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Diabolus Ex Machina

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Diabolus Ex Machina
type
FeatureClass
Diabolus Ex Machina
label
Diabolus Ex Machina
Diabolus Ex Machina
page
DiabolusExMachina
Diabolus Ex Machina
comment
The ending is rapidly approaching. The forces of darkness are on the run, and the Big Bad is reeling. The heroes have clearly won the day, and are all set to live Happily Ever After.
But wait! True Art Is Angsty, so we can't possibly have something as clichéd as a 'Happy Ending'. Enter: Diabolus Ex Machina (Demon from the machine), the Evil Counterpart of Deus Ex Machina — a last-second twist designed to ensure, if not a Downer Ending, then certainly an extension in the villain's favor. Drop a bridge on the hero's girlfriend, Shoot The Shaggy Dog, and whip up a good pot of Deus Angst Machina with a side-order of Outer Limits- or Twilight Zone Twist. Do whatever it takes, as long as you make absolutely sure that everyone goes home depressed.
Note that the Diabolus Ex Machina doesn't necessarily have to bring about a Downer Ending. Often, it is just brought in because if the villain were to lose, the work of fiction would be over. Also, it doesn't apply when a Downer Ending is used as a natural consequence of the general premise, even an ironically twisted one. It only applies if it comes out of left field to.
It is often summoned to ensure a Death By Newbery Medal, especially when characters are Too Happy To Live. The Hope Spot is a vital ingredient in the summoning ritual. Often a Last Breath Bullet, if it's the last thing the villain does. Often hands the Idiot Ball to its victims. Has been known to party with the Planet Of The Apes Ending when feeling silly. Has also been employed in pursuit of Oscar or dropped for a similar reason. If you're lucky, it'll be preceded by a Snicket Warning Label.
Also useful for sneaking around the Hays Code, which mandated that villains (broadly defined to include anyone of any morality the censors disagreed with) be appropriately punished for their acts. As in the ancient Greek reasoning behind Deus Ex Machina, this allowed the writers to evade Executive Meddling and Moral Guardians and tell the story they want to tell, portraying the villains as glamorously as they want, so long as they dropped a bridge on them in the last five minutes. Modern movies shouldn't need this anymore, but they still use it from time to time.
Please note that the examples below will contain lots of ending-spoilers, as a matter of necessity. But we'll try to keep you from getting too spoiled.
Diabolus Ex Machina
fetched
2010-08-28T14:49:23Z
Diabolus Ex Machina
hasLicense
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Diabolus Ex Machina
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2010-08-31T04:31:27Z
Diabolus Ex Machina
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Copa Libertadores
Diabolus Ex Machina
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Depressing Tropes
Diabolus Ex Machina
processingCategory1
Ending Tropes
Diabolus Ex Machina
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In Dex Machina
Diabolus Ex Machina
processingCategory1
Infernal Tropes
Diabolus Ex Machina
processingCategory1
Older Than Dirt
Diabolus Ex Machina
processingCategory1
Sadness Tropes
Diabolus Ex Machina
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Trope Names From Other Languages
Diabolus Ex Machina
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Twist Ending
Diabolus Ex Machina
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Writer Cop Out
Diabolus Ex Machina
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Dropped link to AdamSandler: Not an Item - IGNORE
Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Igotbetter
Diabolus Ex Machina
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Sci Fi Channel
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Big Bad
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Death By Newbery Medal
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Deus Angst Machina
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Deus Ex Machina
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Downer Ending
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Dropped A Bridge On Him
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Earth All Along
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Evil Counterpart
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Evil Is Cool
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Executive Meddling
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Happily Ever After
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Happily Ever Before
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Happy Ending
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Hays Code
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Hope Spot
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Idiot Ball
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Last Breath Bullet
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Nice Job Breaking It Hero
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Oscar Bait
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Outer Limits Twist
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Shoot The Shaggy Dog
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Snicket Warning Label
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Too Happy To Live
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Tragic Dream
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
True Art Is Angsty
Diabolus Ex Machina
seeAlso
Twilight Zone Twist

A list of feature instances declared on this page follows.

