Transporter Malfunction, Star Trek: The Motion Picture: "What we got back didn't live long.....fortunately"
First: WTF was up with them giving kids nightmares with THAT bit of Body Horror?!?!
Second: You now understand why Dr. McCoy didn't like Transporters. They may be the 'safest' form of travel, but when they break down, the results are Horrifying!
Damn this is so funny but I have literally no one I could share this with. Everyone I know either knows the wolves meme but has no idea who O'Brien is or knows who he is but doesn't get the wolves. There is no overlap whatsoever.
I like that even in universe, even without the Tuvix level malfunctions, it's still existentially horrifying because you are being destroyed, converted to information, and then reconstituted elsewhere. There are a few references to people who won't use them and I fully get it.
There's an episode someone else mentioned already called Realm of Fear where it shows that you're fully conscious throughout the entirety of he transport including during the transit stream.
An excerpt from Breaking Bad, where two fans are talking about this:
Badger: Dude, you are tripping! I'm not dead! I'm on the Starship Enterprise macking on Yeoman Rand while the Andorian with the disrupter's back on Talos IV or whatever.
Skinny Pete: What do you think all those sparkles and shit are? Transporters are breaking you apart right down to your molecules and bones. They're makin' a copy. That dude who comes out on the other side? He's not you. He's a color Xerox.
Badger: So you're telling me every time Kirk went into the transporter he was killing himself? So over the whole series, there was, like, 147 Kirks?
Skinny Pete: At least! Dude, yo, why do you think McCoy never likes to beam nowhere?! 'Cause he's a doctor, bitch! Look it up, it's science!
Obviously because the Brundle Boson Teleportation Array resolves matter by coherent biofield topography rather than simple raw molecular composition. Anything with a mass less than 0.3mg that shares a stable quantum entanglement gradient with a biofield is classified as noise and ignored during pattern buffering prior to teleportation.
Clearly explained if you have the 1990 laserdisc edition, pause and zoom in on the computer screen at 1hr03m21s. Don’t know how you missed it.
It would be still terrifying if it works correctly. Iirc, the body gets disassembled and restructured elsewhere from different molecules. That begs the question, is it still you who comes out on the other side? Or just a clone with all your memories? What happens with the consciousness? Even if it became the main method of travel, i would not set a foot in that thing
The transporter in Star Trek is a wonderful piece of technology...when it works.
If it doesn't, you get evil clones, transporter psychosis, accidental twins, turned into a tween, zapped to alternate dimensions where Spock has a beard, sent back in time to Los Angeles on the verge of full-scale class warfare, stuck in a partially-materialized form, Tuvix, or if you're very, very unlucky, put back together wrong in a way so agonizing it's fortunate if you don't live very long.
Tuvok and Neelix get in the transporter. Tuvix, a weird bastard man with all of their worst qualities, gets out. The episode ends with the captain killing him to get the other two back.
The plus side being if you're a clever engineer and the ship is losing life support, you can modify the thing to keep your "pattern in the buffer" for future rescue!
Famous for being able to get you anywhere within the country sized city the universe is set in within ten seconds. Everyone who's taken one is impressed with the speed. In the second Project Moon game, Library of Ruina,we learn that in actuality the journey takes several thousand years. During this time the passengers cannot die, do not need to sleep, eat, or drink, and are merely forced to sit and wait in their seats. Eventually, they get bored / worried, someone breaks out, and every single train ends up devolving into a bloodbath where still no one is able to die. At the end of the trip, the passenger's still alive parts are put together by W Corp employees, put back in their seats, and given amnesiacs to wipe the trip from their memory.To them, ten seconds have passed.
And in Limbus Company we have the option to heavily recommend taking a VIP ticket to a potential passenger - VIPs being frozen for the duration of the travel.
This one should be much higher, I saw a video covering this train and I had no idea it was from an anime gacha game, crazy concept and vivid visualisation of the horros made this an instant nope for me.
The trains of course cost money to ride, including first class tickets that put you in a tube and sedate you for the trip. As well, W Corp uses another company's technology to siphon time from the passengers and then sells the time to the first company.
