Narrow Annihilation Escape

Oh boy... we're in big trouble!

A character's location is destroying itself!

It's...

• being overrun by a menace!
• close to being nuked!
• dimensionally-collapsing!

or any other bad thing is happening, and we're going to be taken with it!

Help has arrived, or an escape path has opened at the last second! Yay!

Only, even though they're safe, the bad thing is that was a one-way escape, and the connection to the location is now forever cut-off. The location cannot be accessed because of lethal danger, a problem exists that would strand the character(s) there forever, or the location itself is physically gone; they can't return, even if they wanted to, and the characters involved may even get a double whammy by seeing the location destroyed from their safe vantage point. Although for many, this is no problem, as they've already gotten what they needed or are safe anyways.

This trope crosses over into Fling a Light into the Future, You Can't Go Home Again, and Point of No Return. See also Mind-Reformat Death, which also has to do with a severed connection.

In video games: this may also be closely tied to a Load-Bearing Boss, if the boss' destruction also sets the destruction of the location in-motion; or, if the location-in-question is a universe/dimension that is collapsing or destroying itself, then it was caused by a Cosmic Keystone. May overlap with One-Time Dungeon. This may overlap with Permanently Missable Content if there's a special item or sidequest in the area that gets destroyed.

Because this trope deals with the destruction of a location that is important to the plot, spoilers are unmarked!!!

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Examples:

Comic Books

• One of the driving plot points behind the Superman franchise: Jor-El, a scientist from the planet Krypton, sends his son, Kal-El, in an escape capsule, toward Earth, just before Krypton's destruction.

Fan Works

• One of squirrelking's Troll Fic works, Halo: Halos in Space, has Joe Chief (No relation to Master Chief.) fighting an invasion on a ship. After the ship is flooded...
  After teh aliens sent the flood other aliens with big heads came and Joe Chief had to runaway becaues there was to many of those and they were killing other human people on teh ship. "Human people army guys hurry and come in ship!" Joe Chief said to the human people there becaus aliens were killing them and he was in a escape ship and ready to go. 3 other human people came just in time becaus the big ship blew up n they were flying fast in space and going to the Halo to meet the army base and get ready fo tight. [sic]

Film - Animated

• Dinosaur: When an asteroid hits miles away from Lemur Island, Aladar and his found family outrun the ensuing fireballs and fire cloud and manage to get to safety before the island is destroyed. Once they reach a nearby shore, they survey the burning island in despair before they move on.
• In a parody of Superman, Both Megamind and Metro Man were launched into space as infants shortly before their home worlds were sucked into a black hole. Both aliens arrive on Earth, landing in proximity, where they become rivals growing up.
• Titan A.E. has this as the driving force behind the plot. In the year 3028, an energy-based race known as the Drej has attacked Earth due to knowledge about a ship known as "The Titan Project". They show up with a giant ship weapon, and fire at North America, resulting in a literal Earth-Shattering Kaboom. A handful of humans flee in spaceships, but the majority of the human race is massacred in the destruction. Those that survive find themselves reduced to becoming spacefaring hoboes: either doing menial work in the ghettos of civilized worlds, or scrounging subsistence in drifter colonies.
• Wreck-It Ralph: The characters within a malfunctioning video game need to do this, lest they be erased from existence once the video game cabinet's plug is pulled from the outlet. Also shown averted with Vanellope in an Imagine Spot by Ralph, where, while the rest of the characters have made it out of Sugar Rush, Vanellope cannot evacuate with them because she is a glitched character, and is left behind; graphically shown being sucked into existential nothingness.

