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Informant, I apologize. I've made a mistake. James O'Keefe was a Breitbart employee and the Vera 'scandal' was published on Breitbart in 2009. And yes, they were fraudulent -- O'Keefe intercut footage of himself shot after his conversation with Vera in which O'Keefe dressed up in an absurd outfit and asked more explicitly criminal questions in order to make Vera's responses look more disturbing, and then the intercut footage was presented as the actual conversation on the website.

The Shirley Sherrod video went on Brietbart in 2010 and at the time, most critics including myself thought they were more of James O'Keefe's manipulative editing as it fit his style entirely by choosing select portions of dialogue, intercutting in order to manipulate the conversation and to make someone look bad. The majority of internet coverage at the time accredited the phony editing to O'Keefe as he seemed to be the go-to person for Breitbart's smear videos -- but upon review today, this was never verified and O'Keefe denies he was involved, so it's unreasonable to put this on his list.

However... I'm still going to have to point to the faked Vera videos, the doctored NPR interviews (which were debunked as manipulatively edited and contextualized once full versions were reviewed), an edited video that shows an actor easily scamming a Maine Medicaid office (the full version shows the actor failed to do so), a video of environmentalists talking about other organizations they work with adjusted with voiceover to claim all these mentioned organizations take payoffs from oil companies -- the man is simply a scam artist and it's beyond me how despite a long history of deception, he isn't instantly dismissed. This is what he does. He lures people, films them saying lots of things, edits material into something incriminating and presents a smoking gun that's inevitably exposed as a fake.

But I apologize for the Sherrod error. Do I think O'Keefe made it? Yes, but I mis-remembered this as a fact when it's simply a suspicion. Thank you for the correction. But I really don't think this man is your conservative knight in armour. You can do better. I'm going to go back to the ARROW thread now. Best of luck on November 8.

O'Keefe was Breitbart's protege in this sort of 'journalism' and he and Breitbart were partners in the Sherrod affair, having been working together since 2009.

As for Vera, he was following the appropriate procedures for dealing with someone proposing human trafficking, which O'Keefe knew full well. If someone comes into your office and wants you to help them sell people into slavery, you play along, collect every piece of info you can, then call the cops, which Vera did. O'Keefe knew full well that he was misrepresenting a man doing exactly what anyone should do in that situation. O'Keefe's other big 'hit' is fraudulent NPR recordings where he re-edited conversations to make it seem like they were accepting money from terrorist organizations.

Unlike previous endeavours, however, this time, James O'Keefe is point blank refusing to release the unedited footage and recordings. This alone should be enough to instantly discredit him even more than he's already been discredited; he doesn't want scrutiny of his evidence, meaning his evidence is bogus.

Anyone who lends credence to James O'Keefe's claims and assertions is doing so not because he's in any way credible or trustworthy, but because he's telling them something they want to hear, something they want to believe so badly that they'll set aside any questions of his ridiculous past and his inane methods and his manipulative editing in order to believe what they've decided to believe. It's, admittedly, the same motivations that lead to people seeing Hillary Clinton as an unquestionable icon of feminism, achievement and freedom.

            INT. APARTMENT - AFTERNOON

            Ib goes to his door and open it to find himself staring at
            the face of Jerry O'Connell. Instantly enraged, Ib makes a
            fist and prepares to swing --

                                     IB
                         You treacherous, ungrateful,
                         backstabbing piece of --

                                     QUINN
                         Whoa, whoa, whoa! It's me!

                                     IB
                         Oh. Quinn.
                               (instantly relaxing)
                         So sorry. Thought you were the other
                         guy.

                                     QUINN
                         This has been happening all day. On
                         the flight to get here, women kept
                         throwing drinks in my face. At the
                         airport, this one lady punched me in
                         the stomach. She looked like Sabrina
                         the Teenaged Witch.

                                     IB
                         Melissa Joan Hart! So awesome! D'you
                         think she's in town for a show and
                         that is not what's important right
                         now! Come in, come in -- what can I
                         do for you?

                                     QUINN
                         Well, I saw on the Sliders.tv message
                         board that your friend Slider_Quinn21
                         is so depressed about the election
                         that he's thinking of writing "Quinn
                         Mallory" on his ballot. Please ask
                         him not to do that.

                                     IB
                         He's got no good options, Q-Ball!
                         We're lucky he's not voting for
                         Donald Trump; we can't ask him to
                         vote for Hillary Clinton if he
                         doesn't support her --

                                     QUINN
                         I understand the burden in a
                         democratic process where there's no
                         good choices in front of you. I have
                         two responses for him.

                                     IB
                         Two? Why two?

                                     QUINN
                         The first: due to the Electoral
                         Colleges and rampant gerrymandering,
                         he could fairly consider the act of
                         voting meaningless since across 535
                         congregational districts, only 18 are
                         swing jurisdictions.