Galaxy Quest is a movie where the cast of a Star Trek-like show in-universe are asked by aliens to help them save their people, believing the show to be a real depiction of what the crew the cast played did. The actors are then brought to a replica of their set, only it is a real spaceship, with all the same parts. Attempting to use the teleporter on a creature turns it into this, as the person using it is just an actor with no idea what he's actually doing.
I also kind of saw it that even this alien race, who had the technology to make this fictional ship a reality, couldn't do the impossibility of Matter Transportation correctly.
It could also be that - since they were doing a 1:1 with the show - that the transporter just wasn't calibrated to handle any physiology other than "humanoid."
They somehow managed to make a fully functioning time travelling device without knowing what it actually did, so I would imagine it would function EXACTLY like the one on the show, even if they didn't know how to do it
She also a great subtle story. A lot of evos that can speak either kept their minds or had thier minds enhanched. But with breach she seems to have completely lost it, and it seems this is not because she went evo, but because her evo given abilties may have taken time to learn, so she for a while she was teleporting between incomprehensible places in reality until she snapped.
The ending is horrifying, but the worst part of that story is the woman who was sent into the Jaunt with no destination. She's still in there, awake and insane, for all fucking eternity as far as we can tell
I would imagine once you go THAT insane you're not you anymore. Like infinity insanity is not something that's ever been so it's hard to say what would happen
Honestly spending that long in eternity must make you so insane that you're basically unconscious at some point, I don't think the human brain was built for that
It is kinda funny that her husband's lawyer tried to defend him by saying she might still be alive and that only made everyone so horrified by that implication that he got sentenced to death
Remind me of professor paradox from ben 10: alien force, he was conducting a time travel tech but fail and end up like the lady, he describe that after he went mad for eon in that place he became bored of that then he went sane, very sane as he said it himself
I do like the idea that you can go so insane that with enough time you just normalize again
Like if you were to believe the guy in Groundhog Day lived the same day for 10000 years like they planned at some point, by the end of the movie he has gone through that process and comes out sane and happy lol
Maybe she would pull a Professor Paradox from Ben 10 where she would slip into insanity and eventually get bored of it and work out a way to escape with nearly infinite time to do it.
and the funny thing is that in the story, the husband who did that to his wife revealed that info to try and convince the jury to let him go since he technically didn't kill her
No, instead he trapped her in an eternal hell
The jury's response? Immediate and unanimous death penalty for the husband
I read a near future sci-fi book many years ago, it was extremely mediocre and I can’t even remember the name of it, but the ending really stuck with me. In the finale the villain jumps into a pod that’s supposed to allow you to cryogenically freeze yourself to be woken at a later date. This happens in a secret base built into ice that’s falling apart and so their pod falls into the ocean. What they didn’t know was that the trick is that you have to be put to sleep first or you’re just frozen, but awake, in your body. So she’s stuck at the bottom of the ocean in a pod, completely frozen but wide awake, forever. I’m not sure how long it would take to go absolutely bonkers but it couldn’t be very long.
D: I thought you were miles away 'lad, where you've been hidin'?
E: Who says "I've been hidin' "?
D: Your brothers thought you were dead.
E: Heh...
E: Prolapse is one hell of a thing ain't it?
D: Too right.
D: Longer than you think...
E: Yes.
D: What?
E: When they found out how to bring us back, some of us would tell stories about "what they saw on the other side", they saw friends... family members... mostly strangers. I spoke to my grandfather... He's been dead for 30 years.
Emesis Blue
It's a Respawn Machine instead of a teleporter, but the overall concept of "it's eternity in there" is still the same
neat little fact: the zombie mercenaries in one scene are called Jaunts
and there are a ton of references and homages to Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick's works
Nightcrawler from X-men’s power teleports by traveling through a brimstone pocket dimension
That’s why there’s smoke and sulfur smell whenever he Bamfs! In and out.
In the XMen evolution cartoon they slow the process down and it turns out if he goes through it any slower he would get shredded by the dinosaur like monsters that live there.
