I liked this podcast. I thought Annie made some strong criticisms of Quinn's character but also some unfair ones too. I feel they don't give Quinn or SLIDERS fans enough credit.

Annie is right that Quinn is shockingly callous when Daelin is holding her brother in her arms as he bleeds out and Quinn calls to her and says, "Come with us!" He's telling her to abandon her dying brother. Richard Compton's direction and Jerry O'Connell's performance salvage this potentially offensive moment: Daelin is traumatized and Jerry pitches his voice to be one of comfort and relief, offering safety from a violent and horrific situation, and Jerry delivers the line with gentleness rather than coercive force. But Annie is absolutely fair to judge it by the words alone.

Annie has another correct observation: Quinn is rude and stupid when he says Rembrandt couldn't possibly understand Quinn's sense of loss and dismisses Rembrandt's example of being in love with an older woman. Annie notes: Quinn is effectively saying that Rembrandt, being in his mid-40s, couldn't possibly know what it's like to be in his 20s and in love, an absurd chronological and characteristical impossibility. Rembrandt is saying that Rembrandt had to face a divide of an age difference and Quinn is facing the divide of dimensions.

However, at 20, I also nonsenscially believed that nobody who was a little older had ever been through what I'd been through.

The podcasters say that Quinn dooms an entire dimension at the end, flat-out ignoring Arturo's line: "Take us out of the equation, this world might have a chance." But to be fair: Arturo is speculating without evidence.

The part I find unfair: Annie repeatedly cheapens Quinn's interest in Daelin to "he wants to mack" with consistent emphasis and I think that is unfair. Quinn misses home, wants to reconnect with someone who represents a piece of his home. Quinn sought to help Daelin even when learning that she had a fiance and wouldn't be romantically involved with Quinn; he is reaching out to her because he cares about her and the episode works hard to earn that sincerity.

I find that in Annie's writing, Annie has over time shown a contempt and disdain for Quinn. A loathing revulsion. I would even go so far as to call it hatred. And I consider that well-earned due to Quinn's onscreen portrayal throughout Seasons 3 - 4 with the incompetence of the writers and actor, but I would say that this hatred is often applied to pre-S3 episodes.

Annie remarked that SLIDERS fans by and large are more concerned with the technological aspects of sliding than the characters. I... don't know if that's actually true.

Certainly, Temporal Flux has written a number of essays on the mechanics of sliding and Reddit has posters asking why the timer works (or doesn't) work the way it does (or doesn't). However, the primary topics of discussion tend to be:

(a) A potential revival with (some or all) of the original actors
(b) Interest in the actors
(c) Alt-world scenarios

TF has written far more on alt-worlds than he ever did on sliding technology. I would consider the interest in the actors to be a wholehearted love for the characters. Fans adore John Rhys-Davies' commanding vocal and physical presence and the beautiful comedic canvas that is Cleavant Derricks' face. Fans love the sweetly endearing, accessible personality that Sabrina Lloyd brings to the screen.

Fans love Jerry for repeatedly trying to bring the show back even if he hasn't succeeded. Trying counts.

However, despite this observation being questionable, Annie still speaks to a fundamental truth of SLIDERS' origins. Reading the original pilot script for SLIDERS and then the "Summer of Love", it is obvious that Tracy Torme does not care in the slightest how sliding actually works on a technological or scientific scale. Sliding is merely a plot device to justify alt-world scenarios of satirical humour and absurdist levels of alienation or danger.

The 'explanation' for the randomness of sliding and the timer being a timer is thin at best and begrudging at worst. In the cut scene where Quinn and the Professor explain to Rembrandt how the timer works now, there is a palpable sense of irritation at this expository obligation (that got cut).

Annie seems to say that this attitude is rare in fans. I don't believe that's true. SLIDERS fans often refer to Season 4 episodes as being uncomfortably reminiscent of STAR TREK in the need to exposit how sliding systems work and creating sliding technology variations like the Slidewave and the Slidecage

The STAR TREK brand identity is strongly identified with an interest in how fictional technology functions. STAR TREK sells books of blueprints and technical manuals for non-existent spaceships and devices. Season 4 of SLIDERS adopted some aspects of that brand identity, but it's pretty obvious from watching Season 1 that Tracy Torme would not be that interested in writing SLIDERS: THE TECHNICAL MANUAL and that's a huge part of why Season 4 felt like an odd variation to a lot of fans.

I would give SLIDERS fans a bit more credit there.

1,562

(934 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

Personally, I've never entirely understood the complaints about Hawkeye being a killer. He fires arrows from a bow. That's not exactly a non-lethal weapon. He kills terrorists and soldiers of fascism and extraterrestrial invasion forces. And in ENDGAME, he was killing murderous mafia criminals. Captain America in the movies shot Nazis and agents of HYDRA and that's not a moral crisis. It's just that Captain America tends to engage in missions of MacGuffin-retrieval or destruction whereas Hawkeye is dispatched on missions that involve killing practicing practitioners of evil. Hawkeye doesn't like killing. Hawkeye doesn't enjoy killing. He kills to stop killers.

If you read the first post of this thread, you'll see details of the full upscaling process. The Reddit AI upscale is not mine, but the process is the same and has been summarized and fully explained in this thread.

1,564

(934 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

I'm not a huge fan of Moon Knight which is odd because I've read so much of his comics. The arc you read -- while I liked it, I knew it would make no sense to anyone unfamiliar with the character and pretty much every superhero comic these days feels like chapter 114 - 118 of a 400 chapter book. It's hard to recommend them, but I am going to give you the full lowdown on Moon Knight which you won't get this way anywhere else.

Moon Knight was originally a villain. His first appearance is in WEREWOLF BY NIGHT #32 where the heroic werewolf, Jack Russell, is hunted by a criminal syndicate called the Committee. The Committee hires noted bounty hunter Marc Spector and provides Spector with the Moon Knight outfit to be equipped to fight a werewolf. Spector initially wants the money but switches sides to help Russell escape. While the Moon Knight character was a thinly characterized figure of greed, the white costume and crescent moon design proved memorable.

Moon Knight reappeared in the MARVEL SPOTLIGHT anthology, in HULK MAGAZINE -- and this time, Spector was now characterized as a heroic figure with the suit being his own creation. Marvel tried to keep the costume but change the characterization so that Moon Knight wouldn't be unlikable. Eventually, Moon Knight got his own series and MOON KNIGHT would offer a convoluted explanation that Spector had been a hero who had attempted to infiltrate the committee and had tricked them into hiring him and also tricked them into providing him with the Moon Knight suit of his own design and if we keep thinking about that, our brains will explode.

Spector was revealed to be a former mercenary who'd only take morally acceptable jobs. He was killed in Egypt but resurrected by the Egyptian moon god Khonshu who inspired him to wear a costume reminiscent of Khonshu's visage and to continue Khonshu's purpose: to safeguard night travellers. Khonshu seemed to infuse Spector with the ability to withstand extensive levels of trauma and pain matched with an obsessive gift for creating Moon Knight's weapons and armour. Spector threw himself into a war on crime in New York City, creating two alternate identities: cab driver Jake Lockley and wealthy socialite Steven Grant, living three lives to infiltrate criminal organizations and then attacking them as Moon Knight.

While Moon Knight joined the Defenders and Avengers, over time, he began to display serious mental health issues: savage bursts of violence, self-mutilation, hallucinations and delusions. Initially, this was attributed to stress from maintaining four separate personas. Later, it appeared that Spector was actually suffering from multiple personality disorder that had manifested in his four different roles. Spector's mental health issues and refusal to seek treatment alienated him from his friends and teammates.

He became obsessed with his worship of Khonshu, at times a nurturing and supportive presence, at times a demonic and abusive deity who demanded Spector isolate himself and give up anything but his Moon Knight exploits.

Due to many different writers having written Moon Knight, there is no single version of what Moon Knight's mental health and religious situation actually is. Some writers wrote Moon Knight as a 'normal' person who is under strain from three secret identities and a superhero persona. Some wrote Moon Knight as suffering from multiple personality disorder. Some wrote Moon Knight as a near zealot in his worship of the abusive god Khonshu.

Some wrote Moon Knight as a good-humoured, pleasant hero supported by the loving god Khonshu. Some wrote Moon Knight as being dominated by Khonshu, then overcoming Khonshu. Some writers implied that there is no Khonshu, that Khonshu is merely a hallucination experienced by a deeply troubled superhero.

The 2017 run of MOON KNIGHT by Warren Ellis and Brian Wood (both now disgraced sexual harassers who are unemployable) had Moon Knight change his costume into a white suit and present him as a consulting detective to police on offbeat crimes. It was revealed that Khonshu was no god, but an interdimensonal entity that had 'colonized' Spector's brain and manifested in inconsistent ways that were Spector's interpretation of a pan-dimensional being.

Then came the Jeff Lemire run you read where Moon Knight is in a hallucinatory, unreal, dreamlike prison which he identifies as Khonshu trying to reassert total control of his psyche. This time, Spector finally defeats the Khonshu influence on his brain once and for all, declaring that he is in control of his own future, not Khonshu. "I am Marc Spector. I am Steven Grant. I am Jake Lockley. And we are going to be okay. We are going to live with who we are. We are Moon Knight. And we never needed you," Spector tells Khonshu, casting out this entity / demon / god / whatever from his mind once and for all.

In the next volume by Max Bemis, Moon Knight is once again fighting crime with Khonshu whispering in his ear and writer Bemis tweeted, "Everything in the last arc took place in Marc’s Head or as an abstraction. Reconciling his illness left Marc able to reappropriate Khonsu." And so, we are right back where we were before.

I feel that most people who talk about Moon Knight try to render all of the above as a coherent history and that's simply not the case. Moon Knight is a character where writers have rarely been able to sync up their approach, so there are a lot of inconsistencies.

Ah, comics. Love talking about them, can't ever recommend them.

1,565

(934 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

i really enjoyed HAWKEYE.

It was longer than needed, but I liked spending extra time with Kate Bishop and Clint Barton and Yelena because they were hilarious. The stakes of the story were extremely low, but it was hilarious that Clint's only meaningful goal was to get home for Christmas while knowing that they'd just shrug if he didn't make it.

Yelena was never at any point a credible threat to anyone other than the anonymous henchmen, but her relationship with Kate was so hilarious that I didn't mind. The entire storyline of Ronin massacring criminals is played so lightly that it might as well have never been a plot element, but it was terrific catalyst for the plot and Kate stumbling into Clint's life due to the Ronin costume was so hilarious that I enjoyed it.

The Tracksuit Mafia were ineptly unthreatening but so hilarious that I was fine with it. Wilson Fisk was a complete cipher defined more by his Netflix appearances than anything he did onscreen in HAWKEYE, but the sight of Kate fighting this mountain of a man was so hilarious that I was okay with that too.

I can't claim HAWKEYE is good, but it's really funny and I will excuse anything if it makes me laugh.

In the 2012 movie JACK REACHER, Tom Cruise plays an interesting variant on a Quinn Mallory type character. Cruise's Jack Reacher is an image of what Quinn might have been had he decided to enlist in the army instead of going into physics for his graduate studies.

Jack Reacher is like Quinn if Quinn, rather than studying science, studied violence and human frailty, developing a genius-level ability to break human beings bone by bone, weakness by weakness.

Cruise's Jack Reacher is former US Army Criminal Investigation Command, a military police officer who resigned to drift across America, rootless and friendless. Wandering from city to city, town to town, Reacher habitually runs afoul of criminals and uses his lethally ruthless combat skills, investigative genius, brutal improvisation and razor-sharp reflexes to overcome every situation of threat and danger.

The 2012 movie is not a failure. Tom Cruise excels at playing a man of unique skills who has abandoned civilian life and military life to be alone, who keeps entering deadly situations that call for his talents. Cruise's Reacher is impatient with normal-speed thinkers, able to outthink and outwit every enemy, solitary and detached, remote and absolutely riveting to watch onscreen. Jack Reacher is a cocky superhuman with no job and no home, travelling randomly across America, looking for trouble. McQuarrie's brutalist sense of action and minimalism led to him directing Cruise in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 5, 6, 7 and 8.

Due to McQuarrie being occupied MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, the 2016 JACK REACHER sequel was not directed by Christopher McQuarrie but instead Edward Zwick (THE LAST SAMURAI). The sequel, JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK somehow manages to be a failure despite having a great director, Tom Cruise, Cobie Smulders and the brilliant young actress Danika Yarosh. It's very odd how NEVER GO BACK has all the right ingredients to make a great movie but somehow can't get its act together.