                                     IB
                         Ohhhh, Americans.

                                     QUINN
                         Slider_Quinn21 could reasonably stay
                         home and keep out of it. However,
                         following this line of thinking, the
                         Professor would say that any
                         abstinence from the electoral
                         procedure is an abdication of one's
                         entitlement to lamentation with
                         regards to political undertaking.

                                     IB
                         Huh?

                                     QUINN
                         If he doesn't vote, he can't
                         complain.

                                     IB
                         You realize, you just basically said
                         nothing whatsoever.

                                     QUINN
                         So if we discard the option of not
                         participating, your friend's best
                         route for participating without
                         supporting candidates he doesn't
                         agree with is to vote for whichever
                         of the six is least likely to win.

                                     IB
                         The dude with the tiger zoo? The dude
                         with the tiger zoo!

                                     QUINN
                         Yes. The dude with the tiger zoo. Go
                         with Joe Exotic. Then your friend has
                         done his due diligence and I'll
                         respect him.

            This has been a public service announcement for
            Slider_Quinn21 paid for by the What Would Quinn Mallory Do
            Campaign.

While I don't doubt that Trump's volatile lack of self-control won Clinton her presidency, I think it is grossly disproportionate to hold Bill Clinton responsible for Trump serving as the Republican nominee. This is a political party who decided that the best person to represent their values, their philosophies, their strategies and their methods for how to govern would be a failed businessman bailed out by his father whose successes came through hiring contractors and securing investments in collapsed enterprises where the contractors and investors would suffer while Trump walked away with the money he owed them and the money they'd paid him. A man who can't focus on a conversation for me than 10 minutes at a time. A person who was infamous for sexual harassment and bragged about it on Howard Stern's radioshow, a man who ran a fraudulent university where the main product was getting to pose next to a cardboard cutout of him for photos. A conman with a crappy TV show and a supposed billionaire whose campaign hats are poorly stitched and whose untailored suits don't fit.

**

On the subject of voter fraud, if anything, Project Veritas is attacking fair and democratic elections by using O'Keefe's usual methods of misleadingly edited footage (as he always has) to undermine trust, faith and confidence in a voting system that is a model of equality and trustworthiness. Even if every single one of O'Keefe's claims were true, you could not possibly steal a Presidential election in this fashion because you could not possibly create enough false identities for multiple voting with registered names in order to sway the results in a contest of this size, nor could you monitor the supposed fraudulent voters to ensure they voted as instructed, nor could the massive expense for so little numerical gain make any possible sense.

You would have to be the stupidest person alive to try to steal a Presidential election by bussing the same groups of people to different jurisdictions.

James O'Keefe of Project Veritas is a known con artist and scammer whose big gimmick has always been to secretly film people and the re-edit their conversations into something that appears to incriminate them for racism, human trafficking or worse only for unedited footage to reveal his fraud. Even a cursory Google of this man made it clear that his videos cannot be taken as truthful. The logistics of having the same people vote repeatedly in different jurisdictions under multiple names in order to make a sufficient difference in a Presidential election are physically impossible. The claim that postal workers can screen for Republican mail in ballots is absurd; they are not distinguishable from the exterior.

I'm sorry. I'm totally in sympathy with your disdain for Clinton and Trump, but the idea that the system is rigged given the massive decentralization and bipartisan nature of the vote counting matched with detached voting machines -- I just don't think that's remotely plausible and James O'Keefe doesn't have the credibility to do an exposé on the Colonel's secret spices never mind voter fraud.

The Samsung S5 is the cheapest option for Samsung Pay with waterproofing and a microSD and it's your only option for those features with a removable battery.

**

I used Final Draft to write "Slide Effects" and Parts 1 - 3 of SLIDERS REBORN, but I have to say that I was. becoming increasingly disgruntled with it. The latest versions did not seem to have been optimized for Windows 8, so I was seeing a lot of freezing and lagging and delayed input was just maddening. Around that time, screenwriter John August revealed a new version of the Courier screenwriting font, Courier Prime.

This new font was so well-suited to screen readers and digital displays while maintaining the typewritten look that I had to go with it. I switched to using the screenwriting software Fade In, which used the new font and was smooth on Windows. In contrast, Final Draft could not use Courier Prime correctly, adding in extreme spaces between each line. I went back and converted all my scripts to Fade In and it's been good.

The only issue I have with Fade In -- dialogue will cut off in mid-sentence to go to the next page. In Final Draft, dialogue would always break at a period, making sure no sentence was split across a page. The setting to adjust this in Fade In doesn't work.

As for writing on tablets -- try swipe typing keyboards, it's a slight improvement over thumbing each key individually.

Hey, there's a new build of Marshmallow that works great on my phone! I like the smoother animations. It looks like Google added extra frames. There's also a finally working function for merging your microSD storage with the internal memory which is quite handy on my phone which has a mere 4.53GB of free space once the OS and apps are installed.

