The Heroes went to Another Dimension where they fought countless Mooks and the Big Bad is destroyed. But how do you deal with the point at the end where you have to explain how they got back home? Answer: you don't, you just transport them back through some undefined mechanism. Suddenly the Heroes are surrounded by a flash of light and then they see that they are back in their homeworld.
Often the Heroes are dumbfounded about how they got back. Maybe they think it was All Just a Dream. The use of the transfer can have further unspoken implications that you may find useful. After a tense moment, it feels like a sweet release and actually increases the drama of what went before. It may imply that the Pocket Dimension stopped existing, or that the dangerous connection has been severed, you've managed to Save Both Worlds and now you can't return, or just the implication that The Magic Goes Away.
Might overlap with Deus ex Machina. Contrast Boring Return Journey, when the trip back serves as a denouement. Compare After-Adventure Restoration. Not to be confused with Going Home Again, which is when a character makes it to the big leagues in a competitive trade, flunks, and then returns to their hometown to reconnect. Sub-Trope of Offscreen Teleportation (characters can get anywhere if they're off-camera for even a split-second).
This is an Ending Trope, beware of spoilers.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Symphogear: After the Final Battle against Finé, the three Symphogear users apparently die because they summon their Swan Songs to destroy a chunk of the Moon crashing on Earth. Three weeks later, Noise monsters are still an issue plaguing Japan. Miku and an unnamed woman are about to get disintegrated by them when Hibiki, Chris, and Tsubasa pop up in their gears to fight the Noise. Hibiki explains that since the clean-up was confidential, she couldn't tell Miku they were alive. This, however, leaves unanswered how they got back down from Earth's orbit; where they rescued or they returned on their own means?
Comic Books
- Impulse: During the Crossover Arc, it's unknown how XS (aka Jenni Ognats) gets back to the future era she belongs to.
- Secret Invasion: In the planning stages of the Secret Invasion, the Illuminatinote are sitting around a table as they discuss the events of their assault on the Skrull homeworld. Dr. Strange tries to cast a spell and they wonder how they got home... Then a War Skrull bursts in and kills them all. It's all right, though, because they're clones.
- Thorgal: In "The Three Elders of Aran", Thorgal, Volsung, and Karshan venture into the guardian's island. To enter the place, they go through a portal inside a whirlpool. We don’t get to see how the three men went back to the Benevolent Ones’ castle.
Fan Works
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
- A Dream of Dawn: Getting to the seat of Harmony at the heart of the otherworld is a long, difficult journey that requires Discord and Twilight to travel to the literal edge of the world and go on a long, confusing trek through the afterlife; Nightmare Moon takes a similar roundabout trip, and finds herself haunted by her past and guilt while traveling through the land of the dead. Once they actually get there and perform the magic needed to fix the apocalypse that had been unleashed in the meantime, they have just enough time to wonder how they're going to get back before Harmony unceremoniously dumps them back in Canterlot.
Films — Animation
- Futurama: In Bender's Game, after Mom gets the MacGuffin in the fantasy world, she, Fry, Leela, Hermes, Zoidberg, and the rest return to the real world.
- Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation: After their gruelling adventures in the South's swamps, Buster and Babs fall off a precipice. Suddenly, a hole in the ground appears and they are magically transported back home.
Films — Live-Action
- Adventures in Babysitting: Throughout the course of the movie, several characters end up scattered around the city, far away from their homes due to being kidnapped, having run away, or having gone to rescue someone. Since most of them are minors and The Heroine's job as a babysitter depends on them being tucked in their beds, it's a matter of great concern that they are returned home. The Dénouement reveals that Brenda, Sarah, Brad, and Daryl have been returned safely to their respective households, so all is well.
- The Guards: The soldier is apparently transported back to the farm in a pretty trippy sequence that leaves it ambiguous whether he actually went back home or why he was allowed to do so.
- Mortal Kombat (1995): Happens twice. First, when Johnny somehow escapes Scorpion's dimension, and then at the end when the heroes somehow escape Outworld.
- The Wizard of Oz (1939): Dorothy was swept away from Kansas with the threat of Miss Gulch taking Toto to have him destroyed, and had become convinced by Professor Marvelo's Batman Gambit to get her to go back home that her beloved Auntie Em was sick to the point of death, and also believed it was her fault. But at the end of the film, she learns that the Ruby Slippers could return her home, and wakes in her bed on her family farm, surrounded by her family and loved ones (and as Miss Gulch was played by the same actress as the Wicked Witch of the West it is commonly believed that she perished).
- The X-Files: Fight the Future: At the end of the film, Mulder and Scully are stuck in Antarctica with a SnowCat with no gas and on the verge of consciousness. The next scene shows them back in Washington D.C. without any explanation as to how they got there. When this is brought up three seasons later by an admirer, Mulder and Scully comically bicker with each other and do not give a straight answer.
Literature
- Have Space Suit – Will Travel: This Robert A. Heinlein novel ends with the return to the protagonist's home.
- Forest of Darkness: The adventurers return to the king's castle as soon as they finish their quest by means of a Magic Mirror. There's no explanation given as to why, and in contrasts greatly with the source material, in which they had to walk back to the castle.
- Wayward Children: Some of the kids get back from their respective Magical Lands through unknown means. Oftentimes, they just stray so far that they end up back in the real world. Others, they simply find themselves age-regressed and back home with their parents with no explanation given. The reason is that most Magical Lands have capricious, fae-like rules. Unlike most instances of this trope, the return is not the end of their stories, but the books' conceit.