DiabolusExMachina/int_10341dc4
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Diabolus Ex Machina
DiabolusExMachina/int_10341dc4
comment
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.
DiabolusExMachina/int_10341dc4
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Ed Edd N Eddy
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DiabolusExMachina/int_10341dc4
DiabolusExMachina/int_10c9b6b
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Diabolus Ex Machina
DiabolusExMachina/int_10c9b6b
comment
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 parent's were waiting until after her birthday to tell her they were getting divorced.
DiabolusExMachina/int_10c9b6b
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The Boondocks
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DiabolusExMachina/int_10c9b6b
DiabolusExMachina/int_10da2b77
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Diabolus Ex Machina
DiabolusExMachina/int_10da2b77
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Doctor Who season finales tend to be based on unfortunate circumstances plunging the state of the world from bad to worse.
How about 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, gets better in time for the season finale.
DiabolusExMachina/int_10da2b77
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DiabolusExMachina/int_10da2b77
DiabolusExMachina/int_1125a5e8
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Diabolus Ex Machina
DiabolusExMachina/int_1125a5e8
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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 Chamber), 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.
Or Does She?
DiabolusExMachina/int_1125a5e8
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Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni
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DiabolusExMachina/int_1125a5e8
DiabolusExMachina/int_1181847e
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Diabolus Ex Machina
DiabolusExMachina/int_1181847e
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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 believe 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? Paraplegic and braindead. Wow...
DiabolusExMachina/int_1181847e
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Final Fantasy VII
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DiabolusExMachina/int_1181847e
DiabolusExMachina/int_11868bb9
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Diabolus Ex Machina
DiabolusExMachina/int_11868bb9
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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.
DiabolusExMachina/int_11868bb9
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World Of Warcraft
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DiabolusExMachina/int_11868bb9
DiabolusExMachina/int_11c73c40
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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Wild Wild West ended with a non-fatal example: The woman they'd been fighting the entire movie over wasn't trying to save her brother or father, but rather her husband. Well, they'll always have that Giant Mechanical Spider.
Lampshaded when James West gripes, "You coulda told us before."
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DiabolusExMachina/int_11c95147
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Diabolus Ex Machina
DiabolusExMachina/int_11c95147
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"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't end well.
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Law And Order Special Victims Unit
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DiabolusExMachina/int_11c95147
DiabolusExMachina/int_159a1126
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Diabolus Ex Machina
DiabolusExMachina/int_159a1126
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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.
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DiabolusExMachina/int_162b4a8c
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Diabolus Ex Machina
DiabolusExMachina/int_162b4a8c
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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.
Some feel that this is a legitimate twist ending, but the end of the trilogy... the hero and heroine have defeated evil, saved the universe and fallen in love. The universe repays them by suddenly — last-chapter suddenly — straining every sinew to keep them apart forever. And they become too stupid to spot the really fairly obvious ways around the supposed problem.
DiabolusExMachina/int_162b4a8c
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His Dark Materials
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DiabolusExMachina/int_162b4a8c
DiabolusExMachina/int_174c2111
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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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.
DiabolusExMachina/int_174c2111
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Ojamajo Doremi
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DiabolusExMachina/int_195986f3
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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.
DiabolusExMachina/int_195986f3
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Bleach
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DiabolusExMachina/int_19a8577c
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Diabolus Ex Machina
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City of Angels. Less than a day after the titular 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...
Of course, the sheer randomness is evident because the other angel-turned-human has a successful job, large and healthy family, and in general a gorgeously happy life. Clearly, the Diabolus is not a fan of Nicolas Cage. This just goes to show that Love Hurts, and the writers love to twist the knife.
Made all the more annoying by the fact the love interest doesn't see the truck because she's riding her bike down a hill with her eyes closed and her hands stretched out.
And underlining the unneccessariness of it all is the fact that the original German flick it's based on, ''Wings of Desire'', ends with Damiel musing about sex with his (still living) love interest.
The sheer poetic beauty of the character's musings and the life-affirming quality of the original makes the changes even more painful.
