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2016-09-19 16:53:04

On the Season 3 monsters in general -- I always figured Quinn and Arturo would whip up some inventive solutions with something of Torme's sense of humour -- such as where the key elements to defeating the zombies, animal-human hybrids, vampires, scarab and robots could be a stick of butter, a jar of aspirin, a tin of peanuts, an insulin kit, cough syrup and a case of golf balls. I've been thinking about this a lot.

2016-09-16 13:51:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ3VQkK6Upo

Honest Trailers for Civil War!

2016-09-16 06:51:03

Once again, the Rewatch Podcast has seen fit to tell outrageous lies about me. In their Season 2 finale podcast on LOIS & CLARK, Tom and Cory claimed that I'd declined to appear on the podcast and had not recorded an appearance. This is untrue -- I went to extensive efforts in scheduling for us to meet for three hours in Melbourne in the same airport terminal during a layover where we could record together. And despite giving Tom and Cory a second chance, they deceitfully cut my segment from the podcast and made an excuse for my absence.

What follows is a transcript of the missing segment. Draw your own conclusions.

TOM: "And we are very happy to have our good friend ireactions back to talk about Season 2 with us!"
CORY: "I swear to God, if he mentions that other show -- I will kill him! I will kill him!"
ME: "Tom -- !"
TOM: "He's just kiddin'! Hey, no worries, airport security! Cory here's just kidding! So, Season 2 of LOIS & CLARK!"
CORY: "Well, it's kind of up and down, isn't it? The new writing team's Tony Blake and Paul Jackson -- "
TOM: "And they're very inconsistent! I liked the second half better than the first half. I mean, the first half is kind of a generic superhero show and Blake and Jackson reflect that -- "
ME: "I find that Tony Blake and Paul Jackson tend to reflect the leadership they're given; they're professionals doing a professional's job, but they're not going to go above and beyond."
CORY: "Season 1 ended with Lois calling Clark friend and family -- then Blake and Jackson took over and had her treating him like some guy at the office."
TOM: "Yeah, it's weird how Blake and Jackson came in as the second generation of writers and they have, again, an inconsistent approach to respecting the past, just like on SLIDERS -- oh shit -- "
CORY: "Tom, you idiot -- "
ME: "When I say they're professionals doing a professional's job, I mean Blake and Jackson work under the executive producers and networks, they follow their mandates, so if they're told to do a generic superhero show, that's what they do. If they're told to do more romcom stuff, that's what they do. Like in Season 1; their one script followed romcom tropes by introducing Linda King, Lois' old college roommate --"
CORY: "Oh thank God. We made it -- "
ME: "Just like on SLIDERS where -- "
CORY: "God damn it!!! Tom! What've you done?!!?"
ME: "In Season 2, Blake and Jackson wrote 'Love Gods' and 'Gillian of the Spirits' which didn't exactly reflect a passion for creating alternate histories, but executed them competently and professionally by giving the actors lots of fun and memorable things to do and scenes where they bounced off each other well -- and then in Season 3, they introduced Quinn's female double and managed to mesh a more action-oriented approach with the old style in "Double Cross -- "
TOM: "Cory, it's okay, it's okay -- we can cut out that later, we can cut out that later!"
ME: "But then with episodes like 'Dragonslide' and 'The Exodus' and 'Slither,' Blake and Jackson have been told to do monster movies and horror movies and that's what they do; they do as they're told, they're not looking to rock the boat too much -- "
CORY: "Oh for God's sake -- if I wanted to do Sliderscast, I would do Sliderscast -- "
TOM: "And so -- how would you describe Blake and Jackson in a more LOIS & CLARK context?"
ME: "Well, their first three scripts for Season 2 are the generic superhero show, but then they wrote the episode where Lex Luthor comes back -- "
TOM: "There, Cory, you see? We cut out the SLIDERS stuff, we go straight to this in the edited version -- "
ME: "Which really shows how Blake and Jackson are a solid pair of hands. 'Dragonslide,' for example, isn't the most popular episode of SLIDERS -- "
TOM: "No!!!!!"
ME: "'Dragonslide' was filmed with almost no editing or revision to the script, and what that tells us is that Blake and Jackson can create filmable material really quickly in a pressure cooker environment and their scripts are on time and within the budget. With "Love Gods" and "Gillian of the Spirits," their fast work was matched with Tracy Torme and Jon Povill editing and punching up their material, too. Whereas with "The Exodus," all notions of quality control had vanished in a drunken haze and they were carrying out executive directives like blowing up John Rhys-Davies after sucking his brain out and shooting him -- "
CORY: "Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh!!!!!!"
ME: "Gacckkkkkk -- gkkkkk -- ghhhh !"
TOM: "Cory! Let go of his neck! Cory, don't -- !"
CORY: "Shut up!!! Shut up!!!! This is the LOIS & CLARK rewatch!!! This is the LOIS & CLARK rewatch!!!"
ME: "Kggghhhhhh! Knnnngddddd!!!"
TOM: "Cory, you'll kill him! You can't do this -- !!"
CORY: "I can't be dealing with this in Season 3 is what I can't be doing!!!!"
ME: "Slldddsrrbbbb -- !!!"
CORY: "What!?"
ME: "Sliddddsssrbbb -- !!"
TOM: "What's he saying?"
ME: "Sliids -- kghhhh -- rborrrn -- ghhhh -- "
CORY: "Ack! Tom, let go of me -- !"
ME: "SLIDERS -- " (cough)
CORY: "Tom, let me go!"
ME: "REBORN!"
TOM: "Cory! He hasn't finished the sixth and final SLIDERS REBORN script yet! If you kill him, there are like 15 SLIDERS fans on the internet who'll never forgive you! Maybe as many as 20!"
CORY: " ................... fine! Fine! But he is NOT coming back for Season 3!"
TOM: "ireactions, thanks again for being here!"

I'm kidding.

2016-09-16 06:13:03

The most important thing to note is that the premiere will be directed by James Bamford, a man who made his career as a stuntman and stunt coordinator but whose real claim to fame, as we all know, is that he played Quinn Mallory. In "The Unstuck Man." In the teaser. Seen only from behind at a distance. That's what really matters.

"Gotta say, I respect ireactions' ability to bring any conversation back to SLIDERS."
— Slider_Quinn21

2016-09-15 16:54:18

So, what happened here?

While I miss Jim and Dan, I have to confess that the Rewatch Podcast has pretty much made Sliderscast extraneous at this point -- not because Slidercast wasn't or wouldn't be enjoyable, but because Rewatch Podcast was consistently present and made its way through all 88 episodes at a continued and regular pace. In contrast, Sliderscast has seemingly vanished and the fact that Rewatch Podcast started so much later and managed to review "The Seer" AND "Slide Effects" while Sliderscast hasn't even gotten into Season 3 is just... kind of sad. I mean, they were friendly competitors, but there's no competition now. Sliderscast is a complete and total non-entity.

And yet -- it's not necessarily a bad thing in that I have often wished SLIDERS had ended with Season 2 rather than getting a long, drawn out, painful demise. Considering Dan Kurtzke's agony in many Season 2 episodes alone, maybe it's for the best that he'll never get into late Season 3.

I hope they come back someday, but if they don't... is the SLIDERS fan community poorer without Sliderscast? Maybe it would be except that the void Sliderscast left was filled by the Rewatch Podcast. The one thing Rewatch Podcast doesn't do, however, is the casual sense of two friends goofing about over SLIDERS -- instead, you get the sense that Tom and Cory treat podcasting like a job whereas Dan and Jim are just chatting and the fact that they record their conversation is incidental. I do miss that.

2016-09-15 15:44:39

Informant wrote:

But I mean... What did you *really* think?

It is so obvious from watching "The Breeder" that nobody writing or producing this show has any respect for the concept or characters and that nobody in charge cares about this show or its viewers and fans. "The Breeder" is David Peckinpah and Alan Barnette looking at you, Surf Dance Chris and sliders5125, and telling you flat out, "We think you are worthless."

And yet... I think that when looking at a franchise, it's important to treat all of its past elements with love and respect even as you avoid their flaws. Tracy Tormé would beat me senseless for saying this, but I see no reason why SLIDERS can't do monster movies. Any story is conceivably a SLIDERS story.

But preferably, the result would be a SLIDERS story that happened to feature monsters ("Invasion") as opposed to a monster movie that happened to feature the sliders (Season 3). Admittedly, my favourite Season 3 monster is David Peckinpah.

In my view, creatures like the radioactive worm and the scarab and the breeder parasites originate from realities which seem to have been damaged by some cosmically indescribable event resulting in the (pseudo)scientific nature of reality having been bent and mis-shapen. However, I imagine that Quinn would declare that while the principles of science, logic and reason are bent, they are not broken.

In his view, each and every one of these supernatural and paranormal creatures operate on rules, just not the rules he'd expect.Understand the rules and the sliders can use reasoning and curiosity to identify a weakness.

In a real SLIDERS story that happens to feature a monster, the monsters themselves would represent insanity and mental illness and the sliders' defeating the monsters would represent the triumph of literacy, knowledge, ingenuity, teamwork and friendship.

Which is why, despite my utter loathing and contempt towards the rock star vampires, the breeder parasites, the dragon, the amusement park that feeds on negative emotions, the remote controlled car that shoots lasers and that... Cajero the Spirit of the Skys... thing... well, I accept that they are part of SLIDERS. The problem isn't the ideas; it's their execution and presentation.

2016-09-14 16:40:48

I've never seen "Species," but "The Breeder" is an abomination. Even if you find Kari's objectification entertaining, the entire episode is witless, crass, clumsy, dull and deeply unprofessional.

There is absolutely no social commentary or satirical points made in the US Government treating the poor as organ farms; there is no effort to explore what kind of mindset produces such a society or to give any meaningful characterization to the people who live in it.

Dr. Sylvius written innanely and flatly as nothing but a malicious antagonist, completely failing to represent this world or its history. The plot deliberately and lazily avoids having the sliders engage with this society at all: they only seek out health care because of Maggie and the focus is on her parasite, not this world.

The sliders are portrayed as ineffectual. Quinn and Rembrandt inexplicably interfere with the authorities arresting a woman, and even if you set aside their total ignorance as to what they're getting involved in, they themselves prove incapable of rescuing the woman and are shown to be incompetent blunderers despite nearly three years of sliding.

