Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome

Rembrandt is in a psychiatrist’s office, explaining how after 18 long months of sliding they finally made it home to a hero’s welcome. His musical career is resurrected overnight, Wade is fending off multiple media offers, and Quinn and Arturo plan to solve sliding once and for all. Only Arturo jumps the gun and claims sliding as solely his own invention. The remaining three meet to discuss the situation and Quinn makes a startling discovery — a Super Bowl outcome is wrong. Rembrandt and Wade don’t believe him, increasingly thinking Quinn has gone crazy as he digs for more discrepancies while Arturo is hogging all the glory. They’re finally convinced of the truth when the Golden Gate Bridge is undeniably the wrong color, and they confront an Arturo who claims to have known all along. Infuriated, they rob his house to reclaim the timer and discover Arturo chained up in the basement. It’s not him who betrayed them, but his double. The other Arturo arrives and claims to be the real one as well, leading to a climactic Arturo vs. Arturo brawl on Quinn’s front lawn in front of the vortex. Only one makes the slide, but which one?

Worlds Visited

	Earth Double Prime It’d be home if only the Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t such an eye-pleasing blue… Read the full Travelogue entry »
	Shrink World The stress of the last slide forces Rembrandt to seek psychiatric evaluation. Read the full Travelogue entry »

Details

• The blue, smashed up Pontiac that Quinn spots on his street belongs to Bernie Massey, license plate number 3LAY495. Quinn says that he got rear-ended just before they slid off Earth Prime.
• Rembrandt tells the psychiatrist in a voice-over that they’ve been sliding for 18 months.
• The phone number of the Golden Bay Cab Company car is 555-0188.
• The car is number 47.
• Evil Arturo’s televised interview is being carried on channel 11.
• The headline of the San Francisco Chronicle on a wall in the Lamplighter bar reads: “49ers Clock Jets in Super XIX 43-10.”
• According to the cuckoo clock in Quinn’s house, he gets home from the bar exactly at 7 PM.
• The name of Wade’s [literary] agent is David.
• Three television stations covering Arturo’s museum dedication are KKBE, KOAD KGAB (which is the same station seen at the beginning of In Dino Veritas.
• The sliding exhibit is located in the south wing of the museum.
• The reset readout on the replica timer shows 23:59:59.
• The doctor tells his secretary to call Gate Haven Hospital to take Rembrandt away.
• A police cruiser outside the jail bears number 107.

Character Information

• Quinn has a neighbor named Mrs. Randall who lives a couple of doors down from him and another named Bernie Massey.
• The street numbers on Quinn’s house are 401.
• During the telephone call to her home, Wade says “give me back to mom and dad,” which means her parents are likely together.
• After she gets off the phone she talks about her sister’s reaction to the phone call but it’s unclear as to how many siblings she has.
• Rembrandt gives his manager, Artie Feld, eight per cent commission.
• Wade says that she doesn’t really follow football.
• Quinn had a classmate in his ninth grade homeroom class named Tom Canfield, who wore braces. Quinn says he and his friends used to call him “railroad tracks.”
• Quinn has a baseball card collection, a fact that will be brought back in The Guardian.
• Rembrandt says that he split with the Spinning Topps because of ego problems.

Money Matters

• Money shouldn’t be a problem on Earth Double Prime because the Sliders can use any funds their doubles have in banks or at home. Later, Rembrandt has enough to bail Quinn and Wade out of jail.
• While it appears that Rembrandt skipped out on his doctor’s bill, he can be seen making a gesture to pay the stunned psychiatrist before he jumps into the vortex.

Notable Quotes

• “That’s right, why should you be the only one weeping? We get just as sad as you.” — one of Rembrandt’s back up singers on some changes that have to take place in the act.
• “Having a tea party, what does it look like I’m doing?!” — Arturo, to Rembrandt who asks him what he’s doing tied up in his own basement.
• “That scoundrel! That intellectually impoverished knave wanted me to win his Nobel for him. As you can see, I told him nothing.” — Arturo talking about his double and pointing to a blackboard on which he has drawn a very sour (though funny looking) frowning face with the tongue stuck out.
• “It is a disgrace, sir, to think that we share a common genetic structure.” — Arturo to himself.
• “They called it sliding. A name charming in its simplicity but wholly inadequate to describe the wonder of it all.” — the freaked out Dr. Whalen.
• “Oh, my God.” — Arturo. Three little words, so much debate…