The first issue is the rendering of Reacher in this sequel. For whatever reason, Zwick's direction and script soften the Reacher character from McQuarrie's version. From the first scene, Reacher has a warm chemistry with Cobie Smulders' Major Susan Turner, an army officer who has been making use of Reacher's talents in a strictly over-the-phone relationship that's gone from professional to romantic. There's a tenderness to Cruise and Smulders only ever talking over the phone about the investigations on which Reacher is assisting her and Reacher admits that he is deliberately drifting across America towards her so they can meet in person.

Romance is something that needs to be earned for the distant, aloof Reacher character of the first film and NEVER GO BACK doesn't earn it, instead using it as the starting point. The bulk of the movie is spent with Reacher, Turner, and a teenaged girl, Samantha (Danika Yarosh), on the run from deadly gunrunners. Samantha may be Reacher's biological daughter.

In NEVER GO BACK, Reacher, a loner, is suddenly living his drifter life with a woman who wouldn't mind being his wife and a young girl who thinks he's her father.

It's very strange: NEVER GO BACK deliberately mutes any potential conflict and drama for this setup. Reacher's wanderlust, remoteness and iciness are diminished or near non-existent in this film, meaning there's no struggle in Reacher trying to perform these un-Reacher roles. NEVER GO BACK seems to take place over the course of a week at which point all three characters go their separate ways, meaning Reacher's effort to be a husband and father are ultimately irrelevant.

NEVER GO BACK has a great idea -- the thought of Reacher finding himself with a wife and a kid is insane considering the character from JACK REACHER is undomestic in extreme -- but the movie makes it impossible to explore it: Reacher's characterization has been softened to the point where there's no conflict and the movie's timespan is so limited that the film can't explore these ideas sufficiently.

All of Reacher's acidity from JACK REACHER is missing in NEVER GO BACK. His methodical brutality is gone. His frustration and impatience with normal anxieties or idiocy are gone. His predatory intensity is gone. Instead, Reacher in this movie is relaxed with a warm smile, tender and sweet in mannerism and demeanor -- and is almost a different person. It's unclear why this character with his genial easiness is a willful drifter who never sticks around.

The film is nicely shot. The performances are strong. The individual scenes are always compelling. But the movie never comes together and the script feels like an unrefined first draft in need of revision to fully master the Reacher character and explore the awkward situations within the story. And the problem is likely caused by two deficiencies.

The first is that Christopher McQuarrie has a certain brutalist approach to action both as writer and director for JACK REACHER. In contrast, Edward Zwick is a thoughtful, deliberate, gentle creator whose lack of extremity is completely mismatched to a character like this. He's a good filmmaker, he's just the wrong one for Jack Reacher. It's obvious that McQuarrie understood how to direct Tom Cruise to play Reacher, how to strip down Cruise's charisma to a lean, result-oriented, militaristic character -- while Zwick is leaving Cruise to his own devices and Cruise doesn't understand how to play Reacher without McQuarrie.

And the second is that NEVER GO BACK is not the right story for a feature film; the concept requires a TV show with a season of episodic exploration of how Reacher, an isolated, solitary man now has a wife and a kid.

It's interesting: after this sequel, novelist Lee Child, creator of the Jack Reacher character, triggered a termination clause in his contract to end his agreement with Tom Cruise's movie studio. It's rare for an author to have this kind of control or to exercise it, but Child wanted no further films with Reacher from this studio or with Tom Cruise playing the character. He shopped the TV rights to Netflix and finally, Amazon Prime.

I assume that the new REACHER TV show on Amazon Prime with Alan Ritchson (Aquaman from SMALLVILLE, Hawk from TITANS) will probably turn out better because it's a TV show. Of course, Ritchson's depiction of this character may be totally unlike any image of Quinn Mallory that I have in my head.

Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada. Her address is -- well. You don't need to know that!

1,568

(1,683 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

I last heard that Wallis Day was filming a movie in Tunisia and hasn't been anywhere near Vancouver in months. Narratively -- I think it makes sense to let Javicia truly be the lead of BATWOMAN for Season 3.

But looking back now -- I think that the writers probably could have transitioned from Rub Rose to Wallis Day in a Season 2 premiere.

They kept using Ruby Rose's photograph throughout Season 2. Since they had the rights to her image even if they didn't have Rose herself, they did have a way of transitioning from Rose to Wallis Day, but it would have been *extremely* difficult.

They could have rewritten the original Season 1 finale into a Season 2 premiere.

2.1- "The Death of Kate Kane"
Opening scene: 'Bruce Wayne'/Hush gets the Kryptonite bullet for Alice. He doesn't encounter Kate because Kate hasn't taken off the Batsuit or gone to Wayne Tower in weeks: she is relentlessly hunting the Arkham escapees.

When we see Batwoman, she's in full costume, masked, played by Kelli Victoria Scarangello (Ruby Rose's stunt double).

https://i.ibb.co/nknYX8D/bat.jpg

Kate doesn't speak without using the Batwoman voice changer and she refuses to take off the mask: she has buried herself in the Batwoman persona due to her grief over her father's betrayal of Batwoman.

When Jacob Kane calls Kate, she picks up but won't speak. Jacob says he knows she's angry at his public decision to hunt Batwoman down but says he's doing his job. Batwoman doesn't answer.

Batwoman is tracking down another Arkham escapee, but when the Crow agents try to arrest her, the escapee gets away. Batwoman is furious . Luke, Mary and Julia urge her to come back to the batcave, take off the costume and address the situation with her father, reveal her identity -- and Batwoman refuses, growling in her vocoder-deepened voice that the problem isn't Kate Kane and Jacob Kane. The problem is the Crows and the Crows are going down tonight.

At this point, Alice delivers the Kryptonite bullet to Jacob in her personal revolver of choice, remarking that Batwoman is their shared enemy.

Batwoman sets a trap for all the Arkham escapees, luring them with false messages saying that there is a stockpile of weapons in an old warehouse that they could use to rule the city. She leaks the messages to the Crows, lets the Crows and the escapees fight it out and batlines Jacob out of the fight.

She snarls at Jacob: who the hell does he think he is to come after her? She notes that below them, the Crows are losing against the escapees. Jacob spits that Batwoman lured his men into a trap; she's responsible for every Crow who dies below. We see Sophie in mortal peril below.

Batwoman triggers a flood of thickening foam that encases and immobilizes everyone on the ground floor, Crow and criminal alike.

She tells Jacob that the Crows are useless, the police are inadequate, Batman is gone: there's only Batwoman and the incompetent Jacob Kane. Jacob strikes Batwoman. Batwoman tries to defend herself but pulls her punches.

Jacob remarks that she seems to be a little soft today and Batwoman breaks his nose. She recoils, horrified and what she's done to her father.  She tries to batline away, Jacob tackles her and her grappling hook punctures a gas line. She throws Jacob off, Jacob draws his standard sidearm, Batwoman throws off his aim and the shot triggers an gas fire.

Jacob descends to ground level to try to dig his people out of the hardened foam before the fire hits them. Batwoman sets off another chemical charge to desolidify the foam so that everyone can escape. But Jacob doesn't leave, pursuing Batwoman deeper into the burning building. They fight in the flames, Batwoman beats him down. From the floor, Jacob pulls out the revolver with the Kryptonite bullet and shoots to kill. Batwoman collapses. Jacob peels off her mask.

CUT TO: A shot of Ruby Rose unmasked, lying on the ground of the warehouse. This is unused footage from some previous episode I don't remember when Kate was unmasked and unconscious and in the suit. But surely it exists.

Jacob is horrified. Backs away several steps in shock and denial. It can't be Kate. It has to be a trick. "It can't be -- " he says. But then we stay on Jacob's face and hear Kate say, "Dad," in a reused audio clip from... again, I don't remember. But surely it exists.

Jacob turns to the warehouse exit, runs away from Kate and screaming that he needs help. Moving farther away from her, hoping his cries will be heard. Then he turns back towards Kate, starts to close the distance from them as she bleeds out. Jacob babbles that he's sorry  --

But then a portion of the ceiling collapses between him and Kate. Jacob rushes forward anyway, but then arms grab him behind -- it's Sophie. He tries to fight her off but she drags him out of the burning warehouse and Kate just before the building is consumed in flame with Kate Kane inside.

2.2 - "Burial"
Kate's body is missing, never recovered from the wreckage. The city erupts into chaos without Batwoman and Jacob is forced to join the bat-team of Luke, Mary, Julia and Parker to contain the situation. They gather at Kate's funeral and Jacob begs God to forgive him.

However, at the end, we find out that a False Face Society member was trapped in the warehouse too; he dug Kate out; the Kryptonite bullet was partially deflected by Kate's lead-lined wrist-gauntlet, going through her body and missing any vital organs. She survived and was brought to Black Mask and is unrecongizably scarred and now played by Wallis Day.

2.3 - "Batwoman Reborn"
The city is attacked and Batwoman reappears to save the day -- but it's a Batwoman with a damaged costume and barely any of the red wig. Batwoman returns to the Batcave, surprising Julia, Mary and Luke. Julia says the real Batwomanis dead and fights this supposed-impostor, but recognizes that this Batwoman has the same fighting style as Kate Kane.

She unmasks and it's Wallis Day, whom the characters recognize as Kate. She looks a little different and all the tattoos are gone. All her skin has regrown new and shifted a little. They question her and she has all of Kate's memories up to the fire. Kate says she doesn't remember how she was healed from her injuries or why her face isn't quite the same.

We later learn that Black Mask healed her body and has programmed a sleeper personality into Kate's mind to be triggered at the right point in his plan for revenge against Batwoman and Gotham City.

2.4 - "Unworthy"
'Bruce Wayne' returns and accuses Kate of being an impostor with poor plastic surgery trying to steal the Wayne fortune. He has her ousted from Wayne Enterprises. He then tells Kate he knows she's the real Kate, but that she was a failure as a superhero in every way and that she is unworthy to be Batwoman.

He shuts her out of the cave; he files for damages against Kate for mishandling his company and triggers a clause in her contract which will drive her to bankruptcy in having to repay all of Wayne Enterprise's costs. Kate is shattered. All she has left is her damaged, burnt, ragged Batwoman suit.

2.5 - "Deficient"
A destitute and homeless Kate tries to keep fighting crime on a budget of $15 a week, wearing an increasingly worn Batwoman costume without any of her gadgets. Due to her injuries and missing memories, Kate is unable to summon her former drive for combat or aptitude for danger. She realizes she no longer has the skill to be Batwoman. Kate is nearly killed and then Jacob Kane saves her.

2.6 - "Prodigal"
Kate confronts her father, blaming him for destroying Batwoman. She has lost everything: she has even lost her face and her voice. Jacob says that he was wrong to hunt down Batwoman. Jacob says that he hated Batwoman because he didn't have the full story; he does now and he's proud of his daughter. Any father would be. Anyone would be proud for Kate to carry their mantle and name.

Kate regroups and realizes that the Wayne who disowned her and threw her out cannot be the real Bruce Wayne.

2.7 - "Unmasked"
Kate realizes that Hush is impersonating Wayne as part of a twisted mindgame from Alice. She defeats him and reclaims the right to wear the suit (and for Wallis Day to wear it after Ruby Rose). For the first time, Wallis Day suits up in full as Batwoman.

This way, we don't just slot Wallis into Ruby Rose's costume and pretend there's no difference. Instead, the Wallis-version of Kate has to go through six episodes of hell before she gets to wear it.

Episodes 8 - 16 have Kate continuing to crime crime and investigate her mysterious recovery. At times, she is haunted by images of a duplicate Kate (with her new face) mocking her, telling her she's not good enough. She also reveals to the public that due to a motorcycle accident, she's had to have reconstructive surgery and was misreported as deceased.

We resume the stories that we would have with the Rose-version of Kate. And in episode 17, Black Mask triggers the sleeper programming and 'replaces' Kate with the Cersei Sionis personality, the mocking shadow in her psyche who now becomes the dominant personality.

And in episode 18, Mary and Luke find a way to restore the full Kate personality and we go from there into Season 3.

**

That said, I really like Season 2 of BATWOMAN as it aired and Ryan Wilder is wonderful. And I don't find fault with the show for refusing to recast Ruby Rose in this manner and only being able to ease into it later and ultimately deciding to have Ryan be the star going forward.

