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Actually, I think this episode has pretty much wrapped up the whole alien crisis and resolved the fate of the world.

I don't disagree with a lot of the complaints towards this episode in the overwhelmingly negative reviews. But I'm not looking at THE X-FILES from that perspective; I'm looking at "My Struggle II" as a climactic chapter at the end of a book that was written without a clear outline and written with many improvised hints and clues towards a future that was not in any way mapped out.

In many ways, I saw the Spartan virus as a metaphor -- a metaphor for the alien conspiracy myth-arc that had infected the show, slowly killing it over nine seasons that must now be cured.

THE X-FILES has always had a central problem: it's building to a climactic story it cannot tell within its TV format. The original and vague plan to break the format with a big budget feature film finale was set aside when it became clear FOX had no intention of cancellation at Season 5.

So, my interest in THE X-FILES is: how does it handle a story it cannot tell? How can we tell the story of an alien invasion when interstellar dogfights and ray guns and laser swords don't remotely fit into THE X-FILES' office sets and hospital hallways and rural locations and shadowy Vancouver streets? Furthermore, the threats have always worked best as humans.

The Cigarette Smoking Man has always represented how power corrupts and corruption infects; he craves power and importance, his own body is a metaphor for that, riddled with self-inflicted disease to which he is an addict. In contrast, aliens are faceless, personality free and anonymous. Carter's solution was always a non-solution: he stalled for time. He kicked the can down the road, kicking the can 10 years away in the original finale. Now he has to wrap it up. What the hell is he to do!?!?!?!?!?

(Personally, I always thought Mulder and Scully would recruit the ghosts, vampires, werewolves, cultists, demons, shapeshifters and parasites to fight the aliens.)

Anyway! Carter's solution is: the alien menace isn't Reticulans and ray guns. The menace is in our blood, in our cells, in the very air we breathe. The enemy isn't in the skies above; it's in the darkness of our hearts, the sense that humanity is doomed to destroy itself and the Cigarette Smoking Man will speed up the process so he can rule over the rebuilding with only the ones he likes and can control.

So, in this fashion, the alien invasion is recontextualized as an invasion of our bodies, of our immune systems, of our resistance to infection. And this new context makes it a story that THE X-FILES *can* tell in its office sets, in its hospital hallways, in its rural locations, in its shadowy streets. Finally, the myth-arc and the format are merged into a unified whole.

But I understand if you don't see it that way, if you just see incoherent nonsense. I'm seeing it from what is probably a *very* peculiar and eccentric perspective. Both THE X-FILES and SLIDERS were left in a very bad state in their finales and I'm admiring the surgery being done to revive the patient. In my view, if the patient is back on his feet, the fact that he needs a cane and some heavy duty painkillers and a lengthy term of rehab isn't cause for complaint?

I don't feel this is a big cliffhanger. The solution was already laid out; a cure is being made from Scully's DNA and all of the Cigarette Smoking Man's chosen survivors, including Monica Reyes, can be used to mass produce it. I also don't feel that the situation is analogous to MILLENNIUM: the so-called cliffhanger was meant to be a series finale with the idea that a third season would be set in this post-disaster setting, doing a TV version of Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD. Unfortunately, the Season 2 creators were replaced by a new team who discarded the Season 2 team's intentions.

The other stuff I liked:

Reyes
•   The way Monica Reyes came into the show; her contempt for the Cigarette Smoking Man is palpable and her reasons for collaborating with him are presented clearly and without dialogue.
•   Even without being spoken, it's clear: Reyes agreed to help the Smoking Man because she hoped to learn everything she could to stop him, hence her meeting with Scully and Scully later calling Reyes "a friend."
•   Annabeth Gish played her hatred for the Smoking Man beautifully, especially with her disgust as she gives him his cigarette.

