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I'm afraid that until SLIDERS REBORN is complete, any other SLIDERS project will have to wait. Hit me up again in 2017!

This is one way to read it. Another way to read it is that Han would not have chosen to go out any other way. Which is not to say he hoped his death would come from being impaled by a lasersword wielded by his own son

But Han, even knowing his son was very possibly and probably going to kill him, had to give his son one last chance to redeem himself. He felt that, being Ben's dad, it was his obligation to give his son this final opportunity that nobody else would ever extend to Kylo Ren. And there is a certain symmetry to how the climax has a father reaching out to his child and the final scene is a child reaching out to her father -- all the grief and loss and loneliness and pain of abandonment on her face, salved by a small sense of hope.

But you can also look at it from the viewpoint that caring about your family can get you killed. It's probably both!

This is very true. However, it leads to another question -- how much time, attention, thought, consideration and effort would SLIDERS require if the show had stayed in Vancouver, done 5 - 7 seasons with the original characters and then ended with a two hour finale presenting a final adventure and a happy ending?

One of the reasons SLIDERS REBORN is delayed -- I decided I had to find a way to work Mallory into the series (preferably without altering the story already in place). It was simply wrong to have an anniversary celebration without a role for Robert Floyd. If SLIDERS hadn't been run so clumsily and unprofessionally, would any of these extensive mental gymnastics and online story conferences be necessary?

(Hilariously, Rob personally assured me that he would not be offended by his exclusion from a piece of fan fiction for a television show he worked on for one year over a decade and a half ago -- and it STILL bothered me.)

But that's just the fans. From an unsentimental and economical standpoint, there is no real upside to remaking SLIDERS. You'd have to give up large amounts of profit and control to the rightsholders and creators, whereas if you made your own parallel universe series -- like PARALLELS -- you could do what you wanted. And if you don't bring back the original cast or if you're determined to do a NEXT GENERATION -- then aren't you basically doing PARALLELS? An new TV show with new characters that might not even benefit from having the SLIDERS legacy behind it?

I've enjoyed Laurel's arc. Season 2 put her on a hilariously self-destructive path from becoming the Arrow's archnemesis to her totally justifiable rage at Sarah for faking her death and returning to a happy homecoming. Season 3 was neat where she sought to honour her sister and spare her father the pain. Throughout all of it, I liked how Laurel kept it prominent that Oliver was not born a driven, hardened crusader against evil but was a shallow and unfaithful little creep and how she didn't truly realize how much he'd changed.

I never found her interesting on her own, but she was an interesting figure in how she related to Oliver. I never felt like Laurel was less than what she needed to be; she was written as a civilian and an office worker, not a superhero, and when she became a superhero, it was in a somewhat misguided effort to keep her sister alive in her heart. I thought they did a nice job. I was quite relieved that the romance was dropped after Season 1 and Laurel had her own motivations and goals even if they were designed to bring complications to Oliver's life rather than Laurel's life. No complaints on Season 2 - 4 Laurel for me.

I guess for me -- while I have some issues with the soap opera of the show and some of the plots -- I don't find the problems as glaring as the problems I had with Season 1, and I thought Season 1 was terrible. So, the show didn't really start in a great place for me and I see no gold standard that it's failing to reach. I find it as flawed as ever, except the flaws have migrated to areas that don't annoy me as much as they annoy you.

Moving onto the shipping wars, which haven't really been in evidence around here and hopefully never will -- Laurel has been problematic since the first episode. In the comics, Black Canary is essentially a more feminine version of the showboating, arrogant, activist Green Arrow. But the actors they cast and the scripts they wrote bear almost no resemblance to the comic book characters.

Stephen Amell's The Hood/Arrow/Green Arrow is a driven, angry, troubled, resolute, solitary veteran of war, nothing like the adventurous thrillseeker of the comic books. Katie Cassidy's Laurel Lance is not the goofy, daring, fun-loving, high-spirited heroine who was Oliver Queen's partner in lunacy. In the comics, there's a very natural sense of two like-minded spirits who are head over heels in love. In ARROW -- you can see why the playboy Oliver might have dated Laurel and admired her, and you can see why Laurel might have had fun with the playboy Oliver -- but there is absolutely no sense that the two of them are partners in life and lunacy or could ever be.

If you ever read the GREEN ARROW comics, the idea of the spontaneous, random, eccentric Dinah Lance being a lawyer or a district attorney would be completely unthinkable. And the idea of Oliver Queen being a nightclub owner is so utterly alien to the comic book incarnation that it's funny; the Oliver Queen of the comics would prefer to go fishing and camp out in the mountains.

So, right from the start, there was this expectation that Oliver and Laurel would be the couple of the series based on the comics -- and it was an expectation the writers didn't seem to keen on themselves as they made Laurel hostile and hateful towards Oliver and made it clear Oliver was too racked with guilt and grief over his crappy behaviour towards Laurel to go near her like that, especially when she was dating his best friend. By the midpoint of Season 1, it was pretty clear that the characters as scripted didn't make a good couple and the actors as performing didn't have a lot of chemistry.

There was also a serious problem in the way they'd written Laurel Lance -- she was incredibly one-note as nothing but the love interest for one man or another, and with Season 2, the writers tried to course correct by giving Laurel a lot of personal problems from addiction to hatred of the Arrow to her sheer loathing for Sara Lance.

It was a tough road, but it finally dimensionalized Laurel and by Season 3, it was possible to see Laurel as a partner, ally and comrade to Oliver -- but there was no romance there. However, years of SMALLVILLE had apparently created a vast audience of superhero fans who weren't deeply familiar with the source material but were certain that the defaults of the source material as the knew them -- Green Arrow and Black Canary are a couple -- would be the eventual default of the show as well.

Ultimately, ARROW went its own route and I give them a lot of credit for that. But it's unquestionably where a lot of the shipping rage and wars come from -- for whatever reason, a certain segment of fans have a bizarre sense of entitlement that they justify by claiming that killing off Laurel is an unacceptable divergence from the source material.

In terms of content, the Sliders Rewatch at http://rewatchpodcast.podomatic.com and the Sliderscast at www.sliderscast.com have certainly given fans a lot to enjoy and discuss. Every couple years, some fan looks up Tracy Torme's phone number and calls him to talk about a potential reboot. There's a 20th anniversary special over at https://docs.google.com/document/d/19GS … it?tab=t.0 with one final chapter to go. But the biggest draw to this board appears to be superheroes. We get really enthused discussing the DC Extended Universe, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC shows and I often suspect it's because the sliders are, in fact, superhero characters.

