Sliders: Declassified (Page 1 of 2)

I'm not going to describe any specific scenes from DECLASSIFIED in this post, but DECLASSIFIED is a really special piece of work to me as a reader and a fan of SLIDERS because Temporal Flux does something special: he captures the spirit of SLIDERS.

Soft Touch: The SLIDERS house style as established by Tracy Torme and Robert K. Weiss has a very specific personality: it's satirical and gentle. Shows like SOUTH PARK and SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE are direct and savage in mocking politics, culture and societal prejudice. But SLIDERS is indirect and kind. Perhaps one of the most memorable scenes of SLIDERS is the Pilot where a captive Rembrandt is told by a threatening Ross J. Kelly that the Soviet ruled America will have Rembrandt put on trial in The People's Court -- which is revealed to be the actual TV courtroom show.

Comedic: Temporal Flux's approach to SLIDERS is very focused on the social satire and the specific tone of the show as found in "Prince of Wails" where the celebrity profile of the English Royal Family is presented in terms of a light Robin Hood pastiche. And as seen when SLIDERS regards sports fanatics with amusement in "Eggheads" as commentators are fixated on the statistics of Mindgame and rappers are shown expressing the joy of learning. The soul of SLIDERS is not based in grand oratory about current events like THE WEST WING or in ridiculing extremists like a modern CW superhero show. Instead, SLIDERS provides allegories in the way THE TWILIGHT ZONE and THE OUTER LIMITS created situations analagous to 60s civil rights issues, but the SLIDERS twist is that its allegories are comedic and sweet.

A Natural: DECLASSIFIED very naturally and easily captures that tone. It satirizes its subject with a gently comic allegory. It creates a lightly adversarial and warm interplay between its characters. It mines its material to create comedic situations regarding capitalism and consumer culture and mass media competition, but unlike SOUTH PARK which stabs its targets, Temporal Flux takes the SLIDERS approach of tilting his object of focus rather than attacking it and that turns out to be the core of TF's vision for SLIDERS.

Stripped Bare: It's impressive because as a SLIDERS story, DECLASSIFIED is completely lacking in most of the usual identifiers for SLIDERS. DECLASSIFIED was written as a fan film. It does not feature Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo, it doesn't feature San Francisco and is distinctly written to have few extras and locations. It doesn't feature four civillian misfits. It doesn't have the SLIDERS formula of visiting a dystopia and falling in with the local resistance.

Identity: And yet, it is clearly a SLIDERS story in the vein of a Tracy Torme and Robert K. Weiss script because it skews its subject matter without skewering it and mines the characters' confused, comedic assimilation of a strange new land for that elusive yet undeniable SLIDERS tone of humour and adversity. It doesn't feel like an approximation of the authorial voice that created the original SLIDERS pilot; it simply is that voice.

Difficult: Even the very best SLIDERS stories by others don't achieve this and wisely don't try. Nigel Mitchell, for example, is a master world builder for SLIDERS with many wonderfully off-the-wall concepts for alt-histories -- but his writing is used to create a nightmarish sense of threat against the sliders. Marc Scott Zicree viewed SLIDERS as a platform for extravagant science fiction concepts rather than social commentary. Mike Truman aims for satirical scripts and prose, but his writing expresses frustration, outrage and exasperation with societal prejudices and establishment fictions.

Voice: In my own SLIDERS writing, I find that I simply have the wrong personality for effective social satire. I am direct and specific; I am critical instead of comedic -- which is why my writing focuses on a pastiche of the actors. My writing sounds like the voices of Jerry, Sabrina, Cleavant and John. But Temporal Flux's writing sounds like Tracy Torme and Robert K. Weiss.

Defined: Temporal Flux's writing is so close to the Torme and Weiss model that to me, they might as well be one and the same. Temporal Flux's satire is deftly ironic and wry rather than angry, precisely as defined by Torme and Weiss -- which makes a lot of sense when seeing that both men were of TV and film that includes SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, THE BLUES BROTHERS and THE NAKED GUN series.

