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I totally agree with you that it was a mistake to keep DISCOVERY in the 23rd century after the anthology format was discarded. Admittedly, that allowed CBS to renew THE NEXT GENERATION for an eighth season, but still.

However, I think that using the original footage of "The Cage"/"The Menagerie" had a neat effect. They could have reshot those clips with Anson Mount and the DISCOVERY version of the Enterprise and the DISCOVERY version of Talos IV. Why didn't they do it? Initially, I wondered if in the context of DISCOVERY, these clips are Pike's memory of "The Cage." Does he, over time, remember past adventures as though they're 60s pulp sci-fi adventures because he himself is a fan of twentieth century TV and science fiction? Is it that the Talosians, due to their mind-altering powers, cast a sheen over any experiences with their involvement that cause memories to be slightly distorted?

I kept waiting for a line of dialogue to address it much in the way DOCTOR WHO in the last Christmas Special used footage of the First Doctor from "The Tenth Planet" and had a shot of William Hartnell morph into David Bradley as the First Doctor with the Twelfth Doctor commenting, "You're in mid-regeneration, aren't you? Your face -- it's all over the place," explaining the new actor's appearance.

But DISCOVERY declined to do this. Instead, DISCOVERY flash-cut from Jeffrey Hunter's Pike to Anson Mount's Pike and simply asked us to accept that this is a new actor playing the old character. When Michael explores Talos IV, she finds the same singing flowers that Spock did in "The Cage," but the flowers are not blue cardboard on straws seen through a fuzzy cathode ray tube; they look like real flowers made as props, animated with computer generated imagery and presented for a high definition format. In essence, DISCOVERY is wordlessly asking to accept that just as the role of Pike is being played by another actor, the roles of visual effects artists, model builders, costumers, cinematographers, set designers and such are also being played by others -- and asking if we could go along with it.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/featu … ip-1192660

So, leaked texts in the Hollywood Reporter seem to indicate that WB president Kevin Tsujihara offered actress Charlotte Kirk acting work in exchange for sex. SLIDERS has had some of this with the SLIDERS crew, according to Temporal Flux, having many theories on why Alan Barnette was so keen to hire Kari Wuhrer. TF says Barnette wouldn't shut up about Wuhrer's chest. From reading the HR story, I get the sense, however, that sex only bought Kirk access and opportunity but didn't actually get her any work.

It looks like Tsujihara was able to get Kirk auditions, but casting directors largely declined to hire her. In her texts, Kirk is outraged that she isn't receiving roles in exchange for sex but doesn't seem to have any thoughts on how her talent and artistic ambitions were suited to specific roles; it's just the expectation that having a physical affair with a Warner Bros. executive would get her hired regardless of the project or her ability. In addition, Kirk describes sex as though it were an activity after a business deal. My office just buys everyone pizza; Warner Bros. under Tsujihara hires sex workers. (Allegedly. This conversation is privileged.)

I don't know that there is anything untoward in that Kirk didn't actually net any significant acting work out of this supposed trade. I just know that it makes both Kevin Tsujihara and Charlotte Kirk look utterly pathetic. Tsujihara's worth $2.5 million; if he wants sex, then hiring a prostitute or going online and finding someone interested in a purely physical relationship (or delegating the task to an assistant) is well within his ability. To dangle a false offer of acting work is a childish, immature effort at feeling influential and powerful. It makes Kirk look ridiculous; she clearly doesn't have the talent to win at auditions and doesn't believe in her own skill and ability and isn't willing to take the classes and training and wants to leapfrog into success by offering sex for acting roles and it doesn't even work.

I have always been doubtful that Kari traded sex for work if only because her roles -- short-lived regular roles, small guest-appearances, direct-to-video cable filler -- were so low-budget and limited in release that I don't think she would have bothered. There wasn't exactly a shortage of softcore erotic thrillers in the 90s. And Kirk's leaked texts would suggest that it's not a remotely effective strategy.

I'm suddenly reminded of the TNG episode, "Phantasms," where a malfunctioning Data attacked Troi with a knife and stabbed her bloody and at the end of the episode, Troi paid Data a visit in private and happily sat alone with him to enjoy some cake. I was nine years old when I watched that one and I honestly think that episode stunted my emotional growth and social skills, making me think that violently attacking someone could be easily forgiven and forgotten inside a single hour of TV and as I type this, I am convinced that "Phantasms" made me the sociopath I became in my late teens and early twenties. Strangely, that episode, much like the first part of Isaac's betrayal, was also written by Brannon Braga. I trust Seth MacFarlane will do better.

I would divide SLIDERS diehard fans into two quadrants. The first is the Transmodiar sort who views SLIDERS through the lens of the TV producer and views SLIDERS in terms of practical elements. Torme, writing the Pilot, needed some background characters to fill out Quinn's graduate studies class and used stock characters and ethnicities: a snarky Asian (Wing), an anxiety-ridden mess (Montague), a token girl (Nan) and a stoner (Bennish). To attribute any greater meaning to any of that is absurd.

Then you have the fan historian, Temporal Flux, who views SLIDERS as an archeology and cultural humanities project. The pilot script, from this perspective, reflects Tracy Torme's life and obsessions: UFOs, hippies, Cold War paranoia, a talented but troubled teacher (Arturo might be a fond, rose-tinted remembrance of Gene Roddenberry), a boss who is ignorant and full of himself (Hurley is based on Maurice Hurley of STAR TREK), and Quinn's messiness and wearing the same clothes for weeks reflect how Torme surrounded himself in his office with empty pizza boxes and takeout containers as he hunched over his word processor and cranked out pages.

And then, well off the map and far away from any common frame of reference is ME. I was a viewer who was enthralled and then repulsed by the later seasons and came to view SLIDERS as a traumatic event of lifelong repercussions who drifted from SLIDERS to DOCTOR WHO, always watching the Doctor step into his TARDIS with longing and regret, listening to River Song declare, "Next stop: everywhere" and wishing to hear Rembrandt say those words and inhabit Steven Moffat scripts. And at the time, I was reading comic books and the horrors there were so much worse than SLIDERS.

I saw Batman's back broken and then he got vaporized. and I watched Green Arrow, Superman, Blue Beetle, Captain America and Iron Man die. I saw the Flash melt into nothing and later, Green Lantern went insane, murdered his friends and teammates and incinerated himself in the sun. I saw Professor Xavier keep an enslaved prisoner in his basement, watched Cyclops abandon his wife and son to take up with an old girlfriend. I read a comic where Wolverine was revealed to be descended from a line of magic wolves.

They all died and they all came back; Batman and Captain America turned out to have been dislodged and unstuck in time. Green Arrow was restored with temporal energies, Superman was in a coma, Blue Beetle's death was unwritten with time travel, Green Lantern's consciousness was retrieved from the afterlife and restored to a rejuvenated body which was purged of the yellow light energy fear entity that had possessed him and driven him to murder and all his teammates were shown to have been alive in stasis all along. The Professor was revealed to have been trying to free his prisoner all along, Cyclops' mind had been affected by a demon and that wolfman Wolverine concept was exposed as a false memory implant. They were all mutilated and murdered and they all came back and I wanted SLIDERS to see some of that action and I see SLIDERS through the lens of the superhero.

And, to me, Quinn Mallory's morphing backstory is oddly reminiscent of Captain America's origin story and formative years: his WWII adventures, due to numerous retcons and flashbacks, have characterized him as a hardened soldier who only ever fought supervillains who was actively overseas while sticking to defending US borders while never taking a single life in combat while regularly firing guns and dropping bombs on Nazis and being a virulently racist bigot who protested Japanese internment camps whose sidekick was a teen hero named Bucky who was actually a 21-year-old sniper who died before the end of WWII while actually having been captured and frozen and kept young and alive to the modern day.

