Escaped from the Lab

"Screw this, I've been here long enough."

Dib: Wait a minute. You escaped from some experiment where they hit you in the head with car doors, right?
Dwicky: (looking at a photo of him in a lab getting mauled by crocodiles) Ha ha, almost!

— Invader Zim, "Vindicated!"

A character who has the escape from a laboratory as an important part of their story or backstory. He or she might have been conceived there, raised there, or spent a significant part of their life there. The character might have served in the lab as an interesting specimen, an object of study, a subject of experimentation, or the ultimate goal of the lab.

Depending on how the lab functions and its purpose, a character with this kind of background is likely to be a Fish out of Water in normal society, and have trouble connecting or relating to other people, or seriously warped morals, especially if they were raised in the lab since childhood. When they don't, it's often explained because there was a single nurturing caregiver in the lab.

Despite all of the above, environments that aren't labs can count as long as they do what labs do to these people: conditioning them mentally and physically into someone substantially different from society.

A common backstory for a Phlebotinum Rebel, Human Weapon, and Tyke Bomb. If a group of characters escape together, they may form a Secret Project Refugee Family. See also Playing with Syringes and Mad Scientist Laboratory. Compare Escape from the Crazy Place.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• #26 and Tetsuo from AKIRA, due to their psychic abilities which the government was trying to understand/amplify.
• Most of the main characters from Brynhildr in the Darkness are survivors from such an escape.
• As shown in the Cowboy Bebop episode "Pierrot le Fou", the ISSP Section 13 lab created a man via genetic engineering and trained him to become an assassin with superpowers. After he was judged to be a failure and sentenced to indefinite imprisonment, he killed all of his guards, escaped from the lab and started hunting down the men behind the project.
• Crazy Food Truck: Arisa is an Artificial Human who escaped from Vald's "Doll" program.
• In Cyborg 009, the titular cyborg and his friends all escaped from the Black Ghost's laboratory.
• Lucy, and later Nana, from Elfen Lied both escape from the lab. Lucy escapes on purpose, Nana has escape forced upon her.
• Agito from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS was rescued from a research facility by Zest, explaining why she's so loyal to him. This was also the case with Subaru and Ginga, who were found during the raid of a laboratory developing cyborgs and adopted by one of the investigators and their husband.
• Koki Maeno from Mnemosyne... sort of. Actually, he is Maeno's clone, and the original already died in that lab.
• Maria (formerly K-8) from Shook Up! is a Super Prototype who fled from the lab that created her along with her "father", the only one there who saw her as a person rather than a weapon/thing/animal.
• In SPY×FAMILY, Anya was given telepathic powers in a laboratory experiment, then subjected to a constant barrage of (harmless but tedious) tests without being allowed to play or enjoy a normal childhood. She escaped in search of a more exciting life, which ultimately led her to Loid and Yor.

Asian Animation

• This is what kicks off the plot of Lamput. The eponymous Lamput is an orange shapeshifting blob who escaped from a laboratory, and a pair of evil doctors named Slim Doc and Fat Doc spend every episode trying to catch him so that they can return him to the lab.

Audio Plays

• This is the main premise of The Elysium Project. The plot kicks off when a group of five teenage test subjects escape from a facility where they're being experimented on as part of the eponymous Elysium Project. The project's purpose is to develop a Super Serum, so the test subjects all have varying degrees of reality-warping powers.