**

On the subject of charging -- for the longest time, I was using a small power bank the size of two chocolate bars to top up my phone occasionally when in a desperate situation. However. Ever since I installed a high amperage USB charger in the car, I've been able to recharge my phone fully during even brief commutes. I gave away my power bank, but I found myself needing one again because my laptop is charged through a microUSB port. I was impressed to find that Aukey has a high amperage power bank that retails for about $17 on Amazon. They've gotten smaller, cheaper and more powerful than my old 2.1 amp power bank.

Hopefully, it won't explode or anything...

Slider_Quinn21, SUPERGIRL is a heartfelt, earnest, at times sickeningly sweet series about nice high school children in superhuman bodies who want to spend all day doing nice things. Of course Informant hates it, he's biologically allergic to fun.

(I'm sorry, but now that I've come to accept Informant is a conservative who isn't a Republican nutjob, I need to to have this. As I said earlier, I can't really disagree with any of Informant's criticisms, they just don't bother me as much as they bother him.)

Personally, I thought Oliver's line of "I don't have time to time travel" was one of the most nonsensical sentences that Stephen Amell has ever been scripted to say. It's a god damn time machine. And in addition to all the plotting problems that Informant noted, there is no onscreen reason for Rip Hunter's disappearance nor does anyone even seem to be worried about his well-being or wonder why he wasn't leading the mission to reunite the team. I can't understand what the point was of separating the team if they were to be recovered so easily aside from creating some incident so that Arthur Darvill could exit the show (is he even leaving?).

And yet... it was fun. I enjoyed it. I thought Sara Lance becoming like James Bond was hilarious. But the show doesn't make much sense and there's an odd sense of just trying to fill an hour with the actors that ARROW and FLASH don't have space to deal with. I wonder if SUPERGIRL's Jimmy Olsen will join the Legends at some point. LEGENDS reminds me of the MARVEL KNIGHTS and DEFENDERS comics where Marvel would publish these titles featuring characters who had no reason to be together beyond keeping the copyrights and titles in circulation and serving as a dumping ground for the unwanted.

I must confess -- I've generally always seen the Republican political party as Donald Trump even before Donald Trump become the nominee. Long before Trump staggered into politics, he came off as a geyser of hatred and arrogance who claimed to be successful but whose fortune was ultimately drawn from (a) a predecessor who was as competent as Trump was not and (b) exploiting the poor and gullible to line his pockets at their expense (c) presenting his exploitative practices as a showcase of independence cloaked in religion to obscure how he was simply a man driven by (d) greed and contempt for other human beings while using (e) hatred and fear of minorities, immigrants, refugees, homosexuals and the disabled and marginalized to convince his audience that his monstrosity had acceptable targets.

And that, to be honest, is how I always viewed most Republicans in America. My opinion was that Bush, Cheney, McCain, Palin, Romney and Ryan were essentially Donald Trump but they concealed and hid and dressed up the characteristics that Trump flaunts and parades and that Trump was who Republicans really are and have been all along.

It's been a relief to realize that there can be a massive gulf between having conservative values and being what the Republican party stands for now.

I honestly don't know what to say about your notification light and battery-full sound effect. Does the Touchwiz ROM offer no way of customizing the notification lights or shutting down the sounds? All my suggestions would be through the Google version of Android letting you modify notification lights and sounds. I set my phone each night to silent until the next alarm that wakes me up. Maybe you should just get an alarm clock.

Wireless charging! The Moto G 3rd Gen can't do it. It's a neat idea. However, I must confess -- I don't really need it. I used to carry around a portable power bank around that could recharge my phone five times fully -- but I recently installed a 2.4 amp USB charger in my car and the forty minute drive from the office to home puts my phone from 80 to 100 halfway in.

One area where wireless charging would have been a great boon -- I have broken the charging ports on nearly all my devices at least once and had to get them repaired. Even now, my iPad Mini 2's charging port is a little loose and I imagine I'll need to call in Applecare soon.

My last laptop, the admittedly buggy and glitchy Asus Transformer T100 Chi, was laid to rest because the charging port broke and could not be fixed. I feel a bit more confident about the Surface 3 because the port looks to be carefully reinforced and the cable's designed to prevent pressure on one side or the other -- but even then, I bought the two-year repair plan.

Your brother seems keen on submerging his phones. To do it once seems like misfortune, but to do it twice seems like predetermined assault on his hardware. That said, it's really inexcusable that any phone in this day and age isn't water resistant. The Moto G 3rd Gen is designed for the impoverished or people who destroy phones so often they have no business spending more than $160 or so and it's waterproof. There's also really no excuse for phones without microSD slots, which is why the Google Pixel line of phones just exasperates me.

