wind can make the door 'knock' until Denzel notices and decides to check it out and thus find a pile of liquor.
The Hapless Child by Edward Gorey is this trope turned Up to Eleven over and over and over again. Bonus points for an ending which seems to be headed towards Deus ex Machina but goes with Diabolus Ex Machina instead.
Animorphs killed a major character in the finale. Fair enough - their lease on survival was well overdue. But then, not content with successfully leaving realistic loose ends arising from what came before, Applegate brought in a completely unheralded Hindu Borg Collective to really ruin her readers' day in the last handful of chapters.
Proof that the Diabolus has been around for a long, long time exists in the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus, the bard, who walked into Tartarus to bring back his wife, Eurydice, who had died on their wedding-day. After giving a performance that made the Furies weep, Hades gave his permission for Orpheus to bring her out with him — so long as he walked all the way out without turning around and looking back. The catch? Nobody told him he had to wait before both were outside... For a second, he sees her shade, before she is pulled back to the underworld, crying his name...
Some versions of the myth omit the Diabolus and have him lose his nerve for some other reason; thinking that he heard her cry out, for instance, or just plain ol' lack of willpower.
In others, Eurydice was happy in Hades because she'd had it up here with Orpheus and his penchant for boring her to tears with his songs and poems. Just as they're almost out of Hades, she asks to hear one of his songs, knowing that Orpheus can't resist this appeal to his vanity.
Tom Holt has a good working relationship with the Diabolus. This is particularly exemplified in Little People, where he introduces an entirely new metaphysical rule just to ensure the Downer Ending.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is another of the Diabolus' old-school performances. After Gilgamesh has gone through unbelievable trials to procure a flower that grants eternal life, it's eaten by a snake on his way home. Proof that even the Diabolus Ex Machina cannot resist the classic appeal of being Scaled Up...
Perdido Street Station by China Miéville's summons the Diabolus Ex Machina with an unholy ritual of Dungeon PunkThaumaturgy. The fact that two completely separate incidents, with no relation between them, ensures that all the main characters will spend the rest of their days being utterly miserable makes this one of the nastiest examples of the demon's works. Deus Angst Machina was invited to the party, and danced all night long...
Mieville's other books, Iron Council and King Rat, do this to a lesser extent. The first involves one of the main characters doing something incomprehensibly stupid that denies the revolution against the tyrannical government of New Crobuzon much-needed reinforcements (though it's implied they wouldn't have won anyway). The second has the reader being informed casually that the children who were the original victims of the Big Bad of the story were condemned eternally to hell alongside him (and the main character essentially doesn't care). Iron Council even has the chutzpah to tack on an epilogue that tries to make it not seem like the complete and utter betrayal that it is.
The author has said a happy ending would be a betrayal to reality and the everyday suffering of the oppressed. He believes life is one big Diabolus Ex Machina.
In Midnight Tides, the fifth book in Malazan Book Of The Fallen, the Emperor of the Tiste Edur is effectively immortal as each time he dies he is resurrected and healed. The Royal Champion of Lether counters this by cutting every single muscle and sinew used for movement in the Emperor's body; the Champion then dies from poisoning. Moments later, a demon befriended by the Emperor's brother walks in and, unaware of the Emperor's condition, kills the Emperor, believing it to be a mercy and thinking it a favour to the brother, thus undoing the Champion's sacrifice.
The last 3 chapters of Northern Lights, apparently for the purpose of introducing the rest of the trilogy. Shouldn't the author have been concerned with connecting it to previous events as much as upcoming events? Omitted from The Film of the Book.
House of Leaves has the moment that Will Navidson, Tom, and Billy Reston finally come upon poor Jed and wounded Wax in the middle of the labyrinth after two weeks, and after Holloway shot Wax. Jed is so happy. Then Holloway reappears and blows Jed's head off.
Ian Irvine goes all out in his Well of Echoes trilogy (which became a quadrilogy almost, it seems, so Diabolus could strike). The world is saved! All is harmonious! At which point one of the Big Badwhose son explicitly identified him as dead earlier turns up. To top it all off, the heroes then destroy all the world's magic, hoping to overload his personal magic source, but that backfires, leaving him the only one with any real magic in the entire world and the rest of civilization pawns to his whims. All so the author could go on and write a dictatorial dystopian trilogy as a follow up. Go figure.
The author loves his cliffhangers, with only one of his fantasy books actually having a proper, satisfactory ending. The others have such glorious situations as one character inadvertently summoning an interdimensional invasion force to her world, the magical field failing at a pivotal battle, rendering the vital magically powered walking tanks useless in the face of a horde of giant winged and clawed mutant monster things, and all the protagonists being captured by a Big Bad and sentenced to be flayed alive. No happy endings here, folks.
In Warhammer 40000: Gaunt's Ghosts, Lijah Cuu is effectively a manifestation of Diabolus. At the end of The Guns of Tanith, he kills off "Try Again" Bragg. In Sabbat Martyr, although the fighting is effectively over and the nine chosen assassins have been slain, he is subverted by Chaos psykers into killing Saint Sabbat. Although he does not succeed and dies in the process, he still succeeds in killing Colm Corbec before he gets killed too.
Poor Sehra Muril, the red-haired girl with a "deliciously dirty laugh". She was going to be first FEMALE VERGHAST SCOUT if it hadn't been for Cuu!
The very first line of Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" is "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself change in his bed into a monstrous vermin." That vermin being a human-sized beetlish insect.
Hans Christian Andersen, "The Flying Trunk": Things are going well for the beggar guy with the titular trunk with his romance with a princess, until the trunk gets destroyed by shrapnel from celebratory fireworks. Seriously. For a Hans story, that's pretty rough. Guess that's why it's not as well known as his other tales...
A rather large portion of his fairy tales are actually pretty depressing. "The Christmas Tree" and "The Little Mermaid" come to mind.
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini. The protagonist and his best friend's son are getting along well and all set to move to America when the main guy tells boy he might have to go back to the orphanage for a short time, and the little boy tries to commit suicide and stops talking.
The Princetta: The main characters return from their adventures and are all set to live Happily Ever After, Malva and Orpheus get together... and then Orpheus is murdered at the last minute.
A rare good use: All Quiet on the Western Front. The narrator is hit by a stray bullet on a day so quiet the official report was a Title Drop. It works because we've already established that Fate is a bitch towards soldiers. (The movie adds some Diabolus by making it the final day of the war.)
In Robert A. Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. All fictional universes are real alternate universes in their reality. One of the characters points out that a hero (a writer) is not permitted to resurrect the Big Bad of his favorite fictional universe because of this trope. The character asks if the hero can just retire as head of the training school but apparently the risk is that the story will evolve to need a serious villain, who will come into existence if written.
The end of the Redwall series book Martin the Warrior does this to a degree that the flashback story it's based on ends on a tearjerker. Everything seems great, Martin gets his father's sword back and kills his enemy Badrang the Tyrant...but right after it's revealed that the mouse Rose, Martin's friend and possible love interest for the entire book, was killed during their fight against Badrang. Martin then leaves his friends and promises never to mention his interactions with them again so they won't be put into danger.Of course then it fast forwards to the present day in Redwall where everything is okay and they discuss how Martin founded Redwall and was a great hero. But it still puts a damper on the entire ending and is one of the few Redwall books to do this.
In Meredith Ann Pierce's The Darkangel Trilogy, Aeriel and Irrylath have finally become an official couple after two years of Will They or Won't They?. So of course it turns out that her body was actually destroyed and reformed into an immortal substance earlier that book, meaning that theirs is now a Mayfly-December Romance. This is Info Dumped by the Obi Wan, who is now a ''voice inside Aeriel's head" who demands that she leave Irrylath and go Riding into the Sunset. Because I Want My Beloved to Be Happy (and wants the world to last longer than “a handful of generations more”), she agrees, and tells Irrylath to go marry the Romantic False Lead. Nobody's too happy about this except the child bard who gets to turn the whole story into a pretty song (and the Romantic False Lead, who is specifically described to be observing the two’s farewell "with barely guarded joy" even though the hero shuts her down pretty quickly).
Arguably one of the worst examples occurs in the book Final Destination: Dead Man's Hand. After the set up disaster the survivors are being transported by a cop, who dies in a freak traffic light accident (the group manages survive the car going out of control though). At the very end of the book the Final Girl, who thinks she's beat Death and won, gets a call from her doctor, who says she has very advanced HIV, contracted from being splattered in the cop's blood at the beginning of the book.
The Ramayana: AFTER Rama rescues his wife Sita, wins the epic battle against the demons, and gets crowned king, he puts her through not one but two trials by fire. Because his subjects believe she might have cheated on him while she was being held hostage. She asks to be - and is - swallowed up by the earth after trial by fire #2.
That last part is usually omitted from retellings, for obvious reasons.
The Dresden Files book Changes has a very nasty one at the end - after barely managing to win the climactic battle, Harry gets shot and killed. However, it is then subverted in the next book, Ghost Story. Harry arranged for himself to be killed and had his memory of arranging the assassination erased.
Seekers, by Erin Hunter. A young polar bear, Kallik, is orphaned and alone. After much wandering and hardship she gets caught by humans, who plan to re-release her alongside Nanuk, a mother who'd lost her cubs, in the hopes that she would adopt Kallik. After some consideration, both bears decide that this is an acceptable arrangement. Nanuk immediately dies in a helicopter crash
In Lord Sunday, the final installment of 'Keys To The Kingdom'', Arthur finally collects the 7 Keys. Up until this point, the series has been fairly predictable, although things have been getting kind of real in the background, what with the deposed Trustees being mysteriously murdered & some people dying from plagues. However, it's here where everything truly goes downhill for Arthur. All he wants to do is end the fighting, but the Will has other plans. It uses him to bring in a tide of Nothing to destroy the Universe, because it turns out it's 1/2 of the Architect of said Universe, & wants to die, but it can't until its creation is destroyed. The main characters are frozen by the power of the Keys, unable to do anything to save themselves for the few moments they have until destruction. Fortunately, it gets better. It turns out that they were frozen because the Atlas was recording the Universe for Arthur to recreate it. The catch? Arthur's mother had died just moments before. A series that had been very light-hearted up until this point takes a sudden turn: Arthur went on that entire quest with the only result being the death of his adopted mother. The closing dialogue of the main story? "Wow, Arthur! You won!" "Yeah...I guess we won." Freaking. Ouch.
At the end of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban it seems as though Harry will be able to leave his abusive foster family to live with his godfather, while an unconvicted criminal will go to jail. Then Remus Lupin turns into a werewolf (it just having happened to be the night of the full moon, and him having forgotten to take the potion which would keep him safe), and in the confusion the criminal escapes meaning the innocent man convicted in his place needs to go on the run rather than take in Harry. Although it later turns out that to live with the man in question would have compromised Harry's security from potential attackers. Trelawney did predict it a chapter before it happened, but the reader can always hope, no?
