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On William: the Season 10 comics were, originally, going to feature William as a villain with telekinetic and telepathic powers. Carter, in his consulting capacity with the comics, vetoed this. He said he had plans for William and making him a villain didn't fit those plans. This was part of why the Season 10 writer thought his material would be canon, and that was the intention -- until "My Struggle" declaring that there is no alien conspiracy made the comics and the Revival completely at odds.

So, there are plans? That said, I think it's obvious that planning is not and never has been one of THE X-FILES' strengths.

As for Informant's issueI wonder if part of the problem is the messed up episode order. Had the episodes aired as intended, "Home Again" would be episode 2 and Scully's mother dying and referring to William would have been the start of bringing up Scully's agony. After a hiatus for episode 3 and who knows what for episode 4, "Founder's Mutation" would have been episode 5 where we see a different take on the William issue, seeing the imagined joy and warmth in Mulder and Scully's fantasies of their son.

Instead, the fantasies were the introduction to the arc and then the follow-up was reiterating the pain when the reiteration had been meant as a reintroduction.

One moment of similarity -- watching Fox Mulder experience a midlife crisis on THE X-FILES made me feel really pleased that I gave Quinn his own midlife crisis, albeit one of a different nature. Matt joked that I should sue Ten Thirteen and FOX for stealing my idea and remarked that Jerry and David Duchovny played basketball together in the Vancouver years. I have a certain (meaningless and groundless) pride in knowing that I gave Quinn Mallory his midlife crisis before Chris Carter gave Mulder one too.

I love SUPERGIRL. It's as flawed as THE FLASH, but it's earnest, heartfelt and it's clearly got a higher budget than THE FLASH and ARROW combined.

In a hilarious note, the boys erroneously refer to "Paradise Lost" as the episode with animal human hybrids -- but later, they agree that "A Current Affair" wasn't as bad as the "worm crap" episode! But all things being equal, Tom notes a mistake in my notes -- I thought Clinton Derricks Carroll was in "The Alternateville Horror"! I can't remember why I thought this. Maybe I thought I saw Clinton in "Alternateville" in the wideshot with all the doubles?

This is the first time in recorded history that I have made a mistake. Now I know how the rest of you must feel.

Tom and Cory remarked, when talking about "Please Press One," that they didn't get why Mallory is described in Bboard posts and newsgroup posts as a "con man" character. There is little to indicate this onscreen. This was something Robert Floyd and Bill Dial talked about in interviews; how Jerry's Quinn was a scientist and Rob's Quinn would be a street-smart criminal. Onscreen, this doesn't really play out and it's a massive misconception and misunderstanding. Jerry's Quinn was perfectly street-smart in his own way. As early as "Prince of Wails," he convinces an armed resistance to consider him an ally. Quinn could also be arrogant and self-absorbed, so the idea that Quinn was some sort of Steve Urkel geek while Rob's Quinn could be the muscle is just baffling. I'm not really sure how to make the identity crisis work in terms of what we saw onscreen.

My suggestion would be to present Mallory as a genius just like Quinn -- except Mallory's genius is myopically focused on money and little else; his grasp of mathematics extends only as far as finances and is useless for sliding and science, and with a running joke that the sliders would never consider Mallory's moneymaking scam artist skills to be admirable or even recognize it as intelligence.

One thing I have been trying to do for SLIDERS REBORN is create a role for Robert Floyd. A role where he could play Mallory and be interesting without having to impersonate Jerry -- in fact, they'd be onscreen together in a buddy cop sort of way. But I've been unable to figure out Mallory's character. It's a bit embarrassing -- "Slide Effects" was me selecting what I liked about SLIDERS and dismissing all the rest, while SLIDERS REBORN has me trying to embrace every facet of the series -- but Mallory and Colin are two characters I just can't figure out.

I don't care about Colin in the slightest, but I feel really bad about Mallory's exclusion, because Rob *really* engaged with SLIDERS. It is the worst reviewed season, described by the series creator as the worst year of the show with the production team creatively disengaging from the show and documenting their disinterest online. But Rob did his very best with the material and he paid tribute to Jerry O'Connell and Quinn Mallory and he honoured them -- which makes me feel bad that I have yet to find a way to return the favour in my anniversary special.

I enjoyed Season 3 of ARROW -- until Oliver died, and then it became very laboured, confused and tired. Oliver's resurrection was absurd and nonsensical and his return from death caused all kinds of problems. We're expected to take Thea's death seriously when Oliver's was irrelevant; we have Oliver vowing never to leave his city again only to leave it a few weeks later; we have a League of Assassins that wants to engage in a complex effort to unleash a biological weapon on an entire city in order to eliminate a single target (couldn't R'as have just bought a gun?) and Felicity's pedestal turned her into an object rather than a person.

I've enjoyed Season 4 much more and am less troubled by the faults, although they're present. I'm having a good time with Felicity. I got the impression the Calculator knows exactly who Overwatch is and who Oliver Queen is; why else did he just happen, as Informant puts it, to get himself involved in Team Arrow? So, that didn't bother me too much, nor does the uncertainty over who rests in The Grave (for reasons I posted above). That said -- Informant is right, especially about Felicity having skipped rehab. The reason that stuff doesn't trouble me: I don't really think of ARROW as a realistic drama. It's an impressionistic, exaggerated, larger than life escapist fantasy.

Seasons 1 - 2 of ARROW were just as absurd, from Oliver apparently building his base under the nightclub with one day of sledgehammering, Diggle pretending to be a smoker when he isn't one and wouldn't smell like one, Thea's addiction issues vanishing after a stern talk, the Black Canary being unmasked to reveal a complete and total stranger whom Oliver inexplicably recognizes as a Sara Lance who looks nothing like the Sara Lance of Season 1, Sara Lance charging into battle with that ludicrous push-up bra, the Huntress becoming Evil because she discovers Oliver has an ex-girlfriend he talks to now and then -- ultimately, I've learned to accept stuff like that and Felicity wheeling around in that chair like she was born in it because ARROW isn't a realistic show. It's a fantasy.

It's no sillier than Barry Allen apparently being the only police scientist in Central City with a lab that Barry and only Barry ever uses. Or Barry being dispatched to crime scenes despite his lengthy coma making it unlikely he would be permitted to work cases without an extensive psych evaluation to make sure his work would hold up in court. Or Star Labs being in operation with funds, vehicles and equipment after FEMA declared it a disaster zone. Or THE FLASH's inability to explain how the prisoners in the Pipeline prison go to the bathroom (Ray Palmer even asks how the prisoners "complete the transaction" only for Cisco to get distracted from answering the question).

