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I don't currently support any artists on Patreon. I'm thinking about it, but I guess what it comes down to is that I'm uncomfortable about making a regular, monthly, standing contribution to a single artist.

I'm a huge fan of writer Peter David; I have yet to join his Patreon. At $12 a year, the benefits of seeing selectly private blog entries isn't worth it to me. At $60 a year, I get his select blog entries and his family photos... which really doesn't do it for me. At $240 a year, I finally get the content I'd want: entries about writing, a monthly Q&A where I can submit questions he'll answer, a chapter a month of his autobiography -- but $240 is just too much annually.

I would also like to support Eruditorum Press, but for $60 a year, I get progress reports and previews of the material I will later buy in book form. That doesn't really do it for me either.

I guess what I would really want and what I would be prepared to pay for -- for $60 a year, I want Peter David's blog entries on writing and to see the Q&As on writing. For $120 a year, I want the blog entries, the opportunity to submit questions and one short story a month. For $240 a year, I want the blog entries, Q&A access, one short story a month and a digital copy of any of his new books and comics during the year. And for Eruditorum Press, for $60 a year, I want... honestly, I don't know what Eruditorum Press could offer me on a subscription service. I will buy all Eruditorum Press books, so I guess a Patreon could automatically send me any and all ebooks for $60 a year, print copies and ebooks for $120 a year and make sure to publish up to four a year or offer a refund.

I'm not a wholehearted fan of the WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE podcast, but I think their Patreon is great. They release a regular and free fictional podcast. For $60 a year, you get behind the scenes notes. For $120 a year, you get the behind the scenes notes, four bonus episodes, a small item of merchandise, access to pre-sales for the concerts and a 10 per cent discount on merchandise. If I were a bigger fan, I would find this very reasonable.

With this in mind, for MY Patreon:

$60 a year gets you two SLIDERS scripts a year, taking place after the events of SLIDERS REBORN and featuring Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo's new adventures in the restored multiverse with Sliders Incorporated. The premiere has Quinn throwing out his back and realizing at he's over 50 and wondering how he can keep sliding.

$120 a year gets you four SLIDERS scripts a year: two REBORN scripts and two scripts set in a reboot continuity where college student Quinn discovers sliding in 2020 and begins sliding with Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo.

$240 a year gets you personal letters from Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt or Arturo (choose one), one a month as your personal penpals, plus the four scripts.

$360 a year gets you all four scripts and four letters a month from the characters.

$480 a year gets you a podcast between me and Transmodiar as he chastises me for the foolishness of this endeavour and castigates me for writing fan fiction after he told me to do original work. Also, you may commission a SLIDERS adventure of your choice for a script!

For $720 a year, you get to see the cease and desist letter from NBCUniversal when they shut me down for unauthorized use and profit of their property and you get to hear Transmodiar laugh at me when this happens plus all of the above.

And at $960 a year, you get to see me realize that all my writing on SLIDERS has always been a gift. Something to hand over freely to the fans. You see me realize that the scripts, the reviews, the blogs, the message board posts – they are a gift to myself and a declaration that yes, this 90s show was silly and poorly written and badly acted for the bulk of its run, but it was special and full of potential and populated with great characters and it was not only loved with sincerity and earnest truth, it was worthy of love and had its later-era creators given it the attention and care it deserved, it would have been a wonderful show that would have stood alongside THE X-FILES, LOST, MACGYVER, SUPERNATURAL and the greatest and most overlooked TV series of all time, SHE SPIES and at this point, I give all the money back.

("What is SHE SPIES?" It's about three lady spies. It's a tongue-in-cheek CHARLIE's ANGELS with a lot of fourth-wall breaking and self-awareness and hand to hand combat. I'm overexplaining it. Women. Punching! Villains!)

SPOILERS for ENDGAME

I thought INFINITY WAR was a good film, just not for me. I thought ENDGAME was good and I enjoyed it a lot. In comics, Iron Man and Captain America don't ever come to endings, so it was lovely to see them come to conclusions here. The battle sequences did a great job of showing all these heroes from different movies sharing the screen together. Scott Lang's reunion with Cassie was very touching. Nebula is a delight onscreen. Thor is hilarious. However, INFINITY WAR and ENDGAME have perhaps unwittingly raised a moral, sociological and scientific question that it doesn't seem able to address. Should Thanos cutting the population in half be undone?

Natasha notes that the world governments have managed to keep things running. Carol says the universe remains filled with life and planets in need of her care. Steve sees humpback whales closer to cities because fewer ships have meant less pollution. Thanos should have been stopped. The heroes failed. Should they try to change what he did when he's left them with a world that is beginning to heal from environmental damage and overpopulation? Does having the power to repopulate and overpopulate this planet give them the right to do so without further consideration?

It's a conundrum that ENDGAME can't handle because the Avengers are the wrong superheroes to address it. The Avengers are, in reality, fighting for the Marvel copyrights to continue existing to produce content in films, TV and streaming services.

Few superheroes are suited to confront such dilemmas; there are only four who could possibly confront this question and they are Quinn Mallory, Wade Welles, Rembrandt Brown and Professor Arturo. And even they hesitated to come to a definitive answer: in "Luck of the Draw," the Professor conceded the philosophy of limiting population while abhorring the methods to do so.

ENDGAME can't go there and instead fills the screen with superheroes and assures you that it's good. They might have side-stepped further it with a line from Carol declaring that most planets and spacefaring civilizations can handle population just fine and it's just Earth that seems to be singularly inept, and yes, more people means more conflicts, but they all had the right to exist and Earth is just going to have to manage.

The time travel was handled a bit strangely at points. The film does a good job of explaining why taking the stones and Thanos and his army and Gamora and Nebula out of their timeframes doesn't alter the past of this movie, it only brings the pieces to the present day gameboard while creating an alternate timeline that our main characters don't experience.

However, then the Ancient One declares that all the stones must be returned to the moment from which they were taken so that she can resume her job, but it wouldn't make any difference to the modern day Avengers. It's simply a measure to prevent death and destruction in other timelines. That's fine too and explains how Loki can appear in a future Disney show while still having died in INFINITY WAR.

Except, but by that logic -- why is Steve Rogers back in the prime timeline at the end? It's wonderful that he was reunited with Peggy at some point in what I assume is the 1950s. It adds a kind coda to the unfinished arcs of the AGENT CARTER television show, declaring that regardless of what did or didn't happen in the never-filmed Season 3, Peggy and Steve found each other again -- except that would be an alternate timeline that wouldn't connect with our own. The same way there's now an alternate timeline where Thanos and his army disappeared nine years ago. And an alternate timeline where Loki stole the Tesseract and escaped after the first AVENGERS.

Steve should have simply disappeared, never to return -- unless the Steve at the end of ENDGAME actually travelled from his timeline to this one to assure Bucky and Sam and Bruce that he was alright?

