Extradimensional Emergency Exit

Quick, into the portal, everyone! Hurry!

— Marcy Wu, Amphibia, "True Colors"

Maybe your boss is angry at you; maybe the Monster of the Week is closing in; maybe the building's on fire... or maybe the world might literally be about to end. Whatever the case, you've ended up in a situation in which there's no way out — except by opening a door into another reality and slamming it shut behind you.

Most commonly involving magic or super-science of some kind, this trope is distinguished by its immediacy: characters don't have to seek out a spaceship or any other complicated modes of transportation and go through the complicated matter of getting through the atmosphere and actually finding another planet in order to avoid danger.

Instead, it's a simple matter of stepping through a portal, activating the interdimensional teleporter, or maybe just snapping your fingers. Characters with this exit will usually have their means of egress either on their person or very close by — to the point that some can actually transport themselves without even meaning to (often starting the adventure of the story in the process).

Once you find the exit, it's a simple matter of leaving as quickly as possible... and hoping that wherever you end up is better than where you were a moment ago. It's possible that the place you just jumped into is way worse/more dangerous than the place you just left. Also, there's still the matter of what's to be done if or when you finally have to return home and face the threat, if you have a way to go home — but surely that can wait for another day, right?

And that's assuming you have a home to return to...

May cross over with Teleportation Rescue.

Compare Hyperspeed Escape, this trope as applied to spaceships, and Emergency Temporal Shift, the time traveller's counterpart to this trope. Contrast Extradimensional Shortcut, which is concerned with using another reality as a means of transportation as opposed to the destination.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Naruto: Obito Uchiha's Sharingan lets him teleport to the Kamui Dimension, an ability which he exploits in battle to escape many attacks. During the World War arc, when he is being hunted down by Madara, Obito retreats into the parallel world, knowing that it would be nearly impossible for his enemy to find him there.

Audio Plays

• In the Big Finish Doctor Who Unbound episode "Auld Mortality," the alternate First Doctor and Susan find themselves cornered by Ordinal-General Quences, who is intent on killing the former and using the second as his ticket into the Presidency of Gallifrey. With no other way out, the Doctor activates the possibility generator, allowing the two of them to escape into a simulated universe of his own design.

Comic Books

• In the crossover comic BoBoiBoy Galaxy x Lawak Kampus: SUPERIOR, the characters are split into pairs, each of which enter one of 8 portals that appear after Gigabot, a dimensional traveling Power Sphera, disappears with Teacher Noodle and Commander Kokoci. Each dimension requires them to find a hexagonal panel to escape. BoBoiBoy and Vaness defeat a monstrous lizard wielding it, and then it runs away to call its mother. The two just manage to escape via portal to evade a fight with her.
• Early in Captain Britain: A Crooked World, the Captain and Saturnyne find themselves witnessing the alternate Earth on the receiving end of an apocalyptic breakdown of reality courtesy of Mad Jim Jaspers. Realizing that all her work on uplifting the world has been for nothing, Saturnyne decides to cut her losses by teleporting herself and her staff into a safe dimension — leaving Captain Britain behind to face the music.
• One issue of Iron Man has him grapple with Doctor Doom, and be sent into the past via Doom's Time Cube. Doom allies himself with the sorceress Morgan Le Fey, and leads an army of zombies against King Arthur. Iron Man realizes that Doom hasn't the power to raise the dead, so he confronts Morgan in her castle tower. Morgan cannot leave the castle, which was made into her prison by Merlin's magic. She nonetheless escapes via a dimensional portal.

