Teleporter Accident: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

 

 

Compare and contrast with [[Teleportation Sickness]], where the process is merely uncomfortable... or at least whatever effects it has, even if bad, are not caused by it malfunctioning. (And yes, there is an overlap in a minority of cases.)

 

Not to be confused with a [[Porting Disaster]].

{{examples}}

* In ''[[Noein]]'', the Dragon Knights run this risk each time they travel between dimensions. Kuina has it particularly bad, inevitably losing another chunk of himself with each transport; the only one to suffer worse is a [[Red Shirt]] who dies in the first episode when he arrives with half his body missing.

* This is referenced and mocked in the very first issue of ''Hiroshi: Strange Love'', after the titular [[Mad Scientist]] invents a teleporter. According to his assistant, "One, you'll probably end up fusing someone with an animal, two, you'll end up trapped between spaces, or three, your mind will switch with someone else's . . ." {{spoiler|It's number one--the assistant [[Catgirl|merges with a stray cat]].}}

 

* A variation occurs in ''Cable & Deadpool'': the two characters genetic code got mixed up beforehand, leading to Cable's transporter fusing them together every time they use the wrong command.

** He actually uses the "Teleport by one" command again, just to piss Cable off.

** {{spoiler|Which is why she wasn't able to save her parents from dying in a fire. Or maybe she DID, but...}}

* [[Mad Magazine]] did a ''[[Star Trek]]'' parody during the original series run, and naturally Kirk in the transporter ends up reassembled...oddly - a hand where a foot should be, another hand sticking out of his ear...

 

* The remake of ''[[The Fly]]'' has both accidental teleporting and [[Tele Frag|telefragging]]. The animals Dr. Brundle sends through come out "synthetic", inside out, and die in terrible pain. His own experiment with the teleporter doesn't go well either: a fly enters the chamber with him, and the two are merged together. [[Body Horror]] results.

** And in [[Novelization|the novel of the film]] written by [[Alan Dean Foster]], one of the other unfortunates was {{spoiler|''Kirk's ex-wife'' (not [[Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan|Carol Marcus]], though).}}

** Parodied in ''[[Galaxy Quest]]'', when Fred tries to teleport Jason up to the ship. He tests the teleporter on a pig-lizard creature instead, with disastrous results:

* In ''[[The Prestige]]'', Tesla succeeds in creating a teleporter... sort of. {{spoiler|What really happens is that it creates a copy at the desired location, without destroying the original.}}

* In ''[[Spaceballs]]'', President Skroob reluctantly uses a transporter even though he's scared of them. His fears are realized when he materializes and the bottom half of his body is facing the wrong way. He's transported back to "fix" the problem and we find out he only needed to walk to the next room, anyway.

 

* A couple of very mild ones happen in ''[[Artemis Fowl]]: The Lost Colony'' in the time-tunnel. Artemis and Holly each wind up with one of the other one's eyes, and No1 loses a couple megabytes' worth of memories.

* [[Arthur C. Clarke]]'s short story ''Travel by Wire'' wryly outlines some of the problems inherent in teleportation, with the system's designer admitting that he'd far rather travel by rocket.

* While scrambling into action at the climax of the first ''[[Time Wars]]'' novel, [[Red Shirt|several people]] are teleported to the same time and place. The resulting [[Biological Mashup]] is reported to be mercifully short-lived.

* Played straight, and averted in a ''[[Ciaphas Cain]]'' novel. A squad of World Eater Berserker Marines are teleported in front of Cain and co. These Berserkers are fine and butcher their way through hordes of Slaaneshi cultists. However, [[Footnote Fever|the foot notes]] mention that teleporting is inaccurate, especially when done through a planet as was the case here. Its likely that there are dozens of World Eaters entombed throughout the planet's crusts in near misses, unless {{spoiler|the cultists' [[Summoning Ritual]]}} helped.

* "Counter Foil" by George O. Smith is a short story where the ubiquitous teleporter system breaks down. People go in, but suddenly people stop coming out.

 

* Transporter Accidents are recurring plot devices in various ''[[Star Trek]]'' series. Which makes several characters' insistence to the safety of the procedure rather bizarre. As any viewer can tell you, when transporters mess up, the result rarely are pretty. Perhaps, like air travel, they're very safe except when they ''really'' aren't. Transporter malfunctions have been known to:

** Create a clone of an individual (Riker).

** Cause people to get transporter psychosis, going nuts. Implied to be the result of putting the complex structures of the brain back together just slightly wrong.

