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My friend blogged: "Mulner and Scuzzy are apparently not fighting the aliens anymore and i am disappointed. I can see people fighting people anytime"

I wrote a lengthy reply.

TLDR: There have been 203 episodes of THE X-FILES and only 67 were about aliens. The rest were about various paranormal phenomena and supernatural creatures. Aliens amount to only 33 per cent of THE X-FILES, so doing away with that part of the mythos still leaves plenty for the show to explore. It might be for the best as the alien plot had gotten convoluted and unworkable over the nine seasons of the show.

Origin Story

•  Originally, THE X-FILES wasn't meant to have an ongoing arc of any kind.
•  This was the 90s era of characters remaining static and unchanging.
•  The aliens were really no different from the shapeshifters or the vampires -- they were unexplained monsters.
•  In the alien episodes, a mysterious government official would usually be seen stealing any evidence of aliens and storing it away.
•  No answers were planned; the mystery was more compelling than any explanation.
•  The aliens and monsters of THE X-FILES were meant to be like the Cthulu Mythos -- inexplicable, unknowable, understandable only in terms of metaphors.
•  THE X-FILES' aliens were metaphors for the forces of light and darkness.
•  Then Gillian Anderson got pregnant.

Explanations are Required

•  The writing team decided to have her abducted by aliens to account for her absence during her character's absence during maternity leave.
•  This decision compelled the writers to start offering concrete explanations for the aliens: what they were doing on Earth, why they abducted people, their relationship with the government.
•  Season 2 revealed that the aliens were harvesting human tissue to create clones for some reason.
•  It also established the mysterious government agent as part of a Syndicate; a shadow government controlling most world governments who'd made a deal with the aliens in some unknown endgame.
•  Season 3 would reveal that the aliens were creating alien-human hybrids and also introduce the black oil, an alien lifeform that would enter a control a human host.
•  Season 4 would reveal that the Syndicate, while collaborating with the aliens, were also working against them, creating a vaccine that would prevent humans from being controlled by the black oil.
•  Season 5 would introduce a second set of aliens, a race of shapeshifters, called the Faceless Rebels, who wanted to stop the black oil.
•  These Rebels were just as hostile to humans, often killing abductees to interfere with the black oil's plans.
•  The feature film, FIGHT THE FUTURE, along with Season 6 would finally offer an explanation for the aliens' plans.

Answers at Last

•  The black oil is the original inhabitant of Earth before the human race. It's a virus.
•  The ice age brought on the black oil's main weakness, extreme cold.
•  Aliens visited Earth and encountered the black oil and it infected them.
•  The two lifeforms evolved into symbiotic partners.
•  They decided to leave Earth and return after the ice age and use the evolving life, humans, as their hosts.
•  Only some of the aliens were able to resist the black oil -- these are the faceless rebels.
•  The black oil aliens spread the virus across the cosmos while the faceless rebels sought to stop them, with Earth as one of their battlefields.

Invasion

•  The aliens returned to Earth in the 1940s, but their presence was detected by the US Government.
•  A shadow government, the Syndicate, determined the aliens' plans to colonize Earth and use humans as hosts for their reproduction.
•  Seeing no means to stop them, the Syndicate attempted to stall.
•  They offered to facilitate their Colonization of Earth by creating the ideal means of allowing the black oil to infect hosts while sustaining their hosts.
•  Human abductees would be experimented on to determine the best way to use them as hosts.
•  The Syndicate determined that the alien virus would be best spread through using bees as a delivery system.
•  They discovered that an alien-human hybrid would be the perfect host for the black oil to reproduce itself.
•  They slowed progress on creating this hybrid, hoping that the hybrid would be a way to develop an an anti-black oil vaccine to save themselves.
•  The Syndicate's betrayal was discovered in Season 6 and the aliens killed most of them.
•  In Seasons 8 - 9, the aliens begin deploying supersoldiers -- genetically engineered alien-human hybrids deployed to key government positions.
•  These supersoldiers would replace the Syndicate in facilitating the alien invasion.

Lack of Payoff

•  All of the above was revealed over the course of nine seasons.
•  The secondary plan, after THE X-FILES began to develop its myth-arc in greater detail, was to do five seasons of the show and end with a movie.
•  This feature film would feature the climax of the alien invasion and end THE X-FILES.
•  However, the show was renewed for a sixth season and the plans to do a conclusion in the film were scrapped.
•  The film became big budget episode that didn't end the show.
•  Once THE X-FILES was denied its climax, the problems of the alien myth-arc became very clear.

A Troubled Mythology

•  The alien myth-arc was not planned in advance, resulting in continuity errors throughout.
•  How can creating an alien-human hybrid help the Syndicate survive the invasion? •  The answer that it  could lead to a vaccine doesn't explain how they'd survive violent and technologically advanced aliens.
•  Why are bees being used to deliver a virus that consists of oil?
•  Why has it taken the aliens since 1940 to get started on this invasion and why have they still not begun?
•  If the aliens can create supersoldiers, why do they need humans to create the alien-human hybrid?
•  The individual pieces of the myth-arc, as revealed, did not fit together into a cohesive whole.
•  Further revelations served only to confuse.

A Format That Resists a Myth-Arc

•  The other problem is that tone and format of THE X-FILES was ill-suited to an alien invasion.
•  The show was largely presented as a criminal procedural drama where the heroes investigated monsters.
•  The stories had extremely grounded, down-to-Earth settings with mundane characters.
•  The plots were based in Mulder and Scully observing paranormal phenomena but rarely having any effect on the situation, being mere humans in an unknowable universe.
•  This format is fundamentally incompatible with an alien invasion story.
•  If the aliens invade Earth, the criminal procedural drama format is lost; the story must be focused on fighting a war against aliens.
•  An alien-human war would deprive THE X-FILES of its grounded, down-to-Earth presentation and step entirely into fantasy.
•  This invasion story would also end THE X-FILES as a series.
•  If the aliens win, there are no more X-Files.
•  If the aliens lose, the X-Files serve no purpose; an invasion makes it clear to the world at large that the paranormal is a known fact.
•  Therefore, the alien invasion story was a story that THE X-FILES could never tell or show onscreen in any way.
•  It couldn't fit into the format of the series.
•  It would invalidate any future installments.

Stalling Tactics

•  As a result, the alien myth-arc of THE X-FILES became an exercise in delaying and stalling.
•  Information would be doled out piecemeal.
•  The alien invasion would always be described as coming soon, but it would never arrive.
•  The series finale indicated that the alien invasion would come in Season 20 of THE X-FILES (2012).
•  This finale was yet another instance of kicking the can farther away.

My Struggle: The Retcon

•  THE X-FILES 2016 mini-series opens with an episode declaring that the alien colonization plan was a hoax.
•  It indicates that there was only one significant alien encounter on Earth; the Roswell crash.
•  All alien incursions and events since then have been the government or its shadow controllers using technology stripped from the Roswell ship to create a massive distraction from their true purpose.
•  Their actual endgame has been to control and reshape society into a corporate controlled military industrial complex with a society driven by consumerist capitalism.
•  The alien colonization and its various events were a way of diverting attention away from how the technology was actually being employed.
•  Mulder has suspected this for some time, developing this theory some time after THE X-FILES' ninth season.
•  This episode confirms his suspicions.
•  Reviewers have protested Mulder’s sudden turnaround in abandoning his belief in Colonization; however, dialogue establishes that Mulder has been doubting Colonization ever since 2006 and when the stated 2012 invasion date came and went, his suspicions must have deepened.
•  The Roswell medical doctor ridicules Mulder’s former certainty in the reality of the faceless rebels at war with the colonists at setting people on fire, which happened onscreen.
•  This retcon is entirely at odds with the majority THE X-FILES episodes that featured the alien myth-arc.
•  This retcon is entirely at odds with the majority THE X-FILES episodes that featured the alien myth-arc.
•  The abductions, the Syndicate's desperate attempts to develop a vaccine, the alien human hybrids, the faceless rebels, the bees, supersoldiers -- all were presented as genuine from a third person point of view.
•  The idea that these were all actors or deceived Syndicate members who bought into the hoax is absurd.
•  However, the retcon is no more contradictory to the mythology than the numerous contradictions already within Seasons 1 - 9.

An Admission?

•  If anything, the retcon is an acceptance of reality.
•  Once THE X-FILES failed to deliver an alien invasion in the feature film, the myth-arc was doomed to offer endless stalling until an inevitable anti-climax.
•  There is no way to do an effective alien invasion story in 2016 that serves as a solid finale to THE X-FILES after nine seasons of delaying tactics.
•  The time has passed.
•  There is no way to fulfill the alien invasion story in a manner that does not render the X-FILES format and storytelling platform irrelevant.
•  Therefore, this retcon effectively concedes defeat.
•  From an in-universe perspective, the X-Files must redefine themselves without the alien mythology or the impending invasion.
•  Even without aliens, it still has 67 per cent of its mythos left -- the supernatural and paranormal material that's unrelated to aliens.
•  The absence of aliens creates a void.
•  That void is easily filled by creating new material and new purpose for the X-Files in the twenty-first century.
•  The continuity contradictions resulting from the retcon are unfortunate.
•  They are, however, irrelevant to the majority of THE X-FILES' stories about investigating monsters of the week.
•  The anti-climax of "My Struggle" was an inescapable inevitability THE X-FILES' format once the series missed its chance to do a climactic alien invasion in its feature film.

Disclaimer

•  It is entirely possible that the debunking of the myth-arc in "My Struggle" will be overturned at a later date.
•  In that case, these bullet points about the necessity of doing away with the alien myth-arc may be invalidated.
•  The explanation of the alien colonization plot is based on my recollections of the series and may be inaccurate in various places.
•  The author apologizes for any errors.

Jerry O'Connell tweeted that THE X-FILES' return made him nostalgic for SLIDERS and for the first time ever, I thanked him for his efforts towards a SLIDERS revival. I mean, I've documented his sins against SLIDERS pretty thoroughly, but in the years that followed, he had a change of heart. And he tried. He called Tracy. He tried to find John. It didn't work. But he tried. I appreciate that.

Okay, I nominated and downloaded the excerpt. I'll read it later.

In a moment of hilarity, the Chromebook app for Netflix is better than the Windows 10 app for Netflix -- Windows 10 has Netflix's lists showing in a single line of titles and the touch interface is confused and contradictory while the Chromebook app is just the website in a window with no unnecessary attempts to re-invent the wheel. And Chromebook apps run on PCs. Oh well. Maybe looking down on the T100 Chi for being a lousy tablet would be like dismissing Stephen Hawking for losing a marathon.

*groans*

Why oh why oh why oh why did Tim Kring, knowing this was a single-season mini-series, END ON A CLIFFHANGER?!?!?!?!?

Tim Kring is teasing (and threatening) some follow-up to HEROES REBORN, NBC president Bob Greenblatt (also the guy who called SLIDERS in Season 3 to be much stronger than Seasons 1 - 2) said that if Kring had more ideas, there could be more HEROES. Ugh.

The sad thing is, the series finale wasn't even that bad, but it had the best and worst of HEROES. Unlike the previous episodes, it was filled with incident and didn't feel slow and stalled. Like the previous episodes, there was no care for theme, characterization and storytelling. With some tweaks and adjustments, HEROES REBORN could have been about sacrifice.