I think, also, SLIDERS had fans like Temporal Flux and the Expert who found all the behind the scenes info for why casting changes were made and why certain stories were told. In an Internet era, most shows see all their behind the scenes stuff out in the open, often revealed in the cast and creators' social media accounts or in audio commentaries. With SLIDERS, fan experts had to dig, but the result is that SLIDERS can be discussed in its behind the scenes context just as extensively as any modern TV series -- whereas other 90s shows like SEAQUEST and EARTH 2 and MANTIS and LOIS & CLARK will never have their secrets known as wholly or exhaustively because those shows did not luck into investigators as capable and resourceful as TF and the Expert.

But I think the reason SLIDERS is still actively discussed with all of us demonstrating a shocking skillfulness in bringing any discussion of any film, novel or TV show back to SLIDERS -- SLIDERS was an anthology series with a regular cast and any story is conceivably a SLIDERS story. (That's not to say it would be a GOOD story.)

ME: "So, I think the solution is that Mallory isn't actually in the story. Quinn is alone hallucinating and near-death and he sees Mallory -- who is actually his subconscious survival instinct as played by Rob Floyd. I got rid of the psychics and mind control and voodoo so you won't hate it."

MATT: "You're wrong. I already hate it. The moment you removed voodoo from the equation? Me equals out. But why does Quinn end up in this near-death situation all by himself?"

ME : "Because I want the story to be largely Quinn and Mallory onscreen talking."

MATT: "Okay. So why is Quinn all by himself? Because you have to have a better answer than that."

ME: "Arrogant overconfidence."

MATT: "Wrong. You're going to be wrong every time. The answer is he doesn't go in by himself."

ME: "I have come up with an explanation for why Quinn goes in alone. It could even be considered insightful."

MAGGIE: "Mallory, you sure you don't need backup on this one?" 

QUINN: "Maggie, come on. This takedown is going to be the most boring thing to happen since Wade dated a robot."

MALLORY: "Interesting move there. No shortage of friends. A crack squad of commandos and Marines who stand at your side. But you came here alone. Every choice. Every crossroad. Always alone."

QUINN: "I thought I had this." 

MALLORY: "You always do -- and you're proven right time and time again -- until you're facing off against a tornado or worse."

QUINN: "I needed a word with alone with Mr. Holt. One more word. I needed to convince myself.. convince him -- that he shouldn't give up."

MALLORY: (looking at Holt's body) "Good job there."

MATT: "Blegh. Stop referencing shitty Season 3 plots. I'm telling you, it's odd without the other sliders."

ME: "Oh, the others show up at the end. But Quinn gets himself into this mess, he gets himself out. Mallory isn't really there."

MATT: "With this rationale, why not swap in Colin?"

ME: "Because I FUCKING HATE CHARLIE O'CONNELL."

MATT: "That mindset doesn't serve the story. It serves ego."

ME: "This is not ego. This is a tribute to a good man and a wonderful actor who treated my show with respect and dignity. Rob deserves to be in SLIDERS REBORN. Charlie O'Connell... uh, he can have my bowling membership card. The real issue is working out a situation where Quinn is near death but can escape because Mallory points him to some tiny, minute piece of information that Quinn and his genius dismissed as irrelevant but turns out to be critical to get out alive."

MATT: "Blegh. That is the sound of personal bias overriding story. By your own admission, you are writing toward the scene you want to see, but you're not planning anything. You will put whatever will justify, to you, the scene between Quinns."

ME: "I'm not writing a script, just bullet points, because I don't quite know how to get to The Quinns aside from knowing it has to be the first scene."

MATT: "I know. That's why you hit me up with this bulletproof write-up, correct? So I could shoot some bullets in it?"

ME: "I was kind of hoping you could apply some wax and polish to it as well."

MATT: "I couldn't plot this stuff. It's so dense."

ME: "Do you mean dense as in stupid or dense as in overly layered or are you cleverly meaning it both ways?"

MATT: "You have good ideas. They're just overly complicated."

ME: "So, in your logical, flights of fantasy free version of this story, what would happen?"

[Ten minutes later]

ME: "Well. I see now that the labyrinth of a manufacturing complex being flooded with explosive hallucinogenic gas by an industrialist who's enslaved his workforce for reasons unknown may have been a little too convoluted."

I read the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN script during its filming -- and then I sadly lost the PDF in a computer failure, which is to say I failed to copy all my files to my new computer and sold off the old one. There's probably a netbook floating around this city that has the PDF on its hard drive.

My memory's a little fuzzy, but in the draft I read, Uncle Ben's murderer goes uncaught -- and that was the central arc of the film. Peter becomes Spider-Man for revenge, but he learns more about his father through Curt Connors, Peter realizes his dad buried his research to prevent it from being used to make weapons. To protect people.

Peter stops searching for Uncle Ben's killer, instead searching for people to help. The sketch of the killer, at the end, simply meant that Peter would keep an eye out for this man, but Spider-Man was no longer about settling the score. But Sony cut almost all of Peter's discoveries about his father. In doing so, they cut this arc.

On a side note -- I think the idea of a Spider-Man cinematic universe was really stupid and I follow Spider-Man religiously. Spider-Man has a great supporting cast and a terrific rogues gallery, but I can't imagine them being sufficient to lead their own films without Spidey in the main role.

In the comics, Spider-Man's world is populated by the Avengers (who regarded Spidey as an ineffectual child playing superhero until recent years), the Fantastic Four (who regard Spidey as a child except for the Human Torch, who considers Spidey an equal), the X-Men (who scare the hell out of Spider-Man with their dark futures and soap opera) and the Silver Surfer, Thor and Loki (whom Spider-Man would prefer to avoid because they're out of his league).

Restrict the Spider-Man Cinematic Universe to characters tied into the Spider-Man rights and you have mostly villains. Villains, by their nature, are not designed to be lead characters and Spidey only has one strong anti-hero antagonist (the Black Cat). SINISTER SIX and VENOM are film proposals where you'd be expected to cheer on the bad guys, an unlikely proposition for the superhero genre. The thing about most SPIDER-MAN comics is that the best tend to be comedies and his villains are meant to be a bit silly.

I don't think you can base an entire film on the Shocker and Hammerhead and the Gibbon and the Spot. And heroes from the Spider-Man rights -- I guess you've got the Rocket Racer, Frog Man, Puma and the Slingers? Most of these characters were designed as jokes to reflect some aspect of Spidey himself; they depend on Spidey as the lead.

Sony wanted a cinematic universe because everyone else seemed to be doing one; the fact that Spider-Man tends to be about Peter Parker was something they tried to ignore and I think it cost that regime their jobs. Not that the new regime is any better based on their new Sony Pictures chariman, Tom Rothman, and his track record of X-MEN: THE LAST STAND and X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE.

What should Sony have done? Personally, I would have used the cinematic universe elements that were suited to what was available -- which is cross-platform storytelling. I would have used AMAZING SPIDER-MAN as a big screen pilot for a streaming series.

The series would be computer animated using the pioneering cel-shaded format developed by the MTV series but using motion capture and voice acting from Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. I would also have a series of video games that used the same visual style.

