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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.

Warning: this message board post contains RAGE because slider5125 has been sending me spam and this pissed me off.

Not a single person in this thread -- not one -- has presented a workable route that incorporates new characters with the previous generation of SLIDERS. All of them are completely unacceptable for broadcast television. If you're doing SLIDERS comic books and novels, then you can certainly open with Rembrandt being miraculously reunited with the Professor, Wade and Quinn. If you're doing a TV show introducing SLIDERS to a new audience -- well, every single one of these NEXT GENERATION concepts has been totally incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't know the show already. If your 2015 TV show pilot is incomprehensible to someone who didn't watch a 1995 version of the series, then your 2015 TV show pilot really sucks.

I know I'm really negative here -- but I genuinely think that good writing and good storytelling is clear, specific, understandable and instantly comprehensible. If I have to watch 88 episodes in order to understand your one episode, your one episode is not worth my time as a general audience viewer.

There's also the fact that even as a SLIDERS obsessive, all these Season 6 ideas are terrible. None of them get to the heart of the characters at all. Rembrandt's been trying to save Wade for TWENTY YEARS?! What the hell took him so long? The Professor does some random stuff and instantly, Quinn is restored? Lifeless and boring. The gang resume random sliding despite the fact that the Professor is in his 70s, Rembrandt's in his 60s, Wade is in her 40s and spent 20 years in captivity -- and given that Quinn wouldn't have aged in quantum limbo, how do you expect Jerry O'Connell to pass for 25-years-old? This is so god-damn stupid it's funny except it's not.

Then there's the god-awful storytelling. The new slider is the son of Arturo and he meets Rembrandt who provides a Wiki-style summary of how he wrapped up all the plots of Seasons 3 - 5. So, the high point of this new SLIDERS is Cleavant Derricks monologuing for 20 minutes about offscreen events. And then there's the painful lack of imagination made manifest by declaring that the new series should focus on revisiting all the Earths from the 1995 series -- so, SLIDERS, a platform for limitless imagination, should do a new show that consists entirely of doing Part 2 of the previous show's episodes. The idea that Rembrandt should talk about how awful and horrible sliding will be -- I find that just appalling, that a new audience's first exposure to sliding would be a classic series character talking about how much it sucks -- which is essentially telling the audience that this new show isn't worth their time and that's if they can even understand what's going on.

But I understood that -- the desire to know that our old friends are alive and well. And Matt Hutaff and Temporal Flux suggested a very clever, subtle, unintrusive way to achieve that: Quinn Mallory, in his 40s, discovers sliding for the first time and accidentally takes a modern-age Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo. However, the presence of video diaries from 1995 made by a double offer a nod to the past, as well as a subtle revelation that these aren't older doubles; these are the original sliders after history was altered to remove sliding from existence.

Naturally, a fan immediately followed up by declaring that this subtle, unintrusive measure should be made crashingly obvious and intrusive by making it so that Rembrandt and the Professor are sabotaging Quinn's sliding experiments and every story should be Part 2 of a classic series episode. Because the idea of an entry-level SLIDERS that works for both old fans and new is somehow unacceptable, all SLIDERS products should be as confusing, alienating, convoluted and unreadable as humanly possible.

Is this really how so many see SLIDERS? As densely incomprehensible mythology accessible only to the chosen few?

Anecdotally, it would seem there are 15 - 20 people who remember SLIDERS and care about it. In which case, we 15 - 20 or so were given an incredible gift that few others received. We were given an incredible storytelling engine composed of both concept and characters which would allow for any kind of story. War adventures. Thrillers. Horror. Political theatre. Espionage drama. Romantic comedy. Any new SLIDERS should share this gift to a wider audience rather than say that SLIDERS is all about doing sequels to stories the general population has never experienced.

So, I think I might have to reconsider my opinion of minimum resolutions for Android phones. I just bought a Moto E (2nd gen) for my mother. I was setting it up -- rooting it, installing Cyanogenmod, setting up a firewall, transferring app storage to microSD storage -- and the 4.5 inch screen is 960x540 pixels, which I declared to be too low. Given how accident prone my mum is, I felt it best to stick to the $100 range for a smartphone and I knew I could get around the 8GB limit with my superuser technqiues -- but the screen actually looks pretty good. 4.5 inches doesn't really require the 720p minimum I advised. That said, unless you're comfortable rooting phones in order to shift app storage to external memory, I recommend you get 16GB of storage minimum because 4 - 8GB just isn't going to be enough for a full Android install with apps.

While I'm flattered that you'd like me to give you your opinion for you, I feel like this is something you need to decide for yourself. But if you do watch it, please post at length here about what you thought.