If Claire's death had been presented as her sacrificing herself for her children, if Tommy's identity crisis had been shown as him sacrificing his identity to save the world, if Carlos' issue had been that he'd taken credit for someone else giving up their lives -- then Noah's death would have worked. But REBORN was far, far too late in indicating that Malina and Tommy's powers could combine while being lethal to the conduit.

It's a real shame, and it just goes to show how HEROES REBORN would have been better off if Tim Kring would take a step back from writing and hire someone else to produce the scripts.

Behind the Scenes Information Courtesy of Temporal Flux

The Unstuck Man

• This information comes from Temporal Flux of DoC and Robert Floyd, who played Mallory (I interviewed him last year for Earth Prime).

• You can look at my notes on "Revelations" regarding the original plans for writing Jerry out of the series until Jerry refused to appear at all (they were going to do the original "Revelations" plot for episode 5, but end with Quinn escaping Kromagg Prime back home (to the Earth in the Pilot, not the one in "Genesis" but failing to take Rembrandt and Maggie).

• Quinn would return for the series finale.

• After Jerry severed all ties with the show, production decided to use old footage of Jerry and Charlie from Season 4 and have them 'morph' into Kromaggs to suggest they'd been replaced at some unspecified point in the previous season.

• Jerry caught wind of this and blocked Season 5 from using his image or voice.

• At this point, Keith Damron came up with the idea of Quinn regenerating into a different actor while still being the same character. He stole this regeneration concept from DOCTOR WHO.

• A casting search located Robert Floyd, who'd been in numerous stageplays and guest-shows and was a classically trained Shakespearean actor (although his studies at the Royal Academy in England were curtailed due to a death in the family and a return to the States to be there for his loved ones).

• Floyd bore some resemblance to Jerry and was hired on that basis. Looking at the Season 5 production, I get the sense he was not hired for his acting talent even though he was an incredibly gifted and devoted performer who had refined his craft magnificently with extensive training and experience.

• According to Robert Floyd, the production was *extremely* unclear on whether he was playing Quinn Mallory in a different body or if he was playing a different character who could access Quinn's memories or if he was playing a merged version where both personalities had melded into a new persona. The script pages were contradictory.

• (These contradictory pieces of information were also passed onto the Season 5 freelance writers who wrote most of Season 5's cripts, resulting in a seriously schizophrenic depiction of Mallory for Season 5, but we'll get into that later.)

• Mr. Floyd (or Rob, as he prefers to be called -- you pick!) had to decide for himself what he wanted to do, so he proceeded to get plenty of Jerry O'Connell episodes on VHS and watch them. He hired an acting coach, John Kirby, to work out how to approach the character.

• First, Rob worked out how to imitate Jerry's voice and body language; the delivery, the intonations, the accent, the pitch, the diction, the posture, the expressions, the movements, the motions.

• Then, Rob and Mr. Kirby would review the scripts and pick out individual moments, deciding which parts were Quinn and which parts were 'Mallory.'

• According to the scripts, although this was never definitively decided, the feeling was that Robert Floyd's Quinn Mallory was a fraternal double of the original Quinn: one of his parents had been a different person from the one that the original Quinn had had.

• None of this was decided by the production, although a cut line of dialogue from "The Unstuck Man" indicates that Rob's Quinn had Michael Mallory for a father, meaning his mother must have been a different woman.

• Originally, this episode would have Rembrandt and Mallory agreeing that Mallory would be called "Michael" (his father's name) to differentiate him from Quinn, but this was cut and dropped (although it remains in numerous draft scripts).

• Rob's feeling was that by the mid-point of the story, Mallory is in control of the body, but Quinn's thoughts, memories and wishes are now informing and guiding his behaviour. That's why, when confronting Geiger, Rob uses Jerry's intonations and body language but doesn't imitate the voice.

• Rob was very excited about playing Mallory and felt that Mallory would ideally be a character with a constant identity crisis, constantly making the audience guess whether it was Jerry's Quinn or Rob's Quinn talking, and occasionally melding together if in agreement.

• Rob wanted his Quinn to be the cunning, self-absorbed, practical criminal while Jerry's Quinn would be a moral and idealistic scientist and both would conflict.

• His only concern: he didn't want to only imitate Jerry, but he was cool with doing that so long as it was one part of an identity crisis.

• That way, he wouldn't be copying Jerry, he would be paying tribute to "a great actor and the guy who really built the show."

• Again, this didn't really work out, but you have to admire Rob's devotion and commitment to the role.

• By that, I mean the opening scene with the body doubles for Jerry and Charlie: they used an unknown voice in production to voice Quinn saying, "Go! Go!"'

• This doesn't make any sense: why didn't they have Rob impersonate the voice?

• The answer: there isn't an answer. Rob wasn't called in to record the line and wasn't aware that someone else had performed it; he would have been happy to do it, but nobody asked him to.

• The truth, according to TF: production didn't seem to expect that Rob to be doing a Jerry O'Connell impression, they were unaware of Rob being a gifted mimic and impressionist.

• They simply noticed he looked a bit like Jerry.

• The production, specifically Bill Dial, was also angry at Jerry for leaving SLIDERS under bad terms and not particularly keen on paying tribute to someone he was angry at.

• Production certainly noticed that Rob could do Jerry's voice, but they didn't bother to change their recording plans and simply went ahead with using an unknown voice -- maybe a sound technician's? -- for the "Go! Go!"

• SO GOD DAMN STUPID!

• According to TF: Conrad Bennish Jr. was supposed to be in this episode, playing the doomsday preacher and five additional episodes.

• Keith Damron, script editor for Season 5, said that Temporal Flux was mistaken / lying / wrong,

• According to Matt Hutaff, who interviewed Tracy in 2009: prior to Season 5, Bill Dial contacted Tracy Torme and asked: what would Torme like to see in Season 5?

• Torme said Bennish. Dial agreed. Torme later heard from the actor, Jason Gaffney, saying that plans were in place to fly him out from Vancouver to LA to perform in six episodes.

• Then suddenly, the deal was cancelled and production was denying this ever happened.

• Temporal Flux suspects that David Peckinpah simply saw a chance to sabotage something Torme wanted by blocking Gaffney's hiring.

Applied Physics

• According to Rob: At this point, production still wasn't sure about how Mallory would turn out, and Rob decided to play this episode as Mallory in control of the body but constantly struck with Quinn's memories, which he considered a betrayal of his own body and retriggered the trauma of having once been crippled and unable to use his legs, only this time, it was his whole body.

• Rob had hopes for this arc: perhaps Mallory would come to appreciate having Quinn's memories. Rob wanted them to share the body as distinct personalities.

• This episode features Tembi Locke, who had a career playing recurring and single guest roles before SLIDERS. SLIDERS appears to be her first guest role.

• According to Temporal Flux: The original conception for Dr. Diana Davis: she joined the sliders to betray them.

• She was secretly looking for a way to help Geiger regain a hold in the multiverse.

• She wasn't necessarily evil, just trying to save her mentor -- it was unclear how much of an enemy she'd be, but there was no plan to remove her from the series, so she and the sliders would have found a way to stick together.

• This plan was abruptly aborted halfway into the writing of this episode.

• The reason: the majority of the scripts for Season 5 were from freelancers and production found it too annoying to try to work in a multi-episode plot among freelance writers who would be working separate from the main writing staff (Chris Black, Keith Damron, Bill Dial) and the other freelancers.

• This setup is unusual for American TV: usually, shows have a huge writing staff, but Season 5's budget kept them at three people plus David Peckinpah, who, at this time, was busy executive producing TURKS.

• This is also the reason why the Mallory identity crisis would be abandoned.

• The production couldn't keep it straight whether Mallory was a merged personality of both Jerry and Rob in a new persona, Rob with Jerry's memories, Jerry in Rob's body -- so the freelance writers got conflicting notes and instructions.

• Some were told to write Michael' (as he was still being called) as a generic male lead, others were told to script him as a scientist some were asked to write him as a criminal.

• Production would have to rewrite the scripts afterwards to make it consistent.

• After all the headaches with this, the multi-episode plot for Diana was dropped as well.

• "Applied Physics" is one of the most popular episodes of Season 5.

• Chris Black studied past episodes extensively to write it, wanting to really mine Jerry's departure for emotion and had to rewatch episodes to choose clips that didn't include Jerry (as he'd blocked the use of his image).

• During the writing of this episode, Bill Dial noticed that the Sci-Fi Channel was not sending him notes on scripts and not reviewing their cuts of the episodes.

• TF points to this episode: note how the Kromagg's gun is aimed at Mallory's chest. Standards and practices for Sci-Fi at the time did not allow firearms to be aimed at heads.

• Dial sent Sci-Fi pages where a character's head gets blown off.
  Sci-Fi sent no response, indicating they weren't reading the scripts.

• This made Bill Dial very unhappy with dire consequences for SLIDERS to follow.

I've been writing up the notes ahead of time for the boys so I can get back to writing scripts. I just wrote up the trivia for a particular episode near the end, and in discussing it, I felt compelled to write up a list and description of The Ten Most Hated People in SLIDERS.

There's also "Cleavant Derricks ****ing hated this episode" and "This was the point where Cleavant lost all hope for SLIDERS and knew it was game over."

I actually like Volumes 1 and 4 a lot. Volume 2 was interesting but an awkward abortion. Volume 3 started well but got convoluted. Volume 5 was boring.

In my view, HEROES REBORN could have been excellent. The problem wasn't the ideas. Kring is always full of ideas. The problem is that he executes brilliant ideas without the imagination, skill, care or cleverness needed to make them funny, dramatic, compelling and exciting. There were perfectly worthwhile character arcs here.

The first thing I'd have done: I'd have trimmed down the characters. There were too many people spread across the globe, especially for 13 episodes. So, I'd stick to three pairings: Noah Bennett and Quintin, Tommy and Miko, Erica and Taylor -- with characters like serial killers Luke & Joanne and Farah & Malina allowed to rotate in the slot for the fourth pairing.

I'd have made Tommy the fanboy of Katana Girl who can't remember how he ended up in Tokyo and ending up in an international spy movie, Noah and Quintin a buddy cop film, and Erica and Taylor as the antagonists of the story.

The second thing I'd have done: I'd just have used Bryan Fuller's technique for handling Tim Kring's stuff. Erica's character arc is a mess because the efforts to make her a nuanced antagonist consisted of her spouting vagaries and dodging questions while claiming it was all for a good cause. Noah and Quintin's scenes were purely expository; there was no in-depth focus on how they deal with regret and loss; Noah's regret makes him angry and dangerous while Quintin's regret makes him desperate and fearful, and both help each other heal and move forward. Erica is a crusader whose daughter, Taylor the knight errant, is losing faith in the cause but afraid to think her mother would be wrong.

I genuinely think that Tim Kring comes up with good stories -- he just doesn't tell them well.

Whenever Bryan Fuller was present on Volumes 1 and 4, the above-approach alleviated all of Kring's problems. The slow-moving plots were treated as an opportunity to go all character oriented. The nonsensical characterization in Kring's plots would, from Fuller, be depictions of troubled and conflicted characters. Subtract the Fuller-influence and presentation and you end up with HEROES REBORN.

