Relocating the Explosion

Special Agent Kurt Weller shows you how to deal with a bomb without a bomb disposal team on-site.

Sam: Max, where should I put this so that it doesn't hurt anyone we know or care about?
Max: Out the window, Sam! There's nothing but strangers out there.

— Sam & Max Hit the Road

Picture this: You're one of the heroes of the story, and you and your allies find yourselves stuck between a rock and death by fiery explosion. What do you do? You can't Outrun the Fireball, Bomb Disposal isn't an option, and Jumping on a Grenade won't do much good either. Then, you remember that you're the only one who can fly (or is the only one thinking fast enough), and that there's only one real thing left for a hero to do... Relocating the Explosion far away from your friends, or the city, or even the world you're in. Be it a missile, a bomb, matter eating nanomachines, or some other form of mass death, it's up to you take it somewhere it can detonate "safely". Cue a distant explosion, and the nagging question the viewers are left concerning your ultimate fate.

This trope is often used near (or is) the climax of a story, and one of the ultimate (and easiest) methods of providing immediate suspense. Did the hero make the ultimate sacrifice, ensuring the villain's last resort would only have one casualty? Or did they get away in one piece, and are just on their way back to their friends? Often times, you'll find out within the same episode/chapter. Other times, you'll be waiting for the sequel. Occasionally, their survival isn't a question at all, and the suspense comes from whether or not the hero can make it in time.

This trope can come in many forms. If it's a missile, the hero will fly up to meet it head-on, detonating it high in the sky. If it's a Time Bomb, they'll have to move it far away before the timer expires. Sometimes the hero is the bomb themself! Of course, flying isn't always possible in a given setting, so there'll be times when someone just runs really fast (or drives) into the distance.

A subtrope of Stuff Blowing Up. Compare Misguided Missile and the tropes mentioned above. See also Grenade Hot Potato, when a character has time to pick up a live grenade and throw it somewhere (or at someone) else. Contrast Crisis Catch And Carry, in which the hero relocates the victim rather than the explosion. Potentially spoileriffic.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Segata Sanshiro's ultimate TV ad feature Segata stopping a missile fired at the Sega headquarters with his bare hands, and then relocating it in outer space while riding it in a Heroic Sacrifice.

Anime & Manga

• Dragon Ball:
  • In Dragon Ball Z Goku teleports himself and the about-to-explode Cell to King Kai's Planet in order to save the Earth.
  • He does it again in Dragon Ball Super, this time with an intergalactic poacher who claims to have a Suicide Bomb. It turns out to be a bluff, but King Kai is still pissed off that this is Goku's automatic response to people trying to blow themselves up (especially since King Kai is still dead as a result of the Cell example, meaning he'd probably be Deader than Dead if the bomb had been real).
  • Dragon Ball Super: In Chapter 89, Beta 1 fires a missile at Trunks while he's surrounded by innocent civilians. Knowing he can't dodge it, he catches it and hurls it into the sea.
• Happens in the final episode of Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai when Dai and Popp have to carry Killvearn, who was revealed to be a puppet that carries a black core within his head, a bomb which has a destructive power akin to an atomic bomb, into the sky to avert world destruction.
• Full Metal Panic!: Combined with Cutting the Knot when there's a crate with time bomb on board a jumbo airliner filled with hostages, Melissa uses her Humongous Mecha to cut a hole in the side of the plane, pick up the crate and throw it away, whereupon it explodes.
• Fairy Tail: Happy flies the badly-wounded Jackal into the sky when he tries to pull a Taking You with Me by turning himself into one final bomb to kill everyone in a town (although given Jackal's guild has the Magitek to pull off Resurrective Immortality, he wasn't nearly as concerned about his impending death as he was spiting the heroes). Happy survives with only burns and a ruined hairdo.
• Gunslinger Girl
  • This is how cyborg girl Beatrice is killed. During the assault on the Venice belltower of St Marks, she realises the terrorists have the warhead of a cruise missile in the belfry as a suicide bomb. Despite being shot through the guts with a 20mm shell, she uses her Super-Strength to pick up the 500kg warhead and throw it out the window. This saves everyone else but obliterates her.
  • When a Bouncing Betty mine is left as a Booby Trap inside a building, Henrietta uses her Super-Reflexes to knock the mine out the window as it's blasted into the air, a fraction before it explodes. There are Agency people outside (including her friend Triela in the anime) but as the cyborgs are programmed to defend their own handlers at all costs that wouldn't have stopped her.
• In KonoSuba, this happens at the end of Season 1 when the core of The Destroyer is about to explode. Kazuma tells Wiz to teleport it. This being Konosuba, the act of teleporting it has bad consequences for Kazuma, the core gets teleported to a mansion and Kazuma ends up on trial.
• In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha The Movie 2nd A's, Clyde Harlaown's Heroic Sacrifice was changed to this, with him bringing the unstable Book of Darkness to a one-man spacecraft, then piloting it away from the Cool Starship containing Lindy and the rest of his crew and into deep space, so that it will only consume him once it's completely unsealed.
• Naruto:
  • Teleporting large explosions off to remote areas was one of the signature tricks of the Fourth Hokage, who was an expert in teleportation jutsus.
  • During the Kazekage Rescue arc, Kakashi teleports away Deidara's explosion.
• In one episode of Night Raid 1931, the heroes have to disarm/dispose of three bombs. Two of them are taken care of this way.
• In One Piece Pell uses his falcon transformation to take a huge bomb away from the capital city.
• Pokémon:
  • One episode of Pokémon: The Series has Riley and his Lucario trap a large explosion inside a sphere of Aura and then force it into the sky to detonate harmlessly.
  • A similar thing happens in Pokémon: Diamond and Pearl Adventure!, but with Hareta using Empoleon's Hydro Pump to force the (as of yet unexploded) bomb into the air and many Pokemon containing the blast with Light Screen.
• Near the end of one of Project ARMS' story arcs, Takeshi courageously decides to take a bomb that would have killed all of the city's inhabitants and flies straight to the ocean. Beyond the speed of sound.
• In episode 25 of season one of Re:Zero, Subaru does this to save Emilia and the rest of the carriage crew upon learning about the large amount of fire magic stones which could cause an explosion big enough to wipe out an entire village.
• During the climax of Terror in Resonance an F-15 attempts to intercept an atomic bomb on a high altitude balloon, presumably in an effort to achieve this; but it's unclear where they hoped to relocate it to.
• In the third episode of Tiger & Bunny, Barnaby defuses the bomb down to the last 2 wires but can't decide which one to cut. That's when he and his partner Kotetsu decide to just kick the annoying contraption through the roof instead.

