EP.COM Exclusive : Original "Raging Quinn" script now online

Matt doesn't usually read my fan fiction on account of me talking about it so much he already knows what the content will be and assumes it's not for him. However, he read my "Net Worth: The Quinn and Wade Edition" and said that in addition to my vision of Arturo being overwritten and overwrought, he thought it was too obvious that it was fanfic. Real teleplays in the 90s, Matt said, did not have characters referring to past events and speaking to a lengthy history between the lead characters, so a script where Quinn and Wade run into Hurley, Kelly Welles and speak with fond remembrance of all the crazy crap they've been through is clearly written by an amateur as opposed to a professional.

In that sense, "Raging Quinn" is totally professional: it has absolutely no love or fondness for Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo whatsoever. Quinn, when affected by The Rage, becomes an angry, callous, abrasive, aggressive bruiser; there is no sense that the writer wondered how much a threat Quinn Mallory would be if he took his body of knowledge and ingenuity and cleverness and turned all of it towards fueling and acting on anger. Arturo, when affected by The Rage, becomes hot tempered and shouts a lot -- which is pretty much his default behaviour to begin with except the script has him getting upset over room service.

There is absolutely no insight into the characters. There is absolutely no effort to get to the heart of these people, to engage with what makes them tick, or to even give the actors something intriguing and multi-layered to play. The explanation for why the brainy characters get angry (intense heat!?!?) is incoherent. There is no rising action, there is no meaningful moment of climax -- the story just stops dead once it hits the page count needed. The fact that David Peckinpah hated this script suggests that he must have been having a good week to recognize this inane collection of empty set pieces as the travesty it is.

This script is indeed a professional piece of work, one that makes me proud to be amateur.

Despite my loathing and distaste for "Raging Quinn" -- Scott Smith Miller is a pretty cool... um, is there another word that indicates his talent without in any way crediting him as a writer? Alright. Scott Smith Miller is a pretty good imagineer. All of his ideas for SLIDERS were excellent so long as, with the poor episodes, you look at the idea as opposed to the resulting episode. What if intellectuals were treated like superstars? What if gunfights settled corporate conflicts, if Prohibition never ended, if humanity could control the weather, if shared dreaming were a commonplace technology, if the Egyptian empire never fell and if Quinn and Arturo became evil? Even "California Reich" just lacks a stronger alt-history twist for its idea of racism never leaving the law of the land.

I think there's potentially an interesting idea here. The sliders land on a world where everyone is born into slavery and hard labour, drugged with a substance called the Calm into passively accepting their lot and only if you survive to 30 are you granted your freedom and an education to continue earning a living stipend in a non-labour profession.

Quinn reacts to a victim/escapee getting beaten down with unusual aggression followed by increasingly strange behaviour: he makes a killing at an illegal gambling den and starts hiring a private army of thugs to engage in terrorist action against the local government. When Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo protest, Quinn makes a show of being talked down -- but then he uses them as patsies for another round of attacks and then starts threatening to blow up various parts of San Francisco unless the municipality gives into his demands and Quinn's ultimate goal seems to be to make himself the ruler of this Earth.

What if our hero, Quinn Mallory, were corrupted? What if Quinn had no self-control over how he uses his powers? (Yes, I said powers.) And what if the sliders were forced to fight their leader and best friend?

The other sliders eventually realize: on the previous Earth, Quinn was exposed to a strange gas -- this gas was used by the military to increase the aggression of their soldiers before deploying them in combat. This drug, called The Rage, has infected Quinn and his righteous anger matched with his intellect and body of knowledge has made him an out of control supervillain whose increasingly dangerous means no longer justify his ends. The sliders successfully use the passivity-inducing drug of this Earth, the Calm, to cure Quinn and they are also able to extract a sample of The Rage from Quinn's body to serve as an antidote for the resistance of this Earth, but Quinn is haunted by how his superhuman intellect could make him a threat and a danger to his friends, and the Raging Quinn personality remains a part of his psyche, a persona that may someday re-emerge...

There's a cool idea here.