Quote Originally Posted by Carry2 View Post
I quoted the wikipedia definition, which is somewhat narrower, on the first page of the thread, but I also think you're creating something of a false dichotomy. I don't have a problem with a story containing unlikely events- even plot-critical unlikely events- every now and then. (In the same way that I can gloss over the remarkably precise timing needed for Romeo and Juliet to kill themselves, as others have commented on.) After all, statistically speaking, unlikely events do and must happen sometimes (and after all, the probability of any sufficiently long sequence of non-certain events will tend to zero, by the multiplication law.)
The thing with coincidences in stories is that you see them so much because they're the critical points of the story. Let's say I'm in a story and suddenly I get kidnapped. Pick any public location you want that I get kidnapped from. I just happen to be there, the bad guys happen to walk in when I'm there, they recognize me, and they kidnap me. This is a pure coincidence, but one that was bound to happen if we live in the same area for months. Now from a story perspective, the few thousand times I go to a public place and nothing happens are completely meaningless. They might show me going out a lot to establish I'm social, but beyond that there's nothing to show, so they'll skip ahead to my kidnapping. It'll look like a giant coincidence, but that's because all the other stuff isn't worth talking about.

Or I guess to put it a different way, if it wasn't for those coincidences, there would be no story to tell.

Applying odds to all these things and multiplying them is a silly way of looking at things. I could apply that to my day today. What are the odds I'd wake up at 7:23 (no alarm)? What are the odds it'd take me a few minutes to find my kindle because I didn't put it next to the bed like I normally do? What are the odds traffic wasn't as bad as normal today? What are the odds my cable company would call me today trying to sell me more stuff I absolutely wouldn't use? I mean, if we take all those odds and multiply them together, we'll be approaching zero too, yet I just had that day.

So if it were just the MitD showing a spontaneous progression from idiot to genius within one scene*, I could probably gloss over that too. This is more a 'straw that broke the camel's back' for me, given that, as far as I can tell, most plot-critical events in the strip have hinged on some random fluke of probability or previously-untouched-on faction or ability. If some of you consider that a feature, not a bug, then good for you. But I am not one of those people.
It's not just the Go scene, that's just the comic showing us the key turn around. O'Chull gave mitd a wake-up call, and made him realize he's just playing along as a naive pawn in the scheme of some pretty bad people. The point is that until he met O'Chull, mitd was kinda happy just following along, not really thinking or even paying attention to what's happening. O'Chull gave him the drive to start caring, and we see this in several more scenes following the Go one. He clearly cares about O'Chull, enough to actually pay attention to what's going on, and to remember him. For him to suddenly jump to their defense is not that surprising, and it didn't take an extremely clever person to do so either.

You have to realize, the difference between a deux ex machina and a plot point is foreshadowing. Mitd is shown to bond with O'Chull, we can see he's getting more involved with what team evil is doing, etc. This foreshadowing establishes why he acts the way he does in 901.