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Sure, teleportation sounds like a good idea, but just remember: it always goes wrong. It's hard to believe a process that involves ripping your molecules apart and then jamming them together thousands of miles away could possibly have any safety risks, but there you are. Sometimes the copy isn't quite as good as the original, and sometimes the new version is a little the worse for wear. Here's our list of the weirdest, the sickest, and the most demented teleportation mishaps from science fiction.
Even when teleportation works properly, there are tremendous risks. You can get a smirking Hayden Christensen popping up on top of every world landmark, chased by a bleach-blond Samuel L. Jackson. And that's an example of successful teleportation. Here's what happens when it goes wrong:
Star Trek: Gosh, are there transporter accidents in Star Trek? I can't actually think of any. Oh wait. Yeah, there are a few. Just a handful, maybe. If you've got big hands. Most notably, the transporter splits Kirk into two Kirks: one passive, one aggressive. In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Stonn Q. Vulcan beams up along with someone else, and they get scrambled into a mess that doesn't live long OR prosper. (And according to the book, Kirk also has a wife who dies in a transporter accident.) In TNG, Reg Barclay has a transporter mishap that makes him even more annoying than usual. And Ro Laren and Geordi get turned ghosty. In DS9, the transporter zaps Sisko and Bashir back in time, forcing Sisko to pretend to be a civil rights leader. On Voyager, the transporter makes Seven Of Nine's Borg implants have sex with the Doctor's holo-emitter. Also, Tuvok and Neelix have the oposite of Kirk's original malfunction, and get merged into one super-passive-aggressive entity. There are like 10,000 more of them, but you get the picture.
Tron. As we pointed out a while back, Tron is about a teleportation experiment, and it's designed to teleport from point A to point B. But instead, it disassembles Jeff Bridges and zap him into the passive-aggressive video-game world. Oops. 
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. One of the Turtles' main frenemies is the one-eyed giant alligator, Leatherhead, who got adopted by the alien Utroms. Stranded on Earth, Leatherhead is constantly building Transmat devices to take him back to the Utrom homeworld. And they're constantly going horribly wrong, in the comics and in the TV show. One transmat device blows up in Leatherhead's face. Another one simply materializes three Utroms, who shoot him. A third transmat device generates energy that lures a whole gang of Triceratons to Leatherhead's secret hideout. Poor Leatherhead!
Savage Planet. This is possibly the absolute sickest teleportation disaster ever, from the indie movie Savage Planet. A whole bunch of intrepid explorers are zapping themselves to an alien world, and they put just a wee bit too much stress on the system. So one of them comes through missing a big chunk of his inner torso. (Warning: video is totally gross.)
Adam Strange loved the Zeta Beam teleportation mechanism, which zapped him to and from the planet Rann — until it scooped out his eyes like cantaloupe balls. The original Green Lantern, Alan Scott, had the same thing happen to him, but he only lost one eye. I'm noticing a theme of teleportation mishaps and missing eyes, what with Leatherhead and all.
Ultimate Fantastic Four. In the original Stan Lee version, the Fantastic Four get transformed into lovable freaks when they go up in a rocket to beat the Soviets into space or something. But in the Ultimate reboot, they build a teleportation machine to send matter into a parallel universe. By accident, the four of them plus (Dr. Doom) get teleported into the N-zone and they get transformed into alternate universe versions of themselves, with the rocky heads and the invisible blondeness and stuff. And they become really passive-aggressive. Like the Thing is always saying, "Is it clobberin' time? Do you think it is? I don't know."
The Fly. In both the 1950s movies and the 1986 version, it's a teleportation accident that turns an inquiring scientist (Jeff Goldblum in the 1986 version) into a half-human, half-fly mutant. In the 1958 original, the scientist starts off his somewhat safeguard-free experiments by teleporting his cat, Dandolo, into a monstrous dimension where we can hear the cat screaming for help. And the cat never gets rescued! That's fucken hardcore. In the new version, Jeff Goldblum wants to stick Geena Davis into the teleportation machine so he can merge with both her and his fly parts, thus creating an even more awesome mutant. Not surprisingly, David Cronenberg is turning his version into an opera.
Blake's 7. I lost count of how many times people get teleported into space on this show, but it happens a lot. It's the show's get-out-of-jeopardy-free card. It definitely happens to Brian Blessed in the third episode. But given Brian's planet-sized ego, he shouldn't actually have been harmed by being zapped into space. He could just generate his own atmosphere and gravity field, with the force of his shouting.
Thunderbolts: Baron Zemo's mind gets zapped into Techno's mechanical "Tech-Pack" in a teleportation accident, according to the source of all lies wisdom.
Dinobots. In one of the origins of these awesome Dinosaurs-in-Disguise robots, they suffered an accident with the teleportation systems of the supercomputer Teletran-3, which zaps them back into Earth's prehistory where they turn into the robot dinos we love.
There's also a BBC show for kids called A Purrfect Villain, which sounds totally meowniacal:
Victor's DNA gets mixed up with that of a cat in a teleportation accident. Victor gets the cat's nine lives while the cat gets the computer code to destroy the world and turn all human life to jelly! The chase is on to save the planet, as Victor loses life after life while the cat types in the code numbers one by one over the internet.
I love that synopsis so much!
And then there's this:
Send an email to Charlie Jane Anders, the author of this post, at charliejane@io9.com.
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