Rewatch Podcast returns to Sliders' Christmas episode with a re-rewatch of "Season's Greedings."
https://therewatchpodcast.libsyn.com/rw … -greedings

wow, that is amazing they are back!

thanks for posting about it

Lester Barrie, who played Elston Diggs, is out of the acting business.  He's a minister in Southern California.

Lester Barrie is still preaching, but he's also acting again.  He's done a couple of "faith based" films in recent years; The Matchmaker and Bernie Problems.

He also did a stand up comedy special in 2018, calling himself an "inspiration comedian".

However, when Jerry O'Connell plays scenes that were intended for an actor who looks like Tobey Maguire and doesn't change his natural demeanor, it creates a disconnect from the scripted content and the onscreen images. Jerry O'Connell plays Quinn as cheerful, warm, confident and charming -- so why is he blind to Wade's interest and why does he hide his work in his basement and why isn't he close to any of his classmates and why has Wade never been to his house? Tobey Maguire's Quinn would have been too shy to imagine Wade would want to come over. What's the reasoning for Jerry's Quinn? It's unclear, but the result is that Quinn seems damaged in some way.

An explanation only comes in Torme's "The Guardian" when Quinn explains that he skipped two grades and was smaller than his classmates and haunted by the death of his father at the age of 10. This itself is also peculiar because in the Pilot, also written by Torme, we see a photograph of Quinn with his father. Quinn is played by Jerry O'Connell who is clearly not 10. In fact, Torme deliberately wrote the Pilot with the idea that Michael Mallory was still alive; that he'd faked his death for mysterious reasons and gone into hiding. However, by "The Guardian," Torme had changed his mind.

Torme retconned Michael Mallory's death in "The Guardian" so that he now died when Quinn was a little boy instead of in his late teens. He altered Michael Mallory, turning his death into a deeply traumatic event for Quinn that, as Quinn himself says, caused Quinn to become isolated, hiding in his basement and losing a certain degree of social acclimation that he would otherwise have. This appears to be Torme's attempt to explain why a character played by Jerry O'Connell could be a withdrawn misfit. It wasn't something Torme planned to do from the start, but he decided to add the trauma to reconcile the difference between the character Torme imagined and the actor who ended up being hired.

The fact that you describe Quinn as being traumatized is interesting to me because I go back and forth in my writing of him. Considering all my stories that I wrote are post-Slide Effects, I write him as mildly traumatized, but then I spend way too much time overthinking that writing decision lol. Because at the end of the day, I keep writing characters thinking about how I would react to a certain situation and then syphioning it into the voice of the character. Quinn isn't me though so he would react differently to having been in a Kromagg simulation watching his friends die then I would.

**

In "Last Days," Quinn tells Wade as they're having dinner that he didn't know she could cook and Wade says, "They're a LOT about me you don't know" (referring to her crush) and Quinn says, "Like what?" and leans forward to kiss her. To me, this tells me that he has known all along, returns her feelings, but been unable to verbalize it, act on it or even acknowledge it for reasons deep within Quinn's psychology.

Going back to the Pilot, it's noteworthy that when Wade greets Quinn at Doppler's, Quinn's reaction to her overtures and acquiring hockey tickets for them is so deliberately avoidant: he doesn't make eye contact, he doesn't stop to really interact with her; he keeps walking; he fiddles with his name badge -- it's like he can't quite engage with Wade despite having clearly developed a friendship with her, and Wade doesn't seem offended, like she's used to Quinn being distracted and elsewhere mentally.

It's also significant: despite being athletic, charismatic, warm and looking like Jerry O'Connell, the Pilot clearly establishes that Quinn barely has any friends. He's pleasant with his classmates, but they have no idea what he's working on. Quinn's only confidant is his cat. When Wade visits Quinn's house, she looks around to take in the wallpaper; she has never been there before despite she and Quinn supposedly being "buds." Quinn seems incredibly averse and isolated and it doesn't make a lot of sense.