It was strange that Gamora wasn't present at Tony's funeral and that she isn't aboard the ship as Thor joins the Guardians; one would think she'd stick with Nebula.

Is Chris Hemsworth contracted to be part of the cast of GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY III?

Is AGENTS OF SHIELD's sixth season going to be set five years after the events of Season 5 the way ENDGAME is set five years after INFINITY WAR? If Netflix hadn't cancelled the Marvel shows, how would they have integrated the five year disappearances into their stories?

Sucked. What a godawful experience. It's astonishing that something built over the course of decades can completely fail to launch and serve its function. I refer, of course, to the cineplex web system for the theatre near my apartment which seems to have crashed and isn't allowing me to book my ticket to a screening of ENDGAME. I'll try again tomorrow.

I'd have to agree that DISCOVERY in the first season made no effort to square its visual representation with the era in which it claimed to exist. Only with the finale showing the Enterprise and Season 2 bringing in TOS elements did the effort come and as much as I liked it, it made DISCOVERY seem apologetically backpedaling.

**

THE BOY SHERLOCK series is an interesting case: it contradicts the Sherlock Holmes stories, but it *only* contradicts them in areas where creator Arthur Conan Doyle contradicted himself. "A Scandal in Bohemia" features Holmes meeting Irene Adler for the first time and is set in 1888. A later story, "The Five Orange Pips," is set in 1887 -- but Holmes refers to having been defeated by Irene in a previous adventure.

"The Final Problem," set in 1891, has Holmes telling Watson about the evil Professor Moriarty and Holmes meeting the Professor for the first time. But "The Valley of Fear," set in 1888 - 1889, has Holmes and Watson discussing Moriarty well in advance.

"The Gloria Scott" claims that Holmes' first case ever was when he was a university student, but this first case is dated 1885 -- except when Holmes and Watson first met in "A Study in Scarlet," Holmes had long graduated from university and the year was 1881.

THE BOY SHERLOCK doesn't match the canon when it comes to Irene and Holmes' first meeting, Moriarty and Holmes' first encounter or Holmes' origin as a detective -- but the information in the stories in these areas is either contradictory or flat out wrong, and I think writer Shane Peacock was using that to his advantage and declaring that the contradictions are there because Sherlock Holmes was burying the demons and traumas of his past.

And I think it *mostly* worked except there came a point when I felt Peacock needed to be overt in explaining the discrepancies. He needed to present the real events between the adult Irene and Holmes, the conflict between the grown Sherlock and the Malefactor-turned-Moriarty -- and Peacock needed to establish whether or not Watson ever knew these truths.

Instead, Peacock ended THE BOY SHERLOCK series when Sherlock was at 17 -- well before the timeline could address these events and 11 years before Holmes and Watson would first meet. Yes, there's over a decade for the BOY SHERLOCK characters to become the Arthur Conan Doyle versions and yes, the reader can imagine how they go from points A to B -- but by ending where he did, Peacock never offered his own answers to questions he raised, and it'll always bother me. DISCOVERY did provide answers.

(A gag order on the name Michael Burnham. Maybe we were better off with the questions?)

The spore drive is something that would have bothered me before, but at this point, we've had transwarp beaming and resurrection blood in the Kelvin timeline suppressed and for some reason, Federation ships never have cloaking devices except the Defiant. It's possible that the spore drive is in development but the technology isn't widely used or restricted to secret levels of application. Transwarp beaming could be a security nightmare, harvesting blood from frozen superhumans could be a restriction based on consent and I guess it doesn't really register to me as a problem. I don't disagree that it is one; I've just become deeply desensitized to this sort of thing.

I was a bit busy last week so only caught up with the last two episodes of THE ORVILLE this week. "Sanctuary" was great, taking on a THE NEXT GENERATION type moral conundrum of diplomatic crisis but unlike TNG, "Sanctuary" didn't resolve the entire situation and relieve everyone of their prejudices, instead choosing a resolution that was tentative, compromised and simply an awkward first step towards peace. I really liked that and it was a wonderful correction on TNG's easy moral softballs.

And the episode of Kelly's past self being transported to the present was great. It was interesting to see the episode as a slightly grim reflection on Adrianne Palicki's career. If you strip away Palicki's glamour and profile, ignore the fact that she turns heads at every red carpet event and has retained her face and figure after 16 years and has had notable credits in numerous franchises (SMALLVILLE, GI JOE, SUPERNATURAL, WONDER WOMAN, AGENTS OF SHIELD), Palicki's career is defined largely by failure.

She was the first Supergirl on SMALLVILLE and dismissed after one episode. Her WONDER WOMAN pilot was a trainwreck. She was a corpse on SUPERNATURAL. GI JOE was an underperforming mediocrity and it was the second one in a row for the franchise. She made a much-heralded entrance on SHIELD and proved so popular with the studio that they shifted her character into a leading role for a spinoff and the network passed.

What it comes down to is that it sucks to be a woman in Hollywood because any man as pretty as Palicki and half as talented would have had at least Jerry O'Connell's number of leading roles. Palicki is a leading-class performer: she commands the screen and can carry and share a scene. The only performer with whom she's ever failed to create meaningful chemistry of some sort is Tom Welling. She's commanding and forceful but with a hint of goofiness for Kelly and as Mockingbird on AGENTS OF SHIELD, she played a seemingly invincible character with the cheerful heartlessness of a veteran spy that could be scary.

She's beautiful, but more importantly, she has the physicality to perform in fight scenes and convey astonishing ferocity and ability and when a stunt performer steps in, Palicki can still sell the stunt as her character. And there's a note of reality when Kelly from the past remarks that she is not in a leading role but a subordinate one, has done noteworthy jobs but achieved no overwhelming successes, and she has fallen short of her goals and dreams.

It's at this point that Wil Wheaton would probably say that the majority of performers go their entire careers without having ever played Supergirl or Wonder Woman or a GI Joe or an agent of SHIELD or a starship commander (if not captain) and many performers certainly don't make a living from their craft. Palicki has always found work, and even if the work hasn't made her Angelina Jolie, there is more to life than just one's professional career. While some people achieve overwhelming success in one life-defining area, for Kelly, it's been smaller achievements across a range that add up to a satisfying life. Kelly may not be the captain, but she is a leader, she runs the Orville well, she's made a difference and not everyone needs to be a star to be special.

The ending was disturbing.

Well, I've been listening to the Rewatch Podcast all the way through THE FLASH and QUANTUM LEAP (albeit not week to week, but I recently finished listening to the backlog of podcasts). I didn't have time to watch THE FLASH and didn't wish to watch QUANTUM LEAP, but I'd actually like to try watching VOYAGERS and writing Tom and Cory a letter each week. I don't know if I *can* because I've been trying to devote myself to REALITY a bit more, but I'll be listening regardless if only because Tom and Cory occasionally mention SLIDERS and every time they do, I feel very happy.