As for the large LEGENDS cast -- I suspect it's simply being practical in that they need to have some characters they can kill.

Okay, I added "gobsmacked" back in.

In other news, I have sent Sliders Rewatch all the deleted scenes and trivia for Season 5 now -- just hit send on an E-mail containing all the notes for "To Catch a Slider," "Dust," "Eye of the Storm," "The Seer," the feature film (never made), and the 2009 series finale outlined by Tracy Torme (never made). While I know a lot about SLIDERS thanks to Temporal Flux, I know far, far less about LOIS AND CLARK, so I suspect this marks the conclusion of my contributions to the Rewatch Podcast unless they want a guest. Looking forward to hearing what they do next!

Behind the Scenes Information Courtesy of Temporal Flux

A Current Affair Trivia
•    Information here is from Keith Damron.
•    This episode was written by the infamous Steve Stoliar, personal friend of David Peckinpah, former personal assistant to Groucho Marx and writer of Paradise Lost," largely considered upon its air date to be the worst episode of SLIDERS ever made.
•    He also wrote Season 4's "Net Worth," largely infamous for reportedly being a Sabrina Lloyd story without Sabrina Lloyd.
•    Stoliar pitched SLIDERS does the Lewinsky story.
•    It was wildly popular with Dial, Peckinpah and Black, but not Damron.
•    Keith Damron thought it was unlikely Universal would approve this story.
•    It was approved.
•    The script came in.
•    Damron, busy with other episodes, had absolutely no time -- none whatsoever -- to rewrite the script, and it was filmed almost entirely as written.
•    Unlike "Paradise Lost" (written according to production's preferences for monster movies and hacked up before and during filming) and "Net Worth" (crippled), this episode is genuinely representative of Steve Stoliar's skills as a writer.
•    Stoliar pitches a  simple, straightforward concept.
•    There's some weaknesses on display such as Rembrandt, Diana and Mallory's inability to realize why Maggie was disguised and some absurdities like the gang entering a room with the President despite holding a device that's counting down.
•    But there's also tremendous effort at world-building and an effort to define all the characters and make them more than their plot functions.
•    Paradoxically, there's also their reduction to plot functions: Bobby Hawks is appalled by the idea of faking a story, but ultimately goes along with it because the episode needed to wrap up.
•    There's effective, good-natured humour without the marked mean spiritedness of other SLIDERS stories from this era.
•    This episode had no script editor working on it.
•    Steve Stoliar is a decent writer. Not a master of the format, but he's decent.
•    SLIDERS blogger Ian McDuffie remarked that script-editor Keith Damron was arguably the worst writer to ever work on SLIDERS, but that "Sometimes, we are blessed with his days off."
•    Bobby Hawks is a pastiche of Matt Drudge.
•    President Jeffrey Williams is a pastiche of Bill Clinton, right down to the hand gestures.
•    Production did not have enough extras for the final press conference, so the extras were filmed in four separate shots and the shots were them combined into a single shot.
•    This episode, for scenes not filmed in the Chandler, uses a leftover set from the COLUMBO TV movie, "Ashes to Ashes."
•    (Does it really look so different from the Chandler that it made a difference?)
•    Oddly, that COLUMBO TV movie was directed by Patrick McGoohan, whose writing, acting and directing on THE PRISONER were homaged in the script for "Please Press One."
•    McGoohan stumbled into Keith Damron's office one day when looking for the bathroom, disappointing Damron, who wanted to pitch a PRISONER reboot -- and I admit that a Damron-PRISONER couldn't have been any worse than the actual reboot.

The Java Jive Trivia
•    The information regarding this episode is from Matt Hutaff of Earth Prime dot com and Season 5 script editor Keith Damron.
•    This is the first episode of SLIDERS with a Rembrandt double that doesn't feature Clinton Derricks Carroll.  (Error: I mistakenly thought Clinton was in "The Alternateville Horror." He isn't.)
•    This episode was written by Janét Saunders, David Peckinpah's assistant since Season 3.
•    They had a good relationship and Janét pitched him this episode for Season 5 and also another to come.
•    Janét had explored the Universal Backlot and found locations that could be used in this story.
•    In the original story, there was a lot of Depression-era gangster action with the story opening with Rembrandt rescuing Angie from the Dropper Daddy's Gang who just killed her boyfriend.
•    Angie was not a manager at the Velvet Slipper, merely a singer who helps Rembrandt get a job as a bass player.
•    Prohibition on alcohol never ended in this version; there was nothing about caffeine being illegal, and Angie's boyfriend was informing on some alcohol producing gangsters.
•    Angie would get kidnapped and the sliders would try to rescue her and fail, but succeed in bringing down the gangsters.
•    It was meant to be a showcase for Rembrandt and Cleavant's singing.
•    The original title of the pitch was "Black and Bluesey" and can be seen in the Odds and Ends at EP.COM.
•    Damron and Dial decided that caffeine would be illegal to add more of an alt-world flavour, which I think was a good idea.
•    However, the final product was impaired due to lifeless direction and a low music budget.
•    Music composer Danny Lux was too busy with scoring SLIDERS and THE PRACTICE and ALLY MCBEAL.
•    Bill Dial turned to songwriter friend Peter Andrews to write "He Must be Dreaming."
•    The filming of this episode was a popular event; even the hands-off Sci-Fi executives came to set to watch the musical performances.
•    According to Temporal Flux: Dial and Damron needed to make this episode another low-cost effort in order to redirect the money to the epic and expensive series finale.
•    This was, upon airing, considered to be one of the worst episodes of SLIDERS ever made.
•    But then, SLIDERS managed to make some more that were even worse.