Shows up in Shiver in the form of a white-tailed deer, of all things. The deer appears in the middle of the road at exactly the wrong time, causing the crash that wrecks Grace's car. Both occupants survive, but with no way to keep Sam warm until help comes, he turns wolf for good. The characters are forced to try an incredibly dangerous plan to bring him back.
Green Sky Trilogy: Yay! The children have been found, the last of the old-guard Ol-Zhaan has rendered himself harmless through excessive narcotic use, the Erdling radicals have been jailed, the two races are finally figuring out reconciliation and want to make it work. All we need to do is make this mostly symbolic gesture of destroying the last weapon...oops. Fortunately, Snyder wrote and charted a Canon sequel to her books in video game form.
The Count of Monte-Cristo lampshades and ends up subverting the trope. Initially Dantes blames God and fate for all the terrible things that occured to him, but with the help of a fellow inmate, is able to reason out how certain people wanted him to suffer, not God. Thus, it becomes a core part of his philosophy that once he breaks out, he can't count on Diabolus to hand out random punishment. It has to be up to him.
The ending of Malevil tastes a little of this, because of a Distant Finale. Some 575 pages are spent on a six-eight month period and the final 20 pages are a 3-year epilogue. More tragedy strikes in the final pages then the whole novel before because it covers a much larger span of time, bringing the story to a Bittersweet Ending.
At the end of My Sisters Keeper, Anna finally gets medically emancipated from her parents... and is then killed in a car accident, yet her kidneys—the organ she had been asked to donate earlier in the book, leading to the aforementioned emancipation quest—are perfectly intact to give to her sister, rendering her actions pointless.
Bridge to Terabithia: all goes well for Jess, he finally warms up to using his imagination... and then Leslie dies in a Contrived Coincidence, which drives home the point that cruel reality trumps imagination...
The end of Part 1 of The Sex Gates. Lee and Rita are going to have a baby, Rita is finally opening a facility that should make the lives of technologically-deprived poor people much better... and then one of those same poor people fatally stabs her when he's supposed to be shaking his hand. They're forced to push Rita through one of the titular gates, which saves her life at the expense of turning her into a man and destroying her unborn child in the process - and Lee loses his balance and falls through as well, turning into a woman.
A Song of Ice and Fire is made of this. No one, good or bad, ever seems to enjoy a permanent victory.
The worst example is most definitely the Red Wedding. After much struggle and loss, Robb and Catelyn are going to retake the North from the Ironmen, and Arya is heading to meet them and finally reunite with at least part of her family. Then Robb and Cat are brutally murdered by their allies, meaning Arya now has nowhere to go, the North's cause is lost, and the Lannisters have basically won the war.
Then Joffrey, Tywin, Pycelle and Kevan die and Cersei's incompetence gets her overthrown by the Faith Militant. But they overlooked the fact that Qyburn is still loyal to her. And on and on this cycle goes...
Orson Scott Card calls these "dirigible endings"; he once wrote an essay on writing in which he mentioned having taught a writing class where one student had written a story about a cult whose leader had convinced all its members to give away all their possessions and climb to the top of a mountain. The writer then couldn't figure out how to end the story, so she had a dirigible fall on them, crushing them all. Marion Dane Bauer told a similar story in her book on writing; she'd say to her writing students "If you end your story by having your main character get hit by a truck, you have just flunked."
So the New Republic has made peace with the Imperial Remnant, the Jedi's image has recovered somewhat from Darth Sidious' propaganda and from Luke Skywalker's mishandling of Caridagate. Black Sun is too busy licking its wounds to be any threat. Sure, there are still some interplanetary troubles, just like there were in the Old Republic, but nothing the Jedi can't—What the kriff? There's been an implacable extragalactic invasion force massing at the edge of the galaxy since about the time Sidious became Chancellor?
In the novelization trilogy of Mobile Suit Gundam, Char Aznable is able to convince Amuro Ray to join him and help end the One Year War. Even more, he warns them of the Solar Ray weapon Gihren Zabi has aimed at A Baoa Qu and Amuro races off to warn the crew of the Pegasus II Note
Here, White Base was known as Pegasus and they get a second one during the second book
and the other Federation soldiers of these developments. Cue one of Char's wingmen getting too trigger happy with his Rick Dom and shooting the G-3 Gundam in the back, blowing it up and killing Amuro.
in House Of Sand And Fog, the conflict between Kathy and Behrani reaches a disastrous conclusion for both sides when the deputy (who is also Kathy's boyfriend) attempts to take matters into his own hands.
Poor little Cassie from "Help", rescued effortlessly from both an evil cult and arrow booby-trap, only to die from shock due to a heart condition (which was mentioned) as the arrow trap (which one of the villains sets up and discusses) activates. Buffy catches it without even blinking but it is too much for Cassie.
Tara was lethally shot through a window and died almost instantaneously while in the middle of the room on the second floor. The gunman was outside on the ground shooting a pistol randomly into the air and yet on pure luck managed a hit so precise that a Marine sniper perched on the opposite rooftop with a rifle would have been hard-pressed to match it. Seriously, this one's a Trope Codifier.
In one of the Buffy comics, Halfrek the vengeance demon has cursed somebody that every descendent of his will die on their 30th birthday, and to ensure this happens she sends a variety of demons and monsters after one particular descendent. Spike wants to stop her mainly out of spite and figures that if he can keep the guy alive until midnight, he's off the hook. Then, after Halfrek has given up, at one minute past midnight, the guy falls out of a window for no reason, and dies anyway...
Tara's sanity gets sucked out, but despite being attended to by Dawn for some time, waits until Glory punches a hole in her wall to start babbling about how Dawn's the glowing green energy girl.
Xander is told a lot of nasty things about his marriage with Anya by an old man who claimed to be Xander himself from the future. He then finds out that "old Xander" is an impostor demon, and that everything it said was a lie. He actually participates in fighting the demon and the Scoobies manage to kill it. Then Xander decides to leave Anya at the altar, anyway.
Actually (doubly, once because evil swaps with good and once because the returning-home-spell doesn't change her fate in the other dimension) inverted in "Doppelgangland" when Evil Vampire Willow from the Wishverse comes to the Buffyverse, gets the I-want-to-go-home going and after saying goodbye the viewer is reminded that she gets back to the exact time she came from, only to die a second time.
This happens in quite a bit of Cold Case episodes, like "November 22nd", "The Crossing", "The Letter" We're in love, cue KKK rapist/murderers, "World's End", "Forever Blue" We were the lucky ones....
Jordan (as Diabolus) reveals all the secrets and issues among the main-cast to each other at the Season 1 finale of Scrubs, even though she has quite few to do with the specific persons (Ex Machina).
Heroes: Charlie is killed by Sylar for her power. Hiro decides to go back in time to save her, but overshoots yesterday and winds up six months in the past. He develops a strong relationship with her, and she becomes his first love interest. Just before leaving with Hiro for Japan, she reveals she has a blood clot in her brain that'll kill her right around the time Sylar kills her anyway. This rips Hiro's heart into pieces and makes his power go wonky, accidentally putting him in Japan, far away from her, so she stays at the diner and is killed by Sylar anyway.
And let's not forget the third season. Hiro (and a newly-reformed Sylar) return to the diner where Charlie worked (due to their time-travel shenanigans) and use Sylar's powers to remove the clot in her brain. Almost immediately afterwards, at the end of the episode she was healed in, she gets kidnapped by the Big Bad and deposited in 1944, thereby robbing Hiro of any potential relationship with her.
Happened a second time with poor Hiro, albeit this time less touching and more stupid. He goes back sixteen years, and meets his dying mother. She gives him the catalyst, and he vows to keep it safe from Arthur, who wants to use the catalyst to fuel his army of supersoldiers. Somehow, for no explained reason, Arthur knows that Hiro has the catalyst and teleports exactly to where Hiro and Claire are. He steals the catalyst, sends Claire to the present, and almost kills Hiro.
Sylar has benefited from this trope so many times it's not even funny. He technically "died" in Company custody halfway through the first season, but got a mysterious off-screen resurrection. Eden's Compelling Voice and Mohinder's power-disabling serum both worked against Sylar at first, but conveniently and inexplicably failed right when they were about to kill him. In the finale of the first season Niki uses her Super Strength to wail on Sylar with a parking meter, Hiro runs a friggin' katana through his body, and he still survives.
The Diabolus has occasionally been employed by The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, as indicated above — they have a healthy partnership.
A particularly impressive example of their partnership is the famous Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last", where an unfortunate, timid man has locked himself in a bank-vault to get the peace to read his many books — and because of that, survives a nuclear holocaust, leaving him the last man alive in the world. Then he realizes that this gives him plenty of time to read his beloved books, and thus unwittingly invokes the Diabolus Ex Machina, who promptly breaks his glasses.
In the seaon two finale ("Twilight") of NCIS, the team manages to foil a devious terrorist plot. As they are celebrating their success, Diabolus strikes in the form of a high powered sniper rifle fired by the Big Bad that drills a hole in Kate's head. To add insult to injury, Kate had just taken a bullet for Gibbs and was spared serious injury thanks to her Bulletproof Vest.
Kate: I was sure I was going to die before— (Boom, Headshot)
Blake's 7 is loaded with Diaboli ex Machina. For example, people who say they hate Servalan, and have no reason to like her, keep betraying the protagonists to her, even though she has never rewarded a traitor and kills them each time. In "Rumors of Death," she's been deposed in a revolution, and she's in a dungeon cell, awaiting execution. Avon picks this time to care about anything other than himself, for the first time in the series, avenging his old girlfriend's death. So he frees Servalan in return for information. He makes that a priority over everything else, including winning and safety (usually his highest priority).
Servalan is some form of walking Diabolus Ex Machina generator - most grievous example is what was meant to be the finale, her trapped on a ship on the edge of the galaxy that was about to explode, orbiting a planet that was also soon going to explode. Come next season, it is confusingly revealed that somehow the fact that the ship was being eaten apart by a ravenous space virus made the teleport TEN THOUSAND TIMES STRONGER than ever before, and even though she had no idea how to operate it by pure luck managed to land herself NOT in empty space for a start (because the teleport had no safety mechanism to prevent that), and then of all the thousands of possible planets not only a habitable one, not only a populated one, but one governed by her own people... COME ON!!!
Just think: if it weren't for the miniseries, this is how Farscape would've ended: They're finally safe from the Scarrans and the Peacekeepers, the wormhole to Earth has been closed forever — but it's okay! Because John is going to marry Aeryn! And then a completely unforeshadowed alien descends from the sky and blasts them into little pebbly bits. And vice versa, since the cliffhanger was pretty much why there was such a demand for a miniseries to begin with.
In The West Wing episode "18th and Potomac", the death of Mrs. Landingham, President Bartlet's personal secretary, has Diabolus' fingerprints all over it; after a gentle little running subplot about Mrs. Landingham picking up her first new car, Diabolus arranges for a drunk driver to run a red light and kill her offscreen at the end of the episode with no foreshadowing whatsoever. This also contributes to a bit of Deus Angst Machina, as what with Bartlet's M.S scandal and various other crises and such, it wasn't as if Bartlet didn't already have enough reasons to be a bit angsty at the time. This example, however, can partially be forgiven in that it leads to Bartlet's excellent rant against God in the next episode, in which he even lampshades the trope (see the page quote), and his equally awesome Redemption in the Rain sequence.