I’d rather not say. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to destroy my archnemesis, split open her psyche, shatter her career and such — but I have a lot of other actress friends and would like to keep the ones I have and find a few more. I wouldn’t want my friends to fear that should our friendships ever take a turn for the worse, I might seek revenge by attacking their reputations or careers as that would induce present and future actresses to keep their distance. Instead, I’d rather they see that this woman upset me, and that my approach is to steer clear of her and when I talk about her, I alter certain details to make her unidentifiable.

She isn’t actually credited as Woman Number Three, I changed the name because I’d forgotten her character’s name as given on the sheet. It’s a generic term I use like saying Brandon Routh auditioned to play Cop Number Three or Bystander One.

I don't remember either. Professionally, I believe that April Fools Jokes are destructive because you can't achieve anything without trust between parties. And personally, this joke is why Transmodiar and I didn't become friends for a very, very, very long time. I missed the original "The R.K. Weiss Lie: Exposed!" prank. I wasn't really active in the SLIDERS community during that time and wouldn't return until 2010 or so, although I did catch one incident where Transmodiar shared a photo of a box that supposedly contained the Sci-Fi Channel's press archives from which he'd gathered some press clippings. Many members of this community quite reasonably declared it absurd that Sci-Fi would have sent anyone office materials.

But when I came back, Transmodiar had a reputation for being untrustworthy. Someone who would create flamboyant, bizarre posts that attacked teenagers for their age (?), attacked teenagers for their web design (these are children, for God's sake and as someone who has been building Wordpress sites lately, I can assure you that the first ones are always poor), attacked people for their fan fiction (an art form that is fundamentally idiosyncratic and for one's own reading).

He scared the hell out of me and triggered every anxiety I had within me.

At one point, I mentioned that EP.COM had once featured an original Cleavant Derricks interview that later had Cleavant's frank remarks about SLIDERS redacted at Cleavant's request. Transmodiar emailed me and sent me the original. We kept talking and he gave me the password to EP.COM and encouraged me to post essays and reviews and offered extremely constructive and pleasant criticisms and highly apologetic rewrites without the terrifying acidity I'd seen in him before. He edited my fan fiction with patience and interest and poked fun in ways that put me at ease with criticizing my own work.

He asked me for help with maintenance and uploading materials and had messengered to me a box containing what were indeed the Sci-Fi Channel's press archives regarding SLIDERS. In the several hundred pages, there were 16 articles that weren't already on EP.COM and I scanned them, OCRed them and put them on EP.COM. And because Transmodiar gave me access to his site, I became familiar with Wordpress and web building and I've been building websites lately for work. I don't recognize the unrepentant, cruel prankster that Transmodiar used to be as the person I know today.

His reputation made me keep my distance from him for a very long time. Looking back, being friends with Transmodiar has sparked a lot in me creatively, personally and professionally. I had some serious anxiety issues when he and I first talked, once having an hour-long meltdown over text with him because I was having a nervous breakdown over having taken the wrong parking spot at work. I was web illiterate. And I was handicapped by a lot of childhood traumas that were encapsulated in SLIDERS.

I've worked through a lot of that since then and a lot of that is because Transmodiar in the present day was a rather gentle and goofy personality who put me at ease with him and with web management and with writing and treated me with the patience and generosity of an indulgent older brother. And I have a particular distaste for the pranking because it delayed our friendship by 5 - 10 years and I consider that stolen time.

I haven't seen SOLO and I'm going to try to keep this post short and follow my fiction-restricted diet.

Star Wars: Episode IX - "The Rise of Skywalker" Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7slB4-0PDU

Is director JJ Abrams going to backtrack on THE LAST JEDI and have Rey be Luke's daughter after all? It was implied by the visual composition of THE FORCE AWAKENS (Han reaches out to Kylo and dies; Rey reaches out to Luke with hope) and the original script (in which Luke would react to Rey by rushing towards her and embracing her). The RISE OF SKYWALKER title is designed to prompt speculation.

Alternatively, the Jedi truly are extinct and Skywalker could be a new designation of Force sensitive individuals. As the Empire rebranded into the First Order and the Rebels into the Republic, the Jedi are renamed the Skywalkers.

STAR TREK in the 60s was not concerned with continuity. It was an impressionistic stageplay made for TV. The movies and TNG were trying to step into a more convincing reality in the style of STAR WARS, but even then, the films were riddled with stylistic discrepancies. We somehow went from touchscreens in STAR TREK V (and its redressed TNG sets) to dials and buttons again in STAR TREK VI. Data went from emotional in Seasons 1 - 2 to emotionless in the third year. His male cat later got pregnant. DS9 somehow had the Defiant carrying out the same battle maneuvers against the same ships in multiple episodes (because the creators reused previously aired special effects footage in 'new' battle sequences). VOY had the ship magically repaired every week despite the lack of resources.

However... DISCOVERY is the first STAR TREK show to be garishly impossible to ignore in its inconsistencies, actively flaunting how its visual style is a mismatch for the era in which it's set. It's actively hostile towards the fans in this respect in Season 1. Only with Season 2 did it start layering in visual references to the original series by presenting the same uniforms and flowers and ships in a made-for-HD design, but even then, it's still jarring. DISCOVERY calls attention to discrepancies whereas the other shows made these mismatches incidentally.

Fuller wanted DISCOVERY to have a look reminiscent of "The Cage" with the same colours but modern materials, but after CBS drove him away, they mandated a completely new design for the sets and uniforms and it all spiraled from there.

https://www.vulture.com/2019/04/allison … -case.html

Allison Mack has pleaded guilty. Actual remorse or a cold calculation that it was her only chance at escaping life imprisonment and having to register as a sex offender?

At the very least, I think Mack should be registered as a sex offender for her trafficking and subject to permanent GPS monitoring. She's dangerous and is a threat to any women who cross her path.

Maybe?

Honestly, I didn't even go to see CAPTAIN MARVEL in theatres. I have a new 55 inch tv with a subwoofer and lights behind the screen so there's no reflection on the screen and it seems silly to go our and pay for movie tickets when I have so much I can watch at home and when it suits me. It probably says something that rather than running out to see AQUAMAN and SHAZAM, I stayed home to watch Jerry O'Connell fight crime.

(It doesn't say anything about the franchise. I’ll comment when I can watch it at home.)

I've watched a few more episodes of CARTER and it continues to be not horrible at all, but one longs for more. It is a cop show where the supporting cast tell the lead that he's not a cop and life isn't like cop shows, followed by standard cop show fare in which our Jerry O'Connell does everything expected of a cop.

CARTER calls out procedural tropes like detectives using guesswork and crime scene technicians performing days of analysis in minutes -- but then has them work as they would in any procedural.