Comic Books

• Ultimate Marvel:
  • The Ultimates (2002) has Thor disposing of an alien bomb that would have destroyed the entire solar system by teleporting it to the wastes of Nastrond, where its detonation won't cause any significant damage besides some small ripples in timespace. Includes a humorous scene of Black Widow moaning that they're doomed, since she disbelieves Thor's claims of godhood and thus figures that he just teleported the bomb to another location on Earth.
  • One of the early issues in the Ultimate Galactus Trilogy has Galactus, now a hive mind composed of multiple probes, approach Earth with the intent to kill, maim and eat it. One of the several plans put in motion by S.H.I.E.L.D. is, in a rare inversion of the trope, a transdimensional portal built by Reed Richards, tapping into a very young alternate dimension which just underwent the Big Bang in order to use the massive energy against the swarm.
• Superman's solution to a nuclear reactor meltdown in Superman/Batman World's Finest? Simply dismantle the reactor and fly it into outer space before it explodes.
• In a 1990s Superman story, Waverider from Armageddon 2001 uses a piece of Linear Men technology to transport an explosive piece of equipment, a quantum field generator, from present-day Metropolis to the distant past, where it explodes without harming anyone.
• From the Time and Time Again story arc, Superman catches a bomb that the Nazis drop on a group of Jews during World War II and flies it into the sky where it detonates without harming anyone.
• In Trinity (2008) issue #14, the solar power of super-villain Sun-Chained-In-Ink has become out of control. Before he blows up and takes the entire planet with him, Supergirl takes him out of the atmosphere and throws him far, far away where his inner star explodes safely.
• Spider-Man: In the finale of the storyline Maximum Clonage, Spidey and the Scarlet Spider are able to disconnect a bomb connected to a Carrion Virus container, but not deactivate the bomb. Scarlet Spider takes the bomb, swings all the way to the Hudson Bay and slingshots the bomb away in the nick of time.
• In The Infinity Gauntlet, with Adam Warlock in possession of the titular weapon, Thanos decides to pull a Taking You with Me by triggering a thermal nuclear device. Thor is able to launch his hammer into Thanos' stomach, sending him away from the heroes' location and explode harmlessly.
• Judge Dredd: This has happened a bunch of times when the Judges had a nuclear device on their hands that they couldn't dismantle in time.
  • In a story set after "Necropolis", the members of a secret club of murderers go on a simultaneous killing spree to break the record for most murders committed in a single night. After they're all dead, their president triggers a nuke he had stored in his vault. An H-Wagon dunks it into the Black Atlantic, which is highly polluted anyway.
  • In the "Total War" arc, the democratic terrorists detonate stolen nuclear devices in Mega City One to force the Judges to step down. The last bomb is dropped off in the relative safety of the Cursed Earth. The only casualties are several mutants who fought it might be worth something and decided to investigate.

Fan Works

• The Flash Sentry Chronicles: In the Season 5 chapter "Lightning's Fate", Lightning Blitz and his friends defeat a gang of criminals that were plotting to destroy Canterlot with explosive crystals, but the leader manages to activate the biggest crystal before being knocked out. Unable to stop the giant crystal from blowing up, Lightning uses the few minutes they have before it goes off to save the city by having his friends take one of daggers he uses to teleport with, and they put it on a nearby float for the Fantasia Festival and have it float away from the city. Lightning then teleports himself to his dagger, taking the crystal with him so it gets out of the city, and then detonates it himself before it can fall back in. Lightning was willing to sacrifice himself to do this if needed as a way to make up for his past, but fortunately Flash arrives just in time and saves him from the ensuing explosion, with Lightning simply needing some rest to recover afterwards.
• In Quarter-Life: Halfway To Destruction, the destruction of Dallas is averted by shoving the entire building containing the bomb through a portal "so it would only go off harmless in Atlantic Ocean."
• In a sidestory of Pokémon Reset Bloodlines, Hunter J has a sonic bomb fired at a residential district from her ship, forcing the superhero Flamestorm to take it up into the sky to prevent damage and civilian casualties. He throws it as far away from the city as he can, although he doesn't manage to escape the blast radius in time. Fortunately, one of his teammates is down below in position to cushion his fall before he impacts against the ground.