In Likeness: In fact, Temporal Flux's thinking on SLIDERS is so similar to Torme. In 2000, I asked Torme what his pefect ending for SLIDERS would be. Torme said he'd like to see Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo make it home with Quinn stranded on another world; the three sliders would rebuild their lives, but after a time, they would find a way to rescue Quinn and in travelling to another world to save him, they would lose their way back and be lost in the interdimension once again but this time by choice.

Authentic: In 2012 or so, this forum was randomly contemplating what the ideal end for SLIDERS would have been and Temporal Flux said he could imagine an ending where the sliders make it home without Quinn and then rescue Quinn but lose the way home in doing so and accept this because home is not a place but the people you're with. His random speculations were the intentions of the series creator.

I have always felt that Nigel Mitchell and Mike Truman capture the inventiveness and imagination of SLIDERS and that I capture the voice of the four original sliders. That we use the SLIDERS platform for our own voices. But Temporal Flux's voice is the actual voice of SLIDERS and that's why DECLASSIFIED has a perfect authenticity for the series.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts; and you hit on something that’s definitely true.  I knew realistically that this would be a one off film if it even happened at all, but I couldn’t help myself - I crafted it with the idea that it would be an ongoing series.  As such, there were areas left unexplored and unexplained along with seeds planted for future revelations.  A second episode would have picked up where we concluded as though the second part of a movie.

I also followed an inspiration (or lesson) from another work - the Nicholas Cage film “Adaptation”. Truly, I don’t think this was a very good movie, but that seemed to be the point.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_(film)

The movie begins to meander into the weeds as it goes on, but it takes a turn when Cage’s character seeks out an experienced author for advice.  The author explains that you must have a simple goal for a story - you must have a character that goes on a journey to find themselves changed some way in the end.  Without that, the story is just a bunch of stuff that happened.

Working from that principle, I fashioned this story as a journey for Alli.  She begins believing she will find adventure but grows to learn that the actual experience she jumped into can be frustrating and mundane.  Even in another reality, life is still life.

Future stories were intended to follow the same journey model.  Episode two would be Gibbs’s journey.  Episode three would be Reese’s journey.

When I originally wrote Sliders: Declassified, I also wrote some notes about where the future would lead (in some cases over a long period of time - like a season or series wide arc).  You can read them below.  I will warn that they may make you unhappy; but like all ideas, nothing was set in stone.

http://freepdfhosting.com/ea01747f41.pdf

With regard to Bennish, you are definitely correct about my presentation of him; and you’ll see that in those notes.  In truth, I was not sure Bennish would even be a permanent part of a cast - the series idea was built around the other three.  But Bennish was chosen as a kind of touchstone to the original show that would get us started.  Also, while the hope was for Jason Gaffney to take part; I was also hedging my bets.  If you could find the right actor, you may be able to pull off a “good enough for fan film” Bennish with a wig, sunglasses and a goatee.

Another interesting note about Bennish comes in the years that followed the original draft of Declassified.  It became clear over time that a fan film wasn’t going to happen; so I considered making it an online comics strip series.  I was inspired by The Ten Doctors on Rich’s ComixBlog:

https://comics.shipsinker.com/downloads/

It was a simplistic pencil drawing presentation as storyboards.  No splash pages or creative arrangements; just a grid of boxes filled with story.  I contacted Rich about adapting Declassified, but he was not interested; so I then tried some other artists.  During that search, artist Michelle Bridges did some preliminary work but ultimately did not go forward.

It was during this phase that I re-thought Bennish a little.  With the time that had passed, Bennish was likely pushing forty by the time of Declassified.  What would he be like at that age?  I had the idea that Bennish’s worst nightmare had come to pass - he was losing his hair.  But not content to accept it, he took action.

In 1995, Bennish looked like he could have stepped out of the counter culture of 1965.  Following that scale, a Bennish in 2010 would look like he stepped out of 1980.  What was the counter culture movement in 1980?  Punk.  What if Bennish shaved half of his head clean but left his remaining long hair hanging down one side?  He could have the recognizable profile at one angle, but a new dimension of character added.  Bennish could be a man struggling to accept middle age.

