Quinn Mallory

Quinn Mallory is a fictional super-genius and college student, and one of the main characters from the 1995-2000 science fiction television series Sliders. Played by actor Jerry O'Connell, he first appeared in the pilot episode of the series and made sixty-nine credited appearances in the series (in some variation or another) in total.

Biography
Quinn was born in 1973 and raised in San Francisco, California, the son of Michael and Amanda Mallory. The driver's license shown in the episode "Summer of Love" indicates his birthday is January 24, but in the same episode, Wade says that Quinn is a Libra, which would put his birthday between September 23 and October 22.

Quinn was skipped ahead two grades in school at some point before 1984. He was bullied in junior high, and being skipped ahead two grades made him smaller and physically slower than his classmates. His father died in 1984. The week after his father's death, several students, including Rex Crandall, bullied Quinn at school, which ended in an incident where he hit Rex with a baseball bat. Quinn shattered Rex's kneecap, and Rex walked with a limp for the rest of his life. In the episode "The Guardian", on a world where events occurred as they did on Earth Prime twelve years ago, Quinn prevented history from repeating itself.

In "Summer of Love", Quinn confesses to Arturo that he was starting quarterback in high school (indicating that despite being slower than his classmates in junior high, he became an athlete in high school, probably driven by a in this case healthy inferiority complex). In the episode "Slide Like an Egyptian", Quinn meets his father in the afterlife while being used for life after death experiments. They discuss how they enjoyed playing American football together.

Quinn attended the fictional California University during the early 1990s to earn his master's degree in physics, specializing in superstring theory. In 1994, he invented a device that allows people to travel from one parallel dimension to another. Quinn referred to this technology as "sliding." On September 27, he went through the vortex with Wade Welles and Maximillian Arturo. Rembrandt Brown happened to be traveling in the area and was accidentally pulled into the vortex.

The four of them landed on a parallel world where San Francisco was in an ice age. They holed up in Rembrandt's car until a deadly tornado headed their way. Because of the way the sliding technology functioned, the group's only choices were to reset the timer and potentially lose the possibility to go home, or to wait for the timer to hit zero and go home then. Since the tornado was likely to kill them, Quinn had to reset the timer and lost the ability to return himself and the others home. For the next five years, Quinn and the others slid randomly to each world with a fixed amount of time on each one, hoping each slide will be the slide home.

In the fourth season premiere "Genesis", Quinn learned that he was not originally from Earth Prime, but that he was actually from Kromagg Prime, an Earth where humans and Kromaggs coexisted until a civil war broke out between the two species. He learned that he was transported to Earth Prime when he was a baby and left with his parents' doubles. When his parents came back to get him, his adoptive parents were too attached to him so they hid Quinn, and Quinn was raised on Earth Prime. Quinn only learned this after he returned to Earth Prime after the Kromaggs had invaded two months prior. He also learned that he had a brother, Colin, who was transported to another alternate Earth as well.

In late 1998 or early 1999, in the season five premiere "The Unstuck Man", Quinn and his brother Colin were unwillingly used in an experiment by Dr. Oberon Geiger to merge people and parallel worlds together. As a result of this experiment, Quinn was merged with a fraternal double of his who was referred to as "Mallory" (although his double's personality became dominant).

After Mallory was sliding for a while, the Sliders met back with Dr. Geiger in the episode "Eye of the Storm", and he attempted to unmerge Quinn from his double. Unfortunately, Dr. Geiger said that the two had been merged for too long and the only way to bring Quinn back would require killing Mallory. Rembrandt said that Quinn wouldn't want that, so Dr. Geiger ended the experiment and Quinn was presumed to be gone for good. But near the end of the series, Mallory would again show signs that Quinn still existed within him.

Notes & Trivia

 * It could be argued that the real Quinn Mallory "died" after being merged with Mallory - his duplicate from another reality, as Mallory's personality became the dominant consciousness between the two. Although Quinn and Mallory were never separated, his friends never gave up hope that the true Quinn Mallory was still alive.