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Things break. This is just a natural rule of the universe. Even the Green Rocks are going to fail to work at some point.
Of course, this is TV, so when your Applied Phlebotinum breaks down, it is always going to do so at the worst possible minute. Or, to quote Dark Helmet, "Even in the Future nothing works!"
What's worse is this: real things that you may have encountered in your daily life often break. When they do, they either function at a reduced capacity or not at all. This can happen on TV, but it is at least as likely that, rather than simply not working, they will do something else entirely, perhaps even something more spectacular than the thing they do if you Reverse Polarity.
The thinking is this: the transporter does something really amazing and miraculous when it's working. Just imagine how amazing and miraculous a thing it could do if it were broken. Never mind that this is no more logical a line of thought than; "A functioning toaster makes toast, but a broken one may start suddenly making sausage instead."
Fortunately, if it's Tim Taylor Technology, you can usually fix it by applying more power. Unless it's vulnerable to Phlebotinum Overload, that is... then something will Go Horribly Wrong. If you're really unlucky, it'll work fine up until when you need it most.
Examples:
- The transporter in Star Trek would break (in the simple "fails to work" sense) pretty much any time our heroes needed to make a hasty exit from a hostile planet. It would break (in the spectacular sense) on occasion as well. Broken transporters have created twins of at least two people (Kirk and Riker), in one case somehow separating "good" and "evil", caused people to regress in age, merged two individuals to create a viable and integrated third individual, sent people to a parallel universe, and even transformed a bunch of people into manatees trapped in the void between dimensions.
- Star Trek's holodeck is also a prime example. The most common "simple" breakdown is to lock the senior officers inside and turn off the safety protocols. Why these features would always be the first to break defies explanation. However, the holodeck too can malfunction more extravagantly, say, by giving Professor Moriarty full sentience and complete control of the ship's computer.
- Strictly speaking Moriarty wasn't a malfunction; the holodeck was working entirely correctly when it created him. The problem was incompetence on the part of the user, Geordi LaForge; a 24th-century PEBKAC, if you will.
- In fact, most Trek plots revolved around some form of this, from malfunctioning replicators to crew members devolving to the everyday, run of the mill warp core breach.
- Futurama spoofed this by having a holodeck malfunction bring the greatest villains of history to life: Atilla the Hun, Professor Moriarty, Mr. Hyde, and "Evil Lincoln". In an homage to Star Trek, Moriarty declares, "Righto gents, it's another simulation gone mad, murder and mayhem, standard procedure."
- Stargate SG-1 frequently has DHDs broken or destroyed on planets that the team would not like to stay. More extravagantly, a malfunctioning Stargate trapped one of the team in a wormhole (when one Stargate was destroyed), trapped Earth in a time-loop (when working in conjunction with an alien device that was intended to do this), nearly destroyed a star (though technically the gate was not malfunctioning, just being abused), actually destroyed a star (this time on purpose), sent SG-1 backward in time, and almost sucked Earth into a black hole. The worst the gate has yet done on Stargate Atlantis was to ensnare a puddlejumper when one of its engine pods failed to retract.
- Not mention the teleportation chips SG-1 had installed recently for purposes of whenever deus ex machina is needed. Take a wild guess what happens when the episode is 30 minutes in and one is not needed.
- Recently in Stargate Atlantis the Stargate managed to send Colonel John Sheppard 48000 years in the future by the same problem that sent SG-1 to the past, considerably increasing the bar for Stargate Atlantis' Stargate malfunctions.
- Also, in one try at making a power source more powerful than the Zero Point Modulator (a device that draws energy from an artificially created micro-universe) in Stargate Atlantis they ended up almost destroying a parallel universe (although they knew something as such would happen, they only didn't knew the other universe would be populated, much less that it would be a parallel one). The incredible part is that the machine became an actual extra-dimensional portal.
- A particularly bad offender was Seven Days, where the sphere seemed to malfunction more often than it functioned, and could do anything from inverting the morality of the entire universe to turning its pilot into (I swear I Am Not Making This Up) the pope.
- Doctor Who's TARDIS is a particularly unreliable bit of Phlebotinum. Its navigation is notoriously unreliable when it works at all, its camouflage system has been stuck for the past 40 years, it has a habit of ignoring the Doctor's directions to deposit him in situations of extreme and immediate peril, and it was once blown to bits outright. Also, it once shrank its passengers to the size of fleas. In contrast to the examples above, though, rather than breaking at the worst possible moment, the TARDIS seems to work correctly only when it's absolutely vital that it does (see Million To One Chance, One Buwwet Weft).
- Parodied in a "Treehouse of Horrors" episode of The Simpsons, where Homer's toaster turned into a time machine when he attempted to repair it after smashing it trying to get his hand out of the thing.
- Ben 10 has this at least once every episode. Handy viewer shorthand: When the Omnitrix is red, Ben can't transform because it needs to recharge. Also, there was one of the "toaster makes sausage" variety, where prying off the faceplate of the Omnitrix with a screwdriver and trying to stick it back on with bubble gum results in that episode's transformations becoming Biological Mash Ups.
- In Voyagers, the boy visits the time of Thomas Edison and finds to his horror that the curious inventor has disassembled his time machine, the handheld device called the Omni. The inventor insists he is confident he can reassemble it, and by the end of the story, he proves it, as he presents the boy with a fully intact Omni.
- Also, the Omni malfunctioning is what starts off the series; it's not programmed to take Bogg past 1970, but a brief malfunction lands him in 1982, where he picks up Jeffrey...who he then can't take home again.
- Codename Kids Next Door: The origin story behind the Delightful Children From Down the Lane goes that Father's first Delightfulization Chamber malfunctioned and overloaded when he put the five of them inside, turning them into a kid-hating zombie hive-mind rather than "the perfect children."
- The "malfunctioning toaster would make sausage rule" also applies to magic as well as science. In Yu-Gi-Oh GX, when Saiou's defeat-equals-mind-control spell fails on Judai, instead of just not being Brainwashed, Judai loses the ability to see monster spirits and the images on Duel Monsters cards.
- Kurau in Kurau Phantom Memory suffers from bolts of weakness since the arrival of her "pair", Christmas - usually when being chased or having to fight. Of course, when Christmas is around it only adds to her strength.
- At the end of Short Circuit 2, Johnny 5 tries to use his radio that hacks into things on a boat, but it doesn't work.
- In Fallout 1 the water chip of your home vault breaks (replacements were shipped to another vault, of course), starting your quest for a new one. Although Fallout 2 reveals the cause of the water chip failure: It was your own grandchild (the sequels hero), who travelled back in time, fiddling with the controls of vault 13s main computer, thus breaking the ''water chip''.
- At one point in No More Heroes, an enemy sets off the sprinklers when he sees Travis coming. The water shorts out his beam katana's battery, and a segment follows where Travis, being electrocuted, must run a gauntlet of enemies to reach the room with the sprinkler controls. Even after the sprinklers are turned off, you have to recharge the katana, though the game does give you a Full Battery power-up.
- Warhammer 40000 likes this one, usually with things (or people) breaking or being corrupted by Chaos at just the right time to sentence lots of people to horrific death.
- Discussed about in this
 Darths And Droids strip, with link to this page.
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