When Quinn comments that kissing Wade would be like "incest," it strikes me as another level of avoidance, and when he asks her, "What's with the tears?" later, it's so obvious what the tears are about that it strikes me as a deflection. When we get to "The Guardian," it's intriguing that Quinn refuses to explain why he wants to train his younger self in the art of beating people up with his bare hands. He can't bring himself to explain until the end; it's the same distance we saw of his life in the Pilot. Quinn describes being unable to relate to his classmates; he's smaller than they are and younger than they are.

Quinn strikes me as traumatized; it's why he doesn't have a lot of friends, why he locks up his feelings, why he hides his work; why he won't disclose aspects of his past. The incandescent charisma of Jerry O'Connell makes him seem well-adjusted, but the details of his life and his choices are telling and I don't think Jerry O'Connell is Quinn Mallory. I think Jerry is just the skin that Quinn Mallory wears to hide the damage.

In my view, the uneasy 50/50 compromise that neither John nor Tracy liked was the correct ratio. It's hard to do ongoing character development in 90s TV of standalone episodes, so giving the character both sides in equal measure allows for the most range in each episode.

I would agree that the 50/50 ratio is probably the best. It works to have a wide range so you get different sides of him in each epiosde. (You get the raging loon in El Sid and the warm father figure in The Gaurdian). Also works because a show's got to have room for character growth as well.

Hearing this I don't understand his love for this character except that maybe Stephanie was based on a person he knew or something. On a surface level, it almost seems like the character of Stephanie was shifted over to Daelin as being the girl Quinn had a crush on. His story sounds really interesting, and I would have loved to read it if he ever finished it but he probably won't realistically speaking. But to be honest, the existence of Stephanie at the end sounds odd. I don't have anything against this random character I don't know. It just feels like her being in that Long Slide Home story is a little weird, considering she was never in the show and not everyone knows of her existence.

That's an interesting interperetation of it. Not what I think what happened, but it's your thoughts and I respect that. I actually don't think that Quinn knew Wade had a crush on him until about Last Days when he starts showing interest in her. I truely believe he was oblivious to it before. (The line "we're buds, it would be like incest" comes to mind. I also wouldn't say that Quinn had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from his fathers death and the playground incident. I'd probably say it was just an old hurt from his childhood that was painful to revisit, as we would all probably feel if we had to revisit something like that.

I'd probably agree on that a little. Now I'm not very good at noticing bad acting vs good acting but there are points in the show that you can see Jerry does have the talent. The pilot he was very good in. You also mentioned Love Gods. Quinn and Jerry having dirastically different views on the likes of the world. I can picture if Love Gods was a season 4 epiosde, he would have been smirking the whole time.

You're probably right on that. It was probably after his glowup, he started getting a lot of attention he never recieved before, so it all went to his head.

John said in a podcast this past year that he regretted being so adversarial with FOX and the producers. "I should have won hearts and minds," he said. Torme probably regrets nothing but resents everything, judging from his past remarks. I'm a big fan of both of them, but I confess -- I have had two former writing mentors, one like John and one like Torme. Both were brilliant. Both had this unfortunate attitude: if something isn't done the way they would personally do it, it's bad / stupid / poorly conceived / made by a talentless person / done for selfish and self-destructive reasons / worthless.

I don't subscribe to that personally. I believe that every creator approaches their work with their own specific interests, priorities and goals. I believe that work should be reviewed in terms of what the creator was trying to accomplish and whether or not they accomplished it. Torme's goal was character comedy and social satire ("The King is Back"). John's goal was hard science fiction and heroism (like your version of "The Exodus").

Their visions weren't 'right' or 'wrong' -- they were just different. They chose not to see that because having an argument was apparently more important than being good partners who would be mutually supportive and value what each other had to say.

Torme's vision of Arturo, if you read the Pilot script, is clearly not a strong, broad, heroic Englishman. His vision of Arturo is clearly Raul Julia (Gomez from THE ADDAMS FAMILY) playing the cowardly Dr. Smith from LOST IN SPACE. The heroic, fatherly Arturo is a part of the character, but he is buried deep and will take a lot of work to uncover. Torme's vision of Quinn, if you read the Pilot script, is clearly not a tall, handsome football player. His vision of Quinn is clearly more like Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker in SPIDER-MAN 2000 (and Jerry was desperate for that job until Maguire defeated him in auditions).