Film - Live Action

• What kicks off the plot of Escape from the Planet of the Apes: Even though Taylor triggered the Doomsday Bomb that destroyed Earth in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, three anthropomorphic chimpanzees, Dr. Milo, Zira, and Cornelius, manage to repair the spaceship that the original quartet of astronauts from Planet of the Apes (1968) arrived in, and escape just before Earth is destroyed. The shockwave causes a time warp that brings the trio to the (then-)modern 1960s.
• Happens at the end of Millennium (1989), when a character causes a paradox that affects Humanity 1000 years into the future. Earth is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and time engineers are attempting to repopulate the planet with people from the past who were about to meet their death (and thus would not affect the timeline). However, a keen NTSB investigator finds a piece of technology, half of a stun weapon, similar to the other half he found 25 years earlier. A theoretical physicist involved in the investigation accidentally kills himself while assembling the weapon, causing the aforementioned paradox, which sends a "timequake" into the future, threatening to destroy the complex housing the time-gate system. The leader of the time complex sends all of the people through to safety into a farther, more distant future, just before the timequake hits.
• MonsterVerse:
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters: When King Ghidorah awakens, he causes the scientific outpost that was built around his tomb to collapse into the ground, the heroes barely making it to safety. At the film's end, Boston is nuked and irradiated by Fire Godzilla while the Russell family and Monarch escape by tiltrotor.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: This occurs in the Hollow Earth when the temple built by Kong's ancestors is destroyed. As the cavern collapses, the three core members of Team Kong plus Kong himself just manage to escape being crushed by the collapse via a tunnel, but the area they left behind, and all the meaningful history and long-passed ultraterrestrial culture it held, is gone; much to Kong's ire.
• A Sound of Thunder: After a wayward tourist, Eckels, steps on a butterfly while on a time-safari, our timeline and the events leading up to the modern day begin to shift in "time waves", with nature taking over the planet, and modern day animals mutating into crossbreeds. Eventually, Safari Team Leader Travis Ryer and technological developer Sonia Rand are forced to hightail it to an experimental version of the time tunnel that the Time Safari company uses, so Ryer can go back to prevent the start of the catastrophe in the first place. Rand is able to activate the time tunnel just in the nick of time, as the final time wave passes through and completely changes Earth and ruins its technology.
• Star Trek (2009): Nero, a Romulan, goes on a vengeful rampage against the Federation, starting by destroying Vulcan with a black hole bomb. Spock is able to rescue the Vulcan High Elders, and Sarek, his father, but is unable to save his mother, Amanda, as the cliff she stood on gave way as the landscape crumbled while they beamed up to the Enterprise. The final view of Vulcan is of the planet spiraling into nothingness as the Enterprise flies away.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who:
  • "Inferno": The Doctor is able to escape the alternate "Republic" version of Earth with the help of the fascist versions of the characters (who each all undergo a Heel–Face Turn), just as that version of Earth is destroyed by the drilling penetration of the crust, releasing tremendous forces and lava that flood and shatter the planet. Fortunately, "our" plan to penetrate the crust has not moved as far along, so the Doctor is able to stop the drilling.
  • "The Sound of Drums": Played straight, then averted. The Master, under the guise of Prime Minister Harold Saxon, brings the remaining population of Humanity (in the insane, cybernetically-enhanced form of the Toclafane) from the very end of the universe (as in, the end of time), and with a Paradox Machine tied into the Doctor's TARDIS, massacres the population of Earth. Humanity, before they arrived in the past, had hoped to play this trope straight as the universe reached its heat death. Averted when Jack Harkness destroys the Paradox Machine, reverting the timeline to normal, and, in the extremely far future, leaving the remains of Humanity to die along with the universe.
• Galidor: Defenders of the Outer Dimension, "Escape from Kek" and "Pieces of Nick": Implied with the titular location "Kek", as everything is an illusion there, and is only held together by the mind of Gorm, the main villain. When Nicholas Bluetooth, one of the the main characters, is convinced by Gorm to don a power suit that enhances his abilities, Nick becomes corrupt. Later, Nick comes around, and destroys Gorm's machinery holding Kek together, but is forced to bring the suit with him. When Gorm uses the suit to track The Egg, a a weaponized wave of energy overloads the suit when Nick touches it, and later realizes that he's out of phase with the rest of reality, meaning no one can see or hear him. Allegra, Nick's friend, tries to convince the crew of The Egg to return to Kek, even though it has been destroyed.
• In the short-lived UPN series Nowhere Man, main character Thomas Veil is searching for proof of his existence, as the show revolves around a global conspiracy un-personing him. He finds a recluse who is a computer and VR genius, and get in contact with the recluse's old computer professor who decides to help them. The VR goggles they demonstrate are of the "so realistic we used real-life video" kind, as well as being an instance of Your Mind Makes It Real, where one's mind is entangled as if it were a part of the computer system. To hack into the website server of the conspiracy, they don their VR headsets, and literally crawl through tunnels (in the VR world) to get to said server. Unfortunately, their presence is detected, and someone starts to erase the server, represented by expanding physical static. The computer genius is caught in the wake of the deletion, and decides to stay behind to let Thomas live and return to the real world. He barely escapes, and when he returns to the real world, the computer genius is now a catatonic vegetable.