The iPad Mini 2's lack of a microSD slot irks me as well, but after every Android tablet in the city proved itself unreliable, I had nowhere else to go. Still, iOS tablets have something Android inexplicably doesn't -- you can hold the narrow-bezeled iPad with your fingers on the side of the screen and the device can distinguish prolonged touches on the side of the screen from actually tapping on it.

In contrast, if your fingers go on the sides of an Android tablet screen, it registers as a touch and you have to hold the tablet without letting your fingers so much as graze the front or you have to wrap one hand around its entire width. I'm astonished Google still hasn't sorted it out, but they seem to have pretty much given up on the Android tablet anyway.

Hunnh. I never thought I'd say this -- but the new version of iOS works incredibly well on my older iPad Mini 2. I rarely update without ultimately reverting back to an earlier version as new versions of iOS tend to slow things down, and I only tolerated iOS 9 over 8 because I wanted swipe typing. But iOS 10 has shortened all the animations so the tablet actually feels smoother and quicker than before.

With Android, however, I'm still on Lollipop. There's been no stable post-L build for the Moto G 3rd Gen.

Windows 10's finally stablized into a usable OS after a long period of patches and updates. And it's still free, sort of, if you download the assistive technologies version.

I stole that from Steve Jobs and Aaron Sorkin.

STEVE: (to his daughter) "You know what Lisa stood for? The computer, the Lisa, you know what it stood for?"
LISA: "Local Integrated System Architecture."
STEVE: "It stood for Lisa. Colon. Invented Stupid Acronym. Of course it was named after you, are you daffy? Local Integrated System Architecture doesn’t even mean anything, of course it was named after you."
LISA: "Why did you say it wasn’t all those years? Why did you say you weren’t my father?"
STEVE: "Honey...I honestly don’t know. I know I didn’t want to be yoked to your mom  I’m poorly made."

It's one of the weird delusions I find myself facing. Whose feelings would I be hurting by excluding the Colin Mallory character? I dunno. But maybe there's one reader who for reasons beyond me really likes Charlie and Colin and is a little irritated to have Quinn disown Colin -- in which case maybe their hurt could be salved by knowing that Quinn named a computer system after his supposed brother. I mean, who cares? Even I don't care about Colin at all. But my indifference should not be SLIDERS' indifference. Except in saying that, I'm expressing the absurd and delusional claim that my fan fiction is a legitimate extension of the series.

You see what I mean? And you've both been here and come through. Don't go backwards, boys. Move forward and maybe I'll even catch up with you someday.

I don't have much to add to your thoughts on THE FLASH except to say -- the 'explanation' for why the timeline has been altered as delivered by Jay Garrick is (a) a beautiful piece of writing that truly comes alive and (b) total crap.

The metaphor of the new timeline being a cracked coffee cup is a beautiful image -- but in order for it to be convincing, the imagery needs to actually apply to the onscreen events. And, onscreen, there is absolutely no reason why Nora Allen living for 30 seconds longer than she did before results in Caitlin having the metahuman gene, Dante being dead in a car accident, Iris never forgiving her father until now for faking her mother's death or Sara Diggle being erased.

I think you'd need a few extra lines here about how time is like a leaf floating down a river; each time you drop a leaf in, it will take a slightly different course and each temporal reset is dropping the leaf into the river once again. Jay needed to explain that time isn't strict and structured; much of life is subject to random chance. When you change time and then change it back, events with many possible outcomes are subjected to a second round of variability with potentially different results -- such as Dante crossing a street, an X and a Y chromosome, etc..

Supergirl
I'm sorry Informant didn't like it, that is unfortunate. I thought the Season 2 premiere was terrific. I can't deny that Informant's right about Kara's characterization. The Season 1 characterization seemed oddly indecisive, almost like they were writing a teenaged Kara Danvers but then abruptly altered her to being in her late 20s without making the character any more mature. However, Melissa Benoist's performance has always been so endearing, so engagingly sincere and sweet -- so it works for me.

The premiere had a very interesting approach, casting a slightly critical eye on Season 1 with Cat Grant noting that Kara has been sheltering herself in the persona of a nervous office assistant with a hopeless crush on Jimmy. Slider_Quinn21's right to say that the sudden curtailment of the Kara/Jimmy romance makes no sense, but I can see what the writers were aiming for. They're trying to say that Kara being an anxiety-ridden, lovesick wreck was a rut she'd fallen into and gotten stuck in, but the Season 1 finale and a year of success as Supergirl means she's broken free, hence her lack of interest in Jimmy.

The budget seemed as lavish as the CBS funded version of SUPERGIRL; aerial flights and fights, extensive CG sequences with doubling and collapsing buildings and drones and helicopters and explosions. I wonder if the Vancouver tax credit and a lower licensing fee is being matched with a budget higher than what THE FLASH gets -- or if we're going to get a bunch of bottle episodes later on. ANGEL in Season 5 opened with a massive series of action sequences and Joss Whedon grimly observed in the commentary that Season 5's reduced budget meant the premiere had crippled many subsequent episodes.