The result is that Torme was perpetually at odds with the onscreen versions of these characters versus what he had imagined in his mind. With Quinn, Torme was able to adjust things accordingly and was happy with Quinn's hair and wardrobe. With Arturo, Torme couldn't control John; Torme wanted Arturo to be 60 per cent insecure and irritable and 40 per cent fatherly. With Seasons 1 - 2, John got it to 50/50; by Season 3, it was John's preference that took hold: 95 per cent fatherly and 5 per cent grouchy.

Personal Preference: In my view, the uneasy 50/50 compromise that neither John nor Tracy liked was the correct ratio. It's hard to do ongoing character development in 90s TV of standalone episodes, so giving the character both sides in equal measure allows for the most range in each episode.

That said, I confess that in writing my own SLIDERS stories and when writing Arturo, I generally defaulted to John's preference of Arturo being 95 per cent the cuddly grandfather. The reason: "Slide Effects" is Arturo's resurrection and I wanted him to be the father figure in every sense. And SLIDERS REBORN shows Arturo 20 years after the Pilot and I decided that Arturo would be at his most assured, mature, decisive and capable and with sliding having brought out the absolute best in him.

Stephanie: Torme has a fixation on the character of Stephanie that I'm not able to explain. In 2009, Torme contacted a fan site. He wanted to write fanfic. He offered to write "The Unofficial Official Series Finale of SLIDERS" and wanted to provide a PDF screenplay. His story idea for "The Long Slide Home": the sliders, just after the events of "The Guardian," discover that the timer is malfunctioning. Slide windows are getting shorter and shorter. Their next slide could leave them stranded. The timer is soon to give out. The sliders rig the timer to send them backwards through the interdimension, revisiting every previous Earth in all previous episodes, hoping to make it home before the timer fails permanently. They revisit the outcome of every Earth they affected for better or worse. In the course of doing so, the sliders are able to dispense with the Kromaggs and Logan St. Clair in quick, throwaway plot points. The focus is on the sliders.

The ending was open to whatever Torme decided when he got to those pages in the full-length script: they might all make it back home and stay. Alternatively, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo might make it home but lose Quinn; they would return to save Quinn but lose their way home and be lost again but feel heartened to have each other and hopeful that, having found a way back once, they would again in time. Due to health issues and paid work, Torme never finished this story, but in the more detailed outline that he furnished, the sliders are having dinner with Stephanie and her husband while trying to figure out why the timer is misbehaving -- so Stephanie was clearly important to Torme.

Quinn and Wade: The relationship between Quinn and Wade is drastically different by "Luck of the Draw" where Wade seems to be done with her ongoing infatuation/flirtation with Quinn. I like to think that in between "The King is Back" and "Luck of the Draw," Wade realizes something weird about Quinn: he knew she was crushing on him the entire time, he knew she had feelings for him for the entire time they were working together at Dopplers -- and yet, he ignored it and refused to address it, and she doesn't understand why and Quinn is unwilling to explain -- and it's not until "The Guardian" that we learn that Quinn has post traumatic stress disorder that has led to a very withdrawn personality covered by the Jerry O'Connell charm.

Jerry O'Connell as an Actor: My theory about Jerry O'Connell is that he was a naturally talented actor with excellent instincts for performance, but no technique or discipline until John Rhys-Davies trained him -- and once John left the show, Jerry reverted to all of his worst habits as an actor: skimming script pages, only reading his dialogue, delivering approximations of what was on the page rather than what was actually written, not reviewing the context of his character's words, and generally undermining the character instead of inhabiting the role. One of the worst examples of this is "Slidecage": Quinn is scripted to think that Maggie has been killed and Quinn is in agony, thinking he's lost yet another friend. Jerry performs these lines with a hungover tiredness -- which implies that Quinn either does not care that Maggie is dead or somehow knows that Maggie survived when there is no onscreen reason for him to think so.

