Do we miss Informant? (Page 1 of 2)

It's almost like people who were fans of a show that went off the air 20 years ago have gravitated toward other interests and use of their time!

Nah... that can't be it.

I've made discreet inquiries. He's fine.

I think Informant is displeased that Sliders.TV would not be his echo chamber for men's rights activists, birthers, neo-Nazis, scam artists and alt-right white supremacists -- oh, I'm sorry, Informant, I mean "free-thinkers" and "Libertarians." That was a typo.

Informant is not a men's rights activist or a neo-Nazi or a white supremacist or a birther or a scam artist. Informant's a really good guy -- but he has particular views and those are the 'experts' he turns to in order to support his personal perspectives.

The final straw for him, I suspect, was when he posted anti-abortion conspiracy theories parroting mostly false claims that Ralph Northam had said infanticide was legal in order to express Informant's anti-abortion views. Informant later declared this anti-abortion view to be the default view of the Sliders.TV community.

(Northam himself is a moderately convoluted issue due to Northam's inarticulate incoherence, please see https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump … n-execute/ for a full summary.)

I edited Informant's post to add a paragraph in bold containing a message from me saying that Informant in no way spoke for the community and that he was (probably) joking (about that part). After that, I think he got fed up.

Do we miss Informant? I don't know, I don't speak for this community. Do I miss Informant? I miss the good he brought to this community. I don't miss the bad.

I miss Informant's storytelling skill and analytical ability when it comes to plot, characterization, structure and execution. The SLIDERS fan community is a huge part of how I went from troubled teenager who cowered in the face of any and all criticism to someone who could laugh and agree when Nigel Mitchell (or you, Transmodiar) called my writing indecipherable and unworkable. Informant offered a different approach to criticism when commenting on my SLIDERS writing process where I was nervous about having the sliders defeat the Season 3 monsters with non-violent MACGYVER-esque tactics.

Informant said that all fiction has specific goals on the author's part where authors decide what kind of story they want to tell and achieving those goals can mean accepting that other objectives won't be met. A story where Rembrandt defeats the animal human hybrids and with a bag of peanuts may be funny, earnest and show a triumph of imagination over mental illness and horror -- but it might not be totally rational and plausible. A story where the sliders run a fast food operation specializing in mini-hamburgers may be a delightful joke -- but it might not be sensible and logical.

But, Informant pointed out, if the author wants whimsical lunacy over tightly plotted rigour and realism, then it's alright to accept flaws in favour of acquiring specific strengths.

Informant always advised me and other creators to tell our stories our way. To welcome and embrace criticisms always and mine them for what they're worth. (TRANSMODIAR: "You can't have the rock star vampires defeated by high intensity soundwaves. They're ROCK STAR vampires.") But to also make sure to distinguish between advice that helps our stories and advice that instead tells other people's stories. (TRANSMODIAR: "Quinn has a secondary backup personality in his brain and that personality is Mallory?! That is ridiculous. Go back and re-read what you just wrote!")

I've read every single book Informant has ever written and they're all really good. They are not the stories I would write, they aren't necessarily the stories I would want to read, but they are extremely well-written and are fundamentally opposed to fascism, inequality, racism, prejudice and cruelty and indicate strong moral principles and great compassion for the weak. I follow Informant on Twitter (which is how I know he's alive).

Which brings us to what I do not miss about Informant: he has specific political and sociological views which aren't even the issue here. Transmodiar's politics are not ireactions' politics. Temporal Flux's politics are not ireactions' politics. Both Transmodiar and TF are a massive part of my philosophical foundations and yet, we're not remotely aligned. I cannot stress enough in the name of Quinn's brown jacket and Rembrandt's train-track-creased boots that ireactions' views do not represent the views of Sliders.TV.

When writing the SLIDERS script where Quinn meets Donald Trump, I asked Transmodiar to create Quinn's political opinions for me and Quinn/Transmodiar's views were decidedly not my own. My criticism of Informant isn't that I disagree with Informant on The Issues; my criticism is that he never seems quite content to let his personal opinions be his own but insists that his incredibly idiosyncratic worldview is universally objective.

I find this insistence on a singular viewpoint to be benign when dealing with fiction but upsetting in real-world situations. Benign examples: Informant is clearly a devout Christian with a fairly traditional view of God. When the character of Chuck appeared on SUPERNATURAL and revealed himself to be (a) a cynical slacker without much faith in humanity and (b) God himself, Informant's reaction was enlightening.

Informant declared that Chuck was clearly pretending to be depressed and downbeat in order to manipulate the other cast members into taking action. Informant's perspective on Chuck was completely detached from the actual TV series, but rather than accept that a TV show might present a different vision of God, Informant declared his God to be SUPERNATURAL's God and ignored what was actually onscreen because it didn't suit his preferred thinking.

When discussing the DC and Marvel superhero films, Informant declared that CIVIL WAR (an adaptation of a 2006 storyline where Iron Man fights Captain America) was an attempt to rip off BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN (2016). Informant backed off that one but then continually insisted that MAN OF STEEL, BVS and JUSTICE LEAGUE are strong successes despite the fact that the people making them being demoted and/or fired and DC fleeing the shared universe market. It wasn't enough for Informant to say that he liked the DC films more; he had to declare them objectively superior to Marvel by way of financial earnings (because BVS earning 874 million with two iconic characters somehow triumphed over CIVIL WAR and its two B-list heroes earning 1.153 billion).

And when it comes to immigration, health care, feminism, racism, cops executing black men, rape, abortion, electoral fraud and birtherism, Informant is not content to simply hold his own views and share them. He then seeks out questionable secondary sources to bolster his views. These sources include men's rights activist Paul Elam, a man who said that women who dress revealingly and go to bars deserve to get raped -- whom Informant offers up as an expert in debunking feminism. James O'Keefe, a noted scam artist who creates deceptively edited videos and made false and disproven accusations of human trafficking against a charity, a man who has been completely discredited as a liar -- whom Informant declares to be a rational investigator into electoral fraud.

Informant also seems to have a peculiar but guarded fixation on white supremacist Richard Spencer (who was espousing neo-Nazi rhetoric and then punched in the face). Informant protested CRISIS ON EARTH X featuring Nazi villains and Nazi villains being punched and complained that the real world keeps smearing anyone with Informant's views as being advocates of the Third Reich, an interesting chicken-or-egg conundrum as Informant's views of race, health care, immigration, economics and elections are often espoused by neo-Nazi groups and individuals.

What it comes down to, I think, is that Informant has certain political positions that are held sincerely by Informant but often espoused by those who use such positions as a facade of legitimacy over racism, hatred, cruelty, savagery, white supremacy, protecting the wealthy over the underprivileged and silencing the marginalized and powerless.

Informant proceeds to defend these men's rights activists, white supremacists and disgraced 'journalists' and conflate that with defending his own views. To the outside observer, it looks like Informant has a not-so-secret love affair with Nazis. To a friend inclined to think well of him (and I am very inclined to always think the best of Informant), it looks like he's insecure in his opinions being merely his opinions and seeks outside affirmation and is less than discerning about where that support comes from.

