"Where's the portal? Ah... eh... WHERE'S THE PORTAL!?"
— Sunset Shimmer, My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Friendship Games
A character tries to enter a magic portal, often at high speed, only to discover that it is no longer there. Maybe the magic has been sealed or the portal cannot be opened in the presence of Muggles, i.e. the character can't show it to their family or friends. Maybe the portal is an Empathic Weapon that lets you through only when it's in the mood. Or maybe it technically does work, but the other end of the portal got moved right up against solid rock.
Whichever reason, the Portal Slam is normally a sign that the fantasy world the portal gave access to is irrevocably inaccessible. This is a common method employed at the end of a fantasy/science fiction series to bring things back down to normal. If the character manages to get back to the world by alternate means, he'll usually discover that the world has drastically changed for the worse with black magic brewing.
Less commonly, the Portal Slam is used near the beginning of the story, as the protagonists figure out how to work the portal by trial and error.
See also Teleporter Accident, Tele-Frag, and Portal Cut.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Digimon Adventure had the gateway to Earth close in Tai's face just before he could get there.
- Doraemon:
- A recurring plot point have this happening either to the Anywhere Door or Time Machine, which leaves Doraemon and gang stranded in a different locatiom or timezone. One note-worthy example in a manga chapter where the gang travels back in time to investigate the myth of Urashima-Taro, only to be captured by a hostile underwater kingdom; by the time they escaped, they realized a tree had unexpectedly grown on the spot where the machine's portal was, swallowing it.
- Doraemon: Nobita and the Steel Troops has Nobita and Doraemon escaping through a Portal Pool (leading from mirror-dimension Tokyo to the real Tokyo) as the steel troops, led by Humongous Mecha Zanda Claus, pursues them, with Zanda Claus who's too big to fit through forcing the portal open, resulting in a massive explosion caused by the portal collapsing that nearly buried Doraemon and Nobita alive. On the plus side, the portal is now momentarily sealed, keeping the steel troops trapped in the mirror world.
Comic Books
- Marvel's Dawn of X begins with Xavier using flowers engineered to grow into organic portal gates to perform a global exodus of mutants to Krakoa. They're capable of reading entrants DNA for the X-Gene, leaving humans unteleported without a specific request by a mutant. Marauders is kicked off when it's discovered that inexplicably this doesn't work for Kitty and she slams into where the portal would be like a solid wall, breaking her nose.
Films — Animated
- At the end of The LEGO Batman Movie when Batman is ascending into the Phantom Zone, he hits an invisible barrier and falls because of his actions in the film's climax, Phyllis no longer sees him as a villain.
- Monsters, Inc.
- When Sully and Mike are banished in the middle of snowstorm, finding a big metal door in the middle of nothing.
- Boo finds only an ordinary closet instead of a portal to Monstropolis after Sully and Mike are obligated to let the closet door be destroyed.
- My Little Pony: Equestria Girls:
- At the end of the first movie, the human Pinkie Pie tries to follow Twilight Sparkle back to Equestria, but bumps into the wall where the portal was, since it has just closed.
- In Friendship Games, when she can't contact Pony Twilight through the magic book, Sunset Shimmer decides to use the portal instead. Human Twilight, who's on the opposite side of the portal statue, detects Sunset's magic and drains it. Since the magic has to pass through the portal, both are drained and the portal is sealed.
Films — Live-Action
- In The Adjustment Bureau, the Adjusters have the power to use any door as a portal. Similar to The Matrix, the portal disappears when the door is closed.
- A famous scene from Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me has Dr. Evil running into his unactivated portal-style time machine, only to smack into it.
- In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur is afraid to go into the portal at Magrathea after the others. By the time he gets up the nerve and runs at it full speed, the portal is inactive and he ends up sliding through it.
- The Matrix Reloaded features a literal backdoor in the programming, whereby the right key in a lock will allow access to anywhere. If the door is closed then the portal shuts and the door goes back to leading wherever it did before. Neo tried to shoulder charge one, only to punch straight through and end up outside the building. One of the Twins goes to gruesome extents to prevent this from happening. He stuck his arm through the door to keep the heroes from shutting it, and stayed like that even after they unloaded a pistol into his arm. Luckily for him, his wounds heal completely when going into ghost form.
- In Parking, Orpheus attempts to enter the Underworld the same way Charon's car did and crashes into a solid wall, wrecking his motorcycle.
- In the Napoleon scene in Time Bandits, The Bandits escape through a timehole, and just as the angry soldiers reach it, the timehole collapses and all the soldiers crash into each other and fall down.
- Shocker climaxes with a chase scene through the world of television. Just as Pinker tries to leave the current "show" by diving into a nearby TV set, Johnathan turns it off, making him bash his head on the screen.