Well. The simplest explanation that comes to mind is that Quinn commandeered a Kromagg reality warping weapon and made his own modifications. I'm sure Kromagg arsenals have lots of perceptual conceptual armaments. So Quinn found one -- and changed it. The weapon would alter universal constants, change the very nature of reality itself, and do so retroactively, making it so that the changed reality would have always been so.

The nature of the change: originally, Quinn unlocked the gateway to parallel universes by accessing the fundamental interactions within gravity fields. The weapon would switch this so that sliding is now unlocked by tapping into electromagnetic interactions, and retroactively, this has always been the case.

As a result, Quinn's experiments in anti-gravity in 1994 are altered; they never opened a gateway. This is the case for all Quinns in all realities. The Kromaggs, too, experience the same: I'm suggesting with this theory that they discovered sliding when creating their gravity negating aircraft; they succeed, but they don't discover sliding and their civilization remains bound to their own Earth.

The only remnants: the videotape journals and Smarter-Quinn, a paradoxical fragment of the previous multiverse, one preserved deliberately by suspending the tapes between dimensions, the other preserved accidentally by the same means.

I don't think any of this really *matters*, however -- because none of this is why I suggest it. I suggest it because the sliders are superheroes. And superheroes always come back. The sliders' superpower: they have the power to cheat the narrative and side-step the natural and normal consequences of other genres and structures.

For the sliders, death is but a door and the sliding concept and storytelling engine is an avenue to evading any kind of narrative collapse and in turn must allow the sliders to be saved from being detonated, deleted, cyberneticized or getting their TV show cancelled -- or having to be revived in one of those god-awful Season 6 plots in the other thread.

What I'm trying to say: the idea that Seasons 1 - 5 were erased is a metaphor. SLIDERS was cancelled. The idea that Quinn erased sliding from all realities is a metaphor for the fallout of the cancellation: everything good and meaningful and special about SLIDERS was taken away.

To be fair, this is probably silly fanboy psychodrama stuff and I wouldn't fault anyone for thinking it best to do the older doubles route without this multiversal retcon element. I mean, SLIDERS REBORN explicitly declares that the 2000 cancellation of SLIDERS destroyed our world and doomed us all, so -- I'm kind of nuts.

The idea that Quinn, having forgotten sliding, rediscovers it in 2016, is a representation of my faith in the SLIDERS format -- it'll come back. They'll always come back.

The thing is, HEROES has no more plot holes than any other fantasy series I enjoy. I loved SMALLVILLE and read all the comic books, for God's sake. But HEROES REBORN has no emotion, no heart, no depth, no meaning, no joy, no wonder, no imagination. It's just plot, and it's not a particularly rewarding or engaging plot and what REBORN did to Matt Parkman is a crime against humanity.

Well. I did steal the title from this series for SLIDERS REBORN. Originally, SLIDERS REBORN was going to be SLIDERS: QUANTUM QUINTOLOGY and I think we can agree that REBORN is a much more striking banner.

I remain fascinated by the idea of using my Windows 10 laptop as a tablet. Detach it from the keyboard to read webpages and ebooks and comics, reattach to type. So far, however, I've spent more time trying to fix this thing as a tablet than I have using it as one. The battery life was awful and needed third party software to create an appropriate power plan so as not to drain the cells in four hours (it now gets ten).

The app store crashed and the E-mail software locked up and the operating system has had to be reinstalled twice and Windows Update has had to be sabotaged to keep it from regularly bricking the unit.

The Kindle app for Windows is hopelessly slow, the Facebook Windows app is an unreadable abomination and I've had to make do with equivalents from the Chrome web store. Yes, that's right -- the only way this Windows 10 tablet works effectively is to raid the Chromebook domain. The mouse needed four separate driver reinstalls before the touchpad would function properly, the attempt to use USB 3.0 created so much wifi interference that I had to go back to USB 2.0 AND the touchscreen keyboard is pretty much unusable.

Occasionally, the screen stops rotating regardless of the orientation. And tablets should be instant-on, but this one takes about 25 seconds to boot and another 15 to log in. This laptop cost $500. My aunt bought a Surface Pro 3 with dock and stylus for $2000 and she has had all of the problems mentioned above.

... but I dunno. I feel like, because I've spent more time fixing this than using it, maybe I haven't given it a fair chance. But I have the feeling that trying to use a Windows 10 tablet as a tablet is simply going to consist of constantly trying to fix it before putting the screen back onto the dock and accepting this is, was and ever shall be a laptop and only a laptop.

Hi. Here are the notes for "Revelations" that I sent Rewatch Podcast.

As for the "Net Worth Redux," I am at the point where Quinn-2 and Wade-2 / Rick and Joanne are talking in person in the Dominion/ Chandler hotel. The majority of the plot holes are fixed except for Jack / Hurley's nonsensical plan for robbing the Magenta Towers.

I could write scripts on my tablet (with a bluetooth keyboard), but Windows 10 is still repatching my computers, so I won't be able to post the podcasts until tomorrow night. My password managers are stored on the PCs and I never commit passwords to memory.

Behind the Scenes Information Courtesy of Temporal Flux

Season 4: Luck of the Draw

• When Marc Scott Zicree interviewed for SLIDERS, he was not entirely sure what he was getting into. He had a passing familiarity with SLIDERS. Most of the junior Season 3 producers had moved on. New writers were needed.

• USA Networks (which owned Sci-Fi) had a VP who'd liked Zicree's writing on science fiction shows and recommended him to David Peckinpah.

• Peckinpah hadn't been looking for a talented science fiction writer. As Season 3 showed, Peckinpah was not concerned with scripts he wasn't writing, he saw hiring screenwriters as the equivalent of hiring typists.

• It was an astonishing stroke of fortune for a writer of Zicree's pedigree and caliber to be interested in SLIDERS and to be approached for a story editor role.

• According to Temporal Flux of DoC: Zicree, in the interview with Peckinpah, repeated everything Peckinpah said in paraphrased sentences, echoing Peckinpah's views on production and scripts.

• Peckinpah declared Zicree to be a genius and hired him as the Season 4 executive story editor -- a position that usually entails commissioning scripts, directing or performing rewrites, leading the writer's room,etc..

• As noted in many interviews, the Season 4 budget was low. The writing staff consisted of David Peckinpah (1. executive producer), Bill Dial (2. co-executive producer), Marc Scott Zicree (3. story editor) and Chris Black (4. producer).

• Most scripts would come from freelancers and need to be rewritten once submitted.

• Because the writing staff was so small, the task of rewriting scripts had to be distributed and delegated and Zicree expected he'd take the approach of giving notes to writers on their treatments. When drafts came in, he would again write notes and he expected would distribute the task of rewrites among himself and his colleagues.

Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome

• Zicree, at this point, began to further familiarize himself with SLIDERS, having long talks with his friend Tracy Torme, rewatching old episodes, reading the Dimension of Continuity articles and deleted scenes, watching Kari Wuhrer's movies.

• He realized SLIDERS was in trouble: down two original (and essential) cast members, a problematic character in Maggie, the remaining regulars had gone from charming and lively to hostile and miserable.

• To make matters worse, the leading man had forced his talentless brother into a regular role on the show.

• According to TF: Marc attempted to make a meal of the mess. He wouldn't try to do the grounded SLIDERS of Season 1 - 2 -- he couldn't anyway. And he wouldn't do the movie ripoffs of Season 3 -- he had no budget for that anymore.

• Instead, he'd try a more hard-sci-fi and myth approach.

• He proposed an ambitious story-arc to really raise SLIDERS' profile: the Kromagg invasion of the sliders' home Earth. This way, the damage to the series in losing John Rhys-Davies and Sabrina Lloyd could be expressed and mined for drama. The Colin character could be a Kromagg spy, an altered clone of Quinn created from DNA samples taken in "Invasion."

• It would be hinted throughout the season, however, that the Earth Prime invasion had been staged to manipulate Quinn into believing a false backstory, a theory all but confirmed by the third episode.

• The season 4 finale would bring all the subtle clues into a massive climax and a shocking cliffhanger.

• Looking at the interviews, it would seem that for episodes between the premiere and the finale, Zicree hoped for imaginative and intellectually challenging science fiction drama with more of a fantasy-adventure approach rather than the social commentary of Season 1 - 2, but with a focus on situational character drama rather than action and eye candy (which couldn't be afforded anyway).

The Other Slide of Darkness

• According to TF: Peckinpah approved of Zicree's Season 4 arc. However, Peckinpah also took the task of writing the season premiere and immediately, the Zicree/Peckinpah relationship began to take a turn for the worse.

• Peckinpah wrote the Kromaggs as overt soldiers, thugs, interrogators and torturers rather than distant figures acting through human agents -- and he also wrote Sabrina Lloyd out via sending her to a rape camp.

• Zicree argued against these plot elements, providing Peckinpah with pages and pages of corrective notes and creative suggestions.

• For example, Peckinpah misunderstood the concept of doubles and wrote a double of Quinn's mother to be played by a different actress.

• Peckinpah ignored this and "Genesis" was filmed.

• At this point, Zicree's protests took on the form of modifying his Season 4 plans. He proposed the concept of the Humaggs, suggesting these were the products of the rape camps. He suggested that the vaguely defined superweapon had sterilized the Kromaggs, requiring the camps.

• Zicree believed that if this plot were present, it would force the episodes to focus on the sliders searching for Wade, giving him opportunities to resolve Wade's fate either via a guest-appearance or an offscreen mention.

• Zicree was met with resistance and refusal by Peckinpah as well as Bill Dial. Dial had been unable to find work in recent years until his friend Peckinpah hired him for SLIDERS and his loyalty was to Peckinpah.

• Zicree continued to argue for the Humagg storyline. This led to a rift between him, Peckinpah and Dial, who began to find him obnoxious.

• Zicree also continued to contribute corrective notes to completed scripts, seeking to distribute the task of rewrites among the producers.

• Dial refused to address the notes, declaring that all the scripts were adequate as written. Dial regularly refused to discuss stories in writers room meetings, preferring to play Solitaire on a computer.

• Zicree chastised Dial for his negligence and demanded Dial's full attention. Dial came to despise Zicree and soon, Peckinpah hated Zicree as well.

• When stories for the middle of the season were being determined, Zicree succeeded in getting two Humagg episodes commissioned due to the lack of alternatives on the table at the time.

• He was also writing "Slidecage" and an episode of DEEP SPACE NINE.

The Exodus Part 1

• According to TF: around this period, Peckinpah and Dial decided to drive Zicree off the show. They did this by destroying his Season 4 arc.

• Zicree's Season 4 arc was building to the revelation that Colin Mallory was an altered-Quinn clone created by Kromaggs.

• Dial and Peckinpah commissioned "Lipschitz Live," an episode with a Colin-double. They then declared that since a clone couldn't have a double, Zicree's plan for the Season 4 finale would need to be abandoned.

• They did this despite the fact that they had bought the Season 4 finale story from Zicree already.

• Zicree completed his work on "Slidecage" and gave up on actively contributing to SLIDERS, simply performing his managerial duties and letting Peckinpah, Dial and Chris Black carry on without Zicree's input.