No time to type up my thoughts on SUPERGIRL. You'll have to settle for stuff I sent Matt in Hangouts.

MATT: "Is SUPERGIRL any good?"
ME: "I like the cast of SUPERGIRL and I like the basic concept, but they've made some awkward choices that have more to do with marketing than characterization. Basically, the stories they tell with Supergirl would be more effective if she were 19 - 21 and in college instead of 25+ and in a steady job. There's an overreliance on voiceover to communicate what is completely obvious on a visual level."
MATT: "The worst offender of that was QUANTUM LEAP."
ME: "There's constant references to an off-camera Superman which is clumsy and feels more like a lawyer authoring the script rather than actual storytelling. The special effects are more impressionistic than realistic, but they're vivid."
MATT: "Well, the DCU has to start somewhere, right?"
ME: "It's a FUN show -- but it's full of logical errors and awkward choices due to legalities and marketing rather than choices in how to depict this character. They have done something very smart -- every version of Superman in LOIS AND CLARK, the animated series, and SMALLVILLE had super-speed -- moving, thinking, reacting and acting like the Flash. Supergirl doesn't have superspeed -- she can just move fast, but it takes time for her to accelerate just to fly at hypersonic speed. So, instantly, the character can be put in difficult situations. Also, Supergirl is not indestructible. Gunfire doesn't harm her, but explosions, blows, heavy duty missiles and other ballistic armaments are established as being an actual threat -- the force could shatter bones or snap her spine or flatten her brain. Again -- most Superman shows have Superman immune to all that, which made him really hard to write. I'm engaged by it, but it's filled with problems. Melissa totally convinces as a hapless, awkward innocent who can become absolutely terrifying because she's angry and has laser eyes."
MATT: "Hahahahahahahaahh!"
ME: "There's this scene where Supergirl has used up all her solar energy and is powerless and she comes across a convenience store robbery and she goes in and convinces the gunman to put down his weapon. And it's not well written, but the actress totally sells the stark terror that she could die and the resolute commitment to saving these people."

ME: "I'd say the main problem is characterization -- Supergirl has no clear backstory. Where did she go to school? Why is she working in media? Who are her friends? What made her decide to hide her powers? How could she have gone 25 - 30 years before seeing a situation that called for her direct intervention? None of this is filled in and Supergirl is written as a dorky college girl who just got off the bus. She doesn't seem to have any body of knowledge on any subject or any specific interests -- she's so blandly defined on paper . The actress has to fill in all these gaps via heartfelt sincerity and earnestness -- and at first, it doesn't seem like a performance -- but there's a couple episodes where Supergirl loses her temper and it is so scary and all the cute, awkward body language just vanishes and Supergirl seems like a demonic force of rage and Melissa puts these lines in her face that make her seem 20 years older. So, she's a very good actress."
MATT: "The absolute glut of superhero programming is frying your brain to a crisp. Haha! You and the Bboard! Living the superhero dream!"
ME: "The SMALLVILLE years were very bleak."

Sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. Earth Prime? Server? I have never heard of this Earth Prime site you describe, nor does the Internet Archive have any record of such a site. Was this a SLIDERS site of some kind? As far as I know, the only SLIDERS resource sites of significance are the Wikia and the Dimension of Continuity.

For me, it's really the TV show COMMUNITY that has resparked my fondness for SLIDERS. COMMUNITY showed that you could create a vivid, dynamic comedy series through sharply realized characters where it's a pleasure simply to lock them in a room and watch them argue. The Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo dynamic is what makes SLIDERS special, and I think the best thing to do would be to find a new and current format. I think that format should be the situation comedy. I think the best thing to do with SLIDERS is to reboot the series with the original actors playing current-age doubles, and those doubles should all be employed at a hamburger restaurant called SLIDERS, and we would transition from science fiction drama into a workplace sitcom series.

I was going to post the script today, but Tom and Cory said some things in their podcast that made me change my mind and made me decide to do a major course correction in how I'm going to be handling things.

Basically, they punched all sorts of holes in "Net Worth"'s plot -- holes that remain gaping and glaring even if Quinn-2 and Wade-2 are in the Rick and Joanne roles. So, I thought I'd have a go at fixing them before posting the script. Cory said that the Online/Offline divide made little sense given how fairly cost effective it is to get online; Tom noted that Jack's plan to rob the Ivory Tower makes no sense at all and also wondered how the Onliners' manufacture and maintain anything if everyone's jacked in at all times. I think there are ways to address this -- but it's going to take more time than doing a find and replace on the script.

Probably by the end of this week at the latest. It was very strange how well Colin's dialogue fit the Professor with only a few modifications here and there. There have also been some interesting discussions.