  Pam Peterson (the computer teacher): I think he's still in there... When the system went down, he went with it.
• Happens several times on Stargate SG-1:
  • "There But For The Grace Of God": On a distant planet, Daniel Jackson finds a mirror that teleports him to an alternate reality where certain differences exist. Unfortunately, the Goa'uld are also currently invading Earth. Daniel is able to dial and get back to the planet where he found the mirror, just as the base self-destruct is counting down the final 10 seconds.
  • "A Matter of Time": Subverted. SG-10 has become caught in a gravity time warp caused by a newly-formed black hole; time is slowing down so much for them that their chance of escape would take ever longer each second that goes by. (i.e. Zeno's Paradox) Stargate Command is only able to stop Earth from being pulled in through the Stargate by setting a bomb close to the gate wormhole, which diverts its path to another planet in the gate network. Played straight, however, in the Expanded Universe Novels "A Matter of Honor"/"The Cost of Honor", where 5 years after, the SGC are able to rescue SG-10, even with the time-warp (thanks to alien technology), where all the events that happened in the interim have caught up; from SG-10's POV, due to the time-warp, it was only a few hours, and the wormhole that SG-10 dialed to Earth was indeed active for 38 minutes on the alien planet, but only for a second on Earth. Furthermore, the matter from the sun that Sam detonated had not yet arrived, only for it to arrive later and incinerate one of the SG-10 team. Thankfully, the rest of SG-1 and SG-10 are able to escape just as the planet is destroyed by the heat of the solar matter.
  • "Unnatural Selection": The Replicators overrun Hala, the Asgard homeworld, and convert an Asgard time-dilation device to their own needs. This has the effect of allowing some Replicators to evolve into a humanoid form. Carter attempts to bring one of them to their side. She's instead forced to set the device in reverse, instead slowing time to an infinitesimal crawl, such that time might as well be frozen. Subverted in that the Replicators seemingly discover how to get to the device, as the humanoid Replicators return in later episodes.
  • "Ethon": The planet of Tegalus is taken over by followers of the Ori. When the Rand Protectorate President threatens to destroy the Caledonians with a Kill Sat, already having destroyed the Earth starship Prometheus, even after the Caledonians agree to a ceasefire, a fight breaks out in the Rand command center, and tensions are later implied to have boiled over into an all-out war. The SGC is unable to later dial into Caledonia's Stargate, and it's again implied that the planet destroyed itself in mutually-assured destruction.
• In the Star Trek: Short Treks episode, "The Trouble with Edward", the titular Lt. Edward Larkin modifies the genome of tribbles to multiply exponentially, which causes Capt. Lucero to abandon the U.S.S. Cabot when they overtake the entire ship. Edward isn't so lucky.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation
  • "Heart Of Glory": A group of Klingon passengers are found on-board a deteriorating freighter. The away team sent to investigate and the passengers barely escape, with a transporter malfunction at first, to boot, just as the freighter explodes.
  • "Time Squared": Done by Picard's doppelganger, but unintentionally. When Picard leaves the ship in a shuttlecraft, thinking that an energy vortex wants him and not the Enterprise or its crew, an energy blast destroys the ship, and he is thrown back in time 6 hours.
  • "Contagion": A variation, but later played straight. The sister ship to the Enterprise, the U.S.S. Yamato, is destroyed by an antimatter breach, when its computer systems are infected with an alien program that rewrites them. Picard decides to investigate its planetary origin, but finds that the program has followed them from the Yamato Captain's Logs. In orbit of the planet Iconia, the Enterprise encounters a probe launched from the surface. The variation occurs when Geordi discovers that the probe was the source of the alien program, and barely makes it to the bridge to order Picard to destroy it. Later, the crew encounters a Romulan warbird laying claim to the planet. Picard, Worf, and Data beam down to the complex the probe was launched from on the planet and find a control room for the probes, as well as a gateway that can transport individuals to distant planets and places. To keep the technology there from falling into Romulan hands, and prevent the probes from ensnaring anyone else, Picard jams the system by launching a probe, but keeping the bay doors shut. He is only just able to use the doorway to transport to the Romulan Warbird as the complex self-destructs. (Thankfully, the Enterprise crew have figured out the problem and are able to beam Picard away safely.)
  • "Remember Me": Dr. Crusher is caught in an experimental warp bubble accidentally caused by her son, Wesley. From Dr. Crusher's point-of-view, she has gone nowhere, and is instead experiencing a series of horrifying incidents: the Enterprise crew is disappearing, and eventually, the rest of the universe disappears as well. Again, she makes an existentially-horrifying discovery: She's caught in the bubble, and it's rapidly shrinking, annihilating any matter it comes into contact with. Deducing where the experiment was first performed, to find the connecting bridge between the two realities^note  as she had encountered vortexes that had, to her, threatened to pull her in, and unknown to her, also rescue her, she races to Main Engineering as the wall of the universal warp bubble advances on her, and she makes it back to our reality by the skin of her teeth.
  • "Rascals": This and a Negative Space Wedgie kick off the episode's plot, causing Capt. Picard, Guinan, Keiko O'Brien, and Ensign Ro Laren to regress into pre-teen children; while returning to the Enterprise, their shuttle is caught in a spatial anomaly that weakens the hull of the shuttle (by breaking it down into constituent elements), and also removes Technobabble genetic sequences responsible for puberty. Chief O'Brien is just able to bring them back, but is shocked when the four materialize on the transporter pad as children and not adults.