There is a certain irony to this because everyone on this forum loves a TV show that the vast majority of the population rightly and sensibly considers to be utter crap. Even the hallowed first season is, as the Think of a Roulette blog observes, full of holes and problems and misjudgements and that's even by the standards of 1995.

Loving SLIDERS is a personal view, a highly individual choice -- much like writing ten SLIDERS screenplays and treating Seasons 1 - 5 as a vast and infinite and coherent and sensible mythology of science fiction fantasy. I don't need anyone else to validate this extremely peculiar and bizarre perspective and Informant does not need anyone to validate his political views or his preference for DC movies over Marvel movies -- but he feels the need to find support in some troubling places and that I find annoying.

The most aggravating thing Informant did recently, I felt, was his insistence on presenting the Midnight's Edge video channel as a reliable news source on STAR TREK. This would be the YouTube channel insisting that DISCOVERY is actually set in the rebootquel STAR TREK universe and that DISCOVERY's continuity discrepancies are part of a master plan to purloin the TREK rights from CBS and take them to Paramount.

This is a painful misunderstanding of how the STAR TREK rights are held (CBS owns STAR TREK lock, stock and barrel and is in the business of TV shows; Paramount has the film license and the infrastructure to make and market films. Even if CBS inadvertently made a rebootquel continuity show, CBS would still own the show). Despite this obviously uninformed and incorrect view, Informant continued to present Midnight's Edge as a reliable news outlet when the only thing Midnight's Edge had going for it is that they don't like DISCOVERY and Informant doesn't like DISCOVERY.

It wasn't enough for Informant to just have his opinion, he had to fall in with liars and scam artists and white supremacists to feel more secure in his opinion. And that's the part of Informant I won't miss.

But having typed all this, I conclude that on the whole, Informant had a lot of important and positive and vital contributions here and he will be missed and it's a shame to lose him even if I could do without the other stuff.

I think the other stuff stresses me out more than other posters because I have rebuilt this message board more times than Chuck has rebuilt Castiel. I am to a degree responsible for whatever is on this forum and if Informant supports people who engage in hate speech on this forum or shares their views, I feel honour-bound to post a brief response. Not an argument exactly -- I never want to tell anyone they're not entitled to their beliefs or views. But to say that those beliefs and views don't represent this community. That Informant's opinions are his own.

I guess I'd just want to reiterate definitively and totally that I know Informant is not a fascist, not a neo-Nazi, not racist, not a misogynist and not a white supremacist. I know this because I've read all of his books and I believe that while autobiographies can lie, fiction reveals all.

I love Informant. I will always be grateful for what he shared with this community and with me and be glad for the positive role he played in my life.

I think one thing that can help is remembering that a lot of people might agree with your personal views while still being crazy and evil. Harvey Weinstein supported the liberal values I believe in. He is a rapist. Bryan Singer supported gay rights. He is a pedophile. We need to be able to look critically at ourselves and our own sides and always be open to new information and new perspectives. And we need to be willing to set aside a supporter or a source should what we currently have prove unacceptable for plausible discourse.

Looking at myself, I recall back in 2015 - 2016 when I told Slider_Quinn21 off for finding Rey in THE FORCE AWAKENS to be a Mary Sue, badgering him on it endlessly until he said that this wasn't the hill he needed to die on. I look back at those posts and shake my head at myself. Why couldn't I just let Slider_Quinn21 not enjoy a movie?

I think I've changed, probably because of writing SLIDERS REBORN. The thought process of reconciling the Season 3 monsters and the Season 4 myth-arc and the Season 5 casting issues with the SLIDERS mythos I prefer forced me to widen my personal echo chamber from a strict perimeter around Seasons 1 - 2 to making more room for the rest and that created an opening that allowed me to escape. And now I can concede that infamous sexual harasser Andrew Kreisberg was a pretty good showrunner on THE FLASH even if he absolutely had to be fired.

I'd like to think we can recognize hate groups and abusers and frauds for what they are even as we keep ourselves open to other people's opinions. That we can critique feminism and immigration without supporting the rhetoric of Nazis and rape advocates. That we can enjoy a DC film without downplaying Marvel's successes or denying DC's financial struggles. That we can appreciate the Marvel franchise while not ignoring WONDER WOMAN and AQUAMAN performing brilliantly at box office. That we can be aware that our opinions are merely our own, don’t need to be anyone else’s, and are open to revision or being disproven.

And surely Slider_Quinn21 can dislike Rey without me insisting that reality itself exists to prove his opinion somehow wrong. (Sorry about that.)

Another aspect of meaningful discussion: we should speak in a manner that invites other people's opinions, encourages people to make fun of us, and assures them that they should feel safe in disagreeing (while noting that hate speech has no place in safe spaces). If you can't indicate openness to other perspectives -- well, it's not a banning offense or in any way a crime, but it creates discomfort.

In Informant's final days here, he shared his views on abortion. I responded with... nothing. I just put up my disclaimer.

Informant thought the disclaimer was stupid. I thought it was stupid too, but I didn't want one of my female friends coming to the message board I talk about a lot and finding Informant's views going unchallenged.

Informant, quite correctly, noted that the disclaimer had no real content, just a running joke of finding different SLIDERS props to incant. Then (I assume due to my adding a message to his post to reiterate the disclaimer), he took off in a snit. Last I checked, he was having another meltdown over Chuck's characterization in the SUPERNATURAL finale. I'll look in on him later.

But regardless, I feel Informant did not create a safe space to share personal views of abortion unless those views were Informant's. I felt he would, rather than respect that we have different views, attempt to argue my own values into submission the way he argues that Marvel movies are failures: he says that people who like these movies are simply falling in line with what's popular, buying into a media bias and that their opinions are not sincere or their own.

Slider_Quinn21, on the other hand, has always made me feel safe. (Transmodiar, too, since 2011.) Slider_Quinn21 and Transmodiar made me feel like it was okay to admit to incredibly pathetic and silly truths -- such as how SLIDERS is important to me because I was a lonely 9 year old in 1994, Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo were my friends and I watched them die.

They made me feel it would be alright to confess the stupidest thing I'd ever said to date: that when I saw the Professor get shot and fall over, I was 12 years old and I felt like I was watching my own father die. That I had a panic attack this past year when I was visiting my niece over Roger Daltrey. She had a copy of his autobiography and I screamed at the sight of Colonel Rickman's face on the cover. "He killed Dad!" I shrieked.

I don't think it's exactly a state secret that Temporal Flux and Transmodiar don't get along and that I have a lot of love and respect for both. It's a bit like being Mystique when Professor Xavier and Magneto are going through a (very long) rough patch. (Actually, it's been pretty quiet lately.)

Neither of them have ever tried to make me take their side or dislike the other. Temporal Flux and Transmodiar have always encouraged me to be friends with the other even if they aren't friends themselves. My wise uncle (TF) and my cool older brother (Transmodiar) both respected that my feelings were my own; they offered their own perspectives on their feud but always concluded with advising me to form my own opinions.

They made me feel safe. This is something we should offer everyone in our community over every subject. I have not always succeeded in doing this, but I won't fail to do so going forward.