I loved the take on Xmen 2, when he's genuinely scared of teleporting anywhere he can't see, because of the potential disaster of there actually being something there, which blew my mind as a kid, as it was something I wasn't thinking about.
Never knew if it's original from the movie or something taken from the comics/series too
It's in the comics too from what I remember, he only likes to teleport if he has line of sight or has been there before, because he could teleport into something. He does accidentally teleport into something (well, someone) eventually.
The Fly- if you accidentally fail to notice another tiny creature with you in the portal as you're teleporting you end up as a completelt new hybrid creature with that creature's DNA irreversibly merged into your own.
i suppose you could hand wave this by saying that those are expected, and therefore have been factored into the calculation already, while the fly was a sudden unknown?
Let me then posit this scenario to you my scientist friend!
What if you ATE the fly. Would that make the teleport go off without a hitch? What if you kept the fly inside your mouth without swallowing it?
This movie is more and more unscientific for every question!!
I expected more from a movie where Jeff Goldblum morphs into a fly!
I feel like if it's been digested at all, then it's a part of your gut. but if it's just held, alive and intact, in your mouth, and you haven't calibrated the transporter to account for it, you're gonna get Brundlefly-d
“Hey, you know that common trope about people saying teleportation is dangerous because you may end up in a wall if you don’t know where you’re going? Yeah, let’s make that an attack on purpose.” -Ryoko Kui probably
He's method of teleporting is pretty dope too. He swaps two things together, and if it's a solid surface, it'll take the shape of what he is teleporting, if you look at the photo, those stone legs and bodies are actually the walls replacing the body parts, pretty gnarly but cool, I hope the anime cooks with his scenes.
It's definitely awesome, but it also made me realize how low key terrifyingly OP it is… like he just teleports a board he was holding into someone's body then immediately drops the chunk of them that it displaced.
It’s a very different kind of fight if a person can decide to replace your eye with their dirty tissue without really telegraphing.
The whole manga goes from good to great from this point on, so I can’t wait to see everything they do with season 2.
How would one even fight that? Like they could've teleported that pice of wood straight into your brain killing you instantly and there's nothing you could have done about it. The only reason you're still alive is because they chose to let you live, for now.
It does help that Mithrun specifically has several handicaps. He has no depth perception, and a poor sense of direction/spatial awareness, so he'll often just... miss.
Don't take him straight on. Rogue backstab. Illusions or dizziness so he cannot tell what and where he's teleporting. Put him up against insect swarms, deadly slimes and fungi that aren't seriously affected by being sliced up (or which becomes even worse).
I don't watch/read the series so these are more D&D tactics, though.
Well yes if you knew what you're facing and have prep time and the right skills it's possible but even if you do have the right skills you still need significantly more information than they have because if you're caught off guard you're dead.
Portals in The Witcher. Going through one is described as feeling like passing through a pitch-black freezing void, while malfunctions and mistakes could potentially lead to catastrophic injuries. Geralt hates going through portals for these reasons
In the books (and the witcher 1) there's a story in which some knight went into a portal and came out as spaghetti of boiled guts and only armour kept it all in one place
I figured he hates them because his mutations give him enhanced senses and they get overwhelmed by the process. But this is so much worse, why does anyone teleport?
The Prestige does something fun with this. Spoilers: Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale play rival magicians trying to outdo each other, often with violent consequences. This culminates in the development of a transportation/teleportation trick worked on by none other than Nikola Tesla (David Bowie). The twist? The machine doesn’t actually teleport the magician. It creates a clone. The clone or the original drowns in a water tank below the stage, leaving the survivor to emerge and take a bow. Hugh’s character is eventually unsure of who they are after it’s performed so many times.
It's done amazingly well, but holy hell, after the first time, you've got a clone! You could simply drop below the stage, and your clone, or you, could pop-up anywhere in the building. Why keep playing Russian Roulette needlessly?
In Star Trek: TNG Lt. Barclay is a side character who has an intense fear of the teleportation technology that is commonplace for everyone else in the Trek universe.
Episode: "The Realm of Fear"
"The idea of being... deconstructed molecule by molecule, it's more than I can stand. Even when I was... a child, I always had a dreadful fear that, if ever I was dematerialized, that I would... never come back again whole."