Fan Works

• Ben 10: Unlimited: This is how Professor Paradox saves Ben from suicide; he sends him to the DCAU...in the middle of the Thanagarian invasion.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami: Ami can save her minions from most dangers by putting them into stasis in what's basically a Pocket Dimension.
• Empathy: Krei Tech's experimental teleporter is the reason why Oh ended up on Earth with the Gorg egg, as he ran through the portal hoping to escape the Gorg. It doesn't end well, as Krei Tech immediately takes him prisoner.
• If Wishes Were Ponies: Shortly after being beaten almost to death by Dudley's gang, Harry Potter accidentally ends up entering a portal to Equestria. After he arrives, he's found by the CMC, who get him to the hospital and save his life.
• The Last Seidr: The Tesseract zaps twelve-year-old Harry Potter out of the Chamber of Secrets and into a SHIELD base. This is a subversion, however, because Harry was whisked from his dimension after he'd already defeated the basilisk, and ends up in the MCU mere seconds before Loki steals the Tesseract (sending Harry into another deadly mission he never asked to be a part of).
• The Mountain and the Wolf: After Wulfrik's plans go horribly wrong (his ship is incinerated by Drogon and Daenerys is killed, he escapes the Red Keep by jumping out the window with two crewmen and the ship's prow. Tyrion and the others assume he drowned, but in fact he once again went through the Warp to end up at the Iron Fleet's location near Essos, one of his crewmen having been bitten clean in half by the daemons.
• New Stars: This trope is what saves the clone trooper Maxx from a grenade...and is also what sends him to another universe.
• The Spectacular Spider-Man: Lost In Gotham: Doctor Octopus used the same teleporter that sent Spider-Man to Gotham to escape Ghost Spider. Subverted; barely two days after he got there, he was beaten up by Spider-Man and Batman (although the former was just making fun of him).

Films — Live-Action

• Masters of the Mystic Arts in Doctor Strange can access almost any possible location with their sling rings. As such, when Doctor Strange makes the mistake of dragging Kaecilius and his Zealots into the Mirror Dimension — where they're even more powerful — he's forced to hastily conjure up a portal back to the real world before they can kill him. Unfortunately, Kaecilius just uses his powers to fling Strange off the road before he can reach the portal and keep him too off-balance to conjure another. For good measure, Strange is only able to escape the Mirror Dimension when Kaecilius fatally stabs the Ancient One and flings her through a portal to her death, unwittingly giving Strange a chance to follow.
• During Tony's first successful presentation of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, he finds himself being abruptly noticed by a gang of Russian mobsters that he's in debt to; cornered, Tony flings himself into the Imaginarium in a desperate attempt to evade his pursuers inside Doctor Parnassus's mind. Unfortunately, the mobsters follow him in. Hilarity Ensues.
• In Pan's Labyrinth, Ophelia's second task involves her entering the underworld realm of the Pale Man by drawing a door in the wall with magical chalk. Unfortunately, the portal closes before she can leave, and Ophelia is forced to hastily draw another door leading back to the mortal realm while the Pale Man is closing in on her. Later, she uses the same chalk to escape from her room while being held captive by Captain Vidal.
• Early in Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), Sonic uses his magical rings to travel from Mobius to Earth after his guardian, Longclaw, is killed by the Echidna tribe. Ten years later, Sonic causes a city-wide power outage when he circles a baseball field, and tries to escape to the Mushroom Planet when he is being hunted down. However, he accidentally loses his magical rings on the top of the Transamerica Building in San Francisco after seeing it on officer Tom Wachowski's shirt. Over the course of the movie, Sonic befriends Tom, and the two travel to San Francisco. When they reach the top of the Transmercia Building, Sonic recovers his rings, but comes face-to-face with Dr. Robotnik, who is trying to exterminate him. At the end of the film, Sonic uses the rings to banish Robotnik to the Mushroom Planet.