It was an impossible situation and they handled it really well. The fact that they didn't handle it as I would have is not a valid criticism.

1,569

(140 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

Serinda Swan, who played Zatanna on SMALLVILLE, was one of the worst actresses I'd ever seen, performing a stilted, overposed character who seemed more like a shop window dummy than a human being. I could always see Swan thinking how to best frame her body for the camera instead of behaving like a person.

I recently saw Swan in the new series CORONER where she plays a medical examiner who has experienced some severely traumatic events. Swan's performance is riveting and sincere; she plays a panic attack with such gnawing agony. Her acting is incredible and because she's cut her hair short and is dressing like an adult professional instead of a comic book cosplayer, she's almost unrecognizable.

My actress friend tells me that a lot of what I describe of Swan's acting is something male directors often ask female performers to do and it's possible that Serinda Swan was always an amazing actress but getting terrible direction until now with CORONER.

**

Finally got around to watching a few episodes of Kristin Kreuk playing a police detective in BEAUTY IN THE BEAST and oh my goodness, Kreuk's ability to sell non-superpowered fight scenes is quite impressive.

1,570

(1,683 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

PEACEMAKER wasn't really on my radar! I am also not up to speed with STARGIRL, SUPERMAN AND LOIS and I only got to episode 7 of this year's LEGENDS. Will catch up next weekend!

I have been watching BATWOMAN and very pleased... although I will, of course, perpetually feel a longing for these stories to feature Kate Kane (whether Ruby Rose or Wallis Day) instead of Ryan Wilder. But the writers have made the best of what they have and Javicia Leslie is terrific.

The only thing that doesn't quiet work for me -- while Ryan and Sophie have great chemistry, it's unsettling to me that Ryan has been given Kate's suit, Kate's team, Kate's apartment, Kate's company and now Kate's girlfriend which brings me back to thinking this would all make more sense if it were Kate in these stories; if they had simply recast Kate with Wallis Day in the Season 2 premiere and played out the original script but kept Kate in-costume, shown her unmasked briefly with a shot of Ruby Rose from Season 1 (they still had the use of her image despite Rose's departure) -- and then had her severely burned to explain why the tattoos are gone when Wallis Day takes over and why her face is a little different after reconstruction.

Dear Microsoft Security Team:

Please do not hire Temporal Flux. He has QUANTUM LEAP pitches to work on.

Dear QUANTUM LEAP reboot writing staff.

Please hire Temporal Flux.

1,573

(23 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

I wonder if Mill Creek were obligated to hand over to Universal whatever DVD files they produced for ownership purposes. I wonder if Peacock took whatever was most recent in Universal's digital archives for streaming, unaware or uncaring as to whether or not the most recent was what was best.

(This is not an invitation for you to send me phone numbers and email addresses and map coordinates to contact NBCUniversal's home video department. I swear to God, if you do that again, I will jump into an interdimensional vortex with Henry and Ryan and disappear forever.)

1,574

(23 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

One question would be: who produced the Mill Creek DVD files? Obviously, Mill Creek set up the disc images, but who compressed them to the point of fitting 7 - 8 episodes onto one disc? Did Universal deliver their original DVD files for Mill Creek to compress? Or did Universal's home video department receive the file size limits and hand them over? And could Peacock have simply been given the most recent versions which were then run through the standard process for SD h.264 streaming?

1,575

(23 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

I don't know how Peacock got where they did, but the screencaps you're showing look like compressed MPEG-2 that's been re-encoded as compressed h.264.

1,576

(23 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

Thanks, RussianCabbie!

These look like the Mill Creek files to me but run through h.264 compression (for streaming) at a low bitrate for SD content. This reduces data layers of noise/grain to make the file smaller.

The Pilot and "El Sid" are, on Universal DVD, two of the *better* presented SLIDERS episodes. The Pilot's 35mm film origins came through clearly and it looks like it was edited on film. "El Sid," while lacking the same fine detail as the Pilot, has good levels of edge contrast thanks to being edited on the industry standard of digital videotape. I have actually never seen "The Dream Masters," but Season 3 looked sharp on Universal DVD. On Peacock, all three look blurry and smeared.

As a result, details like Quinn's flannel shirt and Arturo's beard have become a blur.

It looks to me like Peacock used the Mill Creek files. But where the DVDs use MPEG2 compression (which creates the compression noise artifacts on the Mill Creek discs), streaming services put SD TV shows through h.264 compression at a low bitrate. h.264 compression doesn't generate noise artifacts; it blurs noise and grain for smaller file sizes. You get this if you stream Netflix in low quality and it looks like Peacock did this with SLIDERS as it's an SD show.

"Summer of Love" seems to have been subjected to the same h.264-type compression, but because the original video master started and finished as a blurry mess, the compression has proven irrelevant; there wasn't much to further smooth and smear in the compression.

1,577

(23 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

Where are the screencaps?! How can you let me down after everything!?

:-)

1,578

(23 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

Good to hear that the Sci-Fi Channel years are faring well on Peacock.

How does the pilot look? And episodes 2 - 9? And Seasons 2 - 3?

On DVD, the pilot looks amazing, the eight episodes after that look terrible, Season 2 looks okay, Season 3 looks great, and Seasons 4 - 5 are excellent standard definition video.

It's a shame that the best episodes of SLIDERS have terrible to average quality aside from the pilot whereas the worst in creative quality look the best visually.

1,579

(23 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

I don't have Peacock. Does anyone with Peacock find the quality to be "near-HD"? (I watched SAVED BY THE BELL through a temporary Stack subscription in Canada.)

The DVD compression for SLIDERS on the Universal discs was not particularly high for a DVD release. I previously said it was; I was mistaken.

Seasons 2 - 3 look fine as 35mm film transferred to 540 line digital videotape, Seasons 4 - 5 look good as 16mm film transferred to 540 line digital videotape.

The blurriness of Season 1's second to ninth episodes is not from DVD compression; the low-compression SD blu-ray release from Germany is even blurrier. The problem is that the film was transferred to low resolution videotape for editing and special effects and with incorrect interlacing on "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days," "Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw"; the even and odd fields were swapped by mistake and created jagged edges, flickering lines and increased blur when DVD and blu-ray players attempt to deinterlace the image.

The SD blu-ray of the Season 1 episodes, while detelecined to remove the interlacing errors, is blurrier because it's a 540i PAL format which was produced by Universal simply stretching the video format from 480i to 540i and changing the framerate. In contrast, the Season 2 - 5 episodes, transferred from film to high fidelity SD digital videotape for editing and effects, retain much of the film grain quality of the video images thanks to low-compression SD files in the high capacity blu-ray format.

The pilot looks really sharp and defined in the Universal DVD, moreso than any subsequent episode. Seasons 4 - 5 may look superficially sharper, but that's due to larger 16mm film grains adding high edge contrast when downscaled to SD. The pilot, when reviewed through the magnifying glass of AI upscaling, is so crisply defined that I wonder if the pilot episode were actually edited on 35mm film, being a higher budgeted production than the series that followed and designed specifically to sell a weekly series to networks.

1,580

(3,555 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

Interesting political commentary from Democrat strategist James Carville on midterms and Joe Manchin being better than the alternative.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics … atic-party

1,581

(23 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

I find this difficult to believe given everyone else's descriptions of poor video quality on Peacock.

I think it's likely, of course, that the Sci-Fi Channel episodes look better than the rest due to Seasons 4 - 5 being filmed on 16mm film stock with larger film grains that retain detail when downscaled to 480p for digital videotape editing in the late 90s.

1,582

(3,555 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

I was carefully noncommittal and neutral on the subject of cryptocurrency until Temporal Flux said he thought it was stupid at which point it became clear that cryptocurrency is the most obvious scam ever perpetrated on a public that should know better at this point.

Reportedly, one bitcoin transaction requires 1,173 kilowatts of energy and creates half a ton of CO2 emissions (907,185 grams).

One email requires maybe 0.3 kilowatts of energy and creates about four grams of CO2 emissions.

Cryptocurrency is highly volatile and insecure, easily inflated by its perpetrators to an artificial high to sell off at which point its value will crash. There is no regulation whatsoever. And it represents nothing beyond how much energy you can waste in pumping electricity through an array of computers.

Although it does make me wonder how Quinn Mallory would use blockchain technology productively, maybe to perfect Rice-A-Roni.

1,583

(89 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

How would Temporal Flux write a SLIDERS story satirizing NFTs?

I don't know how; I just know that it would be awesome. :-)

1,584

(3,555 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

The lead actor of GOTHAM, Ben McKenzie (Gordon) has a regular column on Slate.com regarding cryptocurrency and celebrity endorsements of cryptocurrency and celebrity sales of non-fungible tokens.

McKenzie thinks it's a massive scam and that celebrities are leveraging their followings for a quick buck that could leave their fans defrauded and financially devastated.

https://slate.com/author/ben-mckenzie

Well, with MAGYVER, Richard Dean Anderson thought the reboot was garbage (and it did take about half a season to figure itself out). He refused to be involved with the MACGYVER reboot despite the intense wish that he join the show either as MacGyver 2016's father or mentor. In QUANTUM LEAP's case, Scott Bakula is clearly very keen to be involved in any capacity. As for Bellisario -- I assume he shows up at the office to collect his royalty cheques at minimum.

Interesting. Someone actually sliced open their copy of the out-of-print QUANTUM LEAP: PRELUDE novel and put it online in PDF. Maybe you can make it through this time!

https://freepdfhosting.com/462bcfc5ee.pdf

I have never seen the show and I can't remember Tom and Cory's summary. Were the Evil Leapers part of the same QUANTUM LEAP product, or was there a competing time travel experiment that may have been co-opted by demons the way Sam's was co-opted by an angel or fate or God?

**

Hope QL gets picked up. If Slideheads can't get our show back, we can at least be happy that Leapers got their show back.

1,587

(698 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

Disclaimer: I despise James Bond and think he has about as much to offer the twenty-first century as the feather pen. His appeal was that he presented a men's magazine fantasy that is based on consumerism, status symbols, imperlalism, the commodification of women, and white privilege.

That said, Slider_Quinn21 is really onto something because the recent run of Daniel Craig movies would have worked a lot better as a TV series rather than a set of feature films. CASINO ROYALE found a take on James Bond that was true to Bond's cinematic roots. CASINO ROYALE presents Bond as a violent thug, an assassin, a ruthless man in the amoral field of espionage whose 'heroism' is that he's employed by the Western world and by (nominally) democratic governments. But then he has to infiltrate a financial conspiracy for child soldiers and Bond needs a false identity. He has to conceal his bruiser's bearing and savage nature in the guise of a wealthy gentleman, a pleasure-seeking playboy, a high society image of masculinity. He has to adopt a secret identity.

This is a take on Bond that (a) presents the (toxic) male fantasy (garbage) and (b) has sufficient self-awareness. And if CASINO ROYALE had been the first season of a TV show, this theme of Bond having a dual persona, a dual identity, and neither being particularly healthy or admirable would have sustained an entire series.

This run of Bond movies also attempted running plotlines: for the first time in Bond's history, his movie had a direct sequel. Bond encounters the mysterious Quantum organization and then focuses on taking them down in QUANTUM OF SOLACE. Unfortunately, due to a writer's strike, the QUANTUM OF SOLACE script was unfinished, unrefined and simply a collection of empty setpieces. The sense of Bond's dual identity was not mantained for this film.  The Quantum organization was not presented with any clarity and it was confusing as to whether they'd been defeated or not by the end of the film. The Quantum organization would have worked a lot better in a TV show.

Then we have SKYFALL which is a great movie that doesn't acknowledge the Quantum organization at all (so we're to take it that they were defeated in QUANTUM OF SOLACE). This movie focuses on whether or not Bond's brand of espionage is still relevant -- a bizarre question because espionage in real life is not a James Bond movie. Regardless, SKYFALL is a great standalone adventure and yet, seems to be building to a sequel: it ends with a recreation of Bond entering the MI-6 headquarters as seen in the first Bond film, stepping past a padded door, greeting Moneypenny, and entering a mission briefing from his superior, M. While not sequelizing the elements from the previous two films, SKYFALL ends like it's a end of a pilot episode of a TV show.

