h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Can't be a good thing anyway.

I don't know which power it was. I suppose whoever it was that he prayed to. I don't remember him naming anyone in particular. Could be any power really I suppose.

How's that for a wishy washy uninformed answer?

But he didn't pray to anybody! He just wished it to thin air!

It's a huge, gaping plot hole is what it is. Just like when Harker escapes from Dracula's Castle.

Oh! Wishing to thin air? That'll work.......

Come now X.... Just because it isnt specifically stated who or what he prayed to doesnt mean he didnt have someone in mind.... And if that entity is powerful enough to grant his wish surely it knows who he's thinking of....

Explain Harker escaping from what he previously stated as an INESCAPABLE castle then. If I were Van Helsing, that's the first thing I'd ask him.

Deus Ex Machina.

Isn't that part of the fun of these things though? Get something impossible and then make it possible.

I don't think it's a good thing for a story to rely on unexplained and ridiculously convenient events, that's all.

Especially if it kinda jumps assuming too much.

I don't think it was literally inescapable. Nothing is is it? I think it was just to underscore the difficulty, contribute to Harker's feeling of desperation, and heighten the excitement of the escape. He could have said a seemingly inescapable castle.... but that wouldn't have been as good. I think that would have been too obvious foreshadowing.

Well you'd think that if you can enter a place, there's a door somewhere that you just came in through, so it must let you back out.

Exactly nothing is really impossible to escape from. Like you said, if there's a way in there must be a way out as well.

That would have been fine if they had actually /told/ you about his death-defying leap off the edge of a 500 foot tall cliff onto razor sharp rocks. But instead, it seems he magically teleported away. If that's not a Deus Ex Machina, I don't know what is.

I don't remember how he escaped... I thought it was just left up to the imagination at the crucial point.

The last you hear of him, Dracula's left him to the Brides. The story goes on for a while and you don't hear about him again until he turns up in a hospital in Europe somewhere. (Which is fine.) But you never find out how he gets out of the castle; it's not even in his own journal.

I thought the journal entries stopped because it was too traumatic.
Also, I thought there was some adventure where he finds Dracula in his coffin and almost cuts his head off with a shovel. Right about the time the boxes are being moved out and he's hoping to be able to escape....

After he's out of the castle though, I don't see why he couldn't talk about it with Mina at least. At the very least their could've been a line where he's like "I'm sorry, it was just so terrible that I don't want to talk about it."

Yeah. But there are still a few entries after that before he gets left to the wolves, so to speak.

You'd think they would've put something in. Maybe it got cut to save money on effects?

Effects?
It's a book that was written over a hundred years ago. What effects?