Films — Animation

• In the very beginning credits of G.I. Joe: The Movie, Duke grabs a bomb set by Cobra Commander that would have destroyed the Statue of Liberty and, via jetpack, flies it up to the Cobra command ship, destroying it.
• At the end of The Iron Giant, the title hero sacrifices himself by flying into the sky to meet an oncoming missile head-on. He manages to survive, barely.
  "Superman..."
• In the Justice League: The New Frontier animated movie, Green Lantern uses his ring to take the exploding Centre out into space where it can safely explode. The Flash may have done something similar.
• Peter Pan: Tinker Bell snatches Hook's time bomb from Peter and flies it away in order to save him.
• At the climax of Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, Batman is battling Owlman, who is trying to destroy all of reality by setting off a bomb on an Earth that is located at the prime nexus to every other Earth in the infinite multiverse. Batman is unable to successfully deactivate the bomb, so instead he steals Owlman's inter-dimensional portal gun and sends both the bomb and Owlman to an Earth that is completely uninhabited so that the bomb's only victim is Owlman.
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie: Mario, while flying with the Tanooki Suit, baits a giant Bomber Bill that Bowser ordered to destroy the Mushroom Kingdom away from its intended target and into a Warp Pipe with a Wronski Feint, where it explodes without harming anyone. Unfortunately, the subsequent implosion is so strong that it sucks Bowser's Castle and all the main characters on it through the Warp Pipe and into Brooklyn, where a royally pissed-off Bowser proceeds to violently lash out at all the heroes.

Films — Live-Action

• 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain: The boys try to dispose of a time bomb by strapping it to three oxygen tanks and then breaking off the nozzles with a hammer. However, they are not strong enough to break them. Fortunately, Dave Dragon shows up with a huge wrench and breaks all three nozzles at once. For bonus points, the bomb gets propelled to the escaping bad guys' boat just as the timer hits zero.
• Angels & Demons has the Magnificent Bastard fly an anti-matter bomb away from Rome in a helicopter. He survives, just as planned.
• Parodied in Batman: The Movie. Batman finds a classic comedy bomb in a waterfront restaurant — a black sphere complete with huge, burning fuse — and runs it outside to get rid of it. Everywhere he goes, however, there's some innocent blocking his way: nuns walking slowly down an alley, a woman pushing a baby carriage! He sprints up one side of the dock and down the other, occasionally running into the same moving barricades over and over again. Exasperated, he eventually groans, "Some days, you just can't get rid of a bomb." Of course, the trope is spun into Bomb Disposal at the last second, but the scene was meant to make the audience think Bats was still holding the bomb when it went off.
• Batman Forever: Two-Face attempts to blow up a circus with a bomb. Dick Grayson manages to roll the bomb into the sea.
• The Batman (2022): The Riddler mails a bomb to Bruce Wayne, but Alfred Pennyworth opens the package. When he realizes it is a bomb, he immediately hurls it away just as it explodes. The explosion still hospitalizes him, but it is clear his action saved his life.
• In the climax of Black Sunday, Kabakov and Corley chase down the stolen blimp in a commandeered helicopter. Kabakov kills Dahlia, mortally wounds Lander, and damages the bomb's detonator with an SMG. Unfortunately, the blimp is still on course for the stadium, and Lander is able to light the backup fuse (an old-fashioned slow-burning type) before he dies. With minutes to spare, Kabakov jumps onto the top of the blimp and attaches a cable onto it, and they're able to tow it over the Atlantic before it detonates.
• In The Dark Knight Rises, this is Batman's final (or is it?) act for Gotham, where he uses the Bat to fly the destablized fusion reactor core-turned bomb out of the city limits.
• La Folie des grandeurs: A bomb disguised as a cushion starts smoking, intended to kill the King and Queen of Spain. A game of hot potato begins before Blaze finally kicks it out the window... into the arms of the very surprised man who'd made the bomb in the first place.
• In G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Rip allows a warhead containing deadly nanomachines to detonate above his jet, at which point he flies off into space so that the little machines can't devour Washington, D.C.. He survives.
• Godzilla (2014): Ford Brody is unable to disarm a nuclear bomb, so he carries it onto a boat and sets the controls to head out to sea, where it gets far enough that the explosion doesn't harm anyone.
• James Bond:
  • The Spy Who Loved Me: During the battle onboard the Liparus tanker between the submarine crews and Karl Stromberg's army, the English captain is mortally wounded just as he unpinned a grenade. James Bond promptly takes the grenade and throws it in the water.
  • In A View to a Kill, Big Bad Max Zorin has filled a silver mine with explosives so it will cause a catastrophic earthquake that will flood Silicon Valley. Bond and a revengeful May Day manage to move the big detonator outside of the mine, ruining Zorin's plan, though it takes the sacrifice of May Day's life in the explosion to pull it off.
  • In Casino Royale (2006), terrorist Carlos tries to blow up a jumbo jet prototype in order to cause the meltdown of its company's stock options and a huge profit for Big Bad Le Chiffre. Bond figures out Carlos is using a mini-bomb concealed in a key ring to cause a fuel truck to explode near the plane... and straps the mini-bomb to Carlos' belt when they struggle to control the truck. Cue Carlos wondering where the ticking comes from when activating it, and killing himself.
• In Justice League (2017) and the Director's Cut, terrorists attempt to blow up a building full of hostages. Wonder Woman throws the suitcase bomb into the sky.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • The Avengers (2012): Iron Man redirects a nuke that had been dispatched by the World Security Council to obliterate Manhattan, taking it through the portal to the Chitauri mothership.
  • Captain America: Civil War:
    • When Captain America gets a Sticky Bomb thrown at his shield while he is standing in a crowd, he hurls his shield into the air just in time.
    • When Crossbones detonates his suicide vest, Scarlet Witch tries to prevent the explosion from killing anyone else by sending Crossbones flying upwards into the sky, but the bomb explodes when he's still only a few stories above the ground, killing many people on the relevant floors of an adjacent office building. This incident is an excuse for politicians to push forward the Sokovia Accords to severely regulate the movements of enhanced individuals.
• The Mask: At the climax, in order to take care of a bomb that has only a few seconds left on the timer before it explodes inside a nightclub with the Love Interest Tina Carlyle tied up next to it, the titular character rushes over and eats it, using the Mask's powers to swallow it comically and have it explode inside his belly with no ill effects other than having a brief gastrointestinal episode.
  The Mask: [burps out a blast of fire] That's a spicy meat-a-ball!
• In Medusas Child, the cargo plane is free to go anywhere since one of the nuke's tracking devices (the one to ensure it wasn't moved from the Pentagon) failed, so they decide to fool the second one (the one to ensure its creator's ex-wife didn't move away from it) by taping the wife's pacemaker to it and drop it to the ocean.
• In Stargate, Daniel and Jack do this with the phlebotinum-enhanced nuke, using the ring teleporter to send it to Ra's ship at the last second.
• Superman II: Superman flies out into space with a hydrogen bomb so that when it detonates it won't harm the Earth. Unfortunately, by doing this, he releases General Zod and his two lieutenants, three Kryptonian super-criminals who are just as powerful as him.
• Voyage Into Space. At the end the giant robot flies out into space with Emperor Guillotine's ship to save the Earth. It's not clear whether he's destroyed or not.