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DiabolusExMachina/int_1b0ea066
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Diabolus Ex Machina
DiabolusExMachina/int_1b0ea066
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Clerks originally ended with a robber killing Dante, but after the distributor complained that this was pointlessly violent and tragic, the scene was removed.
A rare example of good Executive Meddling, since "pointless" was the operative word there, as any Diabolus Ex Machina worth its salt would be.
DiabolusExMachina/int_1b0ea066
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Clerks
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DiabolusExMachina/int_1b936406
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Diabolus Ex Machina
DiabolusExMachina/int_1b936406
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* GULP!* It's Derrick and "Onion"!
DiabolusExMachina/int_1b936406
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DiabolusExMachina/int_1b936406
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Curtis
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DiabolusExMachina/int_1b936406
DiabolusExMachina/int_1c4713ea
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Diabolus Ex Machina
DiabolusExMachina/int_1c4713ea
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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.
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DiabolusExMachina/int_1c4713ea
DiabolusExMachina/int_1c972511
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Diabolus Ex Machina
DiabolusExMachina/int_1c972511
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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 3, 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.
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German World War I Ace Pilot Lothar von Richthofen (brother of the Red Baron) survived the war, than died in a commercial aircraft crash in 1922.
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Quick summary of diabolus in Ever 17: 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.
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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 episode 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.
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Time Bandits delivers this by way of Idiot Ball... on first glance. But if you look closely, the kid's parents, who die from touching the piece of Evil, were assholes anyway; Agamemnon shows up as a firefighter, and the kid's happiest memory was when Agamemnon adopted him, so it's implied he'll go on to a happier life; and he even has proof of his adventures, due to a Polaroid of the dwarves in his pocket. Diabolus still curses about botching that one.
Nice Job Fixing It Villain
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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.
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The Law and Order franchise loves using this trope to turn a slam-dunk case into an hour-long question of "Will they get away with it". Three egregious examples:
"Marathon" (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 a dime on a notorious serial rapist, cutting himself a sweet deal in the process. (In a minor Audience Sucker Punch, 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't end well.
The season 9 finale. It looks like the Complete Monster 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.
"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.
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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.
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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.
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Good Times, James Evans, Mississippi. For a comedy titled "Good Times", Diabolus sure was busy depriving the Evanses from having any...
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The finale of Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Mad Scientist Dr. 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, 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.
Your Mileage May Vary since Dr. Horrible's attempts at evil, despite being aimed at winning Penny's attention, are portrayed from the very first act to do nothing but get in the way of any potential relationship they could have. When he tries to pass the Moral Event Horizon in Act 3 by killing Captain Hammer, he ends up killing the person he cares about and destroying any chance he had at a happy relationship as a consequence of his actions.
Except he looked like he was about to back off and he wasn't even the one who fired the gun. If, say, he'd tried to kill Hammer, but Hammer dodged and the blast hit Penny, that would have made more sense as well as hitting him harder karmically.
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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..
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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.
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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...
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Re Boot. 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.
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One particular death (Book's) in Serenity is a downer (especially since we never do get to learn what the hell his deal was), but another Wash's death falls right into this. He successfully manages to land Serenity from what is essentially a dead fall, and once he does and pauses to celebrate, his chest is pierced by a random Reaver harpoon.
Joss Whedon mentions that he wrote the death scene that way for a specific reason. He wanted to break the PC Shield, and make you worry about everyone else's fate, especially since everyone else looks like they're about to die later.
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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).
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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.)
This is actually a translation error. In the original novel, the report was "Nothing to report on the Western Front," i.e. "Soldiers are dying in droves, but that's nothing special."
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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, Diablous 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.
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For such an angst-heavy show, Supernatural has only used this once: Playthings. Sam wants his turn at being a martyr and, after getting drunk, forces a promise out of Dean that he would kill him when/if he turns evil. He's hung over the next day and we and Dean think he doesn't remember. But at the end of the episode, he brings it up again and they drive off in an uncomfortable silence. Add it on to them not exactly saving the day either and you've got one hell of a Downer Ending.
