History Main / ReassignedToAntarctica

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[[AC:Radio]]

[[folder:Other]]

* Turner Broadcasting Network tended to use {{WCW}} as Antartica. That is the backstage, behind the scenes, staff part of WCW. Most of the people that worked in it were either kicked upstairs, put out to pasture, or unsuspecting newbies who had no idea what they were in for. WCW, for reasons that would be too extensive to describe here, was a horrible place to work.

* Trigger-happy SmallGirlBigGun Kome Sawaguchi from BlueSeed points to this trope when the team commander asks here to exercise a little self-control. "If I could control myself, I never would have been assigned to this unit!"

* A few incompetent {{supervillain}}s who reformed joined the JusticeLeague. They were sent to the South Pole as "Justice League Antarctica". The League's leadership decided it would keep them out of the way, as no trouble would happen down there. They were wrong, with [[HilarityEnsues hilarious results]].

* In ''Adventures in the Rifle Brigade'', Gestapo captain Venkschaft is sent to the Russian front with the rank of Cocksucker Third Class after having a massive temper tantrum in front of Hitler himself.

* In a recent issue of ''Avengers: The Initiative'', VillainWithGoodPublicity [[SpiderMan Norman Osborn]] reassigns superhero Gravity to the worst possible place in the America superhero initiative...his home state of Wisconsin, where he will take command of the joke team the Great Lakes Avengers.

* The original trio of ''ABC Warriors'' were all assigned to the elite combat unit as a punishment; Happy Shrapnel had finally worn out all the good will he earned as one of the Wolgan War's oldest soldiers by repeatedly looting and brawling, Hammerstein is said to have murdered a human superior, and the details of Joe Pineapples' situation are classified.
* In ''Desert Peach'', the regiment Pfirsig Rommel commands consists of the people [[ThoseWackyNazis Nazi Germany]] cannot just remove from duty (or, in some cases, toss in prison or a concentration camp) for whatever reason, but who are too politically embarassing, too woefully incompetent, or in some cases, too bugfuck crazy to actually get them involved in the actual war.

* Happens in TheMovie of the graphic novel ''Whiteout'', as mentioned under "comic books" above.

* John Laroquette's character was threatened with, and ultimately suffered, this fate in ''Stripes''. But he deserved it, for sending a RagtagBunchOfMisfits on an ImpossibleMission.

* The basis for much comedy, dark and otherwise, in the movie ''Ravenous''. Every character is essentially a misfit or a local in the freezing mountains of far-off 1800s California. The lead character is introduced as a military hero is being disposed of as a result of incurable, dangerous abject cowardice.
* In the [[Film/StarTrek 2009 Star Trek film]] by J.J. Abrams, Montgomery Scott is reassigned to a Federation outpost on a remote ice world after he uses [[StarTrekEnterprise Admiral Archer's]] dog as a test subject to prove that interplanetary transportation is possible(everyone having ridiculed Scotty for the idea).

* Will Arnett's obstructive FBI Agent in G-Force is literally reassigned to Antarctica at the end of the film.

* Chigago PD's Special Investigations department in {{The Dresden Files}}. Dresden comments on this from time to time, mostly because these are some of the sharpest, and bravest (Loup-garu incident anyone?) agents in the police force, but they either pissed off thier previous bosses, or some major politician. Probably both.

* In the Morgan Kane series by Louis Masterson, when the Wild West has been tamed and there's no more need for an old-fashioned gunslinger, the titular US Marshal is reassigned to Alaska. His superiors make it abundantly clear that they intend to bury him there to get rid of him, as he is described as a "walking anachronism".
* The House of Life in the Kane Chronicles series by Rick Riordan has 365 gnomes (That is, places that members can be assigned to) the first is egypt, where it was founded. 365 is literally Antarctica, populated only by "a few cold magicians and some magic penguins."

* A traffic police officer in {{Spooks}} was reassigned to Orkney after trying to impound one of the agents' cars.

* When contemplating his return to power, Gul Dukat in DeepSpaceNine decides to transfer the younger officer who stole his wife to the Cardassian embassy on Breen, even adding "I hear it's bitter cold on Breen."

* Inverted on {{Chuck}}, where a useless, obstreperous person is sent to a distant place to get him out of the way and preserve the [[SecretIdentity Secret Identities]] - but the place he's sent off to isn't Alaska or Antarctica, it's Hawaii. Harry Tang, assistant manager of the Buy More at the time, stumbles on Team Chuck in the middle of a teleconference with one of the generals. With aplomb rarely seen from this character, Casey convinces him that ''he thinks'' Tang has always been aware of spies operating out of the store, the CIA is impressed by Tang's analytical skill, and the transfer to Hawaii is a chance for Tang to have his own career as a spy. In reality, Tang stumbled on them by accident, Casey is the sort of person who would gladly kill Tang if he thought it was easiest, and he still doesn't know the big secret.