• As I look at Season 4, it would seem to me that with no story editor reviewing scripts or overseeing their commissioning, various oddities resulted such as (a) Rembrandt acting like he never met Dr. Jensen in "Slide By Wire" (b) "Virtual Slide," "Net Worth," "Slide By Wire" and "Data World" being the same computer world concept four times over (c) the sliders knowing Kolitar by name in "Way Out West" even though it was never spoken onscreen in "Slidecage" (d) the Kromaggs issuing a kill order on the sliders despite "Common Ground" establishing the sliders were off limits and (e) a truly puzzling Season 4 finale.

• As articles indicate: the Season 4 budget was small. Only one story bought for Season 4, "God's Country," by David Gerrold, was not filmed.

• Season 4 could not afford to let anymore purchased stories go unused -- meaning that Zicree's purchased Season 4 finale story had to be scripted -- by someone -- and filmed. No alternatives could be bought.

• Bill Dial proceeded to take Zicree's story and remove the intended Season 4 arc elements. He then took what was left of the story and stretched it out to fill in the time, either by extending existing scenes to fill more acts than they'd been designed for or writing new scenes that simply reiterated previously stated information.

• This approach to screenwriting is also predominant in Season 5, in which anything expensive or complicated to film would be removed and the remaining material would be stretched to fill the resulting gaps.

Paradise Lost

• The original plot for "Revelations" as intended by Marc Scott Zicree was to begin with the sliders relaxing on a world in which Rembrandt would find a novel -- a science fiction novel with a plot that mirrored the human-Kromagg war.

• What follows is my extrapolation of how the basic story could have gone -- I gave you the vague outline in earlier E-mails. What follows is me (as opposed to Zicree) fleshing out the vague into the more specific. My speculations are in italics. Anything not in italics was a definite story element as communicated by Temporal Flux.

• The sliders would locate the author, who would help work out the secret of how to bypass the Slidecage.

• The sliders would then slide back to Kromagg Prime.

• Dial's script stretched what should have been no more than a teaser and a first act into the very end of the third act.

• The original idea was that the sliders would land on Kromagg Prime and instantly cause an alert to go off. Their arrival is detected; the human inhabitants believe the sliders are the first of a Kromagg invasion and must be met killed on sight by soldiers who've been preparing for a Kromagg incursion for almost two decades.

• In fleeing, Quinn is separated from Colin, Maggie and Rembrandt.

• As Colin, Maggie and Rembrandt evade the soldiers, Quinn searches for his birth parents.

• As Colin, Maggie and Rembrandt defend themselves, Colin begins to exhibit odd behaviour. He uses lethal force, casually murdering several of the soldiers without Rembrandt and Maggie seeing due to the confusion of the fight. They escape.

• Colin, Maggie and Rembrandt find a safe place to hide and look up information to find Mr. and Mrs. Mallory.

• Quinn locates his birth parents. They do not recognize him and believe him to be a Kromagg agent, either compromised or brainwashed. Quinn convinces them to hear him out, producing his microdot and a photograph of Colin, explaining that his foster parent-doubles hid him when his birth parents returned to Earth Prime for him.

• Mr. and Mrs. Mallory protest: they never left their son with doubles. Their son died in the human-Kromagg war. And they have never heard of anyone named Colin Mallory.

• We go back to Maggie and Rembrandt: Colin is holding them at gunpoint. They are his hostages; Colin will need them as leverage because if Quinn has found their 'parents,' then he now knows the truth.

• Quinn and his 'parents' realize: there is no Colin Mallory. Never has been. All the sliders were scanned on arrival; the man known as Colin who came through the vortex is genetically almost identical to Quinn -- a clone with surgical alterations to make him look like a relative.

• The invasion of Earth Prime, the appearance of Amanda Mallory, the microdot, Colin's convenient location -- all this has been staged by the Kromaggs to give them a way back to Kromagg Prime -- by sliding a Kromagg sleeper agent onto the Kromagg homeworld to shut down the Slidecage from within.

• Quinn and his 'parents' race for the Slidecage control facility, realizing the truth. They have to stop Colin.

• It's revealed that the Slidecage can be unlocked with the Mallorys' genetic code -- however, a clone wouldn't be able to access the controls. Nevertheless, Quinn is convinced that if the Kromaggs manipulated them this far, then Colin has some sort of plan for that place and that's where he'd go.

• Quinn begins to wonder: what else has been a trick? Was the Earth in "Genesis" really his homeworld? Was the invasion real or was what he saw of it staged? What happened to Wade?

• The Mallorys arrive at the Slidecage facility to find the guards murdered. Colin is inside with Quinn's friends; he orders Quinn to enter alone.

• Quinn complies, shouting questions to Colin over comm-link -- is the Colin he knows in there under the sleeper programming somewhere? Is anything of the brother he loved real?

• Colin mocks Quinn, declaring him to be an impulsive, gullible, impotent pawn, powerless and helpless -- completely controlled by the Kromaggs even now that he knows the truth, because Colin holds Maggie and Rembrandt's lives.

• Quinn confronts Colin, succeeding in trapping him in one of the control center's chambers and rescuing Maggie and Rembrandt. But Colin has triggered a self-destruct sequence for the facility to explode, which will shut down the Slidecage and open the door for the Kromaggs to return.

• Quinn uses his genetic signature -- the same as his 'father's' -- to shut down the self-destruct. But then he realizes that Colin has tricked him -- the self-destruct sequence was faked; what Colin really made him do was unlock the Slidecage.

• Colin unlocks his chamber -- Quinn never succeeded in locking him in. Colin congratulates Quinn: Quinn Mallory is the Kromagg Dynasty's greatest hero. He has achieved his mission. Now he can die.

• Rembrandt and Maggie make it outside the Slidecage facility, finding Mr. and Mrs. Mallory.
  

• Then suddenly, in the air above, red vortexes appear and Kromagg manta ships emerge. Filling the sky. The Mallorys, Rembrandt and Maggie look up in horror.

• Inside the facility, Quinn and Colin battle, Quinn desperately trying to immobilize the man he sees as a brother and Colin the sleeper agent trying to kill Quinn. Brother against 'brother' fighting --

• And the Kromagg ships descend upon this world in a triumphant homecoming.

• To be continued in Season 5.

The Last of Eden

• Dial's awkward rewrite of Zicree's plot involved ripping out most of the critical scenes.

• The approach of stretching and extending the remains resulted in massive plotholes, obvious filler and nonsensical characterization.

• Quinn and Colin have developed the means to bypass the Slidecage and have the coordinates for home. As Dial had removed the original outcome and decided on a wrong-Earth plot instead, he was required to provide some explanation for why the sliders make it to a completely different Earth.

• His explanation was that Isaac Clarke changed the coordinates -- which does not account for why Quinn and Colin wouldn't protest this or why they couldn't simply apply the bypass formula to the correct home coordinates.

• When all the sliders meet Mr. and Mrs. Mallory, they do not request the anti-Kromagg superweapon to liberate Earth Prime. Instead, it comes up in conversation incidentally. At this point, Quinn declares he will not be leaving Kromagg Prime and gives Rembrandt the timer to liberate Quinn's adopted and Kromagg-dominated Earth alone.

• Quite inexplicably, Rembrandt is untroubled by Quinn abandoning Earth Prime and its people -- and is then told by Quinn he must go to Dr. Clarke to procure the weapon -- even though it was previously established that the Mallorys created the weapon.

• This characterization is another "Mother and Child" level disaster of characterization, rendering Quinn as having abandoned his mission to liberate his adopted Earth, being uncaring about the fate of his mother and being indifferent to sending Rembrandt into a Kromagg war zone.

• This sequence of events also makes no sense: if the sliders now think Clarke has the weapon, why didn't they stick with him instead of approaching the Mallorys?

• Given that Quinn is the one who chose to search for the superweapon, why is he now uninterested in acquiring and deploying it?

• Why is this shift in his goals not addressed or remarked upon by Rembrandt? Why is Rembrandt unconcerned that Quinn is abandoning him?

• The reason these errors are present: writer Bill Dial sought to create a reason for Rembrandt to leave Maggie, Colin and Quinn alone with the Mallorys and needed to send Rembrandt to acquire exposition from Dr. Clarke about why this isn't the correct Kromagg Prime.

• These measures were  separation and stalling tactics designed to extend an underrunning script as the central plot of the story had been removed.

• Dr. Clarke's dialogue with Rembrandt is also nonsensical; he claims to have helped the sliders by providing the coordinates, except the sliders already had different coordinates which they inexplicably permitted Clarke to alter.
  Dr. Clarke claims he has evidence to convict the Mallorys for their war crimes, despite the episode clearly indicating that the Mallorys' anti-Kromagg weapon is known to the public with no consequences having come for two decades.

• Once again, this is Bill Dial attempting to stretch out the remaining fragments of Zicree's story, having thrown out the bulk of the material.

• Even with these measures -- measures that break the logic of this one episode, that break the character of Quinn Mallory, that break the Season 4 arc -- the episode still runs short.

• As a result, the final act is devoted to a lengthy, prolonged and content-free chase sequence.

• The episode ends with the vortex fired off a moving train yet inexplicably keeping pace with the train when it should be a speck in the distance.

• This rewrite has been performed in a lazy, slapdash, inconsistent fashion -- largely because Bill Dial disliked Zicree and was disinclined to treat Zicree's ideas with respect, particularly when this altered Season 4 finale had been done specifically to spite and demoralize Zicree.

The Exodus, Part 2

• This was Jerry O'Connell's final episode of SLIDERS.

• According to TF: Jerry had enjoyed his Season 4 producer role because it allowed him to coast. He could show up late or inebriated without repercussions or consequence.

• He now wanted to be executive producer of SLIDERS, not for creative reasons, but for more opportunities to coast and an increased salary.

• Indeed, his writing, directing and producing credits on Season 4 were primarily for financial interest; he never wrote, produced or directed after SLIDERS aside from a token credit on the film FIRST DAUGHTER (written during Season 4) and a TWO AND A HALF MEN Internet parody.

• Jerry sought the promotion but was not taken seriously by Universal.

• However, he found a stronger bargaining position when the Sci-Fi Channel missed his contractual deadline for ordering Season 5.

• Sci-Fi had never intended for Season 5, intending to draw SLIDERS' audience to Sci-Fi's original programming and then abandon SLIDERS.

• That was the reason for the long period with no new episodes of SLIDERS while shows like FIRST WAVE and WELCOME TO PARADOX and FARSCAPE aired new installments.

• The plan failed; SLIDERS' Season 4 ratings were too strong for Sci-Fi to cancel it if they could afford to renew -- but by this point, their money was tied up in the original programming. They had to find other avenues of finance.

• By the time Sci-Fi found the money and renewed, Jerry was no longer obligated to return to the series.
  Jerry offered to return if and only if he were promoted to Executive Producer. Universal refused to promote him. Jerry quit.

• Jerry offered to do six episodes of Season 5 so long as Charlie starred in all 18.

• David Peckinpah and Bill Dial refused to hire Charlie for any more episodes than Jerry.

• Negotiations continued. There were some personnel changes even without Jerry's issues: Peckinpah had been assigned to a different series, TURKS, meaning that while Peckinpah remained in charge of SLIDERS, Bill Dial would become the de-facto lead producer.

• Dial hired "Virtual Slide" and "Lipschitz Live" writer Keith Damron to replace Marc Scott Zicree as the new Season 5 story editor.