Three words: "Jus In Bello".
"Heart", to an extent.
Also, 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.
Also, "Mystery Spot" has this trope happen, but it is reversed.
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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....
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The most recent Sherlock episode 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.
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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.
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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.'
And for a while Lieutenant Dan considers Forrest himself as a personification of the trope, denying him the heroic death on the battlefield he always believed was his destiny and forcing him to live on with both legs amputated. He eventually realizes he can still make a good life for himself.
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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 Dis Continuity in later centuries, and many performances ended with Cordelia marrying Edgar instead ... even though she already got married earlier in the play.
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The Dresden Files book Changes has a very nasty double one at the end. Harry and his friends have been revving up for an apocalyptic battle to get back his daughter Maggie, and just as the good guys are whipping the bad guys and seem to have a chance at winning, one of them turns out to be a baddie, Susan transforms into a full vampire, and Harry is forced to stab his ex-lover to death to destroy all the Red Court vampires. Oh, and a day later when everything has calmed down, he gets shot in the torso and is dying. To be continued.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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Oath of Courage, people. Remember that thing the series has hammered home about courage overcoming everything. A trifling thing like a collapsing pocket dimension isn't enough to stop the 3G. Especially since the tech specs for Genesic Gao Gai Gar note one of its tools as the very thing they used to get where they were to begin with.
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Torchwood season 2 and 3 finales end with the main characters being killed off, and very abruptly. Tosh and Owen are killed at the end of season 2, with one being trapped in a nuclear power plant which has gone into meltdown, and the other dying from a bullet wound. Season 3 sees Ianto being killed by the sudden release of an alien virus.
Weren't those deaths part and parcel of the Anyone Can Die premise, though? At the very least, Tosh and Owen's deaths seemed like a natural extension of the plot. Meanwhile, Ianto's was truthfully very very contrived.
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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.
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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.
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"The Bones on the Blue Line".
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Near the end of Fable II Lucien 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
[[Spoiler:No reason to do it if you're in a gay relationship or have no children, at least. He kills your family to end the bloodline of Heroes, so they can no longer threaten him.]]
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The Season 5 Finale for House MD: 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.
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The ending of Pitch Black. The out-of-nowhere alien grabbing the female lead just as she's about to escape. It seems like the only reason to do it is to keep her out of the sequel. The saddest thing is, originally she was meant to survive and Vin Diesel's character was meant to die.
It still works, though: Riddick doesn't really decide to rejoin the human race until she dies. The idea that someone could value his life, or the lives of the passengers, enough to sacrifice their own for them was proof positive that Riddick's original view of life — that everyone was really a self-centered bastard at heart, some just pretended otherwise — was dead wrong. And Riddick being Riddick, he'd never have entirely believed it unless somebody died proving it. Risk is something he accepts every day, but actually dying is further than he's ever gone.
You mean the alien grabbing the female lead after Riddick has stabbed her; it having already been established that they can hunt anything that is bleeding really well? It hardly comes out of nowhere. She insulted a psycho, who stabbed her and consequently the monsters ate her.
It's an old discussion: some viewers believe Riddick stabbed her, others claim it's bullshit and she was impaled on the monster's tail as it grabbed her. It's somewhat ambiguous, although his reaction (and the DVD commentary by the director and actors) definitely seems to imply the latter.
"Not for me! Not for me!"
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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.
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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. Or So I Heard.
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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 <i>soon going to explode</i>. 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!!!
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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.
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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.
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The show Cyberchase LOVED using these to keep the magical cure-all Mac Guffin out of the protagonists hands. Hell, that's how they lost it in the first place.
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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.
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Moulin Rouge features Satine's death by tuberculosis RIGHT as everything has turned out fine. Of course, it was established in the first few sentences that she was going to die, but its placement leaves something to be desired.
It was stated and restated throughout the entire film that she's dying. Their reconciliation destroys the livelihood of every other person in the film. Turned out FINE??? How many times did you watch the film???
