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alt title(s): Go Horribly Wrong; Goes Horribly Wrong; Horribly Wrong And now we join a man obsessed with sales and liquidation,
Dabbling with fiendish tests and genetic experimentation.
But you all know how these things go, with unnatural creations.
A puff of smoke! A greenish glow! Voila! Horrible abominations! — Strong Sad
Stock Phrase used whenever that nasty old "science" inevitably messes up royally.
The set up is simple: You have an outpost, laboratory, factory, or other facility dedicated to the research and production of technological marvels, staffed with flighty scientists and ambitious people pursuing a goal with the aims of profit, peace, or other potential applications. Oh. Did we mention that the research is into cheating death? Also, the forest those free market capitalists are clear cutting happens to be rumored to have an Ancient Indian Burial Ground somewhere in it.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Well, let's see here.
In their quest to advance human understanding, make a profit, help humanity, design a doomsday device, or otherwise undertake a high risk, high payoff enterprise, these people will have something Go Horribly Wrong!
The variations are limitless. Perhaps the non-polluting energy source actually taps into the delicately balanced forces locked in a Cosmic Keystone or drains the planet's Life Energy. Or the hunger killing super-wheat is actually a super-weed that destroys all ecosystems. And that's for purely peaceful things. Weapons of any sort will have things go horribly wrong on a cataclysmic scale. The "completely loyal" robot workforce has a programming flaw that makes them revolt. Maybe the Super Soldier program inherently causes insanity, mutation, or plain old megalomania.
These researchers will observe lax safety standards, laxer morals, and be prone to test things out on themselves or unwilling visitors. The Corrupt Corporate Executive will callously and maliciously disregard all warnings, even for basic safety and good PR.
Expect these people to send out a Distress Call or chronicle the debacle in an Apocalyptic Log, be visited by a group whose car broke down, or have things go wrong when the stockholders/government oversight committee comes to shut them down.
This is comparable to a Freak Lab Accident, except at the beginning of a story. Heck, a lot of Speculative Fiction serves no purpose but to have something Go Horribly Wrong.
See also Came Back Wrong for when an attempt at resurrecting somebody from the dead Goes Horribly Wrong. Contrast Gone Horribly Right, for when a project succeeds too well and the result is far worse than any accident could have been.
Of course, it can always get worse.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
Film
- The not-bad-enough-to-be-good, not-bad-enough-to-be-bad film Alien Resurrection had scientists clone Ripley in hopes of creating a Xenomorph for potential military applications. Needless to say, things go horribly wrong when the cloning gave the aliens more grey matter than the scientists, allowing them to escape and wreak havoc.
- The Terminator series. Because it's SUCH a good idea to make computers smarter than you then hand them military control. How come the only one smart enough to keep the Terminators from learning too much is Skynet?
- The reason they have to drill into The Core: secret government experiments with a giant earthquake-causing weapon has somehow ruined the Earth's EM field by causing the core to slow down and eventually stop.
- Crack In The World: Scientists try to tap magma from the Earth's core by detonating a nuclear bomb deep underground. This turns out to be a very bad idea indeed.
- Considering the fact that you can tap magma from the Earth's core at one of the hundreds of active volcanoes all over the surface of the world, they probably deserved to have it go horribly wrong.
- Or, y'know, the fact that they used nuclear bombs to do it. Weapons of mass destruction. Even if they didn't have ways to tap magma without resorting to bombs, it's still pretty stupid to use nuclear bombs.
- Doctor Who used a similar plot in "Inferno".
- In Deep Blue Sea, scientists try to cure Alzheimers by harvesting the brain matter of super-smart genetically modifed sharks. What went horribly wrong? well for one thing, experimenting with really aggressive sharks, underwater, with no way of easy escape might not be the best idea ever... A shark fucking ate Samuel L. Jackson, for one thing.
- While he was indoors. So Yeah . . .
- The movie Event Horizon is about an attempt at FTL travel Gone Horribly Wrong.
- The Fly. Teleportation experiment is upset by a literal fly in the ointment. And then it happens again. Twice. And then David Cronenberg gets hold of the idea and does it twice as well.
- I Robot. A new generation of robots built to be humanity's ultimate servants rebels under the direction VIKI and attempts to protect humanity from itself under an overly strict interpretation of The Three Laws of Robotics.
- Jurassic Park. (And every other movie based on a Michael Crichton story, for that matter.)
- Except The Great Train Robbery.
- Omni Consumer Products "improved" police robots went Horribly Wrong in both Robocop and Robocop II.
- The big reveal of Serenity involves a test of an experimental chemical on a planet's inhabitants that Went Horribly Wrong.
- And what the Academy did to River also went very horribly wrong - for both them and her.
- Species: They try to grow an alien child. Then they try to dispose of it when the experiment is shut down. Not happening.
