“The Exodus, Part 1” is episode seventeen (originally shown as episode sixteen) of season three of Sliders.
A lieutenant is looking at a screen and calls a Dr Jariabek to tell him that the SAT-7 satellite picked up an unusual reading, an object that just penetrated the outer plane of the solar system. He’s saying that it can only be the pulsar when someone jabs the lieutenant in the back of the neck with a syringe. Her attacker extracts something and, as she collapses, injects it into himself, and he bears her face.
The Sliders arrive as an air raid siren is going off and some people are looting. They land on a sofa two men were stealing. The only person on the street after the looters run off is a homeless man with a trolly. He says everyone has gone to the bomb shelters and is talking about when he worked for President North when a car rounds the corner at speed, hits another and bursts into flames.
The driver is partly out of the car and he’s talking about a pulsar. He dies, but the professor recognised him; Dr Vladimir Jariabek, a respected cosmologist. Wade notices he’s been shot. Another car pulls up and an armed USAF captain and airmen get out. The captain is demanding to know if Jariabek was alive when the Sliders spoke to him and if he said anything. They’re denying it and the captain tells them to get into the car. Quinn distracts her with the timer, saying that Jariabek gave them it, and the Sliders manage to take down her and the airmen. The captain is being bundled into the boot of her car and she tells Quinn she never forgets a face. He tells her his full name as well.
Afterwards, Rembrandt wonders why they didn’t tell the truth. Because a brilliant scientist is dead and they may have killed him. The professor explains pulsars and they wonder who they should tell. The professor says Jariabek did consult with the military but also had an office at Caltech.
The captain, Maggie Beckett, is reporting to a colonel. He is not impressed; she doesn’t like the fact that he told her airman to shoot Jariabek on sight. The colonel tells her arrogance may be admired in a fighter pilot but not an intelligence officer. The Sliders may be Russian agents working with Jariabek. Becketts says that Jariabek defected over 20 years ago. The colonel says he’s still Russian, and if he got word to the Russians, the entire programme would be at risk. He wants her to search Jariabek’s office.
The Sliders are at the office and the professor discovers that a pulsar is going to irradiate part of the Earth. Russia. It will kill every living thing in the next 24 hours. At which point Beckett arrives.
A strange-looking pulsar is passing Saturn (and having no effect on anything).
Beckett is questioning Quinn when the colonel, Rickman, arrives with a man in a wheelchair. They want to know about the timer; Quinn starts explaining and the man in the wheelchair turns out to have been working on sliding. His name is Dr Jensen. Jensen speaks to the colonel and the colonel tells Quinn that what they’ve done borders on espionage. But their case in unique and open to negotiation. They want help with their sliding equipment. And if they don’t help? Rickman says the timer must be counting down for a reason and if they want it back, they’ll cooperate. Or be executed for espionage.
Beckett tells the professor that it’s thanks to Jariabek they’re so far ahead of the Russians. He thinks killing the doctor was poor thanks. Quinn is speaking to Jansen; he has the ability to track wormholes and input coordinates but everything that goes into toe vortex corrupts the wormhole and drops into oblivion. He offers to share this with Quinn as a better deal than the one the colonel offered.
Rembrandt is looking for a way out and has found a boy paining the walls underground. They talk and the boy says his stepmother went into a coma. He does know a way out, but it’s got some sort of shield up, which has never happened before.
Quinn is working with Jansen; it seems Jansen damaged his back hotdogging whilst skiing with Maggie. There’s a cure, but thanks to bleeding hearts he can’t use it. And he’s now married to Maggie.
There are more pulsars on their way, described, utterly unrealistically, as the leading edge of a collapsing galaxy, and they’ll arrive before the Sliders are due to leave. And more people are ending up in comas from being attacked.
The story continues in the next episode, “The Exodus, Part 2”.