The sliders are also portrayed as abrasively toxic towards each other and the world around them. Wade, expressing her emotional turmoil in response to all the death she's seen, receives not comfort from Quinn but verbal abuse. Rembrandt is offended when Quinn fails to check out girls. And at the end, our so-called heroes abandon an entire world to the parasite that they brought into this environment.

The entire production for "The Breeder" is inept by any measure of scripted and visual storytelling. The sliders leaping into the vortex is presented in a take where Jerry O'Connell misses his mark and visibly walks offscreen. The shot of Maggie assaulting the man in Diggs' bar is missing sound effects. Maggie is frozen at the beginning of the episode with no ill-effect on the parasite, yet freezing is presented as the solution at the end. The performances are pathetic as Jerry and Kari are clearly on the verge of laughing at this ridiculous script throughout.

It's very obvious that the creators do not care if their material turns out well and have absolutely no concern for viewer enjoyment whatsoever. And that and everything else in this episode is a complete betrayal of SLIDERS.

I'm not saying Seasons 1 - 2 were perfect television, but they demonstrated effort and care in crafting plausible physical environments that resembled the real world with a meaningfully documentary-style aesthetic in Season 1 that gave way to a more shadowy and vivid approach in Season 2 with great attention to set and prop design, sound, cinematography, blocking and performance -- as opposed to "The Breeder" which can't even render the sliders leaping into the vortex correctly.

Seasons 1 - 2 also made sure that despite the darkness and horror of sliding, it was livened up by Cleavant's comedy, the student/mentor relationship between Jerry and John, the heartfelt compassion of Wade and the friendship with all four. "The Breeder," in contrast, presents the sliders as so utterly poisonous that no viewer would want to spend any time with these people. If the worlds aren't compelling and the people aren't worthwhile, what exactly is the point of this series?

And finally, "The Breeder" turns the sliders into idiots and villains. They can't work together, instead fighting and arguing pointlessly and making every bad situation worse. They are incompetent in trying to save innocent people. Maggie murders several people throughout the episode and this has no emotional consequences for her, presenting a crassly indifferent view to human life that is totally at odds with SLIDERS' original faith in the power of ideas to save people's lives. And then the sliders condemn this world to a fate they inflicted upon it.

"The Breeder" features a poorly considered script that makes little to no use of the SLIDERS storytelling engine and is the production is fundamentally unprofessional in all areas of television storytelling. If you like this episode, you are simply wrong. I can prove it with charts.

The breeder parasites, this script, this episode and the entirety of its contents should be put in the ground, dug up, shot repeatedly to make sure its dead, buried again, and then expunged and erased from SLIDERS history.

Anyway. I made sure to include the breeder parasites in SLIDERS REBORN, specifically on Page 2 of the second script ("Reunion") and the parasites will return again in the sixth and final script. I'm sure you understand why.

2016-09-13 22:11:34

So what you're saying is that you do nothing for our common cause while calling for others to raise the torch! Unless your novels are some sort of long game to revive SLIDERS...

2016-09-13 19:01:07

Hey! I'm busy scripting the series finale and planning a social media campaign for it. You try making TWELVE posters for SLIDERS REBORN when you have no new images and no photo sessions with the cast. I have my hands full on the Slidology front. YOU make it happen!

2016-09-13 17:01:25

SUPERGIRL's Season 1 had 6 million viewers. That's double the viewership of THE FLASH's Season 2 finale. Assuming a one-third drop as fewer people watch CW and that's still beating THE FLASH.

I think SUPERGIRL is not really suited to being reviewed the same way one reviews a Marvel Netflix show or BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN. SUPERGIRL is a family show. Parents watch it together with their children.

2016-09-13 16:59:38

I think we might scale down our hopes and aim for an online convention where the stars could participate over Skype and Reddit.

2016-09-12 18:15:05

The ratings needed to be successful on CW are much lower than what's needed on CBS due to CW having much lower advertising rates and budgets; that's why SMALLVILLE had fewer viewers than COMMUNITY and was considered a hit.

As for the costume -- I'll wait to see it in motion. I don't love the yellow cape clips, but it might look good when it's under the right lighting.

2016-09-12 14:06:38

Well. It's too bad you couldn't meet Cleavant. But the important thing is that I've finally accumulated a good amount of Prisma-enhanced graphics to run a SLIDERS social media campaign. I'm not sure what one has to do with the other, but let's call this a victory!

2016-09-11 10:21:41

Also, maybe you could see how Cleavant Derricks has aged and take a photo! I've been trying to create images of the sliders at their 2016 ages. For this image, I added weight gain on all the actors and deepened the lines in all their faces, but I don't think it quite achieves verisimilitude.

2016-09-11 09:49:36

Oh. Well, you caught me.

It IS the Azure Gate Bridge.

2016-09-11 09:24:40

Well, I made the poster with the sliders looking at the Golden Gate Bridge with the all-lower case logo that I think is pretty sharp?

2016-09-10 08:27:23

Ha! I wish. They're publicity stills run through an app called Prisma that turns photos into 'paintings.'

2016-09-09 22:28:45

And what does he make of these ones? Were they worth the 10 bucks?

2016-09-09 21:15:00

Is this a serious question?

2016-09-09 19:57:05

Never ask someone a yes/no question if you're looking for insight. I'd ask him what he sees his part being in SLIDERS were it to be revived in some form and how he'd like to play Rembrandt (experienced slider? Flsh out of water? Elder statesman or clueless oaf? Deadly serious or goofily comedic? Showbiz superstar or low-key music teacher?).

Also, does he think this painting was worth $5?

2016-09-09 19:26:04

I guess I'd ask him to talk about David Peckinpah. David Peckinpah has become my primary area of interest for the time being, mainly because as miserable a show as SLIDERS became, Peckinpah's life was truly wretched and so much worse than anything SLIDERS fans had to endure. He fired Cleavant's friends, his incompetence made the show degrade to the point where the lead actor had no affection for it whatsoever, he permitted the show to become totally unrecognizable by the end -- and Cleavant was his friend. Admittedly, that says more about Cleavant than Peckinpah.

2016-09-09 16:39:50

Send him here, ask him if he wants to rewrite his dialogue? :-D

2016-09-08 16:05:30

Are you still excited even after this post I made in the Bboard issues thread?

maxcardun wrote:

It's like the guy thought Peckenpah was an absolute genius at story's and wanted to overboard with the science fictional aspects or what I like to call "Science Fantasy
10 Sliders at one time which is only ambitious if it's believable and unnecessarily bringing back both Geiger and Rickman, Quinn and Colon's parents live at Epcot Center, THE VORTEX IS PINK, Maggie is Blonde, planet wide epidemics can work at the speed of light with a knife prick, the Sliders start developing "superpowers" [...] not to mention the annoying Mary Sue character he made up known stereotypically as Janine Chen.

Suddenly, I'm worried. The finale of SLIDERS REBORN will feature:

40 - 50 sliders
A pink vortex
A blonde Maggie
The sliders developing 'superpowers'
A spunky teenager who is Quinn's daughter

In addition, the story will have the return of:

The rock star vampires
The giant radioactive slug
The underground Morlocks
The animal-human hybrids
The super-intelligent snakes
The pancake parasites
The fat craving zombies
The dinosaurs
The killer robots
The Dream Masters
The amusement park that feeds on negative emotions
The remote controlled cars with laser cannons
Diana Davis

And the story will be dedicated to the memory of David Peckinpah and will include the sliders running a detective agency like one of Peckinpah's cop shows and a heavily action oriented approach reminiscent of Season 3.

Are you as nervous about this story as I am? Matt thinks I'm completely insane. God help us all.

2016-09-07 19:32:40

Where was Thor during Civil War!?!?! Find out here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPNBKT6JLSU

This is why I like the Marvel Universe. It doesn't avoid absurdity, it embraces it.

2016-09-07 17:09:11

Slider_Quinn21 once pondered:

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

I mean think about all the shows and movies you consider yourself a fan of. Now how many are you willing to write fanfic for? How many are you willing to talk about on a daily basis? And how many would you be willing to say, "I'm putting my life on hold to devote to this?"

As an egomaniac, I assumed he was talking about ME. But I've taken a hard look at myself and the truth is I think about SLIDERS REBORN far more than I actually work on it. If I had obsessed over it to an unhealthy degree, I would probably have been done by last Christmas.

The truth is that I've regularly blown off working on SLIDERS REBORN. I've blown it off because my niece started talking about her dead dad and I didn't feel I could end that conversation. Because there was a two week abstract theatre film festival. Because I needed to focus on my health for a bit. Because my niece needed to move. Because I had actual professional obligations.

I've tried to find an example in my life where I decided writing REBORN was more important than something else -- the only thing I can think of is a SUPERNATURAL convention that my niece wanted me go to with her, a convention I declined to attend because I was looking up San Francisco landmarks to put in the third script. "How can you blow off the event of the century to write fanfic?" Laurie exclaimed. "That's not healthy!" I replied, "How come it's healthy to set aside time for YOUR show but not mine?" I like SUPERNATURAL well-enough, but not more than I like SLIDERS.

This is probably SLIDERS REBORN slipped in its schedule. The original plan was for three feature-length scripts, a short prequel and a novella to be out and done by August 2015. In 2015, I was able to complete two feature length scripts, the prequel and the novella; in 2016, I have completed one 46-page script and will likely finish the final screenplay. It's impossible to treat this like a job; everything else will always come first, SLIDERS REBORN is like my equivalent of other people playing videogames. I will never put my life on hold for SLIDERS.

I'm as shocked as anyone to discover that.

2016-09-06 16:42:32

i recently did a re-read of the comic books. The M0vie Blog did a great retrospective of all the episodes over several years and recently completed reviews for the original Topps comic series and the recent Season 10 - 11 comics. https://them0vieblog.com/2016/07/21/the … ster-list/

Despite Carter's original intention to let SEASON 10 act as the equivalent of those STAR TREK prequel comics to a future X-FILES film, he set it aside. Likely, the chance to revive THE X-FILES as a TV show caught him by surprise, but he saw the six new episodes not as a finale for THE X-FILES but the start of a new run of episodes. As the revival was not going to be the standalone, single-installment production he had expected, the comics could no longer act as a prequel or post-revival sequel -- the revival would be its own prequel and sequel in its episodes. "My Struggle" aired and presented a version of THE X-FILES that was impossible to reconcile with the comics, mostly because in the comics, the alien invasion was real but in the TV show, the alien invasion has been retconned as a hoax.

