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"Slide Like an Egyptian." I honestly don't know what to make of this episode and my reaction mirrors Tom and Cory almost exactly. The episode is very strangely edited with scene to scene progression lost as character motives fade in and out of the story. Quinn's death is a moment in a muddled, confused, disorienting episode and leaves me completely cold. The sliders stumbling across a replacement timer that works pretty much the same way the old one did is just baffling to me. It knocked me out of the story completely. The scarab special effect is appalling. Why are the creators of Season 3 so utterly convinced that special effects will attract an audience when the special effects are so terrible?

I really can't figure out what the point of this episode was beyond David Peckinpah's wish to have the Torme timer destroyed and replaced with one he can call his own. As Cory and Tom note, Michael Mallory's advice to Quinn is meaningless nonsense. There's no real exploration of the Egyptian alt-history. This episode is a boring mess and it's hard to tell what they were going for.

With "Paradise Lost," we come to one of the most loathed episodes of SLIDERS ever made. Tom and Cory note all the obvious, glaring errors throughout the story from misdelivered dialogue to silly chronological errors and baffling contradictions in how this town keeps its secrets or discovered the immortality-granting substances.

"Paradise Lost" features two of the worst guest-characters on SLIDERS. Trudy is appalling, claiming to be trying to save innocent people while only ever providing vague, unspecific warnings that have never saved a single person. Laurie is a non-entity paraded in front of the camera as a Baywatch babe, so dull that Tom and Cory have trouble remembering her scenes. And there's an alarming lack of oversight such as Quinn addressing the Professor as "Max" or actors confusing the words "do" and "don't."

This episode is a clear reflection of how the Season 3 production is unprofessional. They commission scripts for SLIDERS even when the pitches clearly lack parallel universe story elements, which reflects the showrunner's indifference to the series. They permit scripts to be filmed without any concern for introducing guest-characters or scene-to-scene progression or reviewing dialogue, indicating that the script editor is not on the job. They permit actors to mis-read dialogue and do not do reshoots, suggesting the script supervisor is either incompetent or being ignored. All this leads to a nonsensical final product.

I think, earlier in the season, some of the Season 1/2 writers (Tony Blake, Paul Jackson, Nan Hagan) were still writing for the show they knew in Season 2, so you'd get episodes like "Double Cross" and "Dead Man Sliding" which merge the Season 3 spectacle/action approach with Season 1/2 storytelling elements. You had writers like Eleah Horwitz writing perfectly decent stories like "The Prince of Slides" and "Season's Greedings," aiming for the same. These were writers who, I think, were willing to do their own quality control on their material. David Peckinpah did the same for himself on "Murder Most Foul."

But then there are the scripts where the writers were either not reviewing their own material or there were changes being made to film material more cheaply and more quickly but without any concern for coherence or watchability.

In Season 1, Tracy Torme, Robert K. Weiss and Jon Povill were often rewriting scripts. "Last Days" and "Eggheads" were heavily redone. "As Time Goes By" had multiple writers working on the individual threads. "Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome" was heavily workshopped. With Season 3, little to no effort in this area is present. "Paradise Lost" is a marker -- the Season 3 episodes that follow are mostly from scripts that have not been reviewed for basic professional standards (introductions, exposition, in-character dialogue, basic scene-to-scene progression) or have been rewritten in ways that aren't concerned with those standards.

"The Last of Eden" also reflects all the problems that result when scripts aren't being reviewed with these concerns in mind. Cory and Tom explore how the underground society makes no sense and are wildly inconsistent in the threat they pose and the timeline presented by the episode makes no sense whatsoever. The script raises questions about the Gineers that aren't explored in the slighest. The script plunges the sliders into a plot that makes no effort to explore the surroundings or the civilization in any meaningful or informative way, treating every guest-character in this episode as a threat or a mechanism to move the plot to its tedious conclusion.

