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• Weirdness Isolation

The outer space equivalent of the Monster Of The Week, except it isn't necessarily a creature — it can be the nebula that conveniently zaps your stardrive, or the planet with the radiation that makes you age too fast, or, well, any of a hundred similar things from Star Trek. It's unexpected, unexplainable, and puts the cast in an artificially-heightened state of crisis for 5 minutes plus commercials — until they find or invent the necessary cure, solution, fix or repellent spray ).

Except for the superficial details, one Negative Space Wedgie is very much like another — it's just J. Random Threat, the third this month. You know a science fiction series has Jumped The Shark when it turns into a parade of Negative Space Wedgies.

Common varieties include:

• Lost Technology of the Precursors
• Mysterious glowing cloud
• Sufficiently Advanced Aliens having fun
• Swirly Energy Thingy
• Our Wormholes Are Different

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• During the penultimate battle, the crew of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann encounters a device that absorbs Spiral Energy, using it to convert space around it into an ultra-dense state (read: space ocean). Bad news? Our heroes are overloaded with Spiral Energy.
• Gao Gai Gars second half features THE POWER, which is basically a Positive Space Wedgie that's hidden in the planet Jupiter.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha has Imaginary Space, empty dimension spaces created by dimension faults that appeared during the finale of the first season. They will cease all magic when you enter them then suck you in with their strong gravitational pull. No one knows what will happen after that, but Precia believed that falling into it would lead to the lost civilization of Al Hazred.
• Getter Robo Armageddon has the infamous "space vagina" near the end of the show.

Film

• The electromagnetic storm from the 2001 Planet Of The Apes.
• Enki Bilal's Immortal has one appear right on Earth's surface, in Central Park, New York. This phenomenon called the Intrusion causes arctic atmosphere around the area, kills any human trying to enter, and brought some aliens, at least Jill and John from outer space, acting as a some kind of wormhole. Though John didn't create the Intrusion, it's implied that he brought it to Earth.

Literature

• The Antares novels have the Antares Nebula - a highly radioactive supernova remnant. After two years of research (not to mention a lot of money), the good guys develop a radiation shield that can handle it, enabling them to transit the nebula.
• The excession in, well, Excession.
• Completely averted in Robert A Heinlein's Starman Jones. Although the characters do get lost during warp and end up on a fantastic planet, about half the book is spent just describing the advanced math and technology (and work shifts, and computering, and configuration of seats in the cockpit) behind space travel, and the disaster happens only because the characters make mathematical mistakes for personal emotional reasons.

Live Action TV

• Often parodied in Red Dwarf:
  Cat: I hate to go all technical on you, but: All hands on deck, Swirly Thing Alert!
• Star Trek, Original Series was often at its best messing with these:
  • "Where No Man Has Gone Before" (energy barrier at edge of galaxy gives humans godlike powers)
  • "The Menagerie/ The Cage" (Psychic aliens capable of creating illusions that pleases every want of their captor.)
  • " The Squire of Gothos" (Trelane is the wedgie here)
  • "Who Mourns For Adonais?"
  • EVERY Star Trek show has featured Negative Space Wedgie (usually called "an anomaly" in the show itself) when they were not featuring a new Monster Of The Week or Planet Of Hats. Even Deep Space Nine, which took place on a space station near Bajor, encountered a surprisingly large share of Negative Space Wedgie despite its inability to travel.
  • Also parodied in Space Quest VI with the Super Double Reverse Anti-Anomaly.
• Stargate SG 1 was prone to this in early seasons, since the Stargate would take them to any number of dangerous worlds without having to make expensive spaceship set pieces. However, it was hinted that most of their missions outside the episodes were quite mundane, and later seasons, having exhausted the obvious space wedgies, turned to more plot arcs and original episode themes.
  • There was the episode "Grace", where the Prometheus is chased into a nebula by a huge alien ship that makes no attempt to reply to its communications other than agreeing to Sam's deal when she offers them a way to get out of the nebula, as the ship has become trapped there as well.
• Sea Quest DSV, being essentially Star Trek The Next Generation on a submarine, occasionally resorted to a Negative Sea Wedgie. That this was somewhat harder for a reasonable viewer to accept was one of the show's great difficulties.
  • At least in the first season, they were real-life Negative Sea Wedgies (fresh-water sinkholes, black smokers, etc). When they started finding alien spaceships and psychic energy vortices on the ocean floor, most people just gave up.
• Farscape had a couple of these, including a time-stopping cloud that was hardening to encase the ship in permanent stasis, and an entire section of space, even more remote than the Uncharted Territories, called "Tormented Space", which the crew of fugitives resorted to hiding in. Of course, you could also count that wormhole John went through in the first episode to get the series rolling.
  • Then too, there was ending to the series. If that doesn't count, nothing does.
• The TV-film Babylon 5: Thirdspace features an ancient artifact that opens a gate to a dimension inhabited by an yet another race of ancient evil aliens.
  • More ancient, more evil, more alien. The Sufficiently Advanced Aliens that were often the focus of the show were terrified of them.

Tabletop Games

• The Eye of Terror in Warhammer 40000 is a gigantic, thousands of light-years across swirly energy thing of hell. Going into it is a quick way to a Fate Worse Than Death.
  • Or, for the Ork WAAAGH that invaded the Eye and crashed onto a living planet dedicated to Khorne where they became 'doomed' with immortality, having to fight its daemonic inhabitants until they're slain only to rise again the next morning for all eternity. They considered this the awesomest afterlife ever.
  • And there's plenty more around the Warhammer 40k galaxy, including the Storm of the Emperor's Wrath, the Maelstrom, and the odd dimensional portal. The recent Medusa V campaign revolved around a planet being swallowed by a giant Negative Space Wedgie that every faction in the galaxy happened to be fighting on/over for some reason.
  • We can't forget the Damocles Rift, which is giving the Tau much-needed experience in dealing with the warp-spawned horrors they don't believe in.
• Vor The Maelstrom takes place entirely inside the titular Maelstrom. Earth has been swallowed by a hole in the fabric of the universe, and trapped in an faux solar system orbiting a black hole... or something like that. Over the course of the next few decades or so it will tumble to its center, where it will be destroyed. Luckily, there are plenty of other planets plunging to their doom, many in orbits that will take centuries or even millennia to decay. Catch is there are LOTS of other lifeforms trapped in the Maelstrom as well, all fighting for possession of the safest worlds - and more appearing all the time. If there's a way out, none of those who have escaped have been able(or willing) to return to share the secret. Enjoy The Eternal Churchill.

Video Games

• EVE Online has Deadspace Complexes, areas of space where warp drives don't work properly. Thay function as the game's version of dungeons. There are also several unusual phenomena mentioned in the background, ranging from superdense gass clouds to areas of complete void from which no ship has returned.

Web Comics

• The Perry Bible Fellowship has a Freaking Vortex◊.

Western Animation

• Futurama has had its share of Negative Space Wedgies:
  • "Roswell That Ends Well" (radiation from a supernova reacts with radiation caused by Fry putting metal in the microwave, creating a wormhole that sends the Planet Express crew back in time)
  • "Time Keeps on Slipping" (removing Chronotons from a star cluster disrupts time)
  • "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles" (exposure from age-reversing tar makes the characters younger; eventually cured by diving into the Fountain of Aging)
  • "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" (Energy Being Melllvar)
    • Of course, this one in particular is a direct and obvious parody of Star Trek's, as the entire episode is about Star Trek.

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Space Is Magic

Planar Shockwave

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Tropes In Space

New Eden

The Necrocracy

Speculative Fiction Tropes

Never The Selves Shall Meet