John Vs. Tracy: This is strictly theoretical on my part: Tracy Torme strikes me as an extremely argumentative person. John Rhys-Davies strikes me as an extremely argumentative person. This is not a good combination of personalities. However, Torme and Davies are deeply passionate people who take their work personally and put their whole heart into every page and every scene, so it was a good combination of talents.
John said in a podcast this past year that he regretted being so adversarial with FOX and the producers. "I should have won hearts and minds," he said. Torme probably regrets nothing but resents everything, judging from his past remarks. I'm a big fan of both of them, but I confess -- I have had two former writing mentors, one like John and one like Torme. Both were brilliant. Both had this unfortunate attitude: if something isn't done the way they would personally do it, it's bad / stupid / poorly conceived / made by a talentless person / done for selfish and self-destructive reasons / worthless.
I don't subscribe to that personally. I believe that every creator approaches their work with their own specific interests, priorities and goals. I believe that work should be reviewed in terms of what the creator was trying to accomplish and whether or not they accomplished it. Torme's goal was character comedy and social satire ("The King is Back"). John's goal was hard science fiction and heroism (like your version of "The Exodus").
Their visions weren't 'right' or 'wrong' -- they were just different. They chose not to see that because having an argument was apparently more important than being good partners who would be mutually supportive and value what each other had to say.
Torme's vision of Arturo, if you read the Pilot script, is clearly not a strong, broad, heroic Englishman. His vision of Arturo is clearly Raul Julia (Gomez from THE ADDAMS FAMILY) playing the cowardly Dr. Smith from LOST IN SPACE. The heroic, fatherly Arturo is a part of the character, but he is buried deep and will take a lot of work to uncover. Torme's vision of Quinn, if you read the Pilot script, is clearly not a tall, handsome football player. His vision of Quinn is clearly more like Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker in SPIDER-MAN 2000 (and Jerry was desperate for that job until Maguire defeated him in auditions).
The result is that Torme was perpetually at odds with the onscreen versions of these characters versus what he had imagined in his mind. With Quinn, Torme was able to adjust things accordingly and was happy with Quinn's hair and wardrobe. With Arturo, Torme couldn't control John; Torme wanted Arturo to be 60 per cent insecure and irritable and 40 per cent fatherly. With Seasons 1 - 2, John got it to 50/50; by Season 3, it was John's preference that took hold: 95 per cent fatherly and 5 per cent grouchy.
Personal Preference: In my view, the uneasy 50/50 compromise that neither John nor Tracy liked was the correct ratio. It's hard to do ongoing character development in 90s TV of standalone episodes, so giving the character both sides in equal measure allows for the most range in each episode.
That said, I confess that in writing my own SLIDERS stories and when writing Arturo, I generally defaulted to John's preference of Arturo being 95 per cent the cuddly grandfather. The reason: "Slide Effects" is Arturo's resurrection and I wanted him to be the father figure in every sense. And SLIDERS REBORN shows Arturo 20 years after the Pilot and I decided that Arturo would be at his most assured, mature, decisive and capable and with sliding having brought out the absolute best in him.
Stephanie: Torme has a fixation on the character of Stephanie that I'm not able to explain. In 2009, Torme contacted a fan site. He wanted to write fanfic. He offered to write "The Unofficial Official Series Finale of SLIDERS" and wanted to provide a PDF screenplay. His story idea for "The Long Slide Home": the sliders, just after the events of "The Guardian," discover that the timer is malfunctioning. Slide windows are getting shorter and shorter. Their next slide could leave them stranded. The timer is soon to give out. The sliders rig the timer to send them backwards through the interdimension, revisiting every previous Earth in all previous episodes, hoping to make it home before the timer fails permanently. They revisit the outcome of every Earth they affected for better or worse. In the course of doing so, the sliders are able to dispense with the Kromaggs and Logan St. Clair in quick, throwaway plot points. The focus is on the sliders.
The ending was open to whatever Torme decided when he got to those pages in the full-length script: they might all make it back home and stay. Alternatively, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo might make it home but lose Quinn; they would return to save Quinn but lose their way home and be lost again but feel heartened to have each other and hopeful that, having found a way back once, they would again in time. Due to health issues and paid work, Torme never finished this story, but in the more detailed outline that he furnished, the sliders are having dinner with Stephanie and her husband while trying to figure out why the timer is misbehaving -- so Stephanie was clearly important to Torme.