Another is "Mother and Child" where the script clearly specifies that Quinn agrees with Rembrandt that they have to rescue Wade and says warningly, "We don't have much time." But onscreen, Jerry O'Connell tells Rembrandt, "I don't know if we have enough time" and hurries off camera from Rembrandt, suggesting that Jerry isn't interested in saving Wade and doesn't care that Rembrandt is upset. Having reviewed this scene far more than is medically safe, I got the impression that Jerry was drunk when performing this scene and hurried off camera because he had to throw up.

Jerry's Ego: Why did he do this? My suspicion is that Jerry, overweight when he was a young boy, developed a drunkenly overinflated ego when he became a handsome teenager and twentysomething and became overfixated on his looks rather than his talent, and he believed that being attractive was all that mattered for his career. Most of his post-SLIDERS roles were chosen specifically because they showcased him as an attractive man; he forgot that his popularity through SLIDERS was because viewers perceived Quinn as a sensitive and empathetic man with his looks being present but secondary.

After SLIDERS, Jerry spoke of SLIDERS with contempt and disdain, calling it "very cheap," saying it was a show made "with dry ice and toothpicks" and when asked if he would ever do a SLIDERS movie, he said, "Not a possibility" and refused to discuss it further. SLIDERS was the only reason he had an adult career; he trashed the show while he was in it and he denigrated the show after he left.

Jerry's Redemption: I really like the Quinn character, and it made me really angry that Jerry did this to a character I really care about and look up to. However, as I've gotten older, I've learned more about addiction and alcoholism can be as insidious as any chemical dependency, so I try to focus on how Jerry has changed.

He didn't get fired off KANGAROO JACK, but he was nearly fired because by that point, his heavy drinking and fast food and lack of exercise had caused some serious, William Shatner-esque weight gain. He stopped drinking, devoted himself to health and fitness, and while his kangaroo movie didn't set the world on fire, Jerry returned to the life of a working TV actor, kept healthy and fit, worked steadily, got married, had children and started treating SLIDERS with respect. He did a video interview where he talked about how John was his acting mentor and taught him so much; he said he kept a photograph of the original cast in his kitchen so as to always remember the high point of his career; he said he loved playing Quinn Mallory and missed him and would gladly play him again; he said that SLIDERS was a part of him. He would always carry it proudly and hold it warmly in his heart.

He knows he screwed up. He knows he blew it. He knows that Quinn Mallory is his career-defining role, the character who would have rocketed him into pop cultural immortality. He knows that William Shatner will always be a starship captain and that Jerry O'Connell will always be a slider. He didn't care about SLIDERS before, but he cares now and he's sorry. That matters.

He also called Torme a few years ago, having not spoken to him since Season 3. He was trying to see if SLIDERS could be revived; he has continued to call Torme regularly; he has been talking with John about a revival; he mentions SLIDERS every chance he gets. He got his life back on track by the early 2000s. He's trying to get SLIDERS back now. He probably won't succeed, but he's trying. Trying counts.

This is strictly theoretical on my part.

I can see they were probably cut, not because they didn't make too much sense, but also because it was just extra filler. There is no pay off of Stephanie at all later in the pilot.

The tidbit about her may have been kept in. In an earlier script, it was mentioned that Smarter Quinn's wife was in fact Stephanie. They just took the name referance out in the final version. (Fun fact, when I first watched this, I assumed that Smarter Quinn's wife was Wade lol.)

Now I don't really know much about Jerry O'Connell, but based on what you said about him getting fired from the Kangaroo movie and such, probably had some things to do with it. I also think we may have to remember that he was in his 20s and a new star, and wasn't seeing the forrest for the trees. (Michael J. Fox, the actor is rumored to be a nice person but for a period of time, people reffered to him as cocky. Makes sense as he was new to stardom.) Just saying that may have played into Jerry a little bit too during those days.

