| Summary:
In the season-five premiere, the fourth season cast makes a
hasty "slide" off a violent Earth even as an interdimensional experiment is
being conducted on the next Earth they are about to visit. As a result, Rembrandt
(Derricks) and Maggie (Wuhrer) come through the vortex okay, but Colin Mallory becomes
"unstuck"--that is, permanently out of phase with all Earths and doomed to
randomly jump between them for the rest of his days (in other words, he's off the
show)--and Quinn Mallory becomes fused with the subject of the experiment, this Earth's
Quinn Mallory (Floyd). The experiment is being conducted by Dr. Geiger (Peter Jurasik),
who previously used his interdimentional technology to harvest gene fragments from an
alternate-Earth Mallory to cure this Earth's crippling disease. Now he plans to splice
whole worlds together, including their populations, in hopes of creating a planet where
he, himself an "unstuck" man, can live a normal life--without the help of an
anchoring containment field. Lab assistant Diana Davis (Locke) develops doubts about her
mentor and the perfect hybrid world he says he wants to create when she sees the split
personality that Mallory has developed. Feeling guilty about her own part in fusing the
two Quinn Mallorys, Diana becomes a slider herself, hoping to one day split the Quinns
apart. But her wavering allegiance to Geiger is not so easily resolved, especially when
she meets an alternate version of herself who, without his tutelage, dropped out of the
physics program and became a single mother. The internal conflict between Quinns is also
not so easily resolved, especially when the new one gets the feeling that his companions
would like to see the old one win. |
