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You know, it'd be interesting to one day have a Rewatch Podcast episode edited by Jim of Sliderscast and to have a Sliderscast episode edited by Cory.

I did notice Quinn reacting with laughter to Rembrandt's jokes?

Interestingly, Jerry and Quinn were completely opposed; Jerry thought the women-only world was awesome, which goes to show how very, very talented Jerry can be.

Hey, I need advice! My Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4, arguably the finest mini tablet ever made -- has developed a weird split between the frame and the screen. The screen is coming loose. Thankfully, I bought the extended warranty ($60 USD) and the shop says they'll let me trade in my broken tablet for a new one. However, I'll need to buy another $60 extended warranty if the new one develops a fault and I want a subsequent replacement. Would you guys take that deal or would you just take the replacement tablet and hope for the best?

My God, Tom and Cory are great on this show! Faith in life restored! Whew, that was close.

I did not understand anything you just wrote, so I think it must be absolutely brilliant.

I admit, having a new female character serve as an entry point to an existing property is something of a crutch for me.

But. I think COMMUNITY, after six seasons, is designed to take place on the  Greendale campus and that's probably where the movie should be set.

I would probably introduce a new character. Probably a 19-year-old girl played by Anna Kendrick or Saoirse Ronan who has experienced some unspecified nervous breakdown that caused her to lose out on real college and have to settle for loser college, and set it up as being just like all those mediocre romantic comedies about college students -- except that in this case, the college turns out to be Greendale and Greendale is completely ****ing insane.

Jeff is the Dean. Craig is teaching gender studies. Britta is the school counselor. Annie washed out of the FBI and is now running school security. Shirley runs the cafeteria. Troy returned but lost all of Pierce's money investing in something stupid and is now a janitor and Abed has rebooted himself into a first-year community college student in the belief that he can start again. And our new character finds herself involved in the usual Greendale craziness.

I think Season 5 had a lot of potential. Yeah, losing Jerry was a blow. But the truth is, Jerry had mentally quit the show by Season 3 anyway. The writers found a *very* interesting way to keep Quinn on the show even without Jerry. They had a really neat character arc for Diana Davis where the plan was for her to be secretly on Geiger's side for the whole season. The Season 5 cast was the best lineup for the show since Season 1/2. Rob, Tembi, Cleavant and Kari had a really terrific sense of chemistry and all four were very strong performers. The freelance scripts were also fantastic. An interdimensional library! Mind-controlled sliding machines! A mental asylum for the imaginative! A world where caffeine is illegal! A world with the customer service experience from hell!

And then, for various reasons, it was all very badly realized onscreen. The arcs for Quinn-2 and Diana were excised. All the freelance scripts were cut down for the budget, but they were cut down so *clumsily*. And the production continued to make bad choices: cutting episodic budgets to save up for an epic finale they didn't end up filming. Renting a huge hotel set that they then had to use in every episode that drained their funds for other expenses. The production kept aiming to do what was easy. And honestly, the budget isn't an excuse: DOCTOR WHO had even less money than Season 5 and generally managed to cobble things together.

Instead of maintaining a single standing set, Season 5 should have rented studio space that could be converted to different interiors -- hotels, train stations, cafes, military bases, bunkers, hallways. Episodes should have been rewritten to exist in 2 - 3 interior locations with dialogue indicating a vast world outside the studio walls. Exterior shots would need to be filmed tightly on the actors with different backgrounds wheeled in and out. The vortex should have stayed offscreen for most of the season, or they could have made a library of really close-up shots of the vortex that could be recoloured to match other shots. The sad truth is that the Season 5 writers and producers just weren't bringing their A-game.

I love Rob, but for the fans, SLIDERS was better off cancelled. And I disagree with the fans that the cliffhanger was a slap in the face. Ending on Rembrandt leaping into the vortex was the only meaningful gift the show had left to offer: the distant hope that something better would be on the other side -- something better than what the Season 5 creators could be bothered to give us.

I don't see where it was forced. Rob has expressed his willingness to impersonate Jerry, described his skillful preparation in doing so and he was clearly capable of doing it. And they had a great angle: he wouldn't just be a copy of Jerry because the dual-identity would mean he would be his own character. Jerry never argued with himself in one body; Jerry never played a split consciousness. Season 5 had a great character arc and the perfect actor and then they lost it for some reason.

The one thing I'm really pleased about -- I'm glad we finally dealt with that ridiculous message board rumour that Rob approached the producers and asked them to delete Quinn from Mallory. It was a groundless, unsourced, and in some ways malicious remark and I'm glad I was able to ask Rob about it so he could definitively declare that to be untrue.

The audio quality isn't terrific. I loaded up Skype on my tablet and dialed Rob's number. I plugged an audio cable into the tablet's jack and connected that to the microphone input on my voice recorder. So, it sounds like a Skype-quality call with a few moments of distortion -- fine for conversation, but I don't know how much you'd enjoy hearing it. This also records only Rob's end of the conversation. I had to record my end on the only other recording device I had -- my smartphone. And again, the audio quality is acceptable for conversation but not great for listening.