***

On another note I wanted to bring up from the podcast. In the Weaker Sex/Eggheads episode, it was brought up about the 50s/60s style mentality towards gender in Feminist World. I think this works and helps to make the epiosde stronger. This is a world where they had already gotten to experience what men are like in power, and had decided on their own that they didn't like it. So it makes sense that things would be reserved to the point that men are only seen as sexual objects and can only get certain jobs as nannies, teachers or secretaries.

I feel like if they had gone with the alternate attitude type thing like you mentioned there was in Eggheads (say that in this world, the people just prefer to have women in power) then I feel like it would have been more to the style of how gender politics played out in the 90s.

On the note about Quinn and Wade in this episode. You mentioned about him drying her hair. There is also the part where she lies and says that he's her boyfriend to get him the job. This is interesting because all three men tried to get jobs there. I assumed she just went "oh, these are my friends Rembrandt and Professor Arturo," so the fact that she says that Quinn is her boyfriend probably shows that the two were getting closer since their brief encounter in Last Days. It would be after this epiosde and before Luck of the Draw where I assumed they had a talk togethr about not getting involved while sliding. (Which could have been it's own epiosde in itself. Oof, I might be getting the urge to write that story out but probably won't lol.)

John got his way, much to Torme's frustration, in Season 3.

And by the time John was fired, he realized what Tracy had been up against and his opinion of Tracy's work was now different.

The Pilot also has a lot of scenes of Quinn trying to flirt with a girl only for her and her friends to mock him; it's hard to imagine Jerry O'Connell being laughed at by women after he asks a girl named Stephanie out. That makes no sense visually; Stephanie would have told Jerry O'Connell: "Oh, that's so sweet, thank you, Quinn, but I have a boyfriend. You are a very cute boy, though, and I promise you there is some girl out there who sees that and is single."

(Or she would have told him, "Yeah, thanks but no thanks, Jerry; I know you're a player who never remembers anyone's name in the morning and don't get me wrong, you might have the best body I've ever seen and your hair is sexy but you're disloyal, shallow, untrustworthy, and I think you might be stupid. Like, I actually think you might have some kind of reading disability that you haven't even tried to fix because you've been coasting through life on your good looks.")

(Jerry seems to have grown the hell up, though; his recent podcast with Macaulay Culkin where he reflected on parenting and how to encourage his children speaks to a quantum leap forward in empathy and consideration.)

SLIDERS expert Temporal Flux says the Quinn/Stephanie scenes were filmed but cut. They may have been cut for time, but they may also may have been cut because they made no sense whatsoever visually.

Torme wanted the Professor to be cowardly, writing him so in the Pilot. John Rhys-Davies felt insulted to be asked to play the Professor as shrinking from danger or lacking integrity and played against the script. There was a constant friction between Davies and Torme with Davies wanting the Professor to be the lead character, Quinn's teacher and the unambiguous father figure of the group and Torme wanting the Professor to have a dark side and be insecure and threatened by Quinn's genius. In the third season, Torme was no longer present and despite Davies' conflicts with David Peckinpah and Alan Barnette, Davies got his way and the Professor by Season 3 is exactly what Davies wanted him to be (aside from being dead).

That is interesting. I never knew that. I think that is one thing I have to side with Davies over Torme over. I like it better when the professor is then nice guy instead of yelling at everyone (despite the fact that I don’t portray it well in my writing lol).

I didn’t know Arturo was originally written to be cowardly. I didn’t see that at all in the pilot, but that is probably due to the fact of Davies’s performance. Interesting he got to play the professor his way in season 3 despite with the change in creative control. (Well almost his way. Quinn’s still very much the leader in season 3.) but I never knew Torme and Davies were butting heads a lot. All I knew is that he had problems with some of the lines during the Fortune Teller scene in Into the Mystic. Which makes sense considering he didn’t like the part of Arturo resenting Quinn because of his intelligence.

The result is that the Professor is a brilliant man of integrity (as Davies wanted), but he never got his due in the scientific community, never saw his genius recognized -- and the Professor is frustrated that Quinn's intelligence exceeds his own because it implies that the Professor's own genius maybe wasn't that special after all.