** Split one entity into [[Good Angel, Bad Angel|good and evil entities]].

** Send people [[Time Travel|back in time]].

** Beam people inside solid rock or out into open space.

** Outright kill people.

** According to Chakotay, re-materialization without clothes has happened. Which considering the alternatives is getting off ''very'' light.

** De-age people back into kids.

*** A deleted scene would have shown the beagle re-materializing aboard the ''Enterprise'' [[Chekhov's Gag|at the very end]].

** Being stuck in the buffer too long so your pattern has degraded too much to be rematerialized.

** Note that despite all this, in every series except ''Enterprise'', when a character is shown to be unwilling or scared to used the transporters, they are treated as eccentric and unreasonable in their fear of the device.

** Also note that, apparently, [[Reed Richards Is Useless|none of these effects are reproducible when you might actually want them]]. A gizmo that can [[Fountain of Youth|turn an old man into a child, with his memory intact?]] A gate for entering parallel universes? Of course, most of these effects would be [[Story-Breaker Power|Story Breakers]] if they could be invoked at will. Even the related (and ubiquitous) replicator tech is never explored to its fullest potential, for this reason.

* In ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'', O'Neil and Carter enter the [[Cool Gate|Stargate]] to return to base, but end up on an ice planet instead. However, {{spoiler|it turns out they did make it back to Earth, only they rematerialized in Antarctica.}}

** Teal'c also ended up spending a few days as data trapped in the gate's teleport buffer after the other gate was destroyed during transit, forcing the SGC to shut down gate operations (to avoid overwriting him) until they got him out.

** The [[Techno Babble]] explanation is that the gate sends objects as energy through the wormhole, reintegrating them on the other side. The buffer keeps that information for a short instant before the gate re-forms and expels the travelers it just received. It's also the reason iris stops reintegration with a [[Portal Slam]].

** A ring transporter near a dialing supergate and its singularity will send the matter stream to the galaxy where the supergate connects to. It's implied that the Ori made sure the matter stream would then find a ring transporter on a planet for Vala to re-integrate into.

** An energy discharge in a wormhole bisecting a black hole causes all subsequent wormholes bisecting the black hole from the same direction (in any alternate universe to boot) to connect to a specific alternate universe's stargate on Earth.

* The ''[[Doctor Who]]'' two-parter episode "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead" featured Teleporter Accidents on a planet-wide scale deliberately like a lifeboat. {{spoiler|The main computer of the Library teleported everybody ''into'' her database in order to save them from evil shadowy pirahna particles.}}

* ''[[The Comic Strip Presents]]'': "The Yob" parodies ''[[The Fly]]'' remake by having a scientist accidentally merged with a soccer hooligan. Also, at the end of the episode, a macho stud ends up with the lower body of {{spoiler|a tomcat}}.

 

** Warp Spiders can make a special teleportation "shunt" move during their assault phases. However things can go wrong, in which one member of the squad is dragged into the warp, never to be heard from again. This is especially scary for Autarchs, as (being a unit of one) only he can disappear, so it's recommended to keep him in a unit of warp spiders so that someone else can take the unfortunate fall.

 

* A teleporter accident with Lucca's latest invention is what starts off the adventure in ''[[Chrono Trigger]]''.

* Before that, Durandal, the rampant AI, captures the player mid-teleportation, and forces him to "Play a game" of killing the pfhor in a quarantine storage (leading to the level "Blaspheme Quarantine"), in which if the player loses, "(He and Durandal) will continue the relationship on friendlier terms," but if he loses, he dies. Later, Durandal has trouble teleporting you while you are in the alien ship. Tycho also steals the player from Durandal mid-teleportation a few times in ''Marathon: Infinity'' and once in ''Marathon 2: Durandal''.