Then comes SPECTRE which really would have worked better as a 10 - 13 episode season of a TV show. Bond discovers that the events of the previous three movies were plotted by a single organization that encompasses Quantum, an organization called Spectre. Bond discovers that this organization is headed by his foster brother, Blofeld. Bond defeats Spectre and Blofeld in the very same movie in which Spectre and Blofeld were introduced, making the supposed scale of their villainy quite small. Had the Spectre organization been built up over a season and then defeated, it would have seemed more meaningful. SPECTRE also presents the love interest Madeleine as a significant and meaningful romance when they barely have any connection onscreen; it's a relationship that would have worked better across multiple episodes rather than one film.

And then we have NO TIME TO DIE which is a TV show's series finale and would have worked a lot better had there actually been 30 - 50 episodes before it as opposed to four. NO TIME TO DIE insists that Bond and Felix Leiter have a close bond of friendship when they barely spoke to each other in CASINO ROYALE and QUANTUM OF SOLACE and Felix wasn't even in SKYFALL or SPECTRE. NO TIME TO DIE depends on Madeleine being the (second?) most significant woman in James Bond's life based on some fairly forgettable romantic scenes in SPECTRE. NO TIME TO DIE thinks that Blofeld is the most frightening demon in Bond's past when Bond was barely aware of Blofeld until the middle of the previous film.

All this -- the dual identity approach, Quantum, Spectre, Felix and Madeleine -- would have worked better as a TV show.

I can't help but think that the lifetime rule is something that could be set aside with a couple lines of technobabble if it's a problem.

What we should worry about, what should take full priority and requires the total force of our concentration: what of the QUANTUM LEAP novels? There were 18 QUANTUM LEAP novels, 16 of which were published after the cancellation of the TV show and the hastily re-edited season finale turned series finale. The final novel in the series was MIRROR'S EDGE, which sought to recontextualize the unintended/re-edited series finale, "Mirror Image." The QUANTUM LEAP book license did not permit authors to write stories set after the final episode, but MIRROR'S EDGE attempts a loophole by taking place immediately before "Mirror Image" and attempted to recontextualize the last episode.

https://quantumleap.fandom.com/wiki/Books

How will they be integrated into the revival? How will the implications of MIRROR'S EDGE on "Mirror Image" be taken into consideration? Do we need to print off some labels with LEGENDS on them to tape onto the QUANTUM LEAP books?

(Never read them. Only ever saw two episodes of the show. Just happy for the fans!)

(And looking on at a distance, my heart swelling with joy for those who have hoped for more leaps and dreamed of more adventures while also feeling my own bittersweet longing for Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo... )

(And pondering if perhaps in this QUANTUM LEAP revival, we'll meet Sam's niece, Margaret Allison Beckett, to be played by Kari Wuhrer.)

(Hey, this means REWATCH PODCAST has to go back to reviewing QUANTUM LEAP!!!)

Recently read the three volumes of STAR TREK: CODA novels. After the NEMESIS feature film, the novels took over all the NEXT GENERATION, VOYAGER and DEEP SPACE NINE ongoing stories and also produced a series of novels that served as the fifth season of ENTERPRISE (the Romulan War and the rise of the Federation). From 2002 to 2020, this was STAR TREK's ongoing storyline for the 24th century and there were no TV shows or movies to say otherwise until STAR TREK: PICARD presented a completely different situation for the Federation and the TNG, DS9 and VOY characters. It was unclear what the novels would do: they couldn't dovetail, they couldn't coordinate. They would have to stop publishing in their current continuity, much like the STAR WARS novels. However, the STAR WARS novels avoided a grand finale and just had a low key installment as their last.

However, STAR TREK: CODA's three book series has the book continuity versions of the cast discovering that reality is under attack from omniversal beings called the Devidians. They collapse timelines and consume the energies of dying timelines and now they've come for this one, the Prime Timeline. The TNG and DS9 crews investigate and soon realize: they aren't the Prime Timeline. They are actually a splintered timeline from the original; the events of FIRST CONTACT in which the Borg attempted to use time travel to invade Earth created an alternate thread of time that stirred the Devidians' interest in eating timelines. This splintered timeline, while originally close to the Prime Timeline (for the remainder of DS9 and VOYAGER and INSURRECTION and NEMESIS) has diverged farther from the Prime Timeline, granting the Devidians more power from their consumption.

The TNG and DS9 characters discover that the Devidians have become so powerful that they can't be stopped; instead, the crew must use time travel to erase their splinter timeline -- and their adventures and relationships and families created since NEMESIS -- or the Devidians will destroy all realities including the Prime Timeline. Many of them are killed off in the course of this mission; eventually, Picard resets reality, erases the novel universe from existence. The NEW FRONTIER books, the SHATNERVERSE novels, the post-NEMESIS adventures, the TITAN series, the DS9 relaunch, the VOYAGER relaunch -- anything published and set after NEMESIS is effectively wiped out of all existence along with the Devidian threat, saving all other realities.

The only record that they ever existed are in typewritten manuscripts containing the text of all the STAR TREK novels written by a psychic author living in the 1960s (Benny Russell from DS9's "Far Beyond the Stars") and this author sets aside these manuscripts as a story he has finished writing. He turns his typewriter to writing the story of STAR TREK: PICARD.

... that is... not the ending I would have chosen, to put it mildly.

Golly! Great news for QUANTUM LEAP fans. I hope the series gets picked up and is a huge success. I hope that it stirs warmth and joy in old fans who have waited so long for their show to return while bringing a new generation of viewers to the adventure and mystery and fun of Project Quantum Leap. I hope their fan communities aren't suddenly beset by miserly whining about how a QUANTUM LEAP revival means that someone won't be able to sell their rebranded QUANTUM LEAP fanfic as original work.

I mean there was no period where Luke and Mara were dating or even hanging out that much. They had the three books in the first Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn where they were at odds, uneasily working together and then apart. Other writers took over the STAR WARS series and there were maybe three to four books where they were peripherally in the same room while some crisis was unfolding.

Then, when Lucasfilm shifted the novel license from Bantam Books to Del Ray, author Timothy Zahn returned to write the Hand of Thrawn duology as a finale to the Bantam era. Luke and Mara spent the first book apart and the second book on a quest during which they decide they're in love and that they are getting married. The entire period of getting to know each other, dating, seeing if they can stand to spend the night together, working out if they would be good together long term -- all that was skipped. They met and worked together, then didn't see each other for ages, then over the course of a couple days, decided they were getting married. And then, the Del Ray era novels (NEW JEDI ORDER and onward) had them as a happily married couple.

I have to honestly say: what romance? :-P

By that, I mean Mara Jade spent most of the Thrawn trilogy trying to kill Luke or being at a cautious distance while grudgingly working with him. She briefly showed up to rescue Luke during a Jedi Temple situation. She had a platonic partnership in some adventures with Luke while Luke was dating someone else. Three years after Zahn's final installment of the Thrawn trilogy, Zahn wrote a two part sequel and the first installment, "Spectre of the Past," features Mara Jade and Luke in separate plotlines. They only meet and work together in second volume "Vision of the Future" where Zahn abruptly starts describing Luke as having romantic feelings for Mara (a plot that has gone almost totally unaddressed before this) and then Luke proposes marriage at the end.

People seem to really like it, but I genuinely don't get it. There are a lot of books with Luke and Mara as a married couple and Zahn wrote none of them.

Well, 'better' is subjective. I am not a fan of Zahn's STAR WARS, but I do respect it.

From 1954 to 1955, J.R.R. Tolkien made a massive splash with LORD OF THE RINGS, a massive book that was so big that the publishers had to split it across three volumes just so they could afford to print and bind it. He seemed to create an entire publishing industry for multi-volume fantasy novels.

LORD OF THE RINGS was still selling in huge numbers in the 90s and Zahn's writing, I would guess, was an effort to bring STAR WARS into this highly lucrative publishing market. His Serious writing and Serious tone and Serious military science fiction trilogy were perfect for producing STAR WARS novels on shelves adjacent to LORD OF THE RINGS, DUNE, Asimov's FOUNDATION and Stephen King's DARK TOWER in bookstores while presenting STAR WARS in terms of military science fiction like THE FOREVER WAR and STARSHIP TROOPERS and straightforward military fiction like Tom Clancy's THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER and PATRIOT GAMES.

This looked like the only future for STAR WARS at the time. RETURN OF THE JEDI had come and gone from the theatre eight years previous. In 1991, STAR WARS' ongoing saga was not going to be in film or TV or, it seemed, anywhere but novels. STAR TREK novels, while having a strong audience, were generally regarded as something that only spoke to STAR TREK diehards.

In contrast, Zahn's writing had the benefit of being accessible to a casual audience who'd only needed to watch three movies that had been a globally enjoyed cinematic experience. And from what I can tell, TIMOTHY ZHAN'S STAR WARS resounded with an audience who wanted Serious Military Science Fiction Literature and appreciated STAR WARS shifting into this genre and format. The readership at the time were fine with TIMOTHY ZAHN'S STAR WARS having little of the 1977 movie's high adventure or humour and being more like a novelization of a Stanley Kubrick-directed STAR WARS movie. It seemed to inspire an entire publishing line of STAR WARS novels that were sequels or prequels to Zahn's writing as well as video games and comic books that all used Zahn's trilogy as a starting point.

Timothy Zahn's writing may not have aged well. I'm not a fan. You're not a fan. Subjectively, Zahn's vision of STAR WARS leaves me really cold. But objectively, the massive sales and long-term sequelizing indicates that Zahn's writing style was the right choice for that specific book market at that specific moment in the STAR WARS franchise. Zahn's writing got the world at large to take STAR WARS novels Seriously as Serious Literature when media tie-ins are usually regarded as little more than branded fanfic.

I guess we had to be there to like it if we were ever going to like it.

1,594

(3 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

I *feel* like I've read every SLIDERS fanfic ever written. I honestly don't remember ever seeing Michele in any stories although that doesn't mean there weren't any.

Michele's situation is odd: after "Luck of the Draw," Torme wanted to have Ryan and Henry stay with the sliders for several episodes. FOX refused to allow this, saying it would lock the network into a specific airing order for episodes. Fox didn't even want the Season 2 premiere to so much as mention the cliffhanger. Torme had to fight until finally, FOX permitted him to resolve "Luck of the Draw" in a teaser attached to "Into the Mystic".  This would indicate that Torme would have known that Michele featuring in an episode after "El Sid" would never be permitted.

However, this doesn't seem as clear cut because "El Sid" has a production code of K0802. "Time and Again World," filmed first in Season 2, has a production code of K0801.  "Into the Mystic" has a production code of K0807 and the aired teaser was filmed significantly after the rest of "Into the Mystic" was filmed and edited.

Sliders-expert Temporal Flux reports that FOX set press outlets videotapes of "Into the Mystic" that didn't have the actual teaser because it hadn't been edited into the episode yet and attached a letter effectively saying, "We know the episode doesn't resolve the Season 1 cliffhanger, it totally will by the time we air it!"

I guess it's possible that the creators, having not yet won or lost the battle to have Ryan and Henry in more episodes, saw Michele as another character who could conceivably feature in an episode after "El Sid." However, it's also possible that Michele's arc was meant to conclude with her defeating Sid and free to choose her own future on some other world and that any Earth on which she'd remain would be better than any life with Sid.

There seems to be a factor of rushing and not thinking during this period of SLIDERS. Torme noted that "Time Again and World" was shot first and confessed that it was done in a huge rush with the writing team and crew not ready to start filming again, leading to scripting and visual errors throughout this episode. "El Sid," shot second, is another episode Torme describes as suffering from this urgency, calling it two-thirds of a story padded out to fill a timeslot, and the episode seems to bear this out with too few scenes, all of them significantly overstretched beyond what is needed for the content within them.

The production drafts also seem strangely indecisive about the Michele character and also how the story is to end. Michele's character in early drafts beats Sid into submission with a billy club at the end, leaving him alive (until the earthquake gets him) and then Michele slides with the quartet. It's an awkward situation because it's unlikely Michele would reappear, and a subsequent draft tries to amend this where Michele shoots Sid, but with his dying breath, he stabs her in the back and she dies; the sliders depart and leave Sid and Michele's corpses lying side by side as the ceiling collapses upon them.

This was clearly too bleak and depressing, so the writers settled on keeping the rewrite where Michele shoots Sid and frees herself of his abuse but maintaining the original conclusion where she slides out with the others. It looks like this is where they had to leave it and start filming; it's probable that production simply ran out of time to figure out how to have the character exit the episode and settled for the draft they had. If FOX could be persuaded, Michele could appear in the next episode; if FOX were firm on no set airing order (and they were), then Michele presumably parted ways from them between episodes.