* The X-Files: Mulder is sent to the basement to work on the X-Files for being a weirdo. Scully is sent to work on the X-Files originally to assess Mulder, but they both become locked in their stations for being weirdos.
* The basic premise of TheGoodGuys. Detective Stark is a CloudCuckooLander CowboyCop who can't be fired because of his heroic exploits back in the eighties. Detective Bailey was a young up-and-comer who decided to correct the Lieutenant's grammar. The season pilot had them searching for a broken humidifier, and it's gone downhill from there. This is despite all the important cases they accidentally close, due to a string of bad luck and embarrassments along the way.
* Inversion in ''Small Wonder'': Vicky's inventor and one of his co-workers are vying for a promotion. Co-worker's daughter secretly makes suggestions to Vicky to make his competitor look bad. Vicky takes the suggestions quite literally, and the co-worker wins the promotion. And then it turns out to be a transfer to Iceland.

[[folder:RealLife]]
* A common threat for police officers who mess up, but not quite enough for a TurnInYourBadge. The threat is usually something like "you'll end up as a crossing guard for this!"
** Irish politician Seán Doherty, when caught drinking in a pub after hours, once infamoulsy asked a garda (policeman), "Do you want a pint or a transfer?"
* Camillo Cavour, when he was in the military, proved such a troublemaker that he was reassigned to a remote post.
* U.S. President Abraham Lincoln famously quipped that he'd named Simon Cameron ambassador to Russia because "I know of no further place I could send him."
** Earlier, Andrew Jackson had sent James Buchanan to that post for the same reason, allegedly saying, "If we kept a ministry at the North Pole, I would have sent him there."
*** This led to ReassignmentBackfire, as it led people to think that this gave him actual experience.
* There is somewhere worse than mainland Alaska in the U.S. Military. An island called [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shemya Shemya]] in the Aleutians, a group of islands off the coast of the Alaskan Peninsula. According to legend, the wind never drops below 60 knots, the temperature never rises above -20 C and there's a 10-foot visibility fog 300 days of the year. Primary duty there is clearing the runway of obstructions. Or so the legend goes.
* For some reason Mongolia was a place where communists who were too unorthodox were sent.
* A proverb that originated in the Soviet officer ranks conveys the typically Russian philosophical approach to the problem: "They can't send you further than Kushka [a town in Turkmenistan and the Soviet Union's southernmost point] and they can't give you less than a squad to command."
* The poet Alexander Pushkin was exiled from St. Petersburg to Kishinev (now Chişinău, the capital of Moldova), very far away. Kishinev, which had a large Jewish population, was proverbial in Yiddish slang for "very far away"- if a child was gone for a while, their parents would ask if they had been in Kishinev.
* In the City of Denver, Colorado, police officers who screw up, but either not badly enough to get fired (yet) or can't be fired for some reason, get sent to Denver Airport to patrol. It's said that an officer who goes to the airport is on their way out.
* Apparently the people of Coventry hated the military so much that the threat to "send someone to Coventry" has become an idiom in itself.
* Félix Éboué, a trailblazing Afro-Frenchman who achieved high office in France's 1930s colonial administration, up to the status of governor of the valuable Guadelope colony, ultimately pissed off the wrong people and was reassigned to what is now Chad, a sparsely populated French colony that was mostly desert and only effectively governed in the South. [[ReassignmentBackfire This backfired]] when WorldWarTwo started and, it has been suggested at least partially out of spite, Éboué became the first French colonial governor to throw his support behind Chares De Gaulle's Free French government.
* When French Lt. Colonel Georges Picquart uncovered evidence of the framing of fellow officer Alfred Dreyfus for the crime of high treason in 1896, he was hastily reassigned to Tunisia in order to keep the matter quiet. It didn't work.
* In czarist Russia, aristocrats with unfitting opinions were often sent to Siberia permanently. It wasn't all that bad, as they still remained aristocrats and lived in relative comfort (unlike those sent to Siberia during Stalin's rule, who got to live in prisons).
* Catholic clergy who somehow manage to seriously anger the Vatican enough might be sent away to remote "contemplative monasteries." More or less the same situation as the FatherTed example above.
** [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Gaillot Jacques Gaillot]] provides a "metaphorical" example, in which he wasn't actually exiled, but the intent was the same. Gaillot's liberal views made him unpopular with the Catholic Church hierarchy, and so he was demoted from Bishop of Évreux, France to Bishop of Partenia. Partenia is a See which used to be a major Algerian city- used to because it was buried under the Sahara in the 5th century.
* As punishment for scandalous conduct, the Roman poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus to Tomis, a port in Black Sea (now modern-day Constanţa, Romania).
** Augustus was nothing if not consistent. Several of his descendents whom he considered to be scandalous or embarrassing found themselves exiled to godforsaken flyspecks in the Mediterranean (which for a Roman was very slightly better than the Black Sea.)
* General Douglas [=MacArthur=], famous for commanding Allied forces in the West Pacific during WWII and UN forces during the Korean War, was sent to the Philippines as a Brigadier General in 1922 by General Pershing, for becoming involved in a woman that the higher ranking officer had been persuing. At least, that was the rumor of the time.
* This was one of JosefStalin's methods of dealing with those opponents that were too high-profile to simply execute or send to TheGulag. They were appointed ambassadors, removing them from the political scene in the USSR itself.
** Georgy Zhukov, the Soviet general who led the Soviet Offensive against Germany in World War II, was reassigned after the war, first to southern Ukraine, then to the Urals, as he was very popular, hence threatening to Stalin.
* After one too many clashes with [[HeirToTheDojo Henry Ford II]], [[SelfMadeMan Lee Iacocca]] was moved from president of Ford Motor Company to [[KickedUpstairs some impressive job title]] - with a run-down office in a parts warehouse in a rough part of [[MotorCity Detroit]] (mind you, this was in TheSeventies, before "rough part of Detroit" became [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology tautological]]). A job offer from Chrysler moved him from this to being the first modern "celebrity CEO."
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* The {{Doom}} marine, in the first game, is sent to an out of the way research facility as punishment for assualting a superior officer rather than fire on civilians. Things... don't go as planned.