Comic Books

• Batman:
  • Technically, it was a prison, but the experiments conducted upon Bane at Peña Dura are an important part of his background.
  • Cassandra Cain escaped from a psychological lab rather than a chemical or biological one. She was an experiment by her father in raising a child as a perfect killer by raising them without any exposure to spoken language, leaving her able to read human body language almost perfectly but completely unable to speak. The experiment failed, however, since after witnessing death for the first time, she ran and never looked back.
• The protagonists of Scare Tactics (DC Comics) are a group of monsters who were held in an R-Complex lab until they broke out with the help of Arnie Burnsteel. They occasionally encounter one of the other test subjects who got left behind when they escaped.
• Spider-Girl has May's clone April, who had spent her entire life (more or less the entire time the teenaged May has been alive) in a test tube in a lab being subject to experiments like the Venom symbiote being permanently grafted to her. Both this and the ambiguity over which of them is the clone of the other (and whether it was May who should have been subject to the horrors she has experienced) have made her rather resentful, to say the least.
• Every incarnation of Kon-El, a.k.a. Superboy, has this origin story. From the 1990s onwards, every interpretation of Superboy has been that of a clone developed by a shady organization.
• When the project that created them is scrapped, the cybernetically-enhanced animals in WE 3 escape from their military handlers and go on the run from the soldiers sent to destroy them.
• X-Men:
  • The villain Proteus was raised in the Muir Island laboratory with his mother Moira MacTaggart as the Motherly Scientist, but he escaped and did a whole lot of damage because not only was he a Reality Warper, but he also had to possess bodies to stay alive and would burn them out to husks before moving on.
  • Wolverine got lose from the Weapon X facility, but only after they wiped all his memories and laced his bones with adamantium.
  • As shown in X-23: Innocence Lost, X-23 escaped the Weapon X lab after destroying the remaining clones and killing Dr. Rice, the one responsible for turning her into a Tyke-Bomb. Rice, however, got the last laugh by exposing her to the scent that sends her into a berserker rage, forcing her to kill her mother.
  • X-Man was created by the Age of Apocalypse version of Mister Sinister to kill Apocalypse and ended up escaping as a (physical) teenager after a raid on the lab.
• In Young Justice, Secret was an escapee from a DEO lab.

Fan Works

• Child of the Storm: In the sequel, it's revealed that Maddie Pryor a.k.a. Rachel Grey was kidnapped at birth, replaced with a corpse to fake her death, and raised as a Living Weapon by Sinister, undergoing extensive dehumanization to develop a More than Mind Control level of control over her. She eventually breaks free, thanks in part to Harry, but largely to Gambit, who'd been steadily Defusing the Tyke-Bomb and encouraging her to have a life. Ironically, it turned out that Gambit was an altered clone of Scott Summers and he'd literally escaped from one of Sinister's labs as a physical 7 year old, after a power-cut released him from his chamber, ending up as a Street Urchin and thief, before being adopted by Jean-Luc LeBeau. He had no idea about his origins until a great deal later.
• In the crossover fanfic Empathy, this is how Oh the Boov meets the main characters. After accidentally ending up in San Fransokyo due to the portal incident that got Abigail kidnapped by the Gorg, Oh was held prisoner by Krei Tech, and managed to escape by hitching a ride in the back of Bill Anderson's car.
• In Persona 3 Momento Umbrae, Hamuko Takahashi spent her early childhood being experimented on by the Kirijo Group and her uncle Yoshimitsu Arisato in a secret research facility in Inoto, but thanks to the Moonlight Bridge Incident where the Dark Hour was created, she managed to escape the lab amidst the confusion of the researchers with the help of a Shadow she befriended. Though this is eventually subverted; while Hamuko was able to live freely outside of the lab, the family that adopted her was eventually revealed to be working for the Kirijo Group, and they continued to closely monitor her activities if she revealed any Persona potential.

Films — Animation

• The title character Bagi from Bagi, the Monster of Mighty Nature is a Half-Human Hybrid who was one of fifteen genetic prototypes which escaped from a research lab during an earthquake. Bagi was the only prototype not hunted down and killed. She becomes a young boy's pet kitten and grows to become a formidable huntress, later returning to the lab to learn her origins.
• Batty Koda from Ferngully The Last Rainforest was experimented on before escaping and is slightly nutty as a result. He even has wires still sticking out of his head.
• Stitch from Lilo & Stitch, who was created as a weapon by a mad scientist, although Stitch was actually arrested in the lab he was made in shortly after his creation and later escaped from a prison ship.
• Mewtwo is shown to be a clone of Mew in Pokémon: The First Movie. He killed all of the scientists working on him before leveling the entire complex with his Psychic Powers.
• The colony of rats from The Secret of NIMH escaped from a laboratory at the National Institute of Mental Health after being given experimental injections which gave them enhanced intelligence. One subplot in the film involves these rats planning to relocate from an Elaborate Underground Base beneath a farmer's rosebush to the presumably people-free Thorn Valley before agents from NIMH come to recapture them.

