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BEING HUMAN's US remake aired its fourth and final season in 2014. I don't mean to be rude, but I have to ask -- are you from the past? In a recent post, you said you'd discovered a new show called RINGER which lasted one season between 2011 - 2012. It's like you're writing posts from 2 - 3 years behind.

**

I wonder -- how about a SLIDERS gender-flipped reboot where Quinn, Remy and Max are women and Wade is a man?

I don't know enough about Red Dwarf to comment, but I will say that UK television operates on a much lower economic scale than American television. The reason American TV can have 22 - 25 episode seasons is because of the huge amount of money available to pay and maintain a large writing staff with the resources to produce and film material relentlessly. The reason American TV can keep actors for seven years is because of huge sums paid to the actors to make them contractually obligated to stay with the show for multiple seasons.

In the UK, actors are only contracted for one run of episodes at a time unless it's a huge-scale, globally popular project like DOCTOR WHO and even then, the contracts are short compared to US television. Shows like HEX, BEING HUMAN, MISFITS and others only have the budget to shoot a small number of episodes a year. The money is not enough for an actor to live off of for the year, so they have to find other jobs in the meantime. Sometimes, a new season of the show is commissioned -- but the actor is not available as they've taken another job or they have no wish to return or they've lost interest -- and so the faces change.

The TV series, MISFITS, had a carefully chosen cast with the perfect blend of actors -- and one by one, they fell through the cracks of single-season contracts. The final episode of MISFITS had absolutely nobody who'd been in the first episode and each departed character left MISFITS adrift, confused and indistinct as a show with no idea of what it was about. HEX tried to play losing its lead character as shocking, but it was just awkward. BEING HUMAN had a fairly reasonable way of removing its lead actor that worked -- but then the supporting actors decided to leave with the lead actor and it was just inane, with one character dying offscreen between seasons and the other being abruptly killed off.

The system just doesn't work. I have no idea how they can fix it.

And now for another episode of Tech Talk, with Quinn Mallory (or rather, the only person to put words in Quinn's mouth in recent years).

I managed to write about 65 per cent of SLIDERS REBORN's second script on the iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard. But there came a point when I needed the beat sheet side by side with the script, maps and photos of San Francisco next to the word processor, cross-sections of digital clocks next to Final Draft. And the desktop/HTPC setup in the living room wasn't conducive to Work. At this point, I sold some old phones and bought a new laptop. The Asus Transformer T100 CHI. It's a 10-inch Windows 10 tablet with a keyboard.

It's not a powerhouse laptop -- but there's something incredibly *cool* about it. It's very cool; this thing is made of metal and the surface always feels refrigerator chilled. And it's 2.3 pounds. The speakers are surprisingly robust once volume normalization is activated. The screen is sharp; 1920 x 1200 pixels is pretty impressive for $425. It's running on Intel Atom with 2 GB of RAM and eMMC memory, but it's incredibly responsive. Mostly. Firefox freezes every two seconds on this machine, but an offshoot, Pale Moon, runs just fine, suggesting it's less this laptop and more Firefox.

The battery life is a little weird on this thing. I've gotten nine hours of typing and web searches on the laptop. But when watching video or reading comics, it only gets about 3 - 4 hours. It's probably because typing and reading text don't require more than 10 per cent brightness, but multimedia has me raising the brightness to the 9/10 mark.

There are other quirks that are a little odd. The keyboard-mouse dock connects to the tablet section via Bluetooth. Periodically, the keyboard dock loses the connection with the tablet and I need to turn the dock off and on again. About once a month, the touchpad becomes oddly slow and unresponsive and I've had to run a repair-install on the mouse drivers and software.

There's no USB port, only a microUSB 3.0 port, so I had to spend five bucks on an adapter and a USB 3.0 hub to get me some full-sized ports. There's only 64 GB of memory in the tablet, so I had to put in a 128GB microSD card to store more files. The screen is ridiculously reflective; I had to put an anti-glare protector on it to use it outside of pitch-black rooms. The back of the tablet was hard to grip, so I had to put a plastic skin to reduce the risk of dropping it.

There's a back-facing camera on the tablet. I have no idea why it's there or how to even get a program to use it.

So, it's a weird little machine, but I have come to love it and have produced a SLIDERS screenplay and novella with it that, at this point, four whole people have read. I was kind of hoping it could replace the iPad, but the battery life just isn't there for video playback or full-brightness use. But it's kind of cool.