- In the original Stargate movie, Jack O'Neil, Daniel Jackson, and their team go through the gate to Abydos with the expectation they'll be able to go back to Earth right away. Only problem is, Daniel was expecting the gate address for Earth to be written down somewhere in the same room as the gate.
Literature
- The Chronicles of Narnia:
- The doorway in the wardrobe into Narnia vanishes when Lucy tries to show it to her siblings the first time. A portal to Narnia only seems to appear when you're not looking for it, according to Professor Kirke — and indeed, in C. S. Lewis's other Narnia books, every portal only works once, as opposed to the three times the wardrobe does.
- Used again in The Magician's Nephew, with an actual splash; Digory and Polly jump in a pool that they know is a magic portal and only get their feet wet. In their case, though, the portal still worked; they just weren't using their magic rings correctly (as they quickly figured out).
- The Culture:
- In the Culture novel Excession, the title object does this to a ship's displacer-delivered munitions, leaving the ship in question wondering how the hell that was even possible.
- In the later Culture novel Surface Detail (taking place several hundred years after Excession), a very advanced Culture warship is able to perform a similar trick, although another Culture ship also wasn't aware such a thing was possible, indicating that it is still prototype/secret technology at this point.
- In The Dark Tower novel Wolves of the Calla, when someone brings Black 13 (a magic black ball which radiates evil) through the portal in the Cave of Voices, the portal slams shut, separating Ronald and his friends.
- Cowl forces this on Harry and Lara in the Dresden Files, just as they were about to escape the C4-rigged cave.
- A much different version occurs in Neal Asher's Gridlinked. Because the planets that the gates are on are moving at different velocities (and directions), there is technology in place to keep someone from stepping through one end of a portal and flying out the other side at thousands of miles an hour. The sabotage of this safety feature has disastrous consequences and starts off the plot.
- Harry and Ron rebound painfully from the sealed gateway to Platform 9¾ in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
- Variation from In the Keep of Time: since it isn't possible to "splat" against a portal which consists of simply opening a real door, the children are instead kept from traveling through time by the need to warn the men of the English ambush, then by the key's disappearance. Although the magic of the key comes and goes, this turns out to be a Red Herring and not a Chekhov's Gun, as it seems that once "unlocking" a time period, the key remains ready to use until the bearer returns to their own time. Something of a They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot moment, although subverting reader expectations here was also clever.
- In Lightning, any time traveler attempting to make a "jaunt" that would result in a Temporal Paradox is violently "bounced back" to the point from which the jaunt was originally attempted.
- In The Phantom Tollbooth, Milo finds the morning after that the tollbooth has vanished, with a note in its place that explains that the tollbooth will find its way to the next needed child.
- Princess Quinn of Dian Curtis Regan's novel Princess Nevermore attempts to return to her homeworld by leaping back into the pond she emerged from. All she gets is soaking wet. The spell must be reactivated by spinning around to generate a vortex before she can return.
- James Patterson's Witch & Wizard series has portals to the alternate world of the Shadowland, which can only be accessed by certain beings known as "Curves." It is strongly implied that the New Order is trying to eliminate the Curve ability from its prisoners (at one point, when an evil hellhound is the only one of its kind to make it through, Celia suggests that it "must not have been fully brainwashed by the Straight and Narrows.") Said Straight and Narrows, when attempting to get through a portal, will invariably slam into the wall instead.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who:
- "Father's Day": Disruptions in time cause the interior of the TARDIS (which is, of course, bigger on the inside than on the outside) to vanish, leaving only the police box shell. No, don't ask how this makes sense. At least it makes more sense than the original idea: it was supposed to FALL APART.
- It also makes more sense than a similar scene in "The Time Meddler"; when the Meddling Monk's TARDIS has its dimensional controls removed, the console room shrunk to fit the exterior shell!
- "The Girl in the Fireplace" has time portals between a futuristic spaceship and 17th century France. One portal the Doctor uses is attached to a mirror, which breaks on the way through and won't let him back in. The title fireplace is another (malfunctioning) portal, but while time passes normally on one side years pass between each trip on the other, with more than one serious plot consequence.
- In "Flatline", aliens from a two-dimensional universe cause the Police Box disguise of the TARDIS to shrink without likewise affecting the internal dimensions. The result is that the TARDIS shrinks to the size of a toy and the Doctor cannot fit through the opening. Clara instead sticks the box in her purse and the Doctor passes objects through as needed.
- In "Flux Chapter Two: War of the Sontarans", the Doctor tries to enter the malfunctioning TARDIS, only to find out that none of its four sides is sporting a door any more.
- One episode of Farscape has Looney Tunes-style Crighton (It Makes Sense in Context... sort of) paint a wormhole on a brick wall, which works fine for him but causes his pursuer to crash into it like Wile E. Coyote.