Return of Maggie Beckett
•    Information here is from Temporal Flux and Keith Damron.
This is another episode by Chris Black ("Common Ground," "The Alternateville Horror," "Slide By Wire," "Way Out West" and "Applied Physics."
•    As with all Black episodes, there is a strong fascination with Maggie and Kari Wuhrer.
•    Chris Black wanted to address the role of Maggie's father in her life and Dial and Peckinpah were happy to let him do what he liked.
•    However, the prop department negligently got Maggie's last name wrong.
•    There is no real story behind this, but it speaks to how the production really didn't care about what the hell they were doing even if writers here and there did.
•    The character of the General in this episode is meant to be Tom Beckett from QUANTUM LEAP -- albeit unofficially.
•    Originally, the title for this episode was "Waiting for Beckett," but the title didn't clear the legal department for some reason. It was a reference to the Samuel Beckett play, WAITING FOR GODOT.
•    In Seasons 4 to 5, numerous space stories had been pitched, especially with the sliders landing in a spacecraft seconds before it launches.
•    Most of these stories were rejected until Chris Black pitched this one.
•    Damron and Black were then put in competition, both to create a space-based pitch that Dial and Peckinpah would agree to buy.
•    Damron pitched a sliders-land-in-a-launching spaceship story where the sliders accidentally take the spaceship with them to another world with an overpopulation crisis and the sliders have to decide whether to hand over the spaceship or withhold it -- because without the spaceship, they can't slide off this world.
•    Chris Black pitched something far simpler and his pitch was bought.
Damron good-naturedly declared it to be his favourite episode of Season 5.
•    This is the most popular episode of Season 5 among the fan base.

Easy Slider
•    Information below is from Temporal Flux of Dimension of Continuity.
•    This story was pitched because David Peckinpah's obsession with motorcycles was well-known to the staff, especially his assistant and the writer of this episode, Janét Saunders.
•    She thought he would insist on buying it.
•    Peckinpah was not in a lead role for Season 5, but he was technically still the boss.
•    The original pitch featured Kari Wuhrer heavily and was a Maggie love story.
•    However, Peckinpah's distance from the show meant he wasn't pushing for this episode to be made and it was on the verge of being rejected.
•    Then his mistress -- no, not his wife -- mentioned that a motorcycle episode could offer the chance for her to do some stuntwork.
•    Peckinpah commissioned the episode for this reason, although his stated reason was that he liked the costuming opportunities for Kari. "I see Kari in tight leather -- go with it!"
•    This Kari costume never happened due to rewrites.
•    According to Temporal Flux: When Cleavant Derricks heard about Peckinpah commissioning an episode to suit his girlfriend, he lost all hope for SLIDERS.
•    Cleavant realized that the show was not about making a series, it was just Peckinpah and Dial screwing around and with Sci-Fi unlikely to renew for another season after O'Connell's departure made them lose all faith, this was most definitely the end.
•    The other reason Cleavant was sure no renewal was coming: he knew Sci-Fi had committed their budget elsewhere for the next season of TV; they'd set nothing side for a sixth season of SLIDERS.
•    Robert Floyd, in contrast, was sure there would be a Season 6 -- the ratings were excellent, he noted. Sci-Fi would have to be insane to cancel their highest rated series.
•    Surely, Rob felt, given SLIDERS' first-place position on Sci-Fi, they would find the money somewhere.
•    Never in the history of SLIDERS has anyone ever been so very, very wrong.
•    This episode is also infamous for another reason: before Season 5, there was a prominent SLIDERS side run by a man with the handle of "The Expert."
•    The Expert had a lot of behind the scenes information on SLIDERS, frequently revealing plots of future episodes (although he would't ruin them). He had contacts in production.
•    Before Season 5, the Expert posted a ton of information on what was coming with episode plots such as Conrad Bennish Jr. returning, Colin getting blown up, etc..
•    Temporal Flux also revealed the plan for Bennish to return for Season 5.
•    The Expert also revealed that one planned episode for Season 5 was "Sleepless in San Francisco," a Maggie love story and various details of this story.
•    In a chat, Season 5 script editor Keith Damron declared that the Expert and Temporal Flux had made up all their claims and that none of these events would take place in the show.
•    Keith Damron said there was no "Sleepless in San Francisco" story.
•    Shortly after this, the Expert took down his site.
•    Fans theorize that these leaks were a sting operation to identify the Expert's contact, and he took down his site to protect his source.
•    The Expert's episode capsules remain online at EarthPrime.com and Temporal Flux purchased most of the Expert's SLIDERS materials.
•    I would also add that TF's reveals and exposes would, in time, come to equal if not dwarf the Expert's output.
•    Temporal Flux insisted that Jason Gaffney (who played Bennish) had been booked for appearances only for this to be abruptly cancelled and that the Expert's reports had not been wrong -- although, as with any TV show, some stories might not make it to air as initially planned (and reported on by the Expert).
•    Keith Damron maintained in chats that TF and the Expert were liars and had fabricated "Sleepless in San Francisco" and the Bennish arc.
•    This left a nasty impression on SLIDERS fandom. The Expert and TF are beloved figures of fandom.
•    Keith Damron, in contrast, was seen as the mediocre writer of "Lipschitz Live" and considered to have little to no credibility when put against the Expert or TF.
•    It's amusing that someone employed by the show was seen as an untrustworthy charlatan.
•    Meanwhile, fan figures of no official standing were seen as definitive authorities on the series.
•    Keith Damron was seen as attacking Temporal Flux and the Expert, and by extension, attacking the SLIDERS fan base who were the only reason Damron had a job in Seasons 4 - 5.
•    SLIDERS would never have made it to Season 3 or 4 or 5 without that devoted and campaigning audience.
•    Later on, Matt Hutaff was able to get his hands on a pitch for "Easy Slider." The original version as pitched.
•    This original pitch was exactly in line with the Expert's information on "Sleepless in San Francisco," the pitch Damron claimed didn't exist, the pitch Damron claimed that TF and the Expert had fabricated.
•    It was a rough version of what would become "Easy Slider" with the aired episode having made it Mallory's love story instead of Maggie's.
•    Matt was also able to get Tracy Torme to definitively confirm that Bennish had been scheduled for Season 5.
•    This made it blatantly clear that Damron, for whatever reason, had been lying and had done so with great malice towards the Expert and Temporal Flux as well as the fans, seeking to portray the fan experts as liars.
•    For this reason, moreso than his bad scripts and bad editing, Keith Damron is the second most hated man in SLIDERS.

1) David Peckinpah
2) Keith Damron, hated for his 'outreach' to SLIDERS fans and also for his Year 5 Journal where every bad Season 5 decision is documented.
3) Bill Dial, hated for the Season 5 finale and Season 5 in general as well as sabotaging Season 4.
4) Jerry O'Connell, hated for abandoning the show and lying about why, claiming that there was a Season 5 budget cut (there wasn't).
5) Kari Wuhrer, hated for abusing Sabrina Lloyd.
6) Peter Roth, hated as the FOX executive who demanded John Rhys-Davies be fired
7) Robert Greenblatt, hated as the FOX President who declared the Season 3 monster episodes to be superior to Seasons 1 - 2.
8) Steve Stoliar, hated for writing "Paradise Lost."
9) William Bigelow, hated for writing "The Chasm."
10) Doug Molitor for the Slide it Yourself fiasco.

