The Deus Ex Machina is an escape pod that was hidden in a box labelled "Hamdingers" in the Satellite of Love's cargo bay. It was discovered by Gypsy in during Experiment #512 when she asked Mike Nelson for help finding a way to get Joel Robinson off the Satellite. (She believed the Mads wanted to kill him after the movie.) The reason they didn’t discover it before was because (according to Gypsy) nobody likes Hamdingers, so they never opened the box to see what was really inside. Mike also helped Gypsy gain control of the escape pod after tricking TV's Frank into giving him the keys to the control panel in Deep 13. The escape pod is held in place on a ramp made of two large hands.
At the end of the episode, Gypsy used the Deus Ex Machina to launch Joel back to Earth, where he crash landed in the Australian outback.
Although it is mentioned that the Deux Ex Machina was the only escape pod aboard the SOL, three extra pods were discovered during Experiment #820, only to be destroyed by Crow, Gypsy and Servo's insipid carelessness.
Behind-the-scenes[]
A Latin translation of the Greek "theos ek mēkhanēs", literally "god from the machinery," the term "deus ex machina" has its origins in Greek theater, where actors representing the gods would be lowered on ropes into the performance to provide the denouement. In modern usage, the term has come to define any event in a narrative that saves the protagonist from a seemingly hopeless situation, usually in a cheap and lazy way.