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On the subject of the sliders 'origins,' I have never really given much thought to who Wade and the Professor were before the show started and Rembrandt is so full of past anecdotes that I don't need to think about it.

However, I have thought a lot about Quinn's boyhood and have been working on an essay called "The Sex Life of Quinn Mallory" which outlines every sexual encounter I think he has ever had in his life in my head-canon/fan theory space and as part of my own fanfic series, so it's not 'canon.'

I believe Quinn has had sex with Stephanie (but not Daelin), Nan (a classmate in his graduate class in the Pilot), Jane ("Love Gods"), Logan ("Double Cross"). I believe that every sexual experience in Quinn's life has been a horrific, traumatic, disturbing event culminating in Quinn horrified to discover that he had sex with a double of himself and that this double had been having sex with the Professor (shudder).

Then, stepping into my fanfic realm, I think Quinn has had sex with Wade (bubble universe in "Roads Taken"), Cadey (original character) and Wade (finally in real life).

(Yes, I am aware that Wade wasn't in "Roads Taken"; my fanfic posits that those stories really happened with Wade and what we saw onscreen was an altered reality. Sliders-fan Tucker actually wrote a version of "Roads Taken" with the original cast here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1icU … sp=sharing )

Aside from NARCOTICA, I strongly dislike all the comics. But I don't blame the creators or the artists. Licensed comics were often rushed hackwork written by writers marathoning VHS cassette tapes and rushing out a script to meet a licensing deadline. Artists worked off publicity photos that could be incredibly limiting in likenesses. Even NARCOTICA is only half-good, specifically the half drawn by Dennis Calero after Jackson Guice had to drop out due to personal issues. Comics severely underpay its freelancers and I don't find fault with comic book writers and artists who sometimes could not get it together for certain projects.

The thing about PUNKY BREWSTER and SAVED BY THE BELL is that it was not the end of the characters' world that they got cancelled. Punky, Zack and Slater have been off the air before and clearly survived it. PUNKY BREWSTER and SAVED BY THE BELL were cancelled, but their de-facto series finales were effective as jumping off points (unlike whatever the hell that was with THE X-FILES leaving poor Skinner run over, maybe dead, maybe alive).

PUNKY BREWSTER ended with Punky starting the adoption process for her little girl; while Season 2 could have shown all the difficulties after that, the Season 1 finale left you knowing that Punky had taken a good step forward. SAVED BY THE BELL ended with the students saving their school and Slater the gym teacher and Jessi the guidance counselor kissing; while a third season could have explored all the problems that would follow; as a final episode, it was a very happy romcom ending.

FAKING IT producer Carter Covington shot Season 3 of FAKING IT concerned that the show might not make it to a fourth year; Covington wasn't willing to end the show with Season 3, so he prepared cliffhangers. However, he described them as "happy cliffhangers" where something nice happened to each character; a fourth season could explore it further, but if there were no fourth season (and there wasn't), the audience would feel that the characters had been left in a good place.

MACGYVER also ended on a 'happy cliffhanger' in Season 5 due to an unexpected non-renewal, but in a rare change of events, I can't talk about it because I have not yet seen it (and now you may sigh with relief).

All this is in stark opposition to Quinn Mallory bleeding out in a field after being shot by the lottery police or the Kromaggs having implanted a slider with a tracking device that would mean any homecoming would be followed by invasion or Quinn and Maggie having "slid into the future" or Quinn nonsensically not bothering to slide to Kromagg Prime despite having the means to bypass the slidecage or Rembrandt jumping into an unstable vortex, fate unknown.

And one of the issues with SLIDERS: it is difficult to give SLIDERS a 'happy cliffhanger' because the sliders are lost in the multiverse. They're either home or they are not home.

I admit, I am sure that no cancellation-induced Peacock revival cliffhanger with Tracy Torme at the helm could possibly be as bad as "The Seer" (which I sometimes argue wasn't necessarily that bad as it enabled a lot of fanfic). I can't be sure of that because Torme did, as previously noted, leave Quinn bleeding out at the end of Season 1.

The Corsi-Rosenthal air purifier craze is interesting, but it sounds exhausting and painful to buy four fan coil air filters and a fan, assemble them into a cube, ensure it doesn't fall apart, and then change all four filters of this six-sided contraption every few months.

I just bought a couple air purifiers (Honeywell HPA064C with filters to be replaced annually) although they only cover 75 square feet compared to the average Corsi-Rosenthal covering 680 square feet. But I also replaced the dust filters in the two fan coils in my home with MERV-8 filters and put the two air purifiers near the intake vents, ensuring that my home air systems now have a direct line of clean air which goes into the fan coils and gets further circulated through the home.

While media casually refers to any property returning after a long hiatus to be a "reboot," there are actually multiple categories of IP relaunches:

Reboot
A reboot is where the continuity starts over again with no acknowledgement of previous productions, and the term is drawn from turning off a computer system and turning it back on. Reboots include THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB (2020), BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (2012) and THE PRISONER (2009).

THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB would not have benefited from actresses in their 40s reprising roles they played 20 - 25 years previous to have their characters resume jobs they held as adolescents. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST was unlikely to secure Ron Pearlman and Linda Hamilton to reprise their roles in a TV sequel, so recasting and starting over made sense, as did rebuilding the entire concept of the show (a highly civilized lady police officer and a savage warrior fighting crime) in the context of 2012 society. Rebooting both made sense and I would call these two examples of successful reboots.