•    The story original "Easy Slider" pitch is here: http://earthprime.com/etcetera/the-original-easy-slider
•    There exists the possibility that Damron, as an staff member, was obligated to say what he was told to say by his employers.

ringringring ringringring ringring click

"Cisco, it's Overwatch! We need -- "

"Hi! You've reached STAR Labs! We're currently engaged in an extradimensional journey to a parallel world of unknown threat and danger from which we may never return! Please leave a message and we'll get back to you should any of us return from Earth 2 alive."

ME: "Scenes I conceive keep showing up in my TV shows. The third REBORN script has the sliders opening a vortex that sucks up all the doomsday clocks. THE FLASH's mid-season finale had the superheroes opening a vortex that sucks up all these bombs."

MATT: "Hahaha!"

ME: "And AGENTS OF SHIELD had Agent Coulson fighting Grant Ward and knocking Ward to the ground -- and Ward was immobilized and of no immediate threat -- and then Coulson, in a fit of rage over a loved one, crushed Grant's heart using his robot hand and was then was rather regretful. Robot hand. Hmm. Now it sounds stupid."

MATT: "Stupid? More like AWESOME."

ME: "It's just like the rewritten 'Mother and Child' scene where Quinn killed the Kromagg. All these similar scenes I write showing up in superhero shows. What does it mean?"

MATT: "It means the absolute glut of superhero programming is frying your brain to a crisp."

Temporal Flux attempted a comic revival in the years after the cancellation. The problem, unfortunately, was that the investment was too high and the return too low. Currently, I don't think there's a sufficient readership for SLIDERS comics without a very capable publisher willing to engage in deficit financing. So, it's unlikely, but stranger things have happened with properties even more obscure than SLIDERS.

THE X-FILES: SEASON 10 was what inspired my own SLIDERS stuff. SEASON 10 was very much a for-the-fans product that would be incomprehensible to anyone but the die-hards -- and yet, there was a sufficient readership to make the comic a massive financial success (albeit one that was wholly ignored by the TV show making an unexpected return). However, THE X-FILES was an international success, as was BUFFY. FIREFLY less so, but, like THE X-FILES, there were enough die-hards to make a comic profitable.

I'd be curious to read these more obscure comics of ancient TV shows someday -- but I admit, I'm probably not going to watch SIX MiLLION DOLLAR MAN or KOLCHAK anytime soon.

SCULLY: "So now you're saying that you were attacked by a six-foot horny toad?"
MULDER: "Whoa! Let's just keep this within the realm of the natural sciences."

Let's be clear. This was a brilliant episode. And I know I'm being a killjoy, but Scully being aware that she's immortal isn't a very good idea. If it weren't for the fact that this is only a six episode season, it would be disastrous. As much as I love HIGHLANDER, THE X-FILES really does depend on physical threat and danger and the characters being aware that they can be harmed.

Setting that aside, however, it raises all sorts of issues the show is seriously ill-equipped to address. Why would an immortal Scully give up William? She'd be the human shield of infinite uses. Why would an immortal Scully allow Mulder to get depressed over lacking tangible proof of the supernatural? If she's aware that she can't die, she might have cheered Mulder up by stabbing herself through the heart a few times. Why hasn't Scully run a full range of tests on herself to determine how her immortality works and used that to help Mulder in proving the existence of the paranormal?

Why is Scully afraid of the were-monster in this episode? Why does Mulder worry about her confronting suspects alone? Why was Mulder worried when Scully got thrown into a wall last week? When did Scully come to realize and accept her immortality? How has she coped with knowing she'll outlive everyone and everything? What's her stock portfolio like with her longevity in mind?

The immortality is neat if Scully isn't aware of it. The timeloop of "Monday" suggests that Scully probably gets killed *all* the time -- it's just that the onscreen events are the final version in which she didn't die. But that prevents Scully from being aware of her immortality.

It's probably best if this one line is treated as a joke, because it's a bit like the magic blood that cures death in STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS.

Behind the Scenes Information Courtesy of Temporal Flux, Keith Damron and Robert Floyd

New Gods for Old Trivia
•    According to TF: This script was originally called "God's Country," written for Season 4 with all the sliders getting infected by nanites except Colin.
•    It wasn't filmed in Season 4, but rewritten and filmed for Season 5.
•    It was written by David Gerrold, a prolific science fiction writer who is famous for the Tribbles episode of STAR TREK and the time travel novel, THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF. It was a truly seminal novel about how -- oh, wait, you know this one. Never mind.
•    After two episodes where the Jerry/Rob identity crisis for Mallory was ignored, "New Gods for Old" uses the nanites to definitively declare that Jerry has been erased.
•    According to TF: Part of this was due to Dial's unwillingness to put any effort into showing Jerry O'Connell any respect in the series due to his anger towards Jerry for leaving the show.
•    The other part: Damron and Dial were having trouble managing the freelance writers.
•    They had given conflicting notes to the freelancers: some had been told to write Mallory with the name "Michael," while others had been told to use "Quinn-2" or "Quinn" or "Mallory."
•    Some had been told that the character was a Jerry/Rob blend, others had been told it was Jerry in Rob's body, others had been told it was Rob with a secondary set of memories from Jerry.
•    With all these contradictions and Dial's hostility towards Jerry O'Connell, the decision was made to just give up on the identity crisis arc. Dealing with it was interfering with Dial's preference for playing Solitaire during writers room meetings.
•    As a result: the scripts for "Strangers and Comrades" had no Quinn-moments added and "The Great Work" had all the Quinn-moments removed.
•    "New Gods for Old" declared that Quinn was gone now.
•    Robert Floyd was deeply disappointed by this episode.
•    Robert Floyd also loves this episode.
•    He called it an episode that had "Great writing with a great concept!" The ruminations on free will, self-harm, self-determination, collective thought -- he adored it.
•    And then, with the ending, Floyd said, "There was an emptiness. It took some cards off the table -- the one thing I wish we could have kept more than anything."
•    He was very disappointed that Quinn was gone.
•    On the Bboard, fans speculated that Floyd had asked the producers to end the merging plot so he wouldn't have to imitate Jerry.
•    Floyd flat out denies this. "I loved having them both; it was more fun to play as an actor."
•    He said he had gotten pretty good at his Jerry impression and could have kept it up for a whole season, although his preference was to do two minds in conflict so that imitating Jerry would be one part of a complex identity crisis.
•    Floyd approached Bill Dial and according to Floyd, Dial said that he felt "New Gods for Old" was one of Season 5's best scripts and he didn't want to change a thing about it.
•    Dial's statement is in stark contradiction to confirmed facts: "New Gods for Old" was a Season 4 purchase that had seen four different drafts.
•    Which leaves us with only one explanation from TF: Dial didn't want to rewrite all the freelance scripts to be consistent in featuring the dual personalities.
•    It was too much work. Solitaire was calling.

