As Time Goes By

“As Time Goes By”
The sliders in court after being charged with murder.
Episode no.	Season 2 Episode 6
Written by	Steve Brown
Directed by	Richard Compton
Guest stars	James Crescenzo Matthew Flint Eli Gabay Dee Jay Jackson Brooke Langton Mina E. Mina Charlie O'Connell Dennys Payamps Gerry Rousseau Lori Ann Triolo Francisco Trujillo
Production no.	K0806
Original airdate	1996-07-12
Episode chronology ← Previous Next → "The Good, the Bad and the Wealthy" "Gillian of the Spirits"
List of Sliders episodes

As Time Goes By is the sixth episode of the second season of Sliders. It is the season finale. It was originally aired on July 12, 1996.

On three consecutive slides, the sliders encounter doubles of the same group of people, including the double of an old high school girlfriend of Quinn.

Synopsis

San Francisco: Republica de Nueva España

On a world where California is part of Spain, the sliders wait on the street with a large group of immigrants, in Spain illegally, are awaiting work. When the police arrive, only Quinn escapes. Quinn finds refuge in a house where Daelin Richards, the double of a high school girlfriend of Quinn, works. Quinn tells Daelin about sliding and that they have to free Quinn's friends before the timer hits zero. Daelin tells Quinn that she is engaged to Dennis McMillan and shows Quinn a picture. Quinn recognizes the man and said that Dennis McMillan was also arrested. Daelin has her brother, Kit, gather information they need to help Wade, Rembrandt, Arturo, and Dennis McMillan escape.

When it is time to slide, Quinn and Daelin stop the deportation bus and get their people off of it. Then the police arrive. Dennis McMillan tells the police of Daelin, Quinn, and Kit's plans to help people escape. Dennis reveals that he did this because he was promised a green card and then he could marry Daelin and they could legally stay in the country. Kit Richards calls Dennis a traitor, runs after him, and then is shot by the police. Quinn opens the vortex and wants Daelin to come with him, but Daelin, saddened that her brother Kit is about to die, chooses to stay.

In an editing error, as Daelin is looking at her brother, an immigration official kneels down, the scene flashes back to Quinn just before he jumps into the vortex, the scene flashes back to Daelin, and the same immigration official kneels down again.

San Francisco Lions

Upon arriving on the next earth the sliders believe they might have returned home, until reading an advertisement featuring the local professional American football team, the "San Francisco Lions". Rembrandt suggests that Quinn, still saddened by Daelin's decision to stay on her earth, try to find Daelin on this earth. Quinn discovers that on this earth, Quinn moved to Seattle, Washington while in high school, while Daelin stayed in San Francisco. This is the opposite of what happened on Earth Prime, where Daelin moved and Quinn stayed in San Francisco.

Quinn meets with Daelin in her home. Dennis McMillan (who is married to Daelin on this earth) arrives and begins fighting with Daelin. It is clear to Quinn that Daelin regrets marrying McMillan, who is frequently abusive on this earth. When Dennis pulls Daelin's hair, Quinn pulls Dennis away, which makes Dennis angrier. He challeges Quinn to a fight. After Quinn hits Dennis, Dennis tells Quinn to take Daelin and Dennis's baby daughter with him. Quinn wants to take Daelin sliding, but since it is too dangerous for the baby, Quinn calls his double in Seattle and arranges for Daelin and her daughter to move in with Quinn's double.

Time's Arrow

At the beginning of the next slide, Quinn, Rembrandt, and Arturo land in San Quentin prison. They are in prison jumpsuits instead of the clothes they were previously wearing. Wade is not found. The timer is counting upwards instead of downwards and Quinn cannot figure out why. Quinn, Rembrandt, and Arturo conclude that Wade must be in a women's prison somewhere. Upon receiving copies of the court's documents, they learn that they are reported to have pled guilty to the murder of Daelin Richards.