Another example — a lesser one because it's a newly introduced, comparatively minor character, but still a punch in the gut — is in the next season finale, "Posse Comitatus," when C.J.'s stalker is apprehended and she just begins a relationship with the special agent who'd been assigned to protect her... and he leaves her sight for a minute to pick up a candy bar and a flower from a convenience store, finds himself in the middle of an armed robbery and is shot and killed.
Executive Meddling. The show was originally created to combat stereotypes about African-American families. The Evans started as a solidly middle class, two parent household. Unfortunately, the suits felt this wasn't realistic, so James died, and the Evans ended up becoming a poor and struggling single-mother led family.
Doctor Who season finales tend to be based on unfortunate circumstances plunging the state of the world from bad to worse.
The ending to the 2010 episode "Cold Blood". They've stopped the bad guys, got the humans and the Silurians at least on the right track to start living together in a thousand years, and are all set to escape when a crack in the space-time continuum appears, leading to not only the death of Rory, but his erasure from existence. Luckily, he's revived in time for the season finale.
The last of the 2009 specials, "The End of Time", involves a prophecy that the Doctor is soon to die. It concludes with the Doctor vanquishing the Time Lords and sending Gallifrey back into the Time War, seemingly defying the prophecy. Then Wilfred Mott gets stuck in a box. Which is about to be flooded with radiation. And the door is locked. And it won't open unless somebody goes in the other side of the box. And there's no override. And the sonic screwdriver won't work. You can almost hear the writers straining to make this into a situation that requires the Doctor to sacrifice himself.
Prison Break did this in the episode "Selfless" - Scylla had been stolen, everyone was free to go, the release papers had been handed over, and then it turns out that the cop was playing them all along and they're in an even worse situation than they had been before.
The Season One finale: John's been possessed and shot, Dean's been tortured, but everyone is alive and Sam is driving them to the hospital, and it looks like everything will be fine. Until a huge truck slams into the Impala, totaling the car, and the episode ends with all three men bloody and unconscious. As they supposedly recover in Season 2, Dean nearly dies and John dies and gives up the Colt to save him, allowing the next 4 seasons worth of plot to happen, as one of them needed to die and get put in Hell, and the loss of the Colt triggers Sam's, then Dean's, first deaths later on in the season.
"Mystery Spot" has this trope happen, as Dean's comical deaths, but it is invoked for the sake of a lesson, then reversed.
By way of Crack Defeat, an example where the demon is revealed after the fact: One of The Torkelsons has made it to the final of a contest whose winner will get to be a foreign exchange student in Paris. After her final interview she comes out and announces that she lost. No biggie, so? Well, she recounts her interview and ends with saying that she got the highest score. Why did she lose then? Because the exchange student deal is a homestay (we already knew this), and the French family involved would like a boy (but not this). Well, ISTR that would have made the final interviews meaningless, because there was only one boy amongst the three finalists.
The Law & Order franchise loves using this trope to turn a slam-dunk case into an hour-long question of "Will they get away with it". Several egregious examples:
"Marathon" (Law & Order s10e6): Briscoe and Green catch a young Latino thug fresh from mugging and shooting a white housewife. Lenny hears the guy admit it. His word against the perp's. They find physical evidence linking him to the shooting. It gets tossed one piece at a time. When they finally corner him in the end, he Karma Houdinis his way out by dropping the dime on a notorious serial rapist, cutting himself a sweet deal in the process. (McCoy gets him to admit what he said to Lenny: "I gave that white bitch what she deserved")
"Suicide Box" (s13e16): A young black male shoots a cop outside of a diner, out of anger that his brother's murder had been swept under the rug. They had him dead to rights... then the mitigating factors rolled in: His brother's death had been ruled a suicide, the man who shot him never denied it (by the cops never looked at him). His and his mother's protests were brushed aside by the cops. And, oh yeah, his brother's body? Gone. The funeral home buried a casket full of trash (an ongoing fraud scheme, it turned out).
"Screwed" (SVU s8e22)''': The episode features the trial of Tutuola's stepson, Darius (crimes committed in the earlier episode, Venom (s7e18)). Except that ALL the evidence except his confession had been thrown out due to questions about Fin's credibility, also Darius (well played by rapper Ludacris) was only going to trial to hurt and embarrass his mother, Fin's ex (who denied him for most of his life). When Fin's ex got on the stand, Darius (acting as his own council) forced her into dropping her own pain-filled bombshell: Darius was a child of rape... by her father. Acquitted of the murders, in the end, Darius can't even take joy in beating the rap and rubbing Fin and his mother's nose in it.
"Hell" (SVU s10e14) This episode has the SVU team tracking down a member of an African terrorist organization who tried to murder a young girl. With the help of Elijah, who turns out to have been forced to be a Child Soldier in the same organization, and harbors massive guilt over what he was forced to do, they track down the culprit and arrest him. Everything looks like it'll end well...until the Smug Snake immigration officer reveals that Elijah didn't escape the terrorist organization until after he turned 18, which means he can be legally held responsible for the crimes he was forced to commit. It doesn'tendwell.
"Damaged" (s8e22) Three unrepentant teenage boys are on trial for raping a mentally retarded classmate. After a hard fought trial, the jury returns guilty. Everyone's happy. Not so fast. The judge sets aside the verdict, issues a directed verdict of not guilty saying the prosecution didn't prove its case, and piles on saying the retarded girl knew what she was doing and had "the time of her life." Add in a subplot in which Det. Briscoe finds out his daughter has been murdered for testifying against a drug lord, and this episode winds up wrist-slashingly hurtful.
"Cold" (SVU s9e19): It looks like the Dirty Cop is about to get convicted, but then, out of nowhere, two bombshells are dropped one after another. The key witness against him? Its revealed that she's an illegal immigrant, rendering her testimony moot. And the autopsy reports that were the key evidence? They couldn't prove the cop raped one of the victims, Novak knew it, and lied about.
This Diabolus was essentially just an excuse for Diane Neal and Adam Beach to leave the show, as Novak is disbarred for falsifying the evidence and Lake shoots the perp in a Vigilante Execution and is arrested.
"Redemption" (SVU s3e6): The real culprit behind the serial rapes has been caught and all that remains to get the innocent man originally convicted for the crimes out of jail is to get the perp to confess. Everything seems to be smooth sailing... until Elliot goes to the bathroom. When he returns, he finds that in that tiny window of time the Cowboy Cop guest star (who'd been pursuing the rapist for years and who was also in the interrogation room) has pushed the perp out the window in a Vigilante Execution. Because they can't get a statement from the real perp now, the innocent man stays in jail (it should be noted that the justice system doesn't actually work like this).
"Zoontic"(CI). The creepy doctor that had been infecting people with diseases and the sleazeball he hired to rape his old girlfriends are behind bars without a trial. Everything is going swimmingly. And then at the literal last minute, it's revealed that the doctor got 5 grams of anthrax from South America, and he only had 3 grams in his apartment.
Of course, sometimes the same person will show up a few seasons later where they actually will get what's coming to them.
In the second season of Highlander: The Series, Duncan Macleod successfully rescued his mortal girlfriend Tessa from a kidnapper ... only for her to be shot dead by a random mugger less than three minutes after the escape.
Although this is generally what's always happening to Edmund Blackadder, one of the few times this happened with everyone is the end of the second series when Edmund appeared to have escaped capture and greatly impressed the Queen, but then, after the credits, the Master of Disguise turns out to have survived getting stabbed with a sword and a throwing knife, came back, killed everyone, and assumed the Queen's identity with a near-perfect disguise.
Well, this was foreshadowed earlier in the show, what with Prince Ludwig's title of "The Indestructible", and the creators not assuming that Viewers Are Morons.
Day One: The Drazens are all dead, Senator Palmer is safe, as is Jack Bauer's daughter Kim, and the real mole inside CTU has been caught...but then Jack goes into the CTU server room and finds that Nina, the aforementioned mole, killed Jack's wife, Teri, before she fled and was caught.
Day Two: The nuclear disaster has long since been averted, the terrorists' mastermind, while not dead or captured, has been sufficiently scared out of the US, and everything appears to be safe once again... until now-President Palmer makes a public appearance and shakes hands with a random "civilian" who turns out to be a terrorist; with the handshake, she'd infected the President with some sort of biological agent. The episode—and season—ends with Palmer collapsing to the ground, the ending clock replaced with a heartbeat sound effect.
Day Five: the conspiracy has been exposed, President Logan is arrested and everything seems fine and dandy, until the Chinese pop up out of nowhere and haul Jack off, meaning he has to spend the next twenty months enduring torture at their hands.
For that matter, this always notably pops up in roughly around the end of the third quarter of every season save the first.
Season two has Jack's Middle Eastern agent ally on their way to deliver a chip that will prevent the U.S. Government from unwittingly starting World War III, only for him to be attacked by a bunch of racist rednecks that kill him and steal the chip.
Season three has Michelle Desller getting abducted by the henchman of the Big Bad right when it looks like he's finally about to be caught.
Season four has Jack about to launch an operation to, again, capture the Big Bad, but President Logan orders him to stand down at the last second since it was carried out through illegal means, thus blowing the best chance anyone's had to put an end to the whole mess.
Season five: Jack finally gets the recording that proves President Logan conspired with terrorists, and then the Bad Boss in charge of CTU pulls a Face Heel Turn to work with Logan so he can get a better job and destroys the recording.
Season six has Jack finally kill the terrorist he's been chasing after all season... and then he's contacted by the Chinese who are holding his previously thought-dead girlfriend hostage.
Season seven has major antagonist Jonas Hodges caught and the bioweapon his company was developing is destroyed... except for one canister. And its stolen by Tony Almeida who reveals himself as The Mole by killing FBI Director Larry Moss.
Season eight has a twofold one: Jack failing to rescue Omar Hassan in time before his execution after learning that the entire televised thing was already prerecorded, and then immediately after Renee Walker getting killed so the true masterminds behind the conspiracy don't risk getting recognized.
Dawson's Creek: in the grand finale, Jen suddenly has, and dies from, a heart condition. It was well done, though.
This was used in one of the season finales for Alias. The Big Bad of the season is temporarily defeated, Sydney and Vaughn finally get to drive off into the sunset together... only for Vaughn to tell Sydney "I'm not who you think I am," and a semi to come out of absolutely nowhere, slamming into their car and ending the season.
The Season 5 Finale for House: Just when you think House has removed that annoying hallucination of Cutthroat Bitch, kicked the Vicodin, and gotten it on with his long time flirt interest Cuddy, it all turns out to be the biggest screw-over in the history of anything. It was ALL a hallucination! He's NUTS! It NEVER HAPPENED! Cutthroat Bitch was standing there the entire time in his mind, and so was the deceased Kutner. The season ends with House being led into a mental hospital.
An episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation involves a drunk-driving car accident and the death of the only survivor while in the hospital. The killer turns out to be the mother of the (underage) daughter killed in the accident, and thought that the other (legal) girl deserved to die as well. So she suffocated the bed-ridden, just-out-of-an-accident, just-coming-out-of-the-coma girl with a plastic bag from the gift shop. Right before the credits?... find out that, because they switched IDs if they got pulled over for driving, got misidentified at the crash site, was so cut, bruised, and bloodied that no one made the connection, the mother suffocated her own daughter, out of spite.
Another one has a man returning from a war seeing his wife and newborn and even holding said newborn only to be gunned down by some random intoxicated guy.
One of the last few episodes of Monk, Monk spends the episode trying to get on the good side of the kid of the only cop against his reinstatement. Then he gets cornered by a bear, saves the kid, solves the crime, and the guy changes his mind. Unfortunately, the two officers who supported him changed their minds after nothing more than going back over his case records. The writers Yanking TheShaggy Dog'sChain resulted in a mildly delusional Heroic BSOD.
The final episode of Series 3 of Primeval where humanity has been saved from evil Helen by a hungry raptor. However the Pliocene anomaly closes, trapping Danny 3 million years in the past.
Col. Henry Blake was already written out of M*A*S*H. He'd gotten his discharge and left for home. But that wasn't enough, so at the end of his farewell episode, Radar gets the message that his plane was shot down. "There were no survivors."
''Bones has the episode "The Bones on the Blue Line".
The Season 8 finale "The Secret in the Siege" has an extremely dickish one. Pilant orders Booth to break off the much-anticipated engagement with Brennan and never tell her why or he'll kill five random people. As an extra slap in the fandom's face, the producers later laugh during an interview about how the fans probably want to kill them for pulling the stunt.
Some people actually have been screwed over by unexpected twists in Reality TVshows, this may qualify.
Shi-Ann in Survivor: Thailand tried to network with the other tribes when time came for the merge, only for instead, they're told they're living on the same beach... so when Shi-Ann's tribe loses, she's low man on the totem pole, so bye-bye Shi-Ann.
Savage in Survivor: Pearl Islands, who was pretty much screwed beacuse Lillian was brought back into the game and flipped at the merge, causing him to be voted out.
Michelle in Survivor: Fiji. Ten players in the game, and they're divided into two teams of five. Unfortuantely, Michelle's stuck with indifferent players and people on an alliance; not wanting to vote out their own alliance member, they gang up on Michelle, who was playing perfectly well...
In the 11th season of the American Big Brother, Jessie was screwed with a sudden twist. The Coup de Tat, which would be awarded to the fan favourite, was given to Jeff. Jeff wisely uses this and puts up Jessie and Natalie. Jessie is voted out, partly by the perceptive Kevin who knew Jessie was in control of the game at that point and that it'd advance him further if he got Jessie out. Jessie was actually quite humble about it. He was actually complimenting Jeff on his brilliant use of the twist, and saying that, had Jeff made the final two, he would gladly cast a vote for him.
In the 9th season of Big Brother, when James was voted out, a twist was played to bring either James or Alex (Evicted several weeks prior) back into the house. He was voted back in, and immediately went on a rampage to find out who did not vote him back into the house, and he targeted Matt, who was sent to the Jury House.
For that matter, Parker and Alex. They weren't disliked as much as their partners, but because everyone had to play in groups, they merely voted out the one person they disliked the most.
Happens in The Amazing Race occasionally as well. In the fifth season finale, what the audience doesn't find out is that Colin and Christie would've caught up to the leading team, and possibly finished first, but their taxi got a flat tire. In several other seasons (seven and seventeen in particular), despite traveling around the world, it's a language barrier in a large American city (thanks to taxi drivers who come from non-English-speaking backgrounds) that ends up hurting teams the most.
The Sci Fi Channel adaptation of the short story "The Cold Equations" ends on this. The basic premise of the story is that a young girl has stowed away on a spaceship carrying urgently needed medical supplies to a distant colony - and, because of her added mass, there isn't enough fuel to land the ship without crashing (and killing everyone on board), so, according to regulations, the pilot is supposed to throw the girl out the airlock so the cargo can arrive safely. It's established fairly early on that the cargo weighs about the same as the girl, and that jettisoning either the cargo or the girl would save the ship. Near the end, the two of them discover that the cargo wasn't what they thought it was, and jettison it, so they're safe now. That's when Diabolus shows up. To the surprise of the pilot and audience, the ship still has too much mass, because they waited too long and are now closer to the planet. So Someone Has to Die anyway.
The Series One finale of Sherlock has Moriarty walk out fairly close to the end. Sherlock removes John's explosive-laden outer layers, jokes are cracked and all seems to be right with the world. Then Moriarty comes back, and the series ends with Sherlock and John being aimed at by multiple snipers while Sherlock aims his own gun at the explosives, which are now at Moriarty's feet.
The writers built up to that one pretty well, though; it’s not nearly as much of a Diabolus as the secondseries ending.
While not the end of the series (although it could have served as such if the writers strike had not been resolved), season 4.1 finale "Revelations" of the Battlestar Galactica (Reimagined) is a major Wham Episode that also pulls this trope. Hard. (And things get worse before they get better.)
The sixth-season Degrassi The Next Generation episode "Rock This Town" involves many of the main characters attending a birthday party for their friend Liberty. It soon gets out of control when a group of kids from another school show up, but it turns out to be fairly harmless, and everyone has a number of embarrassing moments...until the very end, where Diabolus strikes its head by having one of the main cast (J.T.) stabbed out of the blue by a guest character who never appeared in any episode before or after the one in question.
In The Walking Dead, Rick and Glenn spread walker blood all over some raincoats and wear them to blend in with them. Just when you think they're safe, an absolutely random rainstorm shows up, stays just long enough to dull the smell from the blood by washing it away, and it stops raining after the zombies have noticed they're not undead.
Several episodes of I Shouldn't Be Alive can come off as this. The people who the stories are about almost seem to have been cursed by some malevolent deity based on their awful luck. One episode had a man who had been stranded in a raft for weeks and had to drift from Africa to the Caribbean. He had just reached Caribbean waters, took good supplies, figured everything out and seemed pretty much set to make it all the way to one of the islands safely, when he went to spear a fish with his harpoon, his harpoon snapped in half, the fish did a barrel roll, punctured his raft, and swam away, leaving him to just barely patch his raft up.
Xena: Warrior Princess: The overall finale has Xena execute an ambitiously dangerous plan involving her being killed, so she could go off and fight the spirit Big Bad in the spirit world. She sets Gabrielle the task of bringing her back afterwards using her ashes, and magic spring water. It's not until Xena's actually won, and Gabs (and by extension the audience) is all ready for that happy ending, that Xena drops the bombshell, that this time she has to stay dead, or her Heroic Sacrifice won't mean anything. The twist is not hinted at before it happens, is a disproportionate response, and is largely unnecessary since she mostly seems to have a massive Guilt Complex about the original precipitating incident, which was pretty much an accident. Since Xena claims she knew beforehand, she comes across as something of a Jerkass for not pre-warning Gabs about it.
Remedied in the "director's cut" version of the episode, which provides foreshadowing (though still a little too close to the end) and shows us that Xena didn't really know beforehand that she would have to stay dead.
In the second season of Robin Hood every single thing that can go wrong, ''does'' go wrong in order to kill off Marian. Marian acts wildly Out of Character. Robin and the other outlaws are inexplicably missing at a crucial moment. No one bothers to give Marian a weapon to defend herself with. Every single one of Guy's Berserk Buttons are pressed. The Idiot Ball is thrown about with such abandon that it leaves Plot Holes in the scenery. The contrived sequence of events unfold with the sole purpose of forcing Guy and Marian into the "right" frame of mind that leads to her murder. (And it still doesn't make any sense).
This is the driving force behind the plot, and the source of much of the humor, in Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The Chaser's War On Everything did a parody promo for Australian Story about a woman whose bad luck never seems to run out. eg. she's diagnosed with cancer shortly after the death of her third husband. The parody latched onto the fact that although Australian Story is a documentary series about real people, some of the episodes are so depressing that the events they depict seem contrived.
Downton Abbey is crawling with this trope in the third series, largely because so much successful Character Development has happened that there's not as much interpersonal drama in the house to play off, and there's no overarching Big Bad in the show, so the plot is rife with freak accidents and devastating twists with no forewarning. The third Christmas special really takes the cake, though, when Matthew is violently killed in a car crash right after Mary gives birth to his firstborn. All because the actor didn't want to come back for another season.
In the last episode of series three of Whitechapel, a killer makes two attempts on the life of therapist Morgan Lamb. She manages to outwit and then outrun him, and takes sanctuary at the police station where she strikes up a rapport with Chandler. Finally, the killer dies after throwing himself off a building, dying in his mother's arms with the words: "I'm sorry...sorry I didn't kill Morgan." All's well that ends well — except that the police take the killer's mother to the police station, she spots Morgan in her safe room, distracts the police and promptly stabs Morgan to death with a shard of glass from a coffee table.
Music
Depeche Mode's song "Blasphemous Rumors" is about a girl who tried to commit suicide at age sixteen. She fails, and learns to love life again. Then she dies in an accident.
Countless country songs take advantage of this, often to a narmy extent. In fact, it's a common joke in the American south that if you play country music backwards, the singer's wife will return to him, bearing his dog and his truck intact.
Newspaper Comics
In Funky Winkerbean, Wally (nephewnote Or younger brother or younger cousin. Their relationship depends on which reference you check of the title character) had just returned from a trip return trip to Iraq, with his new bride and newly adopted orphaned waif in tow. The future looked bright for the young Winkerbeans... until Wally got a letter from the Army telling him that he was technically A.W.O.L., because his discharge was issued one day too early. As a result, Wally was ordered back to active duty to serve a full year's tour of duty. The readership was pretty sure that discharges don't work like that (even the ones incorrectly filed) and could've fought the order if he wanted (and almost certainly won). But he fought the war instead. As an extra kick in the metaphorical nads, Becky finds out she's pregnant just in time for Wally to get shipped off. An extra EXTRA kick was administered when the second Time Skip came about and Wally was nowhere to be found. Turns out that for the entire second Time Skip, Wally was held captive by insurgents.
Ironically, the author's complete ignorance on military discharges was such that he overlooked an entirely legal way to suddenly recall Wally to service. All initial enlistment contracts are for eight years of service obligation, not four. The typical arrangement is only four years of active duty and then four more years of 'Individual Ready Reserve' status, the practical upshot being that short of medical disability, Bad Conduct Discharge, etc., you can be yanked back in entirely at their discretion up until eight years have passed since your initial enlistment. The recruiter is required to make durn sure you understand this before you sign.
If you're going into the funny pages, Charlie Brown learned that the demon of heartbreaking sports losses can attack after the end of the game, when he had a rare win stripped from him over a "gambling scandal" (Rerun betting Snoopy a nickel that they would win). Can they do that? No, seriously, can they?