And because in the wake of Informant's absence, Slider_Quinn21 has made Sliders.TV feel like a safe space -- here are my views on abortion which are my own, formed from many late nights chatting with various women but not taken from them. These are not the views of Sliders.TV. They are not the consensus of this community. You are not required to agree with my take which is:

I believe life is sacred and begins at fertilization, but I also believe abortion should be legal. I think the best way to prevent abortion is comprehensive sex education as early as Grade 1 with contraceptives and birth control widely available, provided for free to children and adults, paid for by tax dollars.

I think abortion should be legal for many reasons. First, criminalizing it does not prevent it; it merely ensures that women will do it themselves and do it wrong. Second, I think trying to prevent pregnant women from getting abortions is a waste of time. If they're pregnant and want to terminate, then I feel the ship has sailed and we all need to back off.

Third, I find it morally bankrupt to call for legislation to impose my personal belief (that life begins at fertilization) upon the medical decisions of people I don't know, whose lives I haven't lived, whose struggles I can't comprehend. I will live my beliefs without having them intrude upon others. I find doing otherwise to be arrogant and I reserve arrogance for talking about SLIDERS and Jerry O'Connell's career.

I feel the best way to prevent abortion is to prevent unplanned pregnancy by empowering everyone with the knowledge and technology to do so. Rather than fight against abortion, I would fight for sex education and readily available contraception.

As for Informant's claims that various states want to make it easy to terminate pregnancies after an infant is fully formed and kill the child after birth -- the reality is that only 1.3 per cent of abortions occur after 21 weeks. Usually due to fetal abnormalities and nonviability or delayed access to abortion services.

Ralph Northam misspoke and misconveyed the situation to make it seem like healthy infants would be killed for unwilling mothers. In reality, he was discussing whether infants with severe birth defects should be kept alive via painful measures. His media training was poor. He was incompetent, but nobody should be seizing upon clumsy communication to spew further misinformation.

It was grossly irresponsible of Informant to reiterate incorrect data especially on so sensitive a subject. We should not be presenting false information whether it's Keith Damron's lies, phony STAR TREK news sites or that of alt-right news outlets. We are entitled to our own opinions but not our own facts.

I think abortion should be legal in the same way I think Season 3 DVD sets of SLIDERS should be legal; I'm not thrilled with its existence, but I accept that it's here. If I attempted to legislate it away, people would find some way to get their hands on it and it'd be distributed on piracy sites and false files would spread computer viruses. That's not good for anybody.

I used to be anti-Season 3; every time I saw the DVD set in stores, I'd quietly slip it into a microwave or drop it behind a shelf. That was pointless and unrealistic. You can see the change in thinking in my scripts. My first SLIDERS script, "Slide Effects," removes Seasons 3 - 5 from continuity, treats it as traumatic and unwelcome, declares that it never happened.

SLIDERS REBORN accepts that Season 3 can't be dismissed, that it's part of the series' legacy, and REBORN leaves it in place but offers a subsequent, supplementary option to exist alongside and in addition to Season 3 should the fan choose to take it. The Season 3 monsters return for the end of REBORN, but they aren't killed or destroyed; they're contained, they continue and they may be needed again.

And yet... it actually pisses me off that in 2016, SLIDERS REBORN was the second most popular section of EP.COM. The second. What was the most popular? It was the Season 3 episode guide section. That makes me so angry, angry enough to post an angry rant demanding that Season 3 be made illegal and subject to criminal prosecution. I won't do that; I want people to feel safe.

Informant didn't make me feel safe to talk about abortion. I had dinner plans with Laurel Hills (the real-life version) that night. I wanted to eat Chinese food with Laurel and contemplate who might write a SUPERNATURAL: SEASON 16 comic book. I felt Informant would have no respect for my personal views and ruin my night.

And that's strange because when it comes to the art of storytelling, Informant's viewpoint is truly enlightening. When talking about writing, Informant says that writers should not dictate where stories should go; they should create characters and situations and let them play out with whatever tone and emphasis makes for the most interesting results.

He points to FRINGE and how it's unlike a lot of other fantasy TV because rather than go for bombastic drama, the tone is very low key, very thoughtful, very contemplative, and how the show came to that over time rather than deciding at the outset. He points to SMALLVILLE where the writers decided Clark would be a reporter without having done the work to earn it via episodes of Clark attending journalism classes in college (or even attending college). FRINGE felt sincere and genuine; SMALLVILLE felt staged and forced.

Widened outside of storytelling, that perspective becomes truly empowering and generous: it would be saying that we should all look at the world and find our own approach, our own perspective, our own values -- and that we can be informed by others without being dictated.

This is more than a principle of writing; it is a beautiful philosophy for life. I have always felt deeply honoured that Informant would share such uncommon wisdom with us.

I don't think Informant always lived up to it and wouldn't have in a discussion on abortion. He would have made it a hostile, aggressive argument. He would have belittled me and drowned the Bboard in conspiracy theories and links to documentaries and essays from professional hate speech artists and willful misunderstandings and more misinformation based on Northam's asinine communication. He would, as he has before, call me a an human voice recorder reciting mass media liberal views. (Probably not in those words.)

Slider_Quinn21 makes me feel like even if he disagrees with me, he'll just share his opinion and offer new or correct information. ("You cannot have the sliders fight the radioactive slugs with road salt; they're in San Francisco, they don't sell road salt there.")

TRANSMODIAR: "Got a question for ya."

IB: "What's up?"

TRANSMODIAR: "This outline for the fifth SLIDERS REBORN script -- Jesus, I remember when this was going to be a trilogy!"

IB: "Those were the days."

TRANSMODIAR: "Ib, why did you name the villain in the fifth story after Temporal Flux? Did he piss in your cornflakes or something?"

IB: "What're you talking about? I named the character Randall Mewes. That's not Temporal Flux's real name at all."

TRANSMODIAR: "Ib."

IB: "I didn't model the villain after Temporal Flux. It's just -- REBORN is all about Quinn battling mirror images of himself and that reminds me of the conflict between you two. You're all over REBORN too."

TRANSMODIAR: "Right, because one of us is going to totally release the Season 3 monsters onto the city of San Francisco out of mustasche twirling and spite."

IB: "No! Because -- because Quinn and Smarter Quinn are the same person. They should be friends! But they're not. The way you guys should be friends -- but you aren't! And I'm just writing the energy of that conflict into the scripts."

TRANSMODIAR: "So, am I Quinn or Smarter Quinn?"

IB: "It's not a one-to-one corelation. You're one or the other at various points. There's parts where Quinn says that all past is prologue and every day is a new universe, that's TF. There's a part where Quinn totals a car, that's you. There's a part where Smarter Quinn tries to bash Quinn's face in with a lead pipe like TF once said he wanted to do to you."

TRANSMODIAR: "I think it was a wrench."

IB: "It was a lead pipe. You remember wrong."

TRANSMODIAR: "Of course, I'd totally forget what implement TF wanted to use to smash apart my skull."

IB: "Well, you don't even remember the faces of the guys who robbed you at gunpoint. But, you know -- I think I actually did model the villain of 'Revolution' on Temporal Flux."

TRANSMODIAR: "Because he did something that made you so angry you're going to go on a killing spree as encouraged by your teddy bear and the bleached skull inside his body?"

