Into The Mystic

Template:Infobox Sliders episodes Into The Mystic is the first episode of the second season for the science fiction television show Sliders. On an alternate Earth immersed in occult practices, Quinn becomes the target of a shaman who demands his brain as payment for services rendered.

Quinn dreams that his fellow Sliders Arturo, Rembrandt, and Wade are standing over his grave expressing little grief. He awakens just in time for the next slide, and Wade tells him that Ryan (their fellow passenger from the previous episode "Luck of the Draw", who remains on this world after Wade refuses to stay with him) managed to remove the bullet he'd been shot with, but he's still weak from loss of blood. The Sliders arrive on the next world late at night during a rainstorm, and Rembrandt finds a Dr. Xang to help Quinn regain his health. On reading some of Xang's credentials, Arturo and Wade learn that he is a witch doctor or shaman.

Because the Sliders skip out on paying the nearly $300 bill, Xang has a curse put on Quinn which is delivered in the form of a subpoena by a Grim Reaper to their room that night. Bounty hunters all over San Francisco are looking for him, and the Sliders are told that only "the Sorcerer" can help him now. While dodging bounty hunters, the Sliders enter a fortuneteller's tent and she reads their fortunes. As a man of science, Arturo is especially incensed when her tarot reading shows that they're far from home and that Arturo feels eclipsed by Quinn's success in developing sliding – "like Salieri to his Mozart". When Arturo challenges the fortuneteller to reveal something they don't already know, she says that the Sorcerer is also a Slider.

The Sorcerer lives in a castle across the Golden Gargoyle Gate Bridge, and the Sliders cross the rope bridge (in this world) to seek an audience with him. Quinn rushes past the guards and Mr. Gale, the Sorcerer's business manager, as the others join him in a large auditorium and encounter the wraithlike Sorcerer, who asks them to retrieve some blueprints from Dr. Xang in return for his help. A dwarf bounty hunter captures Quinn on the other side of the bridge.

Arturo, Rembrandt, and Wade rush to Quinn's rescue just before Xang removes his brain (to be placed alongside that of former President Ed Wood, Jr.). At Xang's office, the Sliders find the blueprints the Sorcerer wants – blueprints for a sliding machine. When they return to the Sorcerer's castle, Quinn rushes past the guards and Gale. The Sorcerer attempts to stop him, but Quinn runs past the projection, behind the curtain and encounters his own double, the Quinn of another Earth who started a distribution business here with the Sorcerer trademark to counter the superstition that prevailed here. With the plans for the sliding machine, "Sorcerer" Quinn agrees to help his double and the other Sliders get home. Mr. Gale, the only one who could have given Xang the plans, is fired and has a bounty placed on him.

Once the Sorcerer has fixed the timer to reach their home coordinates, Arturo, Quinn, Rembrandt, and Wade enter the vortex and reappear outside Quinn's house. In less than two minutes before the next window, Quinn deduces (because the gate that's squeaked since he was 12 now doesn't) and the others decide (based on a then-current newspaper headlined by "O.J. Simpson charged for double murder") that they're not on their Earth and open another vortex. After they leave, Quinn's mother and the family gardener come from the house and he shows her that he oiled the gate.