Someone recently commented that the only difference between SLIDERS REBORN and "Slide Effects" is that REBORN will likely end up about 460 pages in total while "Slide Effects" is 46 pages and pretty much the same story.

It was rather harsh and hurtful, but it had the one virtue of being arguably true. ;-)

**

I find myself pondering -- how about imagining SLIDERS for a different market and demographic? What if it were a 22-minute Disney Channel sitcom aimed at pre-teens or an edgier MTV 22-minute dramedy aimed at the teen and college-age viewing audience? Would Quinn be 13 - 15? Maybe Wade's his college-aged computer science tutor?

Or how about imagining SLIDERS as a BBC production? I guess it would resemble the original SLIDERS in that, as with most BBC shows, constant cast turnover would mean that almost none of the Season 1 characters would still be in the show by the final season.

Tom and Cory enjoyed "Genesis" and "Prophets and Loss" plenty, and I could see why. They pointed out how both episodes, respectively written by executive producers David Peckinpah and Bill Dial, are extremely skillful pieces of television.

Cory points out how efficient the scripting is. "Genesis": the Season 3 cliffhanger, Maggie's breathing and the Kromagg invasion of Earth are established in a mere 10 - 15 minutes. The atmosphere of the invasion is horrific and compelling with background details and precise lines of dialogue indicating how the Kromaggs are merciless sadists.

Peckinpah remarked in an interview that he hesitated to make "Genesis" as dark as he did, but he committed to selling sheer helplessness of the human race and how the Kromaggs are totally implacable and unstoppable. It's a shocking turn of events; the sliders' homecoming is a nightmare. Once again, Peckinpah is a professional screenwriter and he does a professional's job in rendering the content. Cory and Tom noted how all these details created a compelling sense of loss and darkness.

The same can be said of "Prophets and Loss." Tom notes how well-structured the script is throughout. The Cadmus character witnesses the sliders' vortex and calls it in, yet this never comes up when the sliders are captured, an odd note that pays off at the end. When the sliders are brought in for questioning, the authorities are friendly, warm, charismatic and the sliders are awkward, nervous and led into giving themselves away.

Tom notes how intricate and subtle the scripting is, letting the conversation play out in almost real-time as an amiable chat becomes a forced detention. Cory and Tom were also impressed by the carefully crafted characterization where only Gareth is seen to operate the machine that incinerates people.

It's also a nicely shot episode. Location filming, great blocking, terrific guest-stars with David Birney as Cadmus and Connor Trineer as Samson. Well done, Mr. Peckinpah and Mr. Dial. I HATE THESE TWO EPISODES. They are two of the worst episodes of SLIDERS ever made. They completely DESTROY EVERYTHING in SLIDERS that matters to me and if I had the time and energy, I would personally round up every DVD set of Season 4 and return them to NBCUniversal through their front window with a complimentary brick attached to every box.

"Genesis" completely destroys the SLIDERS storytelling engine. Once you have the Kromaggs invade 'Earth Prime,' the sliders officially no longer come from our world and they have no connection to anything the audience considers home because there was no Kromagg invasion on our world the last time I checked. As a result, you can no longer use the sliders as audience surrogates and compare alternate realities to their own world with a contrast that is in any way meaningful to the viewer. The fundamentalist-ruled Earth of "Prophets and Loss" is a ****ing paradise compared to the Earth of "Genesis."

Anyone can relate to feeling homesick. There is absolutely nobody who can relate to being the chosen one in an interdimensional war that has turned your adopted Earth into an alien battleground and sent you searching for a mysterious superweapon that might liberate your world. That's just nonsense.

There's also the fact that "Genesis" warps SLIDERS into something *incredibly* convoluted. Quinn Mallory found the gateway to parallel dimensions. But on his first adventure, he lost the way back home. Simple Straightforward. Elegant. Beautiful.

Quinn Mallory found the gateway to parallel dimensions, but once he made it home, home was invaded by the Kromagg Dynasty, a race of interdimensional conquerers, and then Quinn's mother revealed to him that he was actually a refugee from a different dimension in which humans and the Kromaggs once lived in peace until a war between their races saw the Kromaggs driven off with an obscure superweapon that Quinn is now hoping to find in order to liberate his adopted home and oh my God this is terrible.