The Smoking Man
•   His character has always been a figure of corrupted power and I liked how William B. Davis played the Smoking Man's cruel glee as he motions for Monica to give him his nicotine.
•   He shows twisted pleasure in controlling a beautiful woman with a gesture -- the relationship he attempted to build with Scully in Season 7's "En Ami" and a joy he took in using Skinner as a henchman in Season 4's "Zero Sum."
•   He seems to especially enjoy that Monica hates him yet has to do his bidding.
•   His reasoning for the entire Colonization lie and controlling Mulder through the myth of the alien invasion was presented succinctly and clearly and, like Monica's collusion with him, done without dialogue.
•   The line where he remarks that the aliens foresaw mankind destroying itself is a grim and cutting recontextualization of the original show's prophecies of doom and indicates the arrogance of man to think it would take an outside force to obliterate our race as opposed to us doing it ourselves.

Scully Saves Us
•   I really enjoyed the rapid-fire scientific discussions between Scully and Einstein, although I only understood bits and pieces of it.
What I loved was very simply, the grandeur and horror of Colonization being reduced to Scully in a lab, surrounded by bloodwork and DNA sequences, looking absolutely determined.
•   The Smoking Man says earlier that our destruction is really our own doing; he's just changing the timetable.
•   Scully shows that he's not the only one who can do that and the solution is brute force, hammering away at the problem until a cure is found.

The Cliffhanger
•   I don't think it's much of a cliffhanger. The world was saved in the hospital.
•   Monica Reyes knows who the Smoking Man wanted kept alive; Scully would not have called Reyes "a friend" unless Reyes offered that information; Reyes would not have colluded with the Smoking Man unless she was trying to secure that information.
•   There are lots of people out there who can help mass produce the cure now that Scully's devised the method to do so.
•   The world will be fine.
•   At this point, Scully has kicked Colonization's ass and the alien conspiracy has been laid bare.
•   But the appearance of the spaceship makes it clear: there's always more to learn.

Achievements of the Revival
•   The Colonization arc has been resolved.
•   The Syndicate has been explained.
•   A countermeasure to the alien threat has been devised.
•   The X-Files have been reopened and the ability to tell criminal procedural stories with supernatural overtones and content has been re-established.
•   The full gamut of X-FILES stories has been re-established as well: supernatural thrillers, conspiracy thrillers, metatextual humour, tragedy and drama, and social commentary.

Season 11
I would probably open Season 11 with an episode set however long it's been since "My Struggle 2" where Mulder and Scully have been missing since the End of Days of 2016. Start with Agent Einstein on a case with paranormal overtones, in danger, about to die -- then Mulder and Scully appear to save her. Where the hell have they been for the past year / two years? Not now, Mulder and Scully say: let's focus on the monster of the week.

Motorola, like any Android manufacturer, made a lot of crappy phones when working with an embryonic stage of Android. Like most pre-2012 smartphones, their output was buggy due to Android being unfinished and needed a lot of additions grafted onto an incomplete foundation.

Beginning in 2013, however, Motorola took a new philosophy where they released phones that were just Android with 3 - 4 Motorola apps (notifications, data migration, a camera app, some gestures) while leaving the operating system and user interface alone.

Because their modifications to Android are so modest, updates are no longer glitchy. In the marketplace, Motorola offers a nice contrast to the Xperias and Samsung Galaxies and Zenfones and Huaweis. In contrast to phones that look a car crash between two operating systems, a Motorola phone is unadulterated Android on unlocked and inexpensive phones. Even after Lenovo bought Motorola, that philosophy remains in place.

The issues I have with the Moto G 2015 are, to be frank, nitpicky nonsense that the average person wouldn't care about at all. The reason the camera's the way it is? My theory is now that it was calibrated for outdoor daylight photography; the noise reduction filters, if enabled, apply at their strongest for indoor, low-light flash photography and it seems to be a (misguided) attempt to reduce flash glare. The issues with the microSD adoption? That's not Motorola; that's Google. I could have downgraded to Motorola's Lollipop ROM, but I decided to use Cyanogenmod 12.1 for the built-in Superuser access.

