“The Other Slide of Darkness” is episode twenty (originally shown as episode twenty-one) of season three of Sliders.
People are carrying out some kind of ritual involving what may be a sacrifice. Then a woman with one white eye jolts awake.
A man is walking through a foggy forest wearing a breathing mask, picking flowers. Then some people, those seen in the ritual, surround him and cut the supply to his mask. He breathes in the fog and collapses.
The Sliders arrive; Rembrandt is missing the professor. Literally; it seems he did always aim to land on him. Quinn says that Rickman landed about where they did and hasn’t slid out yet. They’ve got less than two days. Then everyone but Quinn starts coughing. Maggie doesn’t; in “The Exodus, Part 1”, it seemed her lungs are slightly different from those of the others. They manage to stumble out of the forest and the fog. Those from the ritual watch them leave and someone says he told them they’d be coming for him.
Quinn finds a path back to town; Maggie has headed back into the fog. Quinn wants to head in after her but Wade doesn’t want to risk another one of them. Rembrandt asks if them includes Maggie. It seems it might not at the moment. Maggie returns; no sign of Rickman. Quinn suggests they head to town. Maggie wants to head back into the fog, but Quinn explains that she could wind up stuck with no way to track Rickman.
In town, a man asks if they are passing through. Maggie suggests they plan to buy property and he doesn’t like that. The woman with the white eye tells him to leave the Sliders alone. The woman, Adra, is reading the cards, something only Wade has any belief in. Wade says that blind seers are rumoured to be the most powerful. There’s a clinic across the way, where Rickman might have gone. Adra touches Quinn and sees what looks like the ritual from earlier. She tells them his face is different and death is waiting. Wade wants to see what Adra knows; the others head to the clinic. Adra tells Wade that Quinn is looking for death and will find it in the fog. He will be dead by his own hand, no-one else’s. The man they seek is one of those who live above the fog line now, the Foggins.
The clinic is a mess. Rickman seems to have taken names of people with the right blood type. And Quinn finds a fried microchip from Rickman’s timer. They tell Wade and she says that Rickman has already found his next victim, Lucy La Croix, one of those on the list. Adra will take them.
Lucy’s father says he hit Rickman. Lucy herself has been attacked and is unconscious, though Quinn doesn’t think Rickman got a full injection. Wade thinks that helps; at the base they were experimenting with the coma victims, and if they’d lived, they might have made it. She will; try to help whilst the others look for Rickman.
Maggie heads into the fog and Lucy’s father gives Quinn a mask that will protect him for a bit. A man is watching Maggie and calls out to her. He doesn’t look like Rickman, bit when Maggie starts to choke and falls, the man says he is; the face has a way of changing with the injections. Their lungs are stronger; it may hurt to breathe now, but in a couple of days Maggie will be used to it. Tell Quinn it’s not time yet.
Quinn stumbles across the passed-out Maggie and gets her out of the fog. She tells him what Rickman said and that she’s sure the man was him. Lucy’s father says the fog plays tricks; Quinn says it contains sulphur. There must be a volcano underneath. Rembrandt says the sulphur binds with the oxygen and makes it so you can’t breathe.
Wade’s efforts with Lucy don’t seem to be working and Adra suggests they try her way. Though it looks like Wade was having an effect. If Rickman’s timer is broken, he’s stuck unless it can be repaired, and he isn’t someone who can do that. He may need Quinn to fix it. And there’s a mention of something that hasn’t cropped up in a while.