• Dial and Damron were now faced with having to write Jerry O'Connell out.

• Dial changed his mind about Zicree's Season 4 finale.

• He decided he would do the Season 4 finale after all -- as Season 5, episode 5.

• In Season 5, episode 5, the sliders would land on the real Kromagg Prime, Colin would be exposed as a clone and a traitor, the invasion of Earth Prime would be revealed as a ruse.

• Colin would be stranded on the real Kromagg Prime. Quinn would open a gateway to the real Earth Prime -- but fail to take Maggie and Rembrandt with him.

• The next 12 episodes of SLIDERS would feature Maggie and Rembrandt with a new slider, a scientist named Melissa Hunter from the real Earth Prime who had worked with the FBI in recreating Quinn's slide-tech and gotten lost in the multiverse.

• Jerry's sixth and final episode of Season 5 would be the series finale; Quinn would return to wrap up the show.

• Then Jerry declared that he would return for no episodes of SLIDERS at all. He and Charlie quit.

• Jerry declared in a chat session that he didn't want to return for Season 5 due to a budget cut. There was no budget cut; this was a lie.

• Jerry would later change his story to quitting over a "contractual dispute" without elaborating on this.

• When directly asked what he wanted to do as Executive Producer, Jerry replied that he thought SLIDERS had become like too "bubble gum" and he wanted it to be more like THE X-FILES -- utterly meaningless.
  Temporal Flux does not believe Jerry had any creative ambitions for SLIDERS whatsoever.

• As a result of Jerry's departure and his refusal to perform an exit story, the Season 4 Kromagg arc would never be resolved.

Dust

• Charlie O'Connell went on to feature in a season of The Bachelor in which his constant state of intoxication made him realize he was an alcoholic. He sought treatment and, I believe, recovered.

• Jerry O'Connell felt no regret about leaving SLIDERS.

• He believed that he would be a Tom Cruise level movie star, having achieved a certain level of fame for SLIDERS, JERRY MAGUIRE and SCREAM 2.

• His performances won him rave reviews, although they were mostly the John Rhys-Davies coached performances of Seasons 1 - 2.

• In interviews, he spoke of his numerous female conquests, his superior athleticism in fencing tournaments and generally portrayed himself as a goofy ladies man and teen idol heartthrob.

• Jerry's opinion was that SLIDERS was a hit because the audience found him attractive, either as an object of desire or as a surrogate figure.

• Immediately post-SLIDERS, he chose roles that flattered his ego as an attractive male specimen: the young astronaut in MISSION TO MARS, the leading man Lothario of the sex comedy TOMCATS, the leading man of the film DOWN UNDER. Jerry chose roles that were largely about his looks.

• MISSION TO MARS was a critical failure and Jerry's performance was considered serviceable but bland.

• TOMCATS was considered to be a masterwork of cinematic incompetence with crass, ugly, sexist humour and Jerry's performance consisted of sneering and mugging for the camera.

• At this point, Jerry's fan following was largely depleted; the fan sites ceased to be maintained. Jerry had made a grave miscalculation, mistaking SLIDERS fans for Jerry O'Connell fans, something that became clear when TOMCATS bombed.

• Jerry's appeal in Seasons 1 - 2: he was an attractive young man playing a sensitive, earnest, heartfelt scientist of intelligence and moral integrity. This performance had been achieved through John Rhys-Davies coaching Jerry.

• Without John to guide him, Jerry's performances had no thought, no detail, no consideration, no characterization -- just vacant blandness or clumsy comedy.

• Jerry also destroyed his earnest, sincere image after numerous girlfriends revealed that he had drunkenly cheated on them and in interviews where he bragged about random hookups with fans.

• In a final, desperate bid at the movie star career he craved, Jerry signed to a Jerry Bruckheimer film.

• For this film, DOWN UNDER, Jerry was keen to film in Australia for this buddy comedy.

• Jerry was nearly fired off this film.

• Ever since SLIDERS moved to Los Angeles, Jerry had received many invitations to nightclubs and bars and parties.

• His star value and attractive appearance drew additional customers, after all. He was drinking heavily until the early mornings. He would stagger home and eat pizza and other takeout foods. By 2002 and shortly before DOWN UNDER was to film, Jerry was flabby and overweight. His performances were Season 4 poor or worse and now he didn't even have his looks.

• DOWN UNDER producer Bruckheimer threatened to fire Jerry. Jerry agreed to get in shape, hiring a personal trainer to do a complete overhaul of Jerry's diet and lifestyle. Jerry agreed to quit drinking, to quit eating fried and processed foods, and to commit to the regular exercise he'd stopped around late Season 4 of SLIDERS.

• Jerry got back in shape and found that he enjoyed sobriety. He filmed DOWN UNDER. It bombed with test audiences, although they reacted positively to one scene -- a dream sequence with a computer generated kangaroo.

• As a result, the entire film was reshot to make the kangaroo the star and renamed KANGAROO JACK. Jerry ended up playing second banana to a cartoonishly rendered marsupial.

• This was the end of the line for Jerry's movie star career; he could no longer be taken seriously as a bankable leading man and he was also not worth his price when more committed and capable actors with lower paycheques were available and hadn't alienated their fanbase or accumulated so many failures.

• This crushing failure of ambition actually turned out to be a good thing for Jerry.

• Needing work, he turned back to the medium he'd thought himself above -- television. He accepted a recurring and then regular role in CROSSING JORDAN with Jill Hennessy and began to rebuild his career as a working class actor who, if not at home, would be on the set or in the gym. He began taking acting classes again.

• In 2012, in a sadly offline YouTube video, Jerry O'Connell did an interview and spoke extensively about SLIDERS.

• He said that he often watched the episodes with his children and wife.

• He kept, in his kitchen, a Season 1 photo of himself with his fellow cast members.

• He said that John Rhys-Davies had been a mentor and father figure who had sold his car to Jerry. Jerry said he loved SLIDERS and regretted that the cast broke up. He said he would gladly reprise his role as Quinn if given the chance, but that NBCUniversal had no interest in reviving the property. When asked why the show had been so loved, Jerry admitted he didn't really understand it, but he loved the family environment and being with Cleavant, Sabrina and John. He missed them all.

• In 2014, Tracy Torme received a phone call from Jerry. They had not spoken since Season 3. Jerry expressed his longing to see SLIDERS revived.

• They made some calls. Cleavant was interested. Sabrina was in Rome and not available. John could not be reached. NBCUniversal was its usual unresponsive self. Jerry reached out to Funny or Die, the website, and performed in a spoof Kickstarter for a SLIDERS movie.

• Why?

• I have two theories. My first is that Jerry, now sober, a married man and a father of two, had done some hard thinking about his life and why his movie career never took off and finally figured it out. It's not the actor. It's the character he creates.

• The key to becoming a movie star is playing an iconic, genre-definitive character who inspires the imagination. Indiana Jones. Spider-Man. Batman. James Bond, Mr. Spock. Dr. House. Superman. Lara Croft. Doctor Who.

• In his career, Jerry had only ever played one character like that. Quinn Mallory was and remains Jerry's one and only shot at pop culture immortality.

• My other theory is that Jerry simply missed John, Sabrina and Cleavant -- and with John getting on in years, Jerry longed for a final reunion of all four. He wished to see the sliders reunited. Restored. Reborn.

• Don't we all?

What I find super-weird is your peculiar fixation on Batman's age. I admit, I didn't find your feedback on SLIDERS REBORN to be super-detailed aside from being your usual encouraging and positive self -- but I was half-expecting you to protest Quinn being 43-years-old given your odd animosity towards Ben Affleck being 43-years-old.

**

SUPERGIRL continues to be enjoyable (to me) but critically flawed and deficient in many, many areas with curious choices that don't make any sense to me. Areas of concern:

Winn and Jimmy Olsen: There's an odd redundancy here; the show simply doesn't need both Winn and Jimmy to be Kara's civilian friend. It's like there's one role (best friend and ally) split across two actors (the tall one and the shorter one). At the pilot scripting stage, both roles should have been made one character -- probably Jimmy -- and probably someone like Percy Daggs III (Wallace from VERONICA MARS) should have been cast in a geekboy role. The show does some neat stuff with Winn and Jimmy stumbling over each other's roles, but the presence of one always feels like it's at the expense of the other. It'd probably be best to find Winn some other role -- perhaps as Alex's helper at the DEO rather than Kara's helper at Catco.

General Sam Lane: The Sam Lane character doesn't work. His characterization is completely nonsensical and it's not remotely plausible that he hasn't been relieved of command. He orders Supergirl to beat up his Red Tornado robot and then gets angry at her for beating it up because beating it up makes it go rogue. His distaste for Jimmy is, as far as what's onscreen indicates, due to being unable to control Jimmy, yet he is shown to be consistently incapable of controlling his responsibilities. When tasked with rescuing a captured Hank Henshaw, Lane engages in a foolish plan, falls into a trap and gets an entire task force killed except for one person. He's never had a single onscreen success. He looks incompetent. The character is simply there for Hank Henshaw to score points as a more reasonable authority figure. I'd hire Colonel Rickman to run the army again before letting this Sam lane get within five feet of it.

Alex: I love Alex. Great performer. Terrific character. Her presence makes either Winn or Jimmy superfluous. But it highlights how Kara has no post-Krypton/pre-Pilot backstory. I have almost no sense of what Kara was like as a child on Earth or why she chose the field she does or what brought her to where she is now. It's odd how the actresses really convince that they're adoptive sisters, but the scripts have no idea who Kara is beyond Melissa Benoist's excellent performance.

Maxwell Lord: I think he's intriguing; he's a Lex Luthor type character who has a reasonable argument and isn't afraid to get his hands dirty to do what's right, but he also has a painful lack of scruples in achieving otherwise reasonable goals. I'm finding the sexual tension with Alex a little too overt, at least at this early point in their association.

Clark Kent: His texting Kara without ever flying in to talk onscreen is ridiculous.

In terms of what might have happened had the show been renewed -- likely, Dial and Peckinpah would have remained in charge of the show. Assuming the budget didn't drop, I imagine Season 6 opens with Maggie, Mallory and Diana sliding after Rembrandt. They discover it's the Earth Prime of "Genesis," but everyone is dead or gone; the Kromaggs have taken the planet for all it's worth and Rembrandt was too late. However, a Spinning Topps record with songs Rembrandt doesn't recognize makes him realize this wasn't his home Earth. The sliders slide out, deciding to continue their meanderings and we get more of the same rubbish of most Season 5 episodes.

In terms of what *should* have happened -- I've generally felt that SLIDERS, even in Season 5, should have ended with something to indicate that the status quo would be restored. Back on the old Bboard, Tom Holste offered a solidified view of this: he wished we could have seen Rembrandt come out of the vortex and discover Quinn, Wade and Arturo waiting for him -- inexplicably, miraculously restored and reunited -- either through cameos or body doubles and reusing old footage and sound clips.

The episode could have just ended on that note. There was no need to worry about having to do a Season 6 premiere of Cleavant talking to archive footage and body doubles. There wasn't going to be a Season 6. They'd never have to explain it. The show could have ended on this joyful, mystifying yet welcome note of hope and wonder.