I would sum up all my issues like this: I want my $160 Moto G 2015 to be as good as an $800 flagship phone. But I'm not going to spend more than $200 on a phone, so I'll have to put in the $600 worth of calibrations and modifications myself with some trial and error.

The only thing I don't like about Motorola -- the batteries aren't removable -- or they are, but only if you're prepared to disassemble the phone and glue it back together.

I thought it was perfect.

:-)

I really think the finale was very well done and it solved a long-standing problem with THE X-FILES.

As I said before, the 3rd Gen Moto G phone has some bizarre denoise filters built into the firmware of the camera. The built-in camera app and all the social media apps apply them to turn every image into a blurry mess.

I had to try about six different versions of the Motorola Camera app before I found one that didn't crash or lock up. Then I had to experiment with the different denoise filters and focus functions until I finally found the right combination of settings that let you manually adjust the exposure and focus without applying the noise filters. It took a couple days to get it all working consistently and calibrate two groups of presets for flash photography, outdoor use and HDR.

Then I discovered that the Google Camera app somehow manages to bypass most of the denoise settings. Aside from the colour noise filter, which is actually a good filter to apply.

So all the adjustments were a god-damn waste of time. For ****'s sake.

I like my Moto G 2015, but there's a couple things that baffled me. Android Marshmallow 6.0's adoptable storage feature claims to shift app installs to the microSD and merge external and internal memory into a single volume. It doesn't do this.

None of my apps installed to the microSD; they all went to internal memory had to be moved after the install. Of the 4GB worth of apps, 2.25GB's worth of apps had the move-to-SD option blanked out.  I mean, why offer feature this in the first place if over half the apps can't make use of it? The merged partition, in addition to serving no purpose, prevents the recovery partition from installing new ROMs or backed-up installs.

Despite the adoptable storage feature, Marshmallow is hostile towards microSD cards. Numerous apps, including the camera apps and Podcast Addict, could not offer the option to save images or MP3s to the microSD. Marshmallow somehow removes the save-to-external option from each app.

There's only 4.23GB of usable space on the phone; my 128GB microSD card can easily compensate for this, but Marshmallow blocks it at nearly every turn despite making a big show of incorporating it. I was compelled to downgrade to Android 5.1.1 (Cyanogenmod 12.1) and go back to using Link2SD to shift apps to partition on the microSD card.

The other thing that drove me crazy was Motorola's camera app. For whatever reason, the Motorola Camera app not only filters out all detail with its noise reduction, it is shockingly buggy. After a few reboots, the exposure settings and tap to focus function no longer appeared, not even after a reinstall. And the unlocked settings -- the ones that let you turn off the over-the-top denoise function -- those stopped loading, too.

I honestly cannot imagine what Motorola was thinking. Hey, we've got a great camera that takes sharp, detailed pictures. Let's make sure the software turns all that detail into a vague and blurry haze of nothing! For this reason, there's at least five different modded versions of the Motorola Camera out there and the only one that wasn't full of these bugs was gregor160300's version.

Also baffling to me is that Motorola put a notification light in the front panel of the phone -- but it only works to indicate the phone is charging. Notifications are indicated by the screen pulsing briefly to show them. It's much less power efficient than it would be to simply use the light that's already in the phone.  Aside from that, most of the issues above can be sorted out through finding a decent ROM with superuser access to get into the hidden camera settings and using Link2SD instead of Marshmallow's phony claims to use microSD cards.

Very odd. This is a great phone, but it makes me wonder why Google implemented a new feature it doesn't actually support and why Motorola sabotaged a solid camera with its software.

Funny how your link goes to dialogue written by SLIDERS' Marc Scott Zicree and brings us right back to SLIDERS.

Setting aside my choices -- the truth is that THE X-FILES and SLIDERS were early adopters of a TV format where the status quo is not static and unchanging, and they handled ongoing development in awkward, ham-fisted, clumsy ways that resulted in anomalies of metatextual commentary.