Though not exactly what I envisioned, Michelle created this mock up for the look I’m talking about:

http://freepdfhosting.com/69698c2421.pdf

In any case, I thought you may enjoy some more insight into where it could have been going.  The entire thing was really just a fun thought exercise for me; it made me feel like I did when I was explaining plot holes in the show.

No problem at all. I loaded the script up onto my Kindle and that was a really enjoyable read during the afternoon.

And thank you for the additional insights into the development of this. Very intriguing. I see now some of the seeds that you attempted to plant in the background in order to be explored in future episodes, like the 'Luckiest SOB Alive' sticky-note comment for Gibbs.

Some of those concepts presented I couldn't say if I would personally love them or not, both the style of how it was executed and having meaningful / significant payoff, plays a huge role in the outcome of concepts ... but I do know that I would have at least enjoyed the ride!

Have you written anything of your own? I would love to read more of your work.

It sounds like Temporal Flux was pitching X-MEN material to Marvel during the Grant Morrison era when Morrison decided to downplay X-MEN's civil rights metaphors in favour of the X-MEN demonstrating conflict between progressivism and conservatism, youth and age, punk and classicism by having mutants developing their own culture and value system separate from humans.

Morrison's NEW X-MEN was brilliant, but as with SLIDERS, Morrison's approach required a very specific set of life experiences and interests and eccentricities to tell stories with his model and other writers floundered when trying to work within this new house style. Morrison was only writing one X-MEN title with different writers scripting the other 10 - 15.

X-MEN as a civil rights allegory is something any writer can approach with their own spin while still producing a recognizable X-MEN story. X-MEN as teen angst is a massive oversimplification of a template that was too complicated and idiosyncratic to assign to anyone other than Grant Morrison. SLIDERS under Torme and Weiss has a personality of unpretentious and low-key satire that aims for contemplation rather than condemnation. "The Weaker Sex" doesn't propose that women are better than men; it just puts the balance of power on the other side. "Luck of the Draw" doesn't endorse population control; it asks you to think about it.

It's difficult to write, but Torme and Weiss weren't just writing their own scripts; they were editing and revising everyone else's. Morrison wasn't editing and revising anyone else's X-MEN stories other than his own on NEW X-MEN.

Temporal Flux's DECLASSIFIED shows how SLIDERS has a house style like Grant Morrison's NEW X-MEN -- but unlike NEW X-MEN, SLIDERS doesn't disqualify other styles but in fact incorporates them. In Season 2 of SLIDERS, the Torme/Weiss model of comedic social commentary is somewhat diminished as new writers came aboard and Weiss was no longer involved. To write a Torme/Weiss story, you have to have a certain peculiarity of personality, I think.

Temporal Flux is someone who watches both FOX and CNN news and then identifies the truth as somewhere in between. Temporal Flux is a person of uncommon clarity and wide perspective and I think you need that to tell this sort of SLIDERS story. I personally do not have that. Few people do which is why most people who write SLIDERS stories are more on the Tony Blake and Paul Jackson spectrum.

Blake and Jackson are two very solid action-adventure writers who wrote and produced a lot of 90s TV. They wrote "Love Gods" in Season 2 and "Double Cross" in Season 3. Neither script has Torme and Weiss' gentle parodies of popular culture, neither presents a tilted perspective on gender divides or environmentalist concerns. But both "Love Gods" and "Double Cross" are recognizably SLIDERS stories because they feature Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt, Arturo, alternate history, exploration of a parallel world, the perspective of the multiverse and so long as you have those aspects of SLIDERS, you can tell good stories that are still SLIDERS stories.

But when you don't have those elements to tell a SLIDERS story, then you need the house style. The original voice. The Torme/Weiss perspective on SLIDERS as a platform for social satire that is indirect, comedic, non-judgemental and invites thought and consideration. That will make the story feel like SLIDERS when it doesn't have *the* sliders.