And Wade. Okay. This is just stupid. Setting aside David Peckinpah's obvious misogyny and unprofessionalism towards his employees present and former -- the script completely mishandles this because it sets up Wade's situation as one that needs to be resolved. This is just idiotic; if the actress has left, Wade's capture is a plotline that can only be resolved if Sabrina Lloyd returns, and after "Genesis," she sure as hell won't. Martin Izsak, a noted SLIDERS reviewer, observed that SLIDERS had created a "narrative debt" that it couldn't possibly pay off.

Mike Truman said, very simply, they should have killed Wade off. Let Quinn and Rembrandt mourn a corpse with the face off camera. And move on. That's one way. I wouldn't have done that.

I would have modified Starke's line to Quinn and have Starke say that Wade is about to be shipped off with numerous women to a rape camp. Then, when Marta, Rembrandt and Maggie rescue Quinn, Quinn insists they go to rescue the women as well. They storm the holding area -- only to find numerous Kromagg corpses and a hole in the wall. Wade is gone.

Resume the same plot as before with Quinn receiving the message from his birth parents, considering with Rembrandt and Maggie whether or not they'll stay and fight Kromaggs or search for the superweapon. And then, fiddling with a radio, they suddenly hear a broadcast. It's a speech being given by "Commander Wade Welles" of the human resistance, saying she's hacked the Kromagg frequencies. And she urges everyone -- soldier or prisoner, slave or civillian -- to keep fighting and not to give up. (Hire a soundalike?)

Quinn and Rembrandt realize that while Wade is fighting the war back home, they have to slide off and find weapons to aid her in the war. And we end on that. If Sabrina Lloyd returns to play Commander Welles, awesome. If not -- we know what she's doing and we're glad she's doing it.

It would certainly make "Prophets and Loss" more palatable, where Quinn and Rembrandt are upbeat and cheerful. Because as aired, "Prophets and Loss" makes no sense whatsoever for the characters. How can Quinn and Rembrandt be so lighthearted? So cheerful? So upbeat? So at ease? Quinn's mother is a Kromagg prisoner. Everyone Rembrandt has ever known or cared about is enslaved or dead. Bennish. Alesha. Danielle. Daelin. Wing. The Professor's son. Rembrandt's parents. Hurley. Wade.

And furthermore, how can the sliders be so utterly indifferent to the resistance back home? The timer lets them slide back to Earth Prime. How can they be joking around and hanging out? Why aren't they periodically sliding back to Earth Prime with supplies for the people fighting and dying for their world?

"Prophets and Loss" features Quinn and Rembrandt encountering a despotic regime and toppling it with absurd ease. If it's so easy, so simple, so straightforward, why did they ever leave Earth Prime under Kromagg rule?

I think the reason SLIDERS was so special to me in Seasons 1 - 2 and parts of 3 was because I would have loved to be a slider. Having amazing adventures with the best of friends. But the delight and joy was mixed with the tragic longing for home.

With Season 4, I don't want to be a slider and I can't relate to these people at all. The Kromagg Invasion has warped these characters into something unrecognizable, especially with their bizarre lack of reaction immediately afterwards. The Kromagg Invasion plot is not something SLIDERS can execute properly without a commitment to ongoing, episode-to-episode characterization.

And the Kromaggs. Okay, I'm out of energy. I'll deal with the Kromaggs when we get to "Common Ground."

It's really sad. Season 4 brought with it freedom from FOX, freedom from episodes being aired out of order, freedom from the numerous content restrictions that came with airing on a major network. Season 4 could have done absolutely anything. But instead, Season 4 dismantled the very concept of sliding by turning the sliders from relatable human beings into aliens.

I posted my review in iTunes and the review just DISAPPEARED and didn't SHOW UP IN THE PAGE! DIE, iTunes! Die die die! Ugh. iTunes is so awful I have to use iMazing just to get files on and off my iPad Mini.

SPOILERS FOR REBORN

"Reminiscence" declares that there was the original Tracy Torme timeline for Seasons 1 - 4, but due to the events of "The Unstuck Man," reality was altered and the version of SLIDERS we watched on television was a corrupted, damaged version of the actual events. For example, "Reminiscence" refers to "Paradise Lost," but describes it as an overpopulated world where death had been conquered and birth was seen as an abomination -- indicating that the sliders did experience versions of Seasons 3  - 4 before the Combine warped their lives -- it's just that they were similar concepts and plots executed Torme & Weiss style.