This way, SPIDER-MAN would continue as a series between films. I think with three or four 13 episode seasons, the characters would have come to mean even more -- and then Gwen's death in ASM2 would have meant something as opposed to being a discordant note. ASM2 could be designed to work for both people who've watched the series and people who didn't and be a big live action season finale to kick off another run of animated episodes. This format would be very focused on spending time with likable characters with movies and between movies.

Sony seemed obsessed with copying Marvel -- I think they should have, instead, drawn inspiration from Lucasfilm and CLONE WARS.

ME: "I can't come up with a story to feature Jerry's Quinn and Robert Floyd's Mallory. I want to so badly -- to pay tribute to Rob and his contribution. But it's impossible. And that's WITH my flexible standards of quality."

MATT: "Why can't you come up with a story?"

ME: "I was thinking was that Quinn runs afoul of a psychic who destroys Quinn's mind only for Quinn, who should be a vegetable, to casually stand up. Turns out Mallory's memories are still in there as a backup personality, the startup-repair for Quinn's brain."

MATT: "That is ludicrous. Go back and read what you just wrote."

ME: "Eventually, Quinn is in control of the body but seeing Mallory and the two combine their knowledge to save the day. What's the ludicrous part?"

MATT: "A crazed telepath attacking Quinn - only for him to learn Quinn anticipated this and built a back up partition-friendly alter ego into his own brain?! I think you're writing these now so you can put my reactions on the BBoard."

ME: "Don't be silly. And I think you've missed the REAL problem with this story, Matt."

MATT: "Do tell."

ME: "What possible situation is there where Quinn could only be saved by a ghostly Mallory offering advice? The idea that Mallory is 'street-smart' where Quinn is 'science-smart' operates on the bizarre misunderstanding that Quinn was only book-smart and couldn't function in situations of risk and danger. If you get both actors onscreen, one becomes redundant -- and it sure as heck isn't going to be Jerry, so it just ends up disrespectful to Rob."

Um. But I have now come up with an idea. Actually, come up is too strong a term. I was watching the series finale of HOUSE where House is in a burning building, depressed and resigned to dying in the flames. He begins to hallucinate visions of by guest-characters who left the show in previous seasons. He flashes back to the events of the day, debating and discussing with the guest-stars (his subconscious mind) what led to this suicidal state of despair.

I was also watching the episode of TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES where Sarah Connor, injured and paranoid, is urged by a hallucination of her dead lover to trust a compassionate doctor whom Sarah assumes can only be an enemy.

And then I was watching a rare Season 5 episode of THE DEAD ZONE -- rare in that it was actually good. Psychic Johnny Smith is engaged to assist the police in hunting for a kidnapped child while overwhelmed with strange visions of reuniting with a long-lost lover. Eventually, Johnny realizes he is being strangled by the kidnapper; the entire episode to this point has been a series of psychic visions to remind him that in his pocket is a pocketknife which he uses to slash the kidnapper and escape.

So, I've decided to totally rip off all of the above to put Mallory and Quinn in the same story together for a short script. No originality here, fellas.

If we're talking about SLIDERS REBORN, I will call in every favour and exert every ounce of influence I have to prevent it from ever being made. (This is where Matt would remark that I have already done that by writing a series that's incomprehensible to anyone other than SLIDERS fans.)

I estimate it would cost $18 million to film; why spend that on a series finale story? SLIDERS REBORN is really my way of acting out my psychodrama. Any new SLIDERS should open the door as opposed to closing it.

So, the best option is the SLIDERS REDUX. Wade Welles is a tech journalist who failed to build a literary career beyond reviewing gadgets. Rembrandt Brown is a jazz bar owner who failed to hang onto his musical stardom. Professor Arturo is a study guide writer who failed to gain recognition for his scientific brilliance. And Quinn Mallory is a tax accountant who failed to create anti-gravity -- but two decades after losing his passion for science, he realizes he discovered something else instead...

But I also wouldn't be able to offer a discount or set a price on this because it's Temporal Flux's idea (although I updated the professions for 2016 for him). And Matt Hutaff suggested a way in which this reboot with older doubles discovering sliding for the first time could be in continuity with the original SLIDERS.

In addition to the REDUX film or TV series, a set of webisodes would reveal -- only for the diehard fans -- that Quinn, between "The Seer" and REDUX, commandeered a Kromagg reality warping weapon to rip the concept of sliding out of existence, giving himself and his friends the lives they would have had if the vortex had never been opened.

So, it would really be up to TF to set his price and Matt would receive an all expense paid trip to Robert Floyd's COCKTAIL THEATRE and some Olive Garden coupons by way of recompense.

The upshot of this is that REBORN is by design a dead end for SLIDERS (because it is The End). A new SLIDERS should be a new beginning. The REDUX is the way to go.

(I actually think the REDUX was probably the plan for the perpetually teased SLIDERS feature film that Weiss wanted to do.)

It's not always the writers and producers. CBS might say they don't want a youth show; it has to be adults. The studio might have a relationship with certain actors they want and require the series to write in a football player type as the lead love interest. The studio might declare it's vital that Supergirl be working with an establishment agency while the network wants a supporting cast of attractive people who hang out and therefore all need to be in on the secret. It's hard to say. The truth is that the CW is remarkably open-minded these days; a lot of networks might take issue with the distinctly non-model looking Grant Gustin as a lead character or demand that Caitlin be seen in the shower once a week.

You never know. Best we can do is review the aired product.

SUPERGIRL's main problem is that it makes choices that are mutually exclusive. The creators wanted Kara to be in her late 20s and gainfully employed, but they also wanted Kara as socially undeveloped individual who doesn't know how to use her powers. They wanted Kara working at a newspaper, but they also wanted her working in an espionage agency. They wanted Kara to have a secret identity, but they also wanted to surround Kara with a supporting cast who are all in on the secret. They wanted a football player type love interest, but they wanted that love interest to be Jimmy Olsen.

I think Informant would agree that writing is about choices. Either Supergirl is an adolescent or an adult, a journalist or a spy, a loner or a team player. The show tries to do both and it just gets confused -- Kara has to hide her identity, but everyone knows it. She's had her powers for years, but isn't sure she's bulletproof. She's got government black ops access to information, but she's basically an intern at her job. She wants to work in journalism, but she never writes stories and works as a gofer. It's like there were two different pitches for SUPERGIRL -- Kara Danvers, the college student interning at Catco who feels compelled to fight crime and Kara Danvers, secret agent and superheroine -- and they smashed the two together.

The crossover episode was a very nice script that was very awkwardly executed. The climax is bizarre: there is almost no footage of all the civilians and Kara in the same shot, so the sense is that the people and the superfight are footage from two different locations stitched together.

