Self Destruct Mechanism - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Coin operated self-destruct... Not one of my better ideas."

-Plankton, Spongebob Squarepants

Keitaro: Why'd you put in something like that!?

Suu: You know, that's just something mad scientists do.

Any relatively simple (compared to the scope of the result) device or process which can cause the complete destruction of a building, spaceship, planet, empire, Weapon Of Mass Destruction, etc. Effectively an Achilles Heel for buildings, spaceships, planets, empires, Weapon Of Mass Destruction, etc.

Or when any item, particularly a Weapon Of Mass Destruction, can only be destroyed with one specific method.

Though usually activated by a Big Red Button, some Self Destruct Mechanisms require two (or even three) people to enter codes, turn keys or push buttons simultaneously, etc. The latter sort almost always comes with a countdown (or even a Magic Countdown) until it actually goes off. All of this fussing about builds suspense and also allows the Self Destruct process to be halted once set in motion.

Sometimes the heroes change their minds, or they weren't the ones who started the countdown. Depending on the situation, the off switch may be uncooperative (or there may not be an off switch); this often results in a Wire Dilemma. Other times it's simply a question of getting back to where the switch is. Either way, it is Always Close.

In the real world, scuttling a large ship is a complicated process involving detonating explosive charges at various points on the superstructure - for obvious reasons, these charges are not in place and armed at all times, but are usually placed just before scuttling if it becomes necessary to destroy a ship. Persons working with sensitive equipment are often provided with a more practical "self-destruct mechanism" to use if capture is a possibility - a large hammer, fire axe, or other heavy implement used to smash the equipment and thus stop its being reverse-engineered.

See also Cyanide Pill, Excessive Steam Syndrome and This Page Will Self Destruct. Compare Load Bearing Boss. Sometimes related to Taking You With Me.

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

The Self Destruct Mechanism plays a prominent role in Gundam Wing, most famously the moment when the main character blows himself up...and lives.. Somewhat subverted by Endless Waltz, where it's revealed that the Gundams' Self Destruct Mechanisms were intended not to destroy them, but to kill the pilots in order to preserve confidentiality. In spite of this, the self-destruct mechanisms never kill the pilots either.
- In Gundam SEED, Athrun uses the Aegis Gundam's Self Destruct Mechanism to take out an enemy (Kira and the Strike Gundam) after Aegis has run out of ammunition and energy. It would have worked if not for an Ass Pull explanation. Later in the series, he plans on self-destructing the Justice Gundam to take out GENESIS. Cagalli begs him to find another way, and they do.
  - Uzumi Nara Athha self-destructs Orb's mass driver and himself and there's even the stereotypical Big Red Button.
Dr. Jail Scaglietti's lab in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha has a Self Destruct Mechanism that Quattro remotely activates after Fate's group manages to subdue the Mad Scientist and the Numbers Cyborgs with him. Unfortunately for the Lawful Good Fate, the lab has a lot of innocents stuck in People Jars so she has to deactivate it to save them, and Jail isn't cooperating since the backup clone in Quattro means it doesn't matter if he gets killed.
Subversion: Certain Pokémon from the eponymous series have a self-destruct move, even though they're living creatures. Seeing as the Pokémon in question, Voltorb and Electrode, may originally have been Poké Balls, this makes some sort of sense. On the other hand, there's the question of why a Poké Ball would develop a self-destruct mechanism in the first place.
- Of course, despite the implication that they've blown themselves to bits, they've just fainted and are just fine after a stop at the Pokemon Center.
  - Taken to an (il)logical extreme with Brock's Pineco in the third season, which would Self-Destruct as an expression of affection, and be perfectly fine afterwards (if a little singed). Sure, it doesn't have arms, but still...
Twice used as a way to escape and buy some time by the protagonists in Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex. The first one requires a fairly lengthy code, while the second one required them to log into a computer first.
In Yatterman, and possibly in other Time Bokan series too, the Terrible Trio always installed an useless self-destructing mechanism on their mechas. This, combined with their stupidity, was often the cause of their demise. Also, the Big Bad almost always left them self-destructing messages with the mission objectives, often hidden in the weirdest objects.