Literature

• In Angels & Demons, the Camerlengo takes the antimatter bomb straight up in a helicopter to detonate at altitude. Of course it was his fault to begin with.
• Circleverse: In Melting Stones, Evvy manages to relocate a volcanic eruption via a combination of tricking some elementals she had become acquainted with, and the assistance of the spirits of the other Battle Islands. This results in the creation of a whole new island.
• The Culture: Many ships are equipped with a "trapdoor system", which is capable of instantly shunting destructive energy inside the ship into hyperspace before it can cause damage. It's said that an H-bomb could go off inside a ship with this technology and it would be safely neutralized so fast that no one in the room would notice a thing.
• Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.: Sheyenne does this in Unnatural Acts. Since she's a ghost, the bomb isn't a problem for her, but is for the still living humans and unnaturals in the area, as well as zombie boyfriend Dan.
• Done in a Heroic Sacrifice in Destroyermen: Crusade. Chief Donaghey discovers an attempt to sink USS Walker with an IED in a rowboat, so he climbs into the boat and rows it away, ignoring the calls of his shipmates to come back. Instead of a fuse, the saboteurs set the whole boat on fire, so he's burning alive as he does this.
  All he knew, as the flesh on his face and hands began to sear and his vision became a red, shimmering fog, was that he had to row. Nothing else in the entire world mattered anymore except for getting that crazy, stupid bomb the hell away from his ship.
  He made it almost forty yards.
• At the end of The Last Hero, the Silver Horde jump off Cori Celesti with the barrel of Agatean Thunder Clay, thereby insuring that the resultant huge explosion does not wipe out the Disc's magical field or destroy the gods. Thereby saving the Discworld, and the fact they were saving it from themselves is just a detail.

