• From: Where the action is
  • Registered: 2015-11-16
  • Posts: 595

Topic: Sliding isn't time travel

Quinn says this several times throughout the first two seasons.  With The Guardian, however, it is established that worlds can be experiencing the same timeline as ours but be at a different point along it.  In that case the world was 12 years behind ours, but there's no reason the Sliders couldn't come across one hundreds or thousands or even millions of years ahead or behind Earth Prime.  It doesn't even have to come from differences in planetary rotation speed, as it did in that episode.  Suppose life formed 200 years later than on Earth Prime.  That's a blip in the cosmic scale, but for our heroes it's the difference between 2017 and 1817.  That could be huge if they had a malfunctioning timer or needed medical attention.  Technically it's not time travel, since whatever the Sliders do won't affect Earth Prime, but in many ways it is functionally the same.

  • Registered: 2015-06-21
  • Posts: 246

Re: Sliding isn't time travel

Cool!

Earth Prime | The Definitive Source for Sliders™
  • Registered: 2015-06-22
  • Posts: 1,341

Re: Sliding isn't time travel

Yep, there are ways to do different time periods even with the Sliders concept.

  • Neno
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  • Registered: 2016-08-06
  • Posts: 14

Re: Sliding isn't time travel

Time travel or not they'd still find a way to lose the timer, well intentioned involvement with the locals and cross paths with their doubles. If only the ever hightailed to the woods till it's time to slide. Blistering Idiots !!

  • Registered: 2015-06-21
  • Posts: 4,668

Re: Sliding isn't time travel

Neno has the most delightful vision of SLIDERS. Season 1, Episode 2! The sliders hide out in a hotel and refuse to go outside: Wade and Professor play checkers while Rembrandt gives Quinn singing lessons. Season 1, Episode 3: The sliders find an all-night diner and refuse to leave: Arturo takes over in the kitchen while Wade works the cash register and Quinn and Rembrandt man the deep fryers. Season 5, Episode 22! The sliders venture as far as the front porch of Quinn's house before deciding they'd rather stay in and play Pictionary.

... I'd watch that show. I would have been totally happy if SLIDERS returned as a sitcom with Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo running a burger joint. But would anyone else like it?

:-)

  • Registered: 2015-06-22
  • Posts: 3,288

Re: Sliding isn't time travel

Someone smarter than me here (TF, ireactions, Transmodiar, etc) either had the idea or pushed me toward the idea that something in the timer kept the Sliders in a specific "neighborhood" of the multiverse.  Time is mid-90s, human beings have evolved, even specific people have been born.  So while there might be a world where the Russians run America or women are the "stronger sex", everything else is especially familiar.  In most cases, the Earth was formed and life evolved exactly the same time.  And even though history was drastically different in certain cases, Quinn's father met Quinn's mother and the exact sperm fertilized the exact egg in the exact way and Quinn Mallory was born looking like Jerry O'Connell.

  • From: Where the action is
  • Registered: 2015-11-16
  • Posts: 595

Re: Sliding isn't time travel

Episodes like The Guardian, As Time Goes By, and Dust show that they can go to worlds where the time flow is different.

As for being the mid-90's, it's surprising to me how nearly every world uses the same calendar, right down to starting the new year on the same random day in early Winter.

8 Reply by Slider_Quinn21 (edited by Slider_Quinn21 2017-06-27 07:49:37)

  • Registered: 2015-06-22
  • Posts: 3,288

Re: Sliding isn't time travel

Yeah and there were a few worlds where humans didn't evolve or the sliders' doubles weren't there.  But for the show to make sense, I think the "neighborhood" story has to be true in some sense.

Because if sliding were truly random, you'd be much more likely to slide to a universe where the Earth didn't form than find a world where you'd have an identical double.

  • Registered: 2015-06-21
  • Posts: 246

Re: Sliding isn't time travel

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

Someone smarter than me here (TF, ireactions, Transmodiar, etc) either had the idea or pushed me toward the idea that something in the timer kept the Sliders in a specific "neighborhood" of the multiverse.  Time is mid-90s, human beings have evolved, even specific people have been born.  So while there might be a world where the Russians run America or women are the "stronger sex", everything else is especially familiar.  In most cases, the Earth was formed and life evolved exactly the same time.  And even though history was drastically different in certain cases, Quinn's father met Quinn's mother and the exact sperm fertilized the exact egg in the exact way and Quinn Mallory was born looking like Jerry O'Connell.

I think the "multiverse neighborhood" was something I threw at Ib when he was working on REBORN. It was certainly how I thought about sliding - at least until you corrupt the coordinates and advance the timer. smile

Earth Prime | The Definitive Source for Sliders™
  • Registered: 2015-06-21
  • Posts: 4,668

Re: Sliding isn't time travel

I don't recall having this conversation with Transmodiar, although I do remember a discussion between him and Recall317 where they discussed how "Obsession"'s psychic characters who can predict the future accurately cast great confusion on SLIDERS claiming in other episodes that every event has multiple outcomes that result in the creation of one parallel Earth for each possibility.