Please Press One Trivia
•    This episode was considered by Keith Damron to be William Bigelow paying homage to Season 1 episodes where the sliders encounter and defeat a dystopian regime.
•    Throughout Season 5, the production had a standing refusal against buying any stories they considered formulaic and declared their desire to avoid stories with the sliders teaming up with the local resistance.
•    (This also led to refusing broad alternate history concepts like a world where Nazis won WWII or where the South won the Civil War.)
•    However, Damron thought it would be great to do a story about the customer service experience from hell.
•    Interestingly, the episode's script is full of references to THE PRISONER, and around the time Season 5 of SLIDERS was filming, THE PRISONER star Patrick McGoohan was directing a COLUMBO TV movie on the stage next door to the Chandler.
•    Damron was deeply disappointed by the 'scoop' that abducts Maggie and the 'mini-scoop' that chases her around later.
•    The 'scoop' was meant to be a frightening truck with a mechanical claw to capture Maggie, and from reading the script's allusions to THE PRISONER, it's meant to be a Rover-esque horror.
•    (This might not make much sense to you if you're unfamiliar with THE PRISONER.)
•    Instead, one was a generic black van and the other was like a remote controlled car.
•    The claw was replaced with a tractor beam.
•    Damron added the scenes where Rembrandt reprimands Mallory for knowing how to steal a car in order to pad out the running length of the episode.
•    Arlo was originally a high tech rebel hacker teenager.
•    Damron rewrote the character into a disgruntled Data Universal employee.
•    With only three guest-stars and generic hallways, "Please Press One" is one of the cheapest episodes of Season 5, made due to determined penny pinching.
•    At this point, it was definitively known that Season 5 would be the final season of SLIDERS.
•    With no support from the Sci-Fi Channel and Sci-Fi having committed their future funding to THE INVISIBLE MAN and FIRST WAVE, they'd allocated nothing for SLIDERS.
•    Production knew this, and were therefore making plans.
•    The economics of Season 5 allowed the producers to make episodes for less than the $700,000 - $850,000 per episode, then move the saved funds to a subsequent episode.
•    This would be done on several episodes to come in order to set aside money for an epic series finale.
•    This epic series finale would never be filmed.

I'll check out some of the X-FILES stuff.

I guess the reboot script is probably best in that the actors won't need to try imitating the actors. They can be their own versions of Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo. It'd be silly to do SLIDE EFFECTS or SLIDERS REBORN because both are using the reader's familiarity with Jerry, Sabrina, Cleavant and John to summon their voices to the story. The 2013 script was still doing a pastiche of the 1995 actors, although it wouldn't be hard for decent actors to interpret the lines in their own way.

Okay. I've finished off all the trivia notes for Season 5, the Feature Film that Never Was and the 2009 Series Finale That Never Was. I just need to rewatch two more episodes ("To Catch a Slider" and "The Seer") for deleted scenes and then all my research for the Rewatch Podcast is done.

I don't know if this is wise or appropriate, but I generally use my fiction to have characters act out my psychodramas. A scene in SLIDERS REBORN has our troubled teen, Laurel Hills, noting that her mother is dead on this world and dead in every version of reality, as established by the current state of the multiverse. Quinn urges her not to believe that Ms. Hills is gone. Quinn tells her that nothing is forever lost because ______________________ and if something loved and lost is _____________________, then it can come back.

I actually have no idea what sentiment to put into these two blank spaces. In my experience, sometimes, you lose things and you can't get them back and you simply have to move on. Anybody reading this who has never lost something or someone is either very lucky or very lonely. Why would Quinn be making this absurd declaration that everything lost can come back? How could he possibly justify such a remark?

I dunno. It's just how I feel about SLIDERS, you see. It was lost -- but I sincerely believe in opposition to reality that so long as I remember it and care about it, it will come back -- although it had to come back in the form of PDF screenplays posted on the Earth Prime website, and I feel that Quinn would say SOMETHING to this effect to comfort a troubled teenager whose dead mother can't be found in this reality or any other. I just don't know what that something would be.

This is normally where Matt tells me to stop requiring that a story represent my feelings.

I was watching "Triangle," "Dreamland" (1 - 2) and "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas." The four episodes have Mulder and Scully encountering ghost ships, body swaps, UFOs, government conspiracies, haunted houses, going about X-Files investigations business as usual. Except these four episodes are set during a period when Mulder and Scully had been fired off the X-Files. They've been reassigned to little more than data entry work.

Which means that when they go out to the Bermuda Triangle and Area 51 and spend Christmas ghost hunting, they're not engaging in their profession. It's not their job. So, if Mulder and Scully are engaging in X-File investigations together, it's because hanging out and chasing paranormal creatures is their default approach to life now. Before, it was a job. Now, it's simply all they know -- with the show often poking fun at how Mulder has no personal life outside the X-Files.

On another level, this is also THE X-FILES' peculiar inability to deal with continuity. Despite the show having the FBI reassign Mulder and Scully, they still continue to investigate X-Files cases with a scene here and there where their new boss reprimands them for unauthorized work or use of resources. Outside of that, these stories could just as easily take place before the resassignment or after their reinstatement.

The overall effect, however, is that it's hard not to see Mulder and Scully in a romantic light when they choose to be with each other in what's now their private time and engaged in their former professional pursuits.

Mulder's politics -- I dunno! I'm sure he votes, but given his opinions on the shadow government, I'm sure he thinks the electoral system is a joke. That said, I too find it difficult to believe that Mulder would not broadly support the right to bear arms, although where he stands on registration, permits, concealed and open carry laws is another issue entirely. As someone who worked in law enforcement as a forensic psychiatrist, he might support restrictions on sales, background checks, registration, permits, etc..