There's a hilarious irony to that because Quinn absolutely reveres the Professor's scientific abilities; the Professor is jealous of Quinn when Quinn is probably the only scientist who ever respected the Professor, which leads to a very interesting father-son/teacher-student dynamic. I feel John Rhys-Davies didn't fully appreciate that.

But a part of that is also due to the relationship between Jerry O'Connell and John Rhys-Davies. When filming SLIDERS, Davies apparently took O'Connell under his wing and taught him how to read scripts, indicate moments, create rapport, convey Quinn's intellect and problem solving -- so a lot of what we see onscreen from Seasons 1 - 3B is Jerry O'Connell, a very young actor, performing with all the experience, skill, decisiveness and thought of the much older and more experienced actor giving O'Connell instruction and guidance.

Jerry O'Connell's body is performing with John Rhys-Davies' talent which is why in Seasons 1 - 3B, Quinn seems to have a wisdom, gravity and perspective beyond his years; it's Davies's wisdom, gravity and perspective. Which is why the Quinn-character changed so suddenly and immediately after Davies was fired. But Davies also took the view that the offscreen relationship between himself and O'Connell should be reflected in Arturo and Quinn, and on that, he and Torme disagreed.

My read on the Professor is that he is a deeply isolated human being. He's lonely: his wife is dead, his son hates him, his friends lost touch with him as he fumed over never getting the recognition he deserved by his fellow scientists. As a result, he is self-involved, bitter and thinks only of himself. When surrounded by Quinn, Wade and Rembrandt, however, he regains what he failed to build or hang onto.

He has a daughter in Wade who adores his perspective and is entertained by his grandiosity. He has a true friend in Rembrandt whose loyalty and great heart is accompanied by a love for the arts that Arturo shares. He has a son and student in Quinn and Quinn recognizes the Professor's genius where the Professor's colleagues never did. When Arturo doesn't have scientific discovery, students to inspire and partners with whom to share his life and adventures, he starts to fall apart. He needs all three to stay whole and when he's whole, he cares about people besides himself.

In "Prince of Wails," he turned his back on science in favour of politics and became the Sheriff of Nottingham. In "Eggheads," he turned his back on science despite flaunting his scientific achievements; he was more interested in fame and then cheated on his wife and fled his life and marriage. In "Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome," he chose not to slide, never developed the friendships he did with the sliders and sank further into his self-isolation.

"But artificial insemination isn't even hard, it's just a sperm donation and a turkey baster. It's been happening since  the end of the eighteenth century!"

Fun fact: In the original script for Love Gods, there was a mention of artificial insemination exisiting on this world, but it was probably removed to give the forced breeding more stakes.

I have nothing against swingers or people having sex. I don't hate it, it just seemed a little weird to me, and I find it a tad bit out of character for season 2 Quinn. Also probably not a fan of Quinn having a child and then abandoning it. But altoegther, it's just a tiny part of the show and doesn't ruin anything for me. I guess in my head, I tend to make sense of the existence of the photograph another way lol.

I've also seen people theorize that there was a double of Quinn on this world who was in fact married to Jane Hills. Pretty far out of reach, but it's a neat explanation I've seen for the photograph and her line of "you don't recognize me, do you?"

I like that theory. it's neat and I feel like that would be in tune with the sliders. Out of all the character changes in season 3, Arturo's growth I will put it was probably the best and seemed genuine. If he is in fact the double, it makes sense that he came to care about these people and loved them like he would his own friends or family.

My only ever "argument" for the right professor slid, since there is never any hints towards either one, is the way he talks about Quinn in In Dino Verates. In continuity, this came right after PTSS. If he is the wrong professor, he just tried to steal his invention. There's no way a week or so later, he would have all those nice things to say about him. Butnevertheless, good scene and I know this epiosde was probably written before PTSS so I digress lol.

Haha, interesting idea. I haven't written anything in close to two-three weeks now, but I might get back into it soon.

You know, sort of unrelated. Luna in the server had an idea about an anothology Sliders spin-off series that focuses on the worlds after the sliders leave. Showing if they really made a change there or not and what happened after they left. That would be kind of cool to see.