Episodes like "Double Cross" and "Dead Man Sliding" showed that SLIDERS could give FOX the light entertainment and action-spectacle they wanted while still telling stories with alternate histories and strangers in strange lands. But in the end, the problem isn't even that Season 3 reducing alt-history for doing monsters and horror and fantasy. Any story is conceivably a SLIDERS story; even a story without a strong alternate history is potentially a SLIDERS story. The problem is that Season 3 is doing *bad* monster movies and horror movies and fantasy movies. This regime has no concern for quality or viewer enjoyment and "Paradise Lost" is the point at which this is consistently indicated in nearly every episode that follows.

My thing with Firefox is purely political. I don't like how they do business, so I won't do business with them. Probably nothing that most people would care about.

I don't think it's a good idea.

I don't think Tom and Cory completely captured my opinion, which is this: you can have new actors play Quinn the boy genius, Arturo the bombastic man of wisdom, Wade the moral crusader and Rembrandt the outdated showbiz icon. But trying to have new actors imitate Jerry, John, Sabrina and Cleavant creates an awkward uncanny valley effect where all the audience will notice is how the imitation is either wildly off-the-mark or close but not-quite-right.

It's also a crappy situation for the actor. Instead of trying to capture the emotion, intensity and dynamic of a scene, they're trying to capture what some other actor might have done with the scene. It doesn't make for a good performance.

Even Robert Floyd, whose Jerry-impersonation is perfect, wasn't keen on imitating Jerry. He didn't think it was a good idea for him to play Quinn 1.0 and only Quinn 1.0. because he felt the audience would get tired of it and he would simply be copying another actor. His opinion was that it would be best if he could constantly shift between Quinn and Mallory. That way, imitating Jerry would just be one part of creating something new.

In any case, guess what? A new episode is up! We discuss Murder Most Foul and Slide Like An Egyptian! Go get it!

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

You guys really helped me relive the Fire Within. In just a little way, I feel like this podcast (along with sliderscast) have been almost like Sliders returning.  No, it's not new episodes but it allows me to have something new to look forward to every week and to be able to re-engage in the sliders world through a passive entertainment experience.  So thank you.

Thank YOU for listening! We really appreciate it! I agree too, when I started listening to the Sliderscast it felt like it was revival as well!

Getting set to sit down and discuss The Prince of Slides as well as that utterly amazing, incredibly well-written seminal episode, The Fire Within. Got anything to say about those episodes? Post it here within the next hour!

Hey guys, we're just sitting down to record the new ep on "Desert Storm" and "Dragonslide" so feel free to give any feedback. We won't get to it now because we're recording but the next ep we are discussing “The Fire Within” and “The Prince of Slides”

Cheers,
Cory

So, one thing I am struggling with in SLIDERS REBORN: five characters. Five lead characters for a 120 page script is too many, and absolutely none of them can be dropped. I mean, a SLIDERS without Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo is false advertising. And the Laurel character was designed as a plot device to reunite the original sliders, but dismissing her after that feels artificial. And I do not have the energy to write 3 - 4 episodes of SLIDERS; three feature-length scripts and a novella are taxing enough.

The unfortunate result is that the characters are carried along by the momentum of the plot. Their actions do not define them. I seriously hit a point of irritation when Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo spent two scenes working on opening a door. And it also means that the parallel Earths aren't particularly well-defined -- which, quite frankly, is a blessing in disguise because world-building is not one of my strengths.

I'm trying to compensate for this by focusing on pastiching the actors. Making sure that while they may not do anything superbly definitive, every line resonates. And at times, I find myself swapping lines and rewriting them to avoid the reader forgetting that the character is in the room. So, maybe Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo spend a lot of time working that door, but they have a hilarious argument as they work it. This results in scripting where Matt Hutaff once exclaimed in dismay, "Everyone's comic relief!" And yes. This is my peculiar impression of Dan Harmon's SLIDERS only with a lot less ability, talent and literacy.

Back on the old Bboard, Informant remarked that no work is flawless and no piece of art excels in every area. That writers must have a vision and then decide what the priorities are in serving that vision. I'm okay with SLIDERS REBORN being less about sliding and more about the sliders, but it makes me feel a bit like Tim Kring -- in that it would probably work better if I paid Bryan Fuller to turn my scribblings and ramblings into finished content.