However, THE PRISONER reboot is my example of a failed reboot where the PRISONER reboot eliminated nearly every point of distinction about the original 1960s show. The original show was defined by characters known by number instead of name, a strong espionage-conspiracy thirller concept, a daring action-adventure formula and a acidically satirical vein of social commentary. The reboot had characters known by name, no spy elements, little action, no adventure and no social satire at all; it wasn't THE PRISONER except in name.

I would say that reboots are successful when the concept and character templates (if not the characters themselves) can be reintepreted and rebuilt to be relevant to the present day and market. Batman has been relentlessly rebooted and can be made darker or lighter as needed for each era. However, reboots fail when the concept is out of step with the needs of the audience or if the production is incompetent or if the reboot is so disconnected from the original that it may as well not use the same name.

Revival
A revival is where the production is set in the original continuity as a sequel to the original production. THE X-FILES, GILMORE GIRLS, SAVED BY THE BELL, PUNKY BREWSTER, GIRL MEETS WORLD and SCREAM all benefitted from being revived when the stars of these properties were working actors and the right age to play older versions of their original characters. They also benefitted from their original storylnes being extremely opportune for sequels.

However, THE X-FILES was a creative failure because despite being a revival, it contradicted or ignored its original (and unfinished) storylines and failed to bring Mulder and Scully to the next stage in their personal and professional relationships the way the other revivals listed above did for their cast. THE X-FILES didn't accomplish the goals of a revival, instead skipping back and forth between ignoring continuity and tying into it, and the results were confusingly impenetrable.

I would say that revivals are successful when the original storylines and characters benefit from resumed exploration, but they fail if the original storylines are too dense, contradictory or confusing for a casual audience who may not have seen or remember the original. They also fall apart if the revival doesn't feel like a new chapter of the original.

THE X-FILES was a peculiar case where the original storylines were too dense, contradictory and confusing for the *writer* attempting to produce a sequel that didn't require the audience to remember much; the writer ended up confusing both the long-time fan and the unfamiliar viewer. And THE X-FILES also put Mulder and Scully exactly where they had been back in the 90s; despite the age of the actors, they felt like they hadn't made any progress.

Rebootquel
A rebootquel is where the continuity starts over but acknowledges the previous productions through time travel. Examples include the STAR TREK 2009 movie and TERMINATOR GENYSIS.

I'd say STAR TREK's rebootquel series was a mixed bag. The first movie was strong, enabling long-time fans to accept an altered continuity while being accessible to new fans. The second movie, however, got hopelessly entangled in continuity and callbacks that were obnoxious and clumsy for long-time fans and nonsensical to new fans. The third one was a strong action story that unfortunately couldn't overcome the audience's dismay with the second movie and make enough money in ticket sales.

And TERMINATOR GENYSIS was truly puzzling and counterintuitive; it rewound back to the 1984 time period of the original movie, but then cast off the 1984 setting as quickly as it could, rendering the rebootquel approach pointless.

This tells me that for a rebootquel to be effective, it needs to embrace the specific time period to which the franchise is rewinding but also embrace that it is a new story, not a remake or sequel to an old story.

Deboot
A deboot is where the continuity rewinds itself to a previous installment and ignores some previous sequels but not the original and possibly a select number of sequels. Examples include TERMINATOR: DARK FATE, HALLOWEEN (2018) and others.

HALLOWEEN's new movies ignore all but the first film; TERMINATOR: DARK FATE ignores all but the first two. HALLOWEEN's sequels were a strong distillation of the original concept and an effective update for a new era. TERMINATOR: DARK FATE was... I liked it well enough, but ticket sales were poor and it's possible that after two bad sequels, an unfinished TV show and long periods where the TERMINATOR franchise had been absent, the audience had atrophied.

In this case, a deboot is an exercise in reverting to the original storytelling template after numerous deviations. HALLOWEEN succeeded because the back to basics, non-supernatural horror of the first film had been lost with the sequels becoming increasingly magical; the deboot felt like a return to form. In contrast, the original TERMINATOR and each sequel had generally featured humans on the run from robots and TERMINATOR: DARK FATE, despite being a deboot, was more of the same and the audience had tired of it and stopped going.

In Conclusion
Reboots: Effective when the concept is timeless but the original storylines don't necessarily need sequels.

Revivals: Effective when the characters and storylines of a past TV show benefit from new exploration and can be made relevant in the present day.

Rebootquels: Effective when the franchise has a large audience but also impenetrably dense continuity in need of a new entry point for casual viewers.

Deboots: Effective when the concept has been distorted and a return to the original idea is welcome.

I think most people in this world have better things to do than take screenshots of "Double Cross" and upscale them to higher resolution and upload them to IMGbb for you. I think people have lives outside of SLIDERS.

... how I envy them.

That said, these didn't turn out great; there isn't a lot of detail even in the PAL 540i masters and upscaling them from 540 pixels high to 3240 pixels high hasn't done a lot to improve them.

Thank God.

**

As for reboots -- I think it's simply a matter of doing them poorly or doing them well. Quality in writing, acting, cinematography, production, editing, season-long arc, characterization, social commentary and relevance are more important than whether or not the series is a revival of a pre-existing property or an original creation. Reboots can benefit from the mythic stature of their previous existence.

There is a certain weight, importance and cultural iconography to having MacGyver disarm a land mine with a paper clip that can't be replicated with an original character.