Ultimately, the SEASON 10 - 11 comic ends with Mulder and Scully encountering an alien spaceship that warps spacetime and creates a window into parallel dimensions where they experience a brief glimpse of their alternate universe doubles in "My Struggle." Then Harris and his artists started a new series that, despite being presented as a tie-in to the revived TV show, doesn't seem to tie in properly at all. While the artists use the hairstyles and likenesses of the Revival versions of Mulder and Scully, they make no specific reference to any of the six episodes. The first five issues so far have been monster of the week stories and there is no indication whether these stories are taking place at some point during the six episodes of the show or at some point after the Spartan virus cliffhanger has presumably been resolved. The amount of time that passes in the comic will eventually make it impossible for the stories to have taken place inside the six weeks of the 2015 season.

The great shame of losing SEASON 10 - 11 is that this run had resurrected the Lone Gunmen and the comic seemed to have real creative freedom in advancing and developing THE X-FILES characters and concepts, all of which would now sadly be discarded with the relaunched X-FILES comic.

But so far, the transition has been gentle; one could easily imagine these relaunched issues to be set in SEASON 10 - 11's continuity as Harris has avoided any direct contradictions; for example, the Lone Gunmen are presumably dead again, but Harris simply avoids mentioning them.

Harris seems to retain a certain creative freedom: issues #4 - 5 delved into Scully's family history. Issue #6 will apparently kick off a myth-arc storyline involving the Syndicate. Harris described his comic as "a sidecar experience" where he wouldn't expect to tie into the TV show's plots, but would try to tell strong X-FILES stories and maintain the atmosphere, style and characterization of his SEASON 10 - 11 comics.

One would expect Harris' X-FILES to read like what the Topps series degenerated into, but Harris has for five issues created at least the illusion that he can build and develop Mulder and Scully as he sees fit -- and apparently, he can still get into the myth-arc somehow. A part of me is wondering if these comics are still set in the SEASON 10 to 11 continuity and have simply adopted the Revival hairstyles for the time being, with the Harris-continuity to potentially return at some point. It's an interestingly low-key solution to a high-tension problem.

2016-08-30 14:40:11

I'm not sure why the Bboard is forcing everyone to answer the questions; I've disabled that for now and I'll watch to see if this leads to more spambot registrations.

As for Slidemania -- well, it is fanfic. Professional grade writing should be seen as a wonderful surprise rather than a basic requirement. I adore crazy fanfic. These are fans expressing their passion; they may not necessarily have the skill to create an enjoyable product, but the fact that they put their stuff out there is to be admired. Slider_Quinn21's vision of SLIDERS in his series was an extension of the Sci-Fi Channel years but with the original-cast and early-season elements blended with the latter-era sliders and storylines, presenting SLIDERS' tangled web as a beautiful tapestry. Slidemania's vision of SLIDERS was very fantasy-oriented, but any story is conceivably a SLIDERS story.

One favourite fanfic of mine is a sequel to "This Slide of Paradise" where Arturo tracks the gang to the world of animal human hybrids and spends an episode wandering around the forest set of that episode.

2016-08-25 16:40:30

I think it's hilarious how so many articles highlight Dan Harmon's lack of superhero series when he was clearly writing COMMUNITY as a superhero show; the show tapped into the absurdity of a multi-genre superhero universe and treated each of the characters like superhero characters, often posing them to create iconic imagery.

2016-08-24 15:31:53

These days, I find myself looking at Seasons 3 - 5 as a picture of David Peckinpah's addiction reignited after his teenaged son's death made him relapse after two decades of sobriety.

Season 3 is the cocaine high. Everything's mad and random and crazy and driven by one's basest impulses in any direction -- nightclubs and sex and explosions akin to riding the top of a supersonic train or high-excitement motorcycle chases -- but with an ugly, dehumanizing edge if you look closely where people and relationships don't matter, only the thrill of the drug. People who seem to be a buzzkill get dumped in the trash or blown up.

But then the high isn't enough and the addict wants drugs that go even deeper into the psyche to feed the need for escape -- the miserable monster movies that were "The Breeder" and "Stoker" and "This Slide of Paradise" are a heroin injection, going into depressants that leave one in a state of euphoric bliss. But in truth, anyone sober looking at the heroin addict would see human body that's little more than a corpse that isn't dead yet.

Then we come to Season 4, where it's now all about combining heroin and cocaine into speedballs, resulting in more euphoria that is, however, socially vacant and emotionally dead; there's no real friendships or relationships through heroin and cocaine. The physicality of the bliss these drugs induce has no emotional love or care or fondness or compassion or heart behind it; the body may feel joyous, but the spirit is deadened and empty, much like Jerry O'Connell's performance.

And then we come to Season 5 -- the drugs aren't for pleasure anymore. The constant anesthetic use has created tolerance and painful withdrawal symptoms in their absence; injecting and inhaling has simply become the joyless routine of "The Great Work" and "Java Jive" and the isolating nature of the drugs has left Peckinpah bleak, adrift and alone, going through the motions without even the extremity that made Season 3 a compelling trainwreck. Season 5 is just filling out the time to get through 18 episodes. Then the show died and David Peckinaph had nowhere left to direct his grief aside from his veins. Shattered and alone, he plunged speedball after speedball into himself until his heart gave out. I have nothing but sympathy for the poor man. Peckinpah and SLIDERS on his watch are symptoms of a terrible disease.

I once pondered where bad TV producers go when they die. Temporal Flux says they go to development hell. Most SLIDERS fans say they burn in actual hell. Informant remarked that regardless of whether Peckinpah is in heaven or hell, what he left behind is many terrible hours of television. Those hours speak to how truly sad, lost and alone he must have been.

Anyway. My final SLIDERS script will be a tribute to David Peckinpah and the ideas he introduced into the show.

2016-08-23 16:23:49

Bah! Earth214 is over! It's had its time! All the action is over at SLIDERS REBORN now! Earth214 is a dinosaur!

No, I'm just kidding. Earth214 is a charming piece of work, but it was written by a teenager. SLIDERS REBORN is written by an adult who thinks like a teenager. When reading Earth214, I felt that the writing was terrible but the underlying concept, intentions, plots, ideas and overall direction were very well thought out -- it's just that the ability to deliver all that in an engaging, convincing and stirring format wasn't quite there yet. It's like Slider_Quinn21 had the raw talent but needed a few more English classes and maybe some screenwriting software. SQ21 says he's done with 214, but I still maintain that going through and rewriting it -- not the story, but the language and descriptions and dialogue -- would turn it from a charming artifact of youth into something very strong. Earth214 is like a very rough statue that just needs a few more sessions to finish chiseling it into something spectacular.

2016-08-21 13:24:40

I think that making a previously Caucasian character black allows SPIDER-MAN HOMECOMING to get some media buzz, make some headlines, spark some chatter and raise the profile in a way the casting wouldn't if they cast Dove Cameron or Sabrina Carpenter to be Mary Jane.

(Yes, I watch LIV AND MADDIE and GIRL MEETS WORLD. Arrested adolescent here.)

2016-08-20 23:14:21

As a Spider-Man obsessive, I cannot begin to express my complete and total indifference to Mary Jane being black. Mary Jane was created as a feminine representation of Stan Lee's extremely vague idea of what hippies were like, except his ignorance of drug culture led to him writing Mary Jane being a fountain of random non-sequiturs and making her name a euphemism for marijuana and presenting this as Mary Jane's natural personality whereas the hippies Stan based this character on were likely hallucinating on LSD and mushrooms.

Since then, Mary Jane has faded away and been replaced by various different characters with the same name and hair colour, so making Mary Jane black doesn't matter much to me when the original Mary Jane isn't in any way workable in this century.

2016-08-19 18:28:03

To me, "Stoker" is another exercise in mutilating a once-great science fiction series into an unprofessional abomination of hackwork and stupidity -- and I am dreading rewatching it. I have to, you see, to finish my final SLIDERS script. I'm putting it off for as long as humanly possible, but the script pages where I must describe the rock star vampires accurately comes closer and closer and I am terrified at the prospect of having to sit through this miserable insult to the intelligence that masquerades as a professional product.

I'm also going to have to rewatch "Dragonslide," "The Fire Within," "Paradise Lost," "The Last of Eden," "Sole Survivors," "The Breeder" and "This Slide of Paradise" and I honestly don't even know if I'll come out of this alive.

2016-08-19 13:30:26

I think it's just the production order that puts "Stoker" earlier. There is no reason "Stoker" needs to be seen before "Dinoslide," but there's also no reason see "Stoker" or "Dinoslide" at all. *shudders*

2016-08-19 13:10:27

I think it's hilarious that Informant is so far up DC's ass that CIVIL WAR's 1.152 billion in box office and adoring acclaim with two second-tier characters is a fadeaway while BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN's 873 million and middling reception with two cultural icons is some sort of transcendent rise to glory.

... YOU WERE ALL THINKING IT.

(Informant is still a brilliant writer, novelist and critic.)

2016-08-17 17:17:10

On one level, I think the idea of watching Season 1 in the wrong order for no reason whatsoever is absolutely baffling. On another, I did get a whole novella out of the wrong order, so sure. I wouldn't want SLIDERS to be immortalized this way, though.

2016-08-15 15:19:06

If you replaced Thor and Hulk in Informant's argument with Black Widow and Hawkeye, it makes more sense? As far as AVENGERS goes, at least.

2016-08-13 20:14:36

So, is that doing it properly?

2016-08-13 16:53:40

I dunno. SUICIDE SQUAD's performance is about what I'd expect from a movie centering on villains who are not cultural icons with a cast that's well known but hardly a box office draw. I adore Will Smith, but he's not exactly the box office giant he used to be. I don't know why anyone would have expected it to do any better than it is right now. Looking to SUICIDE SQUAD to be the next STAR WARS is like expecting SLIDERS REBORN to be the next HUCKLEBERRY FINN. It's a smaller movie for a smaller audience.

That said, while the reshoots don't bother Informant, the general consensus is that the film seems to suffer from severe re-editing and that it has schizophrenic pacing and a confused tone.