This wishy-washy, middle-of-the-road strikes me as the product of a situation where, as Torme notes, "El Sid" was a severely short, rushed, overstretched teleplay pressed into filming before it was ready.

There's another discontinuity of sorts in "El Sid." This episode continues the thread of "Luck of the Draw" where Quinn and the Professor establish that the timer is already strained to the limit in creating a gateway for four people; introducing additional sliders could cause the tunnel to collapse on them in mid-dimension. "El Sid," filmed second, was continuing a plot element introduced two episodes ago. But it's permanently discarded after this. The sliders and Michele slide and at least four of them are fine afterwards. Wade drives a truck through the vortex in "Love Gods" (which aired before this one and also had extra sliders who are never seen again).

A later script was supposed to have Geraldo Rivera slide with the gang and suffer no harm (from the vortex, anyway). In later seasons, the sliders regularly take extra sliders and drive vehicles through the gateway without concern. I suppose the implication is that Quinn's system, while thought to be limited, turns out to have infinite capacity aside from the (supposed) 60 second window that the vortex can stay open (although it always stays open for as long as the plot requires!).

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

I'm reading the Grand Admiral Thrawn original trilogy in comic book form.  I've heard my whole life how great these books are and how great the character is.  Now that I've seen/read all the Disney Canon Thrawn stuff, I decided to read the original.

I'm 1/3 done.  It's boring and slow and doing nothing for me.  Is it the conversion to comic book form?  Does it get better?

Of course not.

Although it's strange to me that you're only now reading the Timothy Zahn Thrawn stories when you have previously made mention of the Luuke clone that features in the conclusion of the Thrawn trilogy.

I think I was 10 when I read the Thrawn STAR WARS trilogy. And despite being a speed-reader, it took me like a month to read all three. It was dense. It was thick. It was slow. It was Serious Military Science Fiction Literature. This was not George Lucas' STAR WARS, a lighthearted, slambang action thrill ride that sought to capture the high adventure of FLASH GORDON with the thoughtful mysticism of a Japanese samurai movie.

Instead, TIMOTHY ZAHN'S STAR WARS was -- I'm guessing -- an attempt to write STAR WARS like a war novel akin to Norman Mailer's THE NAKED AND THE DEAD (a 1948 WWII set novel). Combined with the military science fiction stylings (but not the values) of Robert Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS and its counterpoint, THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haiderman. And with the mythic self-importance of LORD OF THE RINGS novels (which are grimdark misery after the first 50 pages of the first one).

There was a market at the time for thick, dense, hyperdetailed, Serious Military Science Fiction Literature in the early 90s. The Thrawn trilogy, coming out from 1991 to 1993, was an Adult Hardcover Novel for the people who enjoyed STAR WARS movies as children who were now Grown Adults who would appreciate STAR WARS as an Adult Product.

I've never dared admit this to anybody, but while I respected and appreciated the craft and skill of the trilogy and the concluding duology by Timothy Zahn -- it was quite boring. And when I got to the end of it, I felt like I had read an Important Science Fiction Novel, but it wasn't fun. It was like eating unflavoured protein powder by spoon.

In contrast, the first STAR WARS movie had been a pretty great bacon cheeseburger from an indie burger restaurant, the second one had been an unexpected gourmet prime rib, and the third had been a satisfactory fast food Big Mac.

There were points of interest like Mara Jade and Luke's relationship and the twisted lessons of C'Baoth, but Zahn's prose is so serious, so muted, so avoidant of strong emotion and drama that it isn't that inspiring.

Zahn's favourite character is clearly the cold, academic, aloof, mysterious Grand Admiral Thrawn and Zahn's great at writing distant, unknowable characters and less great at writing more earnest, heart-on-their-sleeve characters like Luke and Han and Leia.

I have a lot of respect for how Zahn repackaged STAR WARS as Serious Literature with the publishers maintaining that brand identity for very long periods between 2001 - 2014. Of course, there were plenty of STAR WARS novels that were just weak media tie-in merchandise, but there were plenty that were good and fun and exciting and comedic and closer to the movies, and there were also a bunch that followed the Zahn model of Seriousness. Seriousness was in vogue in 1991. There was a big market at the time for Zahn's books..

Probably doesn't read well today.

1,596

(698 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

Hunnh. It looks like you can get a month of free Showtime just for signing up. You can watch the ten episodes of DEXTER: NEW BLOOD in a month, right? Well, regardless, email me your PayPal address and I will PayPal you twenty whole American dollars to watch DEXTER: NEW BLOOD and tell us all about it here. My soul simply can't rest without knowing what you thought of the belated conclusion I have never seen to a show that I have never seen.

1,597

(3,555 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

I meant to type that Republicans don't want "universal voter ID accessible to any and all." I apologize for the typo.

I meant to say that the Republicans who don't want "universal voter ID accessible to any and all" are the fascist alt-right wing of Republicans that have come to dominate Republican representation in media and politics, not Republicans in general. I apologize for the... well. I apologize.

1,598

(698 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

I don't know about the rest of you, but I desperately need to know what Slider_Quinn21 thinks of DEXTER: NEW BLOOD.

I have never seen a single episode of DEXTER. I have never even seen the cover to the books. All I know about DEXTER is that

(a) my sister seemed to like it
(b) my writing mentor seemed to love it and
(c) the original showrunner walked off the show halfway into Season 1 and told me how much he hated the show this one time I served him two shots of vodka at the bar that would undoubtedly have fired me if not for me finding another job elsewhere.

I urgently require Slider_Quinn21 to tell me what he thought of it. I will seriously PayPal Slider_Quinn21 the money to buy a month of Showtime (streaming) so that he can watch it and tell us all what he thinks of it here.

https://www.sho.com/order?i_cid=int-dex … lood-23043

I'm not kidding here. I need to know. Will you take it, Slider_Quinn21? Will you rise to the challenge?

1,599

(3,555 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

The issue is that fascist alt-right Republicans don't want "election integrity." They want to use procedural methods to declare themselves the winner of any election regardless of how many votes they get. They don't want voter ID because if everyone could vote, they'd lose. I've also read that even Democrats wouldn't want a full turnout because every eligible voter voting would lead to Libertarian or Green Party victories. I don't know how true that is.

The 'fairness' of American political system was always wobbly from the start: the electoral college was, by design, to grant more power to slaveowner states. This attitude of disenfranchisement is found throughout the system: disproportionate representation in the Senate (two senators per state despite population), and gerrymandering and voter suppression are new manifestations of a very shaky system.

**

Going back to DON'T LOOK UP  (briefly) -- it's hard for fiction to confront real world situations effectively and positively. DON'T LOOK UP, judging from the reviews, confronts the fictional equivalent of a real world situation effectively and negatively. Negativity is a deeply alienating approach for media even though it may be totally valid, accurate, correct and reasonable.

One of my favourite (if flawed) shows, the MACGYVER reboot, attempted to say something positive about the climate crisis. It was, to be frank, a a bit of a disaster where the show in some ways trivialized and dismissed the climate emergency.

MACGYVER's fourth season has MacGyver facing a bioterrorist group seeking to reduce the global population by 50 per cent through engineering a series of environmental disasters. It's revealed that this plot is actually drawn from a secret US government file, File 47, where US scientists and spies engaged in a thought experiment in how human-created natural catastrophe could create doomsday scenarios.

A CIA administrator came to view File 47 as a threat to the US and assassinated everyone except for two scientists who escaped and decided to form a bioterror group, an organization called CODEX, which would enact the plan in File 47.

MacGyver at first tries to stop CODEX, but then finds himself confronting how his work as a spy for the US government has protected a broken system that's destroying planet Earth. MacGyver abandons his spy agency and joins CODEX. However, MacGyver ultimately stops CODEX from unleashing nuclear disaster, yet vows to dedicate himself and his agency to battling the environmental catastrophe that the world is facing. He also presents File 47 to various US government committees to show how the world's ecosystems will collapse without immediate action.

MacGyver presenting File 47 is the Season 4 finale, it's presented with a stirringly victorious musical soundtrack -- and it's absurd.  This is a 2020 episode of television suggesting that MacGyver explaining climate change with a top secret CIA file will somehow spark action. Climate change has been a part of our global lexicon since 2006. Al Gore couldn't get the world to take climate change seriously. It is in some ways insulting for MACGYVER to say that MacGyver and a grim PowerPoint presentation will somehow end decades of inaction and indifference.

The Season 4 finale also has MacGyver taking control of his spy agency and declaring that their mission will to build a better future going forward, implying that MacGyver will be leaving behind his usual spyfi hijinks for something more meaningful. That was the Season 4 finale. The Season 5 premiere opens with...  MacGyver engaged his usual spy hijinks on another mission, business as usual; the climate crisis angst of Season 4 is almost totally forgotten.

It's as though MACGYVER's fifth season is declaring that, upon further consideration, the climate crisis isn't something the show wants to think about any more, that File 47 has completely solved global warming, and the biggest problem on MacGyver's mind now is stealing this week's secret files from tis week's villain.

To be fair (ish), Season 4's finale wasn't meant to be the finale at the time, but the 13th episode of a 22 episode season that got cut down to 13 due to the COVID shutdown. There would likely have been another nine episodes exploring MacGyver's personal crisis if not for Season 4 production being stopped.

There is some unspoken rationale in Season 5 for why MacGyver wouldn't be pursuing his environmental concerns. Season 5 establishes that MacGyver hasn't had many missions since Season 4, that his agency was shut down for the entirety of the pandemic (which is stated to have happened and been resolved over an unspecified period of time). Also, the 2020 lockdowns were a massive, global showcase for how the environment could repair itself without constant toxic emissions into the atmosphere, a far more meaningful display than anything a fictional character in a CBS spy show could have ever done. Later in Season 5, we learn that MacGyver has been trying to use some of the material from CODEX to create a cure for cancer.

But all these are simply excuses. In Season 4, MacGyver was experiencing a crisis of faith, of conscience, of purpose and while he didn't adopt CODEX's murderous methods, he accepted their worldview that the world is in serious trouble and that he was working on the wrong side of the crisis (even though that didn't make CODEX the right side). In Season 5, MacGyver is up to his usual adventures and his journey in Season 4 is forgotten.

Season 5 does end with MacGyver ultimately deciding to stop taking any work from the US government and to be an independent agent, but it doesn't seem connected to the CODEX arc and the show ended on this adequate if inconclusive note.

And yet... it's arguable that having MacGyver fight climate change was simply asking too much of a fictional character who cannot actually affect the real world with his actions in a fictional world, and whose fictional existence will always revolve around spyfi hijinks.

MACGYVER was never going to be anything but MacGyver MacGyvering his way out of various immediate situations with improvised inventions using every day objects. MACGYVER was never going to do anything about the climate crisis beyond making a statement, offering a performative gesture, and then going back to the next spy mission. Which has me wonder if maybe they shouldn't have even told this story in the first place -- although once again, the Season 4 that aired was short by nine episodes, so it's not reasonable to judge the writers harshly for a story they weren't able to finish.

Well, both upscaling efforts had two very different goals. Originally, the hope was that SLIDERS could be upscaled to look like a good quality 720p digital video format. The results for the pilot and Seasons 2 - 5 were very good. The results for Season 1's post-pilot episodes were rather muddy and below the standard of the rest.

The second attempt at upscaling Season 1 was not to make it look like HD digital, but instead to aim for the quality of the Season 2- 5 episodes on the Turbine blu-ray set. Those look like high quality standard definition digital videotape versions of a film image (detailed, high levels of film grain). And because it's a lower bar, I aimed for 1080p so that any scaling would be within the video file itself and not dependent on the TV like the 720p upscales.

A new film scan of the PIlot episode would not look very different from the upscale. The Universal DVD version of the Pilot is so crisp and clear even in standard definition that I am starting to wonder if maybe this one episode, as a pilot to sell the series, was actually edited on film. It is a very detailed film image, significantly sharper in all areas than any Season 2 - 5 episode. It's hard to see it in the original SD file and among other SD SLIDERS episodes, but under the Topaz magnifying glass, the Pilot seems to have far more visual clarity and detail than the episodes that followed.

A rescan of Seasons 4 - 5 would also not look too different from upscaled versions of those episodes because those episodes, shot on 16mm film, had most of the film grain detail preserved in being downscaled to digital videotape.