One wishes for Danny Pudi's detailed acting and Abed spouting the procedural tropes he wants to re-enact as scripted by Dan Harmon -- except Jerry O'Connell is perfectly capable of all of that. Jerry could have played Abed. Jerry's hypermaniacal, goofball enthusiasm would be perfect to play a leading man obsessed with living the conventions of a detective show. But the scripting never sets up situations to show Carter trying to re-enact a scene only for reality to conflict.

Jerry is, I assume, completely familiar with the structure of police dramas after an astonishing NINETY-THREE appearances as Detective Woody Hoyt on CROSSING JORDAN and LAS VEGAS. Jerry's played a police officer more than he ever played Quinn Mallory and he is a very fine writer ("Narcotica" is a great comic). Jerry's fought more TV crime than you've fought colds.

Jerry should be completely capable of remoulding CARTER from the generic cop show that it groundlessly claims it isn't. He should offer a focused product where Carter is more interested in roleplaying as a detective with zingers, chase scenes, posing, costumes, slang and such than he is with solving crimes.

Why isn't CARTER better? Why isn't Jerry making CARTER better? My theory is that CARTER is an extremely low-budgeted show with showrunner Garry Campbell churning out scripts but distant from the set, meaning the writing isn't being tailored to capitalize on the actors' performances and hasn't been given the be refined and developed. It's made on a tight timeframe and budget with 10 episode seasons and not many calendar days to write and film it. The emphasis is on being functional and airable.

I don't think CARTER's a Season 5 of SLIDERS situation of witless half-assery; it's more like the end of Season 2 of SLIDERS' production where the cast and crew were extremely tired. "The Young and the Relentless" staggered into production with a decent standard of professionalism but limited energy. Jerry is likely filming 10 episodes of Carter a year between other commitments and doesn't have time to revise the writing. He's there to be on set, perform the scripts to the best of his ability and high-tail it back to LA to play Sheldon Cooper's brother, do voice acting as Superman and pester Torme and NBC about SLIDERS.

CARTER strikes me as a faded photocopy of another mediocre cop show, PACIFIC HEAT. PACIFIC HEAT is animated, but it has the ARCHER-esque comedy towards cop shows that CARTER seems to want: PACIFIC HEAT opens with a team of police officers about to storm a building of criminals, but leading man Todd grumbles about who gets to say "lock and load" and protests wearing a helmet because he likes how his hair looks. After bursting into the building, Todd's partner Zac hesitates before a firefight to get a soda out of a vending machine. Todd barks out questions when interrogating people of interest, and when they answer, he has to ask them for a pen because he can't remember the addresses they've given him. En route to pursue a suspect, Todd gets distracted by a pretty girl, drives around in circles and gets lost.

PACIFIC HEAT shows its cop characters as frivolous and incompetent for comedy purposes; CARTER would have a reason for Jerry O'Connell's character to be so unprofessional.

It's funny. Jerry O'Connell once thought he'd be playing Spider-Man in globally released superhero blockbusters. Now he's proudly headlining an affable cable show that produces 10 episodes a year. It says something. It says that he has advanced to the John Rhys-Davies stage where, like John, he's never too proud to turn down smaller projects with good work (not great work, but good), not seeing TV and indie film as being beneath him, and never giving any script less than his all because for all of CARTER's many mediocrities, Jerry's performance is thoughtful and hyperenthused..

I was worried about watching Jerry in anything because I have such fondness for Quinn, but Jerry's performance as Carter is nothing like Quinn. Carter is a childish man of impulses who talks before he thinks and everything he says is regurgitated from a script for a generic cop show than the character presumably performed once as an actor. Jerry plays Carter as a manic innocent who doesn't entirely understand that reality has consequences because he has grown accustomed to living life on TV sets. Carter has nothing of Quinn's calculating intelligence or cunning; Jerry is careful to make Carter guileness without being foolish.

It's a performance from an actor who has thought through the material and done his best to put himself in it. This is a actor who is happy to be working. This is an actor who hopes for more but will settle for less and has made his wife and children his joy rather than any rewards from his career. This is a man who could lead a SLIDERS revival.

I watched one episode of CARTER, Jerry O'Connell's TV show and it's... not terrible. I'd actually been avoiding watching Jerry in anything for years because I was writing a lot of dialogue for Quinn in my scripts and I didn't want Jerry's persona interfering with his character, preferring to instead use Tom Welling's body language and Tom Cruise's voice (from the fifth MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movie). I knew he'd gotten better because he was terrific in the MUNSTERS reboot and in his guest-appearance on SAMANTHA WHO, but yes.

Anyway, CARTER's gimmick is that Carter (O'Connell) is an actor who plays a detective on TV and now he thinks he can be a detective in real life. It's at this point that I fail to grasp or explain what CARTER's joke is -- CARTER is a TV cop show where the lead cop character is... regularly informed that he is not actually a police officer at which point he... performs the role of a leading man in a cop show... and is reminded periodically that he is not really a police officer and... and... what?

I don't get it. CARTER seems to draw a lot of humour (?) from having characters comment on how Carter isn't the character he plays, but given that this is the only time we've ever seen Carter onscreen and have no scenes of him in his TV show, there is no comparison to be made. There's a lot of noise from this cop show about how life is not a cop show and it's blatantly hypocritical.

Certainly, not all roads of comedy lead to COMMUNITY, but when COMMUNITY did an homage to LAW AND ORDER, COMMUNITY had all the lead characters behaving with deadly serious demeanors as they systematically and analytically sought the truth in investigating the murder of... a smashed yam. At one point, Abed and Troy discuss a suspect behind plate glass and the suspect yells that the wall isn't actually soundproof and the glass isn't one-way. At another, Shirley admonishes Troy and Abed for overstepping, regarding them like a police chief character in a procedural as she intones, "You're not really cops." COMMUNITY took a very silly crime very, very seriously. With CARTER... it's really clueless as to what the joke is unless this is some sort of extended pisstake of Jerry's CROSSING JORDAN role (which I've never seen).

That said, Jerry O'Connell's performance is engaged and sober and he has tremendous charisma as a leading man. On one level, the joke (if there even is one) could be that despite having regularly been criticized for only playing himself, Jerry is mocking his own career trajectory as he plays Harley Carter, a Hollywood TV actor who is slightly less successful than Jerry O'Connell himself, somewhat past his prime and grudgingly accepting that he has to settle for less in his career.

However, the ending of the first episode suggests that Harley Carter became a fake detective because he couldn't be a real one in order to solve the disappearance of his mother when he was a child, a crazily exaggerated, irony-free revelation that Jerry plays with oddly stirring sincerity and... yeah, I'd agree that CARTER is not bad but surely humanity should aspire to heights beyond not bad.

Surely Jerry's talents would be put to better use playing Quinn Mallory in a SLIDERS revival.