Film

Spaceballs has a Big Red Button on Spaceball One that triggers the self-destruction of the ship. Lone Starr knocks Dark Helmet into it, setting off the countdown to the big boom. Later, the main computer gently informs Colonel Sandurz, President Skroob, and Dark Helmet (the only ones left on the ship after everyone else uses the escape pods) that they have one last chance at pressing another Big Red Button that cancels the procedure. They rush to do so, only to discover it's out of order, leading Helmet to lament "Even in the future, nothing works!".
In the classic sci-fi film Forbidden Planet, the Big Red Button initiates a chain reaction that will destroy the planet.
This editor saw a TV movie once that subverted the trope. A spaceship transferring prisoners has an accident that forces them near Earth, a trope in itself. The hero, a cop, must join forces with an alien crew member to stop the alien villain. He suggests going to the ship while the alien is on board and setting off the self destruct. The alien crew member is not only unfamiliar with the idea, but says it makes no sense, as the crew would be stranded far from home.
- This was Something Is Out There, originally a miniseries, later edited down a lot and syndicated as a movie. Of course, after the Tara, the female lead, points out that a self-destruct device would be largely useless, the male lead has to point out that, in the situation they were then in, they would have very much liked to have one.
  - She also pointed out that even if such a device existed, an ordinary crewmember such as herself wouldn't have been told how to use it anyway.
Weirdly, given the way it plays with tropes, Galaxy Quest's Protector actually doesn't have a self-destruct mechanism; the bad guys have to wire the ship's Applied Phlebotinum reactor to explode when they want to destroy it. But there's still a Magic Countdown, and it still stops at the last second.
- Lampshade hanging in that they stop the prossess with about 16 seconds to spare: the ship is rigged so that the countdowns always stop with one second left.
The Predators don't want their hunting gear to fall into local hands, and don't mess about, so they have a personal Self Destruct Mechanism.
- "Personal" on the order of "vaporize several city blocks". In the first Alien Vs Predator, it was explained as a way to keep Xenomorphs from spreading if a hunt on a friendly planet went wrong.
Undercover Brother. Conspiracy Brother foolishly presses the Big Red Button and activates the Atomic Core device in The Man's island headquarters, causing the HQ to be destroyed after a countdown of several minutes.
Alien movies:
- Alien. The Nostromo's engines could be used as a Self Destruct Mechanism with a ten minute delay before detonation ("We ain't outta here in ten minutes, we won't need no rocket to fly through space."). If the cooling units were turned back on with at least five minutes left, the countdown would be aborted.
- Aliens. The colony's atmosphere processor (a fusion reactor) became an inadvertent Self Destruct Mechanism when the Drop Ship's wreckage crashed into it and damaged it. The damage caused to the cooling system earlier by the small arms fire may have had something to do it with it as well. It exploded 4 hours later, with a blast radius of 200 miles and and a destructive force of 30 megatons.
  - Which shows that Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale. Beyond 50 kilometres (about 30 miles), there's no significant effect (ignoring fallout) of a 30 megaton explosion.
  - Since they have no sense of science either, it hardly matters. A fusion reactor cannot catastrophically explode - there's not enough fuel in it at any given moment to do more than turn the reactor itself into slag. For that matter, even a fission reactor can't produce anything bigger than a steam explosion.
The Avengers. After Mrs. Peel deactivates Sir August's weather control machine, it activates an "Auto Destruct" that destroys not only it but also the island base it's on.
The page image is from Star Trek III The Search For Spock, where Kirk and company activate the self-destruct before inviting some Klingons abroad and beaming out, making this film very technically the final voyage of the starship Enterprise as advertised.
Escape to Athena (1979). A Nazi sets the self destruct on the secret V2 silo before passing out. Telly Savalas is unable to avert the countdown, but gets all the good guys out while all the Nazi Faceless Mooks die. Given that there was plenty of liquid oxygen around, and secret missile equipment the Nazis wouldn't want to fall into Allied hands, at least there was a plausible reason for the existance of a destruct mechanism.
In Resident Evil Degeneration, WillPharma's research building has one of these that seems almost excessive... until you remember that they are experimenting with bio-weapons and killer viruses, up to and including the T and G Viruses.