I don't think doing THE X-FILES set in 2012 would work if the show airs in 2016. THE X-FILES tries (and often fails) at realism, and the point of the series was that all these strange events take place in visually and physically plausible environment that's our world. It's not really worthwhile to strand THE X-FILES in the past just to get around the alien invasion deadline when it's a dead end anyway.

I was pretty much expecting the colonization plot to be declared to have been dealt with offscreen in some fashion. I expected it to be dealt with in the 2008 movie in a somewhat oblique manner or with some declaration that pollution / reality TV / blue light from smartphones / wifi signals / whatever had rendered Earth unfit for colonization and the aliens had decided that Earth wasn't worth the trouble anymore -- and that while Mulder was disappointed not to see aliens, there were still plenty of vampires / ghosts / werewolves / sorcerers / psychics / telekinetics and whatnot to deal with, so he had plenty to occupy his time.

My favourite casual dismissal would have been the alien colonists' plan involving using human reproductive urges as part of the telepathic drive needed to reproduce their species in human hosts, except their reproductive process would require male/male and female/female pairings -- but a significant portion of the human population had their prejudiced attitudes so deeply engrained that aliens realized it'd be impossible to use the humans as a host race long-term.

MULDER: "Yeah, that's right. Homophobia saved us all." SCULLY: "That's one truth we need to keep buried, Mulder."

I always thought maybe THE X-FILES should have done a "Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome" -- a faux series finale of sorts, just to explain why it couldn't happen. We sort of got this -- in that FIGHT THE FUTURE had Mulder urinate on a poster for INDEPENDENCE DAY.

Agreed. This retcon was never going to be perfect. I think the only way to get around that stuff would be for a later episode -- maybe the finale -- to show clips of that stuff along with the Syndicate members worrying about the hybrids and the virus and the whatnot -- with the voice of the Cigarette Smoking Man narrating --

And then end with him saying to Mulder: "A tale of terror from before the dawn of life on this planet -- stitched into every page of the story of the human race -- and the most perfect fabrication of falsehoods to lead you and a hundred other self-important fools on a merry chase to nowhere." With the implication that all those historical scenes are part of the Smoking Man's false web of lies and that the Dallas stuff was also staged -- or maybe it was the black oil, but it wasn't part of a colonization plot, that was something the CSM let loose.

Never going to be perfect, but there's ways to make retcons easier to swallow. I think retcons can work so long as the audience can feel like if they're willing to accept the alteration, they're getting something worthwhile in return.

It's kind of funny how this kind of retcon is usually seen in comic books with multiple writers of differing intentions -- whereas Carter was always in charge of THE X-FILES and he's blowing up his own work.

Yeah -- one of the issues I took with the conspiracies Carter presented was this: we are all slaves of the corporate military complex at this stage. So it is lost on me how Mulder and O'Malley seemed to think that there was an additional endgame -- or some further end than what it already is. What exactly is there to prevent?

And it's amazing that it aired on FOX! That said, I'm not convinced there are risks to drinking water with fluoride or that genetically modified foods are riskier than organic foods.

I posted on Reddit: I think "My Struggle" was a good story but it wasn't told quite right. Here's how I would have done retconned the myth-arc with Carter's new take.

In declaring that there is no conspiracy, I think "My Struggle" needed to: (a) show at the beginning that Mulder is no longer sure he knows anything about the aliens or colonization (b) provide strong evidence that debunks colonization and (c) choose specific scenes from previous episodes and explain how they took place in this new version of continuity where colonization was a hoax.

I would not have used the New Mexico Doctor to establish and confirm Mulder's new theory. Instead, I would do the following.

Establishing Mulder's Doubts: I think our opening scene needed to be a flashback to December 22, 2012. It's Mulder and Scully in a bunker. Mulder is telling Scully what he thinks the aliens are doing to the population -- the bees, the black oil. He couldn't find any way to stop it, all they can do now is hide. But Scully feels doubts; there were no signs in the days leading up to the invasion; they locked themselves in the bunker one day in advance -- Mulder's afraid to turn on the satellite TV or radios and hear what horrors are taking place.

Scully turns on the TV and radio. Everything is normal. There is no invasion. Scully drags Mulder to the surface, leads him into the city. Everything is fine. No alien attack. Scully is overjoyed and relieved. Mulder is crushed and shattered.

So, this immediately sets up how everything Mulder believed in was wrong and it broke him. Later scenes set in the present establish very specifically why Scully dumped him: the man was depressed over not being murdered by aliens. For God's sake.

This would weight to Mulder being irritated by people joking about alien invasions.

Debunk Colonization: I think the evidence that Tad O'Malley showed should not have been an alien replicant vehicle. Instead, it should have been the contents of a military bunker he uncovered. The bunker contains the black oil -- but it's a highly advanced prop.

There's also facial prosthetics for people to dress up as the faceless rebels. An apparatus for setting people on fire. Prop aliens and alien costumes. Holographic emitters to create the illusion of UFOs. Stockpiles of hallucinogenic drugs that could create the illusion of missing time.

In short, Tad shows Mulder the prop closet for 1013's productions and this now makes Mulder realize that what he's seen could have been staged.

Reviewing Previous Episodes: So, when Mulder shares his new theory with Scully -- that there is no alien conspiracy -- I would have Scully respond with recounting the events of previous episodes. The spaceship in FIGHT THE FUTURE. The supersoldiers. Mulder's abduction. Mulder then replies with his opinions on how those events could have been staged. Scully points out the Syndicate members all believed in colonization. Mulder suggests that contact with aliens might have been limited to one person who would filter and alter any information he received.

Mulder's theory: war is the primary means by which society is industrialized and now the primary factor in controlling the population of individual countries. A falsified, simulated war against an alien race would be a means to global control.

Basically, I don't think Chris Carter's ideas were bad. I think his ideas are brilliant! I just think maybe he didn't do as great a job as he needed to on selling these ideas to his audience.

It was a blog post.

**

Oddly -- at one point, I joked to Matt that Joel McHale had a role in THE X-FILES and he'd be playing Informant. This was before I knew that Tad O'Malley would be a 9-11 Truther.

I did get the sense that Mulder and Scully were just spouting their catchphrases at each other. It worked for me in that these two people have known each other for so long that they just speak in shorthand.