Specifically, that's armchair psychoanalysis, a term which specifically emphasizes how the analyst is amateur, untrained, unaccredited and has no professional grounds on which to offer any genuine assessment whatsoever.

I do see COMMUNITY as the spiritual successor to SLIDERS (no, it's not THE ORVILLE) -- but one thing SLIDERS struggled with in Seasons 4 - 5 was a reason for the characters to be doing whatever the hell it was they were doing. (By Season 4's finale, they've found three separate superweapons yet failed to use them to liberate Earth Prime; in Season 5, they have the coordinates to bypass the slidecage and a path to Kromagg Prime yet spend three episodes meandering.)

COMMUNITY seemed to hit the same problem in Season 5. It was the much heralded return of the creator which received positive reviews but was described by its own showrunner as listless and devoid of energy in his own commentaries. He explained much of that as failing to follow up on Jeff as a teacher because he got wrapped up in the DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS episode and a LOGAN'S RUN homage, and then episodes like Britta at a charity function with Duncan and the Save Greendale Committee putting on a bear/dog dance were conceived with the empty desperation of putting the characters in a standing set and giving them an argument.

Season 4, whatever its faults, had a clear purpose: the characters were trying to complete their degrees and graduate, Jeff attempting to do so in 13 episodes because he didn't have a full 22 - 25. Season 5 had our graduates return to Greendale to attempt what students taking more than four years to complete four year degrees call "a victory lap," but after one episode of Jeff teaching and Annie studying, academics seemed to evapourate. The Save Greendale Committee had a lot of meaningless busy work. Episodes were conceived in terms of a concept (a heist, a dance, a sci-fi dystopia, a treasure hunt), but with little to no attention to what the characters were trying to accomplish at Greendale or if they'd made any progress.

To Harmon's credit, he acknowledged this in the two-part finale where Jeff remarks that Annie and Abed aren't ready to leave Greendale as they're from a generation where post-education adulthood doesn't really begin until after the age of 30, and he had an insurance assessor declare that the Save Greendale Committee had turned Greendale from an insurance liability into a worthwhile property. But from episodes 3 to 11, there was the strong sense that Greendale was a safety blanket the show should have outgrown.

In Harmon's defense, his plans had been to do Season 4 as a "dress rehearsal" for a Season 5 where the group wouldn't need the Greendale campus to be in the same room (not necessarily the study room) on a regular basis. That was why he had Abed, Troy and Annie living together by Season 3 and had Shirley, Jeff and Pierce go into business together with Shirley's Sandwiches. The offbrand feel of Season 4 had Harmon decide to set Season 5 at Greendale at which point the campus became the focal point of the show instead of the study group which had lost Pierce and Troy. Harmon would later say to The Hollywood Reporter, "I needed to convince myself that Donald leaving wasn't the death of the show, but now that it's all over, I think we can agree that it was."

I don't agree with that. Glover's absence was followed by some below-average Season 5 episodes (which, compared to most TV, are still pretty good), but the problem wasn't the lack of Troy but rather the lack of clarity as to what the group is doing and if they're advancing or backsliding, and without direction, it feels like filler.

I haven't gotten to all the Season 6 commentaries yet, but in interviews, Harmon confessed that he was burnt out and tired and that Season 6 was also not his best work. I have very fond memories of Season 6 and recall that introducing Frankie (Paget Brewster) as a consultant to raise Greendale's reputation to professional stability gave the show new direction: it wasn't about saving Greendale through vaguely relevant filler tasks, but about working with Frankie to make Greendale a decent college in *addition* to being a halfway house for troubled dysfunctionals.

This gave COMMUNITY a sense of clear direction and it seemed less important to wonder about when the characters would get their degrees. There was still some confusion, however, in that Abed seemed to be getting paid for his work for Greendale as Frankie at one point threatens to fire him, Britta works on the committee yet has to clock in at a bar and Annie seemed to be taking blow-off classes like Ladders. However, Abed highlighted this in a fourth-wall leaning monologue about how it was a question as to how the characters get their money but one that he found deeply uninteresting. I remember Season 6 being superb and splendid and thinking that Harmon's disenchantment certainly didn't show in his work.

I don’t see how you can have ARROW without the lead character’s wife, but then again, flash forwards have shown that Oliver and Felicity aren’t physically together for whatever reason, so...

I wonder why Rickards isn’t doing the last 10 episodes. I don’t think she would’ve been contracted for anything past this season as all the actors signed at most, seven year contracts, so either she didn’t want to come back or couldn’t agree on a salary or she’s in a sex cult that demands she give her full attention to human trafficking. Hopefully, she can at least be secured for guest appearances.

It's strange -- I haven't really listened to Jerry for awhile. The last time I was really paying attention to his voice, I was watching Season 4 episodes and it was truly disturbing to hear an odd rasp in his voice, the aftereffect of many late nights at open bars and to hear the peculiar indecisiveness in his tone that's unique to an actor who has skimmed his dialogue and is performing hungover. It was comforting to hear him in this 2019 recording and find that his voice has regained its original qualities of clarity and well-timed control of tone and pacing.

I also noticed his almost Pavlovian reaction to being described as "the fat kid from STAND BY ME" where he nearly shrieks (somewhat jokingly but not) that he was "husky." It reminds me of that episode of COMMUNITY where Jeff tells Annie, "YOU -- are insecure. Because you didn't get hot until AFTER high school," a remark that seems true of Jerry O'Connell and explains his post-SLIDERS choices in roles (BODY SHOTS, MISSION TO MARS, TOMCATS, and KANGAROO JACK) where his character was defined largely by being an attractive young man, and something he didn't cast off for years.

It was also intriguing to hear Jerry's voice describing a science of sorts -- the science of acting and auditioning and for a moment, if one imagined Quinn pursuing acting instead of quantum mechanics, this would be the sort of thing Quinn would talk about and the way in which he would describe it.

I haven't been overly keen on Jerry for many, many, many reasons, but I have felt in recent years that his acting his regained the skill he seemed to lose after John Rhys-Davies was fired, and I really liked hearing a Quinn-adjacent voice in this podcast.

My niece seems to be experiencing some sort of mental health crisis over the announced conclusion of SUPERNATURAL. Honestly, I think she seriously needs to get a grip on reality because it's just a TV show.

ireactions' SLIDERS bibliography

• The Sliders Redux: http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=8527#p8527

• A Pitch for a Reboot: http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=8565#p8565

• The Slide Effects screenplay: https://earthprime.com/etcetera/slide-effects-2

• Sliders Reborn: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19GS … it?tab=t.0

• An Alternate Season 3 and 4: http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=7548#p7548

• Net Worth: The Quinn and Wade Edition - http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?id=323

• Essay: The Assassination of Quinn Mallory - http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?id=212[/*

Hunnh. Robert Greenblatt quit NBC last year. Moved to Warner Bros. I guess all bets are off with NBC, but we should probably trust TF's assessment.