Literature

• The Book of Lost Things features David being lured out into the garden by the voice of his dead mother, only to find himself right in the path of a crash-landing German bomber. With nowhere else to go before the plane hits him, he climbs into a crack in the garden wall, escaping into the Crooked Man's Magic Land with the bomber's wreckage hot on his tail.
• The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, following two visits to Narnia by Lucy and Edmund, the Pevensie children end up getting in trouble with Professor Kirke's housekeeper and have to make themselves scarce in a hurry. Lucy leads them into the wardrobe to hide, resulting in the four of them finding themselves in Narnia together for the first time.
  • In The Silver Chair, Eustace and Jill find themselves the targets of school bullies, forcing them to flee through a gate that just happens to lead directly into Narnia.
• Ciaphas Cain: Cain finds himself in a Necron tomb that's just reactivated. Fleeing for his life, he runs through a Warp portal that happens to be linked to a Necron ship currently under attack by the Reclaimers chapter of Space Marines, who rescue him. He lost two fingers in the jump, although the Reclaimers outfitted him with augmetic replacements.
• Darwath:
  • In "The Time of the Dark", Ingold "crosses the void" to Earth from the fall of the palace at Gae with Prince Tir to shield him from the Dark Ones.
  • In the same book, when a Dark One tracks Ingold to California in our world, he crosses back to Darwath, taking Gil and Rudy with him to get them out of a burning cabin. ^note They set the cabin on fire themselves, as light is one of the most effective ways to combat a Dark One.
• Dragonlinks: In a You Can't Thwart Stage One moment, the big bad is almost killed early on, but manages to fire off an interdimensional teleportation spell before collapsing. He winds up on twenty-first century Earth, where a well-meaning bystander calls an ambulance and he gets his life-threatening injuries seen to before returning to his own world to continue the plot.
• Thanks to the Subtle Knife, Will Parry of His Dark Materials is able to escape between universes:
  • While attempting to get back Lyra's Alethiometer from Sir Charles Latrom, Will is able to navigate between his world he shares with Latrom and Ci'gazze's.
  • Subverted while in the Land of the Dead: there, every window opens only to the deep rocks.
• Labyrinths of Echo: During his tenure as the chief of police, Kofa Yokh had perfected a combat spell that traps its target in a bubble which prevents both physical movement and any use of Plain Magic from within — perfect for apprehending magic-wielding criminals of all sorts. Juffin (having worked as a semi-legal Bounty Hunter at that time) mentions that he has been subjected to this spell several times, but always managed to escape by quickly traveling to another world — an overkill, for sure, but since inter-world travel is the domain of True Magic, it is one of the few things that can counter Kofa's spell.
• The Magicians: Being a parody of The Chronicles Of Narnia, the Fillory and Further series features a moment where Martin Chatwin first ventures into the Magical Land of Fillory by stepping through the door of a grandfather clock. Later, Quentin discovers that the adventures of the Chatwin children were actually real - and that Martin didn't enter the clock out of curiosity: he was being molested by Christopher Plover at the time, and Jane Chatwin speculates that he only entered the clock in a desperate attempt to escape Plover's advances.
• The Stormlight Archive: Elsecallers can travel into Shadesmar at will, which is how Jasnah escapes her assassination in Words of Radiance. She also keeps supplies stocked in Shadesmar, as last time she ran out of Stormlight and it took her months to make it back. Dalinar gains a similar ability in Oathbringer, though he hasn't used it for this purpose yet. Ishar also uses this to pull a Villain: Exit, Stage Left at the end of Rhythm of War.
• Bluebear does it several times in The 13 ½ Lives of Captain Bluebear, thanks to wormholes being scattered all over Zamonia.
  • He attempts to do it when he finds a wormhole in the mountain labyrinth, thinking it's the only possible way out, but gets distracted and then led away by the Troglotroll.
  • While chased by the Spiderwitch, he accidentally falls into a wormhole and gets transported into the 2364th dimension.
  • In the 2364th dimension, after accidentally letting his friend Qwerty (the local prince) fall into a wormhole, he jumps into it after him.
• This Is How You Lose the Time War: The Super-Soldier Agents can innately travel The Multiverse. Falling to her death from an Attempted Suicide, Red uses this to escape to safety an instant before impact.
• The Wheel of Time: A Flashback in Towers of Midnight reveals that Graendal survived Rand's Fantastic Nuke on her stronghold in the previous book by creating a Traveling gateway right before it was annihilated.
• Wulfrik: After Zarnath's betrayal, Wulfrik finds himself stranded on Ulthuan, his crew picked off by elves until there's only one man left and his longship pounded to splinters by a sea serpent. Fortunately, the important part of the ship is still in one piece, a dragon-shaped prow that allows him to sail through the Warp and emerge anywhere else. He and Broendulf escape the elves by going into the Warp, escape the daemons trying to eat him thanks to Tzeentch's intervention, and later does it alone to return to Norsca.