The Pilot shifting from 1994 to 1995 is much like the floating timeline of a comic book where Iron Man originally fought Communists and was injured in Vietnam but has continually been updated to the current day.

The Season 4 Kromagg arc also reminds me of a peculiar late-70s retcon where a flashback showed that Captain America was driven to join the army after his brother died at Pearl Harbor, a retcon that added a nasty tone of vengeance to Cap that made him more like the Dirty Harry style heroes of the 70s than the purehearted hero he'd been before and a retcon that was subsequently undone by a later writer. Even by the loose standards of continuity in 90s TV shows, Quinn Mallory's fractured life is very reminiscent of a superhero comic -- which I rather like because then maybe he could come back the way superheroes always do.

It's interesting that CHUCK, which is sort of like QUINN MALLORY: THE SERIES, had a similar situation: the original Pilot script for CHUCK had our geek hero, Chuck, also crushing on his next-door neighbour, Kayla Hart (Natalie Martinez). Kayla was to be a wild, free-spirited music lover and Chuck, a Best Buy computer technician with extremely low self-esteem after getting kicked out of his engineering program at Stanford, would be so awkward around Kayla that he couldn't even say hello to her at an audible volume. However, shortly before filming, writers Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak felt that CHUCK's leading lady was plainly Yvonne Strahovski's Sarah and that they would never be able to fully capitalize on Martinez in the show as anything but a temporary guest-star. They also felt that giving Chuck too many love interests would be deeply implausible for such a damaged and isolated character, so they cut Kayla Hart from the script and released the actress.

Schwartz and Fedak have, as far as I know, never attempted to write Kayla Hart fanfic. In contrast, the Stephanie character seems highly significant to Torme. I have absolutely no idea why; the character never appeared onscreen, never showed up in a later episode, was never (to my knowledge) repurposed into another character.

In Torme's (unfinished) notes for the PDF screenplay he wanted to write as an officially unofficial series finale, the opening is set shortly after "The Guardian" where, due to Logan St. Clair's modifications in "Double Cross," the timer begins malfunctioning. Slide windows are getting shorter and shorter; the sliders regroup on an Earth where the super-continent Pangea never disassembled and they are welcomed to a family meal by Stephanie and her husband. Torme's details concluded here, but the plot to follow was that Quinn would rig the timer to send the sliders backwards through the interdimension, revisiting past Earths, seeing the outcome of their interference in previous episodes, and hopefully getting home before the timer burnt out.

In Temporal Flux's view, Torme's writing has often represented different aspects of his life and obsessions. Rembrandt was a representation of Torme's love for his father's music. Bennish represented what was the dominant counterculture in Torme's youth, the hippie. The Kromaggs seem to emerge from Torme's fixation on UFOs and spaceships. So what does Stephanie represent to Torme and what is her significance? Is she an insert for Torme's wife? (I dunno.)

SPOILERS

I thought the second part was good, but, well -- conventional. The ending seems to imply that Isaac will be back at his post next week with his colleagues happy to be serving with a comrade who was surveilling them to plot their deaths and participated in an attack that killed several crewman. Questions raised in Part 1 -- why was Isaac behaving differently after the download? Why wasn't he disassembled as the Kaylon said he would be? -- they're either not addressed because the writers have no answers or because they wish to imply rather than assert. In addition, it's not entirely clear why Isaac, having taken part in this invasion, drew the line at ejecting colleagues into space and executing Ty when killing them all would have been the endgame regardless.

The episode really needed the crew to lock Isaac up and demand answers for all of the above: how much did he know? Why did he change his mind? Instead, THE ORVILLE has taken the view that because Isaac has betrayed every Kaylon, he'll have to side with the Union if only by default and poses no threat. And that makes sense to a degree, but after what happened, it makes no sense for Mercer to allow Isaac to be unguarded with crewmen or for the senior staff to reactivate him. They're treating Isaac like he's Picard after he's been rescued from the Borg assimilation when they should be treating him like Grant Ward on AGENTS OF SHIELD.

Now, Seth MacFarlane is a writer of rare nuance and talent, and I can't imagine him failing to mine all of the above for drama and comedy in future episodes. Perhaps nobody wants to hang out with Isaac next week and Mercer has a security squad guarding him at all times. But it is really odd that Mercer, despite his forgiving nature and understanding, isn't demanding full answers and explanations from Isaac before securing Isaac's spot on the Orville.

The Netflix shows have been designed to be watched 2 - 4 episodes at a time if not all 13 in one day. I can sort of understand why Marvel TV wouldn't want to do standalones as they would seem like a distraction when the Netflix app automatically loads and plays the next episode. However, I binge-watched 10 seasons of SUPERNATURAL in about a year and I can't say the standalones were in any way disruptive, so the problem is that Marvel TV chose a format for their Netflix shows and have refused to break from it even when it only works for some shows.

DAREDEVIL's third season was great at this extended format because all the characters' separate arcs were a direct reaction to Wilson Fisk rebuilding his empire. Whether the story was about Agent Ray Nadeem, Foggy, Matt, Karen or Dex, it forwarded the season-long arc of Fisk's second rise to power. In contrast, there is no central event or situation for THE PUNISHER's second season. John Pilgrim's pursuit of Amy has nothing to do with Dinah Madani's obsession with Billy which has nothing to do with Frank guarding Amy which has nothing to do with Dr. Dumont's infatuation with Billy which has nothing to do with the Shultzes trying to hide their son's homosexuality which has nothing to do with Curtis' whatever. None of it's there to further explore the themes of THE PUNISHER. It's just filler and it drags.

And it really doesn't help that Frank spends 40 minutes of screentime on stakeouts in a single episode, as you've noted, and the budget is also clearly a problem. Just as SLIDERS blew the bulk of two seasons' budget on that stupid hotel set, THE PUNISHER has clearly expended most of its funds on location filming in New York City. There is a cultural relevance and urban texture to NYC that was essential to LUKE CAGE's Harlem and DARDEVIL's Hell's Kitchen, but with THE PUNISHER (and JESSICA JONES and IRON FIST and DEFENDERS), the show might as well be shot on the sets and locations of AGENTS OF SHIELD or SUPERGIRL or GIRL MEETS WORLD and they'd probably get a tax credit for their trouble. New York City is not a meaningful character in THE PUNISHER and the cost of location filming has not been worth it.

I do not like THE X-FILES. I am not a fan of THE X-FILES. And yet, I was recently listening to X-CAST podcast interviews with Brendan Beiser (Agent Pendrell) and William B. Davis (he played Professor Myman on SLIDERS in the episode "Eggheads" for one scene).

Beiser was talking about how Pendrell died in a myth-arc episode and Davis was talking about he had no idea how the Smoking Man went from being conspiracy middle management in Seasons 1 - 9 to its leader in Seasons 10 - 11 or what the hell he was even saying when describing the Spartan Virus. I was marvelling at how THE X-FILES was SLIDERS' sister show and had all the advantages SLIDERS didn't -- its original creator running the show throughout its lifespan, actors who fully completed their contracts, massive budget increases, two feature films, a recent two-season revival -- and yet, THE X-FILES is in the same narrative mess as SLIDERS albeit with better cinematography.

In the first page of this thread, I remarked that the retconning of the Colonization arc as a hoax made sense. But listening to these podcasts, I've changed my mind. Too many story points of massive emotional weight were pinned to Colonization. The Smoking Man's depiction as a power-addict who saw Colonization as flattering to his self-importance no longer holds together, leaving poor Davis clueless about his own character.