The real life circumstances surrounding Owen Hart's death.
Eddie Guerrero had a huge drug problem early in his career but got over it through religion. After being a Heel most of his career and having just made a Heel Face Turn, having gained Batista's trust after his refusal to cheat as he normally does costs him the match and on his way to fight a match where he was scheduled to win the championship title was found dead in his hotel room days before his pay-per-view. Dead from the effects of the drugs he hadn't been using for years. Don't do drugs, even if you quit they will catch up with you.
Let's face it; any time someone particularly favored by (or disliked by) a heel GM or VP is involved in a match (or worse, said GM or VP is in the match) you can pretty much guarantee this will happen, either in the form of changing the rules mid-match or outright overturning results for nothing more than spite.
Tabletop Games
To some BattleTech fans, Diabolus is behind the Jihad storyline. Let's see, the Clan invasion is finally called off, the Star League tentatively reestablished, and while there are still loose ends left over (like the threat of the Wolf Khan to come invading anyway once the original truce is up, or the aftermath of a nasty civil war) things finally seem to be ready to calm down a bit...but hey, we can't have that, right? This game isn't called PeaceTech! So the Star League declares itself a sham and disbands again for no good reason just in time to cause the suddenly uber-powerful pseudo-religious lunatics known as the Word of Blake to go Ax Crazy and start pulling cyborg super soldiers, nuclear weapons, and other stuff out of their nether regions in an all-out war against everybody...
This is arguable. The Word of Blake had been foreshadowed as early as the 4th Succession Wars novels, in 1989, over a decade before the Jihad. Their intentions, to level the Inner Sphere by force, instead of by letting the Inner Sphere degrade on its own, was also clearly shown at this time. COMSTAR, and thus the Word of Blake, are also widely known to control the assets used during the Jihad (With a few exceptions). It's played straight, however, in that very little had been said on the subject in the years before it occurred. If one hadn't read the earlier books, it would have seemed to have come from absolutely no where.
The ending to the Deadlands: Hell on Earth setting involved the PCs getting a chance to kill the Big Bads of the game. After going through a bunch of Rail Roaded scenes, they're presented with the opportunity to win and a ship to do so (but they have to sacrifice one of their own to the demonically-powered engine to do so). Then you get to a distant planet... and the ship crashes and the Big Bads are re-released. At least the Game Mastershould have been implying that this was the best possible result from the start; the can that had the Big Bads in it was always shaky at best. Guess who gets to hunt them down and finish the job now?
The entire universe of Warhammer 40000 was probably made by Diabolus.
Toys
BIONICLE has this- in the most literal way possible. At the end of the 2008 arc, the heroes have Outrun the Fireball, awoken the Great Spirit, defeated the villains and are ready to celebrate. And then the Big Bad, who hasn't been seen all year, reveals that he has possessed the body of the Matoran Universe, which happens to be a Humongous Mechaand the body of Mata Nui.
Theatre
In the Richard Strauss opera Elektra, the title character, in the midst of rejoicing over the deaths of her mother and her consort, suddenly drops dead at the end for no reason except to bring down the curtain on a crushing downer note.
William Shakespeare is a notorious offender. For example, in King LearCordelia's death comes pretty much out of the blue, transforming the play into a tragedy in its final act.
King Lear, like many of Shakespeare's other plays, was based on earlier stories that his audience would have been familiar with. Lear and Cordelia don't die in those stories. Shakespeare killed them off because he wanted to surprise the audience. This ending was subject to a lot of Fanon Dis Continuity in later centuries, and many performances ended with Cordelia marrying Edgar instead ... even though she already got married earlier in the play.
Romeo and Juliet is one Diabolus Ex Machina after another. This is even lampshaded; the line in the opening speech about them being "star-crossed lovers" is a reference to the practice of trying to predict the future using astrology, implying that Fate really is out to get them.
Video Games
A lot of the moral choices in the second Army of Two game end this way. You either choose the "bad" option, or you choose the "good" option...except that the guy you gave up some advantage to save turns out to be corrupt AND selling weapons to terrorists. Or a guy you choose to save instead of killing in exchange for money is later killed in a plane crash accident.
The updated ending to Portal - The first independently mobile entity apart from Chell turns up just to drag her back right after you thought she was free.
Left 4 Dead had the infamous Chopper pilot dying at the end of the first campaign. It was nixed when many people found the ending too depressing and cheated out of their feeling of accomplishment. Ironically it was the fan backlash that caused Valve to create a filler campaign between No Mercy and Death Toll, reinstating what was taken out. They use this again in the sequel, to link all of the campaigns together. This meant that some sort of Diabolus Ex Machina would show up in the beginning of each campaign, serving as the Machina of the last campaign (this included a chopper pilot dying as well).
Because it was so egregious, Valve took the time to establish a reason for the constant downer endings in the sequel. The Survivors are actually carriers of the infection, causing anyone who interacts with them to become a zombie.
In Serious Sam 3, after seeing at least two choppers get shot down, (one of which he was ON at the time), Sam decides he's not going to get on any more choppers.
The Conduit actually jokes about it, where Ford's way off an oil rig is supposedly a Leviathan. The Leviathan destroys a helicopter flying over the base:
Ford: ...And you're SURE there's no other way out of here?
Prometheus: Well, there was a helicopter...
The path towards the fourth ending in Drakengard is shaping up to be a Bittersweet Ending, which, given the only other "good" ending is also bittersweet, doesn't seem too bad. After all, after finding out that the Creepy ChildBig Bad is irredeemably evil even after the protests of her twin brother, the heroes have finally succeeded in killing her once and for all. Now the world is saved. Except, wait, something's falling out of the sky...
Justified in that said Creepy Child was essentially the avatar or representative of said things falling out of the sky. We probably should mention that said things are pissed off as hell after she dies and with no seal holding them back...well...
Although that might be a Retcon from the second game. The first game more implies that killing her while she was the avatar of other evil entities kept them from holding said things falling from the sky back. Since this ending isn't even canon to the sequel and both fit the general theme of the game's setting, take your pick.
The real kicker is the fifth ending. The heroes cross over into another dimension to kill the mother of all the aforementioned elderitch abominations. She and the heroes are transported to modern day Tokyo and, after a climatic boss battle, get shot down by missiles from an aircraft. Wow...
Raiden's ending in the original Mortal Kombat. Evil vanquished: check. BBEG dead: check. Hey fellas; let's break the world ourselves!
And Reptile's ending in Mortal Kombat 4. Go through the entire game, win the tournament, and then your Bad Boss pops your head like a grape for asking for a reward. WTF?
Reptile's ending is always a Diabolus ex Machina. The one time that he actually has a happy ending is in Armageddon.
Mortal Kombat 9 just slams into this wall at Mach 5. After destroying Quan Chi's Soulnado, thus saving the souls of Earthrealm, Nightwolf regroups with Raiden'schosen right as Raiden and Liu Kang go to have a chat with the Elder Gods. Then, the CyberLin Kuei attack. Ok, no problem. Then, a Brainwashed and Crazy Sindel shows up. This is where it all goes to hell. Remember that scene three chapters back in Stryker's chapter when Raiden torpedoed Motaro through a bridge to prevent him from killing Johnny Cage? Motaro's death caused Shao Kahnto take off his kiddie gloves and get serious. He uses Shang Tsung's soul(s) to empower Sindel, giving her a massive boost in strength. Sindel, in the span of less than a minute, goes to town on the heroes. Out of Nightwolf, Kitana, Jade, Cyber Sub-Zero, Smoke, Jax, Sonya, Cage, Kabal, and Stryker (Kung Lao had been killed by Kahn a few chapters prior), only Nightwolf, Kitana, Sonya, and Cage immediately survive; Kitana dies in Liu Kang's arms from her injuries and Nightwolf has to sacrifice himselfto take down Sindel, right as Raiden and Liu Kang return from their meeting empty-handed. Afterward, the game switches over to Raiden for the final chapter, having him deal with the tragic repercussions of this event... including him accidentally killing the now-disillusioned Liu Kang, with Liu cursing at him in his dying breaths as he's lost his faith in the Thunder God, his former friend and mentor. Somebody give him a Friendship, please. Oh, and The Stinger reveals that Shinnok, Fallen Elder God and Big Bad of 4, is posed to strike a now vulnerable Earthrealm/Outworld, the implications being that he got a tip-off from his Armageddon self just like Raiden did and has been manipulating everything from behind the scenes, Quan Chi being his enforcer and eyes and ears in Shao Kahn's army.
And for good measure, that rescue helicopter thing mentioned before was also used to keep Sonya and Jax in the plot. Then Jax gets his arms ripped off instead of just upgraded, Sub-Zero gets roboticizedbecause it had to happen tosomeone, Scorpion is tricked out of his redemption, and oh yeah, Kung Lao dies after winning his match fair and square because Shao Kahn was pissy. Basically everyone gets shafted somewhere.
Half-Life 2 Episode 2: After Gordon has whipped the Striders, a Combine Advisor shows up, immobilizes Gordon, Alyx and Alyx's father Eli, rapes Eli's brain to death by jamming a nozzle up his spine to suck the brains out, but is then stopped by Dog before he can do the same thing to Alyx or Gordon, leaving the game, instead of a happy ending, on a Kick the Dog moment.
Heck, look at Half-Life, if you decide not to side with the ostensibly evil G-Man, you're immediately dumped into the middle of a bunch of angry monsters with no hope of victory.
F.E.A.R. ends with the protagonist being extracted aboard a helicopter with a couple of NPC teammates. The helicopter suddenly lurches and Alma is seen climbing aboard an instant before the game cuts to the credits. Which are worth sitting through for yet another whammy.
Basically any time your less-than-useless Delta Force escorts come to extract you/insert you they all get killed horribly before the fighting even begins.
Halfway through Call Of Duty 4, after you've completed the primary objective in Shock and Awe, there's a Diabolic Nuke Ex Machina, when you get a call that the bad guys have set up a nuke in Asaad's palace, then one of your fellow chopper pilots gets shot down. You land to rescue her, but it's already too late, and the nuke knocks the escaping helicopters out of the sky and kills all of the American main characters. You have a minute of Controllable Helplessness before the protagonist, too, expires from radiation poisoning. As a result, the shaggy dog has not just been shot, but totally annihilated.
And during the final mission, after stopping the nuke launch, an invincible Hind gunship appears and lays waste to your squad. Then the Big Bad starts executing the survivors, but before he can get to you, in a semi-Deus ex Machina, the Russian Loyalists arrive and destroy the Hind, distracting the Big Bad and allowing your CO to pass you a pistol. It's not clear if either of you survive, though.
The fake-surrendering Japanese soldiers who kill Roebuck/Polonsky at the end of "Breaking Point" in World At War could qualify, too, seeing as the mission had been a success up to that point, and Roebuck even said in the opening narration that they would all go home at the end. Even worse, you have to choose which one to save. In about a split instant.
But that one's kinda okay, considering one choice leads to your group essentially being led by Jack Bauer.