Live-Action TV

• Arrowverse: When Earth-2 was destroyed by an anti-matter wave, Oliver, Diggle, and Laurel escaped through a breach just before the entire universe was destroyed. Later when the anti-matter wave came to Earth-38, millions of people were evacuated to Earth-1.
• Dark (2017): In the Season 2 finale, when the Apocalypse begins in Winden, an alternate version of Martha shows up to save Jonas, bringing him to the Alternate Universe that she originated from. However, it's later revealed that due to quantum entanglement — which allows for the creation of overlapping Alternate Timelines — Jonas simultaneously doesn't get rescued, but nevertheless survives the Apocalypse by diving into his basement.
• Doctor Who:
  • The events of "The Mind Robber" are kicked off by the TARDIS being stuck in the path of an erupting volcano and unable to dematerialise due to a fault in the fluid link. Out of desperation the Doctor activates the emergency unit which sends them flying "out of the time-space dimension, out of reality" and into a Blank White Void. Unfortunately, coming back proves more difficult than expected — given that said void leads into the Land of Fiction.
  • In the finale of "Evolution of the Daleks," the last surviving member of the Cult of Skaro, Dalek Caan, opts to activate his built-in emergency temporary shift rather than face the Doctor. It's not until the events of "The Stolen Earth" that it turns out that Caan ended up in a time period so far removed from history that it might as be another dimension: the Time War, a nonlinear period of conflict occurring in no specific time but somehow engulfing the entire universe; it's so catastrophic that the war was time-locked, meaning that time machines shouldn't be able to access it... and yet Caan managed it — gaining a glimpse of all time at the cost of his own sanity.
• During the Farscape episode "Through The Looking Glass," a botched Starbust results in Moya getting split into three additional dimensions. Because certain crewmembers can't cope with the aggressive barrage of stimuli in one reality, they have to beat a hasty retreat to the next in line: John is left so debilitated by the nausea-inducing light in the red dimension that he can barely make it to the blue portal with his eyes covered by an improvised blindfold, while Chiana appears to suffers a seizure upon being exposed to the endless noise of the blue dimension and has to be carried to the gold portal before her condition worsens.
• In the BBC adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, the feud between the two magicians begins to heat up earlier than the book when Strange angrily confronts Norrell at his house and gets hauled off to jail as a result. Facing stern prosecution, Strange realizes that the King's Roads are accessible not just through mirrors, but through any form of reflection — and promptly escapes his cell via a puddle on the floor.
• As Sliders is all about a group of travellers moving from one parallel universe to another, so it's not uncommon for them to make these escapes in a big hurry, either due to pursuing bad guys or their "window" closing soon.
• Ultra Series: A few villains have the ability to retreat into a different dimension to Earth's to avoid danger or defeat.
  • Ultraman Ace: Anytime the Yapool were defeated, they would retreat back into their home dimension ensuring their return in the future. In later series this continues being a favorite tactic of them.
  • Ultraman Geed: Ultraman Belial pulled this at the beginning of the series when he initiated the Crisis Impact, retreating into a separate dimension to hide from the Ultras so as to avoid their interference while waiting for the pieces of his plan to come into motion.
  • Ultra Galaxy Fight: The Absolute Conspiracy: Absolute Tartarus bails out to his special pocket dimension, Narak, whenever things get either too though or difficult for him. He also does this whenever he gets what he wants out of the places where he goes to.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons. The game has a number of magic items and spells that allow the user to escape into another plane of existence.
  • Magic Items:
    • The Well of Many Worlds looks like a Portable Hole (a flat surface that can be folded up). If someone enters the Well, they travel to a random plane of existence. The only problems are (a) it's a one-way trip and (b) the Well doesn't go with you.
    • If a Portable Hole is placed inside a Bag of Holding, a gate to another plane opens and draws anyone nearby through it to the other plane. Problem: the Hole and Bag are destroyed by the process, so they can't be used to return.
    • Sphere of Annihilation. If a Gate spell is cast on the Sphere, there is a 15% chance that everything within 180 feet will be sent to another plane of existence.
    • Plate Armor of Etherealness allows its wearer to travel to the Ethereal Plane at will.
    • In Adventure Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits, one room of Lolth's giant spider ship has four large mirrors on one wall, each of which can act as a Gate to another plane of existence for any creature that passes through it. If the party of adventurers kills Lolth, her ship will start to disintegrate. The party can escape by jumping through the mirrors to another plane. If the party doesn't kill Lolth, she can escape them by jumping through one of the mirrors.
    • Supplement The Book of Marvelous Magic. The Tent of Luxury has a "back door" that can act as an emergency exit, allowing the Tent's occupants to escape to the Ethereal Plane.
  • Spells:
    • The gate spell opens a magical portal to another plane of existence where a powerful entity waits. A person who acts quickly can pass through the Gate to the other plane. Problem: when you get to the other plane you're in the presence of the powerful entity, who may not be pleased by your arrival.
    • If a magic user has been to another plane of existence before, they can cast the teleport without error spell and travel to that plane again.
    • The spell plane shift allows the caster or a targeted creature to journey to another plane of existence.
    • The spell rope trick allows anyone to climb a rope and enter into an extradimensional space, where they can hide in safety.
• Pathfinder: The spell ether step is cast as an Out-of-Turn Interaction to dodge an incoming attack by jumping into the Ethereal Plane for a few seconds.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Interdimensional Matter Transporter card banishes one of the player's own monsters until the End Phase, which is meant to symbolize a monster escaping into an alternate dimension in order to avoid certain death.

