Recap / Sliders S 03 E 02 Double Cross

Originally aired September 27, 1996

Written by Tony Blake & Paul Jackson

Directed by Richard Compton

On a world with limited natural resources, Rembrandt meets his number-one fan, while Quinn, Wade, and Arturo meet Logan St. Claire, a young scientist who is trying to perfect sliding...and has an ulterior motive.

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Tropes present in the episode:

• Aborted Arc: Logan St. Clair was originally intended to be a recurring villain on the series. However, Fox banned the producers from using the character as they did not think that Zoe McLellan was attractive enough.
• All Men Are Perverts: Learning about how Monique approached him, Arturo advises Rembrandt to "seize the day."
  Wade: How very male of you.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Logan expects it to be quite easy to attack and raze whatever parallel worlds they come across. Even discounting a major threat like the Kromagg Dynasty, her operation is based on a world deprived of resources and (most of important of all) can't even hammer out all the bugs in their own sliding technology.
  Logan: The world is ours. All of them.
• Big Damn Heroes: Quinn demands Logan let Wade go.
  Adrian: That's not her decision anymore.
  Arturo: [appearing with a gun] No, it's mine!
• Big "NO!": Quinn after Arturo is shoved through the vortex, presumably to his death.
• Blackmail: To get Wade out of captivity, Quinn sabotages the computer system and refuses to fix it, unless his demand is met.
• Brick Joke: Arturo invokes "carpe diem" when advising Rembrandt to leave with Monique. After meeting up at the hotel, Arturo notices that Rembrandt looks rather worse for wear.
  Arturo: Whatever happened to you, Mr. Brown?
  Rembrandt: Well, "carpe diem" is what happened to me.
• Bound and Gagged: After subduing her, Arturo did this to Wade's double to keep her out of trouble.
• Chekhov's Gag: The vendor is a minor character who finds the Sliders' request for a hot dog very odd. Side characters in prior episodes expressed similar confusion over the Sliders being out of step, but this guy is later shown telling Logan and a team of mooks about this, thus allowing her to track down the group and kickstart the main plot.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Arturo's double died from entering an experimental vortex. We never see the body, but we do see what it does to probes.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Averted. The plan is master control of sliding, use it to raze other worlds of their resources, and sell the spoils to this resource-deprived world.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Arturo impersonates his deceased double in order to gain access to his lab at Prototronics.
• Did You Actually Believe...?: After following the Sliders to the next world, Logan chastises Quinn for being surprised and reminds him she has the technology to track wormholes.
• "Eureka!" Moment: Arturo when he realizes his double hid the video disc right behind a Congressional medal kept in a display case.
• Everyone Has Standards: According to his wife, Arturo's double was fully prepared to destroy his life's work rather than let Prototronics use it to harm innocent people.
• Evil Twin: Logan is revealed to be Quinn's female double, and she shows herself to be one rotten apple. Their different last names are attributed to Logan's mother remarrying and taking the stepfather's name.
  Quinn: What dark corner of our soul did you crawl out of?
• Extinct in the Future: On Logan's World, Congress has recently placed horses on the endangered species list.
• Flat "What": Quinn's reaction to being told that Logan is one of his doubles.
• Foreshadowing: Quinn and Logan's first vortex test is absurdly powerful. The former suggests an entire convoy could've used it, which hints at the latter's plan to raze parallel worlds of their resources.
• Hope Spot: Wade is about to escape with the footage of Logan killing Arturo's double, but then she's stopped by Adrian.
• I Have Your Friend: Logan and her boss refuse to release Wade unless Quinn helps them. Quinn turns the tables on them by sabotaging the data and refusing to reconstruct it until she's released.
• I Lied: As noted, Quinn won't reconstruct the data, unless Wade is released from captivity. After Wade is brought to the lab, Quinn at least says he's willing to stay so long as she is allowed to leave. Adrian isn't willing to risk giving up any leverage, but Arturo makes it moot by arriving with a gun, and Quinn happily leaves without reconstructing the data.
• I'm Your Biggest Fan: Monique greets Rembrandt this way, and he's all in on spending time with her, until he finds out she's a stalker. After Rembrandt makes it to the Dominion Hotel, the clerk recognizes him and says the same thing to him, much to Remmy's displeasure.
• Imposter Forgot One Detail: Wade's double wrongly assumed that Arturo invented sliding, which leads to her deception being found out.
• Irony:
  • Arturo says this when he learns his double invented sliding on this world.
  • "Tears in My 'Fro" is our Rembrandt's go-to song, but Crying Man superfan Monique outright calls it stupid.
• It's a Long Story: Meeting up with the hotel, Rembrandt doubts they were driving those vehicles for the fun of it. Quinn tells him this and that he'll explain everything after the slide, but Logan's last-minute arrival gives Rembrandt an idea of what was going on.
• It's Personal with the Dragon: Between Wade being held hostage and Arturo presumably being killed, Quinn can barely resist the urge to strangle Logan. By comparison, Adrian (the actual boss at Prototronics) is barely on his radar.
• Like You Would Really Do It: invoked During the final scene, Logan threatens to shoot Wade if Quinn doesn't import the coordinates she needs.
  Arturo: Don't do it, Mr. Mallory. She won't dare shoot. Without those return coordinates, she's stuck here. And Heaven knows what they do to killers on this world.
  Logan: Don't test me. I'll take my chance with a good lawyer.
• The Man Behind the Man: Logan is the episode's primary antagonist and is presumably behind the plan to raze parallel worlds, but her boss at Prototronics is Adrian. He pushes her to get results out of Quinn and provides muscle in the form of armed guards.
• More Deadly Than the Male: Logan is just as smart as Quinn and can even anticipate his moves, but whereas he tries to avoid violence whenever possible, she is an unapologetic killer.