- Goodnight Sweetheart ended with Gary's Portal to the Past closing forever — leaving him in Post-War Britain.
- A Portal Splat was used to remove Mr. Marshall from Land of the Lost when the actor playing him wouldn't come back for the third season. Fiddling with the controls of a pylon, he opens a portal and slips through, but a tremor knocks the control-pedestal over, causing the portal to vanish before Will and Holly can follow him.
- A Running Gag in Let the Blood Run Free is to have special effects allow characters to walk down a corridor that's clearly painted onto the background. If Matron Conniving Bitch tries to follow them, she'll just walk into the wall.
- Mako Mermaids: An H₂O Adventure: Cam tricks Evie and Nixie into helping him retrieve the trident, with Evie to provide diving equipment, and Nixie to use a Moon Ring to open the trident chamber. Evie ends up boggling at the endless underwater room that is the trident chamber and fails to follow Cam back out before Nixie's Moon Ring runs out of power, leaving her trapped inside with an oxygen tank that she hadn't refilled before the excursion.
- Mirror, Mirror has a portal that only works when both ends are in alignment. Also, it refuses to allow certain people through, to the point of shocking them. At the end of the show, Nicholas chooses to stay and Louisa returns to 1919, thus negating every single event the Old Man worked to bring to pass, thus the Mirror erased itself from the "present day" timeline.
- Vortices disappearing when people try to jump through them happens an awful lot in Sliders. If it's a good guy, they'll always find another vortex. If it's a bad guy, they're usually trapped until the good guys can deal with them. Rickman, the Big Bad of season three, meets his end this way when a portal is just over a cliff. When it shuts down just as he's leaping for it, he falls to his death. The series finale had a device that generated a forcefield over the vortex, causing those attempting to pass through to simply bounce off.
- Stargate:
- Earth's stargate in Stargate SG-1 is equipped with an an "iris", essentially a metal shutter that can be closed over the portal. The iris effectively provides a lethal version the portal slam through one-sided Tele-Frag, since incoming matter can't be fully re-integrated in the space between the gate and the metal sheet. Throughout the series, everything from normal matter through energy weapons, and nuclear weapons at the extreme end, have bounced off harmlessly, leaving at most a radiation signature that's sometimes used as a primitive means of communication. Radio waves pass through unimpeded, and the dangers that have threatened to breach (or bypass) the iris have typically involved either fundamental forces (like extreme gravity), particularly exotic forms of energy or radiation, intangible matter, or straight cyberattacks.
- The gate on Atlantis comes pre-equipped with a force-field filling much the same function. Unlike the iris, nothing has threatened to breach it, though no real attempts have been made.
- Back in the Milky Way, some Goa'uld similarly try to protect important gates using force-fields, though these apparently can't be projected as closely to the portal, and have been breached at least once.
- Since cultures traveling by gate generally know not to step through one without some indication that it's safe, the various methods of shielding gates against incoming attacks have only rarely turned out lethal for travelers. The largest exception happened on Atlantis when John Sheppard raises the gate force field as a platoon of Genii assault reinforcements are coming through. He knocks out the only person guarding the gate controls, then raises the shield after only 5 out of 60 soldiers have come through, dooming the rest to slam against the force field as bursts of energy.
- A non-lethal variant occurs when the gate deactivates moments before a traveler reaches it (hopefully before partially entering it and suffering a Portal Cutnote ). For example, in the episode "Michael" of Stargate Atlantis, Ronan pursues Michael Kenmore, who has taken Teyla hostage, and tries to leap through but just lands painfully behind the inactive gate.
- In the True Blood episode "Hopeless", Sookie and Jason are searching a field when Sookie walks through an invisible portal into the fairy stripclub. Confused, Jason tries to follow her, but when he walks through the spot where Sookie disappeared, nothing happens. He tries a few more times, then curses the fairies and demands his sister back. Sookie reemerges and properly takes him through the portal.
- In the final episode of the original The Twilight Zone, kids who jump into a pool emerge from a pond, to live with a nice old woman. Once the kids do this, they can hear their parents arguing become fainter and fainter, implying the portal is closing.
Podcasts
- Binary Break: Penny, Sophie, and Cate get to the Digital World by travelling through the Large Arch, and find a stone version of it when they land on the other side. When they make their way back to it after their battle in episode 2, it's just a carving and doesn't take them back home - now matter how fast they run through it. Which Cate does try. Repeatedly. For several hours.
Tabletop Games
- In the Dungeons & Dragons Planescape setting, this is a frequently mentioned hazard of plane-walking. Many portals sometimes work only under extremely specific circumstances ("Thou must be accompanied by a flame-haired tiefling whilst holding a lily and only on the third day of the second week of the month on a year with a solar eclipse on Aber-Toril"), and portals can be destroyed or closed by various beings, so it's recommended players provide their own means of transportation.