Artist Joe Quesada once advised that people always be free and open with ideas and I agree with that, but it makes me nervous to offer ideas in response to a question when the person asking that question may excoriate those ideas based on reasoning that, to the uninformed observer, looks suspiciously random.

Anyway. I'm going to offer a vision of a SLIDERS reboot done to Slider_Quinn21's specifications, built on ideas offered in this community, and I'll hope Slide Override won't be mean to me about it. This is a reboot, not a rebootquel, not a revival and it is an effort to do it in Transmodiar's style and play it completely straight.

No monsters! No crossovers! No superhero elements! No multiversal crises! No psychodrama! No Kromaggs! No continuity with the original show! Transmodiar won't have anything to complain about with this vision (aside from its existence). In fact, he will love it. The goal here is to make something Transmodiar would love.

Writing to Transmodiar's tastes has been a really fulfilling exercise. Maybe... maybe I'm now equipped to write original fiction.

I can't quite figure out what the problem with THE FLASH is this season as each new episode seems to have a different set of problems. It was interesting to watch last week's FLASH and last week's ARROW. THE FLASH has spent all season plodding with low intensity towards a confrontation with Cicada, but as noted above, Cicada is simply a thug with a knife and not remotely compelling. There is no reason why Barry can't knock him out like any other freak of the week.

Last week, Nora was exposed as being in league with Thawne and it fell flat, partially because we've known for weeks and are ahead of the characters. But it also occurs to me that THE FLASH isn't really using superspeed in daring, inventive ways this year. Barry and Nora are just speeding in and out. Aside from a few isolated moments, there have been no memorable moments of exploring frozen time or manuevering through impossible situations. Even Nora's endless timeloop episode had Nora unable to stop Cicada because of what looked suspiciously like luck without the story presenting an actual no-win situation. Have the writers used up all their ideas in previous seasons? In contrast, the combat in ARROW this year is quite deliberate in creating situations that call for Oliver to use a bow and arrow.

The Barry/Iris/Nora relationship hasn't come alive. Nora is a grown woman and doesn't seem like a child. Barry's tutorials for Nora have been extremely limited and laboured and there is no sense of Barry imparting wisdom or knowledge or ability or confidence that Nora didn't already have. As a result, when Nora confesses that she's been working with Thawne, there's no warm father/daughter bond to shatter, just dialogue that has them declaring their relationship.

THE FLASH seems really slow this year. Compare that to ARROW which showed Mia Smoak's upbringing and combat training in a swift montage. The infiltration of the Glades was taut and gripping. ARROW has a propulsive energy and Katherine MacNamara gives Mia this deranged, homicidal smile before she launches into combat. ARROW has pacing, momentum, a compelling set of parent-child conflicts. THE FLASH has Barry and Nora talking about how much they like each other and Nora telling Iris how Iris has impressed her. THE FLASH has the heroes talking about how dangerous Cicada is when he's just Chris Klein with unpleasant kitchenware. THE FLASH has lost its sense of showing over telling.

It can be relevant when contemplating a revival/reboot of SLIDERS in response to your questions. It is very difficult to understand what your parameters of plausibility are and to provide material that works within them.

I think you have a great sense of structure, plotting and how an audience reacts to material. However, your criticisms of PARALLELS: you described every instance of advanced and/or mysterious technology and declared it a plothole or an absurdity, an approach that would dismantle any work of science fiction or fantasy. Given that you're on a SLIDERS board, you're clearly capable of suspending your disbelief, but you have a specific standard for what is and isn't worthy of your suspension that you haven't been able to elaborate.

I imagine you have a rationale, but without a clear sense of how you evaluate absurdity and science fiction contrivances, it's impossible to offer material that would meet with your approval because any aspect of a SLIDERS pitch could be targeted as absurd by a standard that, to the outside observer, looks like an arbitrary yet blanket rejection of any sci-fi elements.

With Transmodiar, it was clear why he disliked SLIDERS REBORN. To me, a story where Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo have come back from the dead to save the multiverse is a superhero story. Spider-Man's died and come back to life and he's fought twisters, dream masters, vampires, zombies, dragons, animal human hybrids, radioactive worms, intelligent living flames and remote controlled cars that shoot lasers and he's seen the multiverse crushed to nothing, combined and rebuilt.

The sliders all died. The Professor's brain was sucked out, he was shot and blown up. Wade was sent to an alien prison camp. Rembrandt saw home invaded by aliens. Quinn lost his body, was merged with another person and 'lost.' Pretty much the same things happened to Spider-Man over six decades of publishing with most of these examples happening in the 90s. From 2013 - 2014, Peter Parker was merged with another person and 'deleted' and that was actually one of the less eventful periods in his life and he came through all of that and he always came back. He's a superhero and if the sliders could be superheroes, they could come back as well.

That was my mission statement and it just didn't work for Transmodiar because for him, SLIDERS is not a superhero series and it was just a bizarre psychodrama from an emotionally troubled friend with screenwriting software. I understand that.

With you, Slide Override -- I just don't understand your metric.

Transmodiar sent me a VHS cassette of the DOORWAYS pilot awhile ago. I watched it. It's one of the worst things ever made and it also broke my VHS player.

There may not be a market for lots of shows about parallel universes. But you have plenty of ideas for other shows about other subjects. Marvel executive Joe Quesada was once asked, why should creators ever offer their ideas to Marvel on a work for hire basis with royalties instead of self-financing their ideas and owning all profits?

Quesada replied that Marvel could bring those ideas to life with infrastructure and resources while creator-owned work would be self-financed. He advised that creators always find a good balance between work for hire and self-owned projects and he disagreed with the attitude that one should hoard ideas strictly for creator-owned projects, saying that creators who do so take the view that imagination is finite and then spend more time obsessing over past ideas rather than developing new ones.

If your concept is no longer competitive, if you can't reconfigure parallel worlds into time travel or underground cities or alien planets or virtual realities, then you can always cycle to the next idea.

Robert Patrick had scheduling issues; he was written to appear in the Season 11 premiere, but he couldn't make it and was replaced with Christopher Owens. Annabeth Gish did return; she was in four episodes of the revival. Admittedly, fans weren't happy with her character's portrayal...

The only thing I would insist upon: the sliders are lost in the multiverse, they're trying to find a way back home. This rules out returning to Quinn's home Earth on a regular basis as SLIDERS' drama functions on being away from any sort of reliable home environment. This rules out strict 30 minute slides as after a few worlds, the sliders would simply stop sliding as 30 minutes isn't enough to search for a way back home. If you lose the platform of exploring an unfamiliar new Earth every week while searching for the familiar, it's not really SLIDERS.

Outside of that, I think any showrunner could tailor SLIDERS to their talents and interests whether it's recurring villains, altered backstories and relationships, two-parters, etc..