IB: "Uh. No. Because the villain's plot is so nonsensically convoluted that only a genius-level intellect like Temporal Flux could make it work."

TRANSMODIAR: "Change that. It's not nice to name villains after your friend especially if you look up to him as much as you say you do."

IB: "Well, of course I'm going to change it -- TF's genius is so beyond me. I think the way to make 'Revolution' work -- I need to rewatch the episode 'Obsession' and find a psychic character whose future-aware perspective can justify a storyline for Quinn to hallucinate Mallory. Maybe that nurse or a bodyguard or the president."

TRANSMODIAR: "They can justify a storyline where Quinn experiences a telepathic attack and his brain is about to shut down but it turns out that Quinn anticipated this and he built in the Mallory personality as a backup operating system for startup repair?"

IB: "I'm thinking Quinn's caught in a fire and suffering from oxygen deprivation and hallucinating."

TRANSMODIAR: "Hhhhhhhhhhh!!! I don't even want to ask you why you'd go to all these lengths to write a Robert Floyd fanfic that he is never going to read. I already know why. You're a loon."

A dramatization. May not have happened in this order, all in one conversation or in these exact words.

Day Two (a little early): Informant once said something shocking and true about Jerry O'Connell's career path. Informant remarked that Jerry, in walking away from SLIDERS without an onscreen exit, had shown great disloyalty to SLIDERS fans and that the fans would reward him with the same.

"Sci-fi fans are loyal people," explained Informant. "When they like an actor, when they feel that the actor respects their passion, they will follow that actor to every project, any project, even if that actor goes from pushing buttons on the bridge of STAR TREK to doing stand-up comedy or selling 3D glasses on infomercials. But when Jerry turned his back on SLIDERS and the fans, he made it really easy for the fans to turn their backs on him too."

Jerry O'Connell presently has one fan site. Hasn't been updated since 2008. His fan forum is defunct. He went from a rising star to someone who doesn't believe he could headline his own SLIDERS show at this point in his career. When Informant's right, he's very, very, very right.

I don't know. Maybe he's worried about being banned. Informant has never done anything to warrant being banned, partially because he is a man of decent character and also because he does not use the language or invective that would could in any way be construed as abuse and/or harassment. Looking back, I do notice that I said that if he were to ever again present himself as the spokesperson of this forum, he wouldn't be doing it on this forum -- I didn't mean that I would ban him; I would have simply edited any post where he made such claims to include my message that he doesn't.

Yes, Informant made me uncomfortable, but I don't ban people for making me uncomfortable or for using language that doesn't invite debate and discourse. Expressing views in a disgruntled or closed manner is not abuse and/or harassment. I have only ever banned one person -- breederbutter -- for repeatedly saying that Cleavant was "the racial hire" and promoted above his station as "the racial hire." And you'll recall that I once banned myself for four weeks.

I'll get back to you on the other thing, but for now, here is Day Three:

Informant once expressed a very worthwhile criticism of Season 1 of SLIDERS and Tracy Torme and Robert K. Weiss that I think about a lot. He remarked: SLIDERS in the Pilot, "Summer of Love," "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days" and "The King is Back" take the view that our Earth's history is the correct course of events, the best outcome for all.

SLIDERS visits worlds where 60s counterculture remained dominant or the American Revolution failed or where antibiotics were not created or the atom bomb not produced or where Rembrandt never fell into obscurity -- and says that those are worlds where things went wrong.

SLIDERS takes the view that divergences from our Earth are where errors were made. Informant notes that this is a rather arrogant, self-flattering perspective for the SLIDERS writing staff and the sliders themselves, declaring that the what they perceive as the status quo is the best state of affairs and what is unfamiliar is morally defective or unjust or antithetical to fairness, equality and respect for others.

Informant pointed out that this comes dangerously close to declaring that anything perceived as different is immediately a threat. That it's the result of needing to create physical danger for the sliders as a result of unfamilarity with new environments, but the implication, possibly intentional, possibly not, is that 1990s North America is a near-utopia and anyone who finds fault or considers alternatives is part of a fascist and tyrannical government (the Russians in the Pilot, the British in "Prince") or an egotistical buffoon (Rembrandt in "The King is Back") or so technologically deficient as to be incapable or survival ("Fever," "Last Days").

He conceded that Season 1 does start to question this perspective with "Eggheads," "The Weaker Sex" and "Luck of the Draw," but he pointed out that despite the exceptions, the moral foundation of SLIDERS is flawed. We must question, debunk and/or deepen it with more points of consideration.

His thoughts really hit home with me and I carried them into SLIDERS REBORN. Most people seem to like SLIDERS REBORN, but there's one area that every single person took issue with -- the third script reveals that the multiverse is damaged. The only splitting points for the multiverse are drawn from a single date, March 22, 1995, and a single world, Earth Prime. History branches off at no earlier points and no later points due to a cataclysm that took place between "The Seer" and REBORN. And every version of Earth is headed towards doomsday scenarios as March 22, 1995 is a date where humanity is on a course of environmental destruction that leads inevitably to the Earth no longer being able to sustain human life.

Slider_Quinn21, Transmodiar and Nigel Mitchell and pretty much anyone else who read the scripts didn't buy that. They found it hard to believe that the Earth was that far gone by 1995. I agree; there's some wiggle room in that the date of divergence is also based on Quinn's Earth as opposed to ours or any other world, so maybe things were that bad on Quinn's Earth. But the reason I set it up that way was to raise Informant's argument: that Earth from 1994 - 1995 should not be presented as any kind of utopian ideal in contrast to other civilizations.

Thank you, Informant.

I don't think that perspective is unique to Americans.  People living comfortable lives always see their world as the best of all possible worlds.

It could make an interesting point of conflict for a reboot.  Have one slider advocating something like the Star Trek prime directive, that they shouldn't interfere with the natural development of other Earths, while another is dead set on making every Earth more like ours.

Prelude to Day Four:

Not a dramatization, I swear to God all of the above totally happened (in some parallel universe somewhere).

Day Four: Informant on the Importance of the Original Quartet

For awhile, Transmodiar and I had a little debate between us. I took the view that SLIDERS losing the chemistry of Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo rendered SLIDERS pointless because I watched the show to hang out with my four friends. Transmodiar pointed out that the original cast is hardly a marker of quality given episodes like the incomprehensible "Time and Again World," the energy-sapped "The Good, the Bad and the Wealthy," the noticeably underwritten "El Sid" which seems to be short by about 15 - 20 pages of script, the formulaic "Greatfellas," the underperforming "The Young and the Relentless" and, most alarmingly, the escape-capture repetition of "Love Gods" which seems like it was written by a computer program producing script pages through on an algorithm.

Transmodiar insists that Tony Blake and Paul Jackson are real people and that he's had lunch with Paul Jackson and traded scandalous gossip, but I remain unsure if Blake and Jackson are actually pseudonyms for compiled code from a team of Final Draft software engineers. Transmodiar also felt that Seasons 4 - 5 had many gems and that Charlie O'Connell found his feet while getting less and less to do, that Kari Wuhrer had a lot of charm and passion for Maggie and that episodes like "World Killer" and "The Return of Maggie Beckett" and other strong entries show SLIDERS doesn't depend on Jerry, Cleavant, Sabrina and John to function properly. Slider_Quinn21 has gone so far as to say that while he's fond enough of the original cast, it's really the concept of exploring an new alternate history every week that carries the show, not any particular set of actors.