He is kind of right. And I'm not even getting into metaphysical questions of the soul here, how many Star Trek episodes and movies have involved someone being turned inside out, merged with solid objects, driven mad, accidentally duplicated, sent into the past, merged into a single being with someone else, getting turned into a child, a ghost, or thrown into a holodeck program where they believe they're a super spy or world-conquering mastermind?
This episode did prove that the transported person retains awareness throughout the transportation process, there is no 'black out' point until they are reassembled.
This disproves the idea that people are simply killed in one location and a perfect replica is made at the new destination (Thomas Riker aside 😄 ), but also makes the Transporter malfunction in The Motion Picture all the more horrible (they heard that the transporter was malfunctioning while going through the process, and felt their body being put together wrong!! 👀 )
I don't think Thomas Riker is an exception to the rule. Making a photocopy requires additional energy but it doesn't destroy or interrupt the existence of the original.
It's not late at all, it's like 5-10% of the way through the story. Kishimoto goes home after the very first mission to find out her original is in the hospital.
The Philadelphia Experiment. Initially the plan was to make a destroyer (USS Eldridge, pictured above) invisible but while it became invisible it also teleported to Virginia from Philadelphia for a few minutes before returning to Philadelphia. the teleportation fuses the crew to the ship
I remember seeing a realistic seeming documentary about this one as a child that fucked me up for a while, lol. When I learned it was fake I was like "Oh thank God... Wait, it's obviously fake... I guess I hadn't thought critically about this since I was a child."
This happened to me with pine cones. My cousin told me when we were little kids that if you bury a pine cone with a piece of fruit it would grow a pine tree that grew that fruit instead of pinecones.
I was just on autopilot when I had my first kid and we were on a walk and I said “oh neat fact did you know…” and then immediately realized how ridiculous what I was about to say was. Just had never thought about it or had reason to for like 20 years 😂
I like how in Record of Ragnarok/Shuumatsu no Valkyrie they added this to Tesla lore, as the military tried to use his tech to teleport, they just didn't know that they needed Tesla Particles to teleport safely.
The dragons can teleports themselves and their riders by flying through the Between, a place of nothingness, unbelievably cold, and without any air. It can cause oxygen deprivation, miscarriage, and cystitis especially if they travel too far/spend too long Between
Was curious if anyone would bring it up. This is an interesting case because you quite frequently see it from the traveler's perspective, and hear all the warnings given when they train new riders. The further you go, the longer you stay between, which leads to a rider at one point messing up so bad she thought she wasn't coming back. You get to witness that thought process while she's between.
Also worth mentioning that it's the most common method of a dragon (and sometimes rider) giving in to depression or grief and offing themselves. Just go, and don't come back.
If anyone reading hasn't read the books, it's an assortment of trilogies and standalones written in the same world, and I do recommend it. There's an author recommended reading order somewhere, but if you can't find it then publication order is good enough.
In the game heat signature, teleporters work by destroying your body and recreating it somsewhere else. Effectively, you die and are replaced by a clone. This leads to most people not using teleporters, but there is a dedicated cult of people who have used it who see it as someone dying to give birth to them, and they think it's their duty to eventually do it themselves to give someone else a shot at life, adding numbers to their name to represent how many new lives they have had in this way. This also means that very rarely something can go wrong where the clone is made but the original isn't destroyed, in this case the law demands that one of them dies before an hour has passed and whoever lives is the legal person.
Especially sucks for an Aeldari Warp Spider. “Okay just gonna pop in and out of the Warp real quick and really hope I don’t accidentally bump into the chaos god of hellraiser shit waiting to eat my soul.”
Also the experimental gravity drive from Event Horizon (1997), which is widely interpreted as an unofficial early example of Warp travel by 40k fans (the film’s screenwriter was apparently a fan of Warhammer 40k himself)
And to complete the main foursome of "We discovered a way to cross large distances quickly by taking a shortcut through a parallel dimension with a different scale to ours. The one downside is the other dimension is probably literal Hell":
There is an Ork weapon that involves taking a snotling (think goblin) and teleporting them through a warp tunnel to the target. They arrive insane, sometimes possessed, and often inside of the target.