The shot of Livewire and Silver Banshee suddenly getting electroshocked has no visual information to explain why they're suddenly going down. The firemen appear out of nowhere and the low-angle shot suggests that the fireman was actually introduced earlier in a cut scene -- the composition would imply you're supposed to recognize the character as opposed to seeing a stranger.

It's almost as though footage was lost or unfilmed for some reason and the editors had to put the sequence together with shots of extras, close-ups of Benoist and a few shots of Livewire and Banshee being defeated by some off-camera force -- and do without scenes of the firemen arriving, Supergirl surrounded by the people in the park, the water hitting Livewire and Banshee with Supergirl and the people in the same frame, etc..

Did they get kicked out of the park early or something? Did an actor get sick? Was there a hard drive crash? Something clearly went wrong during production.

EDITED TO ADD: Oh. The fireman was in the Red Kryptonite episode in which Kara saved him. Well. I stand by my reasoning.

ME: "Did you listen to the Communitary?"

MATT: "It's just Dan Harmon being a self-destructive tool."

ME: "What did he say that was self destructive?"

MATT: "Just talking about how shitty the episode was, how he knew it was going to be shitty, and when he was pleasantly surprised at it not being shitty, he was still annoyed that it was so shitty."

ME: "So you'll consider my super critical REBORN commentary to be self destructive?"

MATT: "I will if you repeat yourself as hating your creations with EVERY piece of SLIDERS material you EVER generate."

ME: " ... "

**

On the four page teaser that opens SLIDERS REBORN: "So, this four page teaser where Rembrandt comes out of the vortex to find Quinn, Wade and Arturo waiting for him -- it's totally stolen from the conclusion of THE WOLVERINE. Not an original bone in this body, boys."

On the opening scene of "Reunion": "Here, we have Laurel Hills in Quinn's basement. Matt read this scene in the outline and told me off because I failed to include any explanation for why Laurel was in the basement in the first place. I noticed this too when writing the script and decided, on the spot, to give Laurel a drinking problem. Master planner here! I just the story had to start where the Pilot started. Just sentimental, really."

On the third script, "Revelation": "So, this script as outlined was just a series of incoherent action set pieces. Matt read it and had Words for me. Words that induced me to fire him off this project, shortly after he quit. I threw out all the ideas he rubbished and did something else.

"All this stuff with poisoned water and the sliders hiding in a World War II bunker and the doomsday prophecies on the second Earth and the world hit by global dimming in the third -- I love it so much. It's so relevant and meaningful and well-considered and imaginative. Such a skillful hand in world-building. I paid Nigel Mitchell eighty bucks to come up with all this."

On the prequel novella: "So, this novella -- it was originally Part 2 instead of Part 4. The first draft was Quinn spilling his story to his mom who didn't remember him. Matt said it was one of the most unfathomable things he'd ever read because no woman would listen to this deranged story from a crazy person.

"So I decided to set it in a mental asylum with a psychiatrist as the listener so that he'd be getting paid to listen to a deranged story from a crazy person. At one point, Matt remarked, 'the sliders have to try to find Rembrandt for REASONS,' noting I failed to explain WHY the sliders needed Rembrandt to fix the multiverse. Then Matt said, 'No, I get it -- they need Rembrandt because he's the only one who lived out both timelines, right?' I had actually failed to come up with a reason for why they needed Rembrandt other than to get the cast back together, so I used Matt's reason."

**

MATT: "The Dan Harmon Communitary you linked me to -- it's not tongue in cheek. It's not self-deprecating or in praise of others. It's just straight up, 'This is the first time I have seen this episode and I am positive it is going to be shitacular.'"

I guess. To be honest, despite obsessing over it at the writing stage, it's not really a big deal. SLIDERS REBORN starts with a 4-page teaser. It picks up immediately after "The Seer" and we find out who was waiting for Rembrandt on the other side. The next script is 95 pages and set in the year 2015. The sliders are home, have been since 2001. They refer to all the events of Seasons 1 - 5, but clearly, something happened so that all the dead characters are alive and well again. The emphasis is largely on what the sliders are doing TODAY. What's Quinn dealing with at age 43? What's Wade doing at age 44? What did Rembrandt do with his life after stardom eluded him and sliding changed him? And what new challenges has the Professor embraced?

The reason I did it this way -- I don't feel like it's a worthwhile story to split the Quinns, stick Colin, liberate Earth Prime, defeat the Kromaggs, resurrect Wade, find the lost Professor, deal with Logan St. Clair, cure the Professor's illness, track down Henry the Dog -- that isn't SLIDERS to me. So I decided that however those events happened, they happened in 'offscreen' events and skipped ahead to what I care about: Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo bouncing off each other, bickering, teaming up, arguing, joking, laughing, fighting and running in and out of crazy situation after crazy situation. They are four people who don't always get along, often cannot stand each other, and are inextricably bound by fate, friendship and Quinn Mallory's incompetence. Indestructible. Invincible. The Sliders.

So, to me -- the sliders being resurrected and reborn is something we should take for granted. They were separated and they died. And then they came back. Their coming back to us was a cyclical inevitability, an inescapable outcome. They will always come back.

This was a long-winded way of saying there is an explanation but it's not important.

"Slide Effects" and "The Long Slide Home" are two different stories. "Slide Effects" was a story Torme conceived in 1996 as a potential Season 4 premiere. He expected that he would not be happy with Season 3. His intention was that if he returned to the show for Season 4, he would use "Slide Effects" to dismiss everything after "The Guardian."

"The Long Slide Home" is a story Torme started (and did not finish) writing in 2009. It would have made no effort to explain why the original sliders were alive and well; it would have simply been set after "The Guardian" with no reference to any subsequent episodes. This would not have been "Slide Effects," this would have had the plotline of the sliders making a last-ditch effort to get home.

I was chastising Matt for his 2009 interview teasing a Torme story that never was, and Matt told me that "Slide Effects" was unintentionally the Torme story that would serve as the final SLIDERS adventure. I said then the interview should link to the "Slide Effects" script and he said okay.

Final trivia bullet points for the Sliders Rewatch.