Live-Action TV
- The Snow Queen (2002): Kai and Gerda are transported back home instantly after defeating the Snow Queen
Music
- Ayreon: The last track of Into the Electric Castle describes the characters returning to their respective time periods without the memory of the Castle or Forever, but knowing that something happened.
Tabletop Games
- Queen of the Spiders: If the players succeed in killing Lolth in the adventure Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits, they are suddenly and inexplicably returned home from the spider-goddess' otherworldly real. If they look into it, they might find that the gods spirited them back as a reward for their services.
After a short, dizzying, gut-twisting spin, they will black out, regaining consciousness somewhere in their own world.
Video Games
- Boku no Natsuyasumi: Played for Laughs and used as a mechanism for Acceptable Breaks from Reality for gameplay purposes. In the third game, whenever Boku runs out of air underwater, gets scared by a "ghost" or tries to pick a fight with wasps, he faints and then wakes up in the hay in his family's barn with no explanation. Lampshaded in-game:
Boku: ...huh? Wait, what was I doing again?
- Chrono Cross: At the end of the game, the split timelines are united ("fixed"), and everyone supposedly returns to their respective home, with Serge waking up at Opassa Beach by Leena's side. Worth of note is that he can always flee from the Final Battle if he so wishes, but it's Schala's power that sends him back after the job is done.
- Final Fantasy:
- Final Fantasy Type-0: Colonel Faith, who pilots a flying Helldiver mech and can escape the area really quickly if he is not stopped.
- Final Fantasy V: One minute, you're taking out the Big Bad in his castle, and the next, you're back in your homeworld in front of Tycoon Castle. Subverted in that you're not back in your homeworld; you're on the new world created by merging the two worlds together. Also, you're only two-thirds through the plot.
- Last Dream: After killing the Dark Lord/Gabriel, an interdimensional rift opens above the Well of Souls, forcing the party to make a run for it and jump through before it closes. After the player character arrives back on the beach, he seems confused about what happened, and why only a few minutes have passed since he left to get the firewood.
- Pokémon: Downplayed in the mainline RPGs. After you beat the Elite Four, the game places you back outside your home at the beginning of the game. Played with in some entries, where you actually see your character make the long trek back home over the credits sequence that plays the first time you beat the game. This can be a bit frustrating if you're using the Elite Four for Level Grinding a team for competitive since you just have to turn around and go right back.
- Star Ocean: Till the End of Time: At the end of the game, the main characters wake up from their entire universe being deleted with no explanation of how they're still alive, or how their universe is still intact. Maria speculates on it for a minute, but the party ultimately decides to not worry about it and just go home.
- Super Mario Galaxy: At the end of the game, after defeating Bowser and rescuing Peach, Bowser's galaxy explodes and destroys the universe. The Lumas all throw themselves inside the black hole that is tearing up the universe in an attempt to stop it, and after their sacrifice results in the birth of a completely new universe altogether, Rosalina appears and tells Mario that the material left from dead stars are actually used to create new ones, followed by him, Peach, and Bowser finding themselves back in the Mushroom Kingdom as if nothing even happened.
- Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 2:
- Neue Regisseur pulls everyone back to Earth's Orbit where Neue fuses with the White Star becoming Stern Regisseur and plans to Colony Drop the Earth.
- In this particular case, it only happens in the "True Final Boss ending". The normal ending begins with the heroes essentially using a Combined Energy Attack-fueled teleporter to return home.
- Timecop: It's stated that traveling to the future is impossible, so how do the Player Character and other Time Cops return to their own timeline? When you win the game, you just pop back to your era and that's it.
- Trials of Kokoro: At the end of the game, Athena and her friends are unaware how they survived the giant explosion. Aedric used his powers to teleport them to safety.
- World of Warcraft: One of the early expansion packs turns this trope into a game mechanic. With the introduction of the dungeon finder tool, players couldn't only be pulled from wherever they were in Azeroth once a fully-fledged group was armed, but they were also transported back to their locations either once all the instance's bosses were killed or the group dissolved. In-universe, there's no explanation given for how non-mage adventurers can do this.
Visual Novels
- It Lives: After escaping from the cultists in Chapter 3 and falling out the window, Harper wakes up in their room and wonders how they got home. Chapter 9 reveals that Arthur was one of the cultists at the house and brought Harper home afterwards.
Web Videos
- ALZI Production: In "Harley Quinn", Harley discusses this trope when asked about whether the Big Bad and his mooks will stay dead. Breaking the Fourth Wall, she answers that they are just actors that will somehow come back home soon.
Western Animation
- Justice League: In "The Savage Time", the time vortex dumps our heroes in Germany and then vanishes. At the end of the episode, they are seen exiting the vortex back into our time, but how they activated it from 1944 is left to the imagination.
- Winx Club:
- In the second season's final episode, "The Phoenix Revealed", the Trix sisters are stranded in the Realix dimension, which can only be accessed by reuniting the pieces of the Codex. Since the portal closed and they don't have the pieces on the other side, it's practically impossible for them to return to the Magix dimension. Come the next season and they are shown being transported to a high-security prison without any explanation given.
- In the sixth season's finale, "Winx Forever", Bloom traps the Trix in the Legendarium's Pocket Dimension. It's explicitly stated there's no way for them to come back now that the aforementioned book has been sealed forever. Yet, they appear mid-season seven just like that.