Transmodiar once informed me that his car had been totalled in an accident (he was not at fault, don't raise his rates). At another point, he informed me that he had been laid off from his job. He announced both instances of financial and professional devastation in a cool, solution-oriented, good-natured fashion and explained that he'd been receiving care packages at his office and he wanted to inform his social circle that it was no longer his office.

He then went about securing a new vehicle and new employment in a somber, goal-driven, emotionally healthy approach. I assume he took the same route when SLIDERS lost three-quarters of its original cast and was cancelled with Season 5. Should SLIDERS return and interfere with his professional creativity, Transmodiar will create another concept in another market and do so in a positive and appropriate manner. Transmodiar always moves forward.

Transmodiar sees television and film with high definition clarity, very much like a TV producer. He can see that a SLIDERS revival would simply be an exercise in cycling through an archive of a presently unused copyright and making an effort to monetize its existence. It's a perfectly valid perspective from a person who views things as they are without becoming overly sentimental over anything other than his wife and children and a scattered assortment of family and friends. I think we should welcome such perspective.

And on the subject of story structure, since Slide Override raised it:

There's some other stuff with Transmodiar and Slide Override that I... "dislike" is a mild term and would still be too strong a world. Transmodiar and Slide Override will often declare that elements of plot and characterization are "ridiculous" because the story doesn't meet a standard of plausibility that they have personally defined and they take the view that this standard is an objective measure universally agreed upon by all rather than a subjective perspective.

I'm not knocking it; I'd just say it's an area where we have agreed to disagree. Slide Override declared PARALLELS ridiculous because he said that a building that can travel the multiverse is a ridiculous concept. Transmodiar said he disliked the Claymation episode of COMMUNITY because a sitcom offering a Claymation story is ridiculous. Neither have ever offered any clear rationale for where they draw the line between plausibility and absurdity or how this subjective scale could be applied by others, so it's clearly a personal view on which we shall have to agree to disagree.

When working on SLIDERS REBORN together, Transmodiar would often tell me that plot points were "ridiculous" and I took the view that if Transmodiar felt something was implausible, it didn't mean he was telling me not to do it; it meant he was telling me that my writing needed to do more to earn the Transmodiar's suspension of disbelief.

Transmodiar would inform me that no, he was genuinely telling me not to write a script where Mallory exists as an individual entity within Quinn's subconscious mind. I ignored that part but appreciated that his words were delivered out of sincere concern.

This happens with all friends whether close or distant. There are areas where Tracy Torme and I agreed to disagree in 2000 (I think SLIDERS could totally do monster movies and horror stories and Torme does not). There are areas where Robert Floyd and I agreed to disagree (he voted for Trump). There are areas where Slider_Quinn21 and I agreed to disagree (he doesn't like the line in SLIDERS REBORN where Smarter Quinn tells Quinn, "Everything around you is just mediocre fanfic that doesn't matter and doesn't count").

I think true friendship is where both parties can find it fun to debate these disputes. I think Transmodiar should continue to express his lack of interest even if SLIDERS is revived and that his ideas go well-beyond distaff SLIDERS pitches.

I don't doubt that a revived SLIDERS would be different from the show that aired in 1995, but 2019 has had over two decades of refinement and advancement in television storytelling and over 20 years of culture and societal upheaval and technological development for SLIDERS' satirical perspective.

I wouldn't want SLIDERS to come back fixated on the Berlin Wall and the Summer of Love; I wouldn't want SLIDERS to lack running plotlines or see characterization evolve only between season finales and premieres; I wouldn't want SLIDERS to have guest-stars leap into the vortex at the end of one week only to not be mentioned the next week. And if SLIDERS in 2020 has different priorities and goals than the 1995 incarnation, then it's being exactly what it needs to be because good shows change to face the issues of the era in which they air.

I once asked Temporal Flux who his dream showrunner would be for a revived SLIDERS. He said ANYONE could do a great job with SLIDERS because the format is so wide, so varied, so full of boundless potential with a new universe to explore every single week in every single episode. Not everyone has a FRINGE story to tell or a COMMUNITY episode to pitch but absolutely anyone and everyone has at least one amazing SLIDERS story in them.

Transmodiar has left SLIDERS behind emotionally and I confess that over time, I have come to do the same; I no longer have to see it as a representation of my childhood traumas. I don't need the show any more, but television needs SLIDERS and the world needs Quinn and we all need the Professor.

In a world of streaming services and home theatres and digital filming and affordable CG and high polygon effect counts, TV needs SLIDERS to show the limitless platform of its anthology format matched with its vivid and lovable characters who represent every person struggling to cope with a world of constant and confusing change. And on a planet faced with endless conflict environmentally, socially, economically and politically, we need Quinn Mallory and Professor Arturo to show us that every problem can be confronted with knowledge, teamwork, analysis and understanding.

I recognize and respect that Transmodiar has outgrown the show, but SLIDERS is so much more than what Transmodiar or I have ever needed from it and without it, I fear for the future of our civilization and the continued existence of our universe.

IB: "Lauren! Next year, will you watch FRINGE so we have something to talk about without SUPERNATURAL?"

LAUREN: " ... I am not ready to joke about this yet."

Recently, I was visiting my niece and yelped at the sight of a book lying on the floor. She asked me what was wrong and I pointed a shaking finger at the man on the book cover. "He killed Dad!" I shrieked. My niece picked up the book. It was an autobiography of Roger Daltrey (Colonel Rickman v1.0). "You know he's just an actor, right?" my niece said gently.

I sheepishly asked to borrow it and read it and Mr. Daltrey is a very pleasant and funny soul and no, he didn't kill my father (who is still alive) and the Professor isn't my dad. I have an unusually personal connection to SLIDERS and the Professor's death was *like* the death of a parent. I realize that this connection is neither sensible nor sane, but it wouldn't be any more sensible or sane to deny it.

I was 10 years old when SLIDERS first aired and I was excited to see my fantasy figure hero from MY SECRET IDENTITY playing a boy genius. Quinn was everything I would have wanted to be: scientifically literate, physically capable and daringly adventurous. He also seemed at ease with women without being inappropriately flirtatious (until "Dragonslide" when he fell in love with an unconscious woman).

My father wasn't around when I was a kid. My mother regularly told me that her divorce was my fault and regularly shriek at me that Dad left because I forgot my homework at home or didn't make the track team. It didn't really matter what I did or didn't do; Mum was always going to find some excuse to blame me for the failure of her marriage and beat me and hold knives to my throat and starve me and destroy my schoolwork. The only relief I had was BOY MEETS WORLD for the comfort of a familial setting and SLIDERS because it presented a father figure.

The Professor was wise, amusing, bombastic, grandiose and seemingly all-knowing while also arrogant, cowardly, egotistical and insecure. He was a real person, wonderful but human. Wade was a delight, Rembrandt was hilarious and the sliders were my friends. This is the most pathetic thing I've ever said about myself, but not as pathetic as it would be to lie about it.

