Eeeeeek, Quinn restored!!!
**
I have to say, I am deeply disappointed in Transmodiar. I was hoping he would chastise me for saying Wade Welles could not be held captive, saying I have a ridiculously overinflated view of the sliders' abilities.
**
I always liked Recall and Transmodiar's idea that the commandant in "Genesis" telling Quinn that "once a woman's had a Magg, she can never go back" was just a jibe to upset Quinn and that the real rape camps were sterile, sexless labs (much like my personality at times).
I have always been deeply, deeply uncomfortable with Wade being in a rape camp. The term "breeder camp" is, to me, an unacceptable euphemism because Peckinpah (apparently) couldn't get away with saying "rape" on television at the time. Peckinpah wanted to hurt Sabrina Lloyd by raping her character. When a fan in pre-Season 4 online chat asked Kari Wuhrer how Sabrina would be written out, Kari Wuhrer said, "With some fun and humor: you see, she's good breeding stock."
There is a special place in hell for men who abuse women with rape jokes -- but given that Peckinpah was reeling from the grief of his teenaged son's death and in the throes of a serious drug addiction at the time that would ultimately kill him, I no longer hope that he's in hell. I hope he found peace and found his way back home.
There is a special place in hell for women who abuse other women with rape jokes -- but Kari Wuhrer apologized to Sabrina Lloyd and Lloyd accepted it. Also, Wuhrer found her career take a serious hit when her breast implants malfunctioned and she had them removed, and her career took another hit when she got fired off a soap opera for being pregnant and not being conventionally attractive to the male gaze. Maybe that was her hell and she's served her sentence and been released.
Wade Welles should not have been put in this position, should not have been used this way.
But paradoxically, I also find it incredibly offensive and upsetting to retcon Wade's rape out of the story. I think it is outrageous to say that women need to forget having been raped. And yet, I have done it twice in my own SLIDERS stories: "Slide Effects" declares that the Wade we saw from Season 3 onward was a double -- an amalgamation of 37 doubles -- which indicates one of the 37 Wades was raped, just not the Wade we met in the Pilot and whose adventures we followed for the Tracy Torme years.
Most women aren't going to discover that their trauma and assaults were actually a hallucinatory telepathic prison and also experienced by a double from a parallel universe.
SLIDERS REBORN declares that there were two timelines: one where the original sliders experienced four years of wonderful adventures together, but then Dr. Oberon Geiger's Combine experiment ripped Quinn and all his doubles out of existence and corrupted reality, retroactively altering the past into the version of SLIDERS that we saw on TV with monsters, magic, the invasion of Earth, Wade's capture, etc. -- and then the disembodied post-"Requiem" Wade is reset and restored to her original timeline self, a version who has no memory of the corrupted timeline.
Most women probably aren't going to have reality rewritten around them to excise having been attacked.
I can't defend my writing (and Transmodiar might say I shouldn't, haha). At least "Convergence" indicates that the Kromaggs were just trying to upset Quinn and of course they wouldn't have done anything to damage a valuable intelligence asset like Wade Welles. They would have had far more important uses for her.
In my stories -- I simply did not feel that Wade or the readers would be well-served by giving David Peckinpah's violent fantasies about Sabrina Lloyd any more oxygen. But I do not defend the offensive implications of that decision.
**
A final word: one of the characters in SLIDERS REBORN is Laurel, Quinn Mallory's teenaged daughter. She's based on my niece and when I was writing SLIDERS REBORN, she assumed veto power over anything and everything involving her character. There was a scene where some men corner Laurel and try to rape her and Laurel discovers she has fighting skills she didn't realize she had.
My niece told me that she'd appreciate not being put in such a scene because the threat of rape had a weight and horror that was well beyond what my lightweight sci-fi sitcom adventure could portray appropriately. I rewrote the scene so that Laurel would be cornered by men seeking to harvest her organs which turned out to be far more disturbing and suited to the story.
Please let me know what do you think about my story!