I've had many years to think about this -- and I believe that Quinn, Wade and Arturo were waiting for Rembrandt on the other side. I can feel it.

Well, Slide Override and pilight could still be right that it's too confusing. I dunno. In my mind -- the new viewer is going to be misled into thinking that VHS-Quinn is a double and they'll be left to think that. Even the end-scene would simply suggest that VHS-Quinn is a double reaching out to another double. The issue of Smarter-Quinn won't come up for them -- only a fan would think about that, so that's why there'd be a web comic.

However, Matt and Nigel, when reviewing my stuff, have constantly raised the issue that my plots are confusing and try to cram too many maneuvers or plot mechanisms to possibly work -- and I frequently hit that point in scripts and end up using TV-style editing or hyperbole or humour or I simply alter the story on the spot. So, when I find Slide Override and pilight making precisely the same criticisms that two other editors have made, I'm inclined to give it due consideration.

The truth is that a lot of these plot holes are in some ways deliberate. I want the SLIDERS reboot to have a fortysomething Quinn exploring the abandoned laboratory of his youth, wondering if maybe, despite his complete and total failure, there was something worthwhile in husks and fragments of the world of science he left behind. I want the post-2000 events to be vague, unknowable and cosmically indescribable. These are all metaphors for how I feel about SLIDERS.

This may be why they don't make logical sense in the plot and require awkward half-measures -- the basement still has all the equipment and a working VCR! Sliding was erased in a way that Kromaggs can't rebuild it but our Quinn can?! How can Smarter-Quinn still exist?! I keep choosing emotional sense over logical sense. Slide Override and pilight have fair points. Would either of you care to be retained as my script editor?

WADE: "Why the heck was all that junk still in your basement? You gave up on science two decades ago."
QUINN: "My mom wouldn't throw it out -- she said she still held out hope. Even when I'd given up on myself, she still believed in me."
ARTURO: "Then she was a wise woman, Mr. Mallory."
REMBRANDT: "So what you're saying is that if she'd cleaned house once in the last twenty years, you'd never have built that machine, you'd never have discovered sliding -- AND I WOULDN'T BE HERE!"

I don't think a virgin slidehead would see the VHS tapes as anything more than an artifact left behind by a Quinn-double 20 years previous. The veiled revelation that the Quinn-double was actually this Quinn would just be a small, subtle note for the fans.

To be absolutely frank, I suspect you and Slide Override have spotted some recurring flaws in my writing -- flaws that I tend to cover with jokes. And since the jokes have not been written -- well, the flaws are glaring. Sorry.

Here are my notes on "My Brother's Keeper":

• In a rare development, all the trivia for this episode comes from me.

• This episode was written by Doug Molitor.

• Very interesting man: he was a 1987 JEOPARDY contestant who won four times and competed in the championship for that year.

• He also wrote for tons of shows: POLICE ACADEMY, HE-MAN, NINJA TURTLES, JAMES BOND JR., BILL AND TED, BEETLEJUICE, FREE WILLY, SINBAD THE SAILOR, CARMEN SANDIEGO, X-MEN EVOLUTION -- a lot of children's TV and animation.

• He is also one of the most despised people in SLIDERS fandom, although not for this episode, which was generally considered to be okay.

• In 1999, Sci-Fi held an online contest: Slide It Yourself. This was a contest where fans could submit ideas for a SLIDERS episode.

• Ten ideas would be chosen to be developed into a beat sheet and three ideas would be chosen to be developed into a script.

• The prize for being the best script, as decided by the judges, would be a series finale script autographed by Cleavant Derricks and a leather jacket worn by either Cleavant or Tembi Locke and signed by the star who wore it. SCIFI.COM T-shirts would also be awarded for the top three ideas chosen to be developed into scripts.

• Doug Molitor would be the one choosing the ideas to be made into beat sheets and the beat sheets to be turned into scripts. His credentials were his extensive TV writing experience and his one episode of SLIDERS. The other judge was someone named Patrice Wright who, from what I can tell, wrote for the Sci-Fi Channel's web content division.

• The Slide It Yourself contest is considered by SLIDERS fandom to be a complete and utter disaster.

• The first problem was in Stage 1: pitching brief ideas. There was a lot of blatant plagiarism: Temporal Flux of DoC submitted five ideas and two of them were simply copied by other posters. There was absolutely no moderation done; none of the submissions were held in queue for initial review, so the submissions became a pile of incoherent posts.

• Molitor and Wright were clearly unable to fully review all these submissions.

• As a result, of the ten ideas chosen to be made into Stage 2 beat sheets, two were Temporal Flux's ideas but attributed to others. One was stolen wholesale, the other mutilated.

• Stage 2 made it very clear: Molitor and Wright had exercised poor judgement in several of their choices.

• Temporal Flux had proposed a superhero story that was misattributed to a plagiarist and a story about the majority of the population being mentally ill that had been copied and altered into a world where the majority of the population had low IQs and anyone with above average intelligence was lobotomized.

• How a modern civilization of idiots could function, measure intelligence or perform lobotomies was not explained.

• One pitch was that the sliders encounter a forest fire. That's it.

• Inexplicably, this bare idea with no sense of characterization or world-building was deemed worthy of being fleshed out.

• One pitch was about a world where no black people never invented any kind of technology, so this world had no potato chips or light bulbs or blood banks -- which suggests a fundamentally unworkable perspective on technological development.

• One pitch was about how it was illegal for anyone to not be part of a rock band. It's impossible to think that Molitor and Wright were reviewing these pitches with any thought to quality.

• That said, there were some neat ideas: one where Rembrandt is living the same day over and over again (derivative but intriguing), one where Rembrandt wakes up to discover time has been rewound to the Pilot (quite good), one where Y2K has crippled all technology and Diana's double is to blame, one where copyright law has run amok, and one where Mallory meets a double who is still in a wheelchair.

• Actor Robert Floyd made his one and only message board post to say he thought this last one was a cool idea.

• In Stage 2, each of the 10 ideas had a message board thread where any poster could post on the concepts, offering feedback and ideas. Chaos resulted; the poster who'd originated the idea found themselves deluged by opposing and unrelated story ideas.

• For example, Temporal Flux, who eventually got credit for his superhero concept, had conceived a story where the sliders visit an Earth where there is a superhero who fights crime.

• The sliders observe, however, that the superhero's powers are all vortex based; this superhero's superpowers are created through repurposed sliding technology and the sliders, in trying to learn more about the superhero's tech, accidentally get involved in a plot to destroy the hero.

• The hero's identity would never be revealed, but the story would heavily hint that it was Quinn Mallory under that mask.

• TF found himself buried in comments from posters suggesting that the superhero story be changed to remove the superhero, have Dr. Geiger in the Quinn role and to turn the story into a Kromagg invasion.

• Realmkeeper's idea for Mallory meeting a double who is still crippled was buried in bizarre recommendations such as Mallory-2 being an evil villain who was faking his paralysis and planning to take over the world and the idea that Mallory-2 be replaced with Dr. Geiger.

• Matt Hutaff's idea to have Rembrandt explore what his life would be if he'd never gone sliding was buried in bizarre proposals like a teaser where the sliders see a man fall off a building and find a timer on the corpse and to bring Dr. Geiger into the plot.

• Once again, there was no moderation on these threads, so the people who'd originated these ideas were not being permitted to lead the development of their ideas and the discussions were impenetrable and totally unproductive in fleshing out these story concepts.

• For Stage 3, Molitor and Wright selected posters from each thread and assigned them to 10 different teams, one for each idea, with the poster who'd originated the idea serving as the lead writer.

• This team arrangement made little to no sense for the stronger pitches (Mallory meets a crippled double, the sliders meet a superhero who uses sliding tech to fake his powers, Rembrandt discovers time's been rewound to the Pilot).

• The people who had originated these pitches were capable of completing their own stories; forcing eight people to write one story would only create an unreadable mess.

• The team arrangement was also deeply unhelpful for the weaker pitches where the lack of a strong premise meant a lack of strong leadership. The majority of the resulting beat sheets were an incoherent mess.

• The idea had been that Slide It Yourself would let contestants feel what it was like to write for television. But in television, you rarely have eight to nine people working on a single script and overruling each other; generally, a writer does a draft and may do additional drafts or may see their material rewritten by a story editor or another writer.

• To be fair, many of the pitch leaders were pleased with the beat sheets. Matt and Temporal Flux were happy with "Legacy" and "Opportunity Cost."

• But I'd argue that Matt Hutaff and Temporal Flux are perfectly capable of writing stories without having to fight through 7 - 8 people.

• For Stage 4, three ideas were chosen to be developed into scripts and compete for the first place prize.

• Quite inexplicably, the ideas chosen for Stage 4 were the one with a world where everyone has a low IQ, the one where black inventors don't exist and so neither do indoor toilets, and the one where anyone not in a rock band is breaking the law -- the three with obvious logical errors and historical impossibilities that are glaring even from a one-sentence summary.

• It is impossible to discern any meaningful standards of quality from Molitor and Wright regarding their selections for the Stage 4 scripts.

• I can only speculate that they were not being sufficiently compensated for the time needed to fully review all the beat sheets and discussions, and so chose the story ideas where there was the least in-fighting, even though the in-fighting resulted due to the uncontrolled and poorly organized nature of the contest where strong ideas were being diluted by unrelated concepts.

• The script set on a world where the vast majority of the population is stupid won first prize.

• I've never been able to identify any further writing from Patrice Wright or find any credits to her name, which fills me with relief.

• Doug Molitor went on to write numerous scripts for children's TV shows and one can only hope he never tried to teach screenwriting again as all of his students would have to spend years unlearning his lessons.

• The entire mess is archived here. https://web.archive.org/web/20021226003 … /siy.cgi/1

I have the comics. I'll restore them near the end of the week when I have some time.

Yeah. You could recast. I just think using the original cast is preferable. I do think that it's inevitable that SLIDERS move into NEXT GENERATION territory. John Rhys-Davies is in his 70s; you can't have him do five years of random sliding. Which is why I'd think of this as four Netflix movies a season or a 13-episode first season. I think the first season would have to be the one and only season of random sliding with the original four -- at which point, I think the sliders would have to make it home. If there is a second season, the sliders could be sliding in a more controlled manner and new characters could be brought in as younger sliders. Fans are always talking about a NEXTGEN approach; I think you'd need to give the first generation their due in order to create a good foundation to build on for the future.

It's possible my bullet points were unclear -- but Matt's idea was that these are not doubles of the original sliders. These are the original sliders. But they have forgotten Seasons 1 - 5. The video cassettes, I think, are a great way to bring in continuity but isolate it entirely to these fragments of video diaries. The video diaries would serve the role that Smarter!Quinn played in the Pilot of explaining sliding to Quinn. New viewers, however, would just think the videos are from a double of Quinn.

I would say that part of my anger towards sliders5125 is that I do indeed perceive his response to my work as a personal attack. "Your work would be better if there were no original ideas in it, only ideas lifted and photocopied from other people's work." But even in the abstract, I find that to be a repellent and disgusting attitude whether aimed at me or others. To me, centophobia -- a prejudice against new ideas -- is no less repulsive than homophobia or racism in its contempt for the different and unfamiliar. The idea that something is new and therefore must be bad or inferior is unacceptable and hateful.