If Colonization is a lie, then it completely undermines the deaths of Melissa Scully and Emily and the Lone Gunmen and even Agent Pendrell and it means Mulder and Scully's search for the truth was a search for nothing at all. The emotional arcs of THE X-FILES becomes totally unworkable due to "My Struggle" and the subsequent episodes seemed at a loss. "Founder's Mutation" has Mulder referring to the Syndicate like he didn't debunk them completely one episode ago; "My Struggle II" has Scully describing the human collaborators in Colonization as the conspiracy behind the Spartan Virus when the virus and the alien invasion are two completely different conspiracies with two completely different endgames. "My Struggle II" has Mulder and the Smoking Man confront each other; Mulder doesn't even comment on the change in the conspiracy. "This" has Mulder visiting Deep Throat's grave and not commenting on how Deep Throat's hints at impending invasion don't fit the Conspiracy of Men theory he advanced in "My Struggle."

I've changed my mind. I realize that many people watch THE X-FILES like Slider_Quinn21, someone who doesn't remember Seasons 1 - 9 all that well and for whom continuity barely exists aside from confusion over Mulder and Scully being a couple in "This" and being amicably separated in "Plus One." But THE X-FILES' character arcs were so intertwined with its myth-arc that declaring that myth-arc retroactively non-existent means that even the characters have become a muddled mess. Carter should have respected the myth-arc especially when he's the one who created it.

You know, I haven’t seen any Scottish people for about a year. I’m starting to wonder if all Scottish people have ceased to exist. ;-)

**

Slider_Quinn21 is quite unfair, taking no issue with VOYAGER regularly killing and resurrecting Harry Kim and others via time travel and alternate universe doubles. But DISCOVERY has apparently crossed some line.

I don’t see what’s so problematic here. When Stamets kissed Dr. Culber’s dying body, he acted as a lightning rod and transferred Culber’s ebbing lifeforce into the mycelial network in which Culber’s consciousness reasserted itself and his perceptual effect on the interphasic dimension reconstituted his physical form and actually no, I see the problem here and Slider_Quinn21 is right, this is complete and total nonsense.

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I honestly don’t have much to say about Slider_Quinn21’s criticisms of DISCOVERY being set in the wrong era. It wasn’t when DISCOVERY was intended to only have the first season set pre-TOS, but now it’s a problem. He’s right again.

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It won’t be difficult to square Section 31 being a branch of Starfleet intelligence in DSC with Section 31 being a secret cabal that pre-dates the Federation itself on DS9 — at least in terms of the STAR TREK universe. As early as “Return of the Archons,” TREK indicated that telepathic technology that can wipe memories exists. But even without that, Section 31 is only being spoken of openly aboard a highly classified warship and Captain Pike knew of 31 not because he had worked for them, but because he was friends with one of their agents.

The issue is not really the continuity as much as the authorial intent. Behr’s Section 31 was not within Starfleet; it was a separate organization that occasionally recruited or impersonated Starfleet officers. In addition, I don’t really see Behr’s Section 31 being dispatched to hunt down escaped mental patients. DISCOVERY is treating Section 31 like Starfleet’s personal assassins and thugs; the point of Behr’s Section 31 is that they run rings around Starfleet and seem to have little difficulty co-opting it without existing within it. Behr’s Section 31 would be giving Admiral Cornwell orders (or ‘suggestions’).

I feel DISCOVERY has been pretty clear that the Red Angel phenomenon is not supernatural or metaphysical in nature?

**

Oh, Section 31. I feel like Section 31 has been completely mishandled. Ira Steven Behr created them because he felt it unlikely that the Federation's utopia could exist without some sort of black-ops wetwork division. In their three episodes of DEEP SPACE NINE, the most disturbing thing about Section 31 is their lack of official existence. We only get to know one agent, Luther Sloane, and there's no record of him.

In their second episode, a Romulan proves that Section 31 doesn't exist and that Sloane concocted it as a hoax to assassinate an old enemy; this proof turns out to be staged by Sloane himself, showing that Section 31 could cease to exist on his say-so. Starfleet doesn't acknowledge its existence. To Bashir and Sisko, it's an urban legend or a rogue nation (like the Syndicate in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE). To Odo, Section 31 IS the Federation and claiming otherwise is just an exercise in plausible deniability. And to Sloane, Section 31 is like the Impossible Missions Force. Is Section 31 part of the Federation? Are they heroes? Are the villains? Could Section 31 be trickery and fakery with Sloane using a transporter and a holodeck?

Ira Steven Behr created Section 31 specifically to exist in this ambiguity and I think subsequent writers missed the point. With INTO DARKNESS, Section 31 tries to spark interstellar war between the Klingons and the Federation, a ridiculously attention-demanding tactic from what was a covert organization of spies. Strangely for me, I dislike the SECTION 31 novels which umambiguously declare Section 31 to be villains and have Bashir expose and defeat the organization.

And I think DISCOVERY has missed the point too, showing Section 31 in the chain of command, taking orders from admirals, being known to Captain Pike and sporting special badges. The point of Behr's Section 31 is that they exist entirely as a state of mind and the belief that the ends justify the means and that the Federation's hands can be kept clean if the black-ops wetwork is performed by individuals who aren't sanctioned but also aren't enforced or prevented.

Sloane, at the end of his second episode, tells Bashir that Section 31 engages in betrayal and sabotage and assassination so that Bashir doesn't have to -- so to present Section 31 as a branch of Starfleet Intelligence undermines the reason why their writer created them. Section 31, as presented in DS9 and briefly in Enterprise, predates the United Federation of Planets and exists within the depths of human nature itself.

I concede that Alex Kurtzman has acknowledged the discrepancy between Section 31 being a branch of Starfleet in DISCOVERY and Section 31 being an urban myth in DS9. He says he'll show the transition in Michelle Yeoh's SECTION 31 TV show and I imagine he'll have the Discovery crew reject 31 and shut it down, leaving it as a quiet arrangement between individual officers rather than an actual Starfleet department -- but even that would explicitly declare that Section 31 isn't the Federation and rather misses Ira Steven Behr's point.

Well, it's good that they freed up the cast and crew to find other work.

**

Recently, my niece and I were walking out of a movie theatre and I spotted a poster for CAPTAIN MARVEL.

IB: "It'll be so good to see Agent Coulson back on the big screen again!"

LAUREN: "Who?"

IB: "Loki stabbed him to death in AVENGERS and he got better on AGENTS OF SHIELD?"

LAUREN: "Right, right."

IB: "I once tweeted Clark Gregg and told him that Coulson was my favourite superhero and he said thanks."

LAUREN: "Big of him. Do you have any thoughts on INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE, the movie THAT WE JUST SAW?"

IB: "Yeah! I wish Agent Coulson were in it. I miss him."

I dunno. Shall we speculate on Isaac? Spoilers!!!

I noticed that there was a marked difference between Isaac in previous episodes and after he was rebooted in this one. Specifically: he was no longer indulging or respecting other people's feelings. A key moment for me in Isaac's character was when he and the two children, Marcus and Ty, were stranded on a barren planet and the kids were fighting over a video game that Isaac grabbed, threw into the air and shot. "The game is gone," he informed them. "It is never to be spoken of again." He was concerned about the boys' conflict interfering with their continued survival and even though their feelings weren't important to him, he understood that their feelings were important to them.

It's sort of like how Slider_Quinn21 doesn't take media tie-in comic books, novels, animations, webisodes and such seriously, but he knows that I take them seriously, and he doesn't pretend to consider them canon, but he acknowledges that someone out there does and that my feelings about them are just as legitimate as his lack of feeling towards them. There was consideration and respect even from a canon-following robot like Slider_Quinn21 towards a childish fantasist like me, just as there was from an emotion-averse robot like Isaac towards the actual children and humans who must seem childlike to him.

That is not present in Mark Jackson's performance once Isaac is rebooted. In previous episodes, even when dismissing people's emotional investments, Isaac would put in the time to lounge around Dr. Finn's quarters with beer and demands for dinner. When she asked him if she were a bad mother, he immediately answered, "Yes," but lingered to discuss it in more detail. Jackson's post-reboot performance has a very different sense of timing; his behaviour towards Marcus and Ty in his farewell is clipped and dismissive. His proceeding through his farewell party is devoid of slow, careful precision. He throws away Ty's drawing when, even if he didn't value it, he would have previously grasped that Ty valued him having it.