This is a not very subtle allusion to La boh�me by Puccini, also set in Bohemian Paris, where the Mimi is dying of consumption for pretty much the whole show, even though it doesn't seem to affect her ability to sing. The same thing happens in Rent, which is a retelling of La boh�me. It's a standard opera trope. Puccini in particular almost always killed off his female leads: Madama Butterfly and Tosca commit suicide, Manon Lescaut dies of dehydration in the desert, Ping in Turandot (while not technically a lead) is tortured to death.
Actually, it's Liu, not Ping, and she kills herself rather than undergo further torture. And while we're at it, Suor Angelica kills herself when she discovers her child is dead; in the early opera "Edgar", demure Fidelia is killed by fiery Tigrana; and in some versions of "La Rondine", Magda kills herself. Women do not have a very high survival rate in Puccini, that's for sure.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Subversion: Halfway through the Marathon Infinity Expansion Pack Marathon: Red, after being hit with several other Diaboli ex machina, the shaggy dog having been shot many times, the Marine meets the Organic Big Bad Cosmic Horror Joshua, who then gives him a monstrous cyber-organic makeover, and sends him to exterminate the remaining humans. This happens to be a blessing in disguise, however, with faster running ability, infinite ammo, a jetpack(later) and many cool weapons, and he turns Phlebotinum Rebel shortly afterward. Ironically, Michael, The Dragon, another Cosmic Horror, Face Heel Turns on and kills Joshua for you, although you still have to defeat him. Like in the later Quake IV, "the only way to defeat the enemy is to become one of them".
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An episode of CSI 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.
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Not to mention the fact that that happened so long ago, they might as well have said 'This is how the series ends. Now let's go make a L 4 D sequel a year after the first one came out!'
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The SAW series of movies is chock full of Diabolus Ex Machinas, some coming within seconds of the protagonist thinking he's found a way out.
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.
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Saw
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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 (this is never stated on-screen, and Blofeld isn't explicitly identified, but the implications at obvious).
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.
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Walk Hard's Dewey Cox dies 3 minutes after his last performance.
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The Powerpuff Girls Dark Fic series Immortality Syndrome has several of these, but the biggest comes in Immortality Relapse at the climax, when Boomer Face Heel Turns and survives impalement long enough to trigger the death of the world.
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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.
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Persona 3. Okay, so you've finally beat the twelfth boss shadow, (almost) nobody died, and, best of all, the Dark Hour is gone! Now let's celebrate by eating sushi! Sounds like a typical Happy Ending, right? Wrong. Turns out the Dark Hour is still there, and, even worse, defeating those twelve shadows just made the end of the world come, so now everybody's going to die in a month. ....yeah.
More of a Disc One Final Boss, really; [[spoiler: by that time, your Social Links can't possibly be maxed out yet, only two of your fellow SEES members have changed Personae, and the Compendium is nowhere close to being completed.
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Halloween: Resurrection changes the end of Halloween: H20 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.
And then Resurrection ends the series, with the next film being a remake. Although, the first 5 minutes of Resurrection DOES make a good end for the series. Just ignore everything after the title shows up.
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End of Evangelion, or even Evangelion in general loves this. In EoE Asuka finally stops Wangsting over her mother 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 Asuka gets speared by a fake Lance of Longinius, EATEN ALIVE by the rest of the Mass Production EVAs 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. You could say It Got Worse.
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. All so Anno can have his little End Of The World Special.
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Neon Genesis Evangelion
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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 just before the bombing run goes off. The sight of the two huddled together when the air raid sirens go off, preparing to give their last will and testament before facing annihilation is rather chilling. Indeed, the movie in its entirety is an example of Diabolus. Does anyone else find it odd that no matter where the protagonists go, the monster seems to be right behind them. This is especially apparent when They go to Beth's apartment, which the monster had already trashed and rescue Beth, only to look out the gaping hole in the demolished wall to see Clover coming straight at them. And then, of course, there's the fact that the one helicopter that Clover lunges at just happens to be the one with the cameraman in it. Another theory: The monster just really hates having his picture taken. Just put down the camera, Hud! He'll leave you alone!