Seasons 2 - 3 would see a significant improvement from a film scan. Scaling 35mm film to 540 line digital videotape will blur and flatten the image and AI upscaling can only approximate the detail to rebuild it for HD and there will be a bit of fuzziness to indicate that it's an upscale and not true HD.

Season 1's post pilot episodes, however, would see the greatest leap forward because the videotape image is so blurry, fuzzy and desaturated. Even after the Topaz deblurring and bicubic scaling, the post pilot episodes have a faint fuzziness that's dependent on a film grain effect to offset that lack of crisp definition.

That description was perfect. :-)

In order to preserve the grain texture, the files are encoded as H.265, a newer codec that allows for more data at smaller sizes. VLC has the decoder built in. https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

My personal video player package of choice is K-Lite. https://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm

1,603

(3,555 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

Biden is not taking the massive danger of minority rule seriously.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics … ext-policy

His administration has been focused on his failed infrastructure deal; he has failed to rally Democrats to mount any defense towards how Republicans intend to seize power through taking control of elections at the state level.
https://www.salon.com/2022/01/06/the-in … te-houses/

The ineptitude of the original January 6 insurrection to overturn the legitimate outcome of an election will be replaced with competent procedural cheating next time -- and Biden is taking no real action, raising no awareness, governing like Republicans are just normal politicians on the other side of the aisle when they have completely signed onto fascism, delusional conspiracy theories, gerrymandering and violence.

Biden's mild comments on Omicron and allowing the CDC to cut quarantine time from 10 days to five is entirely too relaxed. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory … s-82072671

While I'm not a huge fan of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Canada, he has warned of an extremely difficult winter as even 'mild' Omicron COVID is causing massive work absences that make it impossible for businesses and public services to function and even a small percentage of a massively infectious COVID variant will break the health care system. Undoubtedly, the United States is closer to the peak of Omicron than Canada, but had Donald Trump had the same tone as Biden has had for Omicron, Democrats would have savaged him for downplaying Omicron.

1,604

(3,555 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

I'm sorry to hear that your wife had a bad reaction to the vaccine. I always seem to lose a week to exhaustion and soreness after each dose of Moderna and am hypersensitive to it. But I also have a hypersensitivity to COVID-19, so it seemed best to get vaccinated and be able to see other booster-vaccinated people in person again. Two doses staves off death from COVID-19, but the symptoms of Omicron will be quite severe and it will be contagious, so that's something to think about. My favourite actress had an intense immune system response to her second dose of vaccine due to a pre-existing blood vessel disorder; her mouth burst into sores and she was ill for nearly two weeks before recovering. She needed to get an antibody test before her doctor cleared her for a booster and she hasn't had any issues.

But it's not easy to get over having had a serious reaction that some women have experienced and mistaken for breast cancer.

1,605

(3,555 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

This may not be a problem for some people, but it is really cold here in Canada and when I walk around outdoors, my boat shaped masks (KF94, 99 per cent filtration, perimeter is tight and further tightened with cord locks on the earloops) -- well, it gets soaked from all the moisture coming out of my exhaled air. I'm pretty sure that the water droplets from the condensation are soaking the electrostatic filter inside the mask and rendering it inoperative. Once an electrostatic filter gets wet, it can no longer electrostatically filter. Wet masks need to go in the garbage.

I guess there's a couple solutions: to throw out the mask as a single use product once it's wet (which kind of ruins the cost-effective approach of rotating between masks every day and going through five masks a month).

Another option is to, when outdoors, switch to a cheap surgical mask. Outdoor transmission risk is fairly low and even a surgical mask with gaps would be sufficient protection and it's only like a 25 cents lost when throwing out the worn and dampened mask.

Another another option would be to put a PM2.5 filter (a flat, charcoal filter layer the size of two business cards) into my KF94s and see if that can absorb the moisture in my exhales before it soaks the mask.

I suppose I could also consider not wearing a mask when outdoors, but... I just don't do that. Again, outdoor transmission is negligible; I think it is unlikely to catch COVID outside, but a mask turns the "unlikely" risk into a risk so fractionally low that it's functionally non-existent.

1,606

(194 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

Trigger Warning: The following story / essay content addresses the subject of sexual assault and Wade in Seasons 4 - 5.







This is a story outline for fully addressing Wade's captivity and sexual assault in Season 4 in a fanfic. I unfortunately don't have time to write a full script. I also don't want to write stories about sexual assault, but this isn't my story. It's David Peckinpah's story. He wrote a story where Wade Welles is raped. He made no effort to address the violation and trauma and recovery of this attack on this character.

It's up to us -- the fans -- to shepherd this story to a place of peace and restoration.

SLIDERS REBORN was a six part series of screenplays written from 2015 - 2016 featuring Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo, taking place 15 years after the events of "The Seer." While those 15 years were largely 'off camera,' the story would reveal in Part 4 that Quinn, Wade and Arturo had been resurrected  during the middle of Season 5 around "Requiem" and had been searching for Rembrandt after that, and finally caught up with him minutes after the final scene of "The Seer." It's also revealed that the multiverse was 'reset' after that, erasing the Kromaggs from having ever existed, and the sliders returned to a 'normal' version of Earth Prime by 2001 and resumed their lives, allowing the story to pick up with all of them alive and well in 2015.

The resurrections were mostly simple: REBORN explains in passing: the Arturo of the story is the original left behind in "Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome." That Quinn was actually separated from Mallory by "Requiem" (without Mallory's knowledge); the shock of Wade's fate caused Quinn to become completely untethered, but the Professor was able to restore him using a reversed version of Dr. Geiger's Combine technology.

Wade's restoration is more complicated. REBORN explains: there were actually two timelines for SLIDERS. In the original, Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo had four years of wonderful adventures until the fifth year when Dr. Geiger's Combine experiment ripped all Quinns out of all realities. This altered both past and present, as Quinn and his doubles were so entangled in the history of worlds that erasing them was like tearing a bone out of the body of reality. The previous four seasons still existed in history, but in a warped and damaged state, like a fraying bandage over a massive wound. This altered timeline contained the first two years' adventures but in the wrong order, both kept but abruptly truncated the timelines of the extra sliders who joined the team (Ryan, Henry, Michelle, the "Love Gods" refugees), and also produced monsters and magic and the death of Professor Arturo and the Kromagg arc of Season 4.

The Professor on the Azure Gate Bridge was able to find a disembodied Wade and 'reset' her to her original timeline, which was a way to not have to address Wade being captured by Kromaggs and imprisoned in a rape camp before she had her head cut off and stuffed into a computer. Wade in REBORN is simply alive, and when the subject of the Sci-Fi Channel episodes is raised, she says she doesn't remember anything about it. She only remembers four years of amazing adventures followed by reuniting with the Professor.

And that's what was right for SLIDERS REBORN -- but it has been six years since I posted the last REBORN script in 2016 and I have become greatly uncomfortable with the idea that the rape of Wade Welles is something to be erased and forgotten. Rape victims in real life don't have the option of erasing horrific physical assaults and violations. They have to be addressed with a lot of therapy and recovery and healing and they don't get cosmic resets.

At the same time, I don't know what the alternative was to this mistake because ultimately, SLIDERS REBORN was supposed to be a lighthearted, fun comedy with all the traumas of the TV show casually dismissed or referred to in a joking manner. However, while it was funny to have Rembrandt angst over having had to fight dinosaurs twice, rape is not something to joke about.

I haven't had time lately to write full scripts, but I briefly outlined a Part 7 of REBORN at one point because I made a bet that if Trump won election, I would write a full script for it. The outline for Part 7, "Redemption," featured the character of Colonel Rickman and brought his storyline to a close.
https://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php … 880#p10880

My outline for Part 8, "Reckoning" would open with Wade having a nightmare.

We start on a nightmare. Wade being held down by Kromagg hands. Wade's head is shaved; she's bald. A guttural snarl laughs, "Your lips say no, but your body says yes and it always does."

Wade wakes up in her bed, gasping. Hair cut short but in her eyes. It's the middle of the night. Her husband, Quinn, is sitting up next to her, already awake. He says this is the fifth time she's had this dream in the past week, and it extends by 30 seconds with each iteration. Wade whispers that she's been dreaming of being in a Kromagg rape camp. But how can she? Wade asks Quinn to tell her that it's just a nightmare based on imagining an alternate timeline, that isn't real, that it's just what she's afraid happened in a version of the multiverse that no longer exists and never did.

Quinn says that it happened to *a* Wade and that Wade has always felt so connected to her other selves. He won't ever tell her that it wasn't real. He says Wade should have Dr. Davis give her a physical, that Maggie has network of therapists for people with trauma from war. Wade says she needs to go for a run.

We cut to Wade in a hoodie, jogging down the streets at night. Coming to the Sliders Incorporated building. She walks up to the door and the entrance scans her quantum signature and biosign as Wade Welles and automatically opens for her. We got to Wade's office: the wall of screens is filled with drafts of displays for social worker resources for living in the merged San Francisco. There are photos of Quinn and Wade's wedding. Wade with her stepdaughter, Laurel. Wade with her mother-in-law, Amanda. Wade smashes the photos one by one and erases all the screens, then sinks to her knees, sobbing.

Cut to: Wade in the morning, walking down the street. Eyes red from sleeplessness. Hoodie gone, now in her purple knit sweater. She goes to a coffee stand; she's told that her standing order for cassis tea was erased the night before, not sure why. She tolerates earl grey, tries to pay with her credit card -- but that's been erased too. She raises her smartwatch to contact support, but her watch has been disconnected from the San Francisco network; she can't call anyone. In fact, all her contacts have been deleted as well.

Wade borrows the phone from the stand and calls Quinn, he doesn't recognize her voice. She says it's Wade; Quinn replies that he doesn't know anyone by that name. Wade says that's not funny; Quinn says he's busy and hangs up. Wade calls Rembrandt, the Professor, her parents, Maggie, Diana, her stepdaughter, even Hurley -- they all claim not to know her and hang up.

Wade goes to the Sliders Incorporated building; the entrance doesn't recognize her biosign. She goes back to the Mallory house (which, thanks to dimensional engineering, is bigger on the inside and is an apartment building where all the sliders live together with Quinn's mother). Everyone is out at work and the home is empty. Wade heads for the backdoor entrance to Sliders Incorporated, but Wade is disturbed to find that all her photos and belongings are gone.

Wade gets into the Sliders Incorporated office and bursts into her office. It is empty and unoccupied as though nobody works there. Wade steps out of her office and finds Quinn -- who walks right past her, as though unable to see her and subconsciously walking around her as though his perceptions simply shift her outside anything he can see. Wade follows Quinn, pleading for him to hear her as Quinn enters a lower level lab containing Dr. Geiger's Combine technology which has been held there in storage. Quinn begins working with the machine, deaf to Wade's pleas -- and then a voice tells Wade that Quinn won't hear her.

Wade spins around to find herself facing a Wade-double -- clad in a hoodie. Wade-2 pulls the hoodie off her head. Her head has been shaved bald. Her bearing is shaky and frail. Quinn can't seem to see or hear Wade-2 either.

Wade says this is impossible; Wade-2 isn't real. Wade-2 takes off the hoodie entirely; in her tank top, her bare arms are a battlefield of syringe marks and bruises. Wade-2 says they took turns holding her down and using her; they'd do it every other hour; they'd pump her full of stimulants to keep her awake for it simply to be cruel; that they would accelerate her pregnancies and repair her body, all within a day so that they could do it all over again.

Wade-2 shrieks, "Who are you to tell me I'm not real!? What gave you the right to forget me and erase me!?"

Wade realizes that the restoration of the multiverse in Part 6 of SLIDERS REBORN, while keeping the Kromaggs out of existence, has restored the Wade double from the corrupted version of reality, but just before her mutilation in "Requiem." Wade-2 says that she found this machine in the Sliders Inc. basement, read the files. The Sliders Incorporated system thinks she's Wade, gave her full access. Wade-2 tried to use it to bring the Kromaggs back -- just one, any one -- so she could kill it. But she can't, they have been erased beyond recovery.

Wade-2 then watched her double living her life, untouched, unmarred, having effectively replaced Wade-2 in existence without a single thought as to whatever became of Wade-2 after the Kromaggs. Wade-2 says Wade erased her and stole her life, so Wade-2 used the Combine machine to do the same -- but she didn't fully understand it and all it did was make Wade slightly out of sync with reality. There's a startup and machine core alignment process involved.