** At one point, Roger's head is turned into a giant eyeball and at another, he was partially melted. (These were [[Played for Laughs|just sight gags]] and were fixed immediately afterwards)

** Eventually, the characters figure out that they can use the teleporter to intentionally create an accident {{spoiler|and thereby separate the toxic goo from the people it's infected.}}

* ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' has craftable teleporters which can send you to certain cities. They're stated to be safe and reliable, except they aren't, having possible mishaps such as making you an evil twin, changing your appearance to that of another race or sending you high, high up in the sky. In the case of the latter, it's a good thing the engineers capable of making these devices also have the option of adding a parachute to their cloaks.

* The ''[[Suikoden]]'' series has the recurring character Viki, a young sorceress with very powerful teleportation magic. Unfortunately, she's also an error-prone [[The Ditz|ditz]] who occasionally botches a teleport. In gameplay, her errors are completely harmless: a time-consuming annoyance at worst, and sometimes actually helpful since they're the only way into certain rooms that are locked from the inside. Story-wise, more serious accidents (one at the end of each game) explain why she's able to appear in every game of the series despite her being a teenager in all of them and the games having gaps of as much as 150 years between them: when she ''really'' botches a teleport, it's not just a matter of where she'll end up but ''[[Time Travel|when]]''.

** If you use her teleport rune in battle, she will teleport things (enemies out of the battle, or heavy objects that will fall on the enemies). If she botches a teleport at this time, it can have ''disastrous'' results (such as teleporting all allies except her out of battle, or making the heavy object fall on the party).

* ''[[Alpha Centauri]]'': Upon discovering Matter Transmission, the quote from Professor Zakharov is: "The first living thing to go through the device was a small white rat. I still have him, in fact. As you can see, the damage was not so great as they say."

* The Chronosphere teleportation system from the ''[[Command & Conquer]]'': ''Red Alert'' series (see above) is lethal to unprotected human passengers, although this is somewhat inconsistently applied. In the first game, teleporting an APC full of soldiers results in the APC arriving at its destination empty, implying the soldiers were all killed...so what about the driver of the APC or any of the other vehicles that can be teleported? Makes more sense in the second game, where the Chronosphere only kills infantry out in the open (and indeed can be used as a weapon directly against the enemy in such a way).

* The prologue to ''[[Saira]]'' involves one of these, where the main character seems to have been accidentally teleported into the distant future [[Epileptic Trees|(or another dimension, or something)]]. {{spoiler|Her [[Chastity Couple|apparent boyfriend]] was a mis-teleport victim, too; he was hurled to the other side of the galaxy by mistake, and the plot of the game revolves around Saira trying to teleport herself there. [[Multiple Endings|Most of the endings]] are also teleporter accidents; she gets sent to the wrong place if the teleport parts used aren't fancy enough, but somehow she [[Nobody Can Die|always ends up somewhere habitable.]]}}

* ''[[The Game of the Ages]]'': Until you learn to protect yourself, portal pools rip you apart.

 

* In ''[[Wapsi Square]]'', Monica is capable of teleporting, but isn't particularly good at it. As a result, she tends to suffer comical but harmless mishaps such as [http://wapsisquare.com/comic/fillmein/ poor] [http://wapsisquare.com/comic/assledtheway/ arrival] [http://wapsisquare.com/comic/homeagain/ placement,] upside down [http://wapsisquare.com/comic/justafewholes/ on arrival,] and [http://wapsisquare.com/comic/hang-of-this/ switching clothing with the person traveling with her.]

* In ''[[Accidental Centaurs]]'', a malfunctioning teleporter prototype explodes, creating a wormhole to another dimension that sucks up two of the system's designers. On the other end of the wormhole, they find that [http://www.accidentalcentaurs.com/?date=2010-03-08 they have been transformed into centaurs].

 

 

* In ''[[X-Men: Evolution]]'', Forge tries to extend the range of Nightcrawler's teleportation, and ends up creating rifts to the hell-like dimension Nightcrawler uses to move from place to place. Needless to say, the inhabitants get out.

* ''[[Dexter's Laboratory]]'' episode "Sole Brother" featured Dexter testing a teleporter. When he used it on himself, he ended up fused with Dee Dee's foot.

* When Candace and Perry fell into ''[[Phineas and Ferb]]'''s teleporter in "Does This Duckbill Make Me Look Fat?", they [[Body Swap|swapped bodies]].

* The ''[[Pink Panther]]'' once fused the pale guy with a flower and himself to a bee.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Transformation Causes]]

[[Category:Teleportation Tropes]]