I would say that the CBS reboot of MACGYVER shows reboots at the worst (in the first season) and their best (in the second to fourth season) and their most mediocre (also in the fourth season)

MACGYVER's first season opened with a shallow recreation of MACGYVER's schtick from the 1985 now presented in 2016 and it looked clumsy and dated. MacGyver creates smoke bombs from cleaning chemicals, fingerprint equipment from office supplies -- which now makes him look unprepared in not simply bringing pocket-sized spy gear like smoke bombs and fingerprinting equipment in advance.

In addition, the 2015 reboot saddled MacGyver with an aggressive partner to handle the physical fight scenes and gunplay (which made MacGyver's supposed pacifist philosophy meaningless as he was just having an associate use violence) and a hacker teammate (which made MacGyver's encyclopedic knowledge unnecessary). Why was this show even on the air when MacGyver's brand of espionage was dated, ineffective and irrelevant? Because MACGYVER was a recognizable trademark and brand name.

But by the end of the first season, MACGYVER finally figured out how to make MacGyver's character work. MACGYVER finally realized that MacGyver couldn't just be sent into spy missions to retrieve MacGuffins or arrest villains; MacGyver was instead best as a problem solver.

MacGyver had to impersonate an assassin and perform assassinations and supply proof of death without actually murdering anybody; had to navigate in and out of a collapsed building with no exits and all his equipment lost; had to find a way to fly a plane without fuel to a distant landing zone; had to save a capsizing ship at sea without ever setting foot aboard. The show finally understood that MacGyver didn't benefit from simple spy missions but impossible problems that the character had to solve. As a result, MacGyver's brand of improvised solutions now felt modern and relevant and MacGyver was suited to facing down present day problems.

And MACGYVER then bit off more than it could chew: Season 4 sent MacGyver up against an unsolvable problem, the crisis of climate change where MacGyver was fighting ecoterrorists and forced to concede that MacGyver and his team were fighting on the wrong side (even though the ecoterrorists were certainly not the right side). It was riveting, gripping and ripped from the headlines. MacGyver, reviewing developments on climate change, had a crisis of faith in his mission and a nervous breakdown, fearing that the terrorists could be right to try to kill 90 per cent of the human population.

How could MacGyver triumph against fossil fuels and a depleted ozone layer and the inertia of human impact on a damaged planet?

Season 4 ended with MacGyver defeating the ecoterrorists from triggering a population-reducing catastrophe and then making a presentation to Washington lawmakers on the climate crisis which... I guess... solved climate change? Because MacGyver never mentioned it again and this 'solution' (a stirring speech and a secret dossier about impending global catastrophe) were apparently all that was needed?

This conclusion to Season 4 did not work. This did not work at all. Season 5 felt truly awkward with MacGyver not dealing with that ecological nervous breakdown of Season 4. There was no on camera explanation for why MacGyver wasn't worried about climate change any more.

(The only rationalization I can offer: the COVID-19 pandemic is said to have happened between Season 4 and Season 5. It's possible that MacGyver was heartened by how during the 2020 lockdowns, ecological damage began reversing itself and this buoyed him up for Season 5 and we never saw him deal with the climate crisis again because the show didn't make it to Season 6.)

However, none of these victories or successes had too much to do with MACGYVER being a reboot. Yes, Season 1 was a reboot of a 1980s property that was painfully outdated in 2015, but that was less about MacGyver's gimmick being 30 years old and more a failure to craft stories that were specifically challenging to the MacGyver character. Then MACGYVER succeeded by presenting MacGyver as a problem solver rather than merely a spy and the series began giving him increasingly impossible problems to solve.

Then MACGYVER failed because it threw MacGyver into problem of the climate emergency which was something MacGyver, being a fictional character, could not actually solve (and his 'solution' in the show was nonsensical).

Quality is far more important than whether or not the property is a revival or an original.

What a ridiculously racist, white-centric post.

The actor Raymond Lee is South Korean. The name of his character is Dr. Ben Seong. Seong is a South Korean name. Your accusation that the name "Seong" must be stolen from a white American's fictional character is patently absurd; the name "Seong" appears in Korean history as early as 1418. STAR TREK debuted in 1966, "Space Seed" featuring Khan Noonien Singh aired in 1967, "Datalore" which first introduced Dr. Noonian Soong as Data's creator aired in 1988.

Gene Roddenberry's characters of Dr. Noonian Soong (STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION) and Khan Noonien Singh (STAR TREK ORIGINAL SERIES) were drawing on the name "Kim Noonien Wang," the name of a Chinese pilot whom Roddenberry befriended during his time in the Army Air Corps; Roddenberry changed "Kim" to a Muslim name, "Khan," and altered "Wang" to "Singh," a Sikh name. Later, Roddenberry referred to his friend again with the character name of "Noonian Soong," altering the spelling of Noonien to use an A and using an unusual transliteration of the Chinese name Sung to "Soong."

It is stupid, ignorant and racist for you to claim that "Dr. Ben Seong", a Korean character with a Korean name played by a Korean actor is somehow stealing from white writer Gene Roddenberry.

It is stupid, ignorant and racist for you to declare that a Korean surname that has existed since the fifteenth century is off limits because a white writer used a similarly-spelled name in a 1988 episode of STAR TREK.

It is stupid, ignorant and racist for you to declare that South Korean characters should not have South Korean surnames because it intrudes upon white characters written by white writers who use Asian names in their fiction.

White people did not create every word and name in the world and the name "Seong" existed long before Gene Roddenberry was born.