And this debate continued for years as people came up with increasingly strained and absurd concepts for resurrecting the original cast and proposed numerous SLIDERS 'reboots' that started with the original Arturo finding Rembrandt and rescuing Wade from a Kromagg prison and splitting the Quinns and revealing that the Earth in "Genesis" was a fake. Focusing on the cast always eroded what would actually carry a SLIDERS revival forward -- the concept -- except that SLIDERS was so defined by the original cast that reviving the show with new actors would mean throwing away good money on royalties that would be better spent on an original concept and title.

Informant, however, pointed out that SLIDERS is fundamentally about its concept but that its concept is intrinsically connected to the original cast. He noted that while Earth Prime is subtly not our Earth (unless Berkeley's campus is now next to Golden Gate Park), it was sufficiently similar that Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo shared a common frame of reference with the audience. They could react to parallel worlds the way the audience would react. Informant observed that with each character being removed from the cast, a central point of connection was lost. The Professor came from our world; his outraged frustration and confusion spoke for the audience. Maggie does not come from our world or anything like our world; we have no sense of what Maggie's perception of normalcy even is, so we can't react with her and feel like we're on a journey with her.

This problem reached another low point in Season 4, Informant said, when Earth Prime was invaded by Kromaggs. "Last I checked, there was no Kromagg invasion in our world," Informant said, "so now Quinn and Rembrandt don't come from our world, and we can't connect to them because they're now aliens exploring other alien worlds." Informant criticized Season 4 for making Quinn from Kromagg Prime, but to him, the original damage came from making Quinn and Rembrandt's home Earth a Kromagg outpost. It had already disconnected the character from the audience.

Informant took the view that the SLIDERS concept requires that the cast members be from a world close to (if not identical) to our own in order for them to have a frame of reference similar enough to the audience to be familiar and that familiarity is key to creating impact, awe, threat and risk when faced with the dangers of parallel Earths. The longer we spend with the original cast, the more that familiarity grows and the more it heightens the what-if concept with greater emotion and characterization. Through Informant's philosophy, SLIDERS as a concept and SLIDERS as an ensemble dramedy are merged into one.

I think Informant is the reason why, despite wanting to write SLIDERS REBORN as a sitcom with Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo, I asked Nigel Mitchell, the Douglas Adams of SLIDERS, to come up with the parallel histories for me and take over for me when it came to world-building and make sure that the what-if sci-fi element was present in ways that I would not write myself or want to write myself.

(To be honest, I first asked Transmodiar to do this; then I fired Transmodiar off SLIDERS REBORN, shortly after he quit. Well. He said he was quitting. He never actually left and continued to consult right through to the end, but Nigel devised all the alt-history details and exposition in the scripts.)

This was precisely Informant's point; that the search for home that the audience could recognize as their own was a way for the show to connect with the audience.

If you don't agree that it was essential and have a different perspective of your own, that'd be great, but I don't think you actually have a different perspective. And I've found requesting your perspective in the past to be a dead end of discussion. At one point, I described seeing the sliders as superheroes and you said this was wrong because superheroes are selfless and the sliders, seeking to survive, are selfish. I asked you why it was selfish to survive because by that logic, it's selfish to sleep, eat, take medicine for illnesses or do so much as breathe. You had no response.

At another, I remarked that I would have liked the sliders to fight the Season 3 monsters using scientific means and reasoning; you mocked this for being like MACGYVER; I asked you how you would have them fight the Season 3 monsters and after ignoring the question twice, you then said you would have used scientific means and reasoning -- meaning that despite mocking my opinion, you had the same one.

At another, you criticized my pitch for a SLIDERS revival featuring Quinn Mallory on the grounds that my pitch for a SLIDERS revival was overly focused on the creator of sliding, a nonsensical chain of logic which tells me you don't actually object to my opinions. You object to me having anything to say at all.

You remind me of Informant on a bad day. It's appropriate to this thread, but I no longer find this amusing or upsetting. Informant's self-implosion wasn't funny. It was tragic and sad.

In recent years, I've met several refugees who've fled their countries which were devastated by war, who saw families and friends enslaved and murdered, who survived prison camps. The claim that people whose homes were destroyed and whose loved ones were either killed or forced into brutal servitude "doesn't change" their perspective and that their memories are "unchanged" is... sociopathic and indicates an total lack of empathy.

Dear fellow fan and message board poster, I am sorry for whatever hardship, grief, loss and despair has pushed you to such indifference to human life and such a diseased approach to discourse. I am also sorry for criticizing your SLIDERS reboot pitches in terms that were too harsh and not constructive, but you must have suffered greatly in some fashion to become as you are. You must have lost something precious or experienced some horror that no person should ever have to endure. You are excused from any further frustration and anger from me. My heart is with you. Please get help. https://www.goodtherapy.org

It is nonsensical for you to claim that an invaded, devastated, destroyed Earth is "familiar" and "functionally identical" to world of the average American viewer watching Season 4 of SLIDERS. Earth Prime was a Kromagg outpost; the Earth in which the audience lives was not. Your argument also discounts the loss of Wade and Arturo and how by Season 4, Maggie was from the Pulsar Earth with no clear alternate history aside from not being ours and Colin was from a pre-industrial world, also unlike our own. Your argument is incoherent.

By this absurd logic, this means that you can't consider yourself to be bereaved by the loss of a family member unless you are present at the exact moment of death. That if your house burned down while you were out, you wouldn't consider yourself having lost a home because you didn't see it happen.

This speaks to a certain level of sociopathy where you do not count events as genuine or meaningful unless you -- and you specifically -- were involved in them physically and experienced them personally.

Your chain of reasoning is also based in empty hair-splitting. And worse, your hair-splitting is flat-out wrong within the context of the show: in "Genesis," Quinn saw the Kromaggs take his mother, Wade and Rembrandt saw the Kromaggs invade their world and in "Requiem," Rembrandt saw Wade tortured and taken away by the Kromaggs.

As I would say to Informant, whom you are beginning to resemble in the worst way, you are entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts. Actually, Informant was never this bad about anything. Informant had a tendency to parrot dubious secondary sources whereas you actively invent false information to justify your opinion and your opinion is completely worthless.

Your disagreements with me are always in the same format: you disqualify my opinions based on measures that are not only arbitrary but would dismiss every opinion on the subject up to and including your own. You said that sliders aren't superheroes because they are trying to survive, but by that measure, no superhero character would qualify as such because every superhero has been seen breathing and eating. You said my reboot pitch for SLIDERS was wrong because it featured the creator of sliding in too prominent a role, a view that could dismiss every SLIDERS pitch.

And you said that I was wrong to say the sliders should use scientific means and reasoning to fight the Season 3 monsters and, when pressed for an opinion, finally declared that in your view, the sliders should use scientific means and reasoning to fight the Season 3 monsters, meaning you have no reason for disagreement, merely a compulsive opposition to anything posted under my handle.