In the original timeline, Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo probably did encounter another Kromagg invasion, encountered an America ruled by religious fundamentalists, accidentally rescued a Kromagg commander, encountered a world dominated by virtual reality, got stuck in a slidecage, saw Quinn and Wade living in a bubble universe, etc.. So you could do Wade's POV of Season 4 by pretending that Torme and Weiss took the same concepts and rewrote the scripts top to bottom.

And then you could do a secondary POV where when asked about the events of Seasons 4 - 5, this alternate Wade from the Geiger-corrupted timeline describes being raped and impregnated and giving birth before she got her brain cut into and was put inside the jukebox from the movie BIG. (I suppose you could always soften it up by saying that the Kromaggs were simply harvesting her eggs and that the Wade in "Requiem" was a clone-slash-cyborg with some of the original Wade's memories and the real Wade escaped before that.)

Ack! I meant "Revelation" and "Reminiscence." "Regenesis" has not even been written yet.

I've been at this too long.

Funny story: In her autobiography, Melissa Joan Hart (Clarissa) semi-brags/has regrets about hooking up with Jerry O'Connell!

Hmm, yes. I, too, have many works of sublime brilliance that will forever change the world and the people in it -- or would, except that they were never written, completed or published. Fellow writers will understand what I mean.

A couple days ago, I was putting together a list of Seasons 1 - 5 episodes for EP.COM. Just to mess around with the webmaster, I also included Season 6 -- which consisted entirely of the fanfics listed above.

If you get to the Season 4 episodes, I have a suggestion for how to handle it. :-)

Thanks, TF! I suspect that the title may end up being "Recruitment."

"Regenesis" is set one year after "Revelation." The sliders will have gone from being a ragtag team of five to a much larger operation. I don't know how necessary the shorts will be, but if the contrast between the characters at the end of "Revelation" and the start of "Regenesis" is too jarring without a transition, the shorts can be used to facilitate the character shifts. If I do end up doing the shorts, I'll likely want to find some linking plot between them. The linking plot could probably be the sliders recruiting people to join them.

Oddly, the novella that fills in the 2000 - 2015 gap between "The Seer" and REBORN was at one point called "Reassessment" -- in that the plot featured Dr. Matthew Liebling performing a psychiatric reassessment of a patient claiming to be an interdimensional travelled named Quinn Mallory. The plot stayed the same, the title became "Reminiscence."

The titles all beginning with RE may be silly, but I've committed to it now. :-) I know you don't really read fanfic, but, as always, thank you for your encouragement.

.................................

I think I might need to expand SLIDERS REBORN to six installments.

(That agonized wail in the distance is the voice of the EP.COM webmaster who is terrified at the notion of having to talk through another installment of this series over Google Hangouts instead of doing actual work.)

(Oh relax. I just realized that there's a one-year gap between "Revelation" and "Regenesis" and about five 10-page shorts might be necessary to address the time gap.)

(Anyone want to suggest titles beginning with the letters R and E?)

I actually did write a novel to explain why the FOX episodes took place in the wrong order. Well. Novella. Let's not go (too) crazy.

It's a very fan-oriented sort of thing. I never expect to see that sort of stuff in an actual TV show!

Oh, it's fine. I didn't say what the explanation actually was or why it comes up. It's fine.

Yes. And also whoever wrote the tag scene of THE WOLVERINE.

Technically, it's Matt's great job -- I just found modern-era candid photos of Jerry, Sabrina, Cleavant and John!

Nice to see you here again. You know, the first installment of SLIDERS REBORN is *your* idea.

You posted on the old-old Bboard that you wished "The Seer" had ended with Cleavant coming out of the vortex to find Quinn, Wade and Arturo waiting for him, achieved through body doubles and voice impersonators and previously filmed footage. Other posters said this would have been too random, too weird, too inexplicable -- but I was really taken with it.

I think they should have done it for Season 5. They didn't need to worry about explaining it in the next episode because there wasn't going to be one. I ended up writing your idea into a script to begin my SLIDERS series.

Without your post, I don't think SLIDERS REBORN would exist. :-)

I love BACK TO THE FUTURE II. It's my favourite of the three. Which puts me in a distinct minority. :-)

Ah, Peter. Shame on you. Say, how exactly do you get the Messages in Time? I know you mentioned how in a podcast, but I can't remember which one.

"Slither" is terrible. One of the worst episodes of SLIDERS ever made. Tom and Cory highlighted a lot of the moronic points: Rembrandt's discarded shirt is later referred to as Quinn's shirt. The sliders foolishly take separate vacations with massive distances between them. Maggie and Wade would never agree to be alone together for extended periods.