Behind the Scenes Information Courtesy of Temporal Flux, Tracy Tormé and Keith Damron

Eye of the Storm Trivia
•  This episode was originally written by Eric Morris, a freelancer who suggested the sliders land on a merged world, encountering guest-stars from previous episodes who have been transplanted to this Earth and are trying to escape.
•  It was meant to be SLIDERS DOES CASABLANCA and to explore how people from different Earths might interact if trapped on a merged world of total contradiction.
•  Quite inexplicably, the production disliked the CASABLANCA resemblances -- but bought the script anyway.
•  By the end of the season, they had no to buy a new one and they needed a seventeenth episode.
•  They had Chris Black hurriedly rewrite it entirely and into the penultimate episode.
•  In the course of the rewrite, the focus on the composite world and the trapped inhabitants was lost, shifting almost entirely to Dr. Geiger and the plot of splitting the Quinns.
•  This episode was also the most expensive episode of Season 5.
•  Throughout Season 5, many episodes were filmed as cheaply as possible, cheaper than usual. The reason for this: production was stockpiling money.
•  They were going to use it for the series finale in which the sliders would return to Earth Prime and confront the Kromaggs once and for all.
•  At the mid-point of the season, production decided to abort the planned finale entirely.
•  Originally, Dr. Geiger's death and giving the sliders their home coordinates was another trick meant to lead into the following episode, although this arc would be abandoned for the actual series finale.
•  All the stockpiled funds were haphazardly thrown into this episode instead.
•  The episode was not significantly rewritten to make use of the money; the intended effects simply had more money put into them.
•  This episode features Jerry O'Connell's face (pulled from "Genesis") shown over Mallory's face.
•  This was achieved after extensive negotiation with Jerry's agent to finally permit them to use past footage and sound clips -- except by the time they got permission, the season was nearly over and it was too late to go back to "The Unstuck Man" and redub "Go! Go!" with sound from a previous episode.
Jerry maintained his refusal to appear, although he certainly had the time to do so.
•  Production had plans to wrap up the series without Jerry, but these plans were thrown out by Bill Dial who decided an another route.

The Seer Trivia
•  John Rhys-Davies declared this to be his favourite episode of SLIDERS. (I'll explain later.)
•  As stated in earlier communications, Bill Dial was angry at Sci-Fi for no longer giving feedback on scripts or reviewing the finished episodes.
•  According to Temporal Flux: Dial decided to get back at Sci-Fi by ending SLIDERS on a cliffhanger in order to see them deluged in fanmail and complaints.
•  There had, originally, been some hope for a Season 6.
Sci-Fi had been experimenting with a low-budget model where shows were made for about $500,000 an episode (in contrast to Season 5's $700,000 - $850,000 budget, numbers from TF, although press indicates the Season 4 - 5 budgets were 1 million per episode, which TF has declared incorrect or I just remember wrong).
•  A Sci-Fi show called G VS. E had been done on $500,000 an episode -- until the production crew union shut the show down for making one crew member do the work of three.
•  Once that happened, the low budget Season 6 -- which would likely have seen the cast reduced to Cleavant and a new actor -- was off the table.
•  Dial knew Season 6 wasn't coming -- but he still aborted the planned ending in favour of a cliffhanger.
•  The original ending for the Season 5 finale: the sliders would return to Earth Prime and fight Kromaggs.
•  It would turn out that Geiger had tricked them, sabotaging their timer to reinstate him to reality.
•  The sliders would get control of Geiger and his technology and create a multiversal 'big crunch' effect where all realities would be collapsed into a single universe and the Kromaggs cast out.
•  The Kromaggs would be defeated, but there would no longer be a multiverse -- only one reality.
•  This would be the end of sliding and the series.
•  TF says he's not sure how well this would have gone over, but production was deliberately making many cheap episodes ("The Great Work," "Please Press One," "Heavy Metal," "To Catch a Slider") in order to use the saved money for this finale.
•  TF says Dial threw this out in favour of having Keith Damron write "The Seer" and threw the savings into "Eye of the Storm."
•  Dial ordered that the series finale end on a cliffhanger.
•  He felt that this would cause outrage and irritation for the Sci-Fi Channel and get back at them for ignoring SLIDERS.
•  He also hoped that the Sci-Fi Channel would notice and protest, thus giving Dial the attention he wanted from them.
•  The Sci-Fi Channel neither noticed nor cared, not during the show and not after the show.
•  No resolution for the cliffhanger was planned; production knew there would be no sixth season.
•  Robert Floyd held out hope.
•  During Season 5, Rob had been very sad that the Quinn/Mallory divide had been lost.
•  He was delighted to play scenes with Mrs. Mallory, Linda Henning, and he was a big fan of her work on PETTICOAT JUNCTION.
•  Rob deliberately did not watch the Pilot, wanting to play Mallory's scenes with Mrs. Mallory as raw and painful.
•  This episode confirms onscreen that Mallory's father was Michael but his mother was another woman as he does not recognize Amanda Mallory.
•  Rob liked these scenes because he was able to play the loss of Quinn, something he himself had felt since "New Gods For Old."
•  When Mallory says that a part of Quinn is still in him, Rob played this as Mallory telling a kind lie -- with the feeling that while Mallory didn't want Quinn back, Rob certainly did.
•  The ending of "The Seer" is considered by the fanbase to be the final betrayal of their loyalty where Dial and Damron could tell any story they wanted and told this one, resolving nothing, wrapping up nothing, creating a cliffhanger that would never be resolved.
•  Paradoxically, Cleavant was in favour of the cliffhanger, according to Matt Hutaff, who met with Cleavant at a CD signing.
•  Cleavant pushed hard for "The Seer" to end with Rembrandt leaping into a vortex aimed for home without revealing what happened next.
•  Cleavant felt that this way, the fans could imagine whatever they wanted being on the other side of the vortex. Maybe Wade. The Professor. Quinn. The real Earth Prime. A happy ending.
•  Cleavant also ensured that the ending has Rembrandt taking the broken timer with him. Cleavant felt that the timer could always be repaired on the next world and the adventure could begin again.
•  The fans have largely excused Cleavant from any blame for the cliffhanger.
•  John Rhys-Davies, at an August 2012 Toronto convention, was asked which episode of SLIDERS he liked best.
•  "What was my favourite episode of SLIDERS?!" John exclaimed.
•  After a moment's thought, he growled: "The last one."