The only reason I can see for QuinSlidr to declare that it's fine for Roddenberry to use "Soong" but not fine for QUANTUM LEAP to use "Seong" is that Dr. Noonian Soong is a white character and Dr. Ben Seong is an Asian character and for QuinSlidr, white characters should always be dominant and Asian characters and names should not exist. There is simply no other reason for QuinSlidr to be so offended by an Asian name.

Furthermore, not every STAR TREK-reminiscent name or sound or idea originated with STAR TREK. There is more to the world than STAR TREK.

As someone who has been watching STAR TREK since I was 10, I never thought I would say to someone what I am going to say to you: get a life.

SAVED BY THE BELL REBORN has been cancelled on Peacock.
https://www.cbr.com/saved-by-the-bell-r … d-peacock/

NBCUniversal is clearly not in a great financial position right now.

I think it is very possible that THE FLASH's ninth and final season will be an anthology across the Arrowverse. Is it probable? I can't say that. But here's why it's possible: Grant Gustin is tired.  All the actors are rotating in and out of the show so that they don't have to work as much for Season 8. Seven seasons of a TV show has left them weary. Filming under pandemic protocols with isolation and segmenting has been soul crushing.

Grant Gustin is going to work even less for Season 9 because he's so worn out. Jesse L. Martin will also be reducing his commitment from rotating series regular to recurring guest-star for Season 9. Candice Patton and Danielle Panabaker will probably stay in the rotation. Everyone is exhausted, pandemic protocols are tiring, and Grant Gustin is noticeably low energy onscreen in Season 8.

I wouldn't say his acting has become the equivalent of Jerry O'Connell in Season 4, but I'd say it's closer to Jerry O'Connell in "Eggheads" where Jerry is working hard but clearly spent, possibly due to "Eggheads" having taken up all of his strength with the sports matches.

With the actors tired and working less, it would make sense to bring in the BATWOMAN and LEGENDS and ARROW cast members to fill in the gaps that result when FLASH actors are absent.

With this approach, Diggle's arc could be completed with Barry helping Diggle settle... whatever was going on with him.

The future Canaries could be wrapped up with Chester visting the future to help Mia Smoak save William and cement Mia, Dinah and Black Siren as a team.

Caitlin and a guest-starring Cisco could visit Gotham to help dispatch whatever monster emerged at the end of Season 4 and help Kate Kane and Ryan Wilder agree to both be Batwoman.

The original Harrison Wells could help the Legends escape from the time prison.

It would be great.

It seems to me that the longevity of lower-rated CW shows like LEGENDS and RIVERDALE was not due to ratings, but due to sales to streaming services where the audience was much higher and recouped any expense from the studio and network. This is why BATWOMAN got renewed for Season 3 so early into the 2021 Season 2.

However, the CW has apparently never been 'profitable'; the studios (Warner Bros. and ViacomCBS which own the CW) made money, but the broadcaster was only breaking even at best. The problem: the majority of the audience watching CW's shows don't watch them on the CW broadcaster. They watch them on streaming services; the CW itself is not a success, but their content has been successful. However, that content is mostly from WB.

At this point, Warner Bros. and Paramount are seeking to sell the CW off, effectively selling off their low-coverage TV broadcaster as Paramount wishes to focus on its Paramount Plus streaming service while Warner Bros. has turned its attention to HBOMax.

With the impending sale, the CW is no longer in a position to renew lower-rated shows as deficit financing where they lose money up front but see a lot more down the line for the parent company and the parent company happy to cover the broadcaster's losses. The CW is about to have a totally different parent company that would not see any of the future profits from an eighth season of LEGENDS or a fourth season of BATWOMAN.

Both shows likely filmed their finales not realizing that their broadcaster was being prepared to be sold off.

THE FLASH will finish out its run. SUPERMAN AND LOIS has an HBOMax deal. STARGIRL is likely fine. NAOMI is on the bubble. But unfortunately, the Arrowverse era is coming to a close for CW-aired, low-budget, low-rated, surviving-through-streaming superhero shows. And sadly, when economics turn against the continued survival of a show, the show will often be denied the chance for a proper finale and conclusion.

I'm sorry that LEGENDS and BATWOMAN are cancelled, but... I have somewhat mixed feelings about the demise of both. I guess I would say: I don't feel LEGENDS suffers too much for a cancellation despite the cliffhanger; the LEGENDS cliffhangers have never been a big deal and I don't feel worried about the characters. I know they will be fine.

And BATWOMAN... it's been a very peculiar journey and it has been confusing to love Kate Kane only for Kate Kane to suddenly disappear from the show and it was further confusing to welcome a new Kate Kane back only for her to leave again and it was confusing that Ryan Wilder, while wonderful, came aboard and promptly assumed Kate's company and Kate's team and Kate's girlfriend which leaves me confused as to why they didn't keep Kate 2.0 if they were just going to tell Kate's stories with Ryan.

I admit that while I am sad not to get more of Ryan and Luke and Mary and Alice... a part of me is a bit relieved that it's over even though I liked the show.

That's correct, so I'll add some nuance: Trump's Senate majority wasn't as weak as Biden's where Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema stop any and all legislation -- although Trump's majorities had infighting and failure and he failed to take out Obamacare which is a leveller. pilight says the weak majority is non-existent downticket campaigning and that a more vigorous effort could have won Democrats a stronger hand. That's probably true, but I have this terrible feeling that electoral game is so rigged at this point that Democrat votes will count for less in Congress and that Republicans have to win far fewer voters to win a majority in Senate and the House.