The one point that didn't seem to offend Tom and Cory too much, however -- was Quinn declaring his intention to abandon the sliders, abandon the chase for Rickman and abandon his pursuit of the timer holding his home coordinates. All to be with Kyra. Tom and Cory found it to be one odd note among many odd notes for Season 3 Quinn.

I found it to be utterly devastating to the Quinn character. As Mike Truman noted in his review, Kyra is an obvious sociopath and manipulator. And for the first time in the series, Quinn has a real chance of making it home (or at least, he thinks he does).

Quinn Mallory has indeed changed since Season 2. He's become oddly caustic and callous, strangely flirtatious, unusually aggressive and much less intelligent. But even this altered version of Quinn has no logical or emotional reason to abandon an opportunity to make it home in favour of being with a woman who will obviously betray him at the first opportunity!

"Slither" is full of incoherent logic, poorly considered storytelling and nonsensical developments and this is before we even get to the super-intelligent snakes that can knock out electricity to buildings and down a plane. And it completely destroys Quinn Mallory's character. There is nothing admirable, understandable or workable with this character anymore. This is Quinn's worst depiction to date in the series.

(Season 4 will be even worse in this area.)

"Dinoslide." It's not bad! Cory and Tom raised issues with the military personnel being suspicious of Maggie and the sliders, saying this doesn't match "The Exodus." I actually thought it quite reasonable that some people didn't trust Maggie due to her association with Rickman even if Maggie was the one to expose Rickman as a murderer.

The episode is very well-filmed with stunning cinematography and location work. The action is compelling. I'm not in favour of SLIDERS stories that use force and violence, but as action hours go, Peckinpah's scripting is capable and filled with strong exchanges. There's a grim sense of humour in the T-Rex being used for food. Malcolm's gift to Rembrandt is touching. It's a fun action episode.

Where the story really falls apart is Rickman. He's not threatening. He's just ridiculous. As I said in my post on "The Exodus," there's really nothing human in this character. He's just a bunch of cartoonishly villainous traits. He's also a coward. He doesn't want to achieve anything other than eke out his days on stolen brain fluid; he doesn't care about the sliders beyond wanting to escape them. He isn't actually dangerous to the sliders outside of them pursuing him.

It's weird how Peckinpah is a decent writer whose script is impaired by the need to involve the Rickman character, yet Peckinpah's the reason Rickman's even in the show! Rickman's in the show because the producers wanted Roger Daltrey and his band to perform for the cast and crew and spend two weeks partying and filming an episode between binge drinking sessions.

Cory's right to say "Dinoslide" should have been the Season 3 finale. It's not a transcendental life experience, but it has the sliders revisiting the "Exodus" colony and it looks beautiful.

It's certainly better than the chaotic mess of "This Slide of Paradise." This is the worst hour of television ever made. Completely unwatchable. The guest-characters are just a mess of exaggerated 'animalistic' behaviours. Dr. Vargas is an unrelatable, inhuman lunatic. There is absolutely nothing onscreen that appeals or entertains.

The animal human hybrids are not remotely interesting or believable and they fill the screentime to the point where it's unbearable.

And then the ending. It's nice that Wade and Rembrandt are mercifully sent home and are freed from this trainwreck of a series. But the Quinn/Maggie romance is just nonsensical.

The two characters have no common ground, no mutual respect, no partnership -- the show has never bothered to explore any aspect of their friendship aside from a contrived sexual attraction. Jerry, despite his flirty performances, seems incapable of performing any actual interest in Kari Wuhrer.

Kari, despite her skill at conveying sensuality, seems unable to indicate that she's sexually interested in Jerry. Even after months of filming together, Jerry and Kari have the onscreen rapport of two strangers who vaguely recall walking past each other at a gas station.

And then Quinn says they slid into the future. Tom says he can hear the voices of a thousand SLIDERS fans screaming out in rage. Cory suggests the line may have been meant sardonically. Oh, Cory. You dear, delightful man.

And Tom. Oh, Tom. Tom performs "Tears in my Fro" for us. It is a wonderful performance. I really liked how Tom chose an upbeat, joyful, energetic approach to the song.

It actually reminded me of something Sliderscast noted in their "King is Back" podcast. Jim Ford observed that our Rembrandt sang "Tears in my Fro" as a melancholy love song while Rembrandt-2 sang the same song in a fast, high-energy fashion that showed why Rembrandt-2 was a star and our Rembrandt wasn't.