I think Chris Carter is a fine writer, but he has constantly written stories he doesn't want to write. It's very obvious that Carter doesn't want to write epic alien invasion stories or fate of the world situations. He wants to write grounded, done-in-one procedurals with supernatural overtones. Any time he tries to write an epic, he stumbles. "My Struggle" had to reintroduce THE X-FILES and pay off the overdue alien invasion without interfering with letting the next four episodes' writers do their monsters of the week in their way in their own style. In that sense, Chris Carter did a nice job.

The only thing that really, really, really did not work -- the majority of the fans are complaining that Mulder talked to one alien abductee, saw one man-made spaceship and declared that the alien invasion was a hoax and totally changed his beliefs in ten minutes. This isn't actually accurate. The dialogue clearly establishes that Mulder has doubted the alien invasion for ten years, ever since he met the Roswell doctor who autopsied aliens and declares the faceless rebels setting people on fire to be absurd nonsense.

However, for this transition to work -- I think "My Struggle" needed to make it clear from the first scene: Mulder no longer knows what to believe. So ideally, the first scene should have been Mulder and Scully in a bunker on December 26, 2012. Mulder is ranting about how the world has been destroyed, doomsday is here. Scully says she understand why he thinks that, she just doesn't *feel* it. She turns on a radio. A TV. Everything is normal. They ascend to the surface. There was no invasion. Scully is overjoyed. Mulder is crushed. And that is where Mulder lost his way and his relationship with Scully -- Scully couldn't be with a man who found the absence of an alien invasion to be cause for misery.

Instead, Carter's characterization -- like Tim Kring's -- is vague and unspecific and Mulder having been doubtful of Colonization for ten years is thrown out so suddenly that one could easily miss it. That's why that plot point doesn't land, in addition to the retcon being in total contradiction to pretty much every onscreen myth-arc event ever, albeit no more contradictory than all the other contradictions in that mythos.

Behind the Scenes Information Courtesy of Temporal Flux, Keith Damron and Robert Floyd

Strangers and Comrades Trivia

•  This episode was written by Keith Damron, story editor for season 5.
•  He was always going to write episode 3 of Season 5.
•  Originally, the third episode of Season 5 was going to focus on Rembrandt.
•  On a Victorian-steampunk era world, Rembrandt would be caught up in an inventor's dream of exploring space.
•  He would be tempted to leave Maggie, Mallory and Diana, continuing the exploration of how without Jerry O'Connell, the show would collapse and have to be rebuilt.
•  Damron says this was too expensive, so he offered a trench warfare idea instead.
•  I do not believe Damron's claims that the story was rejected on cost grounds. The trench warfare story with tanks and gunfire and explosions would have been just as costly.
•  Likely, it was felt that Victorian steampunk costumes, sets and props were complicated while explosions are easier. Less thought. Less effort.
•  This episode also declares the Season 4 quest for the Kromagg Prime superweapon to be over.
•  Damron, in a chat, said that he pushed to end the Season 4 arc this way so that the sliders would not have to address this plot in every episode and could focus solely on single episode adventures.
•  It was felt that with the ongoing quest to stick Colin and split the Quinns, searching for Kromagg Prime was one ongoing plot too many.
•  For whatever reason, this episode fails to explain why the sliders haven't slid to Kromagg Prime with the Slidecage-bypassing equations.
•  Or why they didn't try using a Slidewave or the virus in "Mother and Child" or try stealing the weapon in "Revelations" even if it was from the wrong Earth.
•  This episode was written during a period when it was still undecided if Mallory would be a composite of Jerry and Rob, Jerry's mind in Rob's body or Rob with access to Jerry's memories, with the freelance writers getting conflicting notes.
•  According to Rob, the writers were extremely undecided on who Mallory would be during this stage.
•  As a result, Rob was scripted generically with the possibility of adding in Jerry-moments that were not added in.

The Great Work Trivia

•  We have our first freelance script of the season from writer Robert Masello.
•  Masello's original idea  for this episode: the sliders encounter an interdimensional library that is protecting information and history from the Kromaggs.
•  However, with "Strangers and Comrades" having Kromaggs, Dial and Damron decided to alter the story.
•  They made the futuristic interdimensional library a primitive island monastery with only the knowledge of this single world.
•  They removed the Kromaggs.
•  Dial and Damron heavily rewrote the story to make it as cheap and easy to film as possible.
•  If you look at this story, you can see all the problems of "Revelations," the Season 4 finale that was also scripted by Bill Dial off somebody else's story.
•  The action sequences and myth-arc relevant scenes have been removed.
•  The page count is then padded by stretching out existing scenes and adding new scenes with the new dialogue consisting largely of characters reiterating information that was already established.
•  This was Bill Dial's approach to running SLIDERS in Season 5, an approach that Damron followed in his own rewrites.
•  Several Season 5 episodes feature this overstretched, repetitive rewrite style, especially in "Please Press One," "The Java Jive," "Requiem," "Map of the Mind," "To Catch a Slider," "Dust" and "Eye of the Storm."
•  Other alterations: Masello told by production to write Mallory as a melded personality of both Rob and Jerry.
•  The script originally had Mallory using Quinn's scientific knowledge in performing the data-to-crystal transfer.
•  This was removed as Dial and Damron lost interest in the Mallory-identity crisis (for reasons to be further explored in the next episode's notes).
•  Matt Hutaff felt that "Strangers and Comrades," ideally, should have been the Victorian steampunk episode and "The Great Work" should have had the Kromaggs attacking the interdimensional library -- with the library's technology and information used to wrap up the Season 4 arc in some way.
•  Instead, "The Great Work" is simply overstretched fragments of a fractured story.
•  This attitude to scripting really disappointed actor Robert Floyd, who found it obnoxious to repeat already established information.
•  Floyd would meet with Bill Dial constantly, voicing his concerns about the repetitive scripts.
•  Floyd: "At least once a week, I would go in to see him. He would always have time and he would always work with me. We would go to lunch and he was a really special guy, a really loving guy who absolutely adored the show. He was so smart. But I felt like the producers and the writers were so under the gun to produce the show that they just didn’t have the answers."
•  The fans referred to episodes like "The Great Work" on the Bboard as suffering from "Season 5 Sabotage."
•  According to Temporal Flux, Bill Dial would systematically take great ideas like an interdimensional library and apply his bizarre scripting approach to rewrite them into unwatchable tedium.
•  Why was Bill Dial treating his own show in such a shabby manner for Season 5, especially when his nemesis, Marc Scott Zicree, had quit?
•  My theory: Bill Dial had dependent personality disorder.
•  He was overly dependent upon the encouragement and praise of others.
•  Before Season 5, Dial contacted Tracy Torme and Dial seemed hell-bent on impressing Torme, showering Torme in his plans for Season 5 with Jerry in six episodes.
•  Dial attempted to present Marc Scott Zicree's Season 4 finale story as Dial's own Season 5, Episode 5 story.
•  He wanted Torme to like him and was taking credit for Zicree's stories.
•  When the Sci-Fi Channel cut off contact with SLIDERS, Dial became depressed.
•  Temporal Flux provides a clear account of the Sci-Fi Channel's indifference to the show.
•  Sci-Fi had renewed SLIDERS for Season 5, but renewed too late to keep Jerry O'Connell.
•  Unable to rescind the renewal, they were now obligated to air a Season 5 they assumed would fail.
•  They stopped reading scripts or reviewing episodes.
•  They gave up on SLIDERS and I think this made Dial so angry and unhappy that he simply couldn't bring his A-game to the show, an A-game he'd shown in "Prophets and Loss" and "Asylum."
•  In contrast, Torme would have thrived under an indifferent network.
•  Torme would have loved to make SLIDERS with no network executives weighing in on his stories.
•  Dial, in contrast, felt abandoned and his writing in Season 5 reflects this unhappy state.
•  My thinking is that someone with such a poor sense of self maybe shouldn't be working in managerial positions.