Live-Action TV

• In Season 2 of 24 , a nuclear bomb is flown out into the Mojave Desert so its detonation and resulting fallout won't kill civilians.
• Arrowverse:
  • Subverted in Arrow when Felicity Smoak is able to direct a nuclear missile away from Star City, landing it instead in a nearby town where it kills 100,000 people.
  • Crisis on Earth-X: In the climax of Part 4, Kara's evil doppelganger Overgirl is about to explode with the force of a nuke from Superpower Meltdown. Supergirl has to fly her "Up, up, and away" so that the explosion happens in the upper atmosphere, sparing the city.
  • In the Supergirl (2015) episode "The Faithful", Kara is unable to stop the probe from overloading, so she melts a pit through the concrete and the ground below, into which the probe is dropped, absorbing most of the explosion.
• In Barney Miller, one first-season episode has Fish banishing stragglers from the squadroom when he realizes that a threatened bomb is in a suitcase. However, the suspense is only with the other characters, because the camera stays with Fish. He shoves it in the safe, which limits the damage to its door.
• Batman: Batman has no way to defuse a big bomb shaped like a black ball with a burning wick, so what does he do? Well, he runs in the streets carrying it up to the port and bumps into many people (and ducks) until he finds the right spot to throw it so it can explode without harming anyone, of course... He still runs for two minutes straight with it.
  Batman: Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb...
• Blindspot:
  • In the Pilot episode, a terrorist plants a plastic explosive on a subway train. Since Kurt Weller doesn't know how to disarm it, he instead scrapes as much of the plastic explosive off the detonator as he can, then throws the detonator down the tunnel as hard as he can. It works.
  • In the season 3 episode "Balance of Might", Weller once again has to remove a bomb from a surrounding substance that makes it more dangerous, in this case a bag full of shrapnel in a hotel closet. Once that's done, there isn't enough time to disarm it, so he picks it up and sprints to the hotel's kitchen, where he tosses it into an industrial freezer and shuts the door. The freezer contains the explosion enough to prevent any structural damage to the hotel, though it does blow the door off—Jane tackles Weller out of the way just in time.
• In the series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, there is an episode where the Searcher encounters a ship filled with decaying "solar bombs". The ship was en route to a star for disposal, but got off course, so the Searcher essentially has to do this trope with their tractor beam (since the bombs are decayed there are extremely unstable, requiring delicate course changes).
• At the end of an episode of Chuck, Chuck takes a bomb into his car and drives away with it to save Sarah and John. It explodes in the distance, while a horrified Sarah looks on. Fortunately, he was never in the car to begin with, having stepped out to remote control it from a distance.
• In Criminal Minds episode "Mayhem", an ambulance has been rigged with explosives and left in a hospital's basement garage, to be detonated via cell phone. Penelope can only jam the cell towers for so long, so Derek has to drive the ambulance out to an empty city park and ditch it before the unsub gets his service back.
• CSI had an episode where a security guard was initially a suspect in a bank vault bombing. He's cleared and later, there's a bomb at a school. He tries relocating the bomb but it explodes in his hands and kills him. Grissom puts a newspaper picture of him on the lab's bulletin board for officers who died on duty.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Doctor Dances": At the end, Jack saves the Doctor, Rose, and a whole group of other people from being blown up by a WWII German bomb by tractor beam-ing it into his own ship and flying away. The Doctor and Rose are able to save him before the bomb's stasis breaks and blows up Jack's ship.
  • "Thin Ice": The villain, Lord Sutcliffe, has set up a tent full of explosives with the intent to break the ice on the river and send everyone at the Frost Fair plummeting into the water to serve as food for the giant serpent imprisoned at the bottom of the Thames. The Doctor secretly moves the barrels of explosives underwater, positioning them to destroy the serpent's chains when set off. The apparent failure of the explosives prompts a Where's the Kaboom? reaction from Sutcliffe, who then makes the mistake of running onto the ice, leading to his death.
• Played for Laughs in Get Smart. In "The Groovy Guru", Maxwell Smart realises the Handcuffed Briefcase given to him by a Double Agent has a bomb in it. And the key's been stolen. The Chief calls in the CONTROL bomb disposal unit, whereupon two men in hazmat suits rush in, karate-chop Max unconscious and throw him down the waste disposal chute.
• In the Heroes season 1 finale, Nathan flies Peter up into the sky so that his brother's nuclear detonation doesn't level the city.
• In Lost, Sayid picks up the recently discovered detonation device to take it away from the other Losties on board the submarine. The sub still sinks however and Jin and Sun get trapped in the process.
• MacGyver (1985): In "Hell Week", Mac is confronted with a bomb in a sealed case. Unable to defuse the bomb because the tamperproof screws on the case are wired to the detonator, Mac decides to move the bomb to the basement where it will do the least damage. he is then faced with the challenge of moving the bomb without tripping the mercury switches inside.
• MacGyver (2016): One episode has Mac finding a bomb in a crowded street without enough time to be able to try disarming it, so the team drives to an empty parking lot and leaves it there. Unfortunately, the authorities then think that they had planted the bomb in the first place.
• Nash Bridges: In "Patriots", after shooting the terrorist villain of the week, Nash drives (Joe joins) the rigged to explode in less than four minutes automobile through the traffic to some random abandoned lot and then the two hurry to put some good distance between them and the imminent explosion. In due time the car goes disappointingly *poomf*, then Nash complains that that could have been taken inside that car, then *KA-BOOM* follows, knocking them off their feet.
• NCIS: In the Season 2 finale, Ari Haswari leaves a Time Bomb under a table in the sidewalk cafe where he just met with Gibbs. Gibbs finds the bomb with less than thirty seconds left on its timer, runs into a nearby alley, and throws the bomb into a dumpster before diving for cover.