I've been critical of the writing in this thread, but my criticisms are very simply: few of these ideas would serve to revive SLIDERS in the twenty-first century. pilight and Chaser9 are two of the few who've suggested something that would work, and I think pilight's revised gender-swap idea is quite clever with one episode per season addressing one of the original cast members while treating that cast member as a guest-star whom the new viewers would see as an original character. I think that is brilliant.

I like pilight's idea for a gender-swapped Wade and Quinn and my advice was to make it more entry-level, pointing out that it's very good until attempting to tie it into the classic series. I thought it brilliant to set the series in the original continuity and side-step the age of the actors by featuring a female-Quinn who's the same age as the 1995-Quinn. Very clever.

I like pilight's idea of having the gender-swapped sliders meet the original sliders later on in the series instead of the first episode. That's probably a good way to handle it. This would be tender and touching for the old fans, but putting if farther into the run of the series would prevent it from being confusing for the new ones.

My criticisms are that few if any of the ideas here are entry-level introductions to SLIDERS. That anyone not familiar with SLIDERS would be confused by these stories. That is a perfectly reasonable and legitimate issue to raise.

As for you, you pissed me off.

I presented a simple, effective, straightforward story for a SLIDERS reboot.

I provided Matt's concept for how to make this rebooted SLIDERS a subtle sequel to the original series:

And you replied:

You arrogantly declared that a simple, effective, straightforward story should become a tangled and convoluted "The Seer Part 2" / "Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome Part 2" -- and then you said that your lazy sequel was somehow "better" than what I presented.

You have never shared a single idea that wasn't Part 2 of a previous story. I am appalled that someone like you -- someone with no original ideas at all -- would tell me that the way to improve my material, TF's material and Matt's material is to turn their welcoming, approachable, entry-level story into an unfathomable mess of continuity references.

I find it outrageous, arrogant, offensive and insulting for you to declare that you can improve plots by removing any new ideas and replacing them with your overstretched threads from other people's stories.

I have also been getting a crazy amount of spam from your E-mail address. I'd reproduce them here, but the messages were sent to my junk mail and deleted.

I think that, when telling a story, you can't take it for granted that people care. You have to earn that. And with SLIDERS, I think you would have to earn it from the ground up. The Season 6 stories in this thread assume that the viewer cares; they take no effort to create a relationship, acting instead like it already exists. It's the equivalent of a stranger suddenly showing up in your living room and making themselves comfortable instead of meeting you in an appropriate setting and developing a mutual association.

Why is it defeatism to acknowledge the challenge of continuity and find a way around it? Why is it defeatism to try to cut through confusion and find a way back to what made SLIDERS unique, special, heartfelt, exciting, brilliant, clever and suited to the weekly TV format?

Why is it defeatism to find a cheeky, amusing, daring way to restart the series while incorporating nods to the past that don't confuse a new audience?

It seems to me that the actual defeatism would be for a fan to look at SLIDERS' tangled narrative and declare it must be addressed point by point no matter how incomprehensible and baffling such a story would be, no matter how many nails this would hammer into SLIDERS' coffin. The real defeatism is to say that SLIDERS is unfit for a general audience and has no choice but to remain obscure and irrelevant because directly resolving "The Seer" 15 years after it aired is the only meaningful priority. That, to me, is the thinking of a fan who has completely given up on SLIDERS.

So, Maggie's singing. I don't get it. When has Maggie ever been portrayed as someone with a penchant for musical performance? Were there a lot of karaoke nights on that military base? Yes, Kari is a singer -- but why is Maggie a singer? And, as Tom and Cory noted, why is Maggie being portrayed as someone who shrinks from a fight in "Data World"? And why was Maggie telling Rembrandt, "You're the man, act like it" in "Lipschitz Live?"

We have with "Way Out West" a script by Chris Black, who seems to be obsessed with Maggie's character. Every script he ever writes for SLIDERS in Seasons 4 - 5 are Maggie centric: "Common Ground" focuses on Maggie and Kromanus, "The Alternateville Horror" lavishes attention on the Maggie-double and Maggie's horrified reaction, "Slide By Wire" is a Maggie episode, "Way Out West" has Maggie in the lead role for half the story. Except -- looking at his work, I must come the the conclusion that Chris Black isn't interested in exploring Maggie. He's interested in giving Kari Wuhrer things to do because he enjoys her work, so she gets to face off against Kromaggs, play double roles and sing.

The end result is that there is no Maggie, there's simply a role where different aspects of Kari's skills are fed into a script. None of it adds up to a coherent character. In-universe, Maggie is a former spy and fighter pilot, but the fact that she's a military agent and soldier only occasionally informs her character. This is a Marine who cowers in a fight, defers to men in conflict, performs skillfully as a lounge singer, goes from having no human resource skills in Season 3 (what kind of spy is so incapable of getting along with people?) to being a random mess of characteristics in Season 4.

The only way to justify any of this onscreen material is if Maggie isn't actually a former spy, soldier and Pilot, but instead a Hollywood MTV hostess turned actress who somehow ended up a slider and has some fighting skills from training for roles but has little real combat experience -- and in "The Exodus," she was just job shadowing for a role but somehow got mixed up with the real Maggie Beckett in the confusion of the pulsar.

Oddly, however -- Chris Black could have sorted this out. I think the key to reconciling all this would be to highlight how Maggie was once a spy. As a female spy, playing the seductress and the harmless female would be essential. The breast implants could be something she did to make it easier to make men dismiss her or to make her more convincing in her various cover roles. The trauma of Steven's death in Season 3 caused a split personality that resolved itself during the time she slid alone with Quinn. The singing? It's from one of the undercover roles she performed on a spy mission. The cowering from fights? The truth is that much of Maggie's work was tricking people out of information; she's been combat trained but she rarely had to fight or kill anyone in the field. Maggie is constantly being written as a skin for Kari Wuhrer the actress; maybe it could've been restructured into Maggie Beckett the espionage agent.

Thoughts on "Mother and Child": Cory talked about how he totally lost interest in this episode at the halfway mark. He didn't care about the Kromagg trying to get the antidote to the virus, he didn't care about the action. And I really understood what he meant. The second Wade was raised and dismissed, it was impossible to stay invested in the episode because it focused on things that could not possibly be more important than Wade. There's also a joking, lighthearted tone to the scenes that is completely at odds with the Wade plot. Rembrandt joking about getting a dog, Quinn joking about a continental breakfast -- these lines desperately needed to be played with bleak despair. Had Jerry played Quinn as emotionally disintegrating after the teaser and the episode built to a crazed, violent outburst, the episode would probably have held the attention by holding Wade in the heart of the story.

**

Thoughts on "Way Out West" -- I laughed when Cory and Tom said they couldn't quite tell that Colin had been shot in the teaser and they in fact got the impression that Rembrandt had seen Colin get shot and thrown him off the carriage as dead weight. It was also interesting how Cory, Tom and EP.COM's Mike Truman all took issue with Colin's gunslinger skills resolving the story, saying that it was awkward to have Colin declare that violence solves nothing when in this story, violence solves everything. Interesting and odd -- because from what I could tell, Colin's gunplay only resolved a few immediate threats -- he saved Quinn and Rembrandt from being hanged and defended the widow and her daughter.

Tom and Cory observe that Kolitar, merely wounded at the end, could easily return with his gang and that Colin hadn't solved anything. That was precisely the point of Chris Black's story: the plot of forcing people off their land is resolved by Ben Siegel refusing to invest in tyranny and then discovering the land can be purchased for reasonable prices. That is what defeats Kolitar; Kolitar has nothing to fight for now that the land sales have been made fairly and without violence. Colin's gunfight didn't resolve the story; fairness and equality did. That was Kolitar's defeat and his desire to shoot it out with Colin was a primitive desire for violence that would have won him nothing because he'd lost his stake in the land once Ben decided to buy it rather than take it.

The reason I suspect this fell under the radar of Tom, Cory and Mike: the sliders don't actually contribute to fair deals being made; they find out about it after the fact.

I have no real fondness for Colin or Charlie O'Connell -- but I confess that I really like his performance in this episode. I enjoyed his instant cover story to Ben Siegel. I love the quiet, burning rage he plays when facing off against Kolitar. This episode actually makes me feel bad about refusing to include Colin in SLIDERS REBORN, although not bad enough to change my mind about it.

**

Tom and Cory noted that "Virtual Slide," "Net Worth," "Slide By Wire" and "Data World" are horribly similar in being computer driven worlds. The impression I'm getting -- the story editor had given up on the series. TF revealed that Marc Scott Zicree was hands-off as of "Slidecage" and after "Lipschitz Live" was used as an excuse to destroy the Season 4 arc, I can't imagine Zicree seeing much point in continuing to contribute creatively. The similarity of all these pitches gives me the sense that no one was bothering to vet them or didn't see any reason to try given he'd simply be overruled out of spite.

Behind the Scenes Information Courtesy of Temporal Flux

What Chaser9 and I said is that only 20 people are so well-acquainted with the the minutae of the series, as you put it, that only 20 people or so could possibly want to see:

• Rembrandt emerging from the vortex in "The Seer"

• A reunion with the Professor who was left behind on the Azure Gate Bridge World

• A return to the world of "The Seer"

• The splitting the Quinns

• The sticking of Colin

• Discovering Colin is a Kromagg-clone and sleeper agent

• The liberation of Earth Prime from the Kromaggs

• The explanation that the Kromaggs of "Invasion" were Asian Kromaggs and the Kromaggs of Season 4 were European Kromaggs

• The revelation that the Earth of "Genesis" isn't the Earth in the Pilot

• The revelation that the Wade in "Requiem" was a clone

• The revelation that Wade escaped the Kromaggs as early as "Genesis"

• The final confrontation between the sliders and Logan St. Clair

• A closing exit story for Mallory, Maggie and Diana

• The culmination of the plot in which the FBI was attempting to find the sliders

• The explanation of what happened to Michael, Diana, Michelle and Henry the Dog

• The secret of why Quinn stopped wearing glasses after the Pilot

I've seen the series enough for most people and I wouldn't want to see any of these bullet points. They would be a convoluted, confusing story even for people who remember all this stuff.

What makes SLIDERS special is this: the sliders are lost in the multiverse, exploring parallel worlds, trying to find a way back home. Simple. Effective. Beautiful. The above bullet points do not speak to that unique, powerful, mythic appeal.

None of the Season 6 ideas are in any way about four people lost in the multiverse, exploring parallel Earths, trying to find a way back home.  They're all, instead, about how muddled a TV show becomes when actor-producer-network conflicts control every creative decision.

Which leaves me to ask you and the other Season 6 supporters: what is so wrong with simplicity? Why is it a problem for a new SLIDERS to be straightforward, entry-level, ground-floor material? What is so wrong with the Temporal Flux + Matt Hutaff solution that even that had to be dressed up with some bizarre conspiracy theory where Rembrandt is sabotaging sliding?

The (updated for 2015) Temporal Flux vision of a reboot:

• Wade Welles is a tech journalist who failed to build a life beyond reviewing smartphones and laptops.

• Rembrandt Brown is a coffee bar owner who failed to hang onto his 15 minutes of fame.

• Professor Arturo is a genius who failed to find a career outside of writing high school study guides for science students.