Toys

• BIONICLE: Anyone using a Kanohi Olmak (mostly Brutaka, but Takanuva does it for a while too) does this all the time.

Video Games

• Throughout Bioshock Infinite, Elizabeth's ability to open Tears has been constrained by the Siphon on Monument Island and can only be used on Tears that already exist, hence why she was having such trouble escaping her tower. However, after Monument Island is destroyed in the finale, Elizabeth gains the power to create her own Tears at will — allowing her to escape Songbird's final assault by instantaneously zapping herself and Booker into another dimension. More specifically, Rapture.
• Divinity: Original Sin II:
  • At the end of Act I, Malady helps the player character escape a Divine Order assault by teleporting her ship and its passengers into the Hall of Echoes, though she needs to be protected while she prepares the spell.
  • Malady repeats the feat after Act III, teleporting the ship midair into a Collapsing Lair to grab the player character and then immediately back into the Hall. She then goes to bed to recover.
  • Brahmos the Wanderer transports himself physically into the Dream Land to escape assassins, which he says will trap him there forever. Other Dreamers open a portal for Sadha to flee there from a Voidwoken attack in Act IV, which apparently doesn't have the same drawback.
• In Earthbound Beginnings, one of the PSI Techniques that Ninten can learn is 4th Dimension Slip, which is used to guarantee escape from regular battles.
• Genshin Impact: Defied Trope. At the beginning of the game when the gods of Celestia attack the nation of Khaenri'ah, the Twin Travelers Aether and Lumine try to escape from the ensuing cataclysm by opening a portal to another world. However, they're immediately stopped by the Unknown God who proceeds to defeat the twins in a Curb-Stomp Battle, denying them their escape and separating them from each other. This kickstarts the main story of the protagonist twin searching for their lost sibling in the world of Teyvat.
• Myst:
  • Throughout the franchise, the linking books that transport you to each Age require only a split-second to use and can easy be carried around in a pocket, so they've proved quite useful for escaping disasters. Unfortunately, the fact that a used linking book can't be transported along with you will mean that you'll be trapped in the Age unless there's another book on hand or somewhere in the immediate area. Plus, if you were fleeing from something disastrous, chances are the book will be destroyed in the process — or left behind for someone to exploit. Indeed, Atrus escaped from Gehn in the backstory by diving into the Star Fissure and Linking out as he fell, hoping the Myst book would be destroyed in the process; instead, it only continued falling until it finally ended up in your hands.
  • Also in the backstory to the first game, Atrus was forced to hastily Link away from the Selenitic Age when his first visit was interrupted by a violent meteor storm that reduced the lush world to a barren, cratered wasteland. He eventually returned, though he was careful to bring a replacement Linking Book with him this time.
  • In Riven, you end up having to make use a rare non-linking book example of this in the finale: with the eponymous Age collapsing around you without constant repairs and the linking book back to D'Ni having fallen into the void, you take a dive into the Star Fissure - thus following the path of the Myst book all the way back to your home world.
• During the climax of Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, Curtis Craig finds himself stumbling into the basement lab where Wyntech keeps their interdimensional portal and being cornered, first by a gun-toting Paul Warner — and then by the Hecatomb himself. Rather than attempt to fight the heretofore unkillable villain, Curtis opts to activate the portal and fling himself into Dimension X... which is still pretty dangerous, but at least there are no immediate threats here.
• Tales of Xillia 2:
  • The protagonist's older brother, Julius, uses his Chromatus ability to escape into alternate universes after being framed for a terrorist attack. However, his employers themselves share this ability and send the protagonist, Ludger, to track him down.
  • When the party are threatened by anti-Rieze Maxian criminals, Elle's Key of Kresnik powers activate and accidentally drags them all into another alternate universe. When they return, the criminals are confused since they simply disappeared for a few minutes, and assume it's some sort of magic.
  • Played for Laughs and subverted in the "Eating Omelette In A Fractured Dimension" Drama CD. Julius secretly checks up on his cat, Rollo, in Ludger's apartment. When the party suddenly return, he hides inside a giant mascot costume in the kitchen and is eventually suspected when Rollo begins meowing at the costume. He uses his Chromatus ability to jump into an alternate universe before he can be unmasked, but due to the presence of a Key of Kresnik, his powers extend to the entire party, pulling everyone else with him and blowing his cover anyway.
• The Secret World:
  • Upon your first visit to Agartha, you're given a conduit device that can allow you to automatically teleport yourself back there without having to go through the usual difficulty of finding a portal. It only requires a few seconds to activate, so it's very good for evading currently unbeatable challenges or bypassing hazardous terrain.
  • Following the battle with the Black Pharaoh in the second act of the game, you're knocked out by a squad of Orochi Group security officers; before they can do anything else to you, a random portal suddenly whisks you away to the Dreaming Prison. It's not established what they would have done to you if the portal hadn't opened... up until much later, when it turns out that Bee-imbued agents are a very useful source of harvested organs for Project Odyssey.
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl: In The Subspace Emissary, the villains unleash an enormous Gunship that comes out of a portal to Subspace. When the heroes deal it a destructive blow, villains Ganondorf and Bowser simply step back into the portal as the Gunship explodes beneath them.
• The World Ends with You: At the end of Week 2, Minamimoto tries to erase Neku with a powerful attack, but Joshua pushes his partner out of harm's way and apparently dies in the blast. It's later revealed that Joshua was able to survive by teleporting to an alternate universe right before the attack could connect.