In the end, I transcribed both sides and put it together in a PDF (that's at the end of the web article), so if you want to read a mostly unedited version, it's there. I moved some of Rob's answers around a bit -- for example, he talked about why he left his acting career *before* we started talking about "The Seer," but I decided to move that to after his wishes for Season 6. There were also a couple instances where I lost the audio, but could get the gist of what he was saying -- basically that there were a lot of freelance scripts for Season 5 because of the small writing staff and it put a lot of pressure on the few staff writers.

There's also a bit at the end of the transcript where I started crying a little.

ROB FLOYD: "Are you watching GAME OF THRONES?"
ME: "Hmm. It’s not really my thing. I’m more into shows like THE FLASH."
ROB FLOYD: "Oh, yeah, yeah. I have not seen that, I'm going to marathon that too."
ME: "But I’ve heard lots of great things about GAME OF THRONES!"
ROB FLOYD: "Yeah. You know -- the effects -- I marathoned a lot of it last night and the effects are unbelievable! And I read the books too. I was thinking of the battle scenes and thinking so much was never done with the Kromaggs."
ME: "Yeah. Sci-Fi Channel budget. What can you do, right? I guess, for me -- TV is like a friend. It’s comfort. It’s there for you at your best and worst. And sometimes it has a bad day. And sometimes it loses three-quarters of the cast and gets the budget cut by a third and is dragged out for season after season for syndication while losing everything that made it special and failing to give great actors like you the material they deserve and then it gets cancelled and goes away forever. And-and-and-and -- and that’s okay. Because everything has to."
ROB FLOYD: " ...  oh. Right. Right."

Yeah. I really didn't want this to be the last season. Week after week, I was visiting my friend Laurie, exclaiming that this week was the greatest episode of COMMUNITY ever made. The introduction of Frankie Dart. The crisis room story. The Honda episode. The giant hand episode. The spy movie spoof. COMMUNITY kept hitting new heights of experimental inventiveness. I didn't want it to ever stop. I dreaded the season finale and urgently awaited news of Season 7 --

But then the finale came and it pointed out that Abed and Annie needed lives outside Greendale. That Jeff and Britta might belong there, but Shirley and Troy having left wasn't cause for sadness -- they had to move on eventually. The fact that Jeff and Britta and the Dean and Chang were still at Greendale -- the truth is that they had settled for Greendale, but anyone who didn't have to shouldn't.

And with Jeff and Annie, the show acknowledged that yes, there is a lot holding the characters together. And the fans want to  see them stay together. But the story demands that some of them move on, and so does reality with everyone's six year contracts expiring with this season. I didn't want this to be the last episode. But the finale made me feel like it was okay.

The final hashtag made me miss SLIDERS more than ever.

Agreed. Which makes what was in the trailer so intriguing -- because somebody actually grew up, if that visual is anything to go on.

Unless it's a fake out?

When I go here:
http://ianmcduffie.bigcartel.com/produc … -anthology

I get this message:

We’re closed at the moment
Things should be resolved shortly, please check back soon.

Reddit's cool. But at the end of the day, it's just a message board and on Sliders.tv, you can feel free to go off-topic and personal!

**

After months of using Other Web Browsers on my mini-laptop, Google Chrome is finally working! Well, the portable version of Chrome is working without crashing every two minutes. I've tried Maxthon, Internet Explorer, Opera and all of them had weird performance issues, which serves me right for buying a computer with 2GB of RAM and an Intel Atom processor that wasn't yet compatible with Chrome. Man. What a mistake the Asus T100TA has been.

I thought that, since I have my super-powerful HTPC in the living room serving as my desktop, a low-powered 10-inch laptop would be good enough for when I want to type in the bedroom or work at the coffee shop. But it hasn't been good enough at all; I have to do a lot of web data entry on this thing and either Chrome would crash or the other browsers would freeze up halfway in. For God's sake. My next laptop is i3-Intel with 4GB of RAM minimum.

**

My doctor has advised that I reduce my caffeine intake, so I've switched to decaf for the placebo effect. For years, coffee was either Tim Horton's or 8 O'Clock beans ground before drip-brewing. And after trying a lot of what's out there, my decaf of choice is supermarket Folgers with a dash of salt and cinnamon. I have painfully pedestrian tastes, but at least it's cheap.

http://www.blastr.com/2015-6-25/first-t … -be-heroes

A synopsis of what HEROES REBORN will cover. I have to say, the marketing is making all the right statements. Ordinary people. Crazy situations. The focus on new characters is very wise. The idea that Noah, Angela, Matt, Mohinder, René, Micah, and Hiro will be supporting characters in the new characters' stories sounds effective and fitting. Maybe Peter, Sylar, Claire, Tracy and others are doing other things in this world and the focus is on a different set of people -- which is what Seasons 2 - 4 of HEROES should have done anyway.

