Unplanned Manual Detonation

This trope is when a character plans to detonate a bomb remotely, but finds out that the remote control is broken. Then he has to go and rig it himself, while cursing quality assurance the whole time.

This is often used to set up either an Outrun the Fireball if the detonator can escape, or a Heroic Sacrifice if he cannot.

Compare to Cut the Fuse, a manual defusing of a bomb, and Hoist by His Own Petard, where an enemy bomb is (often manually) detonated against its original wielders.

Examples of Unplanned Manual Detonation include:

Fan Works

• This is how Faith dies in the future!Backstory of I Am What I Am -- the remote detonator for a nuclear bomb (intended to shut down a portal through which demons were invading the earth) was damaged in the field, and Faith carried the bomb through the portal and set it off by hand.

Literature

• Star Wars: New Jedi Order: Force Heretic III: Reunion (how's that for a title?) features a scene of this type involving a gigantic Booby Trapped signal transmitter. The bad guys manage to damage the explosives and one of the heroes has to go back and trigger the manual override—and since there isn't a delay, it'll have to be a one-way trip. A wounded character suspected of being The Mole volunteers on the grounds that his environment suit is damaged and therefore he won't survive the trip back to their base. After some deliberation, the heroes decide to send him in and he succeeds, destroying a large number of enemy warriors in the process, but leaving the question of who the mole was, if not him.

Video Games

• Halo is quite fond of this trope.
  • In Halo: Combat Evolved, Master Chief detonates the engines of the Pillar of Autumn with rockets after 343 Guilty Spark stops the Cortana's automated countdown.
  • In Halo Wars and Halo: Reach, Sgt. Forge and Jorge, respectively, detonate Slipspace drives as heroic sacrifices.
  • Also done with the Crow's Nest bomb in Halo 3.

Webcomics

• In Schlock Mercenary happened 3 times (so far). Once a soldier used his handgun to set off a big load of explosives when making a hole in the wall was a race against time and remote detonator failed; because of the only possible placement for the bomb, the only way to do it was at point blank range and from the direction where most of the blast would be reflected and, well, body armor is supposed to protect mostly from random shrapnel and light personal weapons, rather than building-cracking explosions, so it didn't noticeably affect the outcome. The second time a pilot jury-rigged cannon shell with a pull-cord fuse and activated it while bailing out, when his tank was out of control and on a collision course with civilian buildings, so that it won't arrive as one big hard chunk of armor ripping through everything; he wasn't pulverized due to being partially protected by the hull, if on the wrong side of it, and protected from resulting small pieces of the hull by Powered Armor, though this still was more than light body armor could safely absorb. Much later, the captain of a boarded spaceship carried a ship-to-ship missile warhead into the captured bay before the problem could spread - not only everyone present was vaporized, but the ship absorbed more heat that it could pump out or contain for long, and only landing on water with open airlocks reduced the damage.