Literature

Live Action TV

In Star Trek, the self-destruct mechanism aboard the starship Enterprise in its various incarnations is an example of the kind that requires multiple activators and includes a Magic Countdown. All of the Star Trek series, with the exception of Enterprise, had Magic Countdown episodes involving the self-destruct mechanism, as did the third movie. One notable subversion is the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Dreadnought", where Captain Janeway set the ship on a suicide run towards a rogue missile, before it was disabled at the last possible second.
- In another Voyager episode, Kayzon ships had repeatedly hit one specific spot on Voyager in hit-and-run raids, damaging the secondary command processors. The reason became apparent when Voyager fell into a massive ambush, and tried to activate the autodestruct to prevent capture. Turns out the secondary command processors are vital to the job.
- In Star Trek The Next Generation (and only there) it was called the "auto destruct sequence", which seems to have had a significant effect on popular culture as these days it seems to be quoted almost as often as simple 'self destruct'.
- In the Star Trek The Original Series episode "The Doomsday Machine", Scotty turned the U.S.S. Constellation's impulse engines into a jury-rigged self-destruct device with a 30 second countdown.
Spoofed in Red Dwarf, when Lister accidentally activates the self-destruct through the vending machine... and when the countdown finishes, he gets his order delivered. Turns out Holly chucked the self-destruct mechanism ages ago just because of the chance that would happen.
Stargate Command features a self-destruct in the form of a Really Big Nuke. Its usual role in the story is to emphasise how the heroes really don't want the current threat escaping the base, and it's usually deactivated in plenty of time.
- The SGC's self-destruct was also prone to be activated or de-activated by hostile aliens. One wonders why they don't make the thing more secure.
- Atlantis has one too, usually used to prevent the city from falling into enemy hands. Of course, the day is always saved just in time.
- The midway station between the galaxies also had one. And when tampered by the wraith, this one was NOT stopped just in time. The protagonists ended up floating around in a puddle jumper for days until a ship came to the rescue.
Mission Impossible was a frequent offen-THIS MESSAGE WILL SELF DESTRUCT IN TEN SECONDS.
- Although that line wasn't used nearly as often as people think. Plenty of episodes had the mission broadcast once over a secure line or the agents destroying the tape/message themselves.
- Famously spoofed in Inspector Gadget, with the message self-destructing all over the Chief's face.
- Also famously spoofed in The Ghostbusters: Zero's messages (disguised variously as a tuba, a rubber chicken, and other strange objects) exploded to comedic effect.
In the fourth season finale of the new Doctor Who series, it's revealed that UNIT installed multiple nuclear warheads in the Earth in order to destroy it if necessary. Mildly subverted in that the destruct timer is never activated; it requires three people to set off, and the Daleks transported Martha out of the third station while she was issuing an ultimatum.
- In the Doctor Who episode "Genesis of the Daleks", Davros has a button on the control panel of his life support chair that turns it off. Later, he tries to press a red button that would destroy the Daleks.
- Even the TARDIS itself is revealed to have a self-destruct mechanism in "Attack of the Cybermen."