2016-08-13 16:32:26

But is this course of logic acceptable to Informant?

2016-08-12 16:24:44

I was writing a scene in the final SLIDERS REBORN script and I wanted to have a moment where the enemy contemptuously describes the reality of SLIDERS REBORN as fan fiction -- something worthless and forgettable and not real -- in order to justify his wish to destroy and replace it. I wanted to put this in because Matt has occasionally and very correctly dismissed SLIDERS REBORN as non-canonical fanfic ("Wade is dead, god damn it" / "You're worried about becoming apocryphal? You already are.") and I wanted to address that to some degree by having a character say it.

"This reality you're fighting so hard to defend -- it's not real. It's a sham and a fraud, you must know that by now. You've seen rock star vampires and radioactive slugs, for God's sake. You weren't reborn; you're living in a diseased and dying existence and this world, your friends, your daughter, your mother, your home -- it's just the patient's last muscle spasm. The final burst of neurons firing through the synapses before the brain shuts off. The show's over and it's time you faced the truth -- everything around you is just a mediocre fanfic to make yourself feel better."

Naturally, every 3 sentences or so are interspersed with Quinn getting punched in the face. But Matt HATES lampshades! He calls them LAMEshades. (He never has, but I'm sure he does.) But what does Informant think!? :-D

2016-08-12 15:39:09

I think Slider_Quinn21 is really onto something with the idea that the Reverse Flash's alterations to history resulted in the ARROWverse lacking Supergirl and Superman, but I think the idea of the Reverse Flash doing one thing in SUPERGIRL's continuity and something else in the ARROWverse is too complicated for a television show.

I think a simpler route might be preferable while still using Slider_Quinn21's ideas: specifically, SUPERGIRL is the original timeline without Thawne's interference or any changes in history wrought by Thawne and the Flash's battles across time. But when Thawne killed Nora Allen and assumed Harrison Wells' identity, he also used his knowledge of the future to (a) divert Kara's pod into the sun to kill her (b) depower Clark Kent and (c) also eliminate or interfere with the origin stories of any metahumans who might have interfered with his plans.

In addition, Thawne's drive to build the particle accelerator at an earlier point caused certain people to meet resulting in specific individuals being born -- Caitlin and Cisco -- whereas the original Harrison Wells built the particle accelerator much, much later in life (and Thawne stole his identity to build it "sooner"). That's why Caitlin and Cisco exist on Earth 2 (where Harry built the accelerator with the same drive as his Earth 1 impostor) but don't exist in SUPERGIRL's universe (where the real Wells is building the accelerator at a slower pace).

This would be a way to deepen Thawne's evil; he didn't just alter Barry's life into an existence where his father was in jail for his mother's murder -- he created a world without Superman and Supergirl. Meanwhile, the original timeline carries on as a separate, parallel track in SUPERGIRL (which is a timeline where Barry was much older when he became the Flash, so old he looked more like John Wesley Shipp than Grant Gustin).

When Eddie killed himself and erased Thawne's existence, everyone's memories of Thawne were still intact, Barry's mother was still dead, and the paradoxical nature of the timeline resulted in the black hole and the portals to Earth 2. And now Barry has gone back and stopped Thawne from changing history when the universe seemed to crack from Thawne's forcible removal from the relative present day -- which could mean that the FLASHPOINT reality we'll see in the Season 3 reality is a mixture of the post-erasure timeline (Cisco and Caitlin) along with the original timeline (Supergirl and Superman).

So maybe by the end of FLASHPOINT, the SUPERGIRL and ARROWverse timelines are restored into one, but some of the Thawne-created scar tissue (all the ARROWverse characters) remain intermixed with the present day SUPERGIRL timeline.

Actually, this may be more complicated than Slider_Quinn21's approach. How to distill it --

THAWNE: "This world isn't real, FLASH!"
BARRY: "This is the world we'd have if you'd never touched it -- "
THAWNE: "This deranged wonderland's a mismash of overlapping timelines! You think your parents were the only people I took out of the equation? I didn't just make you the Flash, I made you *my* Flash, I couldn't have any other influences on poor little Barry Allen, so desperate for a mentor. So I had to take away anyone who might have interfered -- a certain Kryptonian had to lose his powers, a little pod in space had to be diverted into the sun -- "
BARRY: "Kara -- there's no Kara on my world because you killed her -- "
THAWNE: "And there was no Cisco or Caitlin until I made them the same way I made you! If they're here, then this isn't the world without me, Flash, this is every bit the world I made except you've let it all go mad -- "

I dunno. It's a bit much. But while this unfolds on THE FLASH, I would have Winn over on SUPERGIRL inexplicably mention that he once met Felicity briefly, Cat would mention Oliver as a one night fling and in ARROW, the Martian Manhunter should show up in one of Oliver's flashbacks. Then FLASHPOINT ends and we realize the ARROW and SUPERGIRL episodes took place after the FLASHPOINT conclusion merged the timelines.

Oh, I love how Grant Gustin thinks that Barry would be head over heels in love with Kara Danvers while Melissa Benoist is of the opinion that Kara is too similar to Barry for there to be effective chemistry. I think that the characters should have exactly the same viewpoints with Barry smitten with a Supergirl who thinks of him as a buddy.

2016-08-11 17:34:41

*sigh*

Well, Slider_Quinn21 suggested that Barry's time travel paradox ripped open the walls of reality and drew Kara's Earth into Barry's Earth and the collision resulted in their realities being merged. We've already seen that time paradoxes, in Season 1, open rifts between realities. So, at the end of Season 2, reality became unstable -- a bit like -- so there's two jars of candy; jelly beans and chocolate! And Barry knocked over the jar of jelly beans and broke the jar, so he swept them all up and put them in with the chocolate to hold them and... and...

Anyway. I'd have all the heavy lifting happen in THE FLASH and have Season 2 of SUPERGIRL and LEGENDS and Season 5 of ARROW set in the merged reality, although the references to SUPERGIRL's stuff would be extremely low-key until the FLASHPOINT arc ends.

2016-08-11 16:49:38

If I were writing for SUPERGIRL, THE FLASH, LEGENDS OF TOMORROW and/or ARROW, I would desperately want to avoid the need to create a device to bring Supergirl into the ARROWverse reality every single time I wanted to do a crossover.

How many times can the Flash lose control of his speed and inadvertently stumble into Kara's world? How many reality-shifting mystical artifacts can ARROW contrive for Oliver to meet Kara? How much technobabble can LEGENDS contrive to bring about a dimensional nexus?

And the issue of the Flash being able to walk away from any consequence to Kara's world or Kara being able to do the same with the Flash's world risks eliminating dramatic tension and meaningful risk. I would seek to avoid all of the above by finding some way to cross over and make it permanent.

And the way I'd do it -- I'd do FLASHPOINT in THE FLASH episodes and, when reality is inevitably restored, I'd indicate that little changes have been made that only Barry notices (like Pied Piper suddenly being re-employed at STAR Labs after Barry revisited Season 1). There are newspaper stories of Superman and Supergirl; there's a CATCO banner in the background. Meanwhile on SUPERGIRL, a Big Belly Burger appears. Winn makes a vague reference to having once met his equal, someone named Felicity, at a hackathon. Cat grimly confesses to a one-night-stand with Oliver. Over on ARROW, the Martian Manhunter shows up in Oliver's flashbacks but Oliver never realized his strange friend was an alien.

And in THE FLASH, Barry gets a call from Supergirl and is astonished; he asks how she came to this universe and Kara has no idea what he's referring to; she remembers their first adventure but has no memory of how they used to inhabit separate universes and some crisis forces Barry to just accept it. When Supergirl meets Oliver, she's intimidated by his reputation as a ruthless killer and Oliver dismisses her as a spineless goody two shoes.

History has merged, but the present is mostly the same. Only Barry notices, and the show acts like Supergirl and Superman have always been around.

2016-08-11 15:21:02

I love how Informant concedes that merging universes is never going to be a logical event but then reiterates his need for a sensible explanation.

2016-08-10 19:13:21

It's hardly an exact science. Timelines get merged for corporate and editorial reasons, not because it makes sense. The Crisis storyline where Earth 1 and Earth 2 were merged wasn't done to make a good story; it was DC's attempt to follow Marvel's lead in only having a single timeline. If SUPERGIRL's continuity is combined with ARROW and THE FLASH, it won't be the natural course of events (how could it be?). It'll be in order to increase the cross-marketing opportunities, widen the CW superhero brand and expand their banner.

I think it would be a good move in that ARROW, THE FLASH, LEGENDS and SUPERGIRL belong together as they're made by the same teams? But it won't ever make logical sense, much in the same way resurrecting Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo would be absurd and illogical.

2016-08-10 18:19:33

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

The thing is....Barry said that none of the people he knew existed in Kara's world. So when they merge, how would that work? If Kara and Company cross over as-is, would the population of the Earth double? Would some people merge? If so, are we going to have billions of Mallorys?

If we really had to address it, I guess they could steal an idea from JLA/AVENGERS where the DC heroes observe that the Marvel Universe Earth is physically smaller than DC's Earth (which has lots of additional, fictional cities) and so the merged Earth has a larger size and a larger population. I imagine that people would either exist with altered histories from the merging or be erased.

There's a neat issue of ASTRO CITY where a man is constantly dreaming of a woman he never knew; a phantom-like superhero reveals to him that there was one of those Crisis-type events and this poor man's wife was erased from existence, and the hero offers to either erase memories of the woman entirely or leave the man the way he is. The man prefers to remember and live with the loss.

Honestly, this problem is bugging ME, too, on a personal level.

2016-08-10 18:14:23

I've fallen behind my DC REBIRTH reading -- I usually don't read comics until a massive event has ended an era the way I recently read all the NEW 52 comics. So, correct me if I'm wrong -- but wasn't the whole point of DC UNIVERSE REBIRTH that Dr. Manhattan from WATCHMEN is the villain who merged the DC and Wildstorm universes?

Also, and correct me again, but wasn't the crazed timeline of FLASHPOINT the result of the temporal shockwave caused by Barry altering time by saving his mother? The world that resulted wasn't the result of Barry saving his mother, but I don't remember it being Pandora's doing either: she observes Barry stopping himself and allows it; she also, in DC UNIVERSE REBIRTH, declares Dr. Manhattan to be a cold, hateful monstrosity who has stolen hope, joy and love from the DC Universe.