"The King is Back" feels so far away. With "This Slide of Paradise," we have a smart, satirical show having collapsed into doing bad monster movies. "The King is Back" is so flawed, so clumsy. A Rembrandt double who doesn't look like a Rembrandt double. Quinn and Wade rushing to rescue Rembrandt -- but making a stop at the concert venue first to check out some Rembrandt-impersonators.

But then there's the scene where Rembrandt and Rembrandt-2's performances are compared to each other. It's so insightful. So thoughtful. It shows such love and care for its characters.

Whereas "This Slide of Paradise" has the sliders blissfully unconcerned when Rembrandt runs off to fight with animal-human hybrids all by himself.

Season 3 is a terrible show. And Season 4 is actually worse in many ways The really sad thing is that SLIDERS was so close -- so very, very close -- to turning itself around. The Sci-Fi Channel renewal caught everyone by surprise.

Tracy Torme was prepared to return to the series. John Rhys-Davies was prepared to return to the series. Sabrina was contracted for Season 4, as were Jerry and Cleavant (and Kari).

But, as is frequent in the history of this series, Universal and the Sci-Fi Channel didn't understand what they'd bought. Sci-Fi's bizarre opinion was that SLIDERS worked best with three men and one woman -- and that it didn't matter which woman was retained.

Who could watch Season 1 and declare the show worked better because it was three men and one woman? Could it be, instead, that one of those men was a Shakespearean actor with an intensely commanding screen presence? And that the one woman was a capable actress who had chemistry with all her castmates? Kari Wuhrer, in Season 3, seems to be acting in a completely different production from the other actors.

Temporal Flux has noted that the regime that bought SLIDERS for Sci-Fi left the Channel shortly before the development process for Season 4. Others less enamoured of the series, less interested in it, took over that process.

The studio, Universal, didn't seem to be concerned with content, either. They wanted more episodes of SLIDERS, but were largely unconcerned with what would be in those episodes.

It's like the people and entities in charge of SLIDERS' future only viewed it in the context of a balance sheet. Episode numbers. Syndication potential. Deficit-financing. Return on investment. Contracts. Show business with no concern for the show, only the business, and they didn't even handle the business that well.

The Season 3 budget was badly mismananged, which is why so many back-9 episodes look cheap and ugly. A man had died during production due to negligence. And yet, David Peckinpah, the ringleader of this decaying circus, was retained. He should have been fired.

Even if you set aside his hostility towards Rhys-Davies and Lloyd and the quality of his work, he presided over a severe misallocation of funds and he wasted Universal's money. And he certainly had nothing to do with getting SLIDERS renewed for a fourth season; it happened in spite of him.

Tracy Torme made a bid to regain control of his series for Season 4. Tom says that Tracy hoped to bring John back as an alternate Arturo. This is inaccurate.

Tracy's Season 4 premiere would have been "Slide Effects." Quinn wakes up to discover it's 1995. Arturo is alive. Rembrandt and Wade have no memory of sliding. The scenario is revealed to be a Kromagg mental simulation along with all the episodes Torme didn't like or watch. The sliders escape and slide off to new adventures. Kari would have been released from her contract; she would never have appeared on SLIDERS again.

But David Peckinpah had signed a multi-year contract with Universal. If Torme returned to the show, Peckinpah would be dismissed -- but Universal would have still been obligated to pay Peckinpah.

Universal decided to go with Peckinpah for Season 4 rather than pay both him and Torme. SLIDERS had escaped the FOX Network, but they had inflicted a lazy, indifferent and unprofessional manager onto the series and that manager never left.

There is a terrible irony to the fact that fan support is technically what kept making SLIDERS worse -- that the continued renewals meant more and more episodes in which Peckinpah and his hires could find new and terrible ways to mutilate the series into a twisted parody of what it once was. The fans saved the show in the sense that they prolonged its diseased and withered state.

The sad truth is that sometimes, things don't get better. Sometimes, we find ourselves in the deepest of holes with no means of escape and then someone will hand us a shovel.

SLIDERS could have changed everything. It could have galvanized our society into realizing the value and importance of choice. How a single choice can change everything and impact everyone. How even the refusal to make a choice is in itself a choice. How every possibility we face is critical and crucial, how our awareness of how our present choices affect our future situations. It could have united us as a planet and a people in confronting all our challenges with knowledge, imagination, curiosity and teamwork. SLIDERS could have saved us all.

David Peckinpah destroyed sliding. He destroyed the future. There is no hope. There is no tomorrow.