Ty himself notes the discrepancy: why would Isaac take the time to give piano lessons and play games of cognition and skill with the children? There was a level of indulgence to Isaac; that indulgence is absent once the upload is complete. It's almost as though in the upload, the Kaylons removed and/or added some specific programming. It makes me wonder if Isaac, when aboard the Orville, was programmed to be ignorant of the invasion plot. If the spy doesn't know he's a spy, he can't give himself away. After the upload, the Kaylons restored his mission and removed his affection for the crew, for Dr. Finn and for the children.

There's also the fact that there is no explicit onscreen event that indicates completion for Isaac's mission to plot an invasion of Earth. The Kaylons are immediately shown to be capable of remotely commandeering the Orville even before they've stepped aboard. They seem to have stepped up their timetable after being found out, but I wonder if Isaac was shut down because his fondness for the crew became a contradiction with the sleeper programming to gather intelligence to eradicate the Union.

I dunno! Generally, actors like Jackson are contracted for 5 - 7 years, so I assume they'll find some way to keep the actor in the cast. But my concluding point: the day Slider_Quinn21 doesn't indulge my fondness for tie-ins is the day we all know he's been replaced by a robot and we have to tell his wife.

I think THE X-FILES has value as a brand, but in the same way MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE had value in 1996. It was just the name. The MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movies are summer action blockbusters; they make small nods to the heists, mindgames and deceptions of the TV show, but the centerpieces are always Tom Cruise and heights. For better or worse, M:I's value was in its name recognition as opposed to the content. THE X-FILES is a name. I could see it being rebooted as a 21st century revitalization of the source material like SHERLOCK; I could also see it becoming a star vehicle for Alison Brie for movie after movie in which she fights CG aliens with everyday objects.

As for payoffs -- I think BUFFY had the right formula: each season has its own myth-arc. I think SUPERNATURAL has the right attitude: complete your myth-arc as planned even if you get renewed after your conclusion. Come up with a subsequent story instead of stretching out your first one. ANGEL had a neat approach where each season tweaked the premise slightly with new characters and new locations.

I think the most interesting challenge in THE X-FILES for a new creator is also its central weakness: the show is decidedly indecisive on whether its universe operates on scientific principles or supernatural principles. The advanced biotechnology of the Colonists has always been an odd fit next to the vampires, angels, demons and evil dolls. Mulder and Scully never comment on this discrepancy; the magical elements of the X-FILES never confront the technological aspects. It's a symptom of Chris Carter treating each episode like its own XF universe.

I think a rebooted X-FILES should confront this head on. Summer Glau’s Mulder and Rupert Grint Scully find themselves going back and forth between the magical and the technological and try to reconcile how they exist. Are the vampires a form of genetic engineering? Are the ghosts the result of telepathic ability? Why doesn't their world operate on consistent principles? Is it the result of some interference in the very nature of reality? Are the aliens from other planets or from an alternate plane of reality? Has some cataclysm corrupted the laws of nature, bending them and twisting them? Is there a person or an organization causing this? What is their endgame?

And this also gives a reboot room to maneuver. At some point, the skeptic has to move towards believing, so what if it becomes a conflict between Grint believing in the magic, Glau believing in the science, and neither ever being entirely right?

Going with the SHERLOCKesque approach of treating the source material with reverence while moving forward in time --

Season 1: Starting with basics: monsters of the week, an alien conspiracy that's infiltrated the government, Mulder and Scully investigating, occasionally aided by the Lone Gunmen. In the season finale, they encounter David Duchovny's Fox Mulder and help him find his way back to his home dimension.

Season 2: The Lone Gunmen join the FBI as consultants and become regulars.

Season 3: Mulder, Scully and the Gunmen are fired from the FBI, decide to restart the Lone Gunmen magazine and rename it X-Files Magazine.

Season 4: The magazine was so successful in Season 3 that with Season 4, they hire more staff, more trainees and the X-Files has gone from Mulder and Scully in the basement to an underground magazine to a global operation.

Season 5: The alien invasion begins and we have a full season of myth-arc intrigue. The arc is resolved in a feature film where the invasion is thwarted by alien technology used to shift planet Earth out of phase from the aliens' dimension, preventing any further extraterrestrial incursion. The X-Files disbands, having served its purpose and proven the existence of aliens.

The entire operation is bought up by the Department of Defense and Mulder asks Scully to marry her. As Mulder and Scully embrace in their house surrounded by their friends and family, we pan away to see William B. Davis' Smoking Man observing the scene...

Season 6: Mulder and Scully are called out of retirement when a new conspiracy arises, one based in magic rather than technology, and the X-Files Division is reopened as a DOD operation.

Season 7: Mulder and Scully are now being hunted by the Smoking Man's monsters and seek help from the Duchovny and Anderson incarnations of their characters from the parallel universe where the Smoking Man originated. We spend a season with David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Summer Glau and Rupert Grint wandering across America, finding monsters of the week.

(Gillian: "I did not want to come back, but my daughter said she'd never forgive me for turning down a chance to work with Ron Weasley.")

Season 8: The Mulders are transformed into vampires by the Smoking Man and the Scullys must find them and cure them before it's too late. (Gillian: "I didn't want to come back, but the chance to stab David Duchovny through the heart was too good to pass up even if he comes back to life after.")

Season 9: With aliens re-entering this reality and the monsters on the loose, the Mulders and Scullys begin a search for the creator of their existence, a mysterious being known only as God. The season ends with the Mulders and Scullys confronting God. God is played by Chris Carter. (Gillian: "I didn't want to come back, but I couldn't turn down the chance to punch Chris Carter in the face.")

Season 10: Carter resolves the multiversal conflict, but at a great cost: the Mulders are trapped in the Glau/Grint universe of monsters and magic and the Scullys are trapped in the Duchovny/Anderson universe of sci-fi aliens. We alternate universes each week as the Mulders and Scullys try to solve cases of the week and find their way home. (Gillian Anderson: "I didn't want to come back, but Rupert Grint said he'd star in an adaptation of my EARTHEND novels if I did.")

Season 11: With the Mulders and Scullys having been restored to the correct universes, Glau and Grint decide they're not ready to stop exploring yet and begin exploring parallel universes. Every week, they visit the universe of a TV show that ended on a cliffhanger and resolve that cliffhanger, so we finally get conclusions to SLIDERS, SARAH CONNOR, PUSHING DAISIES, MY SO CALLED LIFE, FREAKS AND GEEKS, LOIS AND CLARK, QUANTUM LEAP and HEROES and we also find out what happened with Big Eddie in Season 1 of FRINGE and get Walter back to the present day to be reunited with Peter and Olivia.

I watched SLIDERS in IMAX! Sort of.

In COMMUNITY's sixth season, Jeff Winger declares that virtual reality is lame. I didn't doubt it, but I didn't know that for a fact. Jeff's issue with VR was the absurd complications and exertions to perform simple tasks like copying files. In his view, there was no need for a computer system to resemble a real-world environment.

Arguably true, but VR also hopes to be like a STAR TREK holodeck, so when I saw a Samsung Gear VR headset for $20 (you slide a Samsung phone into the goggles), I decided I would like to find out for sure. I'm not much of a gamer, but I thought it'd be neat to try watching TV shows on a simulated IMAX screen in virtual reality.

It's extremely lame. Despite the high resolution of my Samsung S7 phone, the magnified lenses of the VR goggles inflate the phone's screen image and create an unfortunate screen door effect; you can see the space between the pixels. You feel like you're in an IMAX theatre -- except the screen is like a low-res cathode ray tube.