Again, your degrees in comicology vastly dwarf mine, so maybe I missed an issue?

2016-08-10 15:46:58

Rumour has it that Flashpoint will merge the SUPERGIRL and ARROW/FLASH into a single continuity.

I think that sounds much tidier than having Supergirl cast into the ARROWverse? But it's potentially very confusing and needs to be handled in a careful fashion akin to FRINGE's soft touch in its fourth season as opposed to how unrecognizable SLIDERS became by changing locations.

2016-08-02 16:20:03

I agree and disagree. Quinn was very effective as one member of an ensemble; he worked better when he wasn't the default leading man, the actor's influence was badly handled -- yeah! However, I disagree that he isn't interesting, although interest is ultimately a personal value and not an objective measure.

I don't know how deliberate a role Jerry played in the way Quinn shifted. In Seasons 1 - 2, Jerry ignored the scripts regularly and played a shy, awkward character as confident and winning.

But the producers and writers made it so that Jerry O'Connell being athletic, confident and attractive was just one facet of the character -- Jerry O'Connell is a mask that Quinn wears to hide the turmoil and damage behind it. In Season 3, there seemed to be none of this adjustment and modulation and the Jerry persona became the entire character. In Season 4, we seemed to lose both Jerry's personality and Quinn in the performance.

Jim Phelps, to me, is absolutely fascinating because he always seemed to have a plan, he was able to anticipate every potential complication and prepare a countermeasure with a near-psychic mastery of his situations. You could always count on him to find a way. And there were so many ways his master-planning could play out: he could be cold and ruthless or he could be determinedly humanistic, he could be distant and aloof or he could be warm and avuncular.

All the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE cast were ciphers and it was the unanswered questions surrounding them that made them intriguing, and I found Phelps the most interesting of all.

This is something about me: I often find characters fascinating where others find them dull. Cyclops of the X-MEN and Captain America are often viewed as tedious squares, but I look at Cyclops and I see a big geekboy struggling to play diplomat and leader and I see Captain America as a soldier struggling with the conflict between his country's ideals and his country's reality. Most people don't see Scott Summers and Steve Rogers -- or Quinn -- the way that I do.

2016-08-01 15:26:29

The lead character of Quinn Mallory in SLIDERS has an interesting reputation among fans: they seem to hate him. In SLIDERSCAST, podcasters Jim Ford and Dan Kurtzke regularly declare Quinn to be the worst character of the original quartet. Sliders blogger Ian McDuffie wrote that "Quinn Mallory was never worth your time" and "Quinn Mallory is a bad person" and that "Quinn was a total dick."

On the message boards, Informant remarked that he would liked Quinn to have been shot and blown up after getting his brain sucked out. Slider_Quinn21, despite naming himself after the character, declared that Quinn "clearly lost his mind" as the series progressed.

Fans of SLIDERS seem quite willing to write off the main character of the series as a worthless waste of space and it saddens me greatly because I think that Quinn Mallory is one of the greatest fictional characters of the twentieth century. When fans look down upon Quinn, I believe they are in part mistaking the actor for the character, holding the character responsible for behind the scenes problems, and overlooking the magnificent creation that they're eviscerating.

Conflicting Creativity: Jerry O'Connell versus Quinn Mallory
One of the most peculiar casting choices in SLIDERS is hiring a football playing male model type to play a character who, as scripted on paper, is a slightly toned down Steve Urkel. In the Pilot script, Quinn is shy and socially awkward, portrayed in unaired scenes as afraid to approach women romantically and laughed at when asking a lady out on a date.

It's impossible to imagine the extremely attractive and amiable Jerry O'Connell lacking confidence towards women and in fact, Jerry's performance is completely at odds with the scene descriptions. Instead, Jerry plays the secretive and isolated Quinn Mallory with the full force of his charisma.

But instead of undermining Quinn, this acting choice adds depth: despite being athletic, handsome, friendly and brilliant, Quinn Mallory chooses to create his inventions in obscurity. This has the net effect of making Quinn seem damaged for reasons unknown.

Whether this is a conscious acting choice against the script or not, it works. There is a striking internal conflict to the character that speaks to both the adventurous action hero he can be and the distantly aloof intellectual that he is. The contradictions create a multi-faceted character. Throughout the first two seasons and a few episodes scattered through the third and fourth, SLIDERS finds fascinating stories to explore Quinn's adventurous spirit, his traumatic past, his clever ingenuity, his introverted behaviour and also his moral and philosophical values.

Improvised Brilliance
The striking thing about Quinn in the Pilot and the two seasons that follow is his gift for improvisation with the writers mining it to exhibit the characters' intelligence. When captured by the local revolution in "Prince of Wails," Quinn presents the Professor (a double of an establishment political figure) as his prisoner. When mistaken for his own fugitive double by the authorities in "Fever," Quinn attempts to use his football injury to distinguish himself from his alternate. When unable to rescue Rembrandt alone in "Luck of the Draw," Quinn rallies a group of protestors to lend him extra muscle.

The writers frequently have Quinn rush into situations without thought or competence, such as his disastrous rescue of an abused woman in "El Sid" or falling prey to a pickpocket in "Greatfellas," but they also present Quinn's lightning fast mind and ability to combine knowledge and observation to form solutions on the fly. It's a very effective technique for showcasing Quinn's cleverness while leaving him open to vulnerability and failure.

In addition to lack of planning and foresight, Quinn is also shown to lack some vital human resource skills. He avoids intimacy and close friendships for a time (the Pilot and "Last Days"), he is easily confused by sexual manipulation ("Greatfellas" and "Double Cross") and he exhibits an unwillingness to trust people he's close to (the Pilot, "The Guardian"). Throughout the first two seasons, it becomes clear that the 50 megawatt charm of Jerry O'Connell is really a mask that Quinn Mallory uses to obscure a damaged personality whose high-functioning nature is marred by self-induced loneliness and a constant sense of secrey.

Morality and Philosophy
In the first two seasons, Quinn's heroism is primarily defined through his proficiency at problem solving. Even when his ideas don't work ("Fever," "Last Days"), the genius behind them is undeniable. His successes stand out as a display of how the sliders can triumph over danger and threat through the power of ideas, a willingness to fail in different ways to see what does and doesn't work and his failures are often based in a refusal to trust in teamwork and delegation.

Furthermore, the recklessness he displays in getting his friends lost is increasing balanced by guilt and responsibility. In "Love Gods," he balks at the idea of fathering a child he would never get to see; in "The Good, the Bad and the Wealthy," he is outraged by a culture of violence; in "The Young and the Relentless," he is appalled at education being used as a marketing opportunity. Throughout all this, Quinn represents how knowledge, literacy and an openness to new information will allow the sliders to survive anything.

A Heroic Legacy
Quinn Mallory is part of an elite group: he's a science hero who uses nowledge and ideas to save the day. He stands alongside iconic characters like Sherlock Holmes, Batman, Mr. Spock, MacGyver, Dr. House, Hercule Poirot and others known for their incredible brainpower.

However, Quinn is also among heroes who are so strongly identified with the actor who played them that the two can be confused, and in the post-Torme episodes, Quinn's characterization takes an abrupt downturn that has took Quinn from being flawed but admirable to becoming a character who his loathed and despised by the fans.

Season 3 Changes
In numerous Season 3 episodes, Quinn's aptitude for problem solving is lost as the series begins to prize violence over ingenuity as a way to resolve stories. Episodes like "Season's Greedings" and "Prince of Slides" have Quinn punching out villains and battling them with swords. By "Paradise Lost" and "Dinoslide," clever solutions are out and massive explosions are in, reducing Quinn from a scientifically minded hero to a generic figure of 90s machismo.

Also present is Jerry O'Connell's gradual but painful decline as an actor. In "Double Cross," Jerry performs Quinn with the same analytical, scientific presence he created in Season 1 and with a gentle humility: he's touched when Logan flatters his timer technology, he's a little hesitant when she makes advances romantically. But by "Season's Greedings" and "Paradise Lost," Jerry performs Quinn with an absurd flirtatiousness towards the female guest stars and starts infusing an arrogant swagger into Quinn, replacing the open-minded and thoughtful traveller with an overconfident action hero whose defining characteristics are his sexual appeal and physical dominance over others.

Diminished Intelligence and Sensitivity
The most offensive aspect of the character is his sudden stupidity in Season 3, behaving in a baffling and illogical manner that would outrage the real Quinn. In "Dragonslide," Quinn falls head over heels in love with Melinda, a woman with whom he's not had a single conversation and largely seen while she's unconscious. In "Slither," Quinn is so infatuated with Kyra and despite Kyra being an obviously untrustworthy manipulator, he is prepared to abandon sliding for her.

More shocking, however, is Quinn's insensitivity towards his friends where responsibility, compassion and consideration, while imperfect areas for him, were certainly never his blind spots. In "Season's Greedings," Wade melts down emotionally over her longing for family and Quinn goes out on a date with Wade's sister instead of accompanying Wade. In "The Exodus Part 2," Quinn finds the way back home, but refuses to allow his friends to return for reasons incomprehensible. In "Sole Survivors," Quinn pranks his already anxious friends by tricking them into thinking he's being electrocuted.

By the end of Season 3, the character has gone from being a tender, sincere and brilliant young man with some social issues to becoming dim-witted, violent and incomprehensibly cruel by neglect or illogical decisions. There is no inciting incident, no path of characterization, no sequence of events that leads to this characterization. In fact, the early episodes of Season 3 show Quinn dealing with some bad news about the Professor in a rather positive if pained fashion, making this downturn in his characterization even more inexplicable in-universe.

On a visual level, this Season 3 version of Quinn Mallory is difficult to recognize as the Season 1 - 2 incarnation. Jerry O'Connell is now sporting a sun-tan and a stylish wardrobe rather than the secondhand shop attire; his screen presence has become preeningly smug rather than thoughtfully earnest.

Season 4 Retcon
With Season 4, we have one of the strangest onscreen retcons ever made in science fiction television -- we're told that Quinn Mallory is not a boy genius from our world but a refugee from the Kromagg homeworld and a pivotal figure in an interdimensional war and that the people who raised him were in truth his kidnappers.