Later, they are sent to the courtroom where they meet Wade. The sliders are confused as to why they are back in court since they learned that they have already been tried. After Quinn sees that the clock's face is the reverse of the clock's face of Earth Prime, he concludes that on this world, time goes in the opposite direction (at least, opposite with respect to Earth Prime's time's arrow). All the sliders then plead guilty, and shortly later, a police officer removes their hand cuffs.

The sliders experience the flow of time like a skipping record: they move through time in the same way as everyone else on this world for a while, and then when the record skips, they quickly jump back in time.

Quinn feels obligated to prevent Daelin's murder. Quinn arrives at the murder scene and yells a warning at Daelin, who is a police officer in this world. Her real killer shoots Daelin in the shoulder and Daelin shoots her would-be killer, killing him. Daelin survives with only a wound. Dennis McMillan, who is Daelin's fiancee and police partner on this earth, observed from a distance. The two detectives, unaware that the flow of history has been changed, are angry with Quinn for alerting the attempted murderer and spoiling their opportunity to get information out of him. As a hole opens in the sky because of this, the timer starts counting down and a vortex opens and sucks the Sliders in. On the next world, Wade suggests Quinn try to contact Daelin again, but he seems to have given up on it.

Effects of Interfering in the Time Line

I love these time travel sci-fi concepts. As a result, allow me to discuss how Quinn nearly destroyed an entire universe (or more correctly, prevented it from coming in to being in the first place) and how they might have fixed it by sliding.

The result of preventing Daelin's murder has very adverse effects, as it creates a paradox in space time. The only way Quinn and the others could have known that Daelin would be killed was if she were already dead when they arrived. This is a point in the future for everyone but the Sliders. Armed with this knowledge, Quinn intervenes and Daelin lives, meaning he could have never known about her murder in this world's future (as she'll presumably still be alive) which is the Sliders' past. As a result, he would never have plead guilty or even been in prison, as there would have been no murder to be tried for. With Daelin not dead, Quinn wouldn't know she's in any danger, and therefore he won't try to intervene in her shooting [since he doesn't know it's coming]. This means she will be shot and die and will be dead after all at the point when the Sliders arrive. Since she'll be dead, they will be arrested, tried, plead guilty, and be in prison, starting the cycle over again.

If you think of time as a line, you can see that Quinn's actions are the equivalent of a time traveler's. In effect, he and the other sliders made multiple short jumps back in time. If you travel to the past and change something, anything, then the thing won't happen. That means that you in the future (from the point in time when you left to go to the past) won't know about the thing to change, as it never occurred. For example, if I go back in time to prevent the murder of my ex-girlfriend and succeed, the future from that point forward changes. Since I come from a point in the future, and the future I came from no longer exists, then effectively I (or at least my knowledge of the original time line's future events) no longer exist, as they never occurred. This means I either won't [have] travel[ed] to the past (why would I travel back in time to prevent the death of my ex-girlfriend if she isn't going to die?) in the first place. Not being there is what got her killed the first time, thus restoring the original time line and sending us on a loop. The more traditional example is traveling back in time to kill your grandfather before he ever even meets your grandmother. You'll no longer exist, so you can't go back to kill them, meaning they live, and once again you can go back in time.

This creates a paradox. Again, if you think of time as a line going from left to right, then this paradox is the equivalent of bending the line into a loop and not continuing the line past that point. Instead of looking like a vertical line | it looks more like a capital p P. This means, as Arturo noted, that for this world, there truly is no tomorrow. Notice in the image I'm drawing here that the line no longer continues past the loop. That is, it doesn't look like a line with a circle tangent to it (I know, reverse order of terms) in the middle. The circle becomes the end. Time will keep looping, but it will not continue forward. One has to wonder just how fast this looping would be? Probably at an infinite speed, hence to the Sliders', they remember both the original time line and the altered one, as they are in effect living with the memories of both because both did occur on the loop. They stand at the edge of the loop though, with nothing beyond it.