Films — Live-Action

• The Ripley clone in Alien: Resurrection is bred in the lab, but escapes to resume the fight against the Xenomorphs. On the way, she discovers that she is not the only one: an isolation lab contains horrifically distorted failed versions as well as attempts to splice her genes with those of the Xenomorphs.
• The titular hero from Black Mask is an escaped subject of a Super-Soldier experiment from the second World War, who fled from a laboratory somewhere in Europe to Hong Kong where he works as a librarian while keeping his identity a secret.
• D.A.R.Y.L. is a robot child prototype who escapes from a laboratory.
• Koba and some of the other ape characters in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes escaped from the medical lab during Rise of the Planet of the Apes, when Caesar and the apes from the sanctuary invaded and freed them all.
• In The Fifth Element, Leeloo escapes from the lab that genetically reconstructed her after the Mondoshawan ship she traveled aboard was attacked by Mangalore fighters and destroyed.
• The lead couple from The Island (2005) are clones, meant as organ donors, but escape from the hospital they're kept in and start roaming the nearby city.
• The skeleton-sucking Silicates in Island of Terror bust free from the laboratory they're created in (albeit mostly offscreen).
• King Cobra (1999): Seth was developed in a laboratory by scientists who were curious if they could splice together DNA from a cobra and a rattlesnake, and subsequently went on a rampage after escaping his confinement.
• In Lifeforce (1985), prior to an Alien Autopsy, the female alien awakens and drains the "life force" out of a guard. She then escapes the research facility and proceeds to drain various other humans of their life force.
• Agatha, one of the "precogs" from Minority Report, escapes with the help of the main character from the psuedo-lab/home base where the precogs are kept.
• Paul from Paul, a captured extraterrestrial.
• The Questor Tapes: An android is assembled in a government laboratory. He escapes with the intent of finding his original creator.
• Resident Evil Film Series: Alice wakes up in a lab at the end of the first film and escapes without too much difficulty due to a Zombie Apocalypse having taken place while she was comatose. Later in the film series, she breaks into an Umbrella Corp lab so that she can suit up an army of Alice clones.
• Rocky briefly escapes from the lab after Riff Raff menaces him with a lit candelabra in The Rocky Horror Picture Show but comes back soon enough to sleep with Janet.
• In the opening of Short Circuit, Johnny Five escapes from a robotics lab.
• Species: Sil escapes from a government laboratory after the scientists who created her try to kill her.
• V for Vendetta contains a particularly nasty example. The main character is a government-created superhuman who was nearly killed in a fire; his disfigurement is part of the reason why he wears a mask, in addition to his hate for the government.
• X-Men Film Series: In X-Men, Wolverine flees the medical center in the mansion before meeting Professor X and the rest of the team. He later has a nightmare about fleeing the lab in which he got the adamantium added to his body; X-Men Origins: Wolverine would later go on to show the "real" events of this escape. Years later, X-Men: Apocalypse gave us a different version of it as an extended cameo by Wolverine, who otherwise doesn't really figure into the plot.