However. The SLIDERS DVDs are extremely poor quality transfers with a shocking lack of detail and a very blurry image quality. And, when I put my DVD rips on my phone and watch them in the VR cinema, the screen door pixelation obscures the lousy bitrate and overcompressed picture. Gear VR video makes low-res, substandard SD versions of 90s television look acceptable on a massive CRT-esque screen. I watched "As Time Goes By" in an IMAX theatre setting. I watched "The Guardian" in an IMAX theatre setting. With a Gear VR visor and high-bass Bluetooth headphones.

Well. That was worth twenty bucks. :-)

We must add that, in addition to all of Chris Carter's crimes against television, he mangled THE X-FILES so badly that even Slider_Quinn21 would accept a reboot. :-)

But I actually go back and forth on this. If you go back one page in this thread, you can see me offering proposals for an in-continuity Season 12 featuring a new character and William joining the X-Files office. Since then, I've revisited Season 10, Season 11 and all the comic books.

The case for a revival instead of a reboot (on behalf of Slider_Quinn21): THE X-FILES' story stretches from 1993 to 2018 with 11 seasons and two films. It'd be a shame to put all that away especially when "My Struggle IV" arguably closed off the mythology: all the conspirators were killed off on-camera. In addition, Carter has consistently ignored his own arcs. As of Season 3, Mulder has known of an impending alien invasion; he would only ever mention it for season premieres and finales and sweeps week.

Carter ended Season 9 with an exact date for the invasion; his subsequent XF movie didn't mention it. In Season 10, he called the invasion a hoax and brought an analogous Colonization, the Spartan Virus, in the Season 10 finale. In Season 11, he contradicted himself again. Mr. Y declares that the Colonization plot was actually genuine but aborted as Earth has become unsuited to the Colonists' purposes. Season 11 retcons the Season 10 finale as a vision of the future, but offers no rationale for why the Smoking Man is holding the virus back.

Season 11 shows the Smoking Man completely uninjured when Season 10 showed the Smoking Man hideously scarred. As a result, the Season 11 finale showing Mulder shooting the Smoking Man repeatedly and throwing him off a pier means nothing.

As X-FILES reviewer Darren Mooney observed in X-Cast, at this point, Mulder could decapitate CGB Spender, scoop out his brain, keep it in a jar -- and the Smoking Man would still be back next season. Carter confirmed this opinion in interviews, saying he felt the Smoking Man could have survived.

So, we have a nine season mythology retconned as a hoax and retconned again as genuine but aborted. We have a Season 11 finale that teases the re-return of William, leaves us unsure if Skinner's dead or alive, and offers an end to the series' main villain that cannot be trusted. We have Scully pregnant with the actress refusing to return for any follow-up.

I grudgingly concede that throughout THE X-FILES, Carter has ended episodes indicating that some terrible cataclysm is coming -- only to immediately follow up with a monster of the week that makes no reference to the threat. I concede that yes, you could have THE X-FILES: THE NEXT GENERATION where a new showrunner introduces two new investigators who take over the X-Files division and never speak of Colonization or the Spartan Virus or William again.

However, I feel that any new showrunner would be crippled by this situation. With eleven seasons of three incompatible mythologies in the background, THE X-FILES would never be trusted to develop a new mythos no matter who's running it. The showrunners would be unable to open new arcs involving aliens or government conspiracies without getting entangled in the Colonization, the Conspiracy of Men and the Spartan Virus, none of which Carter had resolved or clarified.

Despite the bulk of THE X-FILES being monsters of the week, I think it is unreasonable to have new showrunners engage in a revival where aliens and conspiracies are off the table or so inextricably linked to Carter's clumsy myth-arc that any new alien conspiracy material would be connected to Carter's mis-steps.

Any future X-FILES production should allow a new writer to make full use of THE X-FILES' defining qualities: a skeptic and a believer, monsters of the week, government conspiracies, and aliens plotting some unknown endgame. It's not fair to saddle a new creator with Chris Carter's incompetence. A new set of hands deserves the clean slate of a reboot. So, once again, I say that we should start over with Summer Glau as Agent Fox Mulder and Rupert Grint as Dr. Dana Scully.

But as another concession, perhaps we'd have a Season 1 finale in which Glau's Mulder and Grint's Scully encounter a rip between universes and they come across a confused Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and as they help him find his way back home to Scully and his child, Duchovny's Mulder congratulates this new Mulder and Scully on their stewardship of the X-Files and passes the torch to them. Before he steps back into the vortex to go home, Duchovny turns to the camera and asks Slider_Quinn21 if this will do, if he can finally retire and move on, and if he can accept this new incarnation of THE X-FILES as a true and valid successor.

:-)

To be honest, I’ve been wondering if you might be onto something about Danielle Panabaker. The truth is, despite having fond memories of her in READ IT AND WEEP and SKY HIGH, I didn’t see her in anything for years until she popped up in ARROW as Caitlin and was revealed as a regular on THE FLASH. I was delighted to see her and actually confused because I’d mistakenly thought Dr. Caitlin Snow on ARROW had been a teenaged intern at STAR Labs. Panabaker had barely aged since she played a high school student in SKY HIGH.

And now, you point out she isn’t really that awesome on THE FLASH and was particularly poor in TIME LAPSE and I had to see that for myself. And you were right — Panabaker was very oddly distant in TIME LAPSE. Following that — well, I got around to watching Panabaker in the movie GIRLS AGAINST BOYS and I still have half an hour left, but this is another movie where there’s gunslinging and people are getting shot in a living room with Panabaker standing right there and... she’s really muted and blank and detached from the scene. Again.

Panabaker isn’t explicitly *bad*, but she really isn’t selling the audience on her character going on a murder spree of her own. She doesn’t convey rage, trauma, madness or homicidal intent. She’s just low-key, thoughtful, quiet, and certainly *adequate*, but there’s more to acting than having the right facial expression.

I think of how Gillian Jacobs brings so much spontanaity and insecurity and madness to Britta or how Alison Brie infuses Annie with a neurotic precision on COMMUNITY or how Anna Torv gives Olivia Dunham a military bearing matched with a melancholy loneliness — and next to them, I’m reluctantly finding that Panabaker has the presence of a well-designed, extremely articulate shop window dummy. A magnificently built one, to be sure. She doesn’t make what’s on paper come alive as a fully-dimensionalized person.

... I’m starting to seriously question my fondness for Danielle Panabaker. I mean, in READ IT AND WEEP, i’m now remembering that it was Kay Panabaker who played most of that role and Danielle was really in specific insert shots and fantasy sequences. And SKY HIGH was really about Michael Angarano as a teen superhero with Panabaker playing a classmate who was hopelessly crushing on him. And in Seasons 1 - 2 of THE FLASH, her job was to take care of Barry, something she fixated on at times because she was mentally using him as a replacement for her deceased fiance.

Is it possible that I only like Panabaker because she was playing a pretty, besotted high school student back when I would have liked for someone who looked like Panabaker to be crushing on me? And because I wouldn’t mind having someone like Danielle Panabaker tasked with keeping me healthy and hydrated and nourished? Do I only like Panabaker because she’s pretty?

..................

Well, it could also be that Panabaker’s range just doesn’t extend to shooting people and that’s just not suited to her strengths as an actress.

Well, I apologize for viewing all of your posts as graduate school theses as opposed to what they are -- off the cuff comments on a message board. It's unreasonable to expect anyone to post on this board and supply a bibliography at the end. Thank you for sharing all of your meetings with various celebrities over the years.

He was all of those things, but I would not call him "nothing more" than that. He was also a loving husband -- yes, he cheated on his wife, but she forgave him his misdeeds and understood his grief. His children forgave him his trespasses and asked SLIDERS fans if we might do the same. I'm willing to do that.

To steal from Richard Curtis, I think every person's life is a pile of good things and bad things and the bad can be glaring and horrific and beneath contempt, but it doesn't erase the good that's there as well.

