Deus Ex Machina / Theatre

• Bertolt Brecht:
  • Parodied in The Threepenny Opera, where the playwright actually goes to the length of having his characters explain that the play really ends differently... but, for the sake of a happy ending, a royal official enters on horseback to make everything better. The play ends with a comment saying how unlike real life this is.
  • There's an inversion of this trope in another Brecht play, The Good Person of Szechwan. Just as things have got as bad as they can possibly get for the protagonist, Three Gods (who have been present on Earth since the opening scene, and in fact were responsible for the protagonist's predicament in the first place), pointedly do not step in to resolve matters, and instead mount a giant pink cloud and ascend into the heavens.
  • Brecht was very fond of parodying - and thwarting - an audience's need for closure and happy endings, as it was part of his theatrical manifesto to leave an audience unsatisfied, and thus hopefully motivated to go out into the world and change things for the better.
• Euripides was so well known for using this device that in Poetics, Aristotle singles him out when discussing why it's bad, while Aristophanes made Euripides a character in one of his plays and had him at one point enter the stage with a crane. Examples include:
  • Iphigeneia in Tauris ends with Iphigeneia, brother, and his friend being pursued by enemies over the sea. A wind appears to make their escape more difficult — but Athena appears to order the pursuit to stop. Many critics have noted that apparently Euripides introduced the wind, which serves no other plot function, solely in order to have an excuse to make Athena appear.
  • Alcestis resolves the seemingly unsolvable dilemma at the center of the play (the title character has agreed to die in place of her husband, and Death insists on taking one of them) by having Heracles show up and wrestle Death into submission.
  • In Iphigeneia at Aulus, after Iphigeneia finally agrees to be sacrificed so that Artemis will stop holding back the winds keeping the Greek fleet from sailing, the priests come down in the final scene and say that when they looked away Iphigeneia had been replaced with a pig. Not highlighted for spoilers since she obviously lives if there's a sequel. However, modern reading have noticed that while Artemis did save Iphigenia, she did not really resolved the main conflict of the play. Namely, how Iphigenia will never really see her mother and father again, nor will it change the end of the marriage between her parents, leading to Clytemnestra conspire to kill Agamemnon.
  • In Orestes, Orestes and his sister have been condemned to death for murdering their mother (which Orestes was ordered to do by Apollo, since their mother killed their father, which she did because the father had killed their sister...). The two of them and Orestes' best friend Pylades have escaped, taken Orestes' fiancée hostage, and are holed up in the palace ready to burn it all down around them... when all of a sudden Apollo pops in, orders everyone to stop fighting, and ensures that all of the leads are friends and/or married. This ending is traditionally read as Euripides having written himself into a situation where none of his characters could be expected to solve things without divine intervention. However, more modern readings of the play as a Stealth Parody (as in Anne Carson's super-snarky translation), suggest that we are fully meant to notice how arbitrary Apollo's solutions to the characters' problems are.
  • Deconstructed in Medea. The fact is that Medea killed her children, Jason is too late to save it, and he and others have to live with Medea becoming a Karma Houdini and the grief of the tragedy is not resolved by the arrival of the God. If anything, their arrival only save Medea from being killed and led her to become a Karma Houdini.
  • Similarly, in Hippolytus, Artemis did not manage to stop Phaedra from killing herself and lied about being raped by Hippolytus, thus leading to Theseus ordering his son's death. In fact, it can be said that her presence just made everything worse by telling Theseus the Awful Truth.
  • Double Subverted in Ion. Most audience would expect that Apollo would arrive to save the day and stop Creusa, but he is revealed to be a Dirty Coward and force his half sister Athena to go instead, and only show up at the very end after the most dramatic arcs is over (Creusa tried and failed to kill her son Ion and Ion confronted Creusa about his parentage. Athena even Lampshade Hanging by remark that "the gifts of Heaven are somehow slow, but at the end they are not weak".
• Gilbert and Sullivan often used these (or very out-of-left-field Third Options disguised as these) to resolve their plots. Which ones are straightforward Deus ex Machinas and which ones are parodies or subversions can be an interesting subject for debate.
  • H.M.S. Pinafore is certainly one of the more genuine examples; although Little Buttercup often hints that she has a dark secret, and there is a more subtle clue in Ralph's erudite vocabulary, nothing in the play could remotely help an audience think that Ralph and the Captain being switched at birth is even plausible in the world of the play, let alone that Buttercup would have been involved plus on board at the right time to reveal it, etc., etc. But hey, look at that, it happens to solve both the A- and B-plots in one fell swoop! Cue the finale, it's time to go home!
  • The Pirates of Penzance, on the other hand, is a definite parody. Not only have wacky plot elements been present from the beginning of the operetta, but there has been plenty of foreshadowing of Ruth's final revelation (that the pirates are really noblemen); from the first line of the first song, in fact! (Examples: they drink sherry instead of rum or grog, they hold fast to their code of honour even when it leads to their constant defeat in battle, and there is an entire song about how it's better to be a pirate king than a real one). In the same opera, the police deliberately try to invoke this. At the moment when they are most hopelessly defeated in battle, they... call on Queen Victoria: The mere mention of her name makes the pirates give up instantly out of loyalty to her.