However, the challenge of maintaining SLIDERS' identity without the sliders -- that's something the actual SLIDERS TV show fumbled and whereas Temporal Flux's personality is so in tune with SLIDERS that even when his story doesn't feature the sliders, it is recognizably and authentically SLIDERS.

It's strange -- a lot of the realizations about SLIDERS that DECLASSIFIED prompted in me -- I realized them unknowingly when I read it years ago.

DECLASSIFIED is a SLIDERS story; despite not having the sliders, it has the themes and tone of the Pilot and most of the first season. It is recognizably SLIDERS in the way Seasons 4 - 5 so definitively aren't with their straightforward moralizing and their focus on physical threat. By showing the SLIDERS formula and brand without the sliders in it, Temporal Flux has demonstrated what the original model of SLIDERS storytelling was in the first place.

And that poses some interesting questions because one of the biggest problems SLIDERS fans have debated: how could SLIDERS have remained more recognizably SLIDERS across losing three-quarters of its cast and its original filming location and its series creators? One game has been to transplant the Season 1 - 2 cast into Season 3 - 5 episodes. You can read the version of "Sole Survivors" where poor Arturo has to fight zombies and the first draft of what became "The Other Slide of Darkness" which also features our beloved Professor. https://earthprime.com/sliders-scripts-collection Mike Truman wrote a clever essay about how Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo might have faced the vampires of "Stoker." https://earthprime.com/essays/salvaging-stoker I wrote a Quinn and Wade edition of "Net Worth." http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?id=323

One of my favourite fanfics is the Earth 210 episode guide set on an Earth where Torme and Weiss presumably stayed throughout and a lot of it is taking the existing episodes but assigning Maggie, Colin, Diana and Mallory's roles to the originals. https://earthprime.com/earth-210 I've generally seen Earth 210 as a plausible depiction of a Torme and Weiss SLIDERS -- but after re-reading DECLASSIFIED this week, I realize that this is not entirely the case.

DECLASSIFIED indicates that tone of SLIDERS under Torme and Weiss is not based in sci-fi action-adventure concepts. It isn't interested in virtual reality, slidewaves, cryogenics, interdimensional ghosts, slidecages, turning black people into cyborg zombies, amusement parks that consume negative emotions, bubble universes, collapsing universes, reality warping weapons, interdimensional trench warfare, interdimensional libraries, nanites, aritficial intelligence customer service, aliens landing on Earth, neural remapping and other STAR TREK/STARGATE style tropes. Torme and Weiss are mostly interested in the people who live in these worlds. They want to show what the infomercials would be like. How the fast food restaurants would run.

Putting Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo in Season 4 - 5 Sci-Fi Channel scripts may have livened them up and made them more familiar, but DECLASSIFIED reveals to me that they still wouldn't be SLIDERS stories as defined by Torme, Weiss and DECLASSIFIED.

Looking at Seasons 4 - 5 and its 40 episodes, only three story concepts stand out to me as immediately suited to the Torme/Weiss model: "Virtual Slide" could have been a fascinating exploration of a world where in-person communication is considered rude and intrusive and "A Current Affair" is potentially a razor sharp satire on how gossipy scandal distracts from politics of actual consequence to life and livelihood. "Map of the Mind" was potentially a great story about a world where fiction is viewed with contempt.

Marc Scott Zicree does a brilliant job with "World Killer" and "Slidecage," but neither is exactly a commentary on human society. Annie Fish in their Think of a Roulette Wheel blog called "World Killer" an "outlier" as Season 4 doesn't measure up to its quality. I wonder if "World Killer" would still have been an outlier, surrounded by more grounded stories in a Torme and Weiss run SLIDERS.

"Prophets and Loss" by Bill Dial -- I wonder if on a Torme/Weiss model, this story is reworked so that the fundamentalist rulers are fixated on the health of their population (something TF wrote about in another thread), using a social credit system to bar people from driving cars if they're considered overweight or getting into bars if they're considered to be staying out too late.