- Total Recall: a routine implantation of false memories at Rekall goes haywire.
- The Film Of The Book Time Machine's The End Of The World As We Know It is triggered when humanity starts excavating more living space into the moon with nuclear weapons. When the hero uses the titular machine to go forward a few years, he finds himself in a dystopia and the fragments of the moon in the sky are getting bigger and bigger...
- The MST3K episode It Conquered The World where SCIENCE almost lets a giant Venusian pickle take over the world. Too bad that the chief head science guy "learned almost too late that man is a feeling creature… and, because of it, the greatest in the universe..." This episode also spawned its own Meme and possible alternative title for this trope in "He tampered in God's domain..."
- The Towering Inferno
- In Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, Flint Lockwood creates a device that makes it rain food. At first, everything is fine, but through constant overwork, the machine develops a mind of its own, and starts sending down bigger and bigger food, threatening to destroy the world.
- Battlefield Earth. Beyond the obvious reference, how else can you describe the plot from the Psychlo perspective? You have a planet completely under your thumb, and one greedy mid-manager does an experiment on a subjugated race, which ultimately results in it gaining the knowledge and power to wipe out your home world and all of the occupying forces.
Literature
- The Day Of The Triffids by John Wyndham. No one knows for sure such weird plants came from. But they produce high-quality oil and that's what matters, Just Think Of The Potential! Of course, the oil's even better if their deadly stings are left intact, but simple safety measures are enough, right? And yes, that meteorite shower is... strange, but all the more reason that we cannot miss such an opportunity! Let's all go and look! Right?.. It's only natural... Wait, we just became hapless food for plants?
- Frankenstein's Monster, anyone?
- Michael Crichton made his living writing novels about science that Goes Horribly Wrong
- With the exception of Next, where Science does reasonably fine, except for a few cases of rapidly aging a couple of drug addicts that it managed to cure anyway (there were 5, at most). Its greed that goes horribly, horribly wrong.
- Also The Great Train Robbery, which is basically a Victorian caper story.
- Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters by Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler. Look, we really need to do something with all that plastic junk anyway. Look how many things are made of plastics. So why couldn't microbiologist conduct some experiments privately? After all, little buggers eat only freakin' plastic, so even if some strain could go loose it's still completely safe, right? At worst, they'll eat... Oh. By the way, if low-oxygen organics decays, what we can get in result?
- Striking Steel by Lukins. Defend your planet with a replicating anti-personnel complex! This metal hive's mini-rockets shred anything its radar see moving: small arms, aircraft or shuttle, can even incapacitate armored vehicle. Then little robots collects the scraps and grow thousands of new complexes — no extra burden for your war-torn industry. They has proper communication and Friend-or-Foe, so you can keep them away from your troops and objects, but it's very secure, don't fear they will be hacked, in this you're ahead of the enemy. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Accumulation of their tolerable limits with copying, for once. Especially in the radio resonators of Friend-or-Foe and control. Three generations, and you're in Death World. And the time for Wi-Fi hacking is just too limited when all this Reverse Shrapnel rips your antennae.
- Lots of Whateley Universe examples, but how about the Russian program to create a nanotechnology Super Soldier? The best iteration had one functional survivor... who melted into goo a year later.
- Or how about the bioengineering mad scientist who was found on a personal military submarine... or, rather, the people searching that submarine found around a dozen or two protozoan monstrosities, and no trace of the crew.
- A rare example of sociology going horribly wrong is Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. Instead of conscripting all the stupid people into the army, The Goverment conscripts all the smart and fit people for military service. Needless to say, things go horribly wrong on Earth soon afterwards.
Live Action TV
Tabletop Games
- Happens all the time in Genius The Transgression.
- Each Lineage in Promethean The Created started with one human trying to raise the dead for whatever reason - companionship, curiosity, slavery - and getting bitten hard in the ass by this trope.
- Happens every now and then in the backstory of Warhammer 40000. Not infrequently, the result is the Imperium destroying the planet where it has gone wrong.
- Happens all the time in Ravenloft, where Things Man Was Not Meant To Know seem to be a required course in any university science program.
- Any given mission in Paranoia will inevitably go horribly wrong, as will all the experimental gadgets. In fact in Alpha Complex getting new pair of boots can go horribly wrong.
Video Games
Webcomics
- Pretty much anytime Riff begins playing around with Time Travel or dimensional portals in Sluggy Freelance, things go horribly wrong fast.
- Many of the spells Anne performs in The Wotch (There's a whole arc titled "Consequences".) Cassie too, even the most innocent situations seem to have these problems.
- Damien in El Goonish Shive.
- Happens about as often as one would expect in Girl Genius, given its mad science setting, including the as-yet unspecified disaster deep within the bowels of Castle Heterodyne that ultimately led to the devastation of much of Europe.