Visual Novels

• Love & Legends: At the end of August season 6, the heroine's curse threatens to overwhelm her. Aisetha opens a portal back to her world, and they escape there, where the curse is suspended.
• Zero Escape: SHIFTers are people who can transfer their consciousness to alternate timelines when faced with extreme danger. When this dimensional "jump" occurs, the performer takes over the body of their alternate selves, who die in their place in the original timeline.

Webcomics

• Homestuck
  • This is invoked by the mechanics of Sburb. Playing the game initiates the apocalypse on Earth, and you have to successfully finish your initial tasks, which transport you and your house though a portal into an alternate dimension, in order not to perish.
  • At the end of Act 5, when the game appears unwinnable and they decide to cosmically reset the game, destroying the game universe they're in, Jade's plan of escape is to travel through the Fourth Wall, portrayed as a window-like portal, into a new universe.
  • In Act 6, Dirk and Roxy are being attacked by the Condesce more urgently than the usual game initiation, so Dirk's solution involves teleporting himself hundreds of years in the past back to Jake, where the character utilize the usual Sburb portals to begin the session.
• The titular character of Jenny and the Multiverse uses her dimension-hopping powers quite liberally for this purpose once she masters them, once teleporting to the rooftop of her girlfriend's house to avoid an awkward conversation (and from there to a dimension of Springy Spores to break her fall after she slipped and fell off the roof).
• Kill Six Billion Demons: Allison first uses the Key of Kings for Dimensional Travel in midair after Cio defenestrates her. Cio banked on the threat of imminent death focusing Allison's desire to go home enough to activate the Key.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • The Evil Sorcerer Miron has a Contingency spell set to teleport him to safety if he's ever badly wounded. The heroes deliberately trigger it to force him away from his allies in a fight he could have otherwise won.
  • Knowing that the planet is in danger of destruction, Hilgya the Cleric is prepared to jump to another plane via a Dimensional Travel spell at the first sign of trouble.

Web Videos

• In I'm a Marvel... And I'm a DC: Zero Hour #4 the future incarnation of Lex Luthor explains that the Bad Future officially began when he detected a massive energy surge from Stan's Place; realizing he had only seconds to react, he teleported himself into a Pocket Dimension and waited there until things had calmed down - making him the only survivor of the apocalyptic disaster that followed.