Literature

• While it's not exactly a lab in the traditional sense of the word, in Children of Dune, Leto II's rebellion begins with him escaping from a cave where Gurney and Namri are trying to force-feed him spice in the hopes that he'll undergo the same process that turned his father into the Kwisatz Haderach.
• Chronicles of the Kencyrath: Jame is a rare fantasy example. After she ran away from her (mad) father as a child, she was picked up by the Big Bad (also her uncle) and brought to his castle in Perimal Darkling, spending several years there, and taught the soul-ripping dance of her mother, so she could take her mother's place later on.
• Domina: The changelings are all people who were kidnapped by the fey, horrifically mutated, and then escaped. After they had their mutations fixed, they became a culture of hackers fighting the fey. Except in reality they are homunculi created from scratch by the fey, then allowed to escape. The exact reason for this is never stated outright, but it seems like the fey think they need a counter to their power.
• The novel Dusk by Susan Gates is about a girl named Dusk who escaped from a lab; she was created by fusing hawk and human DNA.
• In Ender's Shadow, Bean escaped from an illegal genetics lab as a toddler while the scientists were disposing of his siblings to avoid discovery. He then spent the next few years surviving on the streets of Rotterdam before Battle School discovered him.
• Frankenstein: Frankenstein's Monster escapes from Dr. Frankenstein's lab.
• The Invisible Detective: Ghost Soldiers reveals that the eponymous creature from The Shadow Beast was one of several first generation mutated slave soldiers (subsequent Unwitting Test Subjects are forced to become far more aggressive) who escaped from their Mad Scientist creators.
• In Lee Nez: Pale Death, Lee and Diane discover that the vampire they're hunting was living peacefully as a human, but was captured by a Government Conspiracy and experimented on. He broke out of the lab and went berserk, killing several people.
• The six main characters from Maximum Ride spend the novels running from the government project that created them.
• The dogs in The Plague Dogs. The focus of the story is their escape from a lab where they were being experimented on and the subsequent pursuit.
• In the Tales of the Bounty Hunters story "Therefore I Am", the robot IG-88 develops Artificial Intelligence and concludes that he is superior to all life in the galaxy. He then murders the scientists and everyone else who tries to stop him from leaving the lab where he was created.
• In This Alien Shore, the main character Jamisia escapes from the lab where she was raised from age six with the help of her tutor, when the lab is invaded by a rival corporation. She spends the rest of the novel on the run from the invaders. The goal of the lab was to make Jamisia the first one able to pilot FTL crafts not from the Outspace Guild.
• In Venus Prime, Sparta's confinement to a mental asylum came as a result of her attempting to escape from one of the Free Spirit's compounds.
• Vorkosigan Saga:
  • In Labyrinth, Taura is a bioengineered Super-Soldier who was sold from the initial lab to Jacksonian (Robber) Baron Ryoval's brothel, then dumped in his cellar, whereupon she was joined up with Miles, escaped, and wrecked Ryoval's lab.
  • In Ethan of Athos, Ethan meets the mysterious and telepathic Terrence Cee, who before the story started had managed to escape from the Cetagendan laboratory where he had been engineered and born.
  • In Falling Free, the engineer Leo Graf is hired to train a class in engineering and testing at a remote Space Station. The entire class is composed of children, genetically engineered for a life in free-fall, and apart from the older kids in the class there are over a thousand children on the space station. Then recent technological breakthroughs make the entire experiment (i.e., the kids) less profitable, and the company financing it decide to cut their losses by dismantling the space station. The children and Leo Graf disagree, and set out to escape (in this case, with the lab).

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 4th season Big Bad Adam, who is an Frankenstein-like amalgamation of several different demons, escapes from the lab he was created in after killing his "mother."
• Dark Angel: Max Guevara escaped from a covert government biotech/military facility as a child.
• Earth: Final Conflict: As a child, Juliet Street was brought to a secret military research center called the Conclave for study. The doctors there were interested in her brain's ability to think 4th dimensionally. While there, she befriended another patient named Ethan, whose telepathic abilities were being studied. Street was eventually broken out by Augur.
• Firefly: River Tam is rescued by her brother from the Academy, a government facility in which she underwent experimentation resulting in significant combat and telepathic abilities, but also driving her insane.
• In the Fringe episode "Wallflower", a mutant child who has been made invisible has escaped from the lab. He is mistakenly presumed dead. He lives by himself and kills people to extract pigment from their bodies so that he can become visible again.
• Kolchak: The Night Stalker: The titular robot from the episode "Mr. R.I.N.G." is the product of a government experiment. He escapes in an attempt to become more human but kills several people while doing so.
• The Lone Gunmen: The group rescues a chimp which can talk through a computer from a lab after it contacts them via email. They don't know it was a chimp at first.
• In Power Rangers RPM, Dr. K was raised in a military think tank called Alphabet Soup, where the government used her advanced mind to build new technology. While she was there, K met and befriended the genetically engineered twins Gem and Gemma. K would escape years later, as did Gem and Gemma.
• In an episode of Quantum Leap, Sam leaps into the body of a chimp in the space program; he later gets reassigned to the crash helmet lab (where they put a helmet on a chimp and hit it with a giant hammer, viewing the results). He escapes along with his chimp-girlfriend.
• The BBC's The Saturday Show had a weekly segment involving a puppet hamster (ironically) named "Tiny". His backstory was that he was experimented on by scientists who used a growth formula on him, where he ended up outgrowing the cage and escaped from the scientists.
• In Stranger Things, the character Eleven is Raised in a Lab after being abducted by the government at birth before escaping at the start of the series. In Season 2, we see another example in Kali, who founded a gang of vigilantes seeking vengeance on her abusers.

