Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in The Spinal Frontier - Plot

Plot

The game begins with Roger being court martialed for various, humorous reasons (all of which Roger, being the idiot that he is, cannot defend properly). He is demoted back to his position as second class janitor aboard the SCS DeepShip 86 (a parody of the Deep Space 9, and also resembling Roger's briefs).

Later, on the DeepShip, Commander Kielbasa (named after the kielbasa sausage and a parody of the Kilrathi from the Wing Commander series of games) announces that, as reward for their excellence in "A Glitch In Time Saves Gamma Nine" (a parody of "A stitch in time saves nine."), they are to be given shore leave on the planet Polysorbate LX ("LX" pronounced "sixty", after the preservative).

Meanwhile, an extremely old and wrinkled woman named Sharpei (after the dog breed of the same name, also noted for its wrinkles, and voiced by Roberta Williams) is revealed to be plotting Roger's demise. It is later revealed that she is the subject of "Project Immortality", which was supposed to prolong life indefinitely.

Roger's adventures throughout the game have him dealing with a T-1000 like "endodroid" (a reference mostly to the replicants from Blade Runner, including an "endodroid runner" giving Roger the assignment and speaking with a New York accent), entering cyberspace (mostly a desert canyon like area, an "office" resembling Windows 3.1, and a seemingly endless room of file cabinets known as the "file manager"), and venturing into Stellar Santiago's digestive system (for which humor is added through Gary Owens' narrations providing scientific detail of everything within each area, as if from a textbook).

Roger and Stellar develop a relationship that almost attracts Roger to the point of enamoration for her. Despite this, Roger continuously must remind himself that Beatrice from past games birthed his son, who saved him from the Sequel Police in Space Quest IV.

A running gag in the game is the inclusion of a rotting fish in Roger's inventory which he cannot seem to get rid of. It is revealed in an anti-climatic end that the fish is the only way to destroy Sharpei, who by the end of the game has become a virus infecting Stellar Santiago.

The game ends on a cliffhanger, with Stellar saying that Roger "is going to like his next mission". Despite this, Space Quest 7 never came to fruition, and the cliffhanger was never resolved.