The Feature Film That Never Was
•  After SLIDERS was cancelled, creators Tracy Torme and Robert K. Weiss, participated in online chats.
•  Both apologized to the fans for Seasons 3 - 5.
•  Torme explained that he had left SLIDERS because he was burnt out from the fights with the FOX Network.
•  He had fought hard in Seasons 1 - 2, only to get to Season 3 and see Quinn become an action hero and Rembrandt become a Navy gunslinger and Wade become a model and the Professor become the wise old man with no dark side.
•  At this point, Tracy's dad got really sick and was dying and Tracy very much didn't give a shit about SLIDERS in the face of family crisis.
•  He decided he'd rather hang out with his dad.
•  In public chats, Weiss said that he had left SLIDERS after Season 1 to focus on running his film and technology companies -- but he was approaching Universal about a SLIDERS movie.
•  Torme, in chats, said he didn't believe a movie would happen and that it was mostly Weiss operating on that front.
•  During this time, I asked Tracy over AIM: if he had one more SLIDERS episode, what would he do?
•  He said he would open with Quinn waking up in his bedroom to find time had been rewound to the Pilot. All the original sliders would be alive and well and back home; sliding was never created.
•  The situation would be revealed as a Kromagg trick along with any other episodes Torme didn't like or watch.
•  According to Temporal Flux, production sent Tracy scripts for Seasons 4 - 5, but he put them away in their unopened envelopes and refused to read them because he knew they would only drive him crazy.
•  Weiss, when asked which season of the show the film would resemble, said "Season 1.5."
•  Jerry O'Connell initially declared that he would not do a SLIDERS movie.
•  After TOMCATS bombed, Jerry said that he would do a SLIDERS movie if there were a role for Charlie O'Connell in the film.
•  After KANGAROO JACK destroyed his film star career and he was passed over for the role of Peter Parker in SPIDER-MAN,  Jerry said he was extremely anxious to do a SLIDERS movie.
•  Cleavant was keen to return and said that he'd spoken to Sabrina Lloyd and John Rhys-Davies. They would return if the original creators did as well.
•  Unfortunately, the movie revival never happened; Universal had no interest in reviving the series.
•  In an interview, Torme said that one idea that Robert K. Weiss suggested for a film was for Quinn to be unstuck and ending up in the bodies of different doubles.
•  Torme liked the idea but shot it down on the grounds that it was too much like QUANTUM LEAP.
•  Temporal Flux had some contact with Weiss and Weiss was mysterious on his intentions for the film, but TF said the likelihood was that the film would have been a remake of the Pilot but set in the present day.
•  The original cast would return but they'd be playing older doubles on an Earth where Quinn discovers sliding, not in 1995, but in whatever year the film was made.
•  It is, of course, only TF's theory and an idea TF came up with rather than what Weiss shared, but it certainly seems plausible as Weiss said he wanted to do "Season 1.5" and this would be a way of setting aside the continuity issues of Seasons 3 - 5 that could confuse a general audience, focusing on reintroducing SLIDERS with an entry-level story.
•  The proposed SLIDERS film was frequently teased but never greenlit.
•  Jerry O'Connell made an effort in 2013 to see a film revival, hoping to assemble Torme and the original cast to approach NBCUniversal.
•  He called Tracy Torme and they talked and met extensively and began reaching out to the key players.
•  Sabrina was living in Africa and unlikely to return to America for a few years.
•  Cleavant was enthusiastic.
•  John could not be reached.
•  NBCUniversal was once again not interested.
•  As of 2016, there has been no further development towards a SLIDERS film.

The 2009 Series Finale That Never Was
•  In 2009, Tracy Torme, while being interviewed for Earth Prime via Facebook, expressed a desire to write fanfic.
•  Torme told Matt that he would like to write a script for the fans.
•  He wanted to write what he termed "the officially unofficial series finale," unapproved by NBCUniversal or FOX or the Sci-Fi Channel, to be posted as a PDF on Dimension of Continuity and Earth Prime with the document to be added to any future SLIDERS DVD or blu-ray releases.
•  While Torme completed an outline, he did not finish the script and eventually left Facebook, needing to focus on paid projects.
•  Torme's story idea was for a script set in 1997, after the events of "The Guardian," effectively dismissing any episodes after his final story.
•  In this story, the sliders find that Logan's modifications to the timer have damaged its function.
•  Slide windows are getting shorter and shorter and the vortex is weakening. They are near the end of their journey and likely to be stranded once the timer fails.
•  They must begin to consider that their next slide could be their last.
•  Torme said that the story would ask: What if the sliders found the way home but Quinn didn't make it? And what if the sliders had to decide whether or not they'd lose their way home to save their friend?
•  This was as much as Tracy sent Matt.
•  Then Torme got busy with paid projects and pilots and he stopped working on the story.
•  He eventually ceased all Facebook activity and fell out of touch.
•  However, during my IM sessions with Tracy, I asked him how he'd like to end the series.
•  He said he liked the idea of Quinn and Arturo making a final, desperate attempt to get home -- by rigging the timer to send the sliders backwards through the interdimension, hoping that in sliding back across previous Earths, they can slide back home.
•  They'd confront numerous past enemies and friends and see the consequences of their actions on previous Earths.
•  Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo would get home while Quinn was stranded in a deadly situation -- and the other three sliders would go back to save Quinn but in doing so, they'd lose their route home and be sliders lost in the multiverse once again.
•  Quinn would be furious that his friends threw away their chance of home.
•  His friends would answer they were each other's world now and so long as they were together, they were home.
•  Quite strangely, Temporal Flux himself proposed this exact same idea once as a potential series finale, offering the sentiment that "Home isn't just a place, it's the people you love."
•  Would Tracy have used this ending for his proposed series finale?
•  I think it is likely it would have been his intention.
•  However, Torme was notorious for writing an outline and then writing a script where he'd diverge from the outline, struck by inspiration as he scripted the dialogue and action, so he may have changed his mind later on in the process.
•  While Torme's intentions never came to fruition, it inspired me -- because if posting PDF screenplays on the SLIDERS sites is good enough for him, it's good enough for me too.

I'm afraid, due to an incomplete backup before running the latest Android update, I lost all my notes (and two weeks worth of text messages). So, this is more a stream of consciousness based on what I remember marking up rather than the actual notes.

The only grammatical issues I would draw your attention to: in one section, you wrote "junkie" as "junky," so I'd do a find and replace for that. In various places, you neglect to use the second conditional form for describing hypothetical situations. You use "was" when you should use "were" -- there's a pretty simple summary at http://writingexplained.org/was-vs-were-difference -- and you can probably find every instance in your manuscript by running a search for "was." I would try this out for you, but my phone is still rebooting.

I think there were a few typos, but I have lost my bookmarks, so... tough.

In terms of the story, I think it's well written and a riveting, compelling, emotional adventure. Your political issues and the painfully fascistic environment comes through well and I really felt Collin's outrage and despair. Collin's enlightened yet helpless state of mind contrasts nicely with Libby's deluded belief that the authorities are all trustworthy and one can do right simply by surrendering to anyone in power.  The entire sequence where Libby goes to Sim and agrees to turn herself in to clear her name only to discover this is nothing but a comforting fiction for the gullible -- it's masterfully written and it really gives a full and stirring portrait of what it's like both inside and outside this societal prison.

Collin's defiant surrender with a statement at the end -- if you were going for the character purposefully doing something practically pointless but personally meaningful, then I guess it's fine. However, the prose seemed to present it as a critical step in the narrative as well as Collin's own journey and -- I'm not sure there was enough there to really sell why Collin's letter is going to make a difference.

I would say the story, such as it is, suffers from being the opening act of a larger story and within this individual episode, there isn't a full or complete arc. I don't feel the Libby and Collin have come to a point where I'm satisfied to step back from the story for now and wait for the next installment; I don't feel like I've hit a jumping point for the next book -- I feel like I've read a fraction of a novel and there's the sense of the story just cutting off as opposed to creating a cliffhanger or a transition point. The vague indications of something malicious in the body just isn't enough to hang onto.

