Hey gang, I'm new to the board & wanted to share some thoughts about one of my favorite TV shows.
To begin, Sliders, to me, symbolizes an era in American & world culture that I feel was sadly lost after 9/11. What I mean is, when I grew up being born in 1983, and it may be rose colored glasses but I felt it was a very unique time in overall history. I got to see some pretty amazing things such as Hubble going into space & optimism of us going as well, the Hale-Bob comet, Star Trek TNG first run, Mortal Kombat, TMNT1, I was a ghostbuster with every toy and suit (grandparents spoiled lol), I went from hearing Ozzy & Metallica one week to Nirvana the next.. then Cobain's passing, I got to grow up with hip hop turn into rap & whatever it is now. I got to learn to love techno/Big Beat with performers like Fatboy Slim & The Crystal Method, the movie hackers & tech progression, all the blockbusters like Forrest Gump & T2 judgement day, seeing Twister at a drive-in opening weekend and most importantly I got to experience a message to the youth of that time that the future of the millennium with a blooming Internet would bring a new hope for society. A post cold war, end of the century celebration that was the 1990s and millennium.
IMO, we as a society were close to something special then, not just from being young & idealistic but it was a sense that people were done with the old ways of world wars & segregation & inequality, maybe not for all just yet but certainly on the right track with the message of tolerance and inclusiveness given to the youth. You may not agree & that's okay. It's how I remember being taught in schools then. Some examples of a communal future was Napster, file sharing & the Internet or World Wide Web kinda still then, which was more than mere sharing of music & those at the top knew that. Free sharing of information.. along with programs like ICQ, chat rooms & such, sharing our lives directly without some middle man big tech company & less fear of exploitation. I'm not saying that was the reason for 9/11 but I do think the control over the distribution of information might of been a factor. I still wonder, as a possible Sliders episode, what if 9/11 didn't happen. How would our society have developed differently and it makes me sad at the loss of potential going into the year 2001.
Pushing all that politics & nostalgia aside & rewind a few years, here comes a TV show somewhere in the middle of a decade of those 90s that had a plethora of possibilities, optimism, hope & creativity. A multiverse before Disney, what if stories similar to the Twilight Zone, a creator & talent from a hit Sci-Fi franchise via Star Trek, a handsome well known young man, an esteemed wonderful experienced actor, a wholesome loving Singer/Actor and a cute girl next door that many, including myself, had a crush on. All with enlightened morals of a just society against the extremes of that society. Sliders changed my life. Even when it went to the SciFi channel I watched every episode because I loved the spirit of infinite possibilities and thought. I even thanked JRD on Youtube last year for giving me the inspiration to be an intellectual which influenced my desire & career for computer science, the Internet and abstract enlightened thought. His character is a figure head to me along with Doc Brown, Rod Serling & TNG Picard among a few others that escape me at the moment.
And here we are now, almost 30 years later with science & math & entertainment highlighting a quantum multiverse idealism among many other story lines from the show that keep coming true. AI & viruses, political ideals & so on. The show has basically become a prophet of modern times, which is surreal to me. Lol I'm waiting for scientists to clone Dinosaurs & have a park in california any day now.
If I were to be excluded from such a community that I believe also sees the show as I do, for better or worst would be like taking away something deep in my heart I held onto through decades of ignorant arguments over how bad it got & how "off the rails" it became and also never knowing if it would ever come back to air. I wish I could be as dedicated as other core fans but as daily life pulls us away from the things we love that didn't happen. Plus I never liked the idea of a fan because it's short for fanatic. I always considered myself a strong admirer of stories, scifi & Sliders. Maybe I place too much weight on the show but in a world that has flipped upside down from the world of the 90s I once knew & experienced, the show has turned into a beacon of light. I myself at the moment am going through difficult times trying to find a job against bot application denials from over experience & under official education in tech career & minimal experience with hand based, trade or fast food jobs. Staying with family after losing savings due to the pandemic. I'm not looking for any handouts, only providing perspective. I've been rewatching the series this week, thinking about where I could go from here in my life. I'm sorry for dumping this but I hope you understand. Sliders in my eyes is a message of hope, not just on multiple worlds or Earths but on our Earth and in our darker or extreme times. The possibility and power of what if & imagination beyond the current now. A message of abstract enlightenment, not just with science or religion or a B level TV show but the sheer concept of possibility in the life we live & how we make those possibilities our reality on this planet.