Not quite the ending, but the climax of World 1 in Final Fantasy V is rather like this. Against all odds, you finally managed to get to the last elemental crystal in time, unlike all the other ones that ended up breaking. The bad guy's possessed puppet gets beaten back, there's a lovely reunion with one of the characters and his granddaughter, where he gets his memory of her back, and a reunion of two of the characters and their long-lost father... and then the crystal shatters anyway, because if the Big Badstayedimprisoned by its power there'd be no other 2/3s of the game.
Ultros of Final Fantasy VI is a Diabolus Ex Machina personified. Four times in the World of Balance, he comes out of nowhere to cause trouble for the heroes, including trying to drop a weight on Celes's head at the opera.
Kefka's rending of the world is another huge example, a huge example of a famous very well received Diabolus Ex Machina.
Disc 2 of Final Fantasy VII is a Diabolus Ex Machina strewn throughout an entire disc. Aside from Aeris dying at the end of disc 1, the party chases Sephiroth to the Northern Crater, where they prepare to battle him once and for all, until Sephiroth decides to break poor Cloud's mind and force him to learn that he's a failed experiment. This ends in Cloud handing over the Black Materia, and all hell breaking loose. So now, not only is Meteor looming, about to kill the world in one week, but the Planet has released its failsafe, a group of massive biomechanical creatures called the WEAPONs that are capable of wreaking serious destruction. So these monsters are on the rampage, the apocalypse is coming in a week, and the crew is slated for public execution. And the next time we see Cloud? Alive, but totally catatonic. Wow...
Time Shift. You've killed the Big Bad, retrieved the only remaining temporal jump drive in your particular dimension, taken down a planet-wide fascist government, and even saved the girl. Then you cause a paradox.
Parodied in I Wanna Be The Guy. At the end of it, you defeat The Guy, take his gun, and return home triumphantly as the credits roll. You also walk under a tree with one of the game's deadlyapplesgiant cherries on it, which falls. If you're not expecting it and don't move, it lands on you, killing you and giving you the standard Game Over screen even though it's after the credits. Fortunately the game still counts you as having beaten it.
Remedied in the Expansion Pack that follows with you waking up afterward, albeit on the opposite side of Faerun, and you spend much of the game trying to figure out how the hell you got there. Also you wake up with an entirely new Diabolus in the form of the Spirit Eater curse.
The rocks falling is lampshaded later in Mask of the Betrayer by Ammon Jerro, in a rather hypocritical bit of humor.
Player Character: I remember being disappointed that the fortress's structure wasn't more architecturally sound.
Ammon Jerro: Yes. That powerful and evil beings insist on causing destruction even as the die is an unfortunate habit.
Fallout 3 is especially guilty of this, capping a brilliant game with a totally illogical ending that forces the player to sacrifice his/her own life by entering a radiation-flooded room to save the world... even though your radiation-proof mutant friend is standing right beside you. That character will actually say something like, "This is your journey and I can't take it for you" or something similar. Jesus, Fawkes, just walk in and press the button so I don't have to die!
Due to gamer outcry at this being one of the dumbest endings in gaming history, one of the expansion packs, specifically Broken Steel, changes this ending, allowing you to send in say, a highly resistant super mutant, a ghoul who is actually healed by radiation, or a goddamn ROBOT! And if you go in yourself you don't die. You can still send in the girl though, if you want to be a dick.
The game will still chastise you for being a coward, despite the fact that you found a way to accomplish your goal and get everyone out alive.
The Baldur's Gate series has a variety of endings, depending on your action in-game. One of them involves the Protagonist giving up their divine soul and turning their back on Godhood in order to be with their newly-found True Love - who, in her aftermath/autobiography is brutally murdered by her vengeful kin, leaving the Protagonist to raise their child alone, embittered, and hell-bent on committing genocide as return. This even applies if the Protagonist was, for the previous 100 hours of gameplay, a Lawful Good Priest of Peace and Healing...
It's put as a rumour, so you can basically decide whether your character would have done that or not.
The ending to Infocom's text adventure Infidel has always been somewhat controversial with fans because it's a good example of this trope being used to Shoot the Shaggy Dog. The protagonist (despite being selfish, greedy, and foolish) makes it to the pyramid's burial chamber to claim the riches ... only for the walls to collapse and trap him there to die. And this, after solving a bunch of very difficult puzzles (including a few 'learn by dying' puzzles).
As retconned in the intro to Turok 3, the destruction of Primagen in Turok 2 caused a explosion that destroyed the entire universe, which is what Joshua was trying to prevent in the first place, making that game somewhat of a Shoot the Shaggy Dog. Fortunately, the universe is recreated, and Joshua somehow survives and has offspring, only to be killed at the beginning of the third game.
Near the end of Fable IILucien tells you he killed your family. There's no reason for him to do this, other than to set up the neutral choice for the ending
Private Jammy is a soldier stationed at Fort Mourningwood in Fable III, named such for his good luck (he's been wounded a whopping total of 724 times). However, once the Hollowmen arrive, he invariably meets his demise no matter what the player does. His ghost then comes back to continue serving as the Hero's loader in the mortar mini-game. What a trooper.
Freespace 2 does this with a flourish: at the end of an arduous, complicated and desperate campaign to destroy the Shivan dreadnought Sathanas which threatens the (known) galaxy, you learn that the Shivans have about a bazillion more such ships.
Jak X. Non-fatal example, but after you've won the game, Rayn is suddenly revealed to have been manipulating you all along, wasn't poisoned, and oh yeah, she's now the biggest crimelord in the world. Well done, Jak.
This almost hit Lamia Loveless as part of a plot just to see Kyosuke Nanbu getting Emo, but she got better eventually. Either her recovery was part of Banpresto's plan all along, or as a reaction of fans outraging at the Diabolus Ex Machina that they set on her just because her default story is done and they want to put some dark and edgy feel on OG.
You just wiped all the gangs out of Paragon City and finished Crackdown. Now it's a police state run by your employer, which is pretty much another gang..
In Saints Row, under gang leader Julius, you destroy the three rival gangs in Stillwater and "unify" the city under the Third Street Saints. Then, with the help of the undercover cop in the Saints, Julius is captured by the police. They use him to blackmail the Saints into helping an anti-gang mayor get elected. Afterwards, when you confront said mayor to negotiate Julius's release, the two of you are blown up in an assassination attempt.
In the sequel, it's revealed that Julius set all of it up to dissolve the Saints and gang violence altogether: without his or the player's leadership, he knew the gang would fall apart and things would become more peaceful. Obviously, it didn't work, if only because the man didn't understand the concept of a power vacuum.
It's also revealed in the sequel that Dex, an ambitious ex-Saint, orchestrated a similar gambit during the finale, aiming to kill the player to destroy the gang (again), but for less noble reasons.
In the Diablo series, this basically explains the sequels, given the numerous ways in which the titular antagonist is apparently Killed Off for Real. But then, one must look at the Meaningful Name of the series...
To be more exact, the first game ends with you killing the Big Bad, Diablo and ramming his soulstone into your own head so you can contain him with your mind. It did not work so well. In fact, Diablo possessed the hero and used his power to strengthen himself so he could escape the dungeon and revive the other Prime Evils. The second game ends with you killing the last of the three Prime Evils, Baal, just after he corrupted the Worldstone, the thing that keeps the demons out of the world (not that it was doing a good job). Archangel Tyrael goes for the lesser of two evils and destroys the corrupted Worldstone. The one you've fought so hard over to protect. And for Diablo III, Blizzard has revealed that the destruction of the Worldstone also blew up the entire mountain, destroyed the barbarian capital and turned the continent into a nuclear wasteland. By the way, the Worldstone not only kept the demons out but also the angels because some of them view humanity as a taint on creation and are quite eager to destroy it. Instead of just the Prime Evils raising an army, a full scale demonic AND angelic invasion involving pretty much every character from either side with a name is about to occur. But hey, congratulations, you won the game.
Oh, and you know how all the player characters of the first game either went insane and / or were possessed in the second? Prepare to be not surprised at the ultimate fate of most of the heroes of Diablo II, or that the three Big Bads were in fact manipulating you all along to do their bidding. Or not. Diablo III doesn't really say what happened to the heroes of Diablo II. However, some claim that the male Barbarian from the second and third games are one and the same. You can also find a Necromancer, who is the apprentice of the Diablo II Necromancer. Really, it could be said that the Diablo II protagonists turned out all right. Except the Sorceress. She was killed by the Assassin..
The World Ends With You: After surviving the Reaper's Game, Neku and Shiki discover that Only Shiki can come back to life. Neku is fine with this, until the Conductor hits him with the whammy that in order to play the next game, the entry fee he has to pay is Shiki herself.
Not Quite! It's later revealed that the guy responsible for reviving people was absent. In fact, the whole game was invalid because of that; only the GM knew the Composer was gone and would have been shafted if anybody, including his subordinates, knew. Thus, it was just a cheat to keep the two in limbo and prevent from being found out.
In Street Fighter Alpha 2, Charlie, who always dies in his endings due to Foregone Conclusion, manages to corner Bison, only to be shot on the back by his intended back-up chopper.
Oichi in Sengoku Basara 2 Heroes dies this way in her own story. On the other hand, The Anime of the GameSengoku Basara... well, puts this on many many characters. Oichi included.
Quick summary of diabolus in Ever17: Hurray! Everyone else already escaped and we've loads of time to get out plus a submarine! They get out safely, chatting while they go up and the sub's battery dies. What the hell? You'd think it would've been recharging automatically before they called for it. So in order to fix the buoyancy problem, Takeshi distracts Tsugumi with a question about the Archimedes Principle and enters the airlock then jettisons himself out to his apparent death and Tsugumi's eternal loneliness. What. The. Hell. But it gets better.
In the ending of Star Wars Republic Commando, your squad has taken out a massive separatist gunship and are ready for evac. Then, out of nowhere (and off-screen), Sev reports he's under attack and you lose contact with him. Despite the protests of you and your squad, your commander refuses to let you rescue him, and you all get on your evac shuttle, leaving him to die. A lot of players hated Yoda for that.
Ameena's subplot in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time ends on a big one. Ameena, Ill Girl and blatant Expy of another flower girl, is finally reunited with her long-lost childhood friend. Then he dies (he was injured in battle a few scenes prior to this) and she succumbs to her illness seconds later. It's even more of a nightmare for the protagonist, since the girl was also virtually identical to his own best friend. Then Fayt's dad dies, then Earth is destroyed...
World of Warcraft, the Pit of Saron: when Scourgelord Tyrannus is defeated, the freed slaves run onto his overlook en masse, celebrating. Suddenly, Sindragosa appears and blows nearly everyone to smithereens, the players themselves saved by Sylvanas/Jaina's teleport.
Aquaria pulls this in The Stinger: the woman in black- who hasn't done anything of significance since the Noob Cave- reveals herself to have been manipulating Naija in a Batman Gambit to destroy the Big Bad. She then wipes the Naija's memory and spirits her away from her new family, leaving her right back where she started- lonely, isolated, and amnesiac. This was supposed to be a Sequel Hook, which would have been annoying but okay in the end. But now comes word that the dev team has splintered and moved on to other projects- including one hyped as a Spiritual Successor. Nice Job Ruining A Perfectly Good Ending, Bit Blot.
