| “The Return of Maggie Beckett” | |||||||
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| Episode no. | Season 5 Episode 9 | ||||||
| Written by | Chris Black | ||||||
| Directed by | Peter Ellis | ||||||
| Guest stars | Winston Rekert (General Thomas Beckett) Steve O'Connor (The Leader) Rob LaBelle (Mr. Xybo) Carl Gabriel Yorke (Technician) | ||||||
| Production no. | E0812 | ||||||
| Original airdate | 8/13/1999 | ||||||
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| List of Sliders episodes | |||||||
The sliders arrive on a world, where the government went public about the existence of extraterrestrials, resulting in a world with a higher level of technology, and where Maggie's double was a heroic astronaut and loved by the public who never made it back to Earth after a mission to Mars. When she is mistaken for her double, the public gets excited. After being kidnapped by the mysterious Leader, Maggie is taken by the government where she must confront her father. Maggie's father reveals that her double did return, but due to damaged radiation shielding, she and her crew were exposed to fatal levels of radiation on the way and died horribly. He covered it up as he doesn't want his daughter's memory spoiled by this, but Maggie believes her double would want the truth known. She reveals the truth about herself to her father and explains that he died in a chopper crash. He believes her as he too was in a chopper crash, but he survived unlike his double while everyone else died. He plans to have Maggie claim to be an impersonator and that its all a hoax, but she refuses so he has her taken away, but Maggie is rescued by Mr. Xybo who is working with the Sliders and the Leader and reveals that he feels guilty as he designed the shielding that failed on the astronauts spacecraft. The Leader reveals himself to be a human, who was changed by Reticulan gene therapy into a sort of human/alien hybrid. At the same time, Maggie's father watches a recorded transmission of Maggie's double, made just before she made it back to Earth in which she says she loves him and is happy to have done what she did, no matter how it turned out. The Leader betrays the Sliders to use Maggie to expose the conspiracy, but is defeated and Maggie notices her father on a nearby television holding a press conference and she breaks out a store window so they can hear it. In the press conference, her father does the right thing and exposes the cover-up and tells the people the truth about what happened to the other Maggie and her crew and announces that he will release video tapes showing it. The Sliders leave, but encourage the Leader to keep trying to find out the truth about things, but not to lose sight of why he started doing that in the first place.
Trivia: At the end when Rembrandt opens the vortex, it opens in front of the clock tower from back to the future and thus places the sliders in Hill Valley, California.