"California Reich" would probably be Torme's wish to have a story where black people practice racism against whites, although I dunno how that would play out. "Lipschitz Live" would probably need to be TF's idea of a reality TV world where privacy doesn't exist, everything is filmed and televised live and people actively play to the cameras to win themselves attention. "Net Worth," "Data World" and "Slide By Wire" are probably best folded into "Virtual Slide."

"Just Say Yes" was better off as Jerry O'Connell's "Narcotica" comic book which simply played the concept straight with a world where all drugs are legal.

"My Brother's Keeper" is potentially interesting -- I can't see Torme/Weiss being too keen on sci-fi cloning, but perhaps they would have liked something closer to "The Breeder"'s alt-world -- a world where people can sign up to donate organs for money including ones essential for staying alive, and the sliders find themselves trying to rescue donors who don't understand why the sliders are horrified by the situation.

"The Chasm" is ridiculous, but there could be something to a world where displays of anger and aggression are medicated as mental illness.

"Revelations" could have been an intriguing world where Holocaust denialism is mainstream? "New Gods For Old" is a really good story, and I wonder if that would be worth keeping mostly as-is as an outlier of a more sci-fi oriented story. "Please Press One" -- I'd probably fold the AI concept from that into "Virtual Slide," I'm not sure it needs its own episode. I feel like anything "The Java Jive" might have to say about a society addicted to caffeine and stimulants is also best folded into "Narcotica."

"Map of the Mind" is an excellent concept brought to life in an extremely Torme/Weiss style DOCTOR WHO story in a novel called "The Stealer of Dreams" and I recommend this Steve Lyons novel to all SLIDERS fans, even fans who aren't familiar with DOCTOR WHO.

"A Thousand Deaths" and its video game concept has me thinking of the classic STAR TREK anti-war story, "The Armageddon Factor" where two civilizations wage simulated wars and virtual casualties on either side are handled with civilians voluntarily reporting for execution. But it had been done by STAR TREK, I'm not sure SLIDERS needed to do a replay.

Mike Truman cited something very interesting about the episodes "Heavy Metal" and "Dust." "Heavy Metal" has the protagonists preventing the development of aircraft so that ships stay in business. "Dust" has the protagonists appalled by archaeologists intruding upon the dead. Truman noted that "Heavy Metal" and "Dust" demonstrate a clear hostility towards science and exploration, a very peculiar attitude for a science fiction series like SLIDERS. I wonder if that's something to be mined, but it was probably done sufficiently with "Gillian of the Spirits."

DECLASSIFIED has made me realize at a surprisingly late stage that a SLIDERS story is significantly more elusive than my SLIDERS REBORN scripts offering parallel Earths and making sure Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo have funny arguments throughout. It requires a careful hand to examine and twist the subject matter whether it's gender norms or in-person communication or a stimulant-addicted society or one that eschews fiction -- but it also needs to be subtle enough that it's a contemplation rather than an attack.

And it also makes me wonder -- if we were saddled with Maggie, Colin, Diana and Mallory but had a network and producers eager to maintain the Torme/Weiss model of non-confrontational satire -- who would have even be able to write these stories without Torme and Weiss at the helm? I couldn't do it. Tony Blake and Paul Jackson couldn't do it. David Peckinpah at his most engaged and determined couldn't do it. Bill Dial's "Prophets and Loss" and its crashingly unsubtle moralizing makes it pretty clear that he wasn't up for it. Marc Scott Zicree is a genius, but his genius does not lie in the Torme/Weiss model.

And that might be a nonsensical question anyway because any regime keen to maintain the Torme/Weiss design wouldn't have driven them from their show in the first place.

Was watching one of the news shows tonight, and they were throwing around accusations that the San Francisco city government is paying to provide drugs and alcohol to the homeless so that they will stay in the hotel rooms they’ve been sequestered in.  I have no idea if any of that is true, but the segment ended with the quip - “if this keeps up, the only people who’ll live in San Francisco are the homeless.”  That led to me to the seed of a parallel reality idea.

