Basic Trope: Teleportation goes horribly wrong
- Straight:
- A group of people are teleported and arrive several miles away from earth’s atmosphere.
- They’re embedded in solid rock instead.
- Exaggerated:
- Downplayed:
- A minor teleportation error lands its passengers’ upside-down.
- People go through the teleporter and come out without their clothes.
- People go through the teleporter and end up a mile away from the target location, so they have to walk the rest of the way.
- Justified:
- The teleport has to account for the curvature of the earth, its travel through the universe, and a number of additional factors for organic matter, each which has to be calculated manually.
- The teleporter was being used in ways is shouldn’t have: such as teleporting complex matter, or going over weight.
- Hyperspace Is a Scary Place
- Someone sabotaged the teleporter.
- A Negative Space Wedgie screwed up the teleporter.
- The teleporter is still in the testing phase and its inventors haven't yet ironed out all the issues.
- Inverted: The teleporter malfunctions…which makes it work perfectly, for once.
- Subverted:
- The teleportation seems to work perfectly, despite a malfunction warning.
- The teleports seems to have malfunctioned when it didn’t re-integrate everyone’s clothes, but it turns out this is a failsafe for going over weight limits, and is an intended function.
- Double Subverted:
- However, it turns out they’ve been subject to a twin-maker teleport, and have been reconstructed with Reverse chirality, preventing them from living their former lives.
- It does this even when under the weight limit.
- Parodied:
- Everyone is afraid of the horrible consequences of a teleport accident…Like breaking out in hives.
- A Red Shirt teleports, and seems fine, then looks down… and realises only half of him made it. He then immediately exclaims “Bugger” and dies.
- Someone goes through the teleporter and comes out with his head on backward. He immediately laments the fact that his ass is so big.
- Zig Zagged: Evey teleporter has a different malfunction inbuilt that is impossible to remove: some leave you naked, some keep inertia and thus throw you around, some will kill you and some will make you wish you were dead. Using a teleporter is less a matter of finding co-ordinates and more a matter of dealing with its unique quirks.
- Averted: All teleportation works as intended.
- Enforced:
- “Man was not meant to teleport. This work will show you why.”
- It was made up by the author to justify why wizards don’t just teleport all their issues away.
- Lampshaded: “Teleportaion is like primitive air travel: it’s perfectly safe, until it’s really, really unsafe. “
- Invoked: The teleported is sabotaged in order to do this.
- Exploited: The risk of this occurring is used as part of an advertising bit against teleportation.
- Defied:
- Teleporters refuse to work unless they’re guaranteed success, in order to prevent horrible accidents.
- Teleportation is refused for this reason.
- Discussed: “ Doctor, how can you insist on using the teleporter despite it’s flaws?”
- Conversed: “The teleporters in this show are allways so poorly made…”
- Deconstructed: Teleportation is banned for use on living organisms, and it’s so risky and unreliable they’re not used to even teleport goods after a time. The supposedly “high-tech” teleporter machine is a fortunately-forgotten piece of worthless tech.
- Reconstructed:
- Improvements in teleportation tech reduce the risk of these errors greatly… although it doesn’t mean they stop entirely.
- While they’re horrible for their intended purpose, teleporters become fantastic tools for discrete executions, with the remains post-teleport ether non-existent, strewn around in gory unrecognizable fragments, or beginning to fall into a volcano.
- Implied:
- “How’d you loose the arm?” “Well, it went to one universe… and I went back here.”
- “What we got back didn’t live long… fortunately.”
- Played For Laughs: The various teleport malfunctions are Once an Episode gags, usually as parodies of similar incidents in certain sci-fi series.
- Played For Drama: Teleporting is rarely used for this reason, and even considering using it is crossing the Godzilla Threshold.
Warp back to Teleporter Accident. Just be careful, the link might be a little… “on the fritz.”
