Re: Season Two Episode Titles
I still like my explaination better. /forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif If you add the word "unexpected" or "unexplainable" to your definition, I think that would be better. /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif
As for your example of a
dues ex machina being Epsilon 3 ... I think that is a bit of a stretch and too literal of an interpretation.
Here is some more information I (ok, really my husband since he is the one who recently read up on it) found:
<font color="orange">deus ex machina (DAY-uhs eks ma-kuh-nuh, -nah, MAK-uh-nuh) noun
1. In Greek and Roman drama, a god lowered by stage machinery to resolve a plot or extricate the protagonist from a difficult situation.
2. An unexpected, artificial, or improbable character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction or drama to resolve a situation or untangle a plot.
3. A person or event that provides a sudden and unexpected solution to a difficulty.
[New Latin deus ex machina : deus, god + ex, from + machina, machine (translation of Greek theos apo mekhanes).]
"In fact the duke acts as the deus ex machina of the piece, working in the background to ensure that everything turns out right and manipulating the characters' actions along the way."
Robert Nott, Lust, justice and faith, The Santa Fe New Mexican, Jun 23, 2000.
When we face a serious crisis we often look upwards for divine intervention. In such hopeless times we pray to the gods to descend from heaven and deliver us from whatever travail prevails. In ancient Greek and Roman drama, the gods literally came down from above, though not from heaven, to help the heros of the drama and save the plot.
As it turns out, the gods themselves needed a little bit of help coming down. A crane was used to lower a god onto the stage and untangle the plot. Thus he was known as deus ex machina, literally, a god from a machine. Soon the figurative use of this device in a drama began to be described by the same name. Greek dramatist Euripides (480-406 BCE) was particularly fond of it. We are all intimately familiar with this device thanks to popular cinema. The hero who had supposedly drowned half-way through the story is miraculously revived to accompany the heroine into the sunset.</font color>
Source:
http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/archives/1100
Anyway, it wasn't my intention to debate the meaning of the latin phrase. Sorry! /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif I just find it interesting to know what it means in order to speculate what the episode might be about.
I just read the article from Sci Fi Wire that Channe so kindly posted and wondered if the epiosde DEM might be in reference to Mr. Smith's character.
He said in the article:
<font color="orange">[Mr. Smith] is either an unwitting prophet or a Shakespearean fool. "You don't know which he is," Astin said in an interview. "He claims that God is speaking to him and he seems to know a lot more than he rightly should."</font color>