I see no contradiction between the objective truth that people are traumatized by war and the fact that SLIDERS does not present Quinn and Rembrandt to be traumatized. SLIDERS is a television show that often failed to present horrific events with psychological realism.

The fact that you present "Common Ground" as a plausible representation of post-war trauma indicates that you are mentally ill and severely so. This isn't funny. This isn't a point-scoring exercise for me. You aren't well. I am very worried for you. Regardless of our differences, you're still a person and deserve compassion and concern. Please get help. https://www.goodtherapy.org

It's interesting.  For the most part, every show has to sell you on plot first.  Great characters usually only develop out of some sort of interesting plot.

To me, the best show ever (not my favorite) is HBO's the Wire.  It's a show that I've recommended dozens of times, but it's also a show that I always mention "starts slow but stick with it."  A lot of people say to give it 4 episodes before you quit on it, essentially demanding that people fight through almost *half* the first season before they're allowed to decide if they like it or not.  That show is almost exclusively about characters - there's certainly a lot of plot, but the plot for that show is decidedly disconnected for the most part.  When I sell the show to people, I sell the realism and the characters.

My favorite show is LOST.  LOST is an interesting case study because it's a show that always had a fight between plot and characters.  People that were there for plot hated the show.  People that were there for characters loved it.  But almost everyone that watched the show watched because of the plot.  I can distinctly remember looking at a newspaper ad for LOST - it was Jurassic Park meets Castaway - two things that intrigued me at the time.  None of the advertisements said "don't worry about the plot!  You'll love the characters!" and I'm not sure I would've watched if they did.

I also distinctly remember ads for Sliders.  And, again, I was sold on plot.  Four people land on a world run by the Russian!  A world dying of disease!  A world about to be destroyed by an asteroid!  But it wasn't anything about characters.

I think the problem with Sliders in this respect is that shows in that time were about plot.  You might have a show with great characters, but it was usually incidental.  Mulder and Scully are great characters, but I think the X-Files cared more about plot than characterization because they needed a plot to draw people in.

Today, I think you can sell a show on characters.  I think Better Call Saul is a show that draws people in on characters and not plot.  People know the plot of Better Call Saul, but they want to see Jimmy/Saul.

I think most people come to a show for the plot and stay for the characters.  I think that's the case for Sliders.  I think the unique thing about Sliders is that the plot is so compelling and so infinite and so untapped that people might've come for the plot, stayed for the characters, and then stayed for the plot as the characters fell one by one.

The common consensus is that THE X-FILES fell apart after the Mulder/Scully partnership ended in Season 8 when David Duchovny completed his seven year contract and moved on. Another common consensus is that COMMUNITY fell apart after Donald Glover left the show.

There are arguments for and against, but I would protest that creatively, THE X-FILES was about the X-Files investigations and so long as THE X-FILES featured a believer and a skeptic exploring the paranormal, it could still be plausibly called THE X-FILES. And so long as COMMUNITY was about a run down community college, it could still call itself COMMUNITY.

These are shows where you could potentially slot in different characters as new FBI agents or community college students or teachers or administrators because the characters existed in relation to a formal institution that could invite new characters and create an exit for existing ones.

SLIDERS, however, was completely informal. Sliding wasn't a branch of the military. There was no Sliders Incorporated or Q-Tech. Sliding was Quinn's after-school project. The completely accidental circumstances of the show and the ticking clock of the timer made it difficult to take characters out without creating nightmare situations (like death) that would damage the show's tone as a dramedy and a fun adventure.

And because all the characters were from 'our' Earth, it was difficult to create storylines that introduced replacement sliders who could function as well as the originals. It would have been hard to justify bringing in sliders from Earth Prime without undermining the sliders being unable back to Earth Prime. SLIDERS, inadvertently or not, created a situation where they couldn't lose actors without fundamentally damaging the show.

It's not like STARGATE where you could have characters transfer to another job or STAR TREK where you could jump a century ahead and show a new crew on a new Enterprise without making anyone upset that Kirk and Spock were out. If you lost John or Sabrina or Jerry, you had to create some rationale for why they weren't sliding and that rationale was usually death or capture or whatever the hell "New Gods for Old" was.

I think that the viewing audience at the time stayed because they kept hoping that the original sliders would come back because the show kept getting renewed every single year no matter how hard FOX and Sci-Fi tried to kill it and the fans believed that if we could just hold out for another season and then another and then another, our friends would find a way back to us.

No, sorry, that's just me -- I have no idea why you guys kept watching. :-)

I'll get back to Informant later... and I'd prefer not to berate him any further. As for pilight, I have come to the conclusion that I have only myself to blame. pilight never behaved like this until I ripped into their SLIDERS fan fiction which is a rather shocking failure of character given how you, Transmodiar, were extremely encouraging (in your way) and tremendously constructive (although you'd insist you weren't). I see now that I am responsible for pilight's actions. If they talk crap about refugees, it's my doing. Which means that when I berate them, am I not ultimately berating myself? When I find fault in them, am I not finding my own faults and failings?

Bringing in new characters to Sliders is tough on several levels.  There's the stuff talked about above with the new characters being aliens from a different world vs the Sliders getting home only to slide out again for some reason.  There's the question of motivation for a new character to slide, presumably knowing they can't go home again, or to keep sliding if they were escaping a doomed or dystopian world like Maggie.  I don't know the answer to that.

Writing characters out is easier.  Maybe they slide into a world just like Earth Prime.  Some of the characters think they're home and stay, some don't believe it and leave.  Maybe a character is sick of sliding and loses hope of getting home and decides to stay on a paradise world.  Maybe a character falls in love and decides to stay with their new partner instead of sliding with the others.  Maybe a character catches a fatal disease and several slides later finds a world with a treatment that can make the condition chronic, but only if they stay and receive the medication regularly.  There are quite a few options that don't end in fatality.

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Not sure 'budget' has anything to do with hiring acting talent. Many of my friends are super-talented actresses whose earnings are well below what Kari Wuhrer was making on erotic thrillers. The rest is... a matter of perspective, I guess.

Anyway. Coming for Day Five: Informant's SLIDERS Reboot

Well, for one, most of the non-Sliders TV/movies he would discuss here have largely ended or have fallen apart.

He and I had some all out wars during the 2000 election.  Haven't had much of a dustup since then, and though I don't post in every thread here, I rarely saw him going off on the basis of politics.  But I have largely stopped discussing politics on-line over the last many years.  I find it's a total waste of time.

I think it's probably hard to feel like you're on a side by yourself on everything.

- Informant loved the DCEU, but generally hated the Marvel movies.  Most people here tended to criticize the DCEU and liked/loved many of the Marvel films.

- Informant struggled to keep watching the Arrowverse and despised Supergirl.  We all stuck with it, including Supergirl.

- Informant was a clear pro-life conservative.  Most people (TF notwithstanding?) are either centrist or liberal.

It's probably hard to find the passion to get back here and be the only one championing something on so many levels.  Without Sliders to talk about on any sort of consistent basis, these are the things we talked about.  Superhero movies, superhero TV, and stuff like that.  He seemed staunchly opposed to most of us, and we had a lot of the same arguments in circular fashion.