This retcon is so wrongheaded it's difficult to know where to start, but very simply, the strength of the Quinn Mallory character is his ability to survive insane situations with clever improvisation. The appeal of Quinn is that anyone could apply his attitude to facing their challenges; the idea that Quinn is now a mythic chosen one undermines his appeal.

There's also the fact that Season 4's version of Quinn is completely incapable of living up to his new reputation as an individual of central concern in a multiversal conflict because Season 4 shows Quinn at his least heroic.

No Hero
In "Genesis," Quinn discovers his adoptive home Earth has been invaded and sets off to find an anti-Kromagg superweapon and liberate his home and also rescue his mother and Wade who are now Kromagg captives.

However, subsequent episodes show Quinn to repeatedly ignore this mission. In "Common Ground," Quinn finds a superweapon capable of destroying all Kromaggs; in "World Killer," he learns about the power to slide massive populations to other Earths; in "Mother and Child," he finds a virus so lethal to Kromaggs they've fled; in "Revelations," he finds another anti-Kromagg weapon. At no point does he even voice interest in using these weapons to save his world. And he never mentions his mother again.

In "Mother and Child," Quinn meets an escaped Kromagg prisoner who knew Wade, but asks no questions about Wade's well-being. When Rembrandt declares they must take this chance to rescue Wade, Quinn ignores Rembrandt's plea and in fact leaves it to a guest-star to tell Rembrandt that Wade has been moved offworld, and despite Quinn having the technology to track other sliders, he voices no interest in trailing Wade to save her.

In Quinn's final episode, "Revelations," he declares that Rembrandt will be returning to the Kromagg-invaded Earth alone and that he intends to reside on Kromagg Prime, apparently no longer pursuing his mother or Wade. In both "Mother and Child" and "Revelations," Jerry O'Connell's performance indicates that neither Rembrandt, Wade nor his home hold any emotional weight or turmoil for him.

An Understandable Contempt
The fans' distaste for Quinn Mallory for his portrayal in Seasons 3 - 4 is understandable. However, it is unreasonable to view the latter-era seasons as a legitimate portrayal of the Quinn Mallory character as created by Tracy Torme and Robert K. Weiss.

Certainly, Quinn's behaviour upset the fans at many turns, but the problem wasn't that Quinn Mallory was a hateful sociopath; the problem was that SLIDERS' creative staff weren't writing Quinn Mallory correctly. There was no deliberate effort to make Quinn a more unpleasant, alienating, hateful character whom the fans would hold in contempt; the aspects of Quinn that infuriate the fans are random decisions made by an indifferent creative team. There comes a point when it is necessary to look at the onscreen events in a real-world context.

Stepping Outside the Game
The switch from brainpower saving the day to blowing things up instead was not a storyline in which Quinn became more violent and cynical. It was because the original showrunners were not present during Season 3 to rewrite scripts and set direction and showrunners more familiar with crime dramas and action movies took over the writing of the series.

The shift in Quinn's body language and behaviour from an earnest youth to a showboating flirt was not a character direction in which Quinn began to indulge his libido; it was the actor becoming enchanted with the Los Angeles nightlife when the show moved there from Vancouver and bringing his personal life into performing a character who wasn't anything like him.

The selfish disregard for others shown in Seasons 3 - 4 was not an episodic arc in which Quinn became a more self-absorbed person. It was entirely due to writers and the actor having degenerated so severely in quality control and professionalism that they were failing to communicate plot information clearly and soon became unable to convey character information coherently or manage their actors' performances.

Quinn's flirting with Kelly Welles in "Season's Greedings," for example, suggests a total indifference to Wade's grief, but it's Jerry O'Connell's performance that turns what should be a platonic friendship and a desire to understand Wade's family into an inappropriately romantic date.

In "The Exodus," Quinn is hated by the characters and fans for refusing to give his friends the way home, except the script actually has no logical reason for Quinn to refuse, and both installments of this two-parter are filled with nonsensical characterization for nearly every character involved: there's a murderous US Army Colonel inexplicably keeping a list of all his victims for anyone to find, soldiers who have forcefield technology but inexplicably decide to shoot rioters despite voicing a reluctance to do so, the Professor inexplicably supporting Quinn withholding the way home -- all this demonstrating the writers' inability to present any of their characters in a plausible fashion. While Quinn's character suffers most from poor characterization, he's not the only one.

In "Sole Survivors," the writers can't seem to figure out if the zombies kill people instantly or prefer to take them hostage and so determining if Quinn pranking his friends with a feigned electrocution is appropriate or not is likely beyond them as well. In "Slither," the writers have the sliders inexplicably taking separate vacations despite the necessity of sliding together and have Wade agree to vacation with Maggie despite having shown nothing but aggravation towards her, and Quinn's willingness to abandon his friends would suggest that the writers have lost any understanding of their characters.

In all these disastrously characterized episodes, Quinn Mallory's declining competence and likability are merely symptoms of a systemic failure to tell any worthwhile stories at all, never mind stories with a worthwhile lead character.

The Non-Arc of Season 4
This inability to manage characterization clearly is even more severe in many fourth season episodes in which pitch reviews and script editing seem to have fallen aside. Quinn is despised for abandoning the mission to save his adopted Earth, yet Rembrandt is also oddly uninterested in all the numerous anti-Kromagg measures the sliders discover in "Common Ground," "Mother and Child," "Slidecage" and "Revelations." The writers seem incapable of maintaining running plot elements throughout Season 4.

The first episode establishes that Quinn and Rembrandt have been traumatized by the invasion; by the second episode, they are joking and laughing. The third episode reveals that the Kromaggs have a standing order that none of the sliders are to be harmed or captured, but all subsequent episodes show the sliders regularly attacked, captured and nearly killed by Kromagg forces without explanation for why the protective order has been rescinded.

The episode "Mother and Child" has Quinn at his most contemptible: when Rembrandt says he wants to save Wade, Quinn walks away indifferently, tossing the sentence, "I don't know if we have enough time" over his shoulder. But this characterization says less about Quinn than it does about Jerry's reading compehension issues in this season. The script actually has Quinn agreeing with Rembrandt while noting, "We don't have much time," only to discover right there and then that Wade had been shipped offworld and they'd missed their chance.

Jerry O'Connell altered his line from acknowledging the danger to refusing to face it and performed the scene with indifference, and "Mother and Child" says less about the problems with Quinn Mallory and more about Jerry O'Connell's laziness towards reading scripts without John Rhys-Davies to guide him. This laxness towards reading scripts is also present to a shocking degree in "Slidecage," where a portion of the plot hinges on Quinn being overwhelmed with grief over Maggie's supposed death -- but Jerry's bored performance mistakenly suggests that Quinn doesn't think Maggie is dead, creating a plothole as Quinn has no reason to think she survived.

The script for "Revelation" in which Quinn hatefully abandons his adopted home and Rembrandt is one of the most incomprehensible SLIDERS scripts ever penned. Quinn states that he has the coordinates to find the anti-Kromagg weapon and bypass the security measures -- yet, he inexplicably has not used them during the weeks of inactivity he's shown to have had. Furthermore, Quinn then permits a stranger to alter those coordinates. When the altered coordinates take the sliders to the wrong Earth, Quinn makes no effort to use the correct coordinates to get to the correct Earth, and Maggie states, "I hope you find your home someday" despite the script having established they already have their route there.

The script compounds its errors further when guest-character Isaac Clarke accompanies the sliders to this Earth to get the superweapon from a Michael Mallory double -- only for Michael to state that it is Clarke who has the superweapon with the sliders failing to question this. Stranger still, despite the weapon being the object of their travels, the sliders only raise the subject with Michael when it comes up incidentally.

The story has Isaac Clarke stating his intention to see Michael Mallory arrested for war crimes for using the superweapon -- except the story also establishes that the weapon's use is openly known with no consequences to Michael and that Clarke helped create it. With "Revelations" being this contradictory and internally inconsistent, the fact that Quinn's motivations make no sense is one of many incoherent plot points and the result of making Quinn hateful is clearly unintentional in that little of the story seems intended to achieve much of anything.

The truth is that every episode where Quinn Mallory's character comes off as unconscionable and hateful is also an episode where the writers have failed in almost every area of basic storytelling and created massive plotholes that undermine and invalidate their own material -- and Quinn's aberrant behaviour in these stories is symptomatic of these unremedied errors.

Devil's Advocate
But let's set all that aside for a moment -- let's say that all this really is Quinn Mallory's character, that it's the character's course to go from the sweet scientist of Seasons 1 - 2 to the violent ladies' man in Season 3 and the emotionless deserter of Season 4. Let's say Quinn really doesn't care about Wade or freeing his home or about Rembrandt's fate. Then why is he a slider?

Why does he continue to step into the vortex every week? Why doesn't he just settle on the paradise vacation world in "Slidecage"? Why does he continue to get into one dangerous situation after another if he doesn't actually want to help people and cares only about himself?

Even if you accept the premise that sliding turned Quinn Mallory into a monster, even if you focus solely on the Season 4 presentation, this version of the character is internally incoherent -- which would indicate that the problem isn't the character but rather how he's written.

A Combination Complex
While fans are fully aware of the misjudged and clumsy writing, direction and production of the latter seasons, fans excuse the characters for all this in most cases -- except when it comes to Quinn Mallory.

The hostility is in part due to the actor. Where Cleavant Derricks' acting remained capable throughout most of the series, Jerry O'Connell's performance declined severely. While Cleavant remained with the show throughout its run, Jerry quit over a contractual dispute and refused to perform an exit story. Cleavant had no creative control over the series and was saddened by its errors; Jerry was a Season 4 producer, writer and director and viewed as complicit in SLIDERS' misdeeds.

As a result, Rembrandt's crimes are acknowledged as poor creative direction while Quinn is considered a villain with a character arc in which his worst character traits become the whole of his personality. The antipathy for the actor has become intertwined with the actor. The anger towards the series and the actor riding roughshod over the feelings of fans becomes anger towards a character who cannot help how he is being mis-performed, mis-written and mis-directed. Quinn Mallory was not the problem.

I think the other part is that fans genuinely do not realize what a significant and special character Quinn Mallory once was; Quinn could have been as iconic and popular a character as science heroes like MacGyver or Sherlock Holmes or Batman, but FOX's abysmal marketing never gave him a chance.