Video Games

• Part way through Final Fantasy X, the Al Bhed are forced to evacuate Home in an airship (which turns out to be the machina Tidus helped salvage near the beginning), when the setting's resident Corrupt Church attack and blow it up. Rikku (the party's resident open Al Bhed) is suitably distraught, while Wakka has a moment of Heel Realisation when his indifference (from his prejudice towards them) earns him a You Monster! comment.
• Golden Sun: Sol Sanctum is the very first dungeon in the game, but can't be visited after it's cleared due to the volcano it's built in erupting.
• Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: The villains cause a cave-in that cuts you off from the entire first part of the world map for the entirety of the game, easily leading to several djinn being Permanently Missable Content.

• In Knights of the Old Republic, the player character steals the Ebon Hawk and escapes Taris with their companions as Darth Malak's fleet levels the planet.
• Happens in the Myst series, at least three times (but subverted once). Before the events of the first game, Myst, even before the D'ni civilization was created, the civilization of the Ronay in the world of Garternay realized their star was dying. A Ronay noble writer, Ri'Neref, wrote a linking^note portal book in-secret, that just happened to end up on our planet Earth, in our universe. Here, he and a large group of civilians, made their home in a gargantuan cavern under present day New Mexico, dubbing themselves and their home "D'ni". Later, when a human, Anna, discovered an entrance into the city's outer tunnels and came down to the cavern, some individuals were bigoted enough against her marriage to a D'ni nobleman, Aitrus to deem the D'ni civilization unworthy of continuing. So, in their rage, they released a gaseous plague that caused the population to either die or evacuate, within the day, and the civilization to collapse. After the events of Myst, Atrus (grandson of Aitrus), another writer, is trying to keep another world, Riven, written by his father, from dimensionally collapsing. You are tasked with going to Riven, capturing Atrus' father, Gehn, and freeing his abducted wife, Catherine. If the player is successful, Catherine brings her world's population to a safe haven, and everyone escapes, while you are sent back to your home through a dimensional anomaly as the world collapses.
• In Persona 5 taking down a Palace Ruler makes their Palace crumble and be removed from the MetaNav. Almost every chapter ends with a cutscene of Phantom Thieves barely escaping the collapsing Palace.
• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: The opening of the World of Light story mode shows the entire universe being destroyed by Galeem, with the only one who is shown to have survived the cataclysm being Kirby, who only just manages to temporarily blink out of the line of fire by pushing his Warp Star to its absolute limit. The DLC characters^note Piranha Plant, Joker, the four Heroes, Banjo & Kazooie, Terry, Byleth, Min-Min, Steve/Alex/Zombie/Enderman, Sephiroth, Pyra and Mythra, Kazuya, and Sora also seemingly survive the disaster, given how they are immediately made available to the player in the mode after freeing ten fighters from Galeem, but the game does not offer an in-universe explanation for their survival nor whether or not they were actually captured by Galeem themselves before joining the party.
• Timelie: Several levels disintegrate as the girl runs through them, making that level a Timed Mission. Sometimes the disintegration works in her favor, as a robot may be disintegrated before it can catch up to her.
• Seemingly the player's motivator to get back to the level's portal in Wario Land 4: In each level is a "Frog Switch", contained within is a bomb that is set to go off after a set amount of time. Sometimes the player encounters this at the very beginning of the level, when forced to press it upon entry, and is forced to run through the entire level within a close time limit! When the player guides Wario back through the level's entrance/exit portal, the entire dimension seemingly collapses into chaos.