• Molière tended to lean on this to wrap up many of his comedies. In Tartuffe the protagonists are saved in the last act when a police officer shows up out of the blue with an order from the king arresting the villain. The conclusion of The School for Wives is so bizarrely complicated that we're still not quite sure what happened, but the gist is that the star-crossed lovers' respective families show up to let them know that they had arranged their marriage years ahead of time (without either of them knowing it).
• William Shakespeare was generally good at averting and subverting this. Measure for Measure has an ending that probably seems like Deus ex Machina to the characters, but the audience spent the entire play watching the Chessmaster set it up. A Midsummer Night's Dream ends amicably when the fairies step in and fix everything with magic, but it takes them three tries to get it right and in the meantime they screw everything up even worse. The ending of The Winter's Tale is either this or Fridge Brilliance, depending on how you read it (although it did name a trope that is usually a DEM).
  Some straight examples:
  • The final scene of As You Like It has a normal one and a literal one: Jaques, the never-before-seen brother of Oliver and Orlando, shows up inexplicably in the Forest of Arden to announce that the usurping Duke Fredrick has found religion and restored his dukedom to his banished brother. But before that, Hymen, the literal god of marriage, shows up to resolve romantic subplots and make predictions in rhyming couplets.
  • In The Comedy of Errors an abbess we've never seen before shows up, and she's the long-lost wife of Egeon and mother of the Antipholuses, one of which had been living in the same town with her all this time and never knew.
  • Occurs offscreen in Shakespeare's Hamlet, between 4.4 and 4.6: on the way to England, Hamlet is kidnapped by pirates, who kindly return him to Denmark.
  • In The Merchant of Venice, Portia produces a document at the end which reveals that Antonio's ships didn't sink after all and he is still rich. It is never explained how she got this information or why she didn't reveal it before Shylock lost everything he owned and Antonio nearly died.
• In the prologue to his Amphitryon, the Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus parodied and lampshaded this trope somewhat by having the god Mercury explain to the audience that there's a precedent for having the gods be active characters in this play: wasn't it just last year that somebody performed a play on this very stage in which someone in dire straits called on Jupiter and (lo and behold) out popped Jupiter to save the situation?
• In the musical City of Angels, writer Stine finally snaps after witnessing the culmination of the Executive Meddling on his Film Noir screenplay, and the producer sics the studio cops on him. Detective protagonist Stone (appearing as Stine's Spirit Advisor after his part was brutally miscast by the studio) goes over to Stine's typewriter and does a little Rewriting Reality, making Stine beat up the cops and defeat the producer. For an encore, Stone types a little more and reunites Stine with the wife he cheated on: "A Hollywood ending!"
• In John Milton's Comus, the Spirit complains that the brothers let Comus get away with his Magic Wand so they can't free their sister — but wait. He recounts the tale of how Sabrina (previously unmentioned) became a goddess and then calls on her to help them, which she does.
• Spoofed, perhaps even deconstructed by Woody Allen in his one-act play God, an excellent if strange production which has No Fourth Wall whatsoever; it's nominally about two Ancient Greeks trying to put on a play right there, when Trichinosis shows Diabetes his new invention, a machine for lowering the gods to the stage in order to solve characters' problems. (He boasts that he's going to make a fortune with it: "Sophocles put a deposit on one. Euripides wants two.") Unfortunately, when turned on, it winds up strangling the actor playing Zeus.
  Diabetes: God is dead.
• Hell-Bent Fer Heaven: The dam has failed and everyone seems doomed to die in the impending flood—when Sid reveals that he wrangled a boat on his way back from the dam.
• The Mozart opera Idomeneo includes a literal example. Idamante is about to be sacrificed to Neptune, when the god's voice proclaims that he is to live instead and take the throne from his father.
• The Tsukiuta series of 2.5D stage plays have their idol characters travel through the worlds of The Multiverse, which echo popular anime genres, though they tend to be Lighter and Softer. Two of the idol units' leaders, Hajime and Shun, are actually extremely powerful magic users, who might actually be gods, so endings that feature this are common — though sometimes, as in Kurenai Enishi, Shun's powers are inaccessible in some way; sometimes as in Ura-Zanshin, Shun can't reach them, and they have to hold out until he can. Sometimes, as in Rabbits Kingdom, the villain is a second Shun (and Shun caused the problem in the first place, though Hajime does fix it with this). And sometimes, as in ROMEO in the Darkness, Shun declines to step in and help the others because it's beneficial to them to see the story through.
• In Jasper in Deadland, when it looks like only Jasper or Agnes will be able to return to the land of the living, Persephone agrees to stay with Pluto for one more day if he agrees to let them both back.
• Mrs. Winter's arrival at the end of Nice Work If You Can Get It serves only to resolve all plot conflicts, clear a few mysteries, and allow for a happy ending for all.
• In Pokémon Live!, the original Mewtwo shows up and saves the day, using his telepathy and Ash's heart to give MechaMew2 a Care-Bear Stare. There was no way he could defeat Giovanni on his own, especially since Pikachu had already been knocked out.
• Parodied in P.D.Q. Bach's The Stoned Guest. At the end of the opera, every character is killed or otherwise dies. Then, for literally no reason at all (other than the arbitrary decree of the composer's patron, who didn't like the original ending), they all spring back to life and sing about how it's a happy ending.

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