Wade-2 says that she faked a task in Quinn's digital to-do list, scheduled him to come down to the Combine storage space to run another check on the machine. He'll start it up, get it running fully -- and Wade-2 has reprogrammed it so that this time, the Combine machine will rip Wade out of reality and replace her with Wade-2. Wade calls to Quinn to stop, he can't hear her; Wade asks Wade-2 to stop, they can talk this through, just give her a chance. Wade-2 says that Wade never gave her a chance and that Wade can't stop the Combine.

Quinn informs Wade-2 that he has deleted her secondary programming from the Combine and merely had it reverse her alterations. Wade is astonished that Quinn can see her; Quinn says his brain, after a previous run-in with the Combine, is now sensitive to shifts in reality. He couldn't see Wade and didn't recognize her voice, but the phone call sparked something in him. He turned on the machine only to roll back anything it had done in the last six hours; it has written Wade back into the world.

Wade-2 sits on the floor, shattered.

Quinn says it might be best to put Wade-2 back in a state of non-existence with the Combine or suspend her in the interdimension without any sense of time passing, sleeping forever. But Wade says no. Wade-2 can stay. They can figure something out.

Wade-2 says she'd rather die than continue to live like this, perpetually reliving her trauma, her assault, endlessly and forever until it's the only memories that stay in her mind. Three years of savagery and violation in the captivity of the Season 4 Kromaggs. But Wade asks Wade-2; what if Wade could share her burden and shoulder it with her?

We cut to Wade and Wade-2 both within the Combine apparatus. Quinn says this could go very badly and that using the Combine with a double has never turned out well. Wade says Wade-2 deserves to have the good to counter all the bad -- and that Wade-2 isn't a double. Wade-2 is Wade.

Quinn activates the Combine and there is a flash. And when it fades, there is only one Wade Welles inside the Combine. She steps out.

Quinn asks Wade if she knows who he is. She says he works in tech support with her at Dopplers. He took her on a spin around the universe. They had so many adventures. The Professor died; the Professor never died. Maggie Beckett joined the team in the third year -- no, Maggie joined the sliders in 2015, 20 years after the first slide. The Kromaggs invaded Earth Prime; Earth Prime is fine and the Kromaggs don't exist. The Kromaggs took her and used her and assaulted her; the Kromaggs never got close enough to her to ever lay a hand on her again. The Kromaggs were going to use her in a biological computer; there is no biological computer. Wade remembers brutality and cruelty, but also tenderness and adventure. She remembers the rape camp; she also remembers never being in the camp at all.

Both seem true, yet the light of happy memories now holds the darker traumas back; Wade remembers them but is not overwhelmed by them.

QUINN: "Do you know who you are?"

WADE: "I'm Wade Welles-Mallory -- and you and me -- we have a daughter and you're my husband."

QUINN: "Wade -- who's doing the talking?"

WADE: "I am."

fin

1,607

(3,555 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

From a TV standpoint: MACGYVER and SAVED BY THE BELL were both hit by the pandemic and had to shut down production in 2020 and resume under strict quarantine protocols. They were filming new episodes during the pandemic, and they proceeded to set their stories *after* the pandemic.

However, most of these stories are basically written as though they were *before* the pandemic despite references to COVID and 2020.

MACGYVER had to do this because its fifth season was using a number of unfinished Season 4 episodes. MACGYVER's fifth season opens with one of these started filming before / completed filming after episodes. A dubbed in line of dialogue declares how MacGyver had to shut down all missions during the pandemic, but they are back on the job now that it is over, having been resolved in some unspecified fashion during an unstated amount of time.

SAVED BY THE BELL ended up doing the same thing: Season 2 is set a year after the pandemic and has everyone declaring that everything is normal now that all have been vaccinated, and while characters lament a lost year, there is no talk of boosters or variants and there is no ongoing masking; the stories outside, of the lost time and year of social distancing, are clearly written in a pre-pandemic world.

In the real world for people who took COVID-19 seriously: people kept wearing masks, understanding that vaccination doesn't stop you from getting sick, it only allows you to get better after getting sick without needing hospitalization, and getting sick with COVID after two doses is still severe and debilitating for at least a few weeks. People were cautious about physical contact with anyone they hadn't known to have been fully vaccinated. People were worried about new variants and the need for booster shots.

This isn't a failure on MACGYVER or SAVED BY THE BELL. Both shows, filming during the pandemic, had no way of knowing how long the pandemic would last or how it would end. They took the view that life would go back to 'normal' because that was a world they could write, perform and render without guesswork outside of the guess that 2021 would be like 2019.

**

I do think we could be near the tail-end of the pandemic. Viruses can't mutate infinitely without losing what makes them transmissible, virulent or vaccine evasive, and for a virus to be transmissible, it has to be mild enough at least at the outset for the patient to be unaware that they're sick and spread it. Omicron is a serious problem even with a lower percentage of severe cases because that lower percentage is still a very big number when it's so contagious. However, Omicron's transmissibility will prevent other variants overtaking it in spread. Those who survive Omicron (which you can without hospitalization if you're vaccinated) retain the immune system responses needed to defeat this and previous variants. COVID-19, for the vaccinated and for Omicron survivors, would become a mild illness going forward.

I'm not a doctor, I could be WRONG.

https://www.salon.com/2021/12/23/some-s … cs-finale/

1,608

(58 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

I've been testing a responsive theme for the last few months on a separate copy of this forum (that uses the same database for posts and accounts). I've activated it today on the main forum.

My intention has been to make the new theme purely additive. The board should look pretty much the same as always on a maximized desktop browser with the same purple gradients of the Sci-Fi Channel Bboard. However, if you narrow the desktop browser window to half the screen width, the text should now wrap correctly within the narrowed window instead of overflowing past the border.

And when viewing this site on a cell phone, the layout will hide some of the menu functions for the reduced space, increase the font size of the posts for readability, reduce the font size of the user names, and wrap the text to fit within the portrait screen of a phone browser so you don't have to pan right and left to read posts.

The original theme is still saved as a backup in case this new one proves to be a problem, of course.

I've also removed the Request Account link and changed the Register link to lead to the Google Form for registrations. Having both a Request Account and a Register button was apparently confusing people, but it took me some time to find the function that let me alter the Register page appropriately.

Yeah, it's awful how neglectful Universal is towards SLIDERS.

Here are the samples of all nine episodes Season 1. It's all the end-scenes (the conclusions of each episode, right up to the producer credits) except for "Eggheads" where it's Arturo's scene with his wife. See the sliders fleeing the Russian mob in crisp HD 1080p! See Quinn and Arturo engage the FBI in... less crisp, approximated HD.

https://mega.nz/folder/b9x0AabS#fvf1LxhBxNaFWgBdtE7ZMg

All the episodes were detelecined to remove the aliasing. After that, the saturation was increased on each episode from 15 - 30 per cent. The Pilot was upscaled to 1080p via Topaz deblurring. The rest of the episodes were simply deartifacted with Topaz but left at 480p and with film grain texture added. Then they were scaled to 1080p via a bicubic algorithm and the codec 'tuned' to retain film grain.

I actually increased the film grain on "Luck of the Draw" by more than the rest by about 25 per cent more than the other episodes. This was to offset the episode being significantly blurrier than the rest, more than Topaz could sharpen up.

It's imperfect, but it's significantly better than what I had before with previous upscales when Topaz didn't have a deblur option yet.

**

It's interesting what RussianCabbie says about smeared text. This is an anomaly in many upscaled video files done with Topaz 2020. However, I'm running an upscale of Season 2's "Time and Again World." The out of focus text of the Lamplighter bar sign looked really smudged under Topaz 2020's preset for removing compression. However, the 2021 preset for deblurring just leaves it out of focus... but still in HD.

Outside of the Season 1 episodes after the Pilot, upscaling SLIDERS is drag and drop. NBCUniversal could easily do it for most of the episodes and use a slightly more complicated process for the problem episodes of Season 1.

I think you're all right, even those of you who disagree with each other.

I don't generally feel that my father has his finger to the pulse of popular culture. Auto parts, YES. TV and film, no. This one time, after watching THE LINCOLN LAWYER, he said he missed the funny girlfriend (Marisa Tomei) from MY COUSIN VINNIE and that she hadn't done anything he'd seen since. I said we just watched her; he asked when? I said she was the commanding ex-wife of the Lincoln Lawyer in THE LINCOLN LAWYER.

I casually mentioned COBRA KAI and he expressed astonishment that somebody actually made a TV show about two middle aged men arguing about dumb crap that happened between them in high school and urgently asked me to help him get Netflix specifically so that he could watch COBRA KAI and enjoy the continuing adventures of two former high school classmates in their 50s and 60s grumbling about who slighted whom at a high school dance.

Just to see what would happen, I mentioned SLIDERS and he didn't know what I was talking about. There's a point to this, I just don't remember what it was.

1,611

(3,555 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

I'd like to believe that people will band together, but that's proven untrue. Look at vaccinations: people accepted vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox and flu without complaint; then white supremacists presented the COVID-19 vaccine as a divisive point and now we have a pandemic extended by the unvaccinated. People believe what they're incentivized to believe even if that incentive is as shallow and meaningless as claiming expertise and unassailability by virtue of privilege, even to the point of psychosis and eating horse de-wormer.

Look at the Center for Disease Control, supposedly run by sensible adults with President Joe Biden in the White House. They have nonsensically reduced the quarantine period from 10 days to 5 not because people aren't potentially contagious after 5, but because, as Dr. Anthony Fauci himself said, companies can force people to go back to work faster and keep the capitalist machine churning.

People are ultimately for themselves; they will only act in their own perceived best interests and those perceptions are often flat out stupid. My suspicion is that we will only work together if enough people can be convinced that what's in everyone's best interests is also their own, but people can have an incredibly shortsighted view. If my country and yours hadn't hoarded vaccines from poorer countries, COVID wouldn't have had the opportunity to continue spreading and creating new mutations.

Movies like TOMORROWLAND give me a little respite from all that and say that it's possible that people will figure it out. Not that they will; no movie can assert that sincerely. Just that it's possible.

To be fair, those shows/movies were big hits and had massive audiences. :-)

I'd love for Torme's revival to happen, but I honestly can't find fault with anybody who thinks a clean reboot would be better. And while I have a lot of problems with NBCU, I wouldn't take issue with them deciding that Tracy Torme's idea is crazy and they are going to hire the Wachowski sisters to reboot the series and cast Allisyn Ashley Arm (Heather from AP BIO) as Quinn Mallory.

1,613

(3,555 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

Well, reading the Wikipedia summary was an unpleasant experience, but it's clearly a story that's meant to be unpleasant. Ultimately, we live in the world of DON'T LOOK UP and we can watch that movie any time we read a newspaper which I do every morning and evening. I have an annual subscription to The Toronto Star, so I have to read it or it's like burning money.

My preference for a movie on such subject matter would be the film TOMORROWLAND, but that's because my preference is to look for something with hope. That said, TOMORROWLAND is only a movie and despite having a character who is relentlessly determined to do SOMETHING about the problems of the world, the movie doesn't (and can't) offer a solution to climate change and world hunger. All it can do is ask people to serve their best impulses and not their worst.

Movies and TV are great for normalizing sexual and gender identities and condemning transphobia and climate change denial, but actually offering a solution to defeating greenhouse gas emissions may be asking them to punch above their weight. It's entertainment.

A pondering.

I find that there are certain factions of SLIDERS fandom that are incredibly contemptuous towards SLIDERS and its hypothetical future because their fondness for SLIDERS never equals their priority to be 'cool.' This is something Temporal Flux has described as fandom always gravitating to "shiny objects" and "beautiful people" rather than insight and information. Such fans -- and they are fans and delightful people -- are more interested in cultivating their 'cool' image in relation to SLIDERS than they are in SLIDERS itself. They define that 'cool' in relation to SLIDERS by declaring that SLIDERS was always worthless trash, they express how they are unaffected by SLIDERS, unimpressed by SLIDERS, unmoved by SLIDERS, and view SLIDERS something to mock and disdain.

Here's the thing: being a fan of SLIDERS isn't 'cool'. (I'm stealing this from my political frenemy, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a liberal in name only.) Being a fan of anything isn't 'cool'.

'Cool' is being indifferent, uninterested, unaffected by external forces like the SLIDERS TV show. 'Cool' is being dismissive and disdainful. Being a fan of anything isn't 'cool'.