Video Games

In the Resident Evil series, the Umbrella Corporation is famous for simply loving its self destruct mechanisms, installing them in nearly everything it builds, from secret laboratories to Victorian mansions to trains.
- It's also called a "triggering system" in the first game. But that's par for the course for a game featuring Jill sandwiches and masters of unlocking.
Code ATA standing for Ashes to Ashes from Super Robot Wars Original Generation series combines this with the Cyanide Pill by having Lamia be able to blow up not only herself but the Angelg and any surrounding units. Dunamis plans for the Brainwashed And Crazy Lamia to pretend to escape so that Excellen and Kyosuke can follow her only to blow herself killing both of them as well and sending everyone else into a Heroic BSOD. Axel stops her with the code DTD
- Units piloted by Shadow Mirror bioroids will initiate Code ATA on their own rides once its HP is depleted.
Every ship in the MMORPG Eve Online has a self-destruct feature. Self-destructing is a viable tactic in a hopeless Pv P fight, as it denies your opponent any chance of looting your ship's remains.
All but one of the Metroid games feature at least one place triggering self-destruction, mostly due to Load Bearing Boss. Sometimes planets.
The titular house of the computer game Maniac Mansion has a nuclear reactor installed in its basement, which can easily explode, destroying the house, everything within it and everything within a five mile radius in a meltdown. The player can cause this in several different ways, including draining the mansion's swimming pool (which doubles as a cooling mechanism), pressing a very large red button that says "Do Not Press", or shutting off the power and allowing the electrical system to go haywire. One particularly bizarre way is if the player sets off the mansion's security system, which triggers a self-destruct sequence that blows up the entire mansion. This, of course, raises the question of just how stupid (or crazy) Dr. Fred is to install a nuclear reactor in his basement, much less buy a security system that triggers it to explode if it's activated.
Both Fallout games have these. Nice for pacifist and diplomatic pcs, 'cause it enables one to finish the game without firing a single shot.
In Gradius III and Galaxies, inputting the regular Konami Code will cause your ship to self-destruct. On the other hand, substituting Left with the L button and Right for the R button will yield full powerups.
An optional $10 'Super Booster Pack' for City Of Heroes gives all your characters a Self-Destruct power on a long recharge timer. It looks very cool and does quite a bit of damage, in return for causing you to be defeated and being slightly harder to resurrect. Since Death Is A Slap On The Wrist in this game...
The Yu Gi Oh trading card game has a few easy ways to cause a draw — one of them just so happens to be a card called 'Self-Destruct Button', which does just that. The reason this is in Video Games is because the game 'Yu-Gi-Oh!: Nightmare Troubadour' had a story sequence where you had to use this or some other means to force a draw, otherwise you lost (even if you won the duel in question).
- However, Yugi gives you a few cards to do this in case you don't already have them — a Self-Destruct Button, and Ring of Destruction, the most notable method of forcing a draw (use it, kill something, and both players take damage equal to that monster's offensive power — naturally, this is used more often for the 'both players take damage' than the 'kill something').
- There's also a pair of monsters called 'Blast Sphere' and 'Adhesive Explosive', two monsters (one released before the other, but the other was made earlier) that, when face-down and attacked, will equip themselves to the opponent's monster and kill it at the start of the opponent's next turn. Blast Sphere has the added bonus of dealing damage to the opponent equal to the offensive power of what it killed. But naturally, for either to appear on this page, they both obviously follow shortly after . . . but it doesn't make the look on your opponent's face when they realize that they have just shot their own Infinity Plus One Monster in the foot any less priceless.
Averted in Deus Ex. At one point the main character has to destroy an oil tanker. This is done through the above mentioned method for scuttling large ships.
In Wing Commander Privateer if you don't want to wait to get blown up or just are in a hurry to go back to an earlier saved game, you're given the option of self-destructing your ship, which takes you back to the main menu screen.
The entire point of the first two Descent games is to find the mine's fusion reactor, and shoot it a bunch until a nuclear meltdown occurs (in the mines with boss robots, the robots are Load Bearing Bosses, although exactly why blowing them up still blows the mine is not explained). Then, of course, it's a mad dash to the emergency exit...
The Harkonnen's Devastator tanks in Dune II possess these. Strange design decision since there doesn't seem to be any real use to them... unless if you're fighting against them as the Ordos. Suddenly, the Deviator's gimmicky but not too useful temporary side-switching attack becomes very useful as you order the tank to self-destruct in a huge and damaging blast radius while it's sitting in the middle of the enemy ranks.
In Quake 2, the Strogg homeworld is riddled with self-destruct mechanisms that are activated by single buttons about ten times larger than the Quake 2 guy's head. It would have been impossible for him to have single-handedly defeat the Strogg without this being a ubiqutous design feature.
World Of Warcraft makes use of this trope in the Ulduar raid dungeon. Mimiron's lair has a Big Red Button labeled "DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON!". Pushing the button, naturally, activates the lair's self-destruct mechanism and the boss encounter's hard mode.
Every building and machine in Machines comes with one, there purpose is unclear but could potentially be used with quick timing if your opponent uses Enemy Exchange Program techniques against you.
One of the Komato logbooks talks about the various self-destruct devices for their bigger troops - Berserkers explode when killed, Beasts spray Splinters when they blow up, and Annihilators have massive explosions for when they finally bite off more than they can chew. The reason for this is that the Komato want to ensure that none of these big guns fall in the wrong hands - namely, that these measures do less harm to themselves than they do to the Tasen.
- There's also a mention in one logbook that one general had nuclear warheads in his suit's self destruct. He ended up destroying multiple cities when he went out. Ouch.
In Megaman X: Command Mission there is an extremely tough enemy called - appropriately enough - Meltdown. It will shrug off countless blows from your strongest party members while it slowly raises one arm that is shaped like a mine with a skull and spanners emblazoned on the side (no, seriously) during each turn. You have 3 turns to run away/kill it, and if you fail the Meltdown self-destructs, dealing the maximum damage you can be dealt. Obviously, your best chance of survival is to run away whenever you encounter it.