Personally, I file questions regarding the mechanics of the multiverse next to where Arturo always got a fitted, tailored suit and how the sliders could alternate between the same sets of clothes despite never carrying luggage or how they had money given they stopped trying to find jobs after Season 1 outside of "Fire Within" and "Java Jive."

The real world explanation for why SLIDERS in Seasons 1 - 2 generally explored branches from a version of history similar to our own -- it was a TV show written and filmed on our Earth with all the inherent limitations of our reality and our frames of reference.

The in-universe explanation for why this was the case, if you really need one, is that the timer was a damaged and malfunctioning device that could only follow the path of least resistance in identifying branching points to which the sliders would travel and the closest branching points would originate from the sliders home Earth and variants within that particular history.

However, from Season 3 and onward, all that goes out the window when the sliders encounter dragons, intelligent flames that can talk, vampires, super-snakes and a double of Quinn Mallory played by a different actor. We seem to gravitate back to the Season 1 - 2 template in "New Gods for Old" when Dr. Diana Davis remarks that the sliders seem to be encountering, in sequence, different outcomes to one specific event.

But I have to confess, I don't really find these questions about SLIDERS all that interesting. I'd be more interested to contemplate how we might take the time-is-behind idea of "The Guardian" and do another variation on it -- with a story where time is ahead, and leading to a plot where we can look at Quinn's retirement and his death and the legacy that sliding would leave behind after the original sliders are dead and gone. Perhaps Quinn, at age 46, encounters a strange gateway in his basement office. He steps in to find himself in an aged version of his basement filled with artifacts of 45 more years of adventures and seated in a chair is an aged Quinn Mallory. This Quinn-2 is 90 years-old. He has sought a younger version of himself to provide knowledge that only this older Quinn can offer.

At Quinn-2's beckoning, other visitors arrive in the basement: Mary, Rickman, Governor Schick, Mr. Chandler, Bolivar, Ted Bernsen, Cutter, Gerald Thomas, Gareth, Dr. Aldohn, and the older Quinn reveals their impact on the multiverse, showing to our Quinn that these supposed enemies have in fact been a force for order, stability and structure while Quinn's actions throughout his life have ultimately led to chaos, anarchy and death. The younger Quinn is stunned and confused, and the older Quinn summons the intelligent living flame, the strange life form that held all the secrets of the multiverse and the flame offers Quinn another chance at true enlightenment...

Sorry, I don't know where I was going with this and Transmodiar said if I wrote anymore fanfic, he would kill me in my sleep.

  • Registered: 2015-06-22
  • Posts: 3,288

Re: Sliding isn't time travel

ireactions wrote:

The real world explanation for why SLIDERS in Seasons 1 - 2 generally explored branches from a version of history similar to our own -- it was a TV show written and filmed on our Earth with all the inherent limitations of our reality and our frames of reference..

This is obviously correct, but I think it's so much more than that.

I think, even in the limited scope of mid-90s network TV, there's more stories to tell about a world that's *slightly* twisted than one that is so alien that it is hard to comprehend.

I've thought about how I'd approach a Sliders reboot if I were to be hired to write one, and I get these ideas where we'd make it more "realistic" (HA!) to how it'd be.  If you were truly using a roulette wheel of an infinite array of Earths, you'd almost never run into a double of yourself.  You are an insignificant blip in this universe, and you'd be infinitely more insignificant in any multiverse.  You were one sperm of many fertilizing one egg of many.  Your parents get drunk one night instead of another, and you are a completely different person.  Your parents meet someone else, and you don't exist in any meaningful way.  Same with their conception and their parents' meeting.  It goes on and on ad nauseum.

It's all a different roll of the dice.  Human beings being the dominant species.  Mammals developing at all.  Life leaving the oceans.  Sentient life existing at all.  Or vegetation.  Or water.  Or any of it.  If you were to be "realistic", I bet you'd go millions of slides in a row without encountering anything "earthlike" at all.  Hell, you might never encounter the Earth itself.

But even if "Earth" is somehow locked in, your show just becomes Star Trek.  Dolphin creatures and bipedal dinosaurs and, yes, probably Kromaggs.  The sliders would be running away from monsters every week, turning it even further from Sliders or Star Trek into something more akin to Planet of the Apes.

So, in the end, it wasn't just the easy way....I think it's the better way too.  Humans developed to a certain point.....then what?  That's the more interesting question.

  • From: Where the action is
  • Registered: 2015-11-16
  • Posts: 595

Re: Sliding isn't time travel

A more "realistic" Sliders would have the heroes dead within a slide or two.  They would slide into a world with no atmosphere or some other factor that makes it unable to support life.

I agree that worlds similar to Earth Prime generally make for better story telling.  Still, there would be nothing wrong with throwing in a really strange one from time to time.