There's no question that David Peckinpah wrote "Murder Most Foul." His life, his career and his family are all over it.

The little boy in the story is named "Trevor" after one of Peckinpah's sons. The plot is a tribute to Peckinpah's long career in crime fiction; the theme park setting shows Peckinaph's obsession with historical re-enactment which also came to the forefront in Season 4 and 5 as Peckinpah really liked working with The Buckaroos, a group that did the Wild West and Civil War re-enactments.

The ending where little Trevor promises to one day find the sliders again has a sweetly poignant longing, speaking to (a) Quinn's desire to be reunited with his father and (b) David Peckinpah's longing to be reunited with his son.

Well, when Season 3 was firing on most cylinders, I think what we had was a good amount of the original vision of SLIDERS but with more chase scenes, more explosions, more CG trains and it was still recognizably the same show but with more superficial thrills. It had more of FOX's wishes for action, but it was still SLIDERS. I think any story is conceivably a SLIDERS story and I see no reason why SLIDERS' platform isn't wide enough to embrace twisters, dinosaurs and vampires.

Where I think Peckinpah went wrong is that rather than encouraging a wide range of genre pastiches, he became completely fixated on horror and he also didn't see to it that scripts were reviewed for coherence and introductions or make sure that actors delivered their lines correctly or ensure sound editors put in effects. Errors happen on every show, but there's a review process to try to catch and correct them. I'd say that around the midpoint of Season 3, that review process has halted in favour of binge drinking sessions.

I mean, I'd love to see an episode where Quinn and Arturo try to work out the scientific rationale behind vampires and devise a countermeasure to defeat them. (I also wrote one.)

I don't agree with that. I don't agree that Seasons 4 - 5 had to be the way they were. The Sci-Fi Channel was pretty hands off on SLIDERS; they didn't even plan to renew it for Season 5, and I don't see any evidence that they pushed for the Kromaggs or for a "darker" show. (Does it get darker than the zombie apocalypse and the animal human hybrids of Season 3?) I think the showrunners could've done anything they wanted within the budget and Torme would have gladly accepted the cut budget and the total lack of interest from the network allowing him to work unrestricted.

As for the Chandler: there was absolutely no reason to rent and maintain a giant hotel set. If you need a hotel room, you wheel in some wallpapered walls, a dresser, a TV and a bed and that's your hotel. If you need a hotel lobby, you roll out a counter and some dummy windows.

That way, you have the option of removing these dressings and bringing in whatever else you might need -- benches and podiums for a courtroom, shelving and lights for a grocery store, exterior walls and fans to fake a street shot, etc.. FRINGE had a massive budget cut in its fifth season, so they rented a bare studio space that they could reconfigure into labs, hallways, markets for frozen corpses, living rooms, train stations, etc..

There's also the fact that the early Season 3 episodes of SLIDERS are a good synthesis of Tracy Torme's characters and storytelling matched with FOX's preference for action and sexuality. "Double Cross" features eye candy, chase sequences, action and an alt-history of environmental decay and resource depletion.

It was entirely possible to give FOX their action and film in LA and still make it *good*. It was entirely possible to film SLIDERS on a Sci-Fi Channel budget and still aim for strong storytelling. And Peckinpah managed to do this for a few episodes throughout each of his seasons. It'd have been nice if he could have managed it for most of them.

I think a season with more episodes like "Double Cross," "Dead Man Sliding," "The Prince of Slides," "Murder Most Foul," "Season's Greedings," "Prophets and Loss," "Virtual Slide," "Slidecage," "Slide By Wire," "Way Out West," "Applied Physics," "New Gods for Old," "The Return of Maggie Beckett" and "A Current Affair" would have been seen quite favourably. Those are the high points; they should have been the standard.

If Season 3 had aimed for maintaining the quality of "Double Cross" -- strong scripts with more action than previous years -- I think fans would have been fine and FOX would have had some explosions and sexuality to put in the trailers.

Peckinpah was partially responsible for John Rhys-Davies' departure and largely responsible for Sabrina Lloyd's exit. As the showrunner, it was his job to keep the original, contracted for 5 - 6 years cast of the show on the show. To lose one contracted actor might be construed as misfortune, to lose three-quarters of them does not speak well of the showrunner's interpersonal skills, ego or skin. Ultimately, I consider Peckinpah responsible, but I also find him unfortunate.

I don't justify or excuse anything he did, but I'm prepared to find some love and understanding for him the way I hope others would find some for me when I make terrible mistakes in my own life and sometimes in this very community (like the time I accidentally uploaded nude photos of Kari Wuhrer to the Sci-Fi Channel server. The photos were for art. Seriously: I was using photos of Wuhrer from the movie VIVID to make graphics for the INFINITE SLIDES fanfic website.).

So, the X-FILES had a run of comic books from 2013 - 2018 from the publisher IDW. The 2013 - 2015 comics were essentially the SLIDERS REBORN of THE X-FILES: writer Joe Harris wrote SEASON 10 and SEASON 11 with 34 issues that focused on the myth-arc, Colonization and the war between the Rebels and the Colonists. Due to the Revival rendering these comics apocryphal, SEASON 11 #8 was the final issue offering a conclusion to the whole Colonization arc and this avenue for THE X-FILES was abandoned. IDW didn't see the point of publishing a tie-in comic that didn't tie in anymore.

However, Amazon Audible got the X-FILES license for audiobooks and for reasons beyond me, elected to do an adaptation of the SEASON 10 and SEASON 11 comic books called COLD CASES and STOLEN LIVES. Yes, that's right; their idea for tying into the 2016 TV series was to release an audiobook adaptation of material that was in stark contradiction to the series. And they hired David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson to perform it. It's interesting -- there was some hope of doing Tracy Torme's fanfic proposal as an audioplay as well (but Torme never finished it). Transmodiar was regularly suggesting that I rope Robert Floyd into doing some sort of audioplay version of SLIDERS REBORN. RussianCabbie wanted the REWATCH PODCAST to perform an audioplay adaptation of my scripts.

Well, I listened to COLD CASES and it is my worst nightmare for how a SLIDERS REBORN audioplay could have turned out. David Duchovny has clearly not read the script and is delivering it as he's skimming it for the first time in a recording booth; there has been no rehearsal or consideration whatsoever for the session. Gillian Anderson is also doing it cold and she's slightly more awake than Duchovny but not by much. They have not recorded together, and there is a terrible sense of Mulder and Scully having had their voicemail greetings clipped and intertwined; they're supposed to be in the same room, they sound like Mulder and Scully action figures with pullstrings delivering canned soundbytes that have been edited into something that vaguely resembles a conversation.

And then there's the fact that Audible didn't hire the entire cast. We've got Duchovny, Anderson, Mitch Pileggi, William B. Davis, and all the Lone Gunmen actors -- but there's no Robert Patrick, Annabeth Gish, Nicholas Lea, and we have actors who aren't even trying to impersonate the originals. It is bizarre to hear Scully talking to a Krycek who isn't Nicholas Lea. I want to call it an uncanny valley effect to hear Doggett and Reyes chatting with voices that aren't their own, but that suggests the actors sound anything like Patrick and Gish and they don't.

The entire project exudes minimality. Audible hired only some of the original cast, didn't build rehearsals into the production schedule, declined to create anything new and instead raided some of IDW's Word files for comic book scripts to serve as content and have performed the most half-assed adaptation possible. It doesn't seem like a professional product. It comes off as the audio track of one of those awful STAR TREK fan films that rope in some of the original actors from time to time.

I hope writer Joe Harris never listened to these, never heard his thoughtful, written-for-print dialogue being performed by the original actors with no concern for how dialogue meant to be read was now being spoken by Duchovny and Anderson recording in separate sessions with no idea of what they're saying or why they're saying it.