Webcomics

Web Original

Western Animation

Spoofed in the Ren And Stimpy episode "Space Madness", where the narrator ends up badgering Stimpy into pressing the "History Eraser Button".
- The shiny, candy-like button.
Lampshade Hanging on Codename Kids Next Door: in one episode, Cree is en route to the KND HQ on the moon to have her memories erased, but escapes when the two KND agents piloting the ship accidentally activate the "Blow Up The Engines" button, which prompts her to incredulously ask Numbuh 5 why a spaceship would need such a device.
In Sponge Bob Square Pants one of Plankton's schemes is foiled thanks to the coin-operated self destruct he foolishly installed into his mechanical replica of Mr. Krabs.
Subverted in The Venture Bros: the old Team Venture once raided an enemy base that was set to self destruct, but malfunctioned. They then decided to move in. Then double subverted when the thing comes back online from someone touching the control panel. Thankfully Richard Impossible absorbed the explosion by eating the bomb in an attempted Heroic Sacrifice/failed suicide attempt.
Goddard from Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius has a self-destruct mechanism that can be activated by voice command; afterward, he can reassemble himself.
In an episode of Doug, the class gets snowed into their school after hours, but Bebe Bluff is prepared with a Laptop that can connect to the internet via her own personal satellite. Unfortunately, before they succeed in actually contacting help, someone pushes the button on the laptop that causes the Satellite to self-destruct. Bebe berates the person for being an idiot, but they then reply that having a button that does that is even more idiotic, to which Bebe realizes is true.
Megatron's Orbital Disruptor Cannon isn't equipped with a Self-Destruct Button, it's equipped with a clearly labelled Overload button.
Taken to the most unlogical extreme in Starchaser: The Legend of Orin, when after the heroes have saved the girl and taken over the villain's flagship. Dagg presses the Self Destruct Button and it proceeds to blow up EVERY other ship in the villain's fleet, except the flagship.
Parodied in Futurama:
George Takei: Do you guys have a self-destruct code, like, "Destruct sequence 1-A, 2-B, 3... ” [Bender's head explodes]
Bender: Thanks a lot, Takei. Now everybody knows.

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