It Was A Safety Switch

It was a safety switch

So I'm actually obsessed with the idea that the "on" button Danny hit going into the portal wasn't actually an on button like one you get in a computer.

In basically any legally compliant workspace where I am (and I think in the western world broadly) you get these big red EMERGENCY STOP buttons that tend to be every few feet and on every machine so if something goes wrong people don't have to run far to make what ever's going wrong stop going wrong

Now to me that thing looks pretty much exactly like this thing

With a different layout, but the big red button is the subject of interest

Jack and Maddie seem to have cartoon consistency in their lab safety protocols, which checks out honestly given that's what they are, but It makes sense to me that they didn't so much put the ON button on the inside of the portal as that they flipped the power off to finish the final checks on the portal and then

Forgot About The Emergency Stop

(Incase people dont know, emergency stop buttons stop all the machinery it's attatched to. This can be anything from Only One Machine to literally an entire floor or building depending on the levels of "oh shit everything needs to stop RIGHT NOW." They're usually 'released' at a seperate point which can be anything from the keys in the panel above to a seperate button/keypad. Or, like the ones we had in our high school, the original red button that was pushed but you had to twist it to get it to pop back up. Kind of like a weird child lock)

So I'm proposing that the Fenton Parents, instead of being idiots in their planning and putting the on switch somewhere insane when they were drawing the schematics, actually built in a safety feature they forgot they tripped

Essentially, the Fenton parents were EXTRA safe in their lab and it half killed Danny