“The Return of Maggie Beckett” is episode nine of season five of Sliders.
Maggie and Rembrandt are talking about things they have been mistaken for, like UFOs and Bigfoot. Mallory would love to see the psychiatric bills they’ve caused. Rembrandt doesn’t recognise the town. Maggie says it’s Fresno; as a military brat, one of her many hometowns.
Rembrandt asks for a guided tour but she doesn’t have many happy memories. They notice that one of the streets is now called Beckett. And there’s the Maggie Beckett Municipal Park. Inside it is a memorial to the Intrepid Five, the first manned mission to Mars, which was lost without a trace. This world’s Maggie as the mission commander. Maggie thinks this is cool, and that she was a lieutenant colonel. Rembrandt congratulates her, but says she’d better keep out of sight. Diana gives Maggie a pair of sunglasses as a disguise.
The postman has an antigravity postbag and Diana thinks it would be a good idea to check out the library in case there have been any breakthroughs in quantum theory they need to know about. Maggie wants to find out more about how alternate. And a bus stops, advertising the Maggie Beckett museum on the side. She wants to go.
They go, but Rembrandt tells Maggie she knows this isn’t smart. Maggie asks him if his alternate was in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, would he go? He would. Mallory calls them over to look at Maggie’s baby photos. A Mr Xybo (Rob LaBelle) comes over and introduces himself. He lists some of the things they have. Like the video of the cheerleader try-out fiasco. There’s a photo of Maggie’s father, Thomas Beckett (a coincidence he’s got the same name as a Quantum Leap character?) shaking hands with President Adlai Stevenson. Xybo is going on about how father and daughter were extremely close until Maggie heads out in disgust.
The other three follow and she tells them that she and her father were not close at all. Mallory reminds her that this is a different world. Maggie thinks that this is a constant. Diana heads to check out the library. Maggie has gone back to the memorial in the park. She tells Mallory she was next in line for astronaut training, but the war broke out and her father decided she could serve her country better fighting on the front line and denied the transfer.
Diana meets them at the hotel. In 1944, the German army broke the Allied line at the Battle of the Bulge and the war lasted three more years. Eisenhower was recalled and never became president. She says the Roswell crash was real, but on this world, it wasn’t covered up, resulting in the Reticulan-American Free Trade Agreement. Rembrandt believes it. Diana says this is why the space programme advanced so rapidly.
The other three leave, with Xybo watching, as Maggie stays in the hotel. To be woken up by Mallory with a knife. It seems anything connected to Maggie is worth a fortune – he sold her toothbrush to Xybo – and was going to sell a lock of her hair. Maggie is not pleased. Then the window is broken. There’s a crowd outside and, despite fleeing out the back, they are caught. Then Men in Black arrive in a black van and bundle Mallory and Maggie away. They are hooded and bound and then freed. An unseen man apologises for the security precautions. He has them released then introduces himself. He is the Leader. And he looks alien.
Rembrandt and Diana are wondering how to find Maggie and Mallory before they have to slide.
The Leader says he is the leader of NASA. He’s surprised a dead astronaut has returned. Maggie says she isn’t Maggie Beckett. Only it turns out her DNA was on the toothbrush. The Leader knows she is.
Rembrandt has been trying to see if anyone knows anything about Maggie and failing and is now desperate enough to try the police when an armed man dressed in black with a balaclava burst in the just repaired window and two more come in the door. They are bundled into a different black van and meet a general.
The Leader thinks the Mars mission was a fake. The general’s description of how the Leader thinks it was carried out is very similar to the plot of Capricorn One. The Leader wants to prove that it was a fake, though he seems perfectly willing to fake evidence to do so. There are cover-ups, though, even if a Roswell landing wasn’t one of them.