I was happy with Superman representing the ideal version of Kara Danvers that she never quite manages to equal. That said, Superman's hostility towards J'onn was, as Slider_Quinn21 puts it, nonsensical. There's also the fact that Superman is visibly at ease and cheerful in the DEO and happily shaking hands with every staffer there.

It would make more sense if Superman's anger towards J'onn was that J'onn had secretly hidden the Kryptonite, told Superman it was all destroyed and been preparing ways to kill Superman in case he ever became an enemy, if J'onn's actions had been a betrayal of friendship and trust. Instead, the script inexplicably has Superman being displeased that the DEO has anti-Kryptonian weaponry when, as you guys noted, it was absolutely necessary. The dialogue as scripted is incomprehensible and it's only thanks to Tyler Hoechlin's charismatic performance that it doesn't sink the character completely.

Hoechlin also effortlessly sells the Clark Kent/Superman divide. As Clark, he's slightly muted and laid back, friendly and a little overwhelmed. As Superman, he has a natural air of authority and good-heartedness that instantly wins people over. The Superman costume looks good except in close shoulder-level shots, at which point the yellow cape clips are jarringly out of place against the red and the blue. The cape buckles on the top of the cape add a displeasing unevenness to what should be a smoothly flowing garment, but on the whole, the costume works in motion and films better than it photographs. I understand the desire to add some accent colour to the costume, but it adds needless clutter. I'd lose the yellow outside of the S and shift the clips to under the cape.

I am very glad Winn is working for the DEO; with Jimmy at Catco, Winn always seemed superfluous -- and I'm eager to see what kind of relationship he'll have with Alex. I'm relieved that Chyler Leigh remains on the show as her onscreen rapport with Benoist livened up the show and made it transcend its plotholes and contradictory scripts.

All in all, this is a good start to Season 2, highlighting what worked and slowly dispensing with what did not.

In the case of SMALLVILLE, the entire Season 1 cast signed seven year contracts, but Eric Johnson, Sam Jones III, John Schneider and Annette O'Toole were released from their obligations at the production's behest. As for Kristin Kreuk and Michael Rosenbaum, they completed their seven year contracts.

Allison Mack signed a two year contract for Seasons 8 - 9 and once it was done, she decided to renew only for a limited number of episodes. But make no mistake: if the Season 1 - 7 team wanted to keep the entire cast, the actors would have been obligated to stay.

David Duchovny wanted to leave THE X-FILES by Season 5, but he signed a seven year contract and he was required to fulfill that seven year contract. Jerry O'Connell could have become Laurence Olivier and John could have booked any number of INDIANA JONES films and they'd still be obligated to show up on SLIDERS unless the production did not want them there. That's simply the nature of these contracts.

The fact that Seasons 3 - 5 had their lead characters locked into long-term contracts and still lost 3/4 should not be seen to indicate that you can't always count on having the actors available. The point of these multi-year contracts is to have hired them for their availability and to lose that availability would require producers determinedly trying to get rid of the actors.

And it wouldn't have happened under Torme; Torme was prepared to assuage Jerry's wishes for a movie career by writing him out of an episode now and then and John had given Torme plenty of ammunition to fire him over Seasons 1 - 2, but Torme would never do that. Torme loved Professor Arturo. Torme loved Quinn, Wade and Rembrandt. He would do whatever it took to keep them and when you have contracts in place, all that remains is maintaining good relationships.

I think that what Tracy says goes is meaningful on two levels. The first is that SLIDERS as aired exists in stark contradiction to his wishes. He thought Quinn being from Kromagg Prime was absurd. He thought the Season 4 Space Nazis were ridiculous. He was disgusted with John and Sabrina's exits and he despised Maggie and Mallory. So when Torme prefaces his statements with, "For what it's worth," he's noting that his wishes for SLIDERS aren't necessarily meaningful given how they were contradicted and ignored.

On another level, Torme shows a certain attitude to writing: the need to allow for improvisation and development without rigidly adhering to a set plan. Planning is an important skill, but the truth is that the script you write can morph into something radically different when actors perform it and directors stage it and the onscreen product will always have nuances and details and points of interest separate from what's on paper.

For example: when Torme wrote Quinn, he saw him as Steve Urkel without the exaggerated behaviour. The ideal actor for the scripted version of Quinn would have been someone from THE BIG BANG THEORY. But the studio and network naturally gravitated to an attractive leading man -- and Torme proceeded to integrate that into Quinn by later working in the backstory that Quinn had skipped two grades, was physically smaller than his classmates and therefore severely beaten down and bullied. None of this was in Torme's conception of the character; he saw the actor and he rethought, he was open to change.