Music

• The song "Lab Rat Bravely Escapes on a Hovercraft Only to Crash Directly Outside the Gates" by El-P, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

Podcasts

• Cool Kids Table:
  • In Bloody Mooney, the crate Mooney was found in seems to have originated from a government lab. A document inside has snippets of government files implying the creature was found deep in the Guatemalan jungle, and that something happens to it when it sees the crescent moon.
  • All the main characters from The Chimera Program, along with a few other NPCs, are able to escape from the lab they were experimented on in the first episode.
• In On the Threshold, Erasmus seems to have escaped alongside several Disposable Vagrants from a one of these — a hospital basement in Victorian London where they were subjected to experimental neurosurgeries. Erasmus considers himself lucky in that he "only" occasionally slips into fugue states in which he loses all sense of the world around him while experiencing alien landscapes and beings.
• Invoked in Season 1 of Within the Wires by the Second-Person Narration of the Relaxation Cassettes, as she gradually drops more explicit hints about the Institute's layout, surroundings, and security flaws to aid the patient in her escape.

Tabletop Games

• Blood of Heroes: Three of the sample characters have this background: Fury, Katana and Samus.
• Buck Rogers XXVC: The pirate Black Barney was a Terrine (genetically engineered) fighter designed and created in a Dracolysk Corporation laboratory in the Jovian Trojans. He and his fellow Barnies killed their creators and escaped the lab.
• Champions: This is a very common way for supervillains to gain their powers.
  • In the supplement Enemies:
    • Stacy Turner was a mutant with the potential for strong Psychic Powers. She was taken by the supercriminal group PSI (Parapsychological Studies Institute) and put through torturous training to give her full control over her powers. She eventually escaped from PSI headquarters and took up a life of crime under the name Mind Slayer.
    • Tom Jerome agreed to be the subject of a medical experiment in exchange for money and glory. When he woke up he had been given superpowers, but his right hand had been removed. He went into a rage and destroyed the laboratory before escaping and becoming the supervillain Sledge.
  • In the supplement Enemies II:
    • James Matthew was a U.S. Army soldier who volunteered to be a part of Project Sunburst, which involved exposure to a nuclear explosion. The anti-radiation drugs he received combined with the radiation in his body to give him energy-related superpowers, and he used those poweers to escape from the laboratory where he was being studied and become the super criminal Radium.
    • Sydney Potter was a prisoner who volunteered to take part in a research project. Due to his bad luck, he was accidentally given a dose of the wrong serum, exposed to radiation, hit by lightning and fell into a polluted river. As a result, he gained the powers of super strength and resistance to damage, used them to escape the research center where he was being held and became the villain Grond.
    • Igor Starankov was taken prisoner by the KGB and was subjected to prolonged sensory deprivation. As a result, he gained immense strength and damage resistance, which he used to break out of confinement and escape the KGB facility. Once free he became a supervillain and took the name Durak.
    • The supervillain Pantera was born Rosa Sanchietti, daughter of the Mad Scientist geneticist Dr. Aldo Sanchietti. During her childhood he performed many twisted experiments on her, giving her superhuman powers and a vicious personality. At age 16 she killed him and escaped from his fortress laboratory.
    • George Wood was an UNTIL agent who volunteered for an experiment to determine how ordinary people could gain superpowers. The experiments worked, but being in constant excruciating pain for more than a year drove him insane. When he overheard UNTIL officials talking about having him committed to a mental institution he broke out of the hospital where he was being held and decided to become the super criminal Orb.d
    • The supervillain Pile Driver was originally a man named Richard Donaldson. After having a traffic accident, he was taken to a laboratory that was actually a secret research center for the super criminal group VIPER. Donaldson was subjected to experimental surgery to reconstruct his body that replaced his left forearm with a pneumatic piston. When he awoke, he became furious and used his pile driver to pound his way out of the laboratory to freedom.
    • Jack Smith was a mercenary who was wounded by a grenade explosion. His fellow mercs took him to the home of Dr. Samuel Levy. Although Levy's doctorate was actually in robotics rather than medicine, he surgically grafted robot parts onto Smith's body and turned him into a cyborg. The mental conditioning Levy tried to use on Smith failed, and Smith escaped Levy's laboratory to become the super criminal Halfjack.
  • In the supplement Champions III:
    • The Buffalo (his real name has been classified) was a volunteer for a U.S. Army project to develop a process to heal wounds and even regenerate lost organs. The process had the unfortunate side effect of impairing higher brain functions. The first experimental subject was a quadruple amputee: he regained all of his limbs but went berserk and broke out of the military hospital to rampage through Chicago. The press called him "The Buffalo" because of the horns that had grown out of the side of his head.
    • The Griffin was originally a pimp named Carlos Dagger in prison for murder. He volunteered as the subject of a scientific experiment in exchange for early parole. Radiation and drugs caused his DNA to revert to prehistoric genetic patterns and he became a birdman (humanoid body, wings, claws and a bird-like head). Unfortunately they also made him fierce, vicious and violent, and he broke out of confinement in order to gain his freedom.
    • When Maia de Sena was 13 years old she started having unusual experiences and was diagnosed as being a mutant. She was taken by the government to be tested and trained in her powers, but she missed her parents and her home and wanted to leave. She eventually escaped the mutant training facility with the assistance of an agent of the supervillain organization The Corruptors of All, which she then joined as the villainess Gaussian.
• A standard background element in Deviant: The Renegades. Renegades are characters who got remade by scientific/occult means and escaped from the lab (or the military base, or the cult compound).
• In Mongoose Publishing's Strontium Dog RPG, on the planet Cytrix IV, human scientists created three clones of one of the native alien Durdees. They educated the clones at an accelerated rate, which caused them to develop violent psychotic tendencies. The clones slaughtered over two dozen lab workers and fled, going on a killing spree that covered eight planets.