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Cloverfield
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Pay It Forward. That came out of nowhere. AND served NO point. Except to ruin any good feelings you had.
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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.
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You Only Live Twice
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Inuyasha, when they finally complete the jewel, the well that allows Kagome to travel through time closes, keeping her and Inuyasha apart. Subverted when three years later it opens again and they reunite, though they don't really explain how or why.
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Hey Arnold!: The Devil sure loves stalking Eugene Horowitz...
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Hey Arnold
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In Funky Winkerbean, Wally (younger brother 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. We don't even know if Wally ever got to see his son (Wally Jr.) in the flesh.
Tom Batiuk said he put a small hint in one of the strips immediately preceding the skip. The hint was Les Moore (the strip's real main character) walking past a newspaper booth with a headline saying something about kidnapped soldiers.
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.
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24 season finales used to be made of this trope:
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, everything seems fine and dandy,until the Chinese pop up out of nowhere and haul Jack off, meaning he has to spend the next six months enduring torture at their hands.
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Twenty Four
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Done again in Final Fantasy VI. The Evil Emperor has apparently seen the error of his ways after the magical espers he has been exploiting hand his Empire its own ass on a silver platter, Kefka, His Psychotic Monster Clown henchman, has been locked away where he won't do any harm and the heroic rebels manage to reconcile the Espers and humanity. Then Kefka pops up, kills all the Espers and absorbs their power and lifts up a whole continent the size of India (relative to the rest of the world at least) to take over the world with the not-so-repentant-after-all emperor. One failed mission to save the world later, one of the heroines wakes up on a deserted island one year After The End with no one else around but her dying mentor with all her friends scattered to the four winds. Oh, and Kefka's a god now. Ouch...
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Final Fantasy VI
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Fallout 3 is especially guilty of this, capping a brilliant game with a totally illogical Wall Banger 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.
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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, ends up being reunited with her childhood friend. Then she dies. Then he dies too (he was injured in battle a few scenes prior to this).
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Star Ocean: Till the End of Time
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Conker's Bad Fur Day ends with a literal Deus Ex Machina as the main character asks the author to wipe off the monster chasing him... except he forgets to ask him to bring back his girlfriend who was killed in the crossfire. Oops.
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Conker's Bad Fur Day
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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. 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 a Beyond The Impossible 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.
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.
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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.
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Death Note
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In From Hell with loveat the end of the book An Immortal disguised as Isabella stabs Eddie. Then, bites his poison tooth and dies. While Eddie is slowly dying
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Secret Histories
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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 things. And vice versa, since the cliffhanger was pretty much why there was such a demand for a miniseries to begin with.
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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.
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Night of the Living Dead, in which the only survivor of the zombie attack is shot on sight by the rescue party.
And with (possibly intentional) Unfortunate Implications, in that the survivor is black and the rescuers are rednecks.
Word Of God said it wasn't intentional, but believe whatever you want.
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Night Of The Living Dead
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In any game where a chopper is called in to rescue your party halfway through the game, it will probably get shot down or otherwise destroyed, as in Resident Evil 3 and Dino Crisis.
Or Call of Duty 4.
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Resident Evil
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Weiss Kreuz Gluhen 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.
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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.
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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 Child Big 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...
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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has both a Deus Ex Machina and a Diabolus Ex Machina in the end. Martin, the heir to the emperor's throne, who you have spent the entire main quest protecting, manages to close the Oblivion Gates and totally stop the Daedra invasion. He does so by ritually sacrificing his life. A Winner Is You!
It seems that the Diabolus hates that family. During the opening sequence, the player is helping the Emperor and his bodyguards escape through underground tunnels. You fight your way through a dozen assassins only to reach a dead end, where one more comes through a hidden door and murders the Emperor.
It gets even worse if you read the Emperor's obituary and find out that Martin was his fourth son. His three brothers were killed offstage by the assassins before the opening sequence even started.
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In Lord Sunday, the final installment of Keystothe 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.
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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.
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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.