I don't know if it's helpful to refer to other novels in this dystopian genre, but the first HUNGER GAMES left us with Katniss having discovered her own strengths and weaknesses even if the villains remained all-powerful; the first DIVERGENT book ended with Tris willfully leaving behind the society she'd known. The characters had achieved something, albeit something small and personal. With FREEDOM/HATE, Libby and Collin have made a few tentative steps towards something or other --it's not clear. Libby still instinctively trusts in the authorities despite their pursuit of her; Collin has gone from being a low-ranking rebel to being a low-ranking rebel with a would-be manifesto.

I don't know if this is something you could address or would even want to at this point, but I didn't feel very satisfied with this one episode even though the writing was strong.

If I weren't familiar with your writing to begin with, I don't know if I would feel sufficiently invested to keep an eye out for the sequel. I feel confident that you're going somewhere interesting based on having read your previous work and you've earned my trust that your setups will lead to worthy payoffs -- but FREEDOM/HATE, within its pages, doesn't give me anything to reinforce that confidence.  It's well-worded, gripping prose, but it doesn't overcome the weakness that it's not a complete story, just a portion of one. The end of FREEDOM/HATE's first volume hasn't provided anything concrete to serve as temporary ending.

Oh. I've only seen Megan Fox in the two TRANSFORMERS movies,  JENNIFER's BODY, NINJA TURTLES and JONAH HEX and I've only seen Alba in the two F4 movies, INTO THE BLUE and GOOD LUCK CHUCK. So okay. Maybe they got better or I only saw them in their Razzie performances.

Well. That is tough. But I will have your notes for you tomorrow on your novel.

VAL: "Why is Barry working cases fresh out of a coma? Every defence lawyer in the world would get his work thrown out of court."

ME: " ... shut up... "

VAL: "And does he work in that lab all by himself? Like, there's only one criminal scientist in the whole police department? And nobody worked there while he was in a coma?"

ME: " ... shut up... "

VAL: "And when the sky rips open from the black hole -- why did they include that random shot of that one actress for no reason whatsoever?"

ME: "Because she's going to play Hawkgirl in a spinoff. I mean -- shut up... "

Jerry's 1994 hair would look great today.

Well, I had to leave my car at the mechanic, and with several hours to wait, I decided to go to the movies. I saw BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN and this film has me exclaiming: I've seen worse!!!

Spoilers

I thought it was good. Not great. It made some critical errors. Basically, Superman in this movie is handled awkwardly. The script puts Superman and Clark Kent at such a vast distance from the audience that it's impossible to really get a feel for who he is or what he's feeling. Superman in this movie is aloof, unreadable, unknowable -- even when he really shouldn't be.

The movie is shockingly unclear on what Superman has been doing since MAN OF STEEL. We get a lot of talking heads about his actions, but the prequel comics do more to show him engaged in emergency response and humanitarian efforts than this film. We get a few scenes of Superman rescuing people from fire and flood -- and they don't work. Superman is either filmed from far angles or played by Henry Cavill with such rigid solemnity that it's hard to get a read on him. Does he care about people? Does he feel called to save them? What drives him to do whatever it is he's doing? It's impossible to tell because so little of the film is spent engaged in superheroics.

Tom Welling, when engaged in super-saves on SMALLVILLE, was aided by directors and writers who made saving people a visual spectacle of excitement. Zack Snyder has a few shots of Superman coming out of a burning building and hovering over flooded cities like it's an obligatory detail to brush over. Tom Welling played his supersaves with an urgent gentleness; he cared about people. Henry Cavill plays these brief scenes with an inscrutable coldness.

On some level, this is deliberate -- this is really a BATMAN movie and we're supposed to understand how Bruce sees Superman. In the absence of knowledge, Bruce assumes malice and threat. But the movie never gives you any visceral, emotional way to feel otherwise because Cavill and Snyder have completely failed to portray Superman with compassion or empathy. 

When the Senate is bombed, Superman stands in the midst of the explosion, surrounded by people in the process of being incinerated -- and Cavill's reaction is just frozen blankness. Tom Welling's Clark would have been grief-stricken, enraged, agonized, tried to grab as many as he could and get them to a hospital. Snyder's Superman is never shown to even try; you're supposed to just assume he did all that.

Thankfully, Affleck's Bruce Wayne is an extremely compelling, riveting presence in the film and without him, there would be nothing to watch. Bruce's loathing towards Superman is completely palpable and on some level feels reasonable because of how unpleasant Superman's presence comes off. The turnaround in his character is absurd, yet Affleck totally sells why Batman has a change of heart and Slider_Quinn21's grousing about Affleck being too old to play this character looks even more ridiculous in a post-release era.

Affleck's physical presence is incredibly convincing and most importantly, Affleck works as a very different Batman from Christian Bale. This Bruce isn't a distant intellectual whose combat skills are a means to an end; he thrives on physicality whether it's wine, women or war. This Batman is prepared to kill in the sense that he's a soldier fighting a war and while he doesn't set out to murder, he doesn't shed a tear for criminals getting blown up or crushed by overturned cars. It's an uncomfortable turn for Batman -- except Affleck's world-weary, hardened Bruce makes it clear this is a superhero who has had to set aside some of his idealism to survive and keep going.

I confess, however -- at times, I struggled to see Bruce Wayne, instead seeing a ridiculously famous actor known more for his interpersonal scandals than his characters.

Wonder Woman's not much of a character, but she's delightfully portrayed by Gal Godot in her fencing with Bruce and her laughter when battling Doomsday. Lex is good, although his bombing of the Senate seems oddly pointless. The movie has some truly peculiar sequences -- a future vision of a malevolent Superman and a Batman at war, a strange visit from the Flash calling attention to Lois in a subplot that has no payoff -- it's awkward. The final battle sequence in Gotham seems to take place in a shadowy landscape of nowhere with no sense of geography. The ending depends on being moved by Superman's sacrifice except Superman has been such a cold figure of nothing that it doesn't really work.

As ZACK SNYDER's SUPERMAN and ZACK SNYDER's BATMAN -- it's good enough, but it's not great, mostly because Superman's so detached that it's hard to enjoy the movie and I really can't tell what this movie is trying to say about superheroes or anything, really. MAN OF STEEL, regardless of its faults, was about a man taking control of his destiny and choosing who he wanted to be. BVS is about a man who feels powerless and... I dunno, fights a giant monster and then something or other. At least MAN OF STEEL's destruction porn is redeemed now.

As I said -- I've seen worse!

You're talking to us right now. Just send me an E-mail or PM using the links next to this post.

Well, the first script was 4-pages. The second one is 95. The third one is 151. Then there's the the novella, which I estimate at 35 pages. I did have some concerns, but, as I told Matt, I just couldn't see it as a *bad* thing to give readers *more* of what they came for, which is the original quartet bouncing off each other.

