Just Say Yes (Sliders)
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| “Just Say Yes” | |
|---|---|
| Sliders episode | |
 Maggie and Colin experience artificial happiness. |
|
| Episode no. | Season 4 Episode 7 |
| Guest stars | Gonzalo Menendez as Jorge J. August Richards as Damon James Sutorius as Agent Fletcher Lowell |
| Written by | |
| Original airdate | July 13, 1998 |
| Episode chronology | |
| ← Previous | Next → |
| "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" | "The Alternateville Horror" |
| List of Sliders episodes | |
Just Say Yes is the seventh episode for the fourth season of the science fiction television show Sliders. Quinn and Rembrandt have to rescue Colin and Maggie from drug-induced reorientation before they slide. The title of this episode is a play on Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign.
From a world with giant mosquitoes, tensions erupt among the Sliders as Colin, Maggie, Quinn, and Rembrandt slide into a janitorial closet at the Chandler Hotel. Maggie prepares to rush off through the hotel bar in a rage just before she's shot with a tranquilizer dart and begins to dance lightheartedly. Damon, an EMT with this world's DEA, shoots Colin with another dart before Quinn takes the sidearm from him. Then he and Rembrandt notice the looks of contentment on everyone's faces, a byproduct of the cylindrical infuser devices all citizens wear on their left arms that regulate an individual's supply of stimulant.
Quinn rushes outside the hotel and sees several technicians leave with a drugged Maggie. At the Abbie Hoffman Memorial Clinic, director Helena Malone and Drug Empowerment Administration Special Agent Fletcher Lowell administer troxoprine to remove drug buildup from her system. When they find Maggie has no drugs in her system, they deduce that Quinn, this world's anti-drug guru who was last seen in Mexico, has returned. (This world's Quinn wears hippie garb and tells people to "turn off, tune out, and drop in," the opposite of Timothy Leary's mantra.) Back at the hotel, Quinn and Rembrandt see Colin through withdrawal symptoms and just miss stopping him from flagging down a DEA van to get his next fix of a "mood elevator". Quinn and Rembrandt try to follow the van with Colin in a taxicab, but the driver is too high on drugs to drive.
Colin and Maggie are set up in a DEA "reorientation compound," a 1950s style house that allows them to set up the perfect (drug-regulated) life. (Drug use in this world acquired the status of psychiatry in ours due to Sigmund Freud's discovery of the pharmaceutical properties of lithium.) In Dr. Malone's office, which they enter easily because there are no locks on the doors, Quinn and Rembrandt learn where their friends are. They try to buy some troxoprine to clean out Colin and Maggie's systems on the black market, but DEA enforcer Damon catches up to them with his strength and endurance enhanced by the dangerous stimulant decimide. Damon breaks through a reinforced door, survives being hit by a car, and leaps one story to reach Quinn before he and Rembrandt subdue him and make him sweat out the decimide. For Damon, it's an unusual sensation to feel pain or anger, but he's willing to help Quinn and Rembrandt reach the reorientation compound.
Damon drives up to the compound with them in his van, dismisses the guards there, and convinces Malone and Lowell that he killed Rembrandt and Quinn as they tried to break into the house. Malone and Lowell arrive and are subdued into the house. They use the troxoprine Malone brought to clean out Colin and Maggie, but Lowell gets the upper hand and takes the first drug he can lay his hand on (after Damon removed his from the injector he wore). Just after saying there would be a DEA investigation, Lowell injects himself with ecstasicide, a hyperstimulant that renders him unconscious and later catatonic.
Back in Malone's office, Damon elects to remain clean for the time being. Malone tries to defend herself to Quinn, but he says, "Some of you need to take a hard look at yourselves." Quinn opens the sliding vortex and jumps through after he asks Maggie to try not to get them in trouble on the next world. She, Colin, and Rembrandt follow and are witnessed by the same cab driver Quinn and Rembrandt met before, who says he must have some really good stuff.