* In Activisions BattleZone, if you fail a particular mission, you are to be reassigned to Mars' polar region.

* Happens once in JohnnyBravo.

* Marvin from MartinMystery was reassigned to a Center base in Antartica, largely as an excuse to have a WholePlotReference to ''TheThing''.

* In DecadesOfDarkness, an AlternateHistory timeline, being transferred to the West African colony of Whydah is considered this for members of the American military. The American State Department's equivalent assignment is Liberia.
* In ''{{The Men from the Ministry}}'', the main characters' boss frequently threatens to reassign them to the Outer Hebrides.

* In ''ASongOfIceAndFire'' the Night's Watch, who guard the great Wall in the frozen north, has become this. While it was once considered an honorable task the fact that the [[SealedEvilInACan Sealed Evils In A Can]] behind the wall haven't been active for hundreds means it's now a joke, guarding the world from an imaginary danger. It's used as a dumping ground for criminals, disgraced ex-soldiers and [[BlackSheep unwanted members of noble houses]]. Of course, after a few thousand pages numerous epic moments of ReassignmentBackfire ensues.

When a character is transferred to a remote and/or unpleasant outpost as punishment for bad performance.

** In ''The Bishop's Gambit'' we learn that the Bishopric of Truro is reserved for extremely irritating Anglican priests, on the grounds that it is "very remote." (It's in Cornwall).

* It is rumored the Royal Navy's equivalent to Shemya is [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Rockall-photo.JPG Rockall]]. Like Shemya except [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rockall_wave_March_1943.jpg waves break completely over it]] now and then.
** For the sake of emphasis, out of all ''six thousand'' of the British Isles, Rockall is considered the worst one.
** Except that it might not be a British Island at all.The ownership of Rockall is disputed. Exchanges continue between the countries involved: Ireland, Denmark (for the Faroe Islands), the United Kingdom and Iceland. Iceland, Ireland and the United Kingdom have all made submissions to the commission set up under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
** The joke goes that it's called Rockall because there's [[IncrediblyLamePun rock-all there.]]
** Rockall is also the image at the top of the page.

** Except that it might not be a British Island at all.The ownership of Rockall is disputed. Exchanges continue between the countries involved: Ireland, Denmark (for the Faroe Islands), the United Kingdom and Iceland. Iceland, Ireland and the United Kingdom have all made submissions to the commission set up under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea

* In the Kate Beckinsale-starring film ''Whiteout'', her character is an FBI agent ''literally'' reassigned to Antartica. Subverted in that [[spoiler: it was a form of self-exile after she felt guilty for letting a suspect die before he could be tried]].

* After one too many clashes with Henry Ford II, Lee Iacocca was moved from president of Ford Motor Company to some impressive job title - with a run-down office in a parts warehouse in a rough part of [[MotorCity Detroit]] (mind you, this was in TheSeventies, before "rough part of Detroit" became [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology tautological]]). A job offer from Chrysler moved him from this to being the first modern "celebrity CEO."

* Tony Hayward, former CEO of BP, is being reassigned to a position in Siberia in the wake of the Deep Horizons disaster.

** There is no Royal Navy base (or nothing at all for that matter) on Rockall and the Island is owned by the Republic of Ireland not the UK.

* In DecadesOfDarkness, an AlternateHistory timeline, the transfer to Whydah, an isolated * American colony in West Africa if you belongs to the * American military and to Liberia if you belongs to the * American State Department. Note that in * America all Blacks are legaly slavs.

* In ''ASongOfIceAndFire'' those who are unwanted by (but still useful to) society are sent away to join the Night's Watch, who guard the great Wall in the frozen north. This includes several disgraced ex-soldiers and [[BlackSheep unwanted members of noble houses]]. Of course, after a few thousand pages numerous epic moments of ReassignmentBackfire ensue.

** In ''The Bishop's Gambit'' we learn that the Bishopric of Truro is reserved for extremely irritating Anglican priests, on the grounds that it is "very remote." (It's in Cornwall, SoYeah).

*There is no Royal Navy base (or nothing at all for that matter) on Rockall and the Island is owned by the Republic of Ireland not the UK.