The second case doesn't really apply, since Start of Darkness established that Xykon's soul doesn't reside in the jar as long as his body is intact. Destroying the phylactery would make him vulnerable to being permanently killed, but wouldn't actually do the trick itself.
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Occurs in the Buu Saga of Dragonball 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.
In the final fight of the same arc Goku is stated to be able to kill Buu in a instant if he goes all out. Per this trope it turns out his living body can't sustain it and he powers do instead. Something like that wasn't even hinted at before and was of coruse added only to make fight more dramatic.
Also, the ending of the Cell Games. Cell is clearly being beaten by Gohan, and puts in a last-ditch effort to destroy earth by preparing to explode. Goku doesn't come up with the idea of using instant transportation to take him to an emptier planet until the very last moment - thus, by doing so, he gets himself killed. The earth dragonballs can't bring him back; any workarounds would've failed, since Goku specifically requested to stay dead and would've resisted any such attempts.
Earlier Goku's fight with Vegeta when Goku takes the upper hand, Vegata reveals he doesn't need to the moon transform into a giant ape and crushes Goku within an inch of his. Later during the fight against Freiza when he has transformed, it looks like Piccolo has him beat, but then Freiza reveals he has TWO MORE transformations. Then after it appears Goku manages to kill Frieza with the Spirit Bomb, Frieza turns out to barely have a scratch on him, nearly kills Piccolo, then blows up Krillin for shits and giggles. Only Goku's Super Saiyan transformation prevented a Downer Ending.
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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 lover interest, Haru. Etc.
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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. The moral? Uh...
Cube 2 is just as bad. 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.
If Cube 2 and Cube Zero had not systematically made the world surrounding the cube less mysterious (In Cube 2 we learn that it's a top secret military project designed to "disappear" people the establishment see as a threat, and in Cube Zero, it turns out that said military are the enforcers of a totalitarian fundamentalist regime), a coherent moral can just about be sorted out: It's a kind of purgatory, and Kazan can escape because his mental state gives him Infant Immortality against sin.
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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.
The Expansion Pack Extraction Point, takes this trope one step further by killing off those NPC teammates and foreshadowing a devastating war. Ironically, Word Of God is not considering this as canon.
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.
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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."
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In one episode 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.
"I was sure I was going to -SPLAT!-"
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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 The Shaggy Dog's Chain resulted in a mildly delusional Heroic BSOD.
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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.
Happens a second time with poor Hiro, albeit this time is 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.
Arthur was basically an omnipotent god at that point, having absorbed his son Peter's powers. Presumably, he was using a more skilled version of precognition. One that could transcend timelines.
This is Season 3 we're talking about. Don't bother discussing the character's actions.
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.
Correction. Sylar prevented Eden from using her voice, by choking her with telekinesis: it's hard to speak when you can't breath. Also, Mohinder's serum didn't fail at all. Mohinder did (as usual). The serum started to have his effect on Sylar, but Mohinder (instead of, say, shooting him right there) started wasting time and gave Sylar time to recover. When Mohinder finally decided to attack him, Sylar was already partially recovered... and partially is all he needed against then powerless Mohinder.
Sylar pulls this one again at the end of Volume 3, where he is stabbed in the back of the head, his one weak point, and left to cremate in a burning building. He turns up miraculously fine in the next episode without so much as a hand wave.
Correction. He is stabbed in the head by glass, which is later revealed to have melted in the fire.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 reveled 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.
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Avatar: The Last Airbender does this at the same time as adverting it twice 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 doesn't. He ends up join them in Book 3, at least. As if that wasn't bad enough, then, while Aang appears to have mastered the Avatar State, Azula shoots him with lightning, killing him. He gets better, at least.
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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.
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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.
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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.
He does
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.
But that one's kinda okay, considering it leads to your group essentially being led by Jack Bauer.
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Kurokami ends in this way, in the last minutes of last episode everyone discovers that final sacrifice is required, even if nobody dies.
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The movie-version of Stephen King's The Mist takes this all the way into Deus Angst Machina territory.
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Stephen King
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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.