Toys
- In BIONICLE, the transportation system of the city of Metru Nui isn't made up of highways or railroads or anything like that — it's made up of chutes. Some daredevils, instead of just hopping on at the stations, prefer to jump in through the energy fields that hold the chutes in place. Time the chute-diving when the field fluctuates and you pass right through; time it wrong and the impact could be lethal (time it in-between, as Matau did in Legends of Metru Nui, and the "slam" is merely a pratfall).
Video Games
- One of the main quests in Avernum 2 is destroying Empire's portal through which it sends reinforcements and supplies to Avernum.
- Happens at the end of the main story mission "What Pride Had Wrought" in Dragon Age: Inquisition. When the Inquisitor's party escapes the Temple of Mythal through an eluvian, Corypheus tries to follow, but the portal closes in his face, resulting in him slamming into the mirror at high speed.
- Can happen in Halo multiplayer if you place a vehicle over the receiving end of the teleporter. You can also stand on it, which temporarily blocks anyone trying to go through, and then you move and kill them easily. It'll kill you if you stand on it long enough, but at that point you kinda deserve it.
- Will almost certainly happen at least once during a play through of Portal, since you're going to screw up and place a blue portal when you meant to place an orange one, or vice versa. Happens even more often during co-op play in the sequel once you realize that it's almost as much fun to torture your teammate as it is to solve the puzzles.
Webcomics
- In Bob and George, George just quite doesn't make it to a portal that Bob just got hit into, believing it to lead back to his own world, where George is the only person who can keep him in check. However, the Author had redirected the portal, meaning it wasn't as bad as George had feared.
- In Erfworld, this one's invoked by Charlie and the Jetstone side, in order to trap Parson in an unwinnable situation. (More an emotional slam than a physical one: Parson was hoping to keep that portal open as an escape route.)
- In Homestuck, God Cat unplugs one of Roxy's portals,
resulting in this.
- Star Power: In this strip, a Gate has been opened, and then closes while Sanchez is trying to enter. By Star Power, who had no idea he was trying to go through.
- This Wapsi Square strip demonstrates that this trope can also occur if someone simply pulls the portal away at the last second.
Western Animation
- In one episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Billy's kiddie pool is accidentally turned into a Cosmic Sinkhole, which basically functions as an inter-dimensional portal. Whenever Sperg tries to use it, he just hits the bottom of the pool.
- Jackie Chan Adventures:
- Hsi Wu the Sky Demon attempts to exit the Demon Netherworld using Shendu's portal after Jade goes through it, disregarding the rule that only one person can use a portal when it opens. Sure enough, the portal closes and Hsi Wu slams into a floating rock formation that happens to be behind the location where the portal manifested.
- A variant in "A Night at the Opera". The villains use a magic makeup to be able to pass through walls. Just as one of them tries to make their escape, Jade splashes him with water and he crashes into a wall.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
- No less than three incarnations of the franchise have told the story of an artist based on Jack Kirby, whose drawings created a parallel universe that he and one of the Turtles must save. The portal stays open long enough for the Turtle to return home... but not Kirby.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987):
- The 1987 animated series does this frequently, to the point where it's lampshaded after the Big Bad and his mooks escape through a portal that closes before the good guys can follow: "How do they get away EVERY time?"
- The first episode of the second season had the most famous instance of a Portal Splat. When Krang agrees to send Shredder back to Earth, the portal opens and he dashes through; but when Rocksteady and Bebop attempt to follow, the portal closes on them, and the two of them rebound off the surface of the portal mechanism itself.
- Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner:
- Wile E. Coyote's experience probably qualifies. He repeatedly paints a tunnel on the side of a wall, sees the Road Runner inexplicably go through the tunnel as if it were a real one, and then tries following it through the painted tunnel, only to run smack into the wall, usually accompanied by a literal "splat" sound.
- Sometimes, it's a paper wall set up at the edge of a cliff, and the coyote bursts through the paper.
- Sometimes, after the Road Runner goes into the painting, a truck comes back out of the painting to run Wile E. over. Then he gets better and tries it himself.
- A hilarious inversion in one episode: the Road Runner goes through a painting in the middle of the road, and when Wile E. tries to follow, he actually ends up inside the painting — where he falls down the cliff that he painted.
Real Life
- People who try to enter Platform 9 3/4 of King's Cross Station to get to Hogwarts by walking through the concrete wall tend to discover this. (Side note: the wall in question is not even between platforms nine and ten, but a dummy archway off on a side wall closer to the entrance. The masonry between platforms nine and ten has been removed; the barrier in the film was actually between platforms five and six.)