I'm not the biggest fan of "Heat of the Moment," but that's another example where Torme worked out a story and a situation, but as he wrote it out in full, he let the characters improvise and do whatever came naturally and the story ended up in a very different place from the outline, because for Torme, the writer controls the drive, but in the script, the characters drive the story. That's why I like Torme's writing -- as well as how he takes very dark, potentially unwatchable situations and makes them funny enough that it's not unbearable.

On October 7, Allison Jean Spears tweeted: "Jerry O'connell has crossed me & i'm gonna talk bad about him at every show until he apologizes on Twitter. - @ingridmusic"

Jerry replied, "What did I do?"

I tweeted him, "OMG! Did you depart from a leading TV role and refuse to perform an exit story despite being available to do so?"

He liked my tweet.

... ??

Torme messaged Matt from his Facebook account, saying, "For what it’s worth, I believe the wrong Arturo slid. And he was the one with the implant." I hardly think one needs to rank video evidence and a personal communication from Torme in competition; they are both perfectly equal and valid.

I think the DVD (which I will order soon) is (in theory, as I have not seen it) a lovely artifact for SLIDERS fans and a chance to spend some time with one of the genius intellects and masterful screenwriters behind the show and it is of course valuable, but it's unreasonable to claim its importance is based in shocking revelations of things we already knew a long time ago.

Oh, don't knock his enthusiasm. Yes, we've already had plenty of confirmation from Torme that the wrong Arturo slid, but come on. Let RussianCabbieLotteryFan enjoy his DVD.

Sorry, I made a mistake. I saw a bunch of preview clips where Oliver and Barry were in the Arrowcave with Kara and J'onn, so I thought the universes had merged. This interview with Andrew Kreisberg confirms that Informant's correct; the universes aren't merging.

http://www.ew.com/article/2016/10/07/su … w-spoilers

I dunno. I assumed they would merge the realities if only to facilitate guest-appearances more readily, but I guess they're not doing that. Interestingly, Kreisberg confirms that because SUPERGIRL didn't get the tax credit they'd expected, the latter half of SUPERGIRL's first season had serious budget problems, which explains a lot of the visual problems they were having in the FLASH crossover.

In "World Killer," Quinn-2 believed that he had killed everyone and in thinking that, he didn't believe there was any redemption for him or any way to set things right. When realizing that the Earth's population has merely been displaced, he regains his engagement (and also his arrogance).

As for REBORN -- "Revelation" reveals that the multiverse is dying and Quinn blames himself with his altruism in "Reunion" actually representing his overwhelming guilt, grief, shame and his coping mechanism, so I don't think he's exactly an uncomplicated do-gooder even in REBORN. RCLF actually didn't bother to read past Page 50 of "Reunion" so he missed all that.

Quinn's facade of relentless positivity in "Reunion" was based on his characterization in "Last Days" where even after his double's sliding machine fails, Quinn is convinced to do something positive with what time he has left and cook a meal with Wade and give some comfort to his friend and also "The Guardian" where he reacts to the inevitability of the Professor's death by mentoring his younger self. In "Reunion," he's decided to use what time he has left to make things better as best he can.

That said, for all his abilities, Quinn Mallory is still a slapdash incompetent, emotionally withdrawn, prone to improvising to disastrous effect, a messy dresser, something of a cowardly liar and his idea of a home is a facsimile of the basement in his mother's house, so while he is and ever shall be my childhood hero, he's pretty messed up.

From the thread on The Breeder
http://sliders.tv/bboard/post.php?tid=220&qid=4102

It is oddly reminiscent of disagreements between John Rhys-Davies and Tracy Torme. John saw Arturo as a valiant, stalwart, heroic figure of revolutionary outrage -- he wanted Arturo to be the Doctor from DOCTOR WHO. In contrast, Torme saw Arturo as a working class bungler plodding his way through life with his education and body of knowledge obscuring an insecure and deeply troubled personality.

Strangely, RussianCabbieLotteryFan might have liked the alternate SLIDERS REBORN's version of Quinn. In the early stages, there was some discussion that REBORN might be set on an Earth where sliding wasn't discovered in 1994; Quinn then lost his passion for science. Cut to the present: everyone lives as they would had sliding never existed.

Quinn is a fortysomething tax accountant. Wade reviews smartphones for CNET. Rembrandt runs a coffee bar, but his only real joy is open mike nights when he performs. Arturo is writing study guides for lazy high school students. When Amanda Mallory dies, Quinn revisits his basement for the first time in years, finally realizes what he created 20 years ago, opens a vortex, accidentally drags the other three in with him, loses their home coordinates, and the adventure begins again.

In this version, Quinn most definitely would have been a normal person going about his life without much intention or hope of changing the world around him.