When I was 13, my mother took to randomly ripping the cable out of the television because she wasn't happy with my piano playing. She also threw me down the stairs. I barely managed to reconnect the TV in time to catch the second half of "The Exodus Part II" and for my trouble, I saw the Professor get his brain sucked out. Then Colonel Rickman shot him and Arturo's corpse was left on a planet that exploded. I felt like I'd watched my father die.

Anyway. My father and I have a pretty close relationship these days with weekly Friday phone calls and I find that my mother's invective towards me was largely a self-portrait where my grandparents weren't speaking to her and my father had fled her, not me.

But from age 13 - 26, I never really grasped that. The Professor's death was a horrific incident that left me forever shaken and unsure. In 2000, after SLIDERS was cancelled, I had a conversation with Tracy Torme where I described how much the Professor had meant to me and Tracy apologized for what happened, explaining that he had not been in a position to choose his successor on Season 3 and that he'd needed to spend time with his ailing father. "I'm sorry you lost your dad," said Tracy, taking my grief dead seriously when a less sensitive person would have rolled his eyes and moved on. "I lost my dad too."

I asked him what he would do if he had one last episode of SLIDERS. He said he would open a new season with Quinn waking up to find time rewound to the Pilot. Wade, Rembrandt and the Professor would be alive with only Quinn having any memory of sliding. The scenario would be revealed as a Kromagg trick along with any episodes after "The Guardian." It was a pleasant dream.

Over time, I found other shows -- I fell in love with DOCTOR WHO when DOCTOR WHO had been cancelled and obsessed over the Eighth Doctor novels which carved out their own place in a defunct TV show. I loved William Shatner's STAR TREK novels which resurrected Kirk after GENERATIONS. I found ways to placate and avoid the hole that the Professor's death left in my life, but sometimes, I found myself staring right into it.

In 2005, DOCTOR WHO was revived and one of the first novels for the new show was "The Stealer of Dreams" by Steve Lyons in which the Doctor and friends visit a planet where fiction is illegal and those who traffic in art are institutionalized and lobotomized. This stirring, beautiful novel was everything that "Map of the Mind" wasn't and when reading it, I wept for SLIDERS. The wound had never healed. For a time, I could ignore it, but it always came back.

In 2009, Tracy did the EP.COM interview and mentioned his story idea. EP.COM asked me to write essays and reviews. In 2011, I wrote his story idea up as the "Slide Effects" script and I felt a little better at offering a vision of how we could step back from Seasons 3 - 5. But it wasn't enough -- it was an idea of how we could have done Season 6 in 2000, but we were 11 years removed and all the actors had aged.

Later on, I became enamoured with the TV series COMMUNITY which is about a study group of misfits at a community college. As an exercise, I would take COMMUNITY scripts, do a find-and-replace to put the cast of SLIDERS into COMMUNITY screenplays and was astonished at how true and heartfelt results would seem.

REMBRANDT: "Whoa."
ARTURO: "What?"
REMBRANDT: (looking at Arturo's plate) "That's a lot of pasta for no veggies."
ARTURO: "You're not in charge of what I eat!"
REMBRANDT: "That's true. Wade?"

Wade steps in front of Arturo and glares at him and his pasta-covered plate. Arturo takes a fearful step back to the cafeteria counter.

ARTURO: (to the server) "And some damn broccoli!"

There was something so vivid, so distinct, so full of life in these transposed script pages. Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo gained vivid definition on paper as scripted sitcom characters and I longed to see them written so in full-fledged adventures.

I was also spending a lot of time in psychotherapy and it became apparent that SLIDERS was a potent metaphor for my childhood trauma and abuse. Meanwhile, THE X-FILES had returned in comic books continuing their mythology at the present day with THE X-FILES: SEASON 10 with Mulder and Scully reopening the X-Files in 2013. I wanted SLIDERS to have a similar product. "Slide Effects" had proven that Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo could come alive in the screenplay format, THE X-FILES comics had demonstrated how to pick up on a long-removed cliffhanger and go back to basics despite an extensive catalog of unresolved plots.

And I realized that if I avoided looking into the gaping hole in my heart left by the Professor's death, I would never mend it. It would never heal.

From 2015 - 2016, I wrote a six part series of SLIDERS REBORN screenplays with the original sliders 15 years after the events of "The Seer." My therapist described these scripts as the equivalent of a doctoral thesis. The first two scripts were posted on EarthPrime.com on March 22, 2015, twenty years to the day that Quinn's first adventure aired on FOX. "You finally did it," I crowed to myself. "This is YOUR show now." My sister, visiting that week, overheard me, knew what I was talking about and remarked, "Doesn't that just tell you how nobody else wanted it?"

I posted the final script on December 27, 2016 and felt complete and fulfilled. SLIDERS now had a series finale that was respectful and inclusive of every season of SLIDERS and my childhood torment was at an end. I was the researcher for REWATCH PODCAST when they were covering SLIDERS -- my role was to send them bullet-point emails documenting everything Temporal Flux had ever shared with this community about SLIDERS which they would mention in their podcasts. For LOIS AND CLARK, I read all the teleplays and sent them deleted scenes.

But after SLIDERS REBORN was complete and as the LOIS AND CLARK rewatch was winding down, I sent The Rewatch Podcast an email telling them I felt it was time to step away from covering other people's creations. "Everything in my life has been a reaction to the death of Professor Arturo," I wrote without a hint of irony although I knew Tom and Cory would laugh. I explained that it was time to move forward, try creating work of my own, and let SLIDERS be something to remember fondly rather than keep it in my present.

And I guess that's part of why SLIDERS returning to NBC or Netflix or Apple or whatever would be difficult for me. SLIDERS REBORN was very much about confronting my childhood trauma. I resolved SLIDERS, I put it aside, and I revisit it largely in terms of turning each and every conversation about other TV shows back to SLIDERS on this message board (and only this message board).

If we see Quinn and the Professor onscreen again played by Jerry and John, then SLIDERS is very much in the present and future and that could be a little uncomfortable for me. But I shouldn't be selfish. A true fan of SLIDERS would want SLIDERS to be bigger than any one person's experience of it.

I think Marvel genuinely fired him. But, over time and with investigations and further soul-searching, it became clear: Gunn is not a pedophile. Gunn is a rape victim who was making 'jokes' about a childhood trauma. Furthermore, Gunn made no excuses and cast no blame for his behaviour, declaring that he understood Disney's decision to fire him and all of that made it easier to rehire him, especially when Taika Waititi declined the job of directing GUARDIANS 3 before he'd even been offered the job.

Marvel has decided that the only director who can replace James Gunn for GUARDIANS 3 is James Gunn.

https://deadline.com/2019/03/james-gunn … 202576444/