So the pandemic has led many businesses to have employees work from home.  This has left many buildings in downtown business districts vacant.  We’ve also seen from many tv shows, celebrities broadcasting from home are very dressed down (unshaven, mussed hair, no make-up).  I believe that behavior to be intentional (celebrities purposefully trying to seem relatable during this crisis), but the picture is that working at home seems to be an excuse to let yourself go.

So let’s carry this forward through time if the spirit of these changes just stay this way.  People won’t need suits and dress clothes any longer, so they’ll donate them to charity.  More homeless will likely appear due to lack of jobs, but the now vacant buildings in downtown could be taken by the city government and converted to rudimentary housing.

Looking at a snap shot in time, you could see a world where the people in business suits walking around downtown are actually the homeless - and the shabby people walking around the edges of society are the people who have jobs and money.   A total reverse of a societal norm with an almost plausible explanation; and also a perfect opening for some Sliders to end up on skid row when they thought they were going somewhere different.  It could also be a good opportunity to explore what it’s like to be homeless when you never expected to be (as Sliders become when they’re lost).

Reading DECLASSIFIED has made me wonder -- if TF captures the original spirit of SLIDERS as it first aired on television, what was the original spirit of SLIDERS as it was intended on Tracy Torme's word processor? What was his vision with Robert K. Weiss before that vision was altered by the necessities of casting actual humans to play their imagined characters? Before that vision was adapted to what was physically and financially filmable? https://earthprime.com/wp-content/uploa … -01-14.pdf

Reading the first half of the Pilot script, I find that there are some slight differences, some significant and some subtle. The first is the casting. Quinn is clearly not Jerry O'Connell in this script; he's described as "handsome in an unassuming, boyish way." He isn't meant to look like an athlete; I think he's more Tobey Maguire than Jerry O'Connell. Quinn is crushing on a girl named Stephanie who shoots him down when he asks her out on a date and Stephanie's friends call Quinn "a dweeb." The original script also makes a much sharper distinction between Quinn and Smarter Quinn. On paper, Smarter Quinn is a volatile, flamboyant, abrasive, arrogant prankster. Smarter Quinn is buff and athletic where Quinn is reedy and shy.

In the aired version, Jerry O'Connell's Quinn is confident, capable and amiable but cautiously avoidant and secretive, ignoring Wade's crush, pleasant but distant from his classmates -- the result of Jerry playing Quinn's scripted dialogue with an easy charisma that isn't on the page. And the only real difference between Quinn and Smarter Quinn is that Smarter Quinn dresses a bit better, with Smarter Quinn's pranks, insults and superior attitude largely trimmed from the story.

Arturo is described as looking like Raul Julia (Gomez from THE ADDAMS FAMILY among many, many other roles), and the characterization is more cowardly than John Rhys-Davies would tolerate, which manifests later in the story.

Wade and Rembrandt, however, are completely Sabrina Lloyd and Cleavant Derricks and the casting there was perfect for the script.

There are also a variety of expansions: Smarter Quinn apparently pulled numerous pranks on multiple classmates and teachers on campus while impersonating our Quinn. Quinn sits through an entire class with Arturo after Smarter Quinn humiliated the Professor. Smarter Quinn insulted the Professor's sexual prowess instead of his theories.

Hurley has a festishistic obsession with the Computer Boy mascot of the Top Flight computer store. And Wade, Hurley's twentysomething employee, has been to Hurley's house for reasons that were too terrifying for Torme to document except it involved looking at Hurley's family photo albums which included the Computer Boy mascot. Wade is also the one to convince Arturo to visit Quinn's house when Quinn wishes to explain Smarter Quinn's pranking.

The radio shock jock's material is also pleasingly modern by today's standards; on our Earth, he speaks derisively of feminists while on the first parallel Earth, he snarls that women are right to be angry because women have always had the game rigged against them.

The most significant change aside from the casting: the vortex is described not as a glowing, beautiful opening in reality that casts light and energy into the space around it -- but as a reflective-rimmed hole in the air and at the heart is a dark, blackened, terrifying void of nothing. An anomaly of unknowable and threatening emptiness that infringes upon the reality of our world. The interior tunnel is not a path of purple and green energies but an empty plane of blackness. Wade never looks at the vortex with Sabrina Lloyd's wonder and delight; Arturo is intimidated by it.