Web Animation

• Occurs in Super Mario Bros. Z, but subverted in that the location still exists (considering what it is, though, no would really would want to go back): Sonic, Mario, and the rest of the team discover a pipe in an underground cave somewhere in the Mushroom Kingdom. This leads to the Minus World, where the landscape goes on to infinity, and everything is uncomfortably retro. (read: 8-bit graphics) Here, Mario and Sonic meet Dr. Kolorado, a Koopa explorer, with his assistant Goombella. Sonic later discovers a warp pipe in the water that would seemingly take them back to the normal world, but like the glitch in the original game, it takes them to the surface, still in the Minus World, right where they started. Luigi jumps in to save Mario and the rest of the gang. Mecha Sonic, who followed Mario and Sonic immediately after they entered the entrance pipe, dukes it out with the pair, along with Luigi, while Kolorado and Goombella can only watch. Kolorado checks his watch, which is actually broken, but drops it when Luigi collides with him. The fall kickstarts the watch, which dissipates the negative energy within the Minus World, turning everything normal. However, their glee is short-lived when Dr. E. Gadd contacts them and reveals that the negative energy is slowly returning, and will seal the entire dimension off once again, turning back into retro appearance, if they do not get to the exit pipe soon. Everyone makes it out, unfortunately including Mecha Sonic, with just a second to spare.

Western Animation

• Cyberchase: In the premiere, Inez, Jackie, Matt, and Digit travel to an island in Cyberspace, to rescue the kidnapped Dr. Marbles. Every day at sundown, the island undergoes a giant quake and reformats itself ^note read: reshapes, and anyone caught in the catastrophe is trapped. Marbles is freed, but Marbles' escape vehicle has room for only one person. Inez insists that Marbles take it to escape. Motherboard creates three escape portals on the island; however, in her recently-weakened state, she can only create them at random. Using their knowledge of direction and distance (the theme of the episode), the quartet escape back to Motherboard's base with seconds to spare, while Hacker's^note That's "THE Hacker" to you!!! ship is caught in the reformat, which turns the island into a glacier, temporarily trapping him there.
• Family Guy, "The Big Bang Theory": A variation, only averted by repairing the timeline. Bertram, Stewie's half-brother, goes back in time to kill Leonardo DaVinci. Unfortunately, due to the Timey-Wimey Ball, Leonardo is Stewie's ancestor, and Stewie himself, when born later, would do something to result in the Big Bang occurring and giving birth to the universe. Leonardo's death results in ripples and holes in time and the universe, with Stewie and Brian barely making it into Stewie's time machine as reality tears itself apart.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In the second part of "Twilight's Kingdom", Twilight tries to evade the magic-draining centaur Tirek. When she teleports to the Golden Oaks Library, she sees that Tirek is blasting a powerful fireball towards her location. She quickly retrieves her pet owl, Owlowiscious, and teleports away from the library just as Tirek's fireball consumes it to smoldering ash. Even though Twilight later gets a crystal castle to call her own, she bemoans that she can no longer live in the Golden Oaks Library.

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