It is sometimes easier to log onto a site and see a view that supports your own.  There's vindication when he reads an article about how the DCEU was too genius for its own time, for how the Marvel movies aren't all that great, how the Arrowverse needs to die, and how Supergirl is the worst of them all.

But I always looked forward to seeing a new post from Informant on a lot of these subjects.  It was always interesting to see a new Marvel movie and see what he thought.  I, of course, looked forward to seeing what he thought about movies like Justice League and BvS.  It was also fun to write a big long thing about any of those movies and see him pick my points apart.  I think it's more fun to read the other side and try and see where they're coming from.

If he's gone, it's going to be less interesting around here.

I don't follow anyone political on Twitter, but I occasionally dip my toe into political waters to see what people are thinking.  My newest political curiosity is how active liberal Twitter people are handling this particular conundrum: if Trump is awful and needs to be impeached and the Democratic Party is the beacon of all goodness, how are people handling the idea that the Democratic Party is seemingly refusing to impeach Trump?

When Trump was elected, I wasn't as upset as everyone else.  I thought this because I didn't think Trump was all that popular with mainstream Republicans (I was quite wrong there) and I thought Democrats would lead the charge against Trump on Day One, and they'd boot him from office whenever he had a misstep.

I was also wrong there.  While Democrats obviously despise Trump and all that he stands for, the anger seems to be isolated to interviews on Rachel Maddow and on Twitter.  There's a lot of talk and very little action.  It actually reminds me of the "thoughts and prayers" that Republicans do whenever there is a mass shooting.  For all Trump's done and for all the evidence they have, we get the Democratic version of "thoughts and prayers"

Stepping back, I get it.  Is it worth it to impeach Trump when there's a really good chance that Senate Republicans won't pass it?  You'd need more than a handful of Republicans to step over the aisle, and while I thought it was possible in 2016, I don't think it's possible now.  I can see why Pelosi and Democrats don't want to give him the OJ-like ability to claim himself innocent when everyone knows he's not.

So when I look, I get this confusion from liberals on Twitter.  It's this "IMPEACH TRUMP NOW!" followed by a "Pelosi knows what she's doing."  Or "PELOSI SHOULD EITHER IMPEACH HIM OR RESIGN" followed by someone attacking that person for not getting in line.  Like Bernie and Hillary, we're coming up on a Civil War inside the Democratic Party where people are either starting to turn on Pelosi (in some cases, calling her complicit to Trump's crimes) or holding the line because that's what Pelosi is doing.

And I'm baffled by it all, honestly.  Yes, Trump is the leader of the Republican party.  And since he's popular (enough) with the base and since it's good for them to have a Republican in the White House, I understand why most Republicans can't just openly turn on him.  But I also assume they'd all be happier with Pence both in the White House and on the ticket.  He's a more traditional conservative (although arguably worse than Trump on certain issues in every definition of that word for everyone concerned), and I think certain parts of the Republican base would be happier to vote for him than Trump.

For Democrats....I don't know what.  I see where Pelosi is coming from, but her inaction almost makes me believe in the idea that Democrats and Republicans are just our labels and everyone in Congress is essentially on the same side.  That they're all happy with the status quo but that they have to rabble on Twitter to make certain people feel better.

Because, yeah, the Senate probably won't kick him out (even though it makes sense for them to).  And even if they did, he probably wouldn't leave peacefully.  And that's a huge problem in itself.  But I think what Pelosi thinks they have to lose isn't really what they have to lose.

If the Senate refuses to boot him, Trump will be able to say he was not guilty - Well, he's saying that now.  And he'd say it even if he was found guilty.  That's not going to change.

If the Senate refuses to boot him, it might affect the election - In certain years, maybe.  This year?  I think most people have a rock-hard opinion of Trump and that an impeachment result (either way) will not persuade their vote in 2020.  Certain people will vote for Trump in 2020 no matter what.  Certain people will vote for his opponent (no matter who that is) no matter what.  People have decided if he's guilty or innocent, and the Senate vote won't have any impact on what they think.  I think even most independents (myself included) have already made up their minds on him.  So who's still unsure?  Wouldn't bringing up all the evidence and showing it convince more people than a strictly-political vote convince people?  Even if you get a few hundred votes to flip in the right place or convince a few hundred people who sat out in 2016 to vote....that's enough to win.

The only thing I can think of is that Pelosi is 100% convinced that someone will beat him in 2020.  That she'd rather face Trump than Pence.  And she might be right.  The map overwhelmingly helps Democrats over Republicans, and it took a historically unpopular candidate in Clinton to lose.  And even then, she barely lost and still overwhelmingly won the popular vote.  I think essentially anyone in the field can beat him, and it might not even be that hard.

If that's the case, maybe you just wait and beat him.  But I read an idea online that the House should go through the impeachment process and then never throw it to the Senate.  Go through the whole evidence procedure but never call for a vote.  So you'd give the American public all the information without ever giving Trump a chance to exonerate himself.  I mean he'll consider this an exoneration and his fans would too....but they're going to anyway.

I think it's an interesting strategy.

Yeah but by not impeaching, they're admitting there's no case.  Is that what they're going after?  Would it have been better for the LA District Attorney to not prosecute OJ Simpson knowing that he got off?  Or do you make your best case and if the system fails, you can still hold your head high?

And if they think this president is dangerous, you don't play politics with it.  If you wait for the primaries, that's another several months where Donald Trump can deal with Iran, where Donald Trump controls the situation at the border, where Donald Trump can be meeting with foreign agents about 2020, etc.

(For the record, I'm not arguing with you.  I'm arguing with them, if that's their logic)

There are currently two problems with impeachment. The first: the Trump campaign didn't collude with Russia, only benefited from it passively. It's difficult to present Trump as a traitor to his country when he wasn't coordinating with Russia and when Russian intelligence likely saw how foolish it would be to attempt any covert coordination with a man notorious for being indiscreet. Charging Trump with being in league with a foreign power is a non-starter.

The second problem is that Trump was not successful in obstructing the investigation into his electoral ties to Russia. He most definitely attempted to impede the probe, but because his orders were refused and because the investigation was completed, it would be extremely difficult to charge him with a crime that he didn't actually succeed in committing to any particular degree. Attempted obstruction is still a crime but a capable defense could argue that it's entirely a matter of perspective and easily muddy the waters.

There is no slam-dunk argument here that wins impeachment proceedings or the court of public opinion, and Pelosi has said that pursuing impeachment in these subjective terms makes it entirely too easy to beat the case down while making the Democratic Party so focused on impeachment that they can't campaign for the White House.

Strategically, unless Jack wants to cast his truth spell on Trump to get him to spill the beans about his demon deal with Crowley, impeachment is a bumpy road that conceivably leads nowhere while draining all the gas in the Democratic Party tank.

Still working on my essay for Informant's 29.7. I wonder how it will all shake out.

As much as I would like Trump out of office, I have to ask: what exactly can he be charged with to oust him? Collusion with Russia? If this loudmouth worked with Russia, he'd never shut up about it. Obstruction of justice? He failed at every turn.

Numerous experts say that Trump's intent to obstruct is established through ordering subordinates to shut down the Mueller investigation only for his staff to ignore him or refuse. And that it's solid grounds for impeachment. To me (and to Pelosi, I think), it would be very easy for the Trump administration to spin that as Trump expressing wishes that he knew would not be carried out. To me, impeachment is currently a dead end.

