Outer Limits: Stitch in Time

[Dave2]

Happily Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner were involved in that episode that had a little Stargate flavor and a little Sliders flavor.
However, there's a big problem. If the motivation for constructing the time machine was Prof. Givens' trauma as a young girl when she was raped, then at the very moment the rapist was shot by Jamie in time the overall motivation for the timeline changed, thus the device in her hand would have had to have disappeared exactly like the machine when she returned to her own timeline. Thus she would not have been able to return to her timeline. Or at very least the time machine would not have been there to allow her to return with the hand device, leaving her stranded at least to wait for 20 years to meet the new timeline Dr. Givens, herself being an older woman who never knew her coworkers at the FBI. Luckily for the story's purpose the writers did not take this into consideration.

We find out later that the new timeline Prof. Givens had the memory of Jamie killing the rapist, but without mention of the older Dr. Givens who was shot. In any case, had the rapist killed the girl, the older Dr. Givens would presumably have disappeared in a split second.

[Dave2]

The entire issue of time travel creates innumerable paradoxes. Had Jamie not gone back with Givens and both the older Givens and the girl been killed, in a split second the entire world around Jamie would have changed without her knowing it. Is that something worth pondering in our lives? How do we know that someone hasn't changed a timeline and thereby affected our own lives in literally a split second without our awareness at all? Plus there are probably infinite timelines. Similar to the case of Sliders, where it is virtually impossible for the sliders to know they had come home no matter how many slides home they had, simply because they could not even know if just 1% of a given parallel world was different than their home world.