• Twice in Power Rangers. Coincidentally or not, these both happened in the finales of shows where Simon Bennett was the executive producer, and were written by the same writing team of Becca Barnes and Alwyn Dale:
  • Power Rangers Dino Fury: In "The Nemesis", Void Queen transforms into a cocoon that gathers so much energy that it will trigger a huge explosion when it hatches. Void Knight grabs and teleports with it to the desert. He barely survives and the explosion still rocks the city.
  • Power Rangers Cosmic Fury: In "The End", the villains plan to unleash a World-Wrecking Wave that will eradicate all that is good from the universe. The Rangers decide to move the super weapon into the Morphin' Grid itself, where the energy wave cannot corrupt any living things and will hopefully be nullified by the Grid's nature. Then it turns out not to be necessary; the final confrontation comes down to the Rangers getting the supercharged evil spirit of Lord Zedd to see reason, and the wave does not go off at all.
• The Professionals:
  • In "Old Dog With New Tricks", Doyle and Bodie find themselves dealing with a Hostage Situation involving a nurse and a lunatic ex-patient who has somehow managed to get hold of a live fragmentation grenade. He's already pulled the pin, and sooner or later he's going to lose his grip because holding the lever down takes more force than most people realise so there's no time to talk him down. Two police officers move a large, solid steel wheelie bin^note Not as contrived as it sounds: The series is set in the middle of The Troubles, and hiding bombs in litter bins or dumpsters was one of the IRA's favourite tricks as close as they can while Bodie sneaks up on the nutter and his hostage, then tackles him and tosses the grenade inside the bin where it can explode harmlessly.
  • They use a similar tactic in "Lawson's Last Stand". A mad colonel is holding up a cannister of nerve gas, strapped to a hand grenade with the pin wired to an overhead pole. He's standing out in the middle of a park wearing rear view mirrors so he can see if someone sneaks up on him. Bodie realises however that the arm he's using to hold up the cannister creates a blind spot that he can use to get close, wrest the cannister off him and toss it to Doyle who has driven up in an armoured car; Doyle throws it down the turret hatch into the NBC-sealed interior.
  • In "Fugitive", Bodie has been captured by terrorists who have him strapped to a radio-detonated bomb as insurance during a Prisoner Exchange. The exchange goes wrong and Bodie goes racing across the field, trying to get away from Doyle who's chasing after him to get the bomb off! Meanwhile the dying terrorist leader is crawling towards the radio detonator, as Doyle tackles Bodie, rips the bomb off him, swings it round his head by the strap and hurls it as far as he can just as the detonator button is pressed.
• Red Dwarf: Rimmer does this with a bomb on board the eponymous ship at the end of "The Promised Land". Because he's currently a "diamond light" hologram, he survives being at the distant detonation point.
• Smallville:
  • In "Resurrection", Garrett uses a kryptonite bomb with a Dead Man's Switch to hold a hospital hostage. He gets killed by a sniper and his finger comes off the trigger, but Clark Kent uses his Super-Speed to wrap a lead apron around the bomb and run it to a safe distance before it explodes.
  • In "Hidden", a nuclear missile gets launched at the town. Clark jumps on the missile, tears out the warhead, and hurls it into outer space, where it explodes.
• Stargate-verse:
  • Stargate SG-1:
    • In "Redemption, Part 2", O'Neill has to use the X-302 Space Fighter prototype to fly the Stargate away from the Earth because Anubis has a Doomsday Device that turns it into a bomb with an explosion large enough to destroy the entire planet. When the 302 fails to reach orbit (it wasn't designed to carry a Stargate that's heavier than it is), it occurs to O'Neill that while the 302's hyperdrive had been deemed useless because of its instability, in this case it doesn't actually matter where the fighter and Stargate end up, so long as it's not Earth. O'Neill ejects right before sending the X-302 through a hyperspace portal (and not a second too soon).
    • "Ex Deus Machina" sees Ba'al hold Earth to ransom by filling a skyscraper full of naquadah and turning it into a bomb with a yield probably well beyond the city-buster range. Since the Prometheus is on station, once Carter figures out that the building is the bomb, she just has them beam the whole thing into orbit.
  • Stargate Atlantis: In "Sunday", Carson Beckett hands the bomb off to a soldier, who has a containment device and is presumably going to take the bomb somewhere. Unfortunately, it promptly detonates, killing them both.
• The transporter in Star Trek has been used not a small number of times to quickly beam some explosive that's about to go off safely out into space. The most notable example is in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's "Trials and Tribble-ations", when a tribble stuffed with explosives by a time-traveler is transported into space just in time, before it can kill Captain James T. Kirk and cause a serious temporal disruption.
• Station 19: The firefighters are attempting to evacuate a hospital that has already suffered a series of explosions when they encounter another bomb in a lab—just as structural damage collapses the exit. One of the doctors has the idea to contain the bomb in the lab's autoclave, which has airtight seals for the sterilization of medical equipment. The bomb is on a timer but will also go off if it's jostled too much, so Gibson has to slowly — but not too slowly — walk it across the room to the autoclave, then sprint to shelter with the others before it goes off.
• In the Stingray (1964) episode "Countdown", using a voice recording of Troy and Phones' entry request into Marineville, X20 manages to get his craft into Stingray's pen inside Marineville while the real Stingray was still out on patrol and primes a bomb with a 15-minute countdown with Marina tied up as hostage. When Stingray returns, they find the enemy craft, rescue Marina, and Troy tries to get the craft out of Marineville and use the ejector seat. Everyone waits with bated breath as the craft slowly makes its way through the launch tunnel. Eventually it reaches the end of the tunnel and Marineville is saved, then after a few seconds of silence inside the control tower, cut to the bomb as the countdown completes, cue nasty explosion on the ocean surface. We don't see Troy escape, but in the next scene at Marina's house-warming party, we see Troy with the rest of the main cast having apparently escaped unscathed.
• Van Helsing (2016): Doc steps on a booby trap that pulls the pins out of a bundle of grenades. Julius throws them away in time.