Behind the scenes information courtesy of Temporal Flux.

So, I'm continuing to flesh out the general outline for the fifth and final installment of SLIDERS REBORN and -- I don't know if this is the right approach, but I'm trying to do all the tiring things first. Rather than try to come up with alt-history details and location descriptions when writing the script, I'm gathering all that information now for each individual scene.

Rather than struggle to work out a fight scene when trying to get to the end of the narrative, I'm working out the details now. That way, when writing the script, I can simply focus on the fun stuff (dialogue and pacing). I made the mistake of shrugging off plotholes and errors in the outline thinking I'd just fix them at the scripting stage and when I hit a problem I couldn't solve at the scripting stage, I was in too deep to have any perspective.

I don't know if this approach will be more successful than what I was doing before, but what I was doing before turned out to be rather painful in the end. Writing "Revelation" almost killed me.

Hopefully, this will be an improvement.

Boy. Been awhile since our last Sliderscast, hasn't it?

I really miss the boys. I listened to the April Fool's podcast where they pretended it'd been a STARGATE podcast the whole time and I laughed uncontrollably at Dan's over-the-top performance as a STARGATE obsessive. I listened to the podcast where Dan, Jim and Ian somehow went from talking about "In Dino Veritas" to agonizing over "Paradise Lost."

I know everyone's gone nuts over Sliders Rewatch, but there's a delightful friendliness and informality to the Sliderscast that I really miss. Come back soon, guys? I also need you to plug SLIDERS REBORN some more.

Is it actually in HD? Or is it just a standard definition image that's being played at 720p/1080p?

I have a few blu-rays where it's just a 480p image that's been stretched to a 1080p resolution with a bit of sharpening and recolouring. The image quality is acceptable, but it's like an upscaled DVD. I watch SLIDERS on my HDTV with Cyberlink PowerDVD's HD upscaling.

The software 'smart-stretches' the 4:3 image into 16:9 by stretching the sides of the picture and zooming in slightly so the image doesn't look distorted. The software also ups the pixel contrast slightly so that edges are more jagged and there's more grain on textures. It creates the illusion of slightly more detail by 'roughening' the picture. And the image has a slightly lower-contrast, not distractingly so, but enough to diminish the flaws in the sharpening. It's not actually HD, though. It's just that playing the DVD without the enhancements would offer a slightly blurrier, pillarboxed image while the enhancements make the video letterboxed and moves it from somewhat inadequate to mostly adequate.

Watching an upscaled SLIDERS on a laptop is a pretty ugly experience, but it looks good if watching it in a living room where you're sitting back from the screen.

Also, it looks good in motion, but the screencaps look ugly. All the jagged edges from the sharpening are just ugly.

I have another question for Informant.

Where do you stand on writers copying other writers' ideas? I ask because you were the victim of plagiarism.

"Revelation" doesn't copy dialogue or scenes. But the main plot is that billions of clocks have been randomly dropped across three parallel Earths. No one knows who they came from or why they've been distributed in this way. All the clocks are counting down in perfect sync. And when large scale disasters or wars or epidemics have taken place, the clocks have briefly sped up in their countdown. The populace thinks the clocks count down to the end of the world.

This is clearly 'inspired' by the DOCTOR WHO episode "The Power of Three." That said, "The Power of Three" flamed out spectacularly by completely failing to answer the question of why mysterious cubes had been distributed all over Earth or why an alien seeking to exterminate humanity let his murder machines sit around doing nothing for a year or what his grudge was with humans. I think I gave it my own spin by using countdown clocks and having people react to living under a countdown.

But how does Informant feel about it? Not the story itself -- I'm sure you haven't read it -- but what do you think about drawing on other people's ideas like this?

I felt it was okay since SLIDERS REBORN is free, but I have concerns about the artistic merits of this approach.

Sorry if I sounded hostile.

The first draft of "Reminiscence" was not Quinn telling his story to a psychiatrist to explain how Seasons 3 - 5 were resolved. The first draft was Quinn cornering Amanda Mallory in a coffee shop. She wouldn't remember who he was. He would sit her down and tell her the entire story of SLIDERS from his particular perspective.

Matt Hutaff read the draft and pointed out that it was an awkward piece of work indeed. He said it was ridiculous to declare that Amanda would sit with a stranger for an hour listening to a deranged recollection of lunacy. That made no sense whatsoever.