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I also want to comment on the direction of the show after season 2 or 3. When I first watched Sliders & taking into account my words prior, as I said, I accepted every season up to the last episode. Do I admit many episodes could have been better written, sure. However, I realized one hypothesis the show could use to explain every episode within cannon and how it became "off the rails". Here's my theory..
The premise of the show is travelling from universe to universe which Arturo explains in PTSD, with straight aligned layered universes side by side BUT I always though of each slide as a jump from a new plain or level to a banch of the last. The best way I can describe it is with the scene from Back to the Future 2 & Doc Brown explaining the Alternate 1985. He draws a branched line off of the prime timeline. Think of that as the first Slide(minus Double Quinn giving prime Quinn the answer to the equation) onto the red light go, green light stop universe. Then as the show story progresses they become lost. Each new slide is like a new branch of a branch of a branch of the multiverse, even Doc Brown explains if Marty went to the future of the alternate 1985 then it would be the future Alternate 1985 & not the prime 1985 which is what kinda happened to the Sliders. They slid to a new branch of close probabilistic & proximity universe BUT for each new slide, that reset the timer to make it reset as the initial prime slide. The timer had a Y2k bug and THAT took them further & further from the prime universe. The timer was programmed to execute each new slide as if it was from the prime universe.
This can also be thought of like a spiral or vortex. As a spiralled vortex goes around & around it slings out further & further from the previous point along the same orbit. Draw a spiral out & stop at 1 outer loop, then draw a line from the center, then draw another loop around & again continue the straight line to the second orbit and so on.. That line will become farther & farther between spiral curved orbits. That is what could be explained in cannon. After years of Sliding the spiral journey they took would have a huge orbit around it's center starting point. The time going around the orbit would be irrelevant since it's a instantaneous wormhole slide. Because each new world is further & further conceptual distance from prime, then the ridiculousness "off the rails" stories become justified. A different way to think of it is, just as the moon spins too fast around the Earth (it does) then gravitational pull is eventually lost and eventually it flings off into deep space (will happen one day IRL). Another visual is like skipping a rock along a infinite size lake and each skip jumps further & further exponentially. The story of the Sliders were following the pattern of a outward spiralling vortex or perhaps a whitehole.
Further more Wade brings this up in her diary in the opening of 'Greatfellas'. She says she believes they were going further & further away from their home world but Quinn insisted it was random. By season 4 & 5 the story cannon itself was flung way out. Also, dealing with multiple abstract dimensions means they can also overlap such as the times arrow going backward, time travel, astral planes, delayed or accelerated time progression, spatial distances would become meaningless like sliding over 500 miles around CA. Lastly it also explains the last episodes warning by the psychic TV writer saying there were no more slides he could see. The spiral vortex of the story was so far out that it was beyond comprehension or measurement. Much like the Cosmic background radiation of our IRL universe limits our view of the true scale to the universe. Maybe Remmy slid beyond the conceptual horizon like into a universe without laws or a absence of a universe or just one too far out of a point of no return information.
In my eyes the show became it's own premise and that is great to me. Other things to point out are the various story lines completely left open to help tie it all together, Mr. Bennish, the genius kid from 'Murder most foul', Quinns future kid from 'Love Gods', the Cromag arch, the search for Remmy after S5 and OG PTSD Arturo. Splitting new Quinn back to OG Quinn or saying season 4 & 5 Sliders were a set of different doubles Sliding than the Earth prime of season 1. All of it could be tied in a neat 10 dimensional bow. The power of possibility & hope.
Thanks all who read this whole thing. I hope it made sense.