I shared this before, an interview with James Carville Jr. where he says Democrats are obsessed with "stupid wokeness" that's unsellable to the American populace and that they sink money into hopeless races and court defeat when their work should be in trying to elect more Democrats to get President Biden more power than he has right now as a figurehead president.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics … atic-party

As a hopefully woke person myself, I'll say that Carville Jr. may have a point that there's no sense in selling what people won't buy.

Democrats did not receive the power that they said they needed. To govern, a US President needs a filibuster-proof majority in Congress. A 50-50 split in Senate with only the VP as a tiebreaker and two Democrat senators who vote against the president is *not* the power that Democrats sought, nor is it the power that the previous president had in his hands.

Democrats seem resigned to losing even their slight, near-non-existent advantage. They aren't trying to sell the story that to accomplish more, they need more power.

Slider_Quinn21 wrote in 2016 that the presidency isn't actually that powerful an office. That's only true when the president doesn't have a strong congressional majority. President Biden is not a powerful president due to his weak majority, and it looks like a Democratic president will never be very powerful while a Republican president will be extremely powerful.

IB: " ... so, what's the deal with the bees?"

KIMON: "Is this a serious question?"

IB: "Yes! I was just telling Brad that every part of the X-FILES mythology makes sense to me in Seasons 1 - 9 except for the bees. I don't understand the role they play in Colonization at all. How are they supposed to carry the black oil in their tiny forms? They're bees!"

KIMON: "The black oil is at its core a virus and the virus was injected into the genetically modified corn which the bees consumed and the bees would then transmit the virus to humans and create a mass pandemic for Colonization."

IB: "So -- the bees are actually carrying the black oil but in a microscopic form."

KIMON: "That's my understanding."

IB: "Oh, okay. I was pondering how the bees fit into the mythology and then I realized I could just ask The Expert. Well. Not The Expert. That's a loaded term in SLIDERS fandom."

Alfred Gough and Miles Millar created SMALLVILLE. They are also showrunning the new WEDNESDAY ADDAMS series on Netflix.

A WEDNESDAY ADDAMS series is a dream come true for me, but hearing that Gough and Millar are writing it -- well, it's the equivalent of hearing that NBCUniversal has commissioned a SLIDERS revival but hired Keith Damron to run it.

Gough and Millar are a truly peculiar choice for a property as eccentric and idiosyncratic as THE ADDAMS FAMILY.  SMALLVILLE had 217 episodes. Gough and Millar were showrunners for 152 of those episodes. Of 152, they only wrote nine. Their nine episodes, while solid, are action adventure mixed with teen angst and have none of the macabre, gothic, comedic sensibilities of THE ADDAMS FAMILY. Gough and Millar aren't innovative, insightful, witty or clever. They're entertaining and competent.

Outside of those nine 'event' episodes, SMALLVILLE under Gough and Millar had a serious quality control problem. Season 1 had a lot of adequate to excellent entries but were hyperformulaic with a repetitive monster of the week format, apparently mandated by Gough and Millar.

The backchatter I've heard from is that Gough and Millar were incredibly disengaged from SMALLVILLE. They originally set out to do BRUCE WAYNE: THE SERIES about Bruce's adventures between graduating from college and becoming Batman. They were unable to license Batman but were told they could get the rights to a young Superman. They sold the pilot to series on the WB network.

After that, Gough and Millar didn't know what to do and didn't bother. They had made Clark Kent too powerful to be seriously threatened; they had geographically isolated Clark to a small town and didn't have a wide range of story ideas within the town. Gough and Millar told the writers room for Season 1 to do monster of the week episodes to fill in the 22 episode orders and then Gough and Millar stopped working on SMALLVILLE scripts, focusing instead on writing screenplays (SHANGHAI KNIGHTS, SPIDER-MAN II).

The Season 1 writers came up with arcs and running plots in Gough and Millar's absence; when Gough and Millar came back at the end of the year to write the season finale, they threw out the Season 1 writers' arcs. The Season 1 writers mostly left for other shows. A new team was hired for Season 2 under the same restrictions with absent showrunners who'd occasionally return and demand that any character or plot development be reset.

As a result, Seasons 2 - 7 suffered from scripts that were produced under severe restrictions, trying not to build any characterization or storylines that the showrunners would just tear down when passing through. Gough and Millar didn't know how to run a 2000s-era TV show of ongoing arcs, viewing TV as strictly standalone, siloed episodes. They were as indifferent to SMALLVILLE as David Peckinpah was to SLIDERS, bringing their A-game to the episodes they personally wrote and uncaring about the rest.

As showrunners, they wrote only 6% of Seasons 1 - 7 and only seemed to give SMALLVILLE 6% of their attention.

Gough and Millar were, however, very successful at the *business* side of running SMALLVILLE. They got it to seven seasons and their successors got it to ten. Gough and Millar hired most of the 'regular' actors on 13 episode contracts and have them absent from nine a year, trimming those costs signifcantly. They cast unknowns to pay lower but equitable rates and less than what more experienced performers would cost. They marketed their actors as heartthrobs for their audience and kept them in the press.

They were great at selling the show and reducing their budget to keep pace with diminishing ratings. They were great at making SMALLVILLE cost less than its earnings in ad revenue. They were great at keeping SMALLVILLE on the air.