Video Games

• The Amazing Spider-Man has the main antagonists for the early part of the game (the cross-breeds) break out of Oscorp, having been triggered to madness by Spidey's presence.
• Helix from ARMS was accidentally created by the ARMS Laboratory scientists, led by Dr. Coyle while researching the ARMS phenomena. Prematurely, however, Helix breaks out of the cultivation tube before escaping.
• One of several rumors concerning Bloody Roar 3's secret boss character, Uranus, is that she's a clone of Uriko Nonomura who escaped from Tylon's laboratories.
• In Borderlands 2, Krieg the Psycho escaped from Hyperion's labs and became a vault hunter. What's left of his sane inner voice has a crush on Maya, using her as a Morality Pet to keep him from becoming a complete psycho like everyone else on Pandora. He has a $1,000,000,000 bounty on his head for being Hyperion property.
• Compilation of Final Fantasy VII:
  • Red XIII from Final Fantasy VII, examined and experimented on by a mad scientist due to him being the Last of His Kind.
  • In Crisis Core, Zack escapes, with Cloud, from Hojo's lab after being subjected to his cruel experiments for four years and spends the following year on the run from Shinra. Being that it's the prequel to the events of Final Fantasy VII, it does not end well for Zack...
  • Similarly to Zack, Vincent is also the result of cruel experiments by Hojo (which gives him virtual immortality), as shown in Dirge of Cerberus.
• The titular Crash Bandicoot escapes from the lab of Neo Cortex after being experimented on with his Evolve-o-Ray and Cortex Vortex machines and deemed a failure. Cortex is unable to capture him and Crash busts through the window (not realizing how long the drop is!).
• DUSK-12 begins with your character, a Super-Soldier in cryosleep, waking up in the lab you're created in. You then have a brief flashback of your previous life as a human and proceed to slaughter your way out.
• Ogmo from Jumper is a lab creation who spends the first game escaping from the laboratory abandoned since World War I.
• Hinted at with Elfilin from Kirby and the Forgotten Land, who has a prominent Ear Notch similar to that of a lab mouse. It turns out that he's the personified compassion of the Big Bad, who separated from them during a "warp experiment incident" at Lab Discovera and found his freedom.
• Mass Effect: A lot of Cerberus experiments go along these lines; project starts, project shows promise, test subjects get lose and kill all of Cerberus' guys. It's a key part of Jack's backstory, but sadly for her escaping from the lab didn't mean her life got any better.
• Grey from Mega Man ZX Advent. If you pick him as your character, the game starts off with him waking up in a lab and escaping it. Later in the game, you actually revisit the lab, albeit a different part of it.
• Kanden from Metroid Prime: Hunters was an attempt by scientists to create an invincible soldier. What they created was an insane killing machine that's virtually indestructible, who slaughtered all the scientists who built him and escaped from the lab before it exploded.
• Mutron-kun, the player's character from Mutant Night, is an Oni cyclops with supernatural powers who escapes from his confinement lab early on. The entire game have players controlling him in navigating his way through the lab facilities and blasting apart robots in order to escape.
• Mewtwo in the Pokémon franchise. It was made by altering the fetus of a pregnant Mew in the Cinnabar island lab. It escaped, destroying the lab in the process.
• Alex Mercer from [PROTOTYPE] escapes from a lab at the start of the game.
• Spider: The Video Game has you getting your mind swapped with a spider's in a genetics lab researching intelligence in insects. You manage to escape in the opening cutscenes and spend the whole game trying to get your mind back.
• The player characters from both 'Splosion Man and Ms. 'Splosion Man were created in a laboratory, and much of their respective games is them escaping.
• Miranda from Steel Harbinger, after being infected by one of the alien pods, gets sealed in her father's lab to prevent her further mutation, only for the lab to be attacked by mutated monsters. In the chaos, her tank gets shattered, awakening her dormant mutant powers — cue Miranda escaping the lab, grabbing firearms, and shooting her way out.
• Thunder Hoop begins with the titular character, a lab-grown test subject, escaping from the lab he's created in during a mutant outbreak.
• X-Men Legends: One flashback mission has Wolverine busting out of the Weapon X labs, but not before he gets the head scientist back for what he did.