The creator has admitted in this message board thread that there were never any fixed plans for a sequel, and that he wanted to avoid a happy ending, possibly making this an intentional example after all.
In Killzone 2, the ISA has busted their asses to get to and defeat Visari, only to find out that the Helghast have a huge reserve fleet coming.
In The Stinger of Syphon Filter: Logan's Shadow, Logan and Xing return to their hideout only to find Mujari dead and Teresa wounded by Trinidad, who then shoots Logan in a moment of Cutscene Incompetence, although he gets off a Last Breath Bullet. Xing starts CPR on Logan, and the story is left on a cliffhanger (which will never be resolved).
In The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind, the Nerevarine destroys the Heart of Lorkhan, freeing Vvardenfell from the Blight and Dagoth Ur. In Oblivion, it is revealed that since Vvardenfell's resident living god also relied on the Heart, the Ministry of Truth fell, destroyed Vivec City, and triggered the eruption of Red Mountain, resulting in the province of Morrowind no longer existing.
Dragon Age II: the Hawke family farm is gone, one of your new allies is dying of darkspawn taint, and just when you think it's safe to stop for a breather, an ogre comes out of nowhere to brutally smash one of your siblings into the dirt, reducing your party to you, your other sibling, and Aveline against the ogre and its hurlock buddies.
No, those aren't dramatic spoilers; that is the ''prelude to the game, which mostly consists of the player trying to build his/herself and the family back up from less-than-nothing.
Metroid: Zero Mission is a remake of the original Metroid that continues after the original ended. It accomplishes this by having Samus shot down by Space Pirates while leaving Zebes, destroying her ship and suit.
Which is followed up by an inversion of sorts in the form of an ancient Chozo temple giving Samus an older yet far more advanced Power Suit (the one she's pictured with in most incarnations). It even is capable of recognizing the incompatible Upgrades she received earlier in the game.
Quite a few Bad Ends for Ookami Kakushi fall under this. To be fair, not all of them are like this; some can be obtained by simply making the wrong decision (such as choosing to believe one girl over the other). As for others, however, there are arcs where you don't immediately see the result of a combination of choices you made until much later, which tend to result in this trope.
Probably the best example of this is one Bad End where Hiroshi attempts to commit suicide after becoming a Kamibito and losing his friends only to be saved by Nemuru, who convinces him to keep living. Sounds like a happy, potentially heartwarming way to end a chapter, right? Cut to one month later, where Hiroshi comes across his old mufflers that have his old, strong honey-like scent attached, which causes him to go insane and attack his sister, which then leads to his implied execution.
In Zenonia4, Regret spends most of the game trying to Set Right What Once Went Wrong with Time Travel. Every time he changes the past, something else happens to ensure that the world is still doomed. Regret eventually decides to face the threat head on rather than running back to the past in a futile attempt to avoid it.
Mass Effect 3's ending. The Catalyst gives Shepard a choice between a few different ways to hit the reset button on galactic civilization and end the violent Reaper cycle. However, no matter how the Crucible is used, the dissemination of it's energy either shuts down or outright destroys the mass relay system and the Normandy is stranded on a random planet. This leads to a MASSIVE Inferred Holocaust for the galaxy. In addition to that, 2/3 of the endings feature the Citadel, one of the series most important locations and the home of several major characters, being blown up.
Less so in the Extended Cut, where those events were retconned. Provided your EMS is high enough, the mass relays are just damaged (and are easily repaired), the Normandy doesn't get stranded, and the Citadel doesn't explode. The Extended Cut also shows that the planets did not in fact suffer a holocaust, once again as long as your Effective Military Strength is high enough. There is no Downer Ending except for the worst ending- which, coincidentally, uses exact same cinematics as the original ending.
Just prior to the final battle, Shepard learns about the missing piece to the catalyst -the Citadel. However almost immediately Shepard is contacted about how the Reapers have not only taken it, they have already moved it to Earth, no small feat considering its a planet-size space station with its own dedicated armada.
Dalton in the Chrono Trigger /Cross continuity. He is quite clearly used as a comedic (and a not really super-powerful) villain in Chrono Trigger, but he manages to exact his vengeance against the heroes as suggested in Chrono Cross backstory and in exclusives Chrono Trigger DS version dialogues.
The Order of the Stick pulls two Diabolus Ex Machinas at various points to save the (un)life of its Big Bad, Xykon - first when Miko Miyazaki unwittingly pulls the rug out from a paladin who's about to smite Xykon and his lieutenant, and second when Xykon's Soul Jar narrowly misses utter and permanent annihilation by falling just short of a portal to another dimension - after the bird that was supposed to drop it in from point-blank range stopped shy for what was then no apparent reason.
Din and Jin from Las Lindas seem to be this trope personified. Their latest "prank" rivals the Euphinator Incident in terms of everything going to hell in the worst way possible just when things were going good for the cast.
Meta-referenced in thisSinfest-strip, courtesy of a semi-sentient, diabolical book.
In Homestuck, the Scratch and the resulting arrival of Jack Noir in their universe just in time to stop them from winning SGRUB was this from the perspective of the Trolls.
In Bittersweet Candy Bowl, Confrontation just gets worse and worse, with every choice the characters make just making things more dangerous for them.
Maria's death in Anders Loves Maria. Occurs in the second-to-last strip, wtih next to no foreshadowing, and Anders spends two splash panels just staring off into space before a Time Skip to his life as a single father.
Season 5 of Survivor: Fan Characters was full of these, given that the season was tagged "The Cursed Islands". Such "curses" involved having someone divvy up the tribes, but then get sent to Exile Island and have no control over which tribe they're sent to at the end of Day 3; a tribe being absorbed into the other tribes; someone having the choice to send themselves to Exile Island until the merge, but have absolutely no contact with their tribe mates until then; a random mutiny - one of the challenges was full of these; mainly, contestants would vote as to how many tribal councils they would be willing to go to with such debilitations as not being able to vote, having an extra vote against them, and not being applicable to win immunity. Miranda won the first, Brock won the second and subsequently led to his elimination, and Marius won the last although he managed to win because of this curse.
In Homestuck, when the Condesce uses her psychic abilities to control Jade in her omnipotent god tier form, right as she arrives to help the Alpha kids play their Sburb session.
Web Original
The finale of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Mad ScientistDr. Horrible held at gunpoint with his own death ray? The gun explodes and he survives. The Made of Iron superheroic jerk Captain Hammer who fired it? Injured and humiliated, but survives. Naive heroine, Penny, on the far side of the room, who has just realized Dr. Horrible and Billy Buddy are one and the same and in love with her? Sorry, Penny. You get Jossed with Penny-seeking shrapnel.
In Sims Big Brother 5, the main twist of the season was that there was a liar in the house. By "liar", I mean someone playing under a false identity. The Liar was revealed to be Logan, but not to the houseguests. One week, there was a double elimination week and Michael Goldsmith said they had to evict the Liar, or else they would lose a portion of the grand prize. (Which the Liar would receive) Knowing he was in trouble from the other alliance, Logan persuaded the majority and the floaters that the liar was Darby. Thus, the house cast their votes for Darby and Logan, and since Darby received more, she was evicted.
Diablous ex Machina struck once before. In Sims Big Brother 2, there was a week in which 6 people were taken into the Solitary chamber, making themselves immune from the vote during Public Voting Week (in which everyone was up on the block, sans the 6 in the chamber). However, the person who lost all of the challenges was more or less screwed. They couldn't use any of the luxuries, couldn't compete for Head of household, were automatically nominated for three weeks in a row, had to eat an instant meal diet, and if any of those rules were broken, they'd be expelled. Dora unfortunately lost....meaning she had many of the worst weeks of her life in the house. Is it any wonder that after becoming the Unlucky Houseguest, she asked everyone to nominate her and vote her out?
Parodied in The Nostalgia Critic's review of Moulin Rouge!: he spent practically the entire review complaining about the movie before the The Nostalgia Chick and Brentalfloss convinced him it was fine as a guilty pleasure. But this being a review of Moulin Rouge!, it needed to end tragically, so he randomly shot Brental Floss and mourned his loss. This was mocking one of their complaints about the movie, namely that Satine's consumption—and her decision to break up with Christian instead of telling him about it—seem like this trope.
Even the kid-friendly world of Alvin and the Chipmunks is not safe from the Diabolus Ex Machina. In one episode, involving a new cat dubbed "Cookie Chomper the 3rd", a Death by Newbery Medal comes out of nowhere in the last two minutes of the show.
This trope is played for laughs in Stone Trek: Every episode ends on a happy note... until the Starship Magnetize explodes for no apparent reason.
The early episodes of Sealab 2021 also always ended with the Sealab exploding. The most notable example of this trope is the episode that's just an episode of the original Sealab 2020 series, and so it's fairly normal and has a happy ending. Then the Sealab explodes for no reason.
It exploded because the captain of the submarine gave such bad directions to his helmsmen, they drove right into Sealab. THEN it exploded.
It didn't involve any dying, but... Codename: Kids Next Door, "Operation Elections": Nigel Uno has just led his school to fend off an attack against a rival middle school, and is making a speech as he's assuming his rightful position as 4th grade president position that was robbed from him by the Delightful Children, who had instigated the attack by the middle school. And then the guy who earlier told him that he had won the election now tells him that he still lost the election to some random guy. Diabolus pours salt into Uno's wounds by suggesting that his fellow operatives also voted for the other guy.
In other election news, a lizard-suit wearing Homer Simpson seems well positioned to win a mayor recall election to replace Quimby, since no one else seems to be good enough. The suit turns out to be his downfall when it shrinks in the wash, and suddenly no one likes him, and since no one gets enough of the vote, Quimby stays in office.
In another Simpsons episode, "Brother From Another Series", Sideshow Bob appears reformed and gets work release when his brother Cecil offers him a job for a dam project. Bart is convinced that Bob is up to no good, but in the end it turns out Bob really has reformed and Cecil was trying to embezzle millions from the dam project. Bob actually helps stop Cecil and saves Bart and Lisa's lives, but when the police arrive to arrest Cecil, Police Chief Wiggum insists on arresting Bob as well for no good reason.
Bob: (In the backseat of the police car with Cecil) But I saved the children's lives! I'm a hero! Cecil: Tell them they'll live to regret this. Bob: You'll live to regret this! ...Oh, thanks a lot. Now I look crazy.
The show Cyberchase LOVED using these to keep the magical cure-all MacGuffin out of the protagonists hands. Hell, that's how they lost it in the first place.
The Boondocks episode "Ballin" has Riley coming close to finally winning a game when the mentally challenged replacement center for his main competition turns out to be a child-prodigy at basketball. Of course, he ''really'' deserved that, since he got that far by sending the previous center off crying when told her her mom did cocaine, was cheating on her dad at the country club, and her parents were waiting until after her birthday to tell her they were getting divorced.