I am unnerved by Gough and Millar scripting a WEDNESDAY ADDAMS series, a show that calls for eccentricity, humour, inventiveness, wit, quippy dialogue, and the ability to balance the morbid with the amusing. Gough and Millar wrote nearly humourless scripts for SMALLVILLE even at their best. Their scripts were functional superhero stories that were nominally related to teenagers and had a flair for visuals, scenes that were playable for actors, a sense of myth and legend, effective in their action -- but they weren't comedies and they weren't in the vein of offbeat horror-comedy like THE ADDAMS FAMILY.

It looks like Gough and Millar are writing eight of WEDNESDAY's 10 episodes. That's 80% of the scripts. Hopefully, they'll give it 80% of their attention as well.

In addition, all ten episodes of the show are being directed by Tim Burton, also the executive producer of the show. Burton is a master of the eccentrically gothic and morbidly bizarre.

Maybe Burton is the true showrunner and actively reworking and writing Gough and Millar's scripts.

Maybe Gough and Millar's 6% efforts are all that Burton requires for his vision. I love Wednesday Addams and I hope that is the case.

The idea of the snake having a different iconographic implication reminds me of "World Killer" where one of the nuns wore stones instead of a cross to indicate that Jesus was executed by being beaten to death with rocks rather than crucifixion. I can see the idea of immunizing people through feeding them small amounts of toxic materials could also lead to interesting social commentary on how our civilization often encourages denying the existence of illness, pain, infirmity or disability as part of a culture of toxic masculinity. I also like how you've presented this story in sociological terms that are more like Seasons 1 - 2 of SLIDERS rather than the sci-fi technology bent that Zicree and others would take.

I'm relieved that you note that the conspiracy is indeed nonsense as COVID is an airborne virus, but even then, the World Health Organization nonsensically took two years to acknowledge that transmission was not merely droplet based but aerosol driven as well, and in the absence of authoritative acceptance of obvious fact, people will fill in those gaps with randomness.

I find THE X-FILES quite dated. The show is founded on the idea that government is insidiously all-powerful and all-controlling. Reality has revealed that government is in fact divided, incompetent and ineffectual.

The show is founded on the idea that evil is an extrinsic force alien to human nature. Since the 90s, psychology and psychiatry have further penetrated the mainstream and instead indicate that evil is due to human failings and human self-interest.

Carter attempted to update THE X-FILES mythology to the modern era, but his update was incoherent and non-committal, backtracking on Colonization, backtracking on backtracking on Colonization, backtracking on backtracking on backtracking on I've lost track and so has he.

The entire episodic non-structure of THE X-FILES is also extremely dated. While the non-Carter scripted, individual episodes are strong, they don't cohere as a series. Season 10 is confusing even within a mere six episodes. 10.1 declares Colonization was a hoax; 10.2 has Mulder describing a Colonization plot like it was genuine (because Carter didn't inform the 10.2 writer of 10.1's retcons). 10.2 shows them falling back into work like they never left; 10.3 has Mulder doubting that the supernatural is real. 10.1 ends with Mulder and Scully getting text messages from the FBI about an "urgent" situation; 10.2 starts with them reinstated at the FBI with no explanation as to why.

Season 11 was even worse. One episode shows Mulder and Scully as a couple living together in Mulder's house; another indicates that Scully lives separately and that Mulder has never been to her house and will disappear into the woods for days without letting her know.

This negative continuity was awkward in the 90s and simply unprofessional in 2016. It reminds me of Mr. Bean's teddy bear constantly being destroyed only to be made whole in the next scene.

THE X-FILES is also further dated in that Mulder and Scully are fundamentally passive characters, observing but rarely driving the story forward. Their involvement rarely if ever saves any lives in their cases of the week; the monsters are regularly free to prey again with Mulder and Scully seeming indifferent as they move onto the next case of the week wtihout having addressed the previous one. This may have been fine in the 90s when the average viewer was only watching 40 - 60% of each season's episodes, but it made the characters seem weak and inept when watching the show as a whole via streaming and time-shifted viewings in 2016.

My impression of Carter based on his dull, uninspired scripting: he just isn't interested in TV any more or in modern television. That's why he was hacking out first drafts to be filmed and performing none of the reworking and revision he did before. I think he got burnt out in the 90s.

In this 90s, Carter hired a collaborator, Frank Spotnitz (who was not available for the revival due to running THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, Slider_Quinn21's favourite Nazi show which he assures us is very, very good).

Strangely, Carter hired Glen Morgan and James Wong for the revival and gave Glen Morgan an showrunner-executive producer credit for Seasons 10 - 11 with Morgan's name appearing at the end of all episodes to indicate Morgan's stature on the show. Morgan declared this an inappropriate credit, saying he wasn't particularly involved in any episodes beyond his own.

Morgan's two scripts show that he is extremely interested in removing the passivity of Mulder and Scully and engaging in running arcs: "Founder's Mutation" had them investigating Colonization-adjacent technology and "This" had them more actively engaged in the story than any X-File before or after. Glen Morgan clearly had a vision for updating THE X-FILES, but it was confined to his own episodes.

Morgan could have revised scripts for consistency and running arcs. Morgan could have taken Carter's basic ideas for the "My Struggles" and written the full teleplays. Morgan has flaws like any writer, but he's engaged and Carter is disengaged.

I will forever wonder why Carter gave Morgan the showrunner/executive producer title, the closing credit and the money, but never had him do the job. It is apparently a mystery to Morgan as well who tried to refuse the title (and presumably the money too) and felt it was a little disrespectful to Frank Spotnitz (whom Morgan noted was an actual co-writer and script editor and nevergot the showrunner credit at the end of episodes).