But, to go back to Informant, there's something about Informant that always deeply disappointed me: the way he presented himself as an expert on Superman (even though he hadn't read much of his comic), an expert on race relations (based on Google Maps), an expert on the concept of toxic feminism (based on watching one men's rights activist documentary), an expert on electoral fraud (based on some videos made by a scam artist filmmaker), an expert on box office earnings and profits (his fixation on the DCEU's supposed success) and any subject that came up.

The truth is: that attitude is best reserved for writing fiction. When Informant put it to use for SLIDERS (2013) and his novels and his "29.7," it presented a version of Informant who had concerns and worries and an overarching view of how the world worked, but laid out as theory rather than objective reality that could not be questioned or debunked. I like to think that the Informant who wrote fiction was the real Informant. That the arrogant lecturer was an outer shell of insecurity obscuring the man within.

Therefore: I must note that I never went to law school (to the great disappointment of my parents). I am only a speculating bystander and am in no way qualified to dissect the legal challenges.

I once wrote a lengthy psychoanalysis of Jerry O'Connell based on one article in MEN'S FITNESS and another on Brandon Routh based on one podcast interview. I could be wrong about Jerry and Routh and impeachment. As wrong as the time I thought Robert Floyd would enjoy reading a screenplay in which Quinn is suffering smoke inhalation and hallucinates Mallory. As wrong as the time I thought Transmodiar would let me post a SLIDERS REBORN script on EarthPrime.com where Quinn confronts Trump. As wrong as the time I accidentally uploaded nude photos of Kari Wuhrer to the Sci-Fi Channel server.

I'm getting off track. My point is that I could be wrong wrong wrong and they really were for art.

I don't know if we're really off topic. I won't have my essay on Informant's "29.7" ready until the end of the weekend.

Impeachment does not strike me as something you can run in the background. Once the Democratic Party rings that bell, it's going to be all impeachment at all hours on all days and I don't know how practical or worthwhile that is for a foregone conclusion of defeat. It could be a course of action from which there is no retreat, no shifting attention. And I recently made a terrible mistake in that area.

I'm flailing a bit, desperately trying to think of THREE MORE THINGS that could count as one of Informant's top ten contributions to SLIDERS. But I'm in too deep to turn back now. And I'll probably end up folding this thread into Informant's political thread. And reposting Informant's top ten contributions in a separate thread. If I can think of ten. Currently, I've only been able to think of six. I don't know why I said ten. A person who is never wrong would have said five things. Damn it.

Also, impeachment doesn't send someone to jail.  It doesn't even require a criminal act.  Pence would surely pardon him anyway, like Ford did for Nixon.

Day Six: Informant on Reasoning and Metaphor. ("29.7" will have to wait.)
 
Informant was a huge fan of FRINGE, an X-FILES-esque paranormal procedural where the bizarre events were revealed to be the result of a SLIDERS-esque machine that opened a gateway between parallel worlds. Informant is also a fan of SUPERNATURAL, an X-FILES-esque procedural that determinedly renders its reality in terms of magic. And Informant watched THE X-FILES revival and expressed dismay at how from week to week, Mulder and Scully seemed to ricochet between a science fiction universe of alien technology and a magical universe of ghosts and demons. The former presented technology that was beyond human creation but not beyond understanding; the latter declared that humans were at the mercy of otherworldly forces that defied all rationality.

I remarked that THE X-FILES' showrunner, Chris Carter, should be admired for letting each writer write their own version of the show and Informant rebuked Carter for this, saying it led to a schizophrenic, incoherent series. Informant conceded that all the writers Carter permitted free rein had gone on to become successful showrunners themselves (Tim Minear, Vince Gilligan, Glen Morgan, James Wong, Darin Morgan, John Shiban, Frank Spotnitz, Howard Gordon, Jeffrey Bell and more), but that Carter's job had been to find a coherent and consistent vision for THE X-FILES, not to running a training camp for the writers of the future.

Interestingly, this is also a problem in SLIDERS. Seasons 1 - 2 featured parallel Earth settings created by choosing a specific point in history and choosing a different outcome, then extrapolating what the present day would be as a result. Season 3 featured Dream Masters, man-made twisters, dragons, radioactive slugs, mutants, pancake parasites, super-intelligent snakes, vampires and animal-human hybrids and humans flying with angelic wings -- none of which were in any way justified by an alternate history and the supposed scientific rigour of SLIDERS.

At one point, I was rewatching FRINGE with a friend, Val, and Val remarked that the 'science' of FRINGE was essentially magic presented in technobabble terms. She seized upon the episode where in one universe, a widow's grief for her dead husband rips apart reality to reach a parallel universe where the husband lives and mourns the death of his wife. 

Val pointed out that there was no rationale, even within the show, for how human emotions could affect gravimetric or vibrational constants to alter the underlying fabric of reality; that there had to be some physical catalyst and feeling sad over a dead spouse didn't count. She said it wasn't science fiction; it was magical-realism masquerading as sci-fi through inadequate technobabble.

And Informant had a very interesting response. Informant pointed out that all reality is perceptual and fundamentally subjective, and that until we open gateways to parallel worlds in our world, we don't actually know whether or not our emotional states can affect reality. That FRINGE with that episode had featured a "soft spot" where reality was malleable and that the subjective perception of reality could potentially determine reality. Was that likely? Informant didn't know. But was it impossible? We could hardly rule it out.

It's at this point that I began pondering the Season 3 monsters and how they could be explained within the SLIDERS reality of Seasons 1 - 2. I had some thoughts about how the monsters were Kromagg experiments in genetic engineering, but when writing the SLIDERS REBORN scripts, I decided to go with Informant's idea of a damaged, 'softened' reality becoming subject to alteration based on perception and brought the Season 3 monsters in for the sixth scripts as representations of mental illness with the monsters originating from realities where the laws of science had been twisted and mutilated.

... I don't feel I really captured Informant's mentality, however. In the novella that offers a broad explanation for all the oddities of Seasons 1 - 5, Quinn explains that when the Geiger experiment ripped him out of reality, it removed every double and caused what the Doctor would call a "total event collapse" in spacetime due to so many of Quinn's doubles being entangled with the histories of parallel Earths. Reality cracked and began to manifest anomalies such as monsters and magic, the symptoms of a dying multiverse. 

Despite Quinn being in a mental asylum to deliver this exposition, I don't feel the monsters really represented mental health problems. And in the SLIDERS REBORN finale, I again didn't feel the monsters represented perceptual subjectivity; they were supervillains for the sliders to trounce in superhero action sequences and it was just absurd. I decided to turn into the swerve by playing it all for laughs by having the sliders use everyday items in bulk and delivered via vortex to defeat the robots and the dinosaurs and what-not, but I felt that I had wandered very far from Informant's original point and I never found a way to get back.

But anyway. I still think that the Season 3 monster sequences are a lot of fun and I really appreciate Informant's thinking in this area.

You could make that partly intentional.  Quinn isn't interested in going to worlds that can't support life, so he programmed his timer to only open wormholes to places within a certain range of temperature, radiation, atmosphere, etc.