I'll say this much: TV isn't really a medium where forward planning is always an asset. Not to provoke Informant's rage, but J. Michael Straczynski exhaustively planned out BABYLON 5 and by the end of the show, the plan had been messed around with quite a bit. Actors in the Pilot with lengthy arcs declined to return to the show, necessitating new creations to fill those roles. Actors in those roles would then depart -- the lead actor of the series, the telepath whose powers were critical. A Season 4 cancellation necessitated that the entire arc for Season 5 be folded into Season 4 -- and then the show got renewed, resulting in a Season 5 that had no reason to exist.

TV is better served when forward planning is more in the sense of having courses to take for different opportunities. Neil Gaiman called it building doors -- the knowledge that he'd left a door that could be opened, although he might move down the hallway some more and find another door instead. So, in terms of the grave, TV history would indicate that the best route is to have multiple possibilities for who dies and multiple plans for how to capitalize on whichever route they end up going.

Whether or not ARROW's writing staff is actually doing this is another question entirely.

Oh, hey, this podcast still exists! Haha!

A terrific podcast as always, but one thing jumped out at me -- when Mr. Stargate declares his favourite scenes involved Wade and Quinn happily signing over their doubles' wealth to Razor Gillette -- pointing out that the sliders can do whatever they like because once they leave this world, they're never coming back.

More than anyone, Mr. Stargate has truly captured what makes SLIDERS special with this off-the-cuff observation. The sliders operate on a storytelling engine that is fundamentally about the characters sliding into other people's stories and breaking the narrative flow and creating a collapse. And this leads to the sliders revealing the power of sliding. Sliding gives them the ability to cheat the narrative, to slip between the rules of the genres they encounter, to shift the restrictions of stories without breaking or damaging them, and in doing so, they can make the stories stronger.

Mr. Stargate is the one of the few people to truly understand SLIDERS and what's astonishing and delightful is that he doesn't even like the show that much seems to have hit upon this entirely by accident.

Whoa, it's the voice of the DEAD!

I would argue that Kring is a genius at conception who simply needs another genius to help him (re)write all the scripts. But outside of Fuller, he has never sought that collaborator, and as a result, TOUCH and HEROES REBORN are just embarrassments. Imagine if Josh Friedman (SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES) had been asked to take Kring's REBORN ideas but shepherd the stories from outlines to shooting scripts and rewrite every scene.

I suspect a lot of the casting choices were due to budget. The HEROES REBORN actors are all excellent. I wouldn't blame them for any of the material aside from their agreeing to perform it. All the ideas here -- digitizing superpowers! Picking up years after the Season 4 cliffhanger! Creating distance from Sylar and Peter! The twins! The villains are actually trying to save humanity! There's neat stuff here -- but it would have been best if Kring had written brief summaries of the 13-episodes -- and then had a collaborator taking over fleshing out each episode and making sure each installment and each arc were focused, tight and meaningful and that every character's line and action informed and revealed.

A lot of the developments are just artless. For example, the idea that Tommy is actually suffering from amnesia is not built to -- there aren't clues and hints that mislead but fit. The memory wipe, as a blanket explanation, doesn't explain why Tommy doesn't notice all the gaps in his memory. There's a lot of blatant filler in these episodes like the videogame segments. None of the scenes for Luke actually address his hatred for superhumans and discovering he's one of them. These are all problems that, I think, are present in any first draft; it's important to then refine, rewrite and revise.

Instead, I often get the sense that Kring is just not going through the process of developing and reworking his material. This was something Bryan Fuller did for him and, for whatever reason, Kring has failed to find someone else to perform that role. I don't know why. When Fuller returned to HEROES for Volume 4 ("Fugitives," where the government is hunting superhumans), Kring readily deferred to Fuller, so it's not like Kring was dismissive of collaboration at a later date.

Not a popular opinion here: I thought Volume 4 was excellent. I'm not saying it wasn't filled with logical errors, but with Fuller back, everything made *emotional* sense. And then, with Volume 5, the circus, -- I know you guys liked it, but to me, it was much like HEROES REBORN -- slow, bland, vague and boring.

When HEROES REBORN was finding writers, there were plenty of available veterans writers from BUFFY, ANGEL, SMALLVILLE, THE DEAD ZONE, LIE TO ME out there, all with experience writing superhero shows filled with stirring visuals and punchy dialogue and striking characters. Kring is good at conception, he needs a partner to help him write the scripts.

It's a real shame he didn't do this and it's a really sad way for HEROES to go out.

At one point, Taylor snaps at Erica Kravid: "Enough STALLING!" And then Matt Parkman's character arc ends in a literal car crash. There comes a point when writers, having lost their way and knowing it, end up handing this sort of thing to their critics.

Seeing Matt Parkman hold a defenseless woman at gunpoint and threaten her for three wristwatches was just contemptible. For God's sake -- Matt was a police officer and a good one! He believed in protecting the innocent and defenseless and there was no need for him to put a gun to Taylor's head! All he had to do was read Erica's mind; instead, Kring has written a formerly sweet, sincere figure as a malicious, sadistic monstrosity and with no more rationalization than a brief rant about wanting his due in life.