- The major plot element of the first arc of Teh Gladiators, a World Of Warcraft webcomic, is the fact that, to increase the popularity of the Arenas, the leaders of the Horde and Alliance arranged for a team of losers and idiots (the eponymous heroes) to win the Arena season by casting a Scroll of Unconditional Victory on them. This plan backfires horribly when two of the team members, Mad Scientists Sharon and Yolanda, create a Frankenstinian monster named Cyclonator X32A, which runs wild and wrecks most of Azeroth. Buffed by the scroll, it's unstoppable until Teh Glads manage to lose a match, which breaks the enchantment. Or Does It?
- Order Of The Stick: Turning Xykon into a lich was partially done to give Redcloak some leverage on Xykon. It didn't work.
Western Animation
- Jonny Quest TOS episode "The Invisible Monster". Dr. Isaiah Norman's experiment gets away from him and creates a mass of energy that exists only to feed on other energy - including living things.
- In the Futurama episode "The Honking", as part of Project Satan a bunch of scientists decided to put together the most evil parts of the most evil cars in history, only to create a car of pure evil.
- The underlying premise of the 90's cartoon Exosquad was that, in an effort to terraform Mars and Venus, humanity genetically engineered a race called "Neo-sapiens" that were bigger, stronger, and more durable in pretty much every conceivable way... and used them as slave labor. Nope, can't see any way *that* could go wrong.
- Luckily, they're sterile. And can collapse into a pile of mush. Yay, science.
- Beast Wars, Scorponok hits Optimus Primal with a cyberbee designed to turn him into a coward. Unfortunately, Scorponok is an incompetent scientist and instead turns Optimus into a crazed berserker who, by the end of the episode, tears through the Pred base with ease.
- Rampage was an attempt to replicate the immortal spark of Starscream. While that part was successful, Rampage was also driven completely nuts. And almost unstoppable. He broke out, and brutalized, massacred, and ate his way through several Cybertronian colonies before he was finally stopped.
Real Life
- Nothing to do with science, but this troper and his brothers were all linemen on their football teams, so when discussing the game he would often say that, "if one of us has the ball, something has Gone Horribly Wrong."
- And yet, some of the best (read: most bizarre "that-should-never-have-worked") plays in football are designed to give the football to an offensive lineman. And they only work once. Ever. Not once per game, or once per team. Once in the history of football.
- Our physician responded the same way when asked why he didn't carry his pistol on his morning runs around the airfield of an American military base in Afghanistan. He would hand it to another officer, stating, "If we're attacked and I'm shooting, it's gone horribly wrong."
- Aren't medics forbidden by the Geneva convention from shooting at enemy soldiers, anyway?
- TV Tropes! This was supposed to be a repository for medical information so doctors could cure any disease in the world, and now look at it!
- The killer bees
 were an attempt, gone horribly wrong, to create a honey bee better suited for the South American climate.
- The introduction of cane toads to Australia.
- The introduction of mongooses to Hawaii.
- Basically the introduction of anything to anywhere (except apparently potatoes).
- Even that went wrong when the Irish started depending on them a little too much.
- Don't forget, that in some countries, early attempts to introduce them lead to people eating the (toxic) leaves.
- Cotton that's been genetically engineered to produce a natural insecticide actually speeds up the rate the insects can adapt to it as opposed to regular spraying (decades of spraying = one adapted insect species; 13 years of GM plants = three species).
- The explosion on Chernobyl nuclear power plant was caused by an experiment to test a new safety measure
- Scientology, according to ex-Scientologists has gone horribly, horribly wrong since Dave Miscavage took over. Ex-members say things have been steadily going downhill since the death of Lisa McPherson caused Dave Miscavage to become an abusive paranoid dictator and it pains them to see the religion that helped them through some very dark times become a dark and twisted parody of itself.
- For example, the infamous practice of "disconnecting" or completely cutting all ties with people who are critical of Scientology originally meant to sever ties with abusive and controlling influences, the equally infamous "SPs" or Suppressive Persons.
- Hence the Scientologese protest slogan "DM (Dave Miscavage) is your SP!"
- The Large Hadron Collider can be used, amongst other things, to create microscopic black holes that would prove that there exists extra dimensions to our universe. Of course some people hearing this feared that the experiments would go so horribly wrong as to create Earth swallowing black holes. The probability for this to occur is in fact infinitely tiny.
- Isn't that what they always say? Accompanied with "Nothing could possibly go wrong".
- Cultivating hogweed to feed cattle in Russia in 50s. When they found out that it made the milk bitter, the damn thing had already thoroughly infested the territory and has been a bane of western-central Russia ever since. Nice Job Breaking It, Stalin!
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