My favorite thing about the Warp has to do with the Orks. Apparently traveling through the Warp can drive people insane as they see things they aren’t meant to see, so the Orks’ solution was to wear blindfolds.
To explain: They take you to your location in 10 seconds!*
*outside view. Inside the train, it will take centuries, perhaps millenia for the trip to end. Meanwhile you're completely conscious and unable to die. People regularly lose their minds and it's up to Warp employees to clean up the mess when the train arrives. And by clean up the mess I mean "scrape the bits of the passengers off the walls and ceiling and put them back in their seats"
Oh, they could put you to sleep, like in The Jaunt, but fans theorize that the "time" that the passengers feel is collected as a resource to be sold to another company.
Teleportation working via creating a temporary portal to Hell was always the premise of the Doom games, but Doom 3 really leaned into it with any teleportation, even just from one part of a facility to another coming in the form of the traveler being slingshotted through a horrifying fleshy cavern for a few seconds.
No, this is not a photograph from a colonoscopy, this is just what teleportation in Doom 3 looks like.
If you constantly teleport around with it to the point it kills you, you get one of two unique death messages that say either say your legs appeared where your head should be or you didn’t materialize
The teleportation device caused David Robert Jones to have his molecules unstable and cause whole body damage. Also, if you are halfway through the teleport when it gets turned off, you get cut in half.
Nightcrawler. His teleportation actually sends him to another dimension for a fraction of a second. However, one day I think Bishop and Kurt do experiments to slow Kurt down while he's in that other dimension and there are a some nasty critters living in that dimension.
From: Dale becomes impatient and enters a faraway tree, a tree with the ability to teleport those who enter it, after learning that Tabitha used one which led to her being able to briefly escape the town that everyone is trapped in. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to know where you will actually end up upon entering one, and Dale ends up fused into the concrete of the drained pool back in town, dying shortly after.
Basic gist of the episode is that aliens allow humans to use their teleportation technology to travel vast distances, but only so long as they follow the strict protocol.
The protocol ends up being a process of scanning an individual, creating a duplicate at the destination, and then incinerating the original copy from the point of origin. This is only realized when there is an (possibly scripted as a compliance test) error that interrupts the transmission, so that both copies are alive at the same time. Forcing the human operator to "balance the equation" (i.e. kill the original copy), or risk the aliens preventing the continued usage of their teleportation technology.
The Prestige (2006) sort of borrowed that "teleportation" concept a few years later.
There's also a second case in Half Life 2 - you use a "slow teleporter" in Nova Prospekt and arrive at Kleiner's lab... a few weeks into the future.
Apparently Combine tech has these slow teleporters while humans use the Xen to make them instantaneous. But still, the idea of having time skips like that is eerie
Travelling in the wheel of time: opens a hole in reality that you can fall through but later on characters figure out how to use travelling as a weapon
American Dad has alien teleportation tech which is clearly very painful, essentially shredding the person as it goes through. Thankfully the moment you go through, the main stops. https://youtu.be/ie8Q4wpNTPA?is=DbiLDCgC3k2Ty797
The Nazis find these stones which can teleport things, but individually they are very chaotic, the Nazis tried to use one to teleport a battleship while off the coast of Peru. It did not work, well it did, but it teleported and fused to a mountain in the Himalayas. Most of the crew were killed instantly, with the rest freezing to death.
In marvel night crawler actually goes through a brimstone dimension that is hell like which is why when he teleports it smells like sulfur and brimstone. His teleportation is instantaneous so he wasn’t aware of it until his speed was slowed down enough for him to see it
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u/Dismal-Vanilla1878 Aug 04 '26
Transporter Malfunction, Star Trek: The Motion Picture: "What we got back didn't live long.....fortunately"
First: WTF was up with them giving kids nightmares with THAT bit of Body Horror?!?!
Second: You now understand why Dr. McCoy didn't like Transporters. They may be the 'safest' form of travel, but when they break down, the results are Horrifying!