Being a fan of SLIDERS is to be sincerely and earnestly engaged with the format of 1990s television and with the specific brand identity of SLIDERS: the characters, the actors, the production model, the behind the scenes circumstances, and being intrigued and interested in how those concepts, characters, actors and production goals might be translated to the modern day.

Being a fan of SLIDERS is to contemplate and dream of what this show would be if it came back today and to know that the odds are not great, but to still find that potential worthy of discussion and consideration. It is a choice to be emotionally invested, to express love and admiration for the sliders, the timer, the vortex, the costumes, the scripts, the world-building -- and some people don't operate on that wavelength. Being a fan of anything isn't 'cool', it's joyful.

Joyful fans are not concerned with "shiny objects," "beautiful people" or being 'cool.' Joyful fans aren't concerned with their image. Such fans approach SLIDERS with a fondness for SLIDERS episodes and love for the sliders.

Look at Grizzlor's photos when he's with Kari Wuhrer or Cleavant Derricks. Is Grizzlor preening for the camera? Anticipating getting to brag? No. He is thrilled and happy to meet these people and to take a brief moment to thank them for how they touched his life. That's a joyful fan.

Yeah, that third dose of Moderna is really hitting my brain right now.

1,615

(3,555 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

Well, I've read the (negative) reviews and the Wikipedia summary and it seems like a pretty good movie to me, but I would never watch it. I'm sure it's great, it's just that if I want to see people being self-destructive and incompetent, I'll just read the newspaper. I turn to entertainment for what is somewhat inflammatorily described as "competence porn." I want fantasies of people being good at things, sometimes at the expense of their needs in other areas.

**

I got my third dose. Pfizer not available to my age bracket, only Moderna. Canada currently has lots of Moderna and not as much Pfizer.

1,616

(698 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

Spoilers. (Actual spoilers for MATRIX RESURRECTIONS this time.)























The RESURRECTIONS Morpheus is a fictionalized version of the original character. While Neo's memories were suppressed, the Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) allowed those memories to manifest as dreams, nightmares and fantasies that Neo would eventually present to the world in the form of a video game. The RESURRECTIONS Morpheus is the code from that video game having received self-awareness and now attempting to serve purpose of the original Morpheus. The RESURRECTIONS Morpheus is Neo's portrayal of Morpheus, but not an exact copy. Liam Neeson's performance in SCHINDLER'S LIST was a dramatic approxmation of Oskar Schindler, but the two men looked nothing alike.

There is a similar situation with Agent Smith. Originally, Hugo Weaving was supposed to play Agent Smith again in RESURRECTIONS, but the scheduling didn't work out and Lana Wachowski was forced to recast the role with Jonathan Groff. Groff is completely capable of imitating Hugo Weaving and imitates Weaving's voice for a few lines, but then stops doing it. The reason: this version of Agent Smith was reprogrammed to be Neo's employer, Neo's somewhat antagonistic partner, so the Analyst made this version of Smith more casually informal, more personable -- but Groff has flashes of Hugo Weaving's relentless, machinelike hatred and loathing, but it's now blended with a superficially pleasant but innately disdainful contempt for human beings. Groff does a nice job of showing that the original Smith is still in there but with the Analyst's amused humour in the mix.

The truce in REVOLUTIONS was that any redpills who wanted to be freed would be freed; any bluepills who wanted to stay would be kept as power sources. The machines would no longer stop Zion's soldiers from liberating humans from Matrix pods, but any humans who chose to stay in the Matrix would remain. This mass exodus led to the machines losing a large portion of their human batteries. The machines began a civil war with each other, fighting each other for the human batteries that remained. The machine civil war reached Zion, except this time, there were machines that sided with the humans and helped them.

The war ended when the machines dispensed with the Architect's version of the Matrix where humans were leaving. The machines transitioned into the Analyst's version of the Matrix where the Analyst made humans want to stay and reject being awakened. The Analyst created a computer dreamworld where humans became emotionally invested in the quests and goals he would create for them. In Neo's case, his quest was to find Trinity, an unconscious desire that manifested through his Matrix video game. In Trinity's case, she was maneuvered into being invested in her illusory husband and children. With intense emotionality applied to all humans in this version of the Matrix, the Analyst maximized the power output of the human brain (the science here is absurd, of course, because in real life, humans don't really generate that much electricity).

After the war, the machines and humans built the city of IO together. It's unclear if Zion was destroyed or if IO is actually Zion, but renamed after the rebuilding to reflect the machine-human coalition. After all, Starling City became Star City on ARROW.

The reason I am very happy with RESURRECTIONS: it is a response to how the iconography of THE MATRIX has been co-opted by the fascist, alt-right, transphobic, misogynistic, white supremacist segment of our society. On this very Bboard (or some incarnation of it), our old friend Kyle encouraged everyone to view a documentary called THE RED PILL which declared that feminism was trying to put white men and white men's rights into a coma. The red pill has become a symbol for adopting a hatred of women and people of colour and vaccinations -- and calling that hatred a form of self-actualization or empowerment (and maybe it is, but only if you're a privileged white man) and declaring that the world is simply divided into normal and abnormal, red or blue.

This clearly enraged the Wachowskis. The egotistical billionaire Elon Musk who built his wealth on gross exploitation of labourers tweeted, "Take the red pill," referring to -- I dunno what, but Ivanka Trump responded, "Already taken." Lilly Wachowski (who sat RESURRECTIONS out) responded, "Fuck both of you."

RESURRECTIONS is a direct effort to repair the damage done by other hands who've taken THE MATRIX's imagery for their own use. With Lana Wachowski's sequel,  'Thomas Anderson' is working on a game called BINARY that's overbudget and a time sink of nothing. Bugs (the wonderful Jessica Henwick) declares that the red pill/blue pill binary is absurd and that the choice between either is an illusion; the red pill was only ever a symbolic representation someone choosing their own identity. The idea that Neo is innately gifted to be the One in the Matrix is debunked; Neo's ability to manipulate the Matrix code is shown to be a peculiarity in how his brain interprets Matrix code that can only truly be exploited with Trinity's presence and Trinity has the same neural aptitude and can have the same powers so long as Neo and Trinity have the capacity to share them. The division between Neo and Trinity is removed.

In addition, the division between machines and humans is removed; machines can manifest in the real world and some like humans and want to create with them. The RESURRECTIONS Morpheus at one point asks Neo if he wants to stay imprisoned or escape and save Trinity, and remarks, "That's not really a choice." RESURRECTIONS is caustic and irritated with those who have co-opted the imagery of the original movie as the Analyst comments that people believe some truly crazy garbage. RESURRECTIONS has Trinity awaken from the Matrix without even taking a red pill; she makes the choice in who she really is. The red pill never truly mattered as much as the choices and identities around it. The red pill was never about becoming one or the other; it was about engaging with reality and pursuing your own answers in your own way as opposed to signing up for one belief system over another.

In terms of storylines -- yes, I'd agree that RESURRECTIONS has left us closer to the ending of the 1999 MATRIX with Neo and Trinity soaring into the skies with a plan to open everyone's eyes to a world without the control of the machines, but with some progression in showing the IO city where humans and machines are now partners and friends. However, it's not really intended as the start to a new story. Lana Wachowski has said that she views this as a single, standalone entry. The film is presented as an epilogue that provides a happy ending for Trinity and Neo who are restored and re-engaged, and I think this was perhaps preferable to REVOLUTIONS having Trinity dead and Neo probably dead / fate unknown.

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

I think it'd be great to get everyone back, but you only need Quinn.

I'd agree with that.

The thing about a film like THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS: everyone who would go to a movie theatre or pull up a streaming service knows who Neo and Trinity are. While Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo are as significant to *me* as Neo and Trinity and Captain Kirk and Sherlock Holmes, that's not the case for the average TV viewer.

I can't help but wonder if these difficulties would make a clean reboot preferable to what Torme seems to want which sounds a bit like HALLOWEEN doing a requel that ignores all sequels but the first. In Torme's case, he would probably consider everything after "The Guardian" to be the unwanted sequels.

I'd agree with Grizzlor that unless Torme is being guarded, he does not see John Rhys-Davies being a series regular in his revival and he doesn't expect Sabrina Lloyd to be involved, although I'm sure he would find a way to get them in if they were available, and that's assuming there even is a SLIDERS revival or that NBCUniversal wouldn't just hire someone other than Tracy Torme to produce a SLIDERS reboot. They can do that. If Lana Wachowski hadn't been inspired to make THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS, Warner Bros. would have hired someone else to make a new MATRIX movie.

1,618

(698 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

THE MATRIX: Spoiler warning but no actual spoilers.














I really enjoyed THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS features the resurrection of Neo and Trinity. I will say, however -- while the explanation for Neo's return is fine since he never actually died onscreen, the explanation for Trinity being alive is nonsensical and effectively non-existent. It is Trinity in the movie. It is not a clone, a digital approximation, a backup file, a simulation based on Neo's memories or an impersonator. It is the same character we met in 1999 played by the same actress who portrayed her in 1999.

I can't spoil how she comes back to life because the movie doesn't actually explain how Trinity survived the events of THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS in which she was impaled in an aircraft crash, her internal organs punctured and pulped on impact. THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS provides an explanation for Neo's restoration and puzzlingly declares that Trinity received the same as Neo.

And yet... it doesn't matter in the slightest. Having Trinity back is far more important than offering a cast-iron reason for how she came back. Trinity is one of the greatest fictional characters of science fiction history and one of the greatest representations of female empowerment. Carrie Anne Moss has a gift for playing women who are intensely powerful but emotionally available; Trinity can beat you into the ground and she has a boyfriend and it's not you, but she would be your friend and ally. And RESURRECTIONS does a great job of bringing all that back and showing that our world is better with Trinity resurrected.

1,619

(3,555 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

Every time someone says they got a booster, I feel a great sense of relief.

My reading indicates that for reasons scientists don't fully understand yet, alternating between Pfizer and Moderna has provided a higher number of antibodies than matching vaccines. I encourage mixing. I've had two doses of Moderna and I'm expecting a third, but I'd be happy to get Pfizer on Wednesday.

On average, early reports indicate that Pfizer and Moderna give you about 75 percent protection against getting sick at all, but after 10 weeks, that drops to anywhere from 30 - 45 per cent. Omicron has unfortunately rewritten the rulebook; earlier, Grizzlor shared a doctor's expectation that a third dose could be the last vaccination needed, but that was only for Alpha to Delta, not for Omicron. However, even if the 10 week wane is true, the booster would still protect you from getting seriously sick, from having to go to the ICU, from being put on a ventilator, and from dying of COVID.

No vaccine could have ever granted permanent immunization. Even if Delta had been the last variant, a third dose would not have prevented people from getting sick from Delta; a third dose would prevent people from dying of Delta.

Vaccines aren't cures as much as teachers; they teach your body how to create the antibodies against a specific virus; they teach your body to cure itself. Anyone who calls vaccination useless because it doesn't prevent infection is either ignorant or lying. Vaccines don't stop you from getting infected; they stop you from getting so sick that you die. This is the case with all vaccines whether it's tetanus, measles, flu, polio, hepatitis or COVID-19.

People in the first 10 weeks of their third dose could still get infected by Omicron; they just have a 70 - 75 per cent chance of never developing a fever or a cough. Michael Rosenbaum caught Delta after two doses of an mRNA vaccine and lost two weeks of his life to fever and exhaustion -- which is significantly better than losing his whole life.

I salute Slider_Quinn21 for doing his duty and protecting his family, his friends, his neighbours and his country.

Just finished watching THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS. Temporal Flux has been very keen on GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE, but THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS is a film that really made me long for SLIDERS as I watched it.

I'm sure it's not a spoiler to say that THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS is the story of picking up on Neo and Trinity, decades after Neo was presumably eviscerated on a digital level and Trinity was impaled and died on camera.

I'm sure it's not a spoiler to say that THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS is the story of Neo and Trinity finding a way back from death, finding a way back to each other, and rediscovering their mission and purpose once again.

I know that Torme wants to see SLIDERS revived like AFTERLIFE with the original sliders passing the timer onto the children, but for me, I would prefer something more like RESURRECTIONS which assures us that everyone who missed Neo and Trinity and kept them close to their hearts were right to do so; that Neo and Trinity have been with us all along; that Neo and Trinity will always come back to us.

But a SLIDERS revival would probably be more of an AFTERLIFE situation. I'm not that crazy.