Western Animation

• Amphibia: Happens in the climax of "True Colors" in order to escape from King Andrias, Sasha deliberately staying behind to Hold the Line and allow Anne, Marcy, and the Plantars to escape. Unfortunately, Marcy is stabbed before she can make it into the portal, but she does manage to get Anne and the Plantars to Earth.
• In the season 4 finale of Castlevania (2017), Saint Germain uses the last of his strength to pull Trevor into the Infinite Corridor, seconds after Trevor attempts a Mutual Kill on Death. He ends up dumped on the banks of the Danube, hundreds of miles away and barely alive, but alive nonetheless.
• Futurama: "Bender's Big Score" ends on a cliffhanger where all the time duplicates of Bender emerge from the caverns under the Planet Express building, causing a paradox pileup that tears open the sky. Nibbler's response is to yell, "Everyone out of the universe!" and disappear by eating himself somehow, the implication being that he's escaped to another dimension. He turns up in later episodes without explanation.
• The Midnight Gospel
  • Simulation farmers all carry an item that will allow them to exit their simulated realities and return to the real world at a moment's notice. Clancy's item of choice is a shofar, while Blithrreyus uses a whistle, though both result in the user sprouting a Third Eye and heading skywards until the simulator pukes them back out again. Given Clancy's reckless lifestyle, he often ends up using this in emergencies — being eaten alive by zombies, cornered by flesh-eating maggots, trapped on an exploding planet, about to be sucked up by a vortex...
  • In the final episode, Clancy ends up being cornered in his trailer by homicidal police while still connected to the simulator, too distracted to notice it's on the verge of Wobbling again. With their backs to the wall, Charlotte pushes Clancy into the simulator completely and dives in after him, exiting reality forever — just before the simulator malfunctions and Wobbles with apocalyptic results. Clancy awakens to find himself in another dream world, but with no way of returning.
  • The same episode features Blithrreyus noticing the rapidly-expanding Wobble, hastily gathering up his children and jumping headlong into the nearest simulator.
• Rick and Morty:
  • Thanks to Rick's portal gun, it's very easy for him to casually leap into another dimension if faced with danger — or inconvenience of any kind, really. As such, things only get complicated for him if his portal gun ends up being lost, confiscated or damaged.
  • Played for laughs in one of the Adult Swim commercials: Rick is forced to use the portal gun to quickly find a bathroom for Summer, first trying the dog dimension where the toilets are all fire hydrants, then in the chair dimension where the toilets are all inanimate human beings. Eventually, they finally find a normal toilet... but the dimension appears to be a nightmare realm populated by Cenobites.
    Summer: ...I'll hold it until we get back to Earth.
    Morty: This is why I let Rick put a catheter in me.