• No One Gets Left Behind: Fleeing from the train in the tunnel, Rembrandt gets tripped up and caught on a rail. The others go back to save him and, failing that, brace for collision rather than try to save themelves. However, the train suddenly stops, due to a pre-scheduled power-down.
• Noodle Incident: According to Monique, Rembrandt's double is doing quite well for himself, even having a tour over in Europe.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Upon Quinn denouncing as an Evil Twin, Logan says they both have a dark side; she just runs with hers. Quinn later admits he's very tempted to strangle Logan for what she's done, and she reminds him of their earlier conversation.
• Not What It Looks Like: According to the clerk, Arturo's double would regularly go to the Dominion Hotel with Logan, so he assumes the same of our Arturo and Wade. Arturo humors him rather than get into the whole story.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Logan, upon seeing one of the Sliders is an Arturo.
  • Rembrandt, upon seeing Monique's Stalker Shrine devoted to his double.
• Outside Ride: To evade Michael, Rembrandt opts to take his chances riding on the top of the train. This is apparently a regular hobby on this world, as one man shows up with the appropriate gear. Rembrandt learns too late that trains on this world regularly go as fast as 200 mph, but the rider manages to hold onto him.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Wade finds footage of how Arturo's double died.
  Alt-Arturo: I won't let you do this, Logan! I'll go public, if I have to!
  Logan: Too late, Max! [pushes him into the unstable vortex]
• Properly Paranoid: Arturo is immediately suspicious of Logan and what she said about his double's death. He is also against sharing their secrets with people they barely know.
• Race Against the Clock: Escaping from Logan, the others only have 15 minutes to get back to the hotel and meet up with Rembrandt. Even driving there, they just barely make it.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Rembrandt already wanted to leave Monique's house, but the appearance of her now ex-boyfriend makes him run like hell.
• Screw Yourself: Quinn and Logan share a kiss well-after she and viewers learn they're doubles. We're not told if anything further happened.
• Spanner in the Works: Logan's plan to raze parallel worlds falls into all sorts of complications simply because an unaware clerk at the Dominion Hotel mistook Arturo for his double and alluded to an affair going on between the double and her, thus wrecking Logan's cover story.
• Spot the Imposter: When Wade is caught sneaking around at Prototronics, Logan's boss detains her and hires her double to fill in as a replacement. The deception only lasts a couple of scenes before Arturo learns the truth.
• Spotting the Thread: Arturo had his doubts about Logan claiming his double was a risk-taking loner that kept to himself, but he was considering heeding Quinn's advice about how doubles don't always behave like they do. Then a Dominion Hotel clerk suggested that Arturo's double and Logan were having an affair, meaning she knew the man better than she had let on. From there, Arturo and Wade set out to investigate what's going on, and they soon unravel the real plot.
• Stalker Shrine: Monique has an entire room in her house devoted to the Crying Man, being full of assorted merchandise and mementos. Our Rembrandt finds it creepy even before learning Monique is a full-blown stalker that wants to marry him.
• Stalker with a Crush: Monique has it bad for Rembrandt to the point of a mock wedding. It turns out Rembrandt's double was aware of her and took sufficient legal action.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: Quinn and Logan are in perfect sync because they're doubles.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Averted. Elston Diggs fills a slot normally belonging to Gomez Calhoun (i.e. offering insight into the given world), but the character's temperament, attitude, and job are different.
• Take Over the World: The ultimate plan is to use sliding to raze other worlds of their resources.
• The End... Or Is It?: After Quinn admits he programmed Logan's timer for a different dimension:
  Arturo: So, she's out there somewhere lost like us.
  Rembrandt: Yeah, but she said something about tracking wormholes. We gonna run into her again?
• The Reveal: Logan seeing her and Quinn's identical heat imprints.
• This Cannot Be!:
  Quinn: That's impossible. How can my double be a woman?
  Arturo: It is the difference between an X- and Y-chromosome, Mr. Mallory.
• This Is Gonna Suck:
  • When Quinn spots the vendor telling a trio of armed guards about the Sliders, he calmly tells Wade and Arturo, "Let's go."
  • Suspecting that Logan was having an affair with his double, Arturo openly wonders what else she's been lying about.
  • Rembrandt when he realizes the train he's riding on top of will be going as fast as 200 mph. The most he can do is tie his belt to a nearby bar.
• Tuckerization: Supposedly, Logan's surname was a deliberate reference to the show's own production company (St. Clare Entertainment), though this has not been officially confirmed.
• Villain of the Week: Logan St. Claire, Quinn's Evil Twin.
• We Will Meet Again: Logan vows to make Quinn pay one day. Of course, she never does, but blame Executive Meddling for that.
• Wham Episode: Logan swapped material with the Sliders' timer, which expands their radius to 400 miles.
• Wham Line:
  • Technically, viewers learn the truth early on, but this applies to Quinn:
    Logan: Haven't you figured it out yet? You're my double.
  • After sliding to a new world, Rembrandt notices the surroundings look familiar and asks Diggs if they're back in San Angeles.
    Diggs: You trippin', man. You in Los Angeles. "Los," not "San."
• Would Hit a Girl: Quinn says Wade being a hostage is literally the only reason he's not attacking Logan where she stands.
  Logan: Guess you're not as far removed from your dark side as you thought.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Subverted. When Arturo openly doubts what Logan said his double did, Quinn says they should've learned by now that their doubles don't always behave like they would. However, this time, Arturo is right to be suspicious.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Arturo's double was married. When Arturo goes to speak with her about what's going on, she initially believes her husband is still alive. Arturo feels quite guilty having to tell her the truth.
• You Are Fat: After a ride on the local public transportation, Arturo is pissed about both the hefty fare and there being an overweight surcharge.

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