• Quinn Mallory is a tax accountant who lost his passion for science after failing to create anti-gravity -- but twenty years after giving up, he realizes that he discovered something else instead.

• SLIDERS: A journey through what could be and might have been. Sometimes, getting lost is the best way to be found.

Is your alternative route for introducing SLIDERS to a new audience better than that? Is it simpler? Is it more enticing? Is it more entry-level? Or is it just a convoluted journey into confusion?

Matt came up with a simple way to bring this reboot method into continuity:

• Quinn in 2015 will find video diaries from the Quinn of the 1995 series.

• The video journals will explain the sliding concept to the 2015 Quinn.

• The journals will later have the 1995 Quinn reveal that due to an interdimensional war, he has found a way to alter history to remove sliding from reality.

• This brief journal will reveal to the fans that the older doubles are the original sliders, just living in an altered timeline where sliding's discovery is delayed to the present. New viewers will not realize this, nor do they need to.

Is your alternative route less complicated? More effective? More welcoming to new viewers? Or are you just writing Part 2 of "The Seer"?

What is so wrong with this simple, effective reboot idea? What is so deficient and unacceptable about this simple, welcoming pitch that it has to have Kromaggs and unstuck men and Wrong Professors making things right? What is so horrible about this beautiful storytelling platform that every new version of it must be a Season 6 premiere that's 15 years too late?

SLIDERS. The sliders are lost in the multiverse, exploring parallel worlds, trying to find a way back home. That's something special. All this:

• Rembrandt emerging from the vortex in "The Seer"

• A reunion with the Professor who was left behind on the Azure Gate Bridge World

• A return to the world of "The Seer"

• The splitting the Quinns

• The sticking of Colin

• Discovering Colin is a Kromagg-clone and sleeper agent

• The liberation of Earth Prime from the Kromaggs

• The explanation that the Kromaggs of "Invasion" were Asian Kromaggs and the Kromaggs of Season 4 were European Kromaggs

• The revelation that the Earth of "Genesis" isn't the Earth in the Pilot

• The revelation that the Wade in "Requiem" was a clone

• The revelation that Wade escaped the Kromaggs as early as "Genesis"

• The final confrontation between the sliders and Logan St. Clair

• A closing exit story for Mallory, Maggie and Diana

• The culmination of the plot in which the FBI was attempting to find the sliders

• The explanation of what happened to Michael, Diana, Michelle and Henry the Dog

• The secret of why Quinn stopped wearing glasses after the Pilot

That's just nonsense. It shows how anyone can make something more complicated; the actual challenge is making things simple.

I had to read this five times before I understood that it was a gender swap. This is actually a very clever way of bypassing the original actors having aged out of their roles. (I suggested the gender swap in an earlier post.)

The overall plot you suggest, however, is a convoluted and incoherent mess. Very simply -- your material would be stronger if you just had these gender-swapped, twentysomething versions of Wade and Quinn discovering sliding and going on an adventure with only subtle efforts to tie into the classic series. Your efforts to do so overtly result in confusion, alienation and the inability to appeal to those new viewers I was talking about.

The other thing I'd advise against is the two additional sliders being from a world that isn't 'our world.' The storytelling engine of SLIDERS was very carefully designed: the sliders' home Earth was ours aside from very subtle, minor differences. As a result, the sliders would encounter alternate histories with nearly the same frame of reference as the viewer, spotting the same differences, reacting together.

This got hopelessly muddled after Maggie Beckett joined the team; suddenly, we have a slider who doesn't know who Thomas Jefferson is and comes from a world where World War II had the Japanese conquering Los Angeles and San Diego and the US Army dropping hydrogen bombs on both cities and then a Cold War that lasted into the 90s. Viewers can't put themselves into Maggie's perspective because her perspective is either alien or unknown.

If your sliders are not from 'our' world, they are poor choices for exploring the multiverse because their reactions to alternate history will not be close to the audience. The great brilliance of SLIDERS was that its original four characters all had a multitude of reactions while still having the same body of history. You had youthful curiosity from Quinn, compassion and social crusadership from Wade, a fascination with popular culture from Rembrandt, and a more conservative and cautious attitude from Arturo. Young and old, cynical and idealistic -- and all from a world we could think of as our own.

ME: "I think it'll be done by -- "
MATT: "STOP GIVING DATES BY WHICH YOU THINK YOU'LL BE DONE JUST RELEASE IT WHEN YOU'RE READY AND SHUT UP ABOUT IT."
ME: " ............................................................. yeah, you're right."

I don't know what happened this past weekend. I remember finishing the find and replace work and formatting, taking a short break to review "My Brother's Keeper" and "The Chasm" and got totally caught up in re-reading Slide It Yourself. Then I got my mother a new smartphone but had to set it up and suddenly it was Monday. Is that really what I did on the weekend?

Recently, I wrote to Nigel Mitchell, asking if he'd write a Christmas SLIDERS story.

NIGEL: "I don't celebrate Christmas."
ME: "Holy crap. You don't celebrate Christmas? You don't believe in the holidays? That is so weird! Because neither do I. I thought I was the only one in the world."
NIGEL: "There are more of us than you might think."

But I do treat Christmas as a series of statutory holidays during which I do all the stuff I didn't have time to do before such as transcribing articles, writing screenplays and maintaining IT in the home.

I've only listened to "Data World"'s segment so far. It's great!

I felt that I didn't have a lot on "Data World," so I gave Tom and Cory the secret history of Kari Wuhrer's breasts. But, to my delight and amazement, the boys mined the deleted scenes material for a ton of insight! Fantastic. Here are the full notes I gave Tom and Cory for this episode.

• This episode was written by Joel Metzger and directed by Jerry O'Connell.

• Reading the script, it's clear this was meant to be a parody of video games that was not adequately realized onscreen, although there were plenty of problems with the story even before the budgeting issues.

• During this episode, Kari Wuhrer, when playing the reconstituted Maggie, grabs her breasts to convey her relief at being in her own body.

• According to Temporal Flux of the Dimension of Continuity, Cleavant spotted this and mercilessly mocked Kari throughout the filming of his scenes as Maggie-in-Rembrandt's body.

• During numerous takes, he would come up with different ad-libbed lines to express Maggie's horror at being in Rembrandt's body, including "Eeeeeeeeeeeek! I'm black!" and "Nooooooooooooooooooo!" (grabbing his chest) "Do you know how much these things cost?!!"

• According to Temporal Flux, Cleavant and Kari did not get along well in Season 3. You can actually see this in "This Slide of Paradise" in the opening teaser; Cleavant is struggling to make it to shore in the water, Kari Wuhrer reaches out to help him and Cleavant knocks her hand away.

• By Season 4, however, Cleavant and Kari had started to get along much better. You can see more comfort in their physical interaction and Kari laughing with Cleavant. TF is not sure what changed.

• In 2000, Matt Hutaff of Earth Prime met Cleavant at a CD signing. They talked for several hours.

• (Matt wishes to inform us that his name is pronounced You-Taff with a silent H).

• Matt learned that Cleavant was friends with David Peckinpah. Cleavant and his wife and kids would have family evenings with the Peckinpah family.

• Temporal Flux is of the opinion that this was a business relationship; Cleavant used Peckinpah's influence to achieve his goals as Peckinpah, for all his faults, had a lot of connections.

• Matt disagrees, feeling that Cleavant simply found something good in Peckinpah to appreciate and befriend. God knows what it was, but he found something. And he did the same with Kari.

• Therefore, I am inclined to think that Kari was okay with people making fun of her breast implants and that this was something she and Cleavant had between them.

• However, Kari grabbing her breasts in this episode seems to be a prelude to "Way Out West" where she repeatedly grabs her breasts throughout that episode, as though she's experiencing pain and soreness.

• Breast augmentations are never a single operation; they are the start of a lifetime of surgical adjustments and upkeep.

• Breast implants can tear, harden, leak and get infected. Kari, during "Data World" and "Way out West," may have been experiencing increased sensitivity of sensory nerves or a capsular contracture where the implant tightens due to scar tissue hardening. This is treated with medication to soften the scar tissue or surgically removing the tissue.

• Kari got the surgery in 1989. This was due to the urging of her music producer at the time, Rick Rubin.

• Rubin, working with her on an album, had less interest in her music than he did in her appearance and image for marketing -- he told her it would be best if her breasts were visible even from behind.

• Kari eventually dissolved her association with Rubin and music went on the backburner as she pursued acting. Her implants were getting her a lot of acting offers for direct-to-video softcore porn.

• Kari accepted all these offers because they paid a lot for very short shoots.

• While there is little data on her surgical situation between 1989 and 2000, it is unlikely -- in fact, it is impossible -- for Kari to not have had various problems that required further medical attention and adjustments. That's simply the nature of this kind of surgery.

• I believe Kari grew to despise her body and the work she got in exchange for nudity.

• According to TF: when "The Exodus" was about to film, Maggie Beckett had yet to be cast even when it was the day before filming was to begin.

• Alan Barnette suddenly burst into the SLIDERS production office, exclaiming, "Check out the tits on this one!" He held up a photo of Kari and she was hired immediately.

• Crew members informed Temporal Flux that Alan Barnette was constantly commenting on Kari's breasts.

• Matt recently sent me a box of the Sci-Fi Channel's press files. I found a 1999 interview with Kari Wuhrer.

• In the 1999 interview, Kari confessed that she was abusive towards Sabrina Lloyd because she was jealous; she was jealous that Sabrina inspired respect for her talent while Kari was simply a masturbatory object to her hirers.

• In later interviews, Kari confessed that her breasts embarrassed her and when she was with men, she asked them not to touch her there.

• In 2000, Kari got her implants removed and replaced with smaller sized implants.

• In 2002, Kari woke up one morning preparing to shoot a sex scene for THE SPIDER's WEB and discovered her right breast implant had encapsulated -- the implant had hardened, pushing her right breast upward and making her nipple point downward. She looked deformed and lopsided.

• The director and actor were sympathetic and helped her film the scene with the right breast obscured from the camera.

• Embarrassed, Kari decided there and then that she would get the implants removed.

• Afterwards, Kari found difficulty acquiring the sex-driven movie roles she'd found before and found work in a soap opera, GENERAL HOSPITAL, in 2006.

• When she got pregnant and gained weight, GENERAL HOSPITAL fired her. Kari sued them. The case was settled out of court.

• Meanwhile, Sabrina Lloyd went back to college (Columbia University in New York), adopted a little girl from Uganda, seems to be moving between Rome and Uganda and seems pretty happy.

Behind the Scenes Information Courtesy of Temporal Flux

I finished setting up my mother's new smartphone today. With aggressive use of Link2SD, the phone now uses only 806MB of the 5GB partition, and that's with a full complement of apps (tools, social media, web article readers). The apps take a a few extra seconds to start up than they would if the DEX and LIB files were running off the internal storage, but they function smoothly once they've started. I don't usually install DEX and LIB files to a microSD card as they tend to crash or run slowly (or at least they do on my Lollipop running Samsung S3), but the Moto E's processor and RAM seem suited to doing this.

I'm kind of amazed that this $100 Moto E phone is doing what would usually cost you about $300 or so off contract. I was expecting to be completely out of space once all the social media and messaging apps and a small number of games were installed; instead, this phone can do everything a flagship can -- it just needs a little longer to start up.