  • Becomes a plot point in "Rick Potion Number 9": Morty has accidentally turned Rick's Love Potion into an epidemic and Rick has ended up transforming the entire human race into hideous monsters in his attempts to fix the problem. Rick's solution? Simply open a portal to a dimension where another version of him managed to cure the epidemic only to die in an accident immediately after, allowing our Rick to take his place. From then on, Rick and Morty are residents of another universe.
  • During "Close Rick-counters Of The Rick Kind," Rick is condemned to a Fate Worse than Death by the Council of Ricks, forcing him and Morty to escape by portal gun. Since the Citadel militia have portal guns of their own, the two of them are forced to flee through several different dimensions to evade his pursuers, until Rick finally shakes them by opening multiple portals at once, delaying the security team for a few critical minutes while they try to figure out which one he went through.
  • A rare non-portal gun instance: in "The ABCs Of Beth", the Pocket Dimension Rick built for Beth is only accessible by portal-creating chalk. Upon witnessing the sight of Tommy having sex with one of the local creatures and then getting ready to devour its newborn offspring alive, Rick immediately chalks an exit into the floor beneath him and gets the hell out of dodge.
  • In "Edge Of Tomorty," Rick is accidentally killed in a spaceship crash, but thanks to Operation Phoenix, Rick's mind is uploaded to a clone body in a neighbouring dimension. Unfortunately, this also results in him getting repeatedly murdered because he keeps finding himself in dimensions where fascism is the norm. Eventually, he finds himself in a dimension populated by sentient teddy bears — only for his local Alternate Self to ask "Bist du faschistisch?" Rick replies "Nope!" and rams his face through the cloning tube, deciding to take his chances with the next reality in line rather than be murdered all over again.
• Several The Transformers cartoons (such as Transformers: Animated and Transformers: Prime) have the characters use this trope in the form of ground and space bridges, which are essentially temporary portals across either land or space. Along with acting as a quick means of transportation, they allow them to quickly leave a fight or pull a Big Damn Heroes moment. They also have the setback of stranding Transformers if the device used to make the bridges breaks (which can either lead to failed missions or stranding Cybertronians on other planets (a big plot point of Animated). Not to mention that if the streams get crossed, they can trap someone in a shadow zone where no one can see or hear them.
• What If…? (2021): In "What If... Ultron Won?", an iteration of Ultron armed with all six Infinity Stones and immunity to the usual drawbacks of wielding them becomes powerful enough to notice Uatu the Watcher, even breaking into Uatu's home dimension in an attempt to kill him. The Watcher puts up a hell of a fight during their battle across the multiverse, but is ultimately forced to retreat, catapulting himself into another dimension right before Ultron can land the final blow. The final scene reveals that the dimension Uatu picked is actually the ruined universe where Strange Supreme was imprisoned back in "What If... Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead Of His Hands?"- paving the way for a deal between the two.

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