Tabletop Games

• In the Paranoia supplement Acute Paranoia, adventure "Me and My Shadow Mark IV", when some Commies park a MegaBomb in a vehicle near the Mark IV, a PC can drive the vehicle down a tunnel far enough to save the Mark IV (and their teammates) from the resulting explosion.

Video Games

• At the end of [PROTOTYPE], Alex Mercer flies a nuclear bomb away from New York in a helicopter to save the city from destruction. Oh, and he survives. Sure, he's totally gooped, but he regenerates.
• In BeamNG, the first mission of the Hustle and Bustle campaign has the player drive a bus with a bomb that will go off if the bus goes below a certain speed. After rescuing the passengers, the bus has to be driven off to one of three locations where the explosion won't hurt anyone.
• In one of the driving missions in Die Hard Trilogy 2: Viva Las Vegas, McClane has to ferry a time bomb out of the Hoover Dam before it detonates.
• This, ultimately, is the culmination of the main story of Blast Corps (until you blast off into space, of course). A runaway carrier hauling defective nuclear missiles needs to get to a safe detonation point before it bumps into something. Only problem is, the automated navigation sets a beeline route that goes straight to the safe detonation area, regardless of obstacles in the way, and if it so much as hits a single pothole enroute, the missiles will detonate. So, it's up to you and your team to do the obvious: destroy everything between that transport and the safe zone.
• Multiple times in Star Wars: The Old Republic.
  • On Dromund Kaas, Imperial players will have to carry strange clawed devices that beep menacingly with red lights attached to locations in a public plaza and put them in a strangely-convenient bomb disposal machine before they go boom.
  • For Republic players on Corellia, an Imperial bomber was shot down but managed to jettison its payload. The detonators failed, but the shockwaves from all the fighting threaten to detonate them, so players need to disengage the warheads and carry them to a portable bomb-disposal unit before they go the way of the Death Star.
• In Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse, giant Max, already risking exploding due to his psychic powers going out of control, is hit with a nuclear warhead. He uses his teleportation power to send himself, and the warhead, to Skun-ka'pe's spaceship before it can detonate and blow up the city.
• As demonstrated by the page quote, this trope is parodied in the opening scene of Sam & Max Hit the Road. After Max rips the head off of an evil mad scientist, the scientist was revealed to be a robot with a bomb for a head. After driving off (sparing the life of the scientist's kidnapped date), Sam and Max return to their office, forgetting about the bomb in the process. Once Max points out the ticking, Sam remembers the imminent danger and, on Max's advice, chucks the bomb out of the office window, where it promptly explodes.
  Sam: I hope there was nobody on that bus.
  Max: Nobody WE know, at least.
• In Spider-Man (PS4), Spidey gets rid of bombs by using his web to sling them high up into the air. For extra points you can web up the bombs to muffle the explosions.
  • In Spider-Man: Miles Morales, left with no other place to dissipate the massive amount of energy he had absorbed from a Nuform reactor exploding, Phin uses the last of her energy to send Miles high up into the sky, rather than have the reactor detonate on the ground.
• At the end of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Sam Fisher can't defuse a smallpox bomb in the ventilation room of LAX Airport in time with only a few minutes left, so he decides to... put the bomb directly in the main hall of the airport, which immediately causes the evacuation of the airport. Then a Bomb Disposal team safely blows it up under a metal pan using a robot.
• In the opening levels of Halo 2, the Master Chief is told that the Covenant have placed a massive bomb on board the space station he is currently on. He manages to get to the bomb with just enough time to let Cortana disarm it (based on their banter, it probably had less than a second to blow when Cortana stopped the timer). The Master Chief then takes the bomb and jumps out of the airlock, flies across space to a Covenant warship, has Cortana reset and then reactivate the timer, and then kicks off from the bomb getting clear just before it explodes, vaporizing the Covenant ship.
• In one mission in Brink!, the Resistance faction gets their hands on a missile which they plant to use to destroy Founder's Tower. If the Security faction wins the mission, their victory cutscene shows their operatives hacking the missile control computer, realising they can't disarm the missile and instead changing it's trajectory so it'll blow up harmlessly over the ocean... unfortunately, a security helicopter flies too close to the detonation, gets caught in the blast radius and knocked out of the air.
• At the end of the Lonesome Road DLC of Fallout: New Vegas the Courier is forced to deal with armed nukes ready to launch at a target of Ulysses' choosing. They can either disarm it at the cost of ED-E or they can choose to redirect the nuke to a target of their choice (an NCR base, a Legion base or both), which will result in that area becoming a Brutal Bonus Level.
• Princess Peach: Showtime!: Detective Peach and Junior Detective find a bomb in a clock tower. Peach hurls it out the window into a nearby river in time.

Web Animation

• Dead Fantasy: In episode two, as Tifa is about to punch Ayane, who is powering up, Kasumi takes the hit, teleporting Tifa and herself away so Ayane can concentrate on finishing her spell.
• In the Friendship is Witchcraft episode "Cherry Bomb", Applejack gets the hell out of Dodge but her friends chase her down. Once caught, AJ reveals that she was trying to carry a timebomb far away, so her friends wouldn't be caught in the explosion, but now they're all going to die instead. Then, with less than a minute left on the bomb's timer, Raincloud swoops in and carries the bomb into the sky, while the music from The Iron Giant plays.
• In the "Terminator vs. RoboCop" episode of DEATH BATTLE!, RoboCop has to do this during the battle itself when the Terminator tries to blow them up together with its ruptured fuel cell. He succeeds by strapping the damaged Terminator onto his discarded Flightpack and launching him into the sky.

Webcomics

• In Schlock Mercenary, the Toughs' first ship, the Kitesfear, was destroyed with massive conversion bombs while docked on Luna, but fortunately the Toughs were able to cut the ship loose and teraport it away on time.