The disagreements over this project have been very interesting. Transmodiar's wish was that SLIDERS REBORN be something that NBCUniversal could and would conceivably fund and film if they were inclined to bring SLIDERS back and when you set aside his issues with plotting, characterization, screenwriting and dialogue, that's his main problem with REBORN, and it's a very reasonable one.

And I accept that; I'm more concerned with imagining it happening within the reality of SLIDERS than imagining it being filmed in our reality. I think the screenplay format can mislead slightly in giving the impression that I honestly think this would be the SLIDERS feature film series. I saw SLIDERS REBORN as being SLIDERS' equivalent of William Shatner's STAR TREK novels where he resurrected his dead character and ended up doing a nine-book series meant not for a general audience, but for people who like STAR TREK so much that they buy STAR TREK novels.

Well, it was very pleasant to hear Jim and Dan back together again and their guest-star added a reasonable third voice to discussing "Double Cross," inexplicable digressions into "The Guardian" aside. As usual, Jim brought a thoughtful, measured and gently sardonic presence to the proceedings while Mr. Stargate relentless ragged on SLIDERS for the crime of not being some other television show entirely.

At one point, Mr. Stargate rants that "Double Cross" uses "throwaway lines of dialogue" to establish the depletion of natural resources as though dialogue written with some naturalism and subtlety to establish the setting is inappropriate and a sign of bad writing due to some arbitrary and completely random set of standards that only Mr. Stargate can apply or appreciate.

Jim and Ian correctly point out that the lack of natural resources and the electricity rationing is actually key to the plot, and even to set up the climax where Logan and her goons can't get into the hotel. However, Mr. Stargate makes up for this with an astute observation that Logan could easily be Evil Scientist #2 and her being Quinn's double doesn't really factor into the story as well as it could or should. If not for this, I would seriously urge Mr. Stargate to reconsider his aptitude and ability to analyze and discuss television on any sensible level.

Overall, it's very nice to have Sliderscast back and to hear them discussing the show again, but due to the massive time gap between this podcast and the last, they have unfortunately forgotten how Season 2 ended. As a result, they are incapable of discussing the massive gulf in style, filming, writing, acting and location that they would see if comparing "The Young and the Relentless" with "Double Cross." Perhaps I shall provide them with yet another lengthy voicemail on the subject.

Debate!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ryp51N21vOU

The Avengers wade into the election!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRp1CK_X_Yw

John Oliver compares Hillary and Trump's scandals!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1Lfd1aB9YI

SOUTH PARK observes that we are caught between a rock and a hard place!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlqKFlU7YAs

According to Temporal Flux, the period after Sci-Fi bought SLIDERS was one where Torme made a bid to regain control of the show. Torme hoped Universal would see that SLIDERS was a mis-managed mess of unprofessional behaviour under Peckinpah. Unfortunately, with Torme's contract having expired and Peckinpah's contract having another year on it, Universal decided to just go with who they had despite the fact that their producer had alienated two lead actors, permitted shoddy safety standards that got an actor killed, received the worst possible reviews for his episodes in the press, permitted financial mismanagement that resulted in the low production values of the back nine and treated the making of "The Exodus" as a giant rock concert with Roger Daltrey and the Who hired to perform with making the episode treated as something to do between binge drinking sessions.

Looking back -- the problem is probably that television was not seen as a meaningful platform for dynamic pieces of visual art that should court critical and widespread acclaim as well as a devoted and adoring fanbase. Instead, TV was seen as filler between commercials, something produced because you couldn't just show static when not showing ads. It wasn't until the early 2000s that this changed, and it's too bad -- because we were this close to getting this as our Season 4 premiere.

I think what is really sad about aborting the Colin Mallory arc is: it wasn't aborted for story reasons. They didn't find a better storyline; they didn't think it would make for a better show. The arc was aborted because (a) Peckinpah and Dial wanted to upset Marc Scott Zicree and (b) Jerry O'Connell didn't like the idea that Colin wasn't his character's brother. These reasons should not have been allowed to influence the onscreen product, but if David Peckinpah cared about making sure the onscreen product didn't suffer from behind the scenes personalities, John and Sabrina would never have left the show.

And Surf Dance Chris taps into why fans kept watching SLIDERS: hope. The hope that if SLIDERS could get just one more season, at some point, the original sliders would come back to us and be restored. That's why I personally don't mind the ending of "The Seer" with nothing resolved, nothing wrapped up, Rembrandt leaping into the vortex without us knowing what's on the other side. I think that Quinn, Wade and Arturo were waiting on the other side.

I think Season 4 is pretty bad, but a number of strong and stand-out episodes make it look better than it is. "Prophets and Loss" is the first episode in ages with a proper alternate history. "World Killer," "The Alternateville Horror," "Slidecage" and "Slide By Wire" have great science fiction concetps. "Way Out West" is fun.