I think the final script will be 120 pages.

I know, intellectually, that Kara's geeky, awkward nervousness is a performance. It's not Melissa's real voice, posture, bearing or facial expressions -- but to me, it doesn't come off as a performance, it's just Kara's natural behaviour. When she's in costume, she's still Kara -- she's just a version of Kara who isn't struggling with her interpersonal dilemmas, and the interactions she has with others are largely restricted to their grateful praise or homicidal malevolence. Which is why, whenever that persona drops, I'm really disturbed. But I take it you don't like Melissa's performance at all?

*shudders*

Red!Kara terrified me. I cowered under my blanket when she swaggered into the nightclub and nearly crushed Jimmy's hand. It just freaked me out. A lot. I watched AMERICAN HORROR STORY without flinching, but this was just disturbing.

Tom and Cory had some interesting thoughts on the Kromagg in "Slide Effects," remarking that they preferred the unknowable Kromaggs of "Invasion" to the space Nazis of Season 4. They talked about how the Kromaggs in Season 4 lacked the creepy, malevolent anonymity of the "Invasion" Kromaggs and how they also disliked the shapeshifting, although it could simply be a Kromagg application of telepathy. Tom was a little unsure of what to make of the shapeshifting in "Slide Effects." I think it's safe to say that with most of the script set in a dreamscape, most of the shapeshifting is telepathic.

When the sliders come out of the dreamscape, however, the Kromagg keeps shapeshifting in reality -- turning into Mallory, Maggie, Diana and Colin and repeating lines from their episodes. While I totally agree with Tom and Cory that the shapeshifting is an awkward and silly superpower, it was necessary to visually indicate that the Kromagg is trapped in the hell he made.

But I guess we could say that the Kromagg was unconsciously projecting his telepathic form into the sliders' minds even though they'd stepped out of his simulation?

To be fair to Season 4, I think we have to assume that the Kromaggs have individuality. They're not all one hive mind, at least not as far as Tracy Torme is concerned -- he had Kromagg women looting human stores in "Invasion" in a deleted scene. But then we have to wonder how universal the contempt for humans is among the Kromaggs -- they can't all be monsters, can they? To assume an entire race is of one identical personality is absurd. Not every Kromagg can or should be the same (unless you want to think that they're all telepathically linked and replicate the same mind across each body?). The Kromagg of "Slide Effects" is described as an "Invasion" Kromagg.

However, I cannot claim to have any great insights into the Kromaggs. The Kromagg of "Slide Effects" has pretty much nothing to do with Tracy Torme's vision of the Kromaggs and the Dynasty and is not even meant to be a reaction to the Season 4 Kromaggs.

The Kromagg of "Slide Effects" simply represents David Peckinpah: an angry person dispatched to a job he didn't want (overseeing the sliders/SLIDERS), getting trapped in the job due to a telepathic misfire/contractual obligation) and lashing out in rage at Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo / Sabrina and John. The Kromagg never speaks -- simply because I had been watching SPIDER-MAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES that week and was really taken with how the shapeshifting Chameleon would always shift into a different character to deliver any dialogue and had never spoke in his own form.

I honestly wonder how much Torme could have maintained the anonymity of the Kromaggs had they returned on his terms.

ME: "There is a series of 22 fan written LOIS AND CLARK novellas that make up the fifth season of the show as it was cancelled in year four for three different reasons." http://www.lcfanfic.com/thm-tufs.htm "I wonder if we can get Tom and Cory to review them."

MATT: "What three reasons? And I doubt they'll commit to reviewing fanfic like that."

ME: "Based on what?"

MATT: "Based on them wanting to review television, not fanfic."

ME: "It was well received."

MATT: "Then YOU review it."

ME: "I'm not even sure I'll survive this Rewatch. And what do you mean, what were the reasons? You said you read that retrospective I linked to."

MATT: "I did. It all sounded like it was cancelled because ABC/Disney was over the series. Eisner wanted his dumb World of Disney back on the air so he could replace Walt in the hearts and minds of America. The easiest reason is that Teri Hatcher cut her hair. That is an unimpeachable reason."

ME: "Wonderful World was Reason 1. Reason 2 was ABC's continued retooling of the series causing the ratings to slide bit by bit -- they fired the showrunner of Season 1 and mandated an action-oriented approach that the budget couldn't handle and also outlandish supervillains that could not be rendered properly on a TV scale at that era, meaning all the villains were campy, silly, embarrassing and alienating while gobbling up screentime that would have been devoted to the two stars -- and when you're selling your show on Teri Hatcher and Dean Cain and they're in it half as much as they used to be, the audience loses interest. The point where the ratings were totally destroyed, however -- was the wedding episode where ABC, at the last second, declared that Lois and Clark were not to be married after all and that something had to stop the wedding -- so Lois gets kidnapped and gets amnesia and is replaced by a frog-eating clone. This story arc lasted eight episodes and it drove viewers away in droves."

MATT: "Hahaahahahah! Yes. But that was season THREE."

ME: "By Season 4, the ratings were pretty much dead and despite a Season 5 renewal having been issued -- ABC, having destroyed the show, now stopped advertising it and re-negotiated to get out of doing Season 5. They were still unable to get out of it entirely -- until Teri Hatcher, after Season 4, got pregnant and her doctor said her pregnancy was not stable and she could not work and Season 5's start date would have to be delayed by months. ABC and Disney took that news and collectively declared that the show was done."

MATT: "Stupid babies ruin EVERYTHING!"

ME: "So there were lots of reasons."

MATT: "HAIR CUT."

ME: "Given how god-awful Season 4 was, I was pretty relieved when the show was cancelled and excited about SMALLVILLE -- But SMALLVILLE was even worse than LOIS & CLARK."

MATT: "Oh yeah?

ME: "SMALLVILLE is one of the worst shows ever made -- although it improved significantly with Seasons 8 - 9 only to weirdly implode on itself with the last half of Season 10.

MATT: "Hahahahahaha!  Ten seasons! You really commit to shitty television!"

ME: "Anyway! This Unaired Fifth Season -- it's really good! So well written! I think, because they had 12 writers on it -- and 1- 2 would go over all the drafts and revise them. I'm sure Tom and Cory could read them all and talk about them in their podcast. Surely they don't want to end on a down note!!!!!"

MATT: "Blecgh!"

ME: "What is the reason for your distaste NOW!?"

MATT: "It's a lot easier to read your one script than 22 novellas."

ME: "At one point, Tom said he assumes each REBORN script is 46 pages."

MATT: "I know. I laughed."

ME: "It's currently 285 pages. But it's 285 pages of Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo bickering. That's what the fans want, Matt!
Nobody really cares about the parallel worlds. It's all about these four messed up people and their weird friendship together. And their desperate efforts to graduate from community college!"

MATT: "Two HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FIVE pages??? Jesus!!"