Webcomics

• El Goonish Shive: Damien killed everyone in the lab he was created in before he escaped. Grace, Vlad, Hedge, and Guineas also escaped from the lab they were created in when Damien killed all of the experimenters there as well. They ended up becoming a (severely dysfunctional) Secret Project Refugee Family.
• Exterminatus Now: Lothar was engineered as a combat prototype in a lab from which he escaped. However, it turns out that this wasn't the reason his limbs were replaced by bionics...
• All the "furrans" seen in Ethan Qix's NSFW online comic Generation 17 escaped from containment compartments that they refer to as a prison. However, they all have cybernetic implants and physiologic enhancements meant to make them Elite Mooks. This means the escapees have powers and abilities that they poorly understand and sometimes can't control.
• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, Molly's clone Galatea escaped from the Dean's lab after clonking him on the head with a frying pan. While Molly's one-month childhood had been spent in a loving environment, Galatea was treated as a lab specimen from birth, with the result that she's a lot more emotionally screwed up than Molly.
• The pleomorphic artificial organism Penelope from the late Ben Nunez's Just Another Web Comic escapes from the secret underground lab of Eryl Keydon during a fire in the shopping mall above the lab. Penelope staggers to an exit, and falls supine in a wooded area nearby, where she's found by Eryl's associate, Jon Hart.
• The surviving hybrids from My Life With Fel are genetically engineered Super Soldiers who escaped when the project that created them was forcibly shut down.
• In Narbonic, when Artie receives the Knipl Grant he discovers that his fellow recipients include a battle android and a shapeshifter, both of which are on the run from the facilities that created them.
  Artie: Biochemically-engineered, morphically-unstable, superintelligent gerbil ... and I suppose the only thing that makes me notable is that I'm on decent terms with my creator.
• Kiki is introduced into Sluggy Freelance this way in 1997, one of several lab animals that Bun-bun breaks out as he escapes his incarceration but the only one to stick around in the strip. Whereas Bun-bun was assigned mainly to cosmetics testing, though, Kiki was a reservoir for medical nanites... without Y2K compliance.
• In Spinnerette, when they were still civilians, Dr. Universe and Greta Gravity were imprisoned in a government weapons lab and forced to work on a device to boost superpowers. Their captors were expecting them to try to escape using the finished device (that was the best way to make them build it), but they succeeded anyway and turned to supervillainy in order to fight back against the corrupt military.