Infecting the Past
The claim that the Quinn of Seasons 1 - 2 becomes the Quinn of Seasons 3 - 4 in a logical character arc is fundamentally insulting to Tracy Torme and Robert K. Weiss' superb scripting in Seasons 1 - 2 and their brilliant casting and direction. The Quinn character was extremely well-devised as a capable protagonist who was still vulnerable and flawed; the writing and acting decisions that made the character seem loathsome were entirely blind to the strengths of Quinn's character.

Fans seek to combine the behind the scenes failures for Quinn into a coherent character arc when the simple truth is that the character was not being written or performed correctly and even regarding the seasons separately and even within the latter seasons alone, Quinn's psychological trajectory is nonsensical. Quinn bearing loss with the desire to make a difference in "The Guardian" is not the Quinn who reacts to loss after "Exodus" with acidity and cynicism. The Quinn who vowed to rescue his mother and Wade in "Genesis" is clearly not the indifferent Quinn of "Mother and Child."

The real Quinn Mallory is a fascinating character with a truly distinct voice and purpose. He is a science hero who represents the power of ideas to overcome hardship and difficulty; he is an improviser who shows how the willingness to take chances and make mistakes can lead to refinement, improvement and triumph but can also lead to one fine mess after another.

The contradictions between the performed character and the scripted role make Quinn complex with many different functions: he can be the stalwart and moral hero or the thoughtful academic, he can be the wise teacher or the impetuous student, he can be the leading man or he can be the bystander. This is a character with incredible versatility as Torme and Weiss cleverly crafted a character who could be smarter than his writers without ever being invincible.

The fan argument is constantly that Quinn is a selfish coward and has been all along. But the truth is that Quinn's character was the product of many key influences: Tracy Torme and Robert K. Weiss scripting him, Jerry O'Connell interpreting the scripts, the writers adjusting their material to the actor, the costuming department, story editors Jon Povill and Jacob Epstein, and veteran actor John Rhys-Davies providing Jerry O'Connell with personal coaching. When these influences were tampered with or removed without consideration, Quinn's character suffered.

After Torme's departure, Quinn's characterization was handled by David Peckinpah, Marc Scott Zicree, Jerry O'Connell, Bill Dial and Keith Damron, all of whom had fundamentally contradictory and irreconciliable takes on Quinn and Jerry's post-John performances show how vital Davies was for Jerry's talent. By the final episode of SLIDERS, the only remaining employees who'd been there since the Pilot were a single actor and a production supervisor and the downward spiral for Quinn only reflects these behind the scenes situations.

The numerous failures of how he was written and the onscreen character being unlikable in his last two seasons on the air should not be seen to represent Quinn Mallory's character; they should instead be seen to represent the ineptitude and unprofessionalism of the writers and the actor and their willful blindness to Quinn's limitless potential.

2016-08-01 09:53:16

Having Superman text Kara or only relay messages through intermediaries and never being at home or being seen at a distance or being knocked unconscious was getting pretty ridiculous. Eventually, the excuses for avoiding an on camera presence would have been impossible. It was inevitable that Superman would need to be shown onscreen.

The world at large had no issue with the Tim Burton BATMAN films contradicting the BATMAN animated series while reruns of the 60s BATMAN show aired daily in syndication while 40s era BATMAN serials were being re-released.

2016-07-25 19:47:02

So, awhile back, my Windows laptop broke. I couldn't charge it anymore, the repair shop said the charging port couldn't be repaired and I decided to buy a Surface 3. And it's good.

I bought the base model with a mere 2GB of RAM, but it's super-speedy for my word processing and spreadsheets and the 64GB of storage is easily augmented with a 128GB microSD.

Unlike my previous Windows laptop, the Surface 3 isn't full of irksome OS glitches. The screen rotates correctly, the keyboard and mouse don't engage in random input, the Windows Store doesn't crash, the keyboard doesn't abruptly disconnect and there's a proper USB port. And the speakers are booming.

However, while the OS is fine and the desktop apps run fine, the touch apps can occasionally be a little buggy -- a comic book reader where the pages don't rotate, a video player where the top menu bar won't fade away, an ebook reader that can't be set as the default ebook app -- and these are the only ones worth a damn. And while desktop apps are battery efficient, touch apps aren't.

It was definitely too early to give up on my tablet except I was so optimistic about the Surface 3 that I gave my mother my iPad Mini 2 and couldn't bear to ask for it back. So, I spent $75 on a used Samsung Tab 3 10.1 -- which, despite being three years old, isn't significantly less than most 10 inch Android tablets on the market. Android tablet development has really come to a dead stop in recent years. I figured it'd be a cheap backup when the Surface 3's battery runs low or when touch apps are acting up.

But the Tab 3 -- I had a similar tablet back in 2013, and this comparable tablet looks just ghastly to me. The 1200x800 pixel screen looks hideous. All text looks jagged and pixelated. And the comic book reader! All the pages look like they've been printed on a low-res printer. Every line and letter looks patchy and scratchy.

I eventually managed to find a decent image-smoothing filter. But I wondered -- how did I ever put up with this three years ago? Did I just not notice or have anything to compare it to until now? I looked at my mother's old 7-inch tablet with an even lower 1024 x 768 tablet and it looked even worse than my Tab 3.

I'm wondering if maybe it's the screen protectors I used. They're anti-glare, but in reducing reflections, they would blur the screen image a little. Is it possible that they smoothed out the roughness of these lower-res screens and, because my protectors are still in the mail, I'm seeing what was underneath before?

I dunno. The Tab 3's fine as an occasional and very cheap backup to my Surface 3. But it's kind of horrifying that this clearly outdated tablet with its hideous screen has pretty much the same resolution as most tablets on the market. No wonder the tablet market's dying out; Google's tablet OS is just the phone OS stretched to fill a larger screen and the hardware's fallen into a rut.

2016-07-25 16:15:16

The final SLIDERS REBORN script is going to be the sliders doing a Marvel movie. I think a JUSTICE LEAGUE movie from us would be just like that.

**

WORLD'S FINEST #172 has an imaginary story where Jonathan and Martha Kent adopt Bruce Wayne and raise him with Clark. Could be others.

**

Has anyone been watching the DC Animated films? I thought it was neat how, after adapting the story where Batman discovers he has a homicidal 10-year-old son who becomes the new Robin, they've started having continuity with three sequels. However, I found SON OF BATMAN and BATMAN VS. ROBIN to be aggressively mediocre and BATMAN: BAD BLOOD was so bland I couldn't finish it.

There's a lot of heart to the material, but the films never seem to find it -- there's a certain artlessness to the direction, editing, blocking and a lifeless lack of style. The dialogue is also very stilted in its delivery -- it's like the actors are being recorded separately and with such poor direction that all the characters feel like they're in completely different rooms. There is no sense of timing or pacing at all to these films.

**

Wouldn't it be hilarious if after all this, Slider_Quinn21 watches the Ultimate Edition and hates it?

2016-07-24 16:29:36

I don't know why the filmmakers created an inciting incident in Africa outside of the need for the Lexcorp bullet to give Lois a path to unravelling the conspiracy against Superman and Batman. As Slider_Quinn21 notes, the battle of Metropolis was the only incident needed. The Senate hearings could have easily been about the event and Lex's falsified witness could've been one of his employees.

The only difficulty with this plot is that Superman worked with the US Army against Zod's forces, so Superman's role throughout would be known to the government; there'd be nothing to uncover or decipher. I guess you could say that the records facilities were hit and that the majority of the soldiers Superman worked with were killed, but there were still a couple officers left by the end. I wonder if the filmmakers were simply reluctant to criticize their own previous installment.

I really liked Slider_Quinn21's idea of Superman having been a fan of Batman only to be repulsed by the bat-branding. Just my redraft of SQ21's redraft:

SUPERMAN: "What are you doing? Your tank here just killed six people; you've started giving death sentences to criminals already in jail -- "
BATMAN: "I don't shed tears for sex traffickers and rapists --"
SUPERMAN: "I've been reading about you since I was a child. You defended the innocent, you weren't out to execute the guilty. What happened to you?"
BATMAN: "You happened. You want to talk about the innocent, tell it to the two hundred thousand you killed in Metropolis."
SUPERMAN: "I tried to stop it -- "
BATMAN: "YOU WERE THE REASON IT STARTED!!!"

Superman is stunned. He retreats. He begins to float away, shaking his head.

SUPERMAN: "I don't want to hurt you, but I can't let this go on. The Batman is done. The next time they shine your light in the sky, don't answer it."
BATMAN: "All that blood dripping off your hands and none of it yours -- not yet. Do you bleed? You will."

2016-07-24 09:04:26

I don't know that BVS in its director's cut is uncluttered. There is still a lot going on: introducing the Justice League, Batman having a nervous breakdown, Superman's global reputation, Lois' investigation into the Africa gun battle, Clark's investigation into Batman, the Flash travelling back in time to warn Batman of something, Batman having a vision of a future where it looks like Darkseid is somehow controlling Superman, Lex delving into the Kryptonian archives and making contact with an alien intelligence, the Lexcorp files on Wally West and Diana Prince and Arthur Curry and Victor Stone -- there's a lot here. Maybe too much. All that combined with the theatrical cut's failure to show whether Superman cares about people or not made the film seem poorly structured. Confusion is fundamentally alienating and everytime Superman was onscreen, he created confusion.

However, the director's cut has the throughline that everything on screen relates in at least some way to Lex's manipulation, that everything part of his design to engineer anger and hatred in Batman alongside Superman's horror and moral outrage towards Batman.

BVS's take on Superman is that he's a global fireman and paramedic but keeps being viewed by others as a soldier. This was scripted in a very nuanced, subtle fashion and conveyed not through Superman's dialogue but through his actions and silent reactions. When Snyder was forced to trim all these little moments, he inadvertently made Superman seem uncaring, indifferent and inhuman and it eliminated the precise nature of Superman's issues with Batman: Superman thinks that superheroes should be like field medics in a battlefield as opposed to armies declaring war.

I find that when you like characters and care about what they're doing in each scene, you can either accept or ignore any mysteries around them so long as you're clear on who they are and wehre they stand. The director's cut is clear. The theatrical cut is vague and confusing.