LAURIE: "You're redoing the Mark Sheppard episode of SLIDERS?"
ME: "Yeah. I think the fans will really like it!"
LAURIE: "So you're going to beef up Mark's role, right? In light of how awesome he is on SUPERNATURAL, you have to give him some cool stuff to do."
ME: "Actually -- I've decided to replace his character with Hurley."
LAURIE: "You did what?"
ME: "Yeah -- in Season 1, there's this character who's Quinn's boss at the computer store, and I thought it'd work better if the villain were someone with whom Quinn has a prior -- "
LAURIE: "Get the fuck out of my house."
ME: "What?"
LAURIE: "You've disgraced my family and my destroyed entire belief system! I want you out of here -- I don't want to see you for the rest of the week!"
ME: " -- ?!?! Because I cut Mark Sheppard out of an episode?"
LAURIE: "YES! And because I have exams, but it's mostly the first thing."

**

WADE: "Don't worry, Quinn says. The densi-whatever-mometer makes the slides safe. I'm telling you, Professor -- one of these days, we'll slide right into a solid object. Oh, terrific -- now I've said it -- "
ARTURO: "My dear Ms. Welles -- I hardly think we need have any fear of such an occurrence. Why, the exotic matter in the vortex can only gain dimensional stability within in an atmosphere. Were the gateway to generate within solid matter, we would be crushed to death before we realized it."

Wade looks relieved.

WADE: "Oh thank God. I'm glad you're here to tell me these things."

**

MATT: (reading the script excerpt) "Is th... is that 'Net Worth'?"
ME: "Yeah."
MATT: "I would ask why you would do this for such a non-episode, but I already know the answer. You're a loon." (watching the episode) "The opening 3 seconds of CGI indicate what a piece of garbage this episode's going to be!"
ME: "The Sliders Rewatch boys really loved this episode. Which is to say they loved watching it and imagining Quinn-2 and Wade-2 in the story."
MATT: "Hahahaha! This episode is so dumb! 'Giga-encrypted entry key.' And this is the episode that launched the BBoard Beret Wars."
ME: "This is the most interesting story of Season 4. Who cares about the Kromagg invasion of Earth or the Colin spy-plot or the Slidecage or the Slidewave? This is Quinn and Wade in a cyberpunk romantic comedy! This is what actually matters! It just needs some finessing to bring it to life properly. Some extra time and effort."
MATT: "I would absolutely say to not spend more time on 'Net Worth' than Steve Stoliar did."

w00t! New podcast! "Net Worth" and "Slide By Wire."

http://rewatchpodcast.podomatic.com/

All the scripts are at www.earthprime.com/reborn in PDF, unless you're looking for a different format.

Part 4 is the only one that isn't a script.

The ePub conversion is done via my new screenwriting software, Fade In. I don't love the lack of quotation marks; I feel like they add a clarity to what text is spoken and what text is description.

From offscreen, Laurel screams. The sliders rush to her. She points fearfully at a display case. It holds the lifeless corpse of a man in his late twenties.

WADE: "Deric?"
REMBRANDT: "What? This is the psychic guy?"
WADE: "No -- the other one! Man. He's looking good!"

Laurel looks ready to cry.

LAUREL: "That guy -- he's dead! He's been mounted like a trophy! He -- "
WADE: "It's fine, he's a robot."

Laurel looks relieved.

I feel like the lack of quotation marks there results in a lack of clarity.

Just sent the boys all the info for an oral history of Kari Wuhrer's breasts. God help them. God help us all.

Yay, new book coming from Informant soon!

I updated Android on my phone to a new version of Cyanogenmod. And now the phone turns on every time I take it out of my pocket or if the phone is screen down and I flip it over.

ME: "I would never roleplay as Quinn. I would never try to be him -- I could only fail."
MATT: "You are roleplaying as Quinn. That's what SLIDERS REBORN is."
ME: "I am not. I'm roleplaying as Dan Harmon if Dan Harmon were a fan of SLIDERS and NBCUniversal inexplicably gave him the series and 15 million dollars to do three SLIDERS movies."

I wonder how much SLIDERS REBORN would actually cost to film. DOCTOR WHO is on about 2.25 million US dollars per episode and the most expensive thing in REBORN hundreds of thousands of small digital clocks flying through the air and flying into the vortex. I guess there's the location filming (Vancouver) and the shopping mall that's been converted into an impromptu art and creativity studio and the giant pillar of digital clocks. But SLIDERS' greatest asset is Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo sitting around bantering. That's the greatest special effect ever made. The finale is going to become like the climax of a superhero movie, however -- less MAN OF STEEL superfights and more SMALLVILLE-style supersaves, however. I would be curious to see someone estimate the necessary budget for this someday.