Only the Author Can Save Them Now: Difference between revisions

* Phibrizo from ''[[The Slayers|Slayers Next]]'': The credibility point was broken about at the point where he {{spoiler|killed all of Lina's friends without much effort at all, then backpedaled, said he only killed their bodies, and then threatened to destroy their souls as well. And then we got the very literal [[Deus Ex Machina]]...}}

* ''[[Digimon]]'' has a habit of this:

** ''[[Digimon Adventure 02]]'': Averted to the very end, until the final enemy, who feeds on sadness, is defeated by "hopes and dreams." While it's not completely out of the blue like the season one examples, it's still pretty lame. It would probably have been better received if ''the dreams in question'' weren't invented wholecloth for the episode with no previous explanation. (Okay, Jou at least got a [[Retcon]] where he decided to enter the medical profession after all...[[All There in the Manual|in a drama CD]]...[[Shaggy Dog Story|after spending a good portion of season one convincing his parents to let him do something else]].)

** Completely avoided in ''[[Digimon Tamers]]'', but ''[[Digimon Frontier]]'' gives us the way the kids suddenly became indestructible near the end. Power levels get [[Over Nine Thousand|DBZ-ish]], and you have Lucemon slamming the heroes into the ground so hard the moon they're on ''is destroyed with enough force to take out the two other moons.'' The kids...just aren't hurt. The villain's final defeat made enough sense, but to last long enough to do make it happen, unprotected humans were simply ''not being hurt'' by world-destroying forces.

== Film ==

* [[Played for Laughs]] in ''[[Monty Python and the Holy Grail]]''. Our heroes only survive the Legendary Black Beast of Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh because [[Author Existence Failure|the animator suffers a fatal heart attack]].

* "He didn't get out of the cockadoody car!" Present in both the film and the novel, [[Misery]] gives us a meta-example of the story's villain lecturing its protagonist about the evils of pulling contrived crap like this. She tells a story about how her experience of serialized action films was ruined when a hero clearly shown in a car plummeting to his death at the end of one serial is shown ''not'' in the car doing something else at the beginning of the next even though it couldn't have happened that way. The story's author protagonist admits that although this forces him to travel through very complex circumlocutions to fully justify what happens in the novel he's writing for the villain, it ultimately makes for a better story.

 

 

== Live Action TV ==

** "Reckoning" suffers from this. Clusters of Replicators? [[More Dakka]], or the disruptor introduced at the season start. A galaxy-spanning swarm of Replicators that almost instantly adapts to weapons used against them? Meh, let's use the previously unmentioned Ancient superweapon that wipes them all at once.

* ''[[Doctor Who]]'' had this in a number of finales of the new series. [[Doctor Who/Recap/NS/S2/E13 Doomsday|Unlimited armies of Daleks and Cybermen?]] Easy, use something that [[Keystone Army|takes them all out]] at once. [[Doctor Who/Recap/NS/S3/E13 Last of the Time Lords|The Master rules the Earth?]] [[Doctor Who/Recap/NS/S4/E13 Journeys End|Another army of Daleks with the power to DESTROY! REALITY! ITSELF!?]] Donna develops [[Leet Speak|1337]] Time Lord hacking skills and...they explode, somehow. [[Doctor Who/Recap/NS/S4/E17 E18 The End of Time|The Master has turned everyone on Earth into copies of himself?]] {{spoiler|The Time Lord President Rassilon [[Eviler Than Thou|fixes it with a flick of his wrist.]]}}

* ''[[Babylon 5]]'', where the only way to stop both the Shadows and Vorlons was to yell "[[What the Hell, Hero?|What The Hell, Cosmic Superbeings]]" at them and tell them to get lost.

** Unlike most other examples both [[Big Bad|BigBads]] motives were to help the younger races, the only reason it qualifies is the author was needed to make them listen.

* Inverted in ''[[Power Rangers Dino Thunder]]'' the last [[Monster of the Week]] is able to survive a [[Deus Ex Machina]] style [[Finishing Move]]. Except for the fact it doesn't it dies and the footage is then played backwards to revive it. They then pull another [[Deus Ex Machina]] to kill it by [[Stupid Sacrifice|sacrificing their zords]] even though they still had [[Humongous Mecha|Megazords]] they hadn't even used yet.

** Later in the episode the [[Big Bad]] is shown to be [[Not Quite Dead]] and in the ground battle survives a hit from the Red Rangers [[Super Mode|Battlizer]] gets up, and proceeds to split into 4 copies. Which they can only stop with a type 3 [[Deus Ex Machina]] (the episode seemed to love those). Worse the one time they had used that type 3 it wasn't in the real world, it was in a comic book world making it a type 2.

== Tabletop Games ==

* ''[[Dragonlance]] (Chronicles)'' may be an example of this. The Armies of Evil (tm) not only have better troops, including the draconians, which can kill even when dying, they also have dragons and gods. If not because a pretty obvious [[Deus Ex Machina]] or two (some of them in the form of an actual god, even) the heroes would have lost, and died.

 

== Video Games ==