Sliders, Part One (episode)

Template:Infobox Sliders episodes Sliders is the title of the pilot episode of the science fiction television show Sliders. Graduate student Quinn Mallory experiments with antigravity but instead opens a gateway to a parallel Earth.

In a San Francisco basement, physics student Quinn Mallory tapes a diary entry documenting his latest efforts to perfect an antigravity device. Mallory admits that he has failed in that, but he's stumbled upon something else. Playing back the previous night's experiment, Quinn reveals to the viewing audience that his equipment opened some type of transparent gateway. He stops taping, rushes to eat breakfast, and hurries to his graduate physics class taught by Professor Maximillian Arturo. The other students there, about a half-dozen, appear overwhelmed by Arturo's presentation on the "Dirac effect," but Quinn sits doodling the gateway he observed. After class, he proceeds to his job at a computer store and talks briefly with his friend and fellow salesperson Wade Welles.

In the family basement later that day, Quinn documents his attempts to find out where the gateway leads to. He's already sent various objects through and invented a bulky cell phone-like "timer" to retrieve them after a given period of time. When a basketball shoots back through, it confirms Quinn's decision to travel through the gateway himself. The next day, after setting the timer for twenty minutes, he steps through the gateway and appears in his basement. Thinking his discovery a failure, Quinn leaves his house to go for a drive, which nearly turns fatal when he stops at a traffic signal on red (which means go, not stop, on that world). He turns on the car radio and learns about the "global cooling" debate, Americans crossing illegally into Mexico, and sees a billboard advertising Elvis Presley's upcoming concert in Las Vegas. Returning to his house, Quinn finds his mother married to the family's gardener and thinks he's going crazy before the timer counts zero and returns Quinn to his own world.

When Quinn attends Professor Arturo's class the next day, the professor abruptly dismisses the class and admonishes Quinn for mocking his theories and calling him a "pompous windbag". Quinn goes to his job and finds that he was fired for telling off his boss and that he kissed Wade! At first Quinn thinks this change in others is due to the vortex he travelled through (on the "Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridge" as it's called in this and later episodes), but he comes home and goes into the basement to find the antigravity equation he'd been working on finished by his double, the Quinn Mallory of a parallel Earth. The double explains that he's travelled between dimensions -- he's been "sliding" -- for some months now. There's no control now over what worlds Quinn can slide to, but with the timer he can control how long he stays in each one. The double tries to warn him not to do something, but his vortex drowns out his voice as he is pulled back to his world.

Quinn's mother admits Arturo and Wade at the front door and they proceed to the basement, where Arturo is astonished that Quinn seems to have confirmed the Unified Field Theory. Quinn opens the vortex to another world and he and Wade are ready to enter, but Arturo has misgivings about stepping through. Quinn draws more power from the house's electrical system to widen the gateway for all three to proceed, but once they enter the vortex, the additional power seeks out and envelops the Cadillac and person of Rembrandt "Cryin' Man" Brown, a singer on his way to sing the national anthem at a baseball game.

Arturo, Quinn, and Wade arrive in a frozen, dusty basement. The timer was set for them to stay five hours on this world. Lighting candles, they proceed upstairs and find everything frozen over. Emerging from the Mallory house, Arturo, Quinn, and Wade meet Rembrandt and, sitting in his wrecked Cadillac, Quinn explains what happened. A tornado begins to sweep through the area and the four of them agree they have to open another portal to survive, even though the timer hasn't hit zero yet. The vortex opens above them and Quinn heaves Arturo, Wade, and Rembrandt into it. It appears to close before Quinn can enter it, and the others find themselves in what appears to be Golden Gate Park again.

This episode is continued in Sliders, Part Two