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Dragon Age. Alright, we've got our allies together, Loghain has been deposed/executed, everyone's behind us and we're ready to kick some ass. Let's win this thing. Oh, by the way, did we mention that the Grey Warden who kills the archdemon will die? Just thought you'd like to know.
Not quite. Morrigan offers you a way to have your cake and eat it, too.
That's not all you are eating, HIYOOOOO!!!
Essentially the player faces Diabolus Ex Machina but can counter it with Deus Ex Machina.
Right! Eat the cake yet have it, AND have sex with the witch! Really sweet. And all you have to do is get her pregnant with what might very well be the Antichrist. But don't worry! She totally promises that nothing bad would happen! And also, never look for her, she is escaping for the mountains. Not in any way suspicious, I'd tell you that. yup. Best choice of them all right there.
Your Mileage May Vary. Reducing Alistair to a rum-sodden hobo, encouraging the Loghain to sacrifice himself and then marrying the Queen is what could be called awesome.
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Hey, even his "happy endings" can be pretty depressing. The Little Match Girl.
A rather large portion of his fairy tales are actually pretty depressing. The Christmas Tree and The Little Mermaid come to mind.
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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 Emily is watching over their son. Emily 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. Emily 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, Damien...err, 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 Emily eat the remaining berries...barely hours before a ship with Richard's uncle, who had been searching for them for several years, happens upon their boat.
To make matters even worse, the sequel reveals that while Richard and Emily had died, Paddy managed to survive, defying all laws on the effects of body weight in regards to poisonous substances. Several years later, he is caught on a sinking ship as a young child along with a little girl and an adult not long for this earth. Unlike the Downer Ending of the previous movie, Paddy survives and gets to continue making sweet sweet love to his nubile teen girlfriend for the rest of his days. It's hard to apply the label of Karma Houdini to acts committed as a child...but damn.
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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.)
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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.
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Even James Bond is not safe from this demonic influence — in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, he drops by to ensure that Bond's marriage becomes a SHORT one.
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 (this is never stated on-screen, and Blofeld isn't explicitly identified, but the implications at obvious).
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.
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Dawson's Creek: in the grand finale, Jen suddenly has, and dies from, a heart condition. It was well done, though.
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The entire universe of Warhammer40000 was probably made by Diabolus.
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In the FLRG arc of Pokemon 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. With absolutely no explanation. And then, Sird captures Mewtwo. Even though Red had already captured it. Also with no explanation.
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Timeshift. 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.
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Neverwinter Nights 2 has one of the most appalling Diabolus Ex Machina endings ever. Quite literally, Rocks Fall Everyone Dies.
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.
Which, given it's the point of the entire story and is at the beginning of the game, hardly counts.
The rocks falling is lampshaded later in Mask of the Betrayer by Ammon Jerro, in a rather hypocritical bit of humor.
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"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 was his entire career. And as yet the REAL footage has not been released, so what he was or was not doing to it remains a mystery.
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In Screamers, the captain survives the Late To The Party, survives the Twist Ending, and makes it to the Emergency Evacuation Pod in time to make it off the planet alive, only to take a cyborg teddy bear along with him for the ride home.
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In the epilogue 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, although he gets off a Last Breath Bullet. Xing starts CPR on Logan, and the story is left on a cliffhanger.
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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.
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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 she was undergoing treatment at. And died.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Sam Raimi film Drag Me to Hell certainly took an almost literal approach to this, for the female protagonist had spent the entire film attempting to beat an ancient gypsy curse to send her to Hell, by means of ownership of a cursed object (in this case, a button). In the end, she seems to have beaten the curse by apparently giving the button back to the gypsy who cursed her, getting the promotion she was hoping for, and was going to join her boyfriend on a relaxing vacation to Santa Barbara, where it was heavily implied he was going to pop the question. Then, at the very end, it turns out that her boyfriend still has the button, she had actually given the gypsy her boyfriend's vintage coin, and the film, of course, ends with her getting dragged to hell.
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This almost hit Lamia Loveless as part of a Wall Banger 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.
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