Chris Carter and Mulder and Scully have been given more chances than anyone who has ever worked in television. One would expect a paranormal procedural on FOX in the 90s to get cancelled after 6 - 9 episodes; they got a full first season and renewed for a second. One would expect a modest run of 3 - 5 seasons; they got a feature film after his fifth year followed by four more seasons. One would have thought that the Season 9 series finale would have been the end; they got a second feature film. One would have thought that poorly performing film in 2008 would have been the end; they got a six episode season for 2016 and a 10 episode season for 2016. In each revival, Carter seemed to dig a deeper hole for Mulder and Scully.

I think you might consider wishing you had less Mulder and Scully instead of more; perhaps five seasons followed by a big budget feature film series finale.

However... I agree that the Season 10 and 11 standalones were mostly very strong and there is a certain absurdity that the myth-arc episodes were only the premieres and finales and yet diminish the show far more than the standalones can elevate it.

Weird. I didn't get around to watching DISCOVERY Season 3 or 4 (yet). I guess Season 2 felt like a finale.

I am three episodes into PICARD. As always, I am in dire need for Professor Arturo. I need the Professor to come back. I need his wisdom, his perspective, his bombast, the patience beneath his impatience. But I'm alright because even though we don't have the Professor right now, we have our Captain back.

BATWOMAN had a good third season... so good that I wish they had stuck with the original character somehow. I wish they hadn't hired a notoriously flaky, unreliable, argumentative, volatile performer who had never done a long-term TV job to be the star of BATWOMAN. I love Javicia Leslie, but it's irksome that Leslie's Ryan Wilder has Kate's company, Kate's team, Kate's superhero codename, and now Kate's primary love interest, Sophie. If Ryan is so functionally similar to Kate Kane, why not just do it with Kate Kane? But I concede that the show would probably be just as awkward if all of Kate's supporting cast and surroundings were removed as well.

BATWOMAN has not been renewed for a fourth season yet.

LEGENDS had a good seventh season of comedy hijinks and a bizarre yet compelling choice in having Matt Ryan play a character who isn't Constantine. The gang's adventures through history were great fun and the show also ended its seventh season on a cliffhanger with no renewal announced as of yet.

I sure hope this doesn't blow up in their faces.

I am not caught up on STARGIRL or SUPERMAN AND LOIS or THE FLASH.

I stayed home with a migraine today, but in the afternoon, I read the DARK NIGHT: METAL Batman crossover. Maybe it's this severe-then-mild headache, but I couldn't understand what was going on. I moved onto reading the FOREVER EVIL JUSTICE LEAGUE crossover and that I understood just fine, but I confess that a storyline of evil versions of the JLA attacking Earth is not exactly the most intellectually challenging even if the characterization is strong and there's a neat arc of Lex Luthor renouncing Evil to fight the eviler JLA.

I also note: DC Infinite's reading lists are good. Marvel Unlimited's app is kind of a mess in arranging all the separate issues of a crossover into the correct reading order. The SECRET EMPIRE / Captain America's history is rewritten to make him a Nazi storyline, for example, was missing entire sequences of comics in the supposed reading list and I had to turn to Wikipedia, Amazon and various fan sites to figure out what to read and in what order. In contrast, DC Infinite had all the issues of DARK NIGHT: METAL and FOREVER EVIL in the queue, listed in order -- so I can't say that DARK NIGHT: METAL was confusing because I missed some tie-in or ancillary issue.

I have to say, reading Lex Luthor inspired to join the JLA is kind of an emotional boost and makes me really keen to go to bed early and get back to work tomorrow. This is why I like superheroes.

I stopped reading comics awhile ago because spending $4 - 9 on a single 20 page comic book was economically unsound and superheroes were all over Netflix. However, I bought subscriptions to Marvel Unlimited and the new DC Universe Infinite apps because two $60 annual fees to Marvel and DC each is effectively $10 a month. Marvel Unlimited has a lot of gaps in its older material and new titles are added three months after they've gone on sale, but if you're working your way through their library from 2000 onward, it's a good deal.

Just make sure to read at least 15 individual DC issues and 15 individual Marvel issues and you'll have read the number of comics you could have bought individually in print for the same cost and you'll have gotten your money's worth.

I am not sure if DC Universe Infinite is as good a deal. They only add new titles six months after initial release -- which is fine for me since I'm still reading 2016 DC comic books. I don't know how complete their library is. However, Scott Snyder's entire run of BATMAN would cost me a lot more than $60 and it's all here, so that alone has justified at least a one year subscription for me.

Spoiler warning

Season 6 opened in a parallel universe, revealing that an explosion in the S5 finale had ripped open the walls of reality and created an alternate version of Riverdale called Rivervale that was defined by supernatural and occult forces. After five episodes, the situation was explained and we returned to the supposedly non-supernatural Riverdale --

And due to some aftereffect of the extradimensional energies that were unleashed, Archie and Betty are now manifesting superpowers. Archie now has invulnerability and super strength and Betty is developing psychic powers.

...

This all works for me. So long as the characters' personalities are present, RIVERDALE thrives on shifting from dramedy to serial killer hunting to crime drama to horror to occult roleplay to cults to paranormal investigations to supernatural horror to superheroes.

I'm sure there are plenty who will disengage or simply be unwilling or unable to accept such turns of narrative because genre shifts within a single series can be unsettling. Some will go so far as to declare that genre shifts within a series are "creatively bankrupt 100%" just because it's outside the previous boundaries of the series. But for me, if the genre shifts serve the characters and are written with awareness and a genuine love for whatever the genre is, it can work, unlike, say, the clumsy MAD MAX and DRACULA ripoffs of SLIDERS.