Nitpicks/Errors

• A close look of Bernie Massie’s car reveals that, with the exception of the plate, the car is the exact same one that Judge Nassau wrecked (twice) in Time Again and World. The damage on Massey’s car is concurrent with the damage sustained in Nassau’s first accident in Time Again and World. Also, both cars are blue, Pontiac four-doors and both have a silver luggage wrack on the trunk hood.
• Shortly after the four arrive at Quinn’s house, Arturo takes a moment of reflection in the basement looking at the blackboard with the final equation that partly proves the concept of string theory. At the end of the equation is a small happy face that Quinn’s double drew when he completed the equation in the Pilot. While this shows a good deal of research done by the people behind the scenes, the happy face begs the question of whether the same Quinn visited this world and finished the problem or whether the Quinn of Earth Double Prime drew the face himself.
• Both Quinn and Wade read the San Francisco Chronicle headline aloud as Super Bowl 19, but freeze-frame analysis shows that Bowl isn’t printed in the headline.
• When Quinn shows the professor that Roger Maris’ home run record (61 home runs in one season) the baseball card he is holding is from the 1991 Topps collection, as evident from the colorful border along the front of the card.
• Arturo produces an arrowhead from an alternate world along with several other artifacts he’s brought with him, but through all of the Sliders’ journeys thus far there has never been any mention of the four bringing items with them through the vortex. (Tormé has indicated that the arrowhead came from the Aztec World seen in the Acclaim Comic Blood and Splendor.)
• When Wade and Rembrandt arrive at the museum, two different reporters shove two different microphones in their faces but both bear the name of the same station: KKBE.
• During Rembrandt’s session, about two-thirds into the episode, a mantel clock shows the time as 11:15 a.m., but the doctor’s secretary is about to leave and Rembrandt mentions that it’s getting close to 6:30 p.m., the time when he was to meet the others for the slide.
• One of the major differences that the Sliders note is the paint job of the Golden Gate Bridge; on Earth Double Prime, it’s blue. On Earth Prime, it’s not painted red for aesthetics, it’s painted that way so that barges and other ships won’t crash into it. It’s unlikely that the designers would choose to paint it blue in the mid-1930s on any world.

Neatpicks

• “I guess I felt I was glad it wasn’t my brain he was after. I mean, how would you feel?” — Rembrandt, to the psychiatrist, in a reference to Into the Mystic.
• “You should have seen this guy, on one world he, he introduced a strain of antibiotics and single-handedly stopped the plague!” — Quinn, to his mother, in reference to Arturo’s medical feat in Fever.
• “All I did was jury rig the detonator, the fissionable material was already there.” — Arturo trying to downplay his heroics in Last Days.
• Arturo (or is it Arturo’s evil double) mentions “the world where I met my late wife,” a reference to Eggheads.

Rewind That!

• The closed captioning, at the end of the episode again provides script dialogue that doesn’t appear in the final version of the show. While Rembrandt tells his doctor “… not to mention the more ugly memories of mutinous Topps, on top of which we’ve got an Arturo [and] we don’t even know which one he is,” the captioning reads: “on top of which, we’re not even sure which Arturo won the fight and came through the gate. This guy seems a little different — but maybe it’s just my imagination.” The debate among fans rages on.

Guest Stars

• Kristoffer Tabori as Dr. Whelan
• Stacy Grant as Miss Vonbaeck

With

• Don MacKay¹ as Artie [Feld]
• Deanne Henry² as Mrs. Mallory
• Carlton Watson³ as Sebastian Smith
• Tom Pickett⁴ as Leeroy Hopkins [Maurice Fish]
• Brian Arnold⁵⁶ as Barry King
• Linda Ko as Tanika
• Tina Klassen as Miss Jennings
• Mike Mitchell as [Museum] Guard

Unaccredited

• The actor and actress who portray Wade’s parents.

1. Don MacKay also appeared as Rembrandt’s manager Artie Feld in the Pilot.
2. Deanne Henry also appeared as Mrs. Mallory in Into the Mystic.
3. Carlton Watson guest starred as the reverend of the San Francisco Community Church in Last Days.
4. Tom Pickett appeared as Maurice Fish in The King is Back.
5. Brian Arnold appeared as the SFN science corespondent in Last Days.
6. The name and character of Barry King is meant to be a take-off on Larry King, complete with suspenders, silver hair, gravelly voice and glasses.