He also said he thought it was silly to try to offer in-universe explanations for why Season 1 episodes aired out of order, why Season 2's additional sliders vanished, why Season 3 had magic, why Season 4 was miserable and why Season 5 didn't have any Quinn-doubles and was constantly reusing the same sets. He thought the methodology for restoring the original sliders was nonsensical and incomprehensible and raised all sorts of questions about the process.

I rewrote the story so that Quinn was now talking to a psychiatrist so there'd be a reason for someone to sit through this story. The information Quinn conveyed, I kept largely the same, but I had the psychiatrist ask *all* the questions Matt raised and had Quinn answer them.

I think this is the way to handle feedback on fiction; if you're clear on the story you want to tell, then use feedback to consider *how* you tell it.

Over in the REBORN thread, a reader commented that he was confused by a specific aspect of the "Reminiscence" interlude novella. I reviewed his complaint, added two paragraphs to the novella, and the issue was resolved. So there's also this opportunity to respond to reader feedback and fix things to aid the reader experience.

I have quietly added something to the Odds and Ends section of Earth Prime: the "Slide Effects" screenplay in which Quinn wakes up to discover that it's 1995, time has been rewound to the Pilot, all his friends are alive and well, and only Quinn has any memory of sliding.

I have to say, I really like how things are going on Earth Prime as of late -- in that while I loved Matt's "Seer" review and Ian's blog, we were getting rather downbeat and depressing and I feel like our recent additions have been much more life-affirming and optimistic. :-)

SPOILERS

Hi again. My reasoning was this:

We had the original version of SLIDERS -- call it the Tracy Torme version -- for four years. Then in Season 5, we had the events of "The Unstuck Man" where Quinn and all his doubles were ripped out of reality. This wasn't just a case of Quinn's doubles going missing; they retroactively never existed.

Quinn remained in existence as scar tissue on a damaged multiverse, but removing his doubles cracked reality and broke the concepts of cause and effect. Quinn and his doubles were sliders, many entrenched and entangled in the history of infinite numbers of Earths; ripping them out would be like tearing out load bearing pillars in a building.

This retroactively affected past events. This manifested in small ways at first -- episodes happening in the wrong order, additional sliders vanishing and being forgotten -- but the effects became more pronounced closer to the ground zero point: magic and the supernatural in Season 3, the nonsensical Kromagg Prime backstory of Season 4 -- and then we had the present of Season 5 in which reality was now dying, the symptoms shown via parallel Earths shrinking and collapsing (hence all the episodes set in the Chandler hotel and on the Backlot). And there were no more Quinn-doubles, hence Quinn's peculiar absence from Season 5.

So, the version of SLIDERS that we saw on TV is actually a Geiger-corrupted version of the *real* SLIDERS.

In Season 5, we have a paradox: how can be there no Quinn-doubles? The only explanation is that not only were all of Quinn's doubles deleted, they were retroactively erased from history. But if he doesn't exist, who created sliding? In most time travel movies, paradoxes are resolved before consequences arise; this is what happens if they're not resolved. You get the craziness of Seasons 3 - 5; things stop making sense and it ripples into the past as well.

I will confess that the logic of this doesn't make clear, linear sense, but I feel this can be excused if the story declares that reason, rationality, cause and effect are broken concepts after the Geiger experiment with the effects affecting both past and present.

It is, essentially, a metaphor for the FOX Network's interference. :-)

But if it's confusing, a re-draft may be in order.

Well, there's always the archived version?

https://web.archive.org/web/20080429204 … t/blinker/

I kind of wish I could hang out with Blinker. I think we live in the same town.

I would say my biggest mistake with REBORN was not talking about the plot issues I was having, instead trying to find some technobabble to resolve the issue and only digging myself into a deeper and deeper hole until Matt took away my shovel and threw me a rope ladder.

I would say the most ridiculous and stupid part of REBORN is, well -- the graphics. I mean, creating images of four actors standing next to each other would just be a half-day photoshoot for a real TV production. For SLIDERS, we have to cheat with putting Jerry's 2015 face on his 1995 costume and compositing photos of Jerry, John, Sabrina and Cleavant next to each other. And I did a pretty decent job at first with 100x100 pixel images, but then Matt upped the 'featured image' resolution to 800x300 pixels for the Earth Prime redesign. I actually found some pretty recent photos of Jerry, Cleavant, John and Sabrina, but so far, my efforts to put them in the same image together have been pretty hideous. I'm hoping to get it right for the final chapter.