Another weird thing that happened: Laurie (whom the Laurel Hills character is based on, although the resulting character is actually nothing like Laurie) finally finished her box set of FIREFLY. And she hated "Objects in Space" because the evil and sadistic bounty hunter threatened to rape Kaylee. I said I didn't understand why a villain being a rapist was a problem. Laurie said that it triggered feelings of fear and vulnerability and powerlessness that FIREFLY had no business triggering unless it was really going to explore the subject of rape -- and that Kaylee whimpered pathetically when all the men got to fight the bounty hunter. I pointed out that River defeats the bounty hunter and Laurie said that I couldn't possibly understand how it feels to be a woman watching a show where rape is raised so casually.

After that, I went home and went back to a scene in Part 2 of REBORN where Laurel Hills is cornered by three thugs who claim they have uses for "fresh, young flesh" -- presumably, to force her into sexual slavery. I changed this to the thugs wanting Laurel for "fresh young kidneys" and "virgin lungs" and "mint condition eyes" and rewrote some of the earlier bits of Nigel Mitchell's world-building to include a huge demand for black market organs. I asked Laurie if this was acceptable and she said sure. I don't understand at all, but I found forced organ harvesting to be equally threatening and therefore an acceptable rewrite.

Anyway. I have finished 1/3 of Part 2, which, because of the darkness and misery, was really slow-going. The final 2/3 are more the oddball bantering and lunacy I prefer to write, so I expect I'll have a rough draft done by the end of the weekend. And spend the rest of the month adding setups to my payoffs as well as more jokes.

If Sabrina isn't part of the reunion, what exactly is being reunited? What's the point of doing it at all?

I also can't say I'm too keen on a NEXT GENERATION approach considering the first generation was a complete and utter disaster in the end. I still remember the delight and joy of knowing that Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo were the first to discover sliding and we were along for the ride on this very first outing into the multiverse. Why deprive a new generation of viewers of feeling like they too, are discovering sliding with Quinn Mallory? Why would we instead tell them that sliding has been done before in some other series they would have to grudgingly endure in order to appreciate the current series?

It'd be cool, though, if Jerry played Michael Mallory to the new Quinn Mallory. (Jerry's a bit young, but Michael Mallory's also a bit dead.)

My black lab, Rocky is going on two years without a spleen. He has some arthritis, but is in pretty good health otherwise. I think he and my other dog, Boo, are going to be depressed more than anything else since Buster is gone.

And typing that last part just about set me off again... It sucks.
But drowning my sorrows in TV shows and junk food is keeping my mind off of things for the most part.

Reddit. Hmm. That would be one of the ones that I have no idea how to use.

I do need to catch up on the rewatch

In case anyone was wondering, this was generally used as the go-to thread to discuss the podcast, SlidersCast at www.sliderscast.com -- Man, some good memories here. Ironically enough, the message board went kablooey right around the time things went off the rails for us. I had to deal with a few illnesses, a death in the family, and during all that, work was busier than it had been all year. I was slammed.

Also working against us was the fact that we had an episode recorded, the now released episode 25. We had a special guest on that episode, the very cool Ian McDuffie, who you may remember from the blog, "Think of a Roulette Wheel". Anyways, Ian had a lot to add to the episode, so it's much longer than most episodes, and we had some audio issues throughout, so it required more editing than any other episode thus far.

A perfect storm of events to cause a boatload of delays.

We're getting back into the swing of things now and should have Greatfellas up in a week or so, and we've got the Patreon bonus episodes as well. Anybody that backs us for a dollar or more gets the first bonus episode. Anybody that backs for $3 or more gets every episode we do. And in case we miss the June deadline, we'll do 2 for July. Anybody wondering what the bonus episodes are, we cover alternate universes in other shows and movies. We tackled an awesome Twilight Zone episode first, and we'll be doing that Netflix movie "Parallels" soon.

And for anyone who already watched Parallels, you might find this interesting:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2 … rector_of/