Dan Harmon actually talks about this sort of plotting in the Season 6 paintball episode commentary, where Harmon said that he thought the plot of City College funding paintball and the silver paintball assassin was incoherently communicated and makes no sense whatsoever. Then he notes (and I'm paraphrasing): "But whatever. Our favourite characters are onscreen having a good time! So long as the people we like are onscreen doing what they do, the rest doesn't matter."

2016-07-23 21:06:13

The more I think about it, the more I find myself downgrading the theatrical cut from "I've seen worse" to "absolutely terrible." However, Slider_Quinn21's criticisms still hold weight in many areas. Only Batman and his former employee seem to blame Superman for the Metropolis attack; the lines about Metropolis' downtown core, Stryker's Island and Gotham's harbour being nearly empty seem clumsy, and there's still no backstory to why Batman has lost faith after 20 years in Gotham. These are flaws -- but the director's cut is so well-paced and compelling and driven and purposeful that I find myself accepting its choices whereas the theatrical cut was too confused and fragmented for me to go along with it.

Watching it in theatres, I kept getting pulled out of a very disjointed narrative. Why does Lois spend so much time investigating a mysterious bullet when that doesn't lead anywhere? Why does Lex blow up the Senate? Why does Lex send Clark photos of Batman's victims? Why doesn't Lex just give Wayne the Kryptonite? How is any of his this crap necessary when all Lex needed to do was (a) give Batman a Kryptonite weapon and (b) kidnap Martha to force Superman to fight Batman? There comes a point when I and many viewers despaired of any of these plot threads adding up to anything and the movie became incredibly dull.

Then there's the incredible vagueness of Superman's character. What happened in Africa? Is he responsible for the massacre described? Why, with so many global issues, does Superman fixate on a municipal-level vigilante? Why the hell is Superman just watching a flooded town? Why does Superman fly away from the Senate explosion without doing anything to help and leaving people to see a government building blow up at a superhuman flying away without explanation? How willing is he to kill Batman in the fight?

All this was clearly laid out in the script, and it seems like the cutting was done in a shockingly careless manner. At the very least, the Africa sequence needed to stay intact -- not necessarily with all the extra dialogue, but to make it clear: Lex's mercs murder most of the village and incinerate the corpses, Lois is threatened, the US Army activates a drone attack, Superman flies in and manages to save Lois and some survivors by stopping the drone strike -- but a witness from the village declares that Superman murdered the civilians as part of Lex's plan to frame Superman and build him up as a threat in Batman's view.

If that were intact, all the subsequent material -- Lois' investigation, Clark being manipulated into investigating Batman further, Bruce receiving letters heightening his anger, the Senate exploison -- they would all be part of Lex's psychological mind game with Superman so disturbed by Batman that he might actually be willing to trade Batman's life for his mother's. Every incident was meant to be a step leading towards a titantic clash between Superman and Batman -- except the theatrical cut removed the context and the result was a very confused film.

Superman looks as demonic and frightening in the director's cut as he does in the theatrical cut -- but the film has spent some time with Clark Kent so that while the audience understands why Batman would hate and fear him, the audience knows that Batman is wrong about him and Henry Cavill's cold expressions now have context; he's not uncaring, he's uncertain.

This film is very much like CIVIL WAR -- it's about two people who should be friends instead becoming enemies and being maneuvered into destroying each other. But the cuts eliminated Superman's character to the point where this was completely absent in the cinema.

I am oddly impressed that Informant saw the theatrical cut and somehow saw the director's cut in there somewhere -- because a lot of his views on how Superman and Batman and Lex came off in the story struck me as Informant reviewing what should have been in the film as opposed to what was actually onscreen -- except it's all there now.

2016-07-23 15:27:33

So, a re-review where I will focus on the director's cut differences that made a strong impact on me.

I thought BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN was terrific in its director's cut version. The theatrical cut had me saying, "I've seen worse!" This new version still isn't quite what I'm looking for in a superhero movie, but it's a very good piece of work. Aside from a few profanities and a few shots of a gun to Martha Wayne's head, this could have been released to theatres with a PG13 rating.

The main problems with the theatrical cut -- Superman being a cold and inscrutable figure who doesn't seem heroic and the plot being incredibly confusing -- both are addressed. Quite interestingly, it's the missing plot pieces that convey Superman's compassion and heroism.

In the theatrical cut, Lois is threatened while interviewing an African warlord and Superman rescues her -- but this somehow leads to the village being massacred and Superman blamed and accused of killing all these people -- leading to incredible confusion. Why didn't Superman save the villagers; why only Lois? Why is Superman being accused of murdering civilians? What did or didn't he do, exactly? Because we don't know where Superman stands on interfering and intervening, we have no idea who Superman saves or doesn't save. We have no idea if he cares about people or if he's just getting involved when it suits him -- so Superman trying to intimidate Batman into stopping his crimefighting feels more like Superman marking territory rather than trying to help anyone. Superman saving the little girl from the factory fire had a cold and distant face when people were thanking him; Superman hovering over a flooded town seemed dismissive and uncaring.

But the director's cut irons this out completely. A slightly extended sequence where it's shown that Lex's mercenaries killed the people in the village and burned the corpses before Superman arrived on the scene.

However, a witness mis-reports this, claiming the massacre took place after Superman came on the scene. Clark is shown to be horrified and confused by how his actions are being construed, which is reiterated later on in added scenes where Clark reacts to news coverage of Superman, uncomfortable with being accused of choosing who lives and dies -- which leads to him investigating Batman, who is making that choice by branding criminals who are always targeted for death in prison. Clark's investigation and his managing to find compassion for a rapist sex trafficker makes it very clear: Superman isn't here to fight or impose his values or create a public persona. He just wants to save lives.

It's not really that much extra material. A few short scenes here and there of Clark investigating the jailhouse murder of a Batman-branded convict. A few brief shots of Clark watching debates on Superman. Absent from the film, this material made Superman inhuman and removed. Restored, Superman becomes a hero -- and when we see him rescue a child but be solemn as people reach out to touch him, it's clear that he is uncertain about being a figure of such regard and concern. When we see him hovering over a flooded town, it feels like Superman is simply plotting the best course of action to determine how to save as many lives as possible.

This massive improvement is also especially vital later on -- when the Senate explodes. In the theatrical cut, there's an explosion, we see Superman look around blankly -- then there's news footage of Superman flying away from Washington like he didn't care to do anything to help. In the director's cut, we see victims being treated by paramedics and Superman flying another person down to the first responders -- and then looking at the body bags with grief.

With a Superman worth caring about, the rest of the film works: Batman gunning for Superman has real tension and danger to it now, Superman being pummeled and pulped by Batman and stabbed through the heart by Doomsday is a heartbreaking turn of events, and Batman's regret over misjudging Superman has weight as Superman truly does represent a decency of character Batman no longer believed in.

The clarity of the plot also makes the movie flow much, much better. In the theatrical version, it was unclear what Luthor's plan was. The broad strokes were obvious -- to manipulate Batman into killing Superman in order to act out Luthor's mistrust of anyone more powerful than himself -- but there were too many details without a clear context such as Clark and Bruce receiving letters and photos to manipulate them, the confusing incident in Africa, blowing up the Senate, etc..

Luthor then revealed he was behind all of it, but so much of the film was spent wondering what the point was of all these disconnected events and the theatrical film assigns blame without offering purpose. As a result, the theatrical film suffered from a sense of directionless randomness -- Lois' investigations and Clark's meanderings don't seem to amount to anything.

The director's cut, however, makes it absolutely clear from Africa-onwards that Superman and Batman are being manipulated against each other. Every development from Clark receiving photos of Batman's victims and being assigned to cover Lex's party to Bruce receiving clues about the Kryptonite and the Senate being bombed on the same day Bruce is made aware of his former employee's grief while eliminating evidence that Luthor created a false witness to the massacre -- it's all been to put Batman and Superman in each other's crosshairs and create a mounting enmity between the two.

And because I wasn't constantly doubting my interpretation of onscreen events or unsure of what the characters were doing or why, I was able to really enjoy this individual vision of Batman and Superman. Because I was so involved and compelled, the Martha-climax feels really well-earned.

While there isn't any additional backstory to why Batman has lost his way, the clarity of Lex masterminding Batman's madness is sufficient and there is a terrible sense of unease in this version with a now extremely heroic Superman fighting a noble but wayward Batman. The Doomsday attack, which in the theatrical cut was quite boring for me, was now a gripping sequence because now that I was invested in Superman, I felt every blow and blast he experienced and I was on the verge of tears when he died.

This is a good movie. It may not be the version of Superman that everyone wants, but it's exciting, thought-provoking, compelling and it makes strong choices that draw attention and engagement. This should have been the version released to theatres. It's not a fun, lightweight Marvel movie, but I think that if this version had been shown in cinemas, it would have made 800 million dollars easily in its first couple weeks. I can't imagine anyone going back to rewatch it for fun, but I can imagine people rewatching it to experience an epic journey again and to see how Luthor's plans fit together in such insidious and calculated fashion and to spend more time with Superman.

I think it's a real shame that Warner Bros. had so much faith in this film only to choke when they decided to rip half an hour out of it.

2016-07-23 13:32:22

The Ultimate Edition is reversing my negative opinions of this film -- I thought the theatrical version was a mixed bag of incoherence, but this Ultimate Edition is revealing all of the theatrical cut problems to have resulted almost entirely from missing scenes that were absolutely essential. I'm starting to think the problem was less Zack Snyder and more Warner Bros. refusing to release a three hour movie despite the fact that they commissioned and approved a script that couldn't work as anything else.

I'm also seeing why the WB executives applauded when they first saw the rough cut of this movie and why the reaction to the theatrical cut was so very, very different. All my issues with the film -- the muddy lack of clarity over what Superman does all day; the aloof and alienating distance from Clark Kent; the character's selfish disregard for innocent life; the baffling tangents and dead ends of the plot; it's all fixed now.

More later, but I'm going to have to completely re-review this movie now. It's amazing how just a few shots and some revised sequences can add a completely new emotional context and a much clearer plot structure to things I found baffling in the theatrical release.

2016-07-18 15:38:29

To be honest, I thought the big joke here was how I've known this woman for less than a week and SLIDERS is already a primary concern.

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Re: Sliders DVD Releases (Universal, Mill Creek, SD blu-ray, Restoration) (934 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

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Re: Sliders DVD Releases (Universal, Mill Creek, SD blu-ray, Restoration) (934 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

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