Western Animation

• Mar-Vell from The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes does this in "459" by flying with a Nega-Bomb to outer space. He almost doesn't make it so Thor finishes the deed.
• DC Animated Universe:
  • The Batman: The Animated Series episode "Time Out of Joint" features a time-slowing device that lets the user move at Flash-like speeds. Batman uses the device to carry a bomb out of Gotham City and throw it into a nearby river as it's in the process of exploding.
  • Justice League:
    • In "Wild Cards", the Flash is attempting to defuse a bomb in the middle of Las Vegas. Since there's only a few seconds left on the timer, and he can't remember which wire to cut, he simply grabs the bomb and runs into the desert with it. Amusingly, he does this so fast that people aren't quite sure what just happened, and Joker slows down the recording of the security cameras to show Flash in Bullet Time getting it out of the city.
      Joker: ...huh.
    • In "Initiation", Captain Atom's suit gets breached during combat, forcing him to fly into space so that his subsequent detonation doesn't kill his fellow heroes. He gets better.
• DuckTales (2017): In "Who Is Gizmoduck?", the Gizmoduck suit is set to self-destruct and Fenton can't abort it, so he flies over the ocean before it explodes, sparing the city. He somehow survives, but ends up in a full body cast.
• In the Futurama episode "A Big Ball of Garbage", the crew has to plant a bomb on a giant garbage ball that's on a collision course with Earth. Unfortunately, the Professor mounted the timer display on upside-down and set it for 52 seconds rather than 25 minutes. Bender grabs the bomb and throws it as far as he can into space, saving their lives but dooming the planet to smelly destruction. Of course, they subsequently find another way to save the day.
• In the Smiling Friends episode "Enchanted Forest", Mip's gift for the princess turns out to be an IED set to be triggered when the box is opened, which the princess tosses out the window just in time.
• In Spider-Man: The Animated Series, Spider-Man disposes of a time bomb by using his Super-Strength to throw it straight up into the air from the top of a tall building when it's about to explode since, being in the middle of a city, he couldn't find any other safe place to move it to.
• In the Star Trek: Prodigy episode "Supernova, Pt. 2", the crew of the Protostar realize the only way to stop the Living Construct and save Starfleet is to destroy the ship. They can't just destroy the ship right there because it would effectively drop the titular supernova on the fleet as the Protostar has a literal protostar onboard, thus they decide to detonate it while at protowarp. However, this means someone needs to stay behind to make sure it happens. Dal attempts to do it, but Holo-Janeway convinces the crew to let her, ultimately giving them an isolinear chip claiming to have her programming but actually a farewell message as her program is too big. The crew escapes and the Protostar detonates at warp, creating a temporal anomaly and destroying Holo-Janeway.
• Star Wars Rebels: In "Warhead", Zeb, Chopper and AP-5 have to deal with an Imperial infiltrator droid with a Self-Destruct Mechanism that will activate if they attempt to destroy it or wipe its memory. The plan Zeb comes up with, after Chopper freezes the self-destruct, is to have AP-5 reprogram the droid to self-destruct when it returns to the Empire. It works perfectly, resulting in the destruction of an entire Star Destroyer. Unfortunately, this still gave the location of their base away thanks to Thrawn having recorded where each such droid was sent.
• Star Wars Resistance: In the short "Treasure Chest", Flix and Orka buy and open an old chest salvaged from the ocean only to find it's full of old grenades. After the bombs fail to go off when their countdown stops, the duo dump the chest of bombs in the ocean — a wise precaution, as it is then that the grenades detonate.
• Steven Universe: In "Message Received", the Gems get rid of a Homeworld communicator that's about to self-destruct by having Steven bubble it and Garnet knock it as far into the air as she can.
• Teen Titans (2003):
  • This happens in "Snowblind". Red Star, whose powers were notorious for backfiring, were about to backfire bigger than they ever had before. So he flew up to the other atmosphere and self-detonated.
  • In "Titans Together", Herald averts disaster by teleporting a fusion bomb into space.
    Herald: Any requests?
    Cyborg: Far away would be nice!
• In episode one of The Tick, the Tick carries a time bomb planted in a dam by the Idea Men, up onto the top of the dam where it more or less explodes safely (except for destroying the Idea Men's blimp). The Tick himself is, fortunately, nigh indestructible.
• The early stages of the bomb scene in Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death follow this trope. Similarly to the Adam West Batman example, the first few places Gromit finds to dispose of the bomb have innocents he can't endanger in them, but then he sees the Yorkshire Border and tries to leave the bomb there.

Real Life

• Bomb ranges exist because, more often than not, this is the safest way to dispose of explosives. If moving the bomb isn't practical, an alternative is to surround the bomb with materials capable of containing the blast, so that nothing of importance gets damaged.
• Towards the end of World War II, the Germans were launching their V-1 weapons on London. Basically a medium-fast proto-drone with primitive pulse-jet propulsion, with a ton of high explosives in the warhead. Shooting them down usually resulted in a ton of high explosives detonating prematurely in the air instead of on the ground. However, this created a massive explosion in the air that the pilot of the shoot-down plane was flying directly into. A safer, but perhaps more nerve-wracking, tactic was evolved. The fighter pilot would fly next to the V-1 and use his wing tip to lift up the tip of the V-1's wing. The V-1 had no aileron control, relying on the rudder for directional corrections. Once tipped past a critical angle, the rudder could not recover it, and so the V-1 would spiral into the English Channel, moving the detonation from land to water (or at worst into an empty field rather than an urban area).
  • Ironically pioneered when the pilot of the first Gloster Meteor jet fighter to engage one had a gun-jam problem, but really only available to Meteors and to the fastest prop fighters (Hawker Tempests, Griffon-engined Spitfires, Mustangs and the like) that could catch up to the bomb in flight and stay alongside it.
• Similar to the V1 example, the Brits intentionally reported on V2s hitting areas south of London (when in reality they were hitting London, their intended target) so that the Germans would think they were undershooting their target, thus correcting and sending the next batch of V2s into some less densely populated areas north of London. It worked.
• A CIA agent demonstrating the use of thermite bombs for the impending Bay of Pigs invasion had one explode prematurely. He grabbed the bomb and carried it away from the other explosives, inflicting fatal burns on himself.
• John Birges tried to invoke this in regards to the infamous Harvey's Casino bomb: it was designed so not even he could defuse it. Instead, in exchange for his ransom, he offered instructions on how to deactivate its motion sensors so it could be moved somewhere uninhabited before going boom. Some communication mix-ups led to him never getting the ransom, and the FBI ultimately tried to defuse it themselves with remote-control explosives; the thing went off and took most of the casino/hotel with it, but fortunately everyone had long evacuated.
• A modern Attack Drone variant of this has appeared in the war Russia wages in Ukraine since 2022: both sides use electronic jamming against each other's drones (and sometimes cruise missiles). In the case of loitering munitions, that means they won't reach their intended target but most of the time still crash and explode somewhere else.

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