Gone Horribly Wrong - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Go Horribly Wrong; Goes Horribly Wrong; Horribly Wrong

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 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.
- Really, REALLY horribly wrong.
  - Really, really, REALLY 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.)
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.
- Or worked perfectly.
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

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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.
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.

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Live Action TV

Tabletop Games

Video Games

Bio Shock had an Objectivist Utopia go horribly wrong. Basically, the resident Psycho Serum caused everyone go insane, then President Evil had a civil war with The Mafia.
If you're going to make an MMORPG set in a Comic Book universe, you're probably contractually obligated to lampshade this at least once. City of Villains brings us the surprisingly Genre Savvy Vernon von Grun, a card-carrying Mad Scientist who not only expects things to go wrong, he looks forward to it:
This is terrible! Nothing bad is happening! We did everything perfectly, but something has gone wrong! My plans are all off-track. Mad science isn't supposed to go wrong like this! But the true test of a mad scientist is how much worse you can make things go wrong.
- His "colleague" Doc Buzzsaw appears to be not so savvy:
  Oh, what has science wrought? I sought only to turn a man into a metal-encased juggernaut of destruction powered by the unknown properties of a mysterious living crystal. How could this have all gone wrong?
Chrono Trigger has everything start going bad with Lucca's teleporter experiment. In hindsight, though, that was probably preordained.
In Dead Space, not only is the mission to Aegis 7 by the CEC prone to this but so is the story behind the marker found there. The marker found on Aegis 7 is a copy of the original Black Marker found on earth, which is an alien artifact of unknown origin. The Military brought the copy to Aegis 7 in order to run experiments with it using the information contained on it. And of course no one put much thought to What Could Possibly Go Wrong and they put the experiments in rooms with easily accessible vents. Predictably, by the player who has by now learned to check vent openings in case a necromorph is about to crash through it, the experiments escape using said vents and slaughter the entire research base. They are barely contained by placing the Red Marker, where the colonists of Dead Space find it 200 years later, to suppress the Hive Mind since the Marker projects what is called a Dead Space where necromorphs are suppressed. This is without mentioning the fact that it has a 50% of driving anyone who goes near it insane to the point where they will scribble compulsively on the walls in complete nonsense. In fact out of all the scribbles these individuals scrawl only "Make us Whole" makes much sense. Though of course what that means exactly is a bit obscure though it is implied to mean putting the marker back where it was found. The Hive Mind is also implied to be created by this same experiment.
The plot of the Doom games has experiments in teleportation going Horribly Wrong, unleashing a plague of demons upon the surface of Mars. The Marines are called in to deal with the threat, and are wiped out except for one survivor who has to kill his way through the forces of Hell.
In F.E.A.R., saying that things have Gone Horribly Wrong is a massive Understatement.
Say it with me now: Final Fantasy VII. Contains both the "power source draining the planet's Life Energy" and "borked Super Soldier program" varieties.
- Final Fantasy VI also has the Super Soldier variety. Hey, two out of three non-Omnicidal Maniac Generals ain't so bad!
  - Leo wasn't part of the experiment. That gives it a 50% Omnicidal Maniac output.
In the Geneforge world, experiments go wrong so often that laboratories, workshops, and schools are designed with the expectation that this will happen sooner or later. Some are built on uninhabited island, some are built underground, and some just rely on thick doors to seal the place off.
Half Life. A routine... whatever-it-was-they-were-trying-to-do procedure, but "Unforeseen Consequences" happen. The fact that they mention it's standard protocol implies they've done it plenty of times before without causing aliens to overrun the complex.
- Episode Two informs us that the sample being tested that day was brought in by G-Man... Also Wordof God points out that the crystal inserted into the anti-mass spectrometer is the same type as the ones found in Nihilanth's chamber
- The procedure was supposedly a normal procedure, but throughout the test, the scientists consistently allude to safety protocols being bypassed and anomolies being ignored. They got what they deserved.
- FROHMAN!
- In the same universe, GLaDOS can be considered an experiment Gone Horribly Wrong.
  - Or an experiment gone right.
In Quake 4 every mission seem to do this first your drop ship get shot down nearly killing you,then the EMP bomb plan fails, then you get turned into a Stroog, then you get shot into battle in a flying coffin (drop pod)which crashes. Basically then entire game is a series of plans gone wrong that somehow works out in the end.
In Timesplitters: Future Perfect, Jacob Crow's attempts at eternal life result in zombies and the Timesplitters.
Transarctica's backstory for the new Ice Age is "Operation Blind", a plan to cool global warming by kicking up dust with nuclear weapons at the poles.
Jak II has the main character as the subject of an experiment which went horribly wrong for the responsible parties and anyone you accidentally or deliberately kill over the course of bringing them down.
- Hinted in the previous game as well, though it could have been at least partially on purpose. "I told you the Dark Eco would change you two!"
Infamous: Cole gains control over electricity through an experiment gone horribly right. You did not misread that, folks. You learn early on that the Ray Sphere that caused the explosion, making things the mess they are, is intended to take the Neuro-Electric impulses of many people and concentrate it into one person. The "explosion" absorbed the people killed in the explosion and concentrated it all into Cole, the poor shmuck who delivered it and was told to open it.
Outpost Two: Eden's terraforming microbe was intended to break apart organic molecules and release oxygen to make New Terra into an earth-like planet in a single generation. Organic molecules like the ones in our bodies. Needless to say, it gets loose and starts eating everything on the planet.

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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."
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!
- It was worth it.
  - We did what we had to do.
  - For Science!
The killer bees were an attempt, gone horribly wrong, to create a honey bee better suited for the South American climate.
- It's also a case of Gone Horribly Wrong Gone Right: Killer bees do thrive in the South American climate. They apparently do just fine in deserts too.
- Right for them. Wrong for the people who get attacked by them.
The introduction of cane toads to Australia.
The introduction of mongooses to Hawaii.
- Basically the introduction of anything to anywhere (except apparently potatoes).
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!"