Yet, time keeps trying to move forward. After all, we see people move and speak. Those events occur over time. So this world is steadily marching toward true nothingness. The staff chose to demonstrate this by visualizing the idea of space-time. If time the time lines are alternating at infinite speed, the space attached to those time lines is undergoing such violent oscillations that it shakes itself apart. Hence the heavens, the sky, outer space literally tears. Wade points out, "there's a hole in the sky."

What you see on the other side of the rip is Earth and the moon. Only you see it for just a moment before it vanishes out of existence. The tear removed the smooth transition between today and tomorrow, exposing the future (from the Sliders' perspective) day. This is the empty space beyond the curve of the letter P. To the Sliders, this world's past will no longer have happened up to this point. That's odd, but not fatal, as the world is moving forward, toward its future. But the world has no past. The events that occurred before Daelin's shooting, WWII, the dinosaurs, the Big Bang, the very creation of that universe itself will not have happened. That means that Daelin and the others can't exist now. "It's only a matter of time" before they vanish too.

Arturo notes that if they slide, "take us out of the equation," the world may stand a chance. While this is true, it is also likely that their very presence is what's keeping this world in existence, albeit not for long. Their presence allows for the loop on the time line to remain in play for as long as space-time can withstand the oscillations. Arturo notes that they started off in the apparent future,in prison, from where we can assume they would have slid out, with the timer at zero. (Though this does raise the question of how Wade landed separated from the group. The others recall that they've been separated on a slide before. Her landing in the womens' prison was a coincidence.) For this to have happened, they must have slid in, hence Arturo's deduction that when the timer, which has naturally been counting up as it moved backwards in time, reaches whatever amount of time they had on that world, the vortex would open, which it did, and they would be compelled to slide, even appearing to reverse gravity to get them up into the vortex. (In reality, gravity worked fine. They simply fell backwards in time instead of forward. It's like watching a falling object on video on rewind to see it fall up).

What chance does it give this world? Well, the Sliders could not be at the vortex with the sky ripping if they had not existed on the world before (to them) that moment. This is part of the paradox. If they prevented the murder, they wouldn't have started off in prison. Though it stands to reason that preventing the murder means they were on that world at some point, whether in prison or the Chandler Hotel. And at this point, with the sky ripping, they leave (or arrive...take your pick). This would require a world to have existed prior to the vortex opening so that there was one to land on.* This means that that universe's past, Big Bang, WWII, etc., must have occurred. And for them to keep sliding from world to world, they must have left at some point, likely leaving the world to continue on.

So, if they'll simply leave and go with the slide, the loop can correct itself if in no other way than that the paradox is resolved. The line looks more like this now: ___O___ The discontinuities are the two points where the Sliders arrived and left. If they'd simply leave, it would allow time to continue flowing, as their leaving forces the world to have existed before they arrived so it would be there for them to arrive on, thus forcing all of that world's past to be in tact. And remember, the damage was one way. Either the future or the past (depending on perspective) was threatened, but not both. The loop in the middle allows for the Sliders' intervention to create two time lines. But the fact that their trip was complete (they're not on that world forever, say 40 years into their sentences) marks the other discontinuity point where that world's future picks up and continues as a line.

As for what goes on in the loop from the perspective of those living it or what the future holds for that world, who knows? We could speculate but I'm willing to be there are multiple correct answers. However, the fact that the Sliders' seem still to be aware of their adventures on that world when they land in the next one at the end of the episode, suggests that everything we saw during their time on that world is what happened, record skips and all if we follow the Sliders' point of view.

Thanks to FOX for putting out an actual thinker of an episode playing with a really unique concept. Remember that * from earlier? Well, I kind of wondered how long the Sliders had until they died. They could slide into a dimension where the Big Bang didn't happen and there was no universe...or oxygen. How about one where Earth is a little closer to the sun? Or a little further? What about one where our galaxy isn't located at the same X,Y,Z coordinates, so even though Earth exists, they land within 400 miles of San Francisco's coordinates, but in this universe, the whole galaxy is shifted and that's just empty space. What's to stop them from landing IN a mountain, volcano, bottom of the ocean, shark's belly, etc.?