With THE X-FILES, it was as often accidental as it was deliberate. With SLIDERS, it was largely accidental with a few instances where it was deliberate. Both shows ended up in a position where they set up what Martin Izsak calls "narrative debts," where the audience is made to expect something the show fails to give. In both cases, that debt was a resolution to an alien invasion the various plots related to that issue.

When you build up to a payoff you can't deliver and then you have the chance to come back over a decade later, there aren't really that many options. With THE X-FILES and SLIDERS, you can only do one of two things.

You can either do the big climax 10 years too late -- or you can turn into the swerve. You can willfully present the anti-climax, acknowledging that it's not quite what one hoped for with self-aware dialogue that is essentially reaching out to the audience in an apologetic fashion. And then you move on.

ME: "Matt, I destroyed another cell phone."
MATT: "Hahahahahahahahahhaahahahahha!!!"
ME: "Thanks, buddy."
ME: "And after that long-ass post on the BBoard about how you finally got yourself under control with the gel casing and temper-proof glass cover."
ME: "This time, I bricked it. No, wait. It's fixed. I was able to sideload the OS back onto the internal memory. Hmm. This was funnier when it was destroyed. I'm sorry I was able to fix my phone, Matt. When I started this chat, I thought it would be funnier than it turned out, much like Season 3 of COMMUNITY."
MATT: "Don't be silly. Season 3 of COMMUNITY didn't start out funny at all."

I think "Requiem" can only be understood by reviewing both the aired episode and the original script by Michael Reaves on EP.COM.

I enjoyed this episode a lot, although I would've liked it more if it had aired as Episode 4 rather than 5. This was clearly meant to come after the lighthearted were-monster adventure, following up on Mulder's mid-life crisis with Agent Einstein's cutting and accurate condemnation of M&S's careers. (That said, they must have something going for them given that they were hired back to a security-clearance heavy job after a 14-year hiatus during which six of these years were spent as a wanted federal fugitives.)

I don't disagree with your criticisms, in an odd turn for us both. I'm as flabbergasted as you are. However, I sometimes find myself not worrying too much that a writer's view of reality doesn't reflect actual reality. Sometimes, it's interesting just to live on Planet Carter and its knotty, contradictory complexity. This is without question one of Carter's most lighthearted efforts ever and one of the *very* few happy endings he's ever offered. This is quite possibly one of the few X-FILES stories where the lead characters actually managed to save some lives.

To me, this episode was what I WANT TO BELIEVE wanted to be as a film -- a criminal procedural that, due to Mulder's presence, suddenly takes on paranormal and supernatural overtones. But where I WANT TO BELIEVE was a hackjob scripted in a mad rush in a few weeks before the writer's strike, "Babylon" was clearly someone enjoying what they're doing.

It's weird. As you can tell from my posts, despite talking a lot about THE X-FILES, I don't actually like it very much. It's just that it's from an era I care about (being contemporaneous with SLIDERS) and it defined genre fiction and received everything denied to SLIDERS (creative freedom, secured actors, high budgets, a feature film, grounded production values) while still being quite a lot like SLIDERS (long, drawn out, confused, incoherent and kind of pointless). I'm not a fan of THE X-FILES as much as a polite acquaintance -- but I actually like this mini-series.

I bought some oversized bottles of sparkling water and their unusual height had me constantly knocking them over and I managed to spill one all over my Samsung S3. Thankfully, due to an unusually tight case and some uneven distribution of liquid, the device was unharmed -- but this was something of a tipping point for me. I decided to sell off the S3 and use the proceeds to buy a third-gen Moto G (it's waterproof). The S3 actually sold for more than the Moto G cost me. The tempered glass protector and case had the S3 perfect shape, but for some reason, it was having the original box it came in allowed me to charge a premium that a buyer was willing to pay. I can't say what I'm thinking here because I am disinclined to mock a customer, but maybe whoever's reading this could go ahead.