There's an interesting scene where Wade says she wants to jump into the vortex, Raul Julia's Arturo refuses, and Wade asks the Professor how it would look in history if she and Quinn stepped into the tunnel to another dimension but the Professor were too scared to join them. The Professor's ego won't allow him to remain in the basement and Wade can see that, but the vortex is so disturbing that one can understand the Professor's hesitance.

In the original script, the vortex is an ominous black shape of terror, a doorway to nightmares and doom and Rembrandt's palpable fright when he sees it is the default and correct response.

I wonder how different the second half will be.

Finally got to reading the TF script, and I LOVED it!  While I'm not totally sure if the characters themselves are the right choices to have throughout a full season, the dark humor, improvisation to danger, and TV science goofiness (finding a chip in a door lock) was all quintessential Torme Sliders.  I think the premise, in that people on EP used Sliding with disastrous effects, is a great one.  Truly a novel way to connect back to, and potentially "run into" the original group again.  While I realize he provides a large part of the plot in this script, the only thing I'd change would be including Bennish long term on this ride.  Maybe this is blasphemous, but I never liked the character outside of being a rotten turd on the few worlds they visited.  I think he was established as villainous though I suppose he could be a "Dr. Smith" type of companion.  All in all, this was really a clever take on "rebooting the show" mainly because it's "small."  I fear that if Hollywood were to attempt it, they would immediately be busting their budget, which was never Torme's vision for this series.  In fact, your approach would succeed on a streaming service like Peacock because it wouldn't require insane budgets.

Interesting, the "Nancy Grace" angle.  Trying to think back to the late 90's, there weren't too many media formats that would have covered this other than Howard Stern or National Enquirer or something like that.  Also, was Sliding declassified to the public?  That seems unlikely given that most conspiracy theorists allege pretty much nothing is by the federal government. 

You know what's ironic is, when I scan through television (network and streaming), Sliders would STILL have no place!  Science Fiction tinged in sarcasm and humor?  Everything is either kid/teen overload like Stranger Things or Locke and Key, or extremely dark.  I suppose Supernatural is an exception.  I would hate to see this script concept or any other given the teen treatment.  While I look forward to the new Ghostbusters, which does that, it's not right for Sliders.

I had some inklings of what episode 3 would be, but had an interesting thought tonight.

Most everyone probably takes their cell phone and its capabilities for granted today.  Obviously cell phones existed in 1995 (the Sliders prop is made from one); but cell phone signals weren’t broadcast the same then as they are now.  Also, text messaging didn’t really start to become popular until 1999 when the ability to exchange texts between cellular networks started to make it more practical.

https://mashable.com/2012/09/21/text-messaging-history/

This is something that was never really explored on the original Sliders as a result; but with everyone carrying a cell phone today, what if a newly lost Slider landed on a parallel earth and they started receiving text messages on their Earth Prime phone?  Would they know the person?  If they followed the conversation, where would it lead?  And why is the Slider the only person responding in that reality?  What happened to the true owner of the account?

Not sure on the technical ins and outs of that; but with a little forgiveness, it could be an interesting way to explore a character’s life and the type of reality they’ve landed in.

Thought on it some more, and it’s stretching into a better idea.  It could actually kick something off like the Starman comic’s “Talking with David” that happened once a year; or the O’Brien hell episode once a year on DS9.  The tweak would have it presented as more of just a human story similar to how “As Time Goes By” was more a look at the relationship of Quinn and Daelin with parallel realities just a back drop.

Our new Sliders land in a new reality and are exploring around when Reese’s phone indicates there’s a new text message.  The simple message - “Are you there?”  The group is a bit shocked his cell phone would even work, and Reese decides to respond.  During the conversation, he comes to realize who it is.  It’s his sister who died years ago - the circumstances of her death being what shaped him into the cautious, pessimistic person he is today.