Total Drama Island: Poor Bunny. He's first eaten by a snake, then Geoff tries to catch the snake in order to get Bunny back, when an eagle swoops in and captures said snake. Geoff gets another chance when the eagle lands at the edge of the dock, when a shark jumps out and snatches up not only the eagle with the snake with Bunny inside, but a sizable portion of the dock as well. All this, in a parody of reality TV. Damn.
It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown: Final play of game, and we're looking at either Charlie slotting in the game-winning field goal from short-range, or Lucy humiliating herself in front of the crowd for pulling that trick (you know the one). Even Charlie pulling a John Carney wouldn't have been as bad as Lucy pulling the trick anyway and not getting any of the blame for the loss, not even from poor old Chuck.
Pretty much the entire purpose of the Kanker Sisters in Ed Edd N Eddy. They tend to show up anytime something's actually going right for the titular characters for a change (ex. "Over Your Ed", "Look Into My Eds").
Happens on a regular basis in Invader Zim, usually with Dib.
Avatar The Last Airbender does this three times in the Book 2 finale. First, it's quite clear that Zuko's gonna do a Heel Face Turn and join Team Avatar, but he instead does the reverse, betraying his uncle Iroh and teaming up with Azula. As if that wasn't bad enough, then, while Aang appears to have mastered the Avatar State, Azula shoots him with lightning, killing him, and as a result, successfully taking the Earth Kingdom capitol of Ba Sing Se. He comes back, at least.
ReBoot. The final episode of the series has Megabyte captured and our heros celebrating. But then it turns out the captured Megabyte was an alias (aka a decoy) and that Megabyte had infiltrated the Principal Office and then took over. Cue Cliffhanger.
This trope is a recurring theme in G.I. Joe: Renegades, where Failure Is the Only Option. Every time the Joes find something that will clear their names, it's a safe bet it will either get burned, blown up, smashed, stolen, or stabbed. That is until the season one finale where the Joes returned to the Pentagon with all the evidence they needed to clear their names after destroying Cobra Mansion and defeating Cobra Commander, who survived and is ticked off by the way. The series is now on hiatus until the second live action movie is finished but it's doubtful the Joes will suddenly become wanted criminals again when it resumes.
During the Christmas Episode of Metalocalypse, Doctor Rockzo, The Rock and Roll Clown (he does cocaine) sells all of Toki's Secret Santa gifts, for some cocaine. When Toki finds out, he prepares to give the clown a sound thrashing. Unfortunately, before he can reach him, Murderface's drunk Grandma crashes her scooter into a cross, trapping Toki under it. Rockzo escapes punishment, and even gets a handjob from Skwisgar's mom.
Dexters Laboratory has a brutal one in the original Series Finale "Last But Not Beast", combining it with a massive case of Status Quo Is God. Dexter and his family have finally learned how to work together and were able to stop the monster Dexter accidentally unleashed from Japan. However, he accidentally mentions his lab, which causes Mom and Dad to remember it, toonote He had to reveal it to get them to work with him. What does Dexter do? Pull out a mind eraser gun, erasing the memories of the lab and everything after it! However, Monkey, who had aided the family earlier, loses his mask, making Dexter realize his pet monkey was the hero. So, Monkey goes and takes the gun and erases HIS memory, allowing Mandark, who was taken out early on, to claim victory and leaving Dexter to bemoan that he wished he destroyed the monster. And DeeDee says nothing about it.
Real Life
Never mind all this sports stuff: Wilfred Owen, after writing some of the best-remembered poetry about the horrors of the Great War, was killed one week before the Armistice. The really nasty bit? Owen's parents got the letter informing them of his death while the bells were ringing to celebrate the end of the war.
There has been at least one real life occurrence of a person who just won the lottery being run over by a car. On a positive note, he was 73.
General George S. Patton, after serving through World War IandWorld War II, and was the sort of fighting man who should've died on the battlefield or in old age, gets killed in a car accident in Germany two months after the end of the war and a day before he was to return to America.
Angel Juarbe Jr., a New York firefighter, won the reality show Murder in Small Town X while also winning the great respect of the viewers, in contrast to quite a few other contestants on the show. Three days after picking up his winnings, he was killed in 9/11 along with two other firefighters as they undertook a suicide mission to get a badly needed rope.
A certain stuntman who twice swam the Niagara river (unsuccessfully) and rode a barrel over Niagara Falls (successfully) later died from slipping on an orange peel.
Jack Danielnote No "s" died of a toe infection after kicking his safe in frustration. He had apparently had a bit too much of his own product and forgotten the combination.
Sigurd the Mighty cut off the head of Earl Melbright of Moray when they invaded Scotland. He tied the head to his saddle and brought it back home as a war trophy. While he was riding, his leg brushed against the head's teeth, resulting in a small cut. It went septic, and he died of infection.
Similarly, Allan Pinkerton, a famed 19th century detective, died of infection after biting his tongue. note He'd had a severe stroke.
A folktale about Zhao Yun's death (of Romance of the Three Kingdoms fame) begins with him getting undressed for a bath. His wife is impressed by how unscarred his skin is, despite decades of battle. He replies that he's never lost a fight and never even taken a wound. His wife, as a joke, pricks him with a needle. And he starts bleeding. And he doesn't stop. The story ends with him dead from loss of blood and her killing herself with his sword. This may be the reason Luo Guanzhong glosses over Zhao Yun's death in the book.
"We knew a croc (or something) would get him". Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, after dodging death from crocs, snakes, sharks, etc. for years, was offed by one of the world's least aggressive toward humans creatures, a stingray.
Moreover, contrary to popular assumption, Irwin was just swimming by it, rather than actively provoking it in any way. He was, in fact, there to save the stingrays.
The assumption that he was provoking it is reasonable given that provoking dangerous animals deliberately, conspicuously and repeatedly was his entire career. The REAL footage was destroyed by Irwin's widow, so what he was or was not doing to it remains a mystery.
The stingrays, as a species, have tried their best to avert this by causing a statistically abnormal rash of deaths in the wake of Irwin.
Japanese singer Izumi Sakai (of Zard fame, best known for several Detective Conan opening themes) had a weak health for years. Several illnesses forced her to go on an hiatus from 2001 to 2003, but she recovered and went back to work. In 2006 she was diagnosed with cervical cancer, when she seemed healed it was discovered the cancer had spread to her lungs. When she finally got better and was planning her comeback, she fell from a three metre high landing in the hospital where she was undergoing treatment and died.
German World War IAce Pilot Lothar von Richthofen (brother of the Red Baron) survived the war and then died in a commercial aircraft crash in 1922.
German WWII Ace Pilot Heinz Bär, who fought on all fronts of the war, made it from sergeant to lieutenant colonel, and had 220 aerial victories, with fifteen of them on the Messerschmitt 262, was killed in a glider accident in 1957.
The second highest scoring fighter ace ever, Gerd Barkhorn (301 victories), was killed in a car accident with his wife Christl in 1983. Christl drove the car.
This is a common affliction of IT guys. The rebuild is going well, then, out of the blue: boot sector error of some unknown kind! Or: Virus! Or: Insert disk two! (BUT I DIDN'T GET A DISK TWO!) and so on.
Haing Ngor survived The Killing Fields, and played a fellow survivor in the movie, only to be shot to death in an LA parking garage.
Still in sports: Francisco "Django" Bustamante at the World Pool Championships in Chicago 2002. While abroad, he received a call from home bearing news that his infant daughter died. This and the stress served as game breakers against him despite getting in the finals against Earl Strickland.
Man has accident while visiting the Grand Canyon. Man is saved and sent to the nearest hospital by helicopter. Helicopter crashes on the way, killing all on board.
The 2005 New York Jets' starting quarterback Chad Pennington suffered a season-ending shoulder injury in a game against the Jacksonville Jaguars. Back-up Jay Fiedler suffered practically the same injury eight plays later.
Samantha Smith - Cracked remembers this little girl as a sweet heart of a bad ass who wrote a letter to the leader of the USSR and received a letter back that sparked her on the course to show the everyman the great bear of Russia to be well, human, and she was successful... and then she died at age 13 in a plane crash.
Yuri Gagarin was about to go to space a second time, but wound up dead when his MiG-15 trainer crashed.
Blues musician Stevie Ray Vaughan recovered from a nearly deadly addiction to cocaine and alcohol, returned to form with his comeback album In Step in 1989, then died tragically in a helicopter crash a year later (along with the pilot and the rest of the crew) after playing a concert in Colorado.
The great explorer and soldier T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) died in the most ignoble way after the life he had led, in a motorcycle accident as he was pulling out of his drive.
John Lennon, who led perhaps the greatest rock band of all time, battled drugs, a messy divorce, a deportation attempt, and personal psychological problems. Just as he is getting his life in order and starting to make a comeback as a musician with his Double Fantasy album, he is gunned down on the street, after a busy day promoting his album, by an obsessed fan.
In 1980, Kenny Waters was sentenced to life imprisonment for a crime he didn't commit. His sister Betty Anne spent the next 18 years trying to get him released, even going through law school to able to defend him, at the cost of her marriage. She finally managed to get him released in 2001... only for him to die six months later from head trauma after falling off a wall. The Hilary Swank movie Conviction is based off this story, though the producers omitted the detail about the brother dying for obvious reasons.
Benjamin Wilson Jr, star basketball player for Chicago's Neal F. Simeon Vocational High School, considered to be a player of unlimited potential, was gunned down in 1984 by a thug at the age of seventeen.
Sports writer Jessica Ghawi, aka Jessica Redfield, lived to tell the tale about the Toronto Eaton Mall shootings in June 2012. Just one month later, she became one of the victims of the Batman Shootings in Aurora, Colorado, during a premiere of The Dark Knight Rises.
17 year-old Joseph Dunbar, the youngest victim of New Zealand's Pike River mine explosion (of which there were no survivors), wasn't supposed to be in the mine at the time of the first explosion. He was due to start working there in a few days and came down to have a look at the mine.
Still in New Zealand, in 2000, teenager Kirsty Robinson survived a boat accident that claimed the life of her father. A year later however, she was killed in a car crash, with her mother dying of a heart attack soon after, leaving Kirsty's brother Gareth as the last surviving family member.
At least several hundred burn victims from Hiroshima atomic bombing were evacuated to Nagasaki for treatment; only to be nuked again just days later. Nagasaki's bomb almost missed the city (due to some of the worst marksmanship in history), so most of these people survived both atomic blasts. However the vast majority of these double survivors succumbed to their original wounds in the following days, partially because triage practices at the time demanded medical resources be used to try to save the lives of people more likely to live.
Diabolus missed Tsutomu Yamaguchi twice. The first time was August 6, 1945, when he went back to his workplace to get his forgotten travel stamp when Little Boy fell three kilometers away. He was supposed to be heading home that day, but spent a few days in hospital before he could go home... to Nagasaki on August 9. He was describing the incident to his boss when Fat Man fell three kilometers away.