SPOILER

One of the things that drove me crazy about HEROES: glimpses of the future in Season 1 revealed that Hiro, in half a decade's time, would become a capable, skillful superhero. But Seasons 2 - 3 muddled his character so much that by Season 4, Hiro was still the clumsy incompetent he'd been in Season 1. It was something of a relief to see Hiro in this trailer as the future Hiro who appeared in Season 1, suggesting the hiatus has been good for Tim Kring to think things through properly.

I sometimes wonder if the problem in the HEROES writers room was the lack of leadership. The constant changing and altering of people's powers. The inability to give Sylar a consistent character arc that wasn't abandoned for something else entirely. The inability to write Eve as the same character. The inexplicable declaration that the heroes and villains' powers came from the eclipse when they'd plainly established that the powers were from genetic factors unrelated to the sun. This strikes me as many different voices with contrary wishes and no one leading them towards a common goal.

Which makes me think that Tim Kring should hire someone to be the story editor and focus on the more practical aspects of production.

I hear Tracy Torme is available.

Well. I'll see it before I judge.

So, not to embarrass anyone, but the Sliders Rewatch originated as a truly ghastly podcast by Cory and Karen. It was very obvious from the first episode that Cory and Karen loved SLIDERS; it was also very obvious that they lacked the vocal presence to convey that love in a podcast. They are slow, hesitant, overly-deliberate speakers -- and you know, there's nothing wrong with that, but it made for a truly slumber-inducing podcast. I had to stop listening to it for the safety of myself and others -- which is to say I listen to podcasts when driving and Cory and Karen were making me so sleepy that I had to turn them off or risk an accident.

But now we have a reboot with Tom2Point0 and Cory. And I have to say, Tom is that peculiar X-Factor -- that missing ingredient of elusive definition who, injected into the Sliders Rewatch, suddenly amps it up from sedating to spectacular. Tom's commanding vocal presence and sly humour is ideal for podcasts and he bounces off Cory perfectly. Cory is the ideal contrast to Tom's voice; higher pitched and more thoughtful and calculated, and where with Karen, Cory was incredibly dull -- well, with Tom, Cory's voice suddenly becomes earnest and heartfelt and this partnership is just ideal.

I really enjoy the format of two episodes per podcast. I love listening to Dan and Jim and Ian talking for 82 minutes about "In Dinos Veritas" on SLIDERS as a more informal gab-fest between friends, but there's something very crisp, professional and compact about Sliders Rewatch. Neither is better; they're just different products with different aims and the contrast is flattering to both. I particularly like how Cory and Tom have a very affectionately admiring take on SLIDERS, such as noting how Quinn in the Pilot inexplicably points the timer at the sky when seeking to escape a tornado or how Rembrandt's plan to rescue Quinn from the CDC in "Fever" consists of driving up to the building and waiting for Quinn to escape.

They're all done with Season 1 now and they've done a great job. I'm eager to hear them take on Seasons 2 - 5 and I am very pleased to see that this reboot with Sliders Rewatch has become a great success. Congratulations to Tom and Cory. Well done! Fix your website. Oh my God, the dark blue on black is unreadable. (Not that I can talk; it took me a month to fix Sliders.tv because I'd been so distracted by some personal affairs.)

I thought the PARALLELS pilot was an interesting vision of what could have been a new version SLIDERS. My revival effort, SLIDERS REBORN, is something for those fans who long to know that Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo are alive and well. But a more realistic SLIDERS revival would be something like PARALLELS: the alternate universe concept with a very different set of characters.

I would have been okay with PARALLELS being released with the title SLIDERS. Pretending for a moment that PARALLELS is SLIDERS: it's a neat reimagining where the lead characters aren't scientists, where sliding's creation and creator are an unknown mystery, where the focus is almost immediately on strangers dealing with sliding and dealing with an unfamiliar world as a group. The original Pilot is, by modern standards, slow.

PARALLELS moves fast while keeping a strong sense of characterization and gave you a sense of what a whole season's worth of episodes will be like because the characters all experience sliding together rather than one character going first. And because sliding is a mystery on PARALLELS, there's no need to spend half the pilot explaining the time limit or how it works or how it was created; the rules are established faster.

If PARALLELS had been called SLIDERS, I would not have been irked by all the changes from SLIDERS. All the changes serve to get the audience and characters into sliding quickly and establish what it's like for these characters to explore strange new worlds. The changes aren't just differences; they are purposeful and they are effective. Removing the scientific character from SLIDERS but plunging the characters into sliding makes the story focus on the experience rather than the details.

I sure hope this Pilot isn't just a pilot.

Also, check out THE LOST ROOM, a mini-series by the same writer/director. Great stuff -- and with a strong ending, unlike PARALLELS.