Quinn and Wade: The relationship between Quinn and Wade is drastically different by "Luck of the Draw" where Wade seems to be done with her ongoing infatuation/flirtation with Quinn. I like to think that in between "The King is Back" and "Luck of the Draw," Wade realizes something weird about Quinn: he knew she was crushing on him the entire time, he knew she had feelings for him for the entire time they were working together at Dopplers -- and yet, he ignored it and refused to address it, and she doesn't understand why and Quinn is unwilling to explain -- and it's not until "The Guardian" that we learn that Quinn has post traumatic stress disorder that has led to a very withdrawn personality covered by the Jerry O'Connell charm.
Jerry O'Connell as an Actor: My theory about Jerry O'Connell is that he was a naturally talented actor with excellent instincts for performance, but no technique or discipline until John Rhys-Davies trained him -- and once John left the show, Jerry reverted to all of his worst habits as an actor: skimming script pages, only reading his dialogue, delivering approximations of what was on the page rather than what was actually written, not reviewing the context of his character's words, and generally undermining the character instead of inhabiting the role. One of the worst examples of this is "Slidecage": Quinn is scripted to think that Maggie has been killed and Quinn is in agony, thinking he's lost yet another friend. Jerry performs these lines with a hungover tiredness -- which implies that Quinn either does not care that Maggie is dead or somehow knows that Maggie survived when there is no onscreen reason for him to think so.
Another is "Mother and Child" where the script clearly specifies that Quinn agrees with Rembrandt that they have to rescue Wade and says warningly, "We don't have much time." But onscreen, Jerry O'Connell tells Rembrandt, "I don't know if we have enough time" and hurries off camera from Rembrandt, suggesting that Jerry isn't interested in saving Wade and doesn't care that Rembrandt is upset. Having reviewed this scene far more than is medically safe, I got the impression that Jerry was drunk when performing this scene and hurried off camera because he had to throw up.
Jerry's Ego: Why did he do this? My suspicion is that Jerry, overweight when he was a young boy, developed a drunkenly overinflated ego when he became a handsome teenager and twentysomething and became overfixated on his looks rather than his talent, and he believed that being attractive was all that mattered for his career. Most of his post-SLIDERS roles were chosen specifically because they showcased him as an attractive man; he forgot that his popularity through SLIDERS was because viewers perceived Quinn as a sensitive and empathetic man with his looks being present but secondary.
After SLIDERS, Jerry spoke of SLIDERS with contempt and disdain, calling it "very cheap," saying it was a show made "with dry ice and toothpicks" and when asked if he would ever do a SLIDERS movie, he said, "Not a possibility" and refused to discuss it further. SLIDERS was the only reason he had an adult career; he trashed the show while he was in it and he denigrated the show after he left.
Jerry's Redemption: I really like the Quinn character, and it made me really angry that Jerry did this to a character I really care about and look up to. However, as I've gotten older, I've learned more about addiction and alcoholism can be as insidious as any chemical dependency, so I try to focus on how Jerry has changed.
He didn't get fired off KANGAROO JACK, but he was nearly fired because by that point, his heavy drinking and fast food and lack of exercise had caused some serious, William Shatner-esque weight gain. He stopped drinking, devoted himself to health and fitness, and while his kangaroo movie didn't set the world on fire, Jerry returned to the life of a working TV actor, kept healthy and fit, worked steadily, got married, had children and started treating SLIDERS with respect. He did a video interview where he talked about how John was his acting mentor and taught him so much; he said he kept a photograph of the original cast in his kitchen so as to always remember the high point of his career; he said he loved playing Quinn Mallory and missed him and would gladly play him again; he said that SLIDERS was a part of him. He would always carry it proudly and hold it warmly in his heart.
He knows he screwed up. He knows he blew it. He knows that Quinn Mallory is his career-defining role, the character who would have rocketed him into pop cultural immortality. He knows that William Shatner will always be a starship captain and that Jerry O'Connell will always be a slider. He didn't care about SLIDERS before, but he cares now and he's sorry. That matters.
He also called Torme a few years ago, having not spoken to him since Season 3. He was trying to see if SLIDERS could be revived; he has continued to call Torme regularly; he has been talking with John about a revival; he mentions SLIDERS every chance he gets. He got his life back on track by the early 2000s. He's trying to get SLIDERS back now. He probably won't succeed, but he's trying. Trying counts.
This is strictly theoretical on my part.