I watched TIME LAPSE and Slider_Quinn21 is right. Danielle Panabaker's performance is acceptable for the first half, but there comes a point when her character, Callie, is watching people get murdered in her living room and having a gun put to her face and Panabaker's reactions are muted and sleepy. I'm not sure what's going on here, but in an interview, the director mentioned that the actors all had very different attitudes to how to rehearse and they had extremely limited time to film as the apartment in which they were filming was scheduled for demolition.

TIME LAPSE reminded me of one of my niece's student films, actually -- there was a key moment when an character was supposed to react with terror and shock in response to a ghost, but my niece was shy and didn't tell the actress to emote and failed to provide a cue and therefore never got the shot she needed. Since then, she's learned to be clear and assertive. TIME LAPSE is full of little moments where the direction and the performances just aren't capturing the details needed to convey the situation.

There's some chatter about a potential Season 12 of THE X-FILES; Carter will be invited to propose the content and financials for a potential re-revival. But Gillian Anderson is fed up with the show and apologized to the fans for the Season 11 finale. The audience certainly lost interest; the show went from 7 - 8 million viewers in Season 100 to about 3 - 3.3 million in Season 11.

I dunno. Were we talking about a Season 10 revival, my proposal would have been to have Mulder and Scully wrap up the Colonization arc in the season premiere in a single story and then focus on standalones. Instead, Carter decided to stretch out the myth-arc while ignoring nine seasons of detailed continuity. At this point, the show had a second chance to get its house and order and has shown itself incapable of doing so. Despite "My Struggle IV" offering some closure by killing off all the conspirator characters, Skinner is either injured or dead and Scully's pregnancy (again?!) will be another distraction from what has always been the bulk of TXF content: standalone monsters of the week.

Knowing Carter and his total inability to sustain running storylines (while constantly starting them) and his refusal to ever end a story arc, he'll likely have a Season 12 that:

(a) opens with Mulder and Scully again estranged after Scully lost the baby in a miscarriage
(b) reopens the X-Files to investigate the myth-arc and an impending doomsday scenario
(c) reveals that the Smoking Man's alive and extracted the fetus that was Scully's child
(d) ignores the above for a run of standalone episodes follows by
(e) a series finale that has a bunch of action moments and leaves all of the above unresolved.

And that's assuming Gillian Anderson would return. She doesn't want to and I think crap like this is why.

You could conceivably do a revival without Carter or Duchovny or Anderson with new FBI agents stepping into the basement office, but at this point, Carter has accumulated so much baggage with William, the Spartan Virus, Scully's pregnancy, the Smoking Man likely being alive, Skinner's injury and loyalties and whatnot that it'd drag down any new creators and cast members. I wouldn't trust Carter to offer any sensible continuation or finale after the way he used his 16 episodes.

As much as Slider_Quinn21 will object, I think that if THE X-FILES comes back, it's time for a reboot. I know Slider_Quinn21 always prefers revivals, but Seasons 10 - 11 were the revival and given the ratings and the content having alienated Gillian Anderson, this well has been poisoned by the ineptitude of the original creator and his inability to run a show. The time and opportunity for revival has passed. It's time to start over with a new Mulder and Scully and get it right this time.

I'd like Eric Kripke, Joel Wyman and Bryan Fuller to write it.

I actually feel the same way about Panabaker that I do about Cavanagh -- a very talented actor whose material has been increasingly muddled over the course of five years. Cavanagh's issue: the writers started writing his stand-up comedy impressions instead of writing his character and Cavanagh's comedy voices are not a fully-dimensionalized character. Panabaker's issue: the writing has lost Caitlin's original voice and the current characterization isn't a logical fit.

I've never been entirely clear on WHY the series named the character "Caitlin Snow," the name of the DC Comics supervillain Killer Frost. THE FLASH's procedural template did not require a future supervillain on Barry's team nor did they write her as one. Caitlin was a biologist, a scientist, a medical doctor, specifically Barry's personal physician. In Seasons 1 - 2, she was written with a crisply scientific, result-oriented characterization and Panabaker did a great job of selling Caitlin's medical acumen and the perpetual trauma of seeing Ronnie die followed by her betrayal by Hunter Zolomon. Because her name was Caitlin Snow, the expectation was that she'd become a villain -- which wouldn't have made any sense; Panabaker was contracted as a regular. The fate of most if not all villains: they are defeated and written out.

Season 2 showed an alternate universe Caitlin as Killer Frost. That really should have been the end of it. But with the writers looking for FLASHPOINT consequences, they decided in Season 3 to make the prime Caitlin into Killer Frost and... it didn't work. There was no explanation for where this Killer Frost personality came from; it had nothing to do with the onscreen Caitlin. There was no reason for why the Killer Frost persona would be so homicidal and malevolent; it didn't reflect or invert Caitlin's desires. Killer Frost was a villain of the week who kept coming back and was played by one of the regulars and inhabiting the place of a lead cast member -- and it didn't make any sense.

And with Killer Frost being a murderous loon, Panabaker was required to make the Caitlin persona distinct. And without a clear line of characterization as to how Caitlin and Killer Frost were even connected beyond sharing the same body, Panabaker unfortunately flattened Caitlin into generic, guileless innocence while Killer Frost was violent and volatile. With Season 4, the writers remembered that Panabaker was on contract, so they toned Killer Frost down and since then have written Caitlin as a member of Barry's team.

Unfortunately, they've lost Caitlin's voice with all the changes and awkward rollbacks; they've lost the Caitlin/Barry relationship with Barry as her patient. They've lost Caitlin's sense of tragedy and loss because her arc is now focused on this dual persona. They've lost the focus on Caitlin's biology background, so she's just a science girl alongside Cisco. Panabaker's performance is no longer emphasizing Caitlin's scientific nature; instead, she and the scripts are focused on making her Caitlin performance *unlike* Killer Frost and when you define a character by what she isn't, there's no sense of who she is.

Many aspects of THE FLASH have become dulled and faded due to five years of adhering to a formula, occasionally threatening sweeping change but never really wanting to lose anyone from the STAR Labs hallways, and both Caitlin and Harrison Wells have suffered for it.

I've always liked Panabaker. One of my favourite children's movies is READ IT AND WEEP where young high school student Jamie writes a daydream journal featuring a fantasy version of herself, Isabelle ("Is"), who is sharper, wittier, stronger and more well-groomed and who defeats all the classmates and teachers who annoy her. When Jamie's daydream novel is actually printed in the school paper, it becomes popular, is published as a successful novel and Jamie starts having lengthy conversations with her fictitious self, Is, and Is starts taking over Jamie's life.

Jamie is played by Kay Panabaker and Danielle, Kay's older sister, plays Is as the taller, prettier, more self-assured image of what Jamie would like to be. It's a fascinating performance where Kay and Danielle often swap places in the same scene to indicate how the Is-persona is starting to dominate Jamie. Panabaker was also in SKY HIGH playing a superheroine who could control plant life. I'm not saying READ IT AND WEEP and SKY HIGH are cinematic masterpieces -- they're low budget children's movies, but I grew up with Danielle Panabaker and she'll naturally always feel like the cool older sister to me... or, in Caitlin's case, my personal medical doctor.

I think ARROW had a great Season 5 and Season 6 in returning to the street crime origins of Seasons 1 - 2. I’m very happy with this year as well (sorry, Informant). I’m really enjoying LEGENDS’ craziness and zaniness. SUPERGIRL is also having a fabulous year. And all these shows could run indefinitely: ARROW can forever explore Oliver’s trauma by having each villain represent some aspect of his dysfunctionality and poor human resources skills, LEGENDS is about misfits and SUPERGIRL’s refugee metaphor is evergreen.

In contrast, THE FLASH doesn’t have that boundless applicability. THE FLASH has never identified a central metaphor. It’s not about growing up too fast; it’s not about trying to keep pace with the forward motion of the world around us; it doesn’t really have anything to SAY that’s specific to superspeed. THE FLASH has been about Barry trying to resolve his childhood trauma and embrace his future destiny as a legendary superhero. As of the Season 2 finale, it’s all been done.