The main problems are that the production has become just as bad as Season 3 with numerous stories and directions that are even crasser and darker than the monster movie marathon of the latter Season 3 episodes. Home has been invaded, all the sliders' families are dead, Wade is in a rape camp -- and these are subjects SLIDERS can't handle without the characters being too traumatized to explore a new world episodically each week, so they're just ignored. Rembrandt's trauma in Seasons 1 - 2 could be played for laughs, but the subject of Wade is too horrific to deal with in this fashion and it makes it so that lighthearted fare like "Alternateville" and "West" feel completely out of sync.

The show either goes for softball challenges where the stories are wrapped up with clumsy happy endings that don't make sense ("Just Say Yes," "Virtual Slide") or bleakly miserable endings that are depressing ("Common Ground," "The Dying Fields"). Season 4 also has a very compressed, artificial look because of the producers' stupid beyond stupid decision to erect a massive and expensive standing set with the Chandler that forces them to use it in every single episode whether it should be used or not. The early seasons got around this by having generic studio space with set dressing that could be wheeled in and out to turn a single room into a bar, store, cafe, courtroom, hotel, office, etc..

Season 4 is so depressing that even the fun episodes are diminished, it looks cheap and ugly and Jerry O'Connell looks half asleep onstage and Charlie O'Connell's main acting experience came from playing Quinn's dead corpse in "The Young and the Relentless." A few flashes of inspiration from Marc Scott Zicree and Chris Black can't sustain a whole season, sadly. Comparing it with Season 3 isn't terribly meaningful; Season 4 is just bad in different ways.

I have another question for Informant.

I think that when writing "Slide Effects," I was extremely contemptuous of Seasons 3 - 5. I have tried to not do that with SLIDERS REBORN and gone to some lengths to be respectful. Rembrandt grumbles about the time he had to fight 2D beings and a radioactive worm. Arlo Higgins from "Please Press One" has a cameo as does Crowley from SUPERNATURAL (well, Jack from "Net Worth"). It's all played for laughs, but not in a mean way, I think. For example...

From off-camera, Laurel screams. The sliders rush over to her. Laurel points a trembling hand at a display case. Inside is the lifeless corpse of a man in his mid-twenties slumped against the glass.

WADE: "Deric?"
REMBRANDT: (peering at the case) "That's the psychic guy?"
WADE: "No, the other one! Man. He's looking good!"

Laurel looks ready to start crying.

LAUREL: "The guy's dead! He's been mounted like a trophy! He's -- "
WADE: "It's fine, he's a robot."

Laurel looks relieved.

I mean, that's not dismissive or contemptuous, right? I refer to episodes I hate in humourous way, but not in the sense of saying, "My god, that was so stupid!" but rather, "My goodness, we and the sliders have certainly seen a lot of crazy crap, haven't we?"

But... um, I'm concerned about Colin. The character of Colin has never sat well with me simply because I think Quinn works best as a loner, an isolated only child, and the Charlie O'Connell role may have made Jerry happy but did not serve Quinn at all. However, a reader, Christian T. Chung, suggested that I might address the Colin spy-plot and reveal that he was a Kromagg clone. At this point, Colin is so distant from SLIDERS REBORN's concerns that I couldn't see how it could in any way serve REBORN.

But then came a scene where Rembrandt is doing up the Sliders Incorporated boardroom and he puts up a portrait of Mallory, paying tribute to a comrade and friend who is sadly not with us anymore. It then occurred to me -- wouldn't Rembrandt want to put Colin's photograph up as well? But... I just didn't want Colin on the wall. I don't like him, Informant! I don't want him!!! I have accepted Maggie Beckett, Diana Davis, Mallory, the zombies, the mini-scoops and the pirates, but I don't want Colin Mallory!

REMBRANDT: "Could we get Colin up here too?"
QUINN: "Could we not? I'm still getting over finding out that he came out of a Kromagg cloning farm as one of fifteen replicants programmed to kill us."

I was thinking Quinn encountered that Kromagg cloning farm at some point during the 15 year time gap between "The Seer" and SLIDERS REBORN. But now that I've been expressing the importance of respect and courtesy -- isn't it kind of mean-spirited to bring up Colin just to write the bastard off? And also -- I don't put too much stock in actors, but I'm having trouble imagining Jerry O'Connell being prepared to say this line. I think he would refuse to perform it. Unless John were around to tell him to get his ego out of the way and that this is what he gets for bringing his talentless sibling into a leading role?

A part of me wonders if I can argue that Quinn's dialogue is simply reinforcing the original creative intention for Colin. But let's be honest, that line is there because I hate Colin so god damn much. But then shouldn't I just avoid referring to him at all? At the same time -- if Mallory's portrait is going on the wall, it raises the question of why Colin isn't there. Or do we just decide not to have Mallory's portrait at all? What would Informant do? What would Informant do?!?!