Web Originals

• The Doomy Adventures of Irken Doominess: Jir was built for an evil irken named Riz, but was somehow turned on before completion, the only part uncompleted was his programing which would have made him an evil killer, but since he escaped from the lab, he went on to be the kind smart Adorably Precocious Child he is now.
• SCP Foundation: The Cat Girls that make up most of SCP-2085 ("The Black Rabbit Company") were originally created in a laboratory. They managed to kill their creators and escape from it.
• Shadowrun Storytime:
  • 2D was captured by Evo for experimentation due to being a natural technomancer but escaped during a Halloweener raid on the facility. Evo still wants to recapture 2D, both to continue their experiments and to stop him bombing their buildings.
  • Dervish has no memories prior to waking up in Seattle and is at first assumed to have been a vat-grown supersoldier who either escaped or was dumped on the streets. It's revealed late in the story that his unique physiology led to him being experimented on first by the UCAS and later by Aztechnology when he was captured during a raid, but how he wound up in Seattle is unclear.
• Taerel Setting: "Project Bloodmoon" was the project that made vampires ("Kin'toni") in a lab (or many labs; writing is inconsistent on this). When a researcher was bitten and turned, the subjects got out of the lab, leading to a Zombie Apocalypse.

Western Animation

• Beast Wars: Protoform X was a Maximal experiment attempting to recreate Stascream's mutant indestructible spark. However, Protoform X was twisted and insane, broke free, and went on a rampage, killing many and destroying Starbase Rugby. He was sealed away and placed aboard the Axalon whose crew were instructed to dispose of Protoform X where it wouldn't harm anyone else.
• One of the characters in Capitol Critters is a former lab rat named Muggles, who now lives among normal rats inside the White House walls.
• Gargoyles:
  • Thailog was created in Dr. Sevarius' lab using Goliath's DNA, and given subliminal messaging to make him as cunning as Xanatos. Eventually he escaped from the lab and began his own schemes.
  • The Mutates were kidnapped humans mutated into pseudo-gargoyles, and were actually (unbeknownst to them) allowed to escape for brief periods of time (as no attempt to recover them would have been too suspicious) to get the Gargoyles' attention as part of a Xanatos Gambit, which paid off when Brooklyn discovered Maggie.
• The Hollow: In the first episode, Adam suggests a theory that maybe the teens are somebody's lab experiments, explaining their powers.
• An episode of Jonny Quest has a researcher attempt to coalesce a large quantity of energy in a small capsule; he fails miserably, wrecking his laboratory. This also unleashes a living energy monster which is invisible, thus the episode's title: "The Invisible Monster". The creature consumes the scientist who created it, then goes trudging around the countryside seeking more energy sources to feast upon.
• Justice League: The original Royal Flush Gang from "Wild Cards" were children abducted by the government so that their meta-human abilities could be studied. Then Joker broke them out.
• Kaeloo: Quack Quack's backstory is that when he was an egg, his parents were killed by a hunter, and his egg was taken to a laboratory where he was subjected to strange scientific experiments. Eventually, he escaped from the lab and went to live with the rest of the cast.
• The Owl House: Vee, the shapeshifting demon that's been impersonating Luz in the human realm, is revealed to be a Basilisk, an extinct species that was cloned by the Emperor's Coven so they could study how the species drained magic. She was among a small group of others (including the Greater Basilisk from "The First Day") that managed to escape.
• Pinky and the Brain, the laboratory mice trying to take over the world, frequently escape from their lab in order to enact whatever their latest scheme is. Of course, they always return to the lab as it's their base of operation.
• Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles eventually reveals that unlike previous incarnations in the franchise who were exposed to Mutagenic Goo by complete chance, the Turtles were intentionally created as Super Soldiers by Baron Draxum using mutagen and the DNA of human movie star (and Battle Nexus fighter) Lou Jitsu. Upon learning that the baby turtles he'd grown attached to were going to be mutated, Lou promptly busted out of his cell to rescue them, setting the lab on fire in the process. Draxum presumed them all dead, when in actuality, they all survived (albeit with Lou getting doused in mutagen and mutating into a rat) and live in New York's sewers, the turtles completely unaware of their origins.
• Rocko's Modern Life:
  • There is a pit bull named Earl who attacks Rocko and Spunky in the Pilot episode.
    Rocko: Spunky! I think Earl escaped from the science lab again!
  • In a later episode, he is adopted by Bev (much to Ed's chagrin), who is horrified to learn that he was used for experiments, and vows to make sure that Earl never ends up back there.
• In Young Justice (2010), Superboy joined up with the team after he was busted from a Cadmus research center by Robin, Kid Flash and Aqualad after being persuaded to do so.

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