I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of FLASH comics, but the era I read and enjoyed most was when Wally West was the Flash; Barry was dead. Writer Mark Waid was not the first writer to script Wally as the Flash, but Waid identified a central character flaw in Wally to explore in nearly every story: Wally was impatient. It was his greatest weakness.

He was always in a hurry; he was always leaping before looking; he was constantly underinformed and unprepared. At the end of Waid’s run, he explained that he had loved writing THE FLASH because Waid himself had been a deeply impatient person. But, in recent years, Waid had learned how to be patient and as a result, he no longer felt the intimate connection to Wally West that he had before.

THE FLASH as a TV series never found a central point of the human condition. Impatience was not one of Barry’s failings aside from Oliver pointing out that Barry needed to review environments before entering. THE FLASH pinned all its content on the Flash mythology. It worked for two seasons. Now it’s just going in circles. But, I mean — it’s not like the pure frustration of HEROES or the tedium of IRON FIST. THE FLASH has accomplished all of its goals... and it keeps getting renewed every year and has more hours to fill.

One show Informant and I have agreed to disagree on: ANGEL. ANGEL, like THE FLASH, was a paranormal procedural. However, ANGEL periodically shook up its format. Season 1 was about helping a weekly guest-star; Season 2 shifted into Angel’s dysfunction breaking up the team; Season 3 was about Angel accepting a new role as an employee working for the people he used to lead; Season 4 was a 22-episode movie about Angel and his friends facing the Antichrist; Season 5 was about trying to turn the evil law firm they’d fought for four years into a force for good.

Informant argues that ANGEL lost its way by abandoning the Season 1 template and that’s a fair criticism, but I think THE FLASH demonstrates what can happen when a show refuses to build regular evolution into its formula; it can become stagnant, tired, repetitive, predictable and every formula risks becoming formulaic.

I dunno. THE FLASH would benefit from a rest. That said, I’m always happy to see Danielle Panabaker and Tom Cavanagh working.

That's a ridiculous thing to say.

Grizzlor, I question your supposed expertise in such matters. Yes, you've demonstrated some in-depth knowledge. Yes, you've had many, many, many conversations with SLIDERS alumni.

But you've just as often demonstrated shocking ignorance. You claimed Gene Roddenberry was responsible for continuity errors in STAR TREK VI (he had no involvement). You said SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES could have helped FOX earn more money on TERMINATOR SALVATION when SALVATION was a Warner Bros. project.

In one of your most absurd statements, you said that Marvel should sell all their remaining film rights to Sony and FOX. The actual reality: they had already sold Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four and Daredevil to Sony and FOX. They were receiving nothing of the outside studios' profits. That's why Marvel self-financed the AVENGERS property.

Now you claim that FOX was somehow responsible for David Peckinpah's misbegotten stewardship of the show. Yes, David Peckinpah blamed FOX for the movie ripoffs. And yes, they are less in evidence in Seasons 4 - 5. But Peckinpah also joined FOX's Peter Roth in getting John fired off SLIDERS. He permitted Kari to harass Sabrina Lloyd and drove Sabrina off the show as well.  He was also responsible for the shoddy stunt standards that got Ken Steadman killed on "Desert Storm" and I know for a fact that you're also aware that he maintained the same dangerous work practices as late as "Easy Slider" where his mistress was not qualified to do stuntwork but hired by Peckinpah anyway.

Throughout Peckinpah's tenure, he did not review scripts to make sure guest-stars were addressed by name (or ensure that Dial or Damron did). He allowed actors to show up drunk and writers to play Solitaire during meetings. He agreed to a massive hotel set that tied up the budget for Seasons 4 - 5 in rental fees that could've gone to locations and props and effects and guest-stars. He let the show end on a cliffhanger.

He was literally referred to as the "boss" right to the end of Season 5 and worked with a disinvolved network for Seasons 4- 5 that clearly let him do whatever he wanted, so the idea that Peckinpah is not responsible for SLIDERS' three year crash and was just a 'manager' for FOX is ridiculous. FOX wasn't even there for the last two seasons. Peckinpah's management and attitude didn't change when FOX was out of the picture.

Tracy Torme would have loved working on the Sci-Fi Channel and he would have been happy to produce material without a single network note.

Now, I am not presenting myself as an expert who knows more than Grizzlor. I get the feeling that Grizzlor has pretty much the same facts that I do and I get the sense from the inside knowledge he does have that Grizzlor and I were both apostles in the lore of Temporal Flux. We’ve clearly read the same information on rights and licensing between studios and TV networks. But we have somehow come to contrary conclusions.

Nevertheless, even from a layperson's perspective: if we agree that FOX wasn't involved in the two seasons that SLIDERS wasn't airing on FOX, if we agree that David Peckinpah was considered "the boss" by Keith Damron and Bill Dial, if we agree that the Sci-Fi Channel was disinterested in SLIDERS -- then it makes no sense whatsoever to say Peckinpah wasn't responsible for SLIDERS' dissolution and demise.

That's not to say that Peckinpah isn't unworthy of pity or compassion, of course. We can see that Peckinpah is responsible for destroying SLIDERS while recognizing that he was a tormented and lonely human being who killed himself with grief. And cocaine and heroin.

Temporal Flux once joked that Peckinpah was burning in development hell. Brand_S once said that Peckinpah was burning in actual hell. I would like to think that Peckinpah, wherever he is, found his son, found some measure of peace and found his way back home.

Something I often wished comic books would do -- I've always thought that each character's comic or line of comics should take place in their own universe but with versions of the other characters. By which I mean that SUPERMAN titles would feature a consistent universe between them, but the FLASH comic book would be set in its own universe.

The Flash could guest-star SUPERMAN or ACTION COMICS or MAN OF STEEL or SUPERGIRL or what-have-you, but it would be the SUPERMAN-universe's version of the Flash and vice versa. Over in SUPERMAN, you might have aliens emigrating to planet Earth, but in THE FLASH, there would be no indication of any such storyline. The JUSTICE LEAGUE title would feature independent versions of the characters and the writer could pick and choose what aspects of the individual titles to acknowledge and which to ignore.

I'd be quite content for each movie to serve its own purpose rather than the larger conglomerate even if that diffuses the original intent of a shared cinematic universe.

This is the saddest thing I have ever read on this forum. I'm sorry to hear this.

Ahem. Slider_Quinn21's views are his own and in no way represent the consensus of this forum were such a thing even to blah blah blah. I'm sorry this happened, Rob. I was going to make this joke about how Batman not only brings out your hatred of old people but of short people as well in the GOTHAM thread, but -- I'll save it for later.

I see no issue with that interpretation.

I think that the rationale for why John is so gentle in this episode in contrast to Sam and Dean's memories of him as a harsh taskmaster -- he's in shock from seeing his sons over a decade older from how he remembers them last, he's in shock from seeing his wife alive again. John never wanted to be a hunter until Mary died; it was Mary who descends from a legacy of hunters and reluctantly showed John her world, and when Mary is alive, John doesn't feel the call to be a hunter anymore.

I cannot stress enough in the name of all that is holy that Informant’s views to which he is entitled and welcome to voice do not represent those of Sliders.tv as a whole.

Informant is perfectly welcome to share his views and others are welcome to disagree. But me -- I just don't think the world needs me (or anyone incapable of getting pregnant) to offer an opinion on abortion. I am going to focus on what really matters, on a mission that is truly for me and me alone -- I must destroy April Fools Day, put it in the ground and dig it back up just to shoot it dead.

I cannot stress enough in the name of the Professor's slide-rule, Rembrandt's AIDS ribbons and Jerry O'Connell's damaged liver that the views in any one post in this thread do not reflect those of Sliders.TV as a whole.