The Moto G 2015 is cool. A Nexus 6 with cheaper internals and impressive externals. Plain Android, so unlike my S3, no custom ROMs are needed to evade manufacturer bloat. Except, comparing it to my S3 -- it looks bigger than the S3, but the S3 used physical buttons where the Moto G uses onscreen buttons, so the area of screen usage is about the same as the S3. The camera has a dual-tone flash that makes photos a bit yellow. The battery isn't removable, although it lasts two days on a full charge, so even when suffering from wear, it'll still be good. There's only 4.53 GB of usable storage after Android is installed -- although there's some built in software that merges the internal storage with my 128GB microSD. It won't affect my usage, yet it has to be noted that in nearly every way, this phone is a bit of a step down from the S3.

But it's waterproof. :-D

So, regarding those script notes where I blew them up at the end by telling the writer, "Never mind, these changes I suggest are too much, your story's great the way it is" -- I woke up this morning and suddenly knew how to rework my suggestions into minimal additions and tweaks instead of total replacements.

It's this new philosophy of editing I have. I think the main turning point that got me here -- I was critiquing one of Matt's scripts and giving him ideas for major changes to to fix the problems and Matt said he didn't feel he could make those changes even though he agreed with the criticisms. He later sent me a set of notes from a different reviewer where this reviewer had precisely the same complaints I did -- but his solutions to the problems were small, precise and subtle changes that involved altering lines of dialogue and adding a few things here and there -- things Matt was willing to change. Ever since then, I have followed that example towards editing for Matt's stuff and for this other writer. Tweaks and additions instead of replacements. Things the writer wouldn't balk at considering.

I don't have the energy to argue that the sliders can be icons right now. I spent a chunk of my afternoon doing chores and also writing up notes on a script that somebody sent me. I thought this script was really excellent, absolutely superb -- but I had a few small suggestions and little tweaks that I thought would recontextualize the ending and give the same ending more impact and meaning. I wrote out what I would change -- little additions or alterations to specific scenes -- and then what I thought would be replacing one final-act scene with a different one.

Except replacing that scene meant replacing a whole bunch of other scenes and suddenly, I wasn't finding neat ways to deepen this writer's story as much as I was simply replacing his style and craft with my own and my grasp of screenwriting doesn't even begin to approach his, and by the end, I realized I hadn't offered notes on his story; I'd given him a completely different story and it wasn't even a better story -- it was just my story instead of his.

So my notes ended with me saying, "You know what -- ? These notes aren't helping you tell your story, they're just replacing it. I've changed my mind. Don't do any of this. You wrote a great script! I should leave it alone."

Which means this was a complete and total waste of time. God damn it.

Hey. I reposted TF's Marvel Universe thoughts in the Marvel thread: http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=1818#p1818 Let's keep this thread for talking about how Slider_Quinn21 hates old people and how anyone over 30 can't fight crime!

;-)

I think they had to spend at least two episodes on William. His departure from the series was a massive emotional blow and there is no way he could be ignored. Also, Carter intends to use him in some fashion. I think the problem is that there is no sense of progress due to the altered episode order. The plan was Episode 2 presents William as a source of grief and loss and agony and regret while Episode 5 shows the strange and twisted joy and the maddening longing Mulder and Scully have when they think of him, leading to Episode 6 where... who knows?

Instead, what we have is the reverse and instead of progression, it's repetition. This messed up airdate order has also caused other problems. The X-Files office makes no sense. It's fully furnished in Week Two, yet bare and nearly vacant in Week Three. Week One has Mulder realizing the alien conspiracy is a hoax and who knows what else as well. Week Two has Mulder casually referring to the Syndicate's alien human hybrid colonization plot like it's real and believing in the paranormal. Week Three has Mulder with no belief in the paranormal and regaining that belief. Mulder's character arc is seriously confused now.

It's pretty awful that 21 years after SLIDERS, FOX still can't air episodes in the right order.

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.