That said, some will react to RIVERDALE's shift to superheroes the same way we reacted to SLIDERS becoming a clumsy TV approximation of DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS / DRAGONHEART / SPECIES / THE RUNNING MAN / ANACONDA.

Jim_Hall and I have been chatting. He thinks Seasons 4 - 5 might have been shot on 35mm film (and Zicree recalled that it was) but with the image sensor set to a higher level of light sensitivity and therefore higher levels of noise in addition to film with a higher grain content.

I suppose that's possible. I've always thought that Seasons 4 - 5 of SLIDERS look like they are shot on 16mm film due to the high grain quality which I've seen on CHUCK and the first season of BUFFY. DAWSON'S CREEK's pilot episode had the sharp clarity of a Season 3 episode of SLIDERS but immediately afterwards, the series acquired the grain texture of SLIDERS in the Sci-Fi Channel years and I later read that DAWSON's pilot was filmed on 35mm but the series was done on 16mm. THE DEAD ZONE had a S4 - S5 look in its first three seasons and then looked more like the pilot episode of SLIDERS because it went to 720p digital and was edited on 480p digital videotape.

However, my eye isn't exactly practiced in noting film quality. I've never even held so much as a film cannister. I'm just a viewer observing that Seasons 4 - 5 of SLIDERS have a similar grain level that matches other TV shows that I know to be filmed on 16mm. It's entirely possible that S4 and S5 acquired a similar look for entirely different reasons.

I'm not sure I understand the question. The villains were pulled out of the timestream either moments before their death or when their timelines ceased to intersect with Spider-Man's and they were returned in the present day to their home universes. Gwen would have been retrieved moments before her neck snapped if she'd been drawn in by the spell.

Maybe she was off camera somewhere and returned to Andrew Garfield's dimension in the present day and they were reunited in time.

I would certainly like a Marvel One Shot with the Spider-Mans.

It's strange: when Andrew Garfield's movie series was cancelled, I was both disappointed and relieved. I was disappointed that we wouldn't delve into AMAZING's mysterious backstory for Peter Parker's father, I was also relieved because AMAZING SPIDER-MAN II was such a mess that I didn't want any more from this Sony regime (and clearly, Andrew Garfield didn't want any more either because he deliberately got himself fired from AMAZING SPIDER-MAN III).

The only thing that I really wanted from NO WAY HOME that I wanted them to do and they tried to do but couldn't do: I wanted them to resurrect Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy. There was a clear path to fix this hateful mis-step from ASM2, but it looks like (a) pandemic protocols and scheduling made it difficult to book Emma Stone and (b) the story was already getting a bit cluttered.

Kind of frustrating that Willem Dafoe's Norman Osborn is hale, hearty and healthy while Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy remains dead and buried. There's no justice in this world!

I honestly didn't notice anything wrong with the CGI in NO WAY HOME, but that doesn't mean anything at all. Marvel may have fixed any issues for streaming.

Alternatively, I might not notice because I have come to accept painterly, animated-looking effects that aren't photorealistic. It used to really bother me that BABYLON 5's spaceships looked like PS2 graphics and now it seems fine. There was that CG giant that the Flash fought in the Season 7 premiere that you called out as terrible and it didn't even register to me as bad. I am the last person to be asked about CG; the last time I remember disliking a CG effect was the Scorpion King in THE MUMMY RETURNS.

From what I can tell, Tobey Maguire asked that his Peter Parker's home life and whatnot be kept vague for whatever reason and Andrew Garfield said that was fine too. But yes, I'd like more detail. However, Andrew Garfield seems to have recovered from his depression after the catharsis of saving MJ and Tobey Maguire is probably feeling better that despite failing to save Harry Osborn, he was able to save Norman Osborn after all. And to me, these are very significant developments even if we don't know if Andrew Garfield ever got to the bottom of his father's secret research or if Tobey Maguire was able to keep his staff photographer job from SPIDER-MAN III.

I'd still like to know those things too, of course.

I don't know that SLIDERS lends itself to being directly interconnected in a shared universe. The sliders don't *stay* in the same universe; how often can they really crossover in such a fashion?

I think SLIDERS' hypothetical crossovers would be more like what TF suggested: the sliders are seen running through the background of various scenes of other TV shows on the same streaming service / network.

Somewhere, Nigel Mitchell is kicking himself for writing a SLIDERS/X-FILES crossover where it's just Quinn and Arturo investigating the murders of their doubles and encountering Mulder and Scully when TF has now proposed a more complex and challenging path for the story.

I saw SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME. It was really good. I was impressed by how the story folded Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire's versions of Spider-Man into the story without overshadowing each other or Tom Holland. The moment where Andrew Garfield saves MJ the way he couldn't save Gwen was a beautiful moment of closure. The entire arc of Tom Holland's Spider-Man trying to save the villains rather than kill them was perfect.

The ending was an interesting rejection of Spider-Man as a privileged child of wealth and legacy; he has literally been reduced to being absolutely nobody and therefore everybody.

It's interesting to contemplate what this film would have been if it had been made without access to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Foggy wouldn't have been in it. Dr. Strange wouldn't have been in it. It could have alluded to the existence of all the Avengers characters, but it could not have shown them or featured them in any plot developments. There was some hint that the story might have been every bounty hunter on Earth pursuing Spider-Man with Kraven the Hunter being the most successful. But the writers never had to write this version of the story.