They go to his sister as the timer has them stuck on this world for quite a long time, and the story unfolds as Reese reconnects.  It turns out that she lost her Reese years ago. But sometime during our visit, our Reese notices her phone is unlocked and takes a look.  She has sent the same “Are you there?” message to his number at the same time everyday for months upon months.

Maybe her initial digging into her brother’s disappearance revealed that he left their world; so she’s kept paying her Reese’s phone bill to keep the account active.  The hope is that one day he’ll come back and respond.  So far through these texts, she’s met three different Reeses that stumbled, lost into her reality - but her Reese still hasn’t returned.

It’s kind of a re-work of my old “Venus fly-trap for Sliders” idea, but the sinister element removed.  Or, maybe it works better with this sinister element left in.  For those that don’t know, that was an idea I had about a Quinn double who used “Missing: Quinn Mallory” posters to lure Sliders to his home thinking they may find sliding equipment.  The Quinn double then kills them.  He’s a unique kind of serial killer; and buried in his back yard are the bodies of twelve different Quinn Mallorys.

Anyway, the Reese idea would still need a little alternate history back-drop of some type and something for the other Sliders to do, but it could be a story that’s lighter on the sci-fi side and more of a human story exploring what makes Reese who he is.  And every year the show could revisit the idea as Reese tries to find his sister’s double on whatever world they’re on so they can have a talk.

I'd like to see this idea. It's reminiscent of some of the unfilmed scenes from "In Dino Veritas" where the original plan was to see sliders accidentally joined by Geraldo Rivera attempting to document their travels only to be eaten by a dinosaur. In your idea, the whole world is Geraldo.

Geraldo seemed popular in the 90s. The Season 3, 1995 episode of LOIS AND CLARK, "Chip Off the Old Clark," also had a script in which Geraldo Rivera was to be investigating a scandal where a woman claimed that Superman had impregnated her. The script specifies that Geraldo and Lois are old friends. Geraldo was also too busy for this one.

... why am I talking to Temporal Flux like he doesn't know Geraldo was planned to be in the dinosaur episode?

lol - Personally, I think Sliders should leave your head spinning a little; and I feel like that’s what happened in season one.  Not only does it add to the “feel” of being lost and uncertain (placing us in the Sliders shoes), but it makes the episodes very re-watchable as you notice more new things on multiple viewings.

There were many things in the Declassified script that people probably didn’t catch on the first go around because they didn’t know where the story was going yet. Probably my favorite was the gameshow world newspaper headline “Countries Face Off on International Feud”.  The idea was that the United Nations on that world was set up as a game of Family Feud. Diplomats from disputing countries would guess the most popular answers concerning issues from their countries based off survey polls; and whichever country best knew the people’s wishes would be judged as winning the dispute.  In other words, does your opponent know your people better than you do?

But the pacing of the stories is also based on a predictive quality of where our society is heading. If you look at what children are watching now, what used to be a 22 minute cartoon has been cut in half down to 11 minutes.  Look at companies like Quibi whose business model is reducing stories into bite size bits.  And I would note too that content (including cartoons) is becoming more sophisticated. 

I was surprised that the final season of Steven Universe focused entirely on Steven having post traumatic stress disorder because saving the universe as a child and facing death (including his own) had left him scarred; and when the day was finally won with peace reigning, Steven didn’t know what to do with himself and he started having a true nervous breakdown.  I mean, this is a popular kid’s show putting this out there.

This is what the young are being trained to enjoy - a bombardment of entertainment that keeps their neurons firing and makes them think. And as the years continue and these people get older, you’re likely to see these compressed models used more and more because they’ll be running the world.  Sliders at its start was once again well ahead of its time.

I also look at something Greg Berlanti said.  Many were amazed at how quickly he progressed storylines on shows like Flash.  Ideas that used to last years (like hiding your secret identity from your love interest) were instead dealt with in the first year.  Berlanti said this was based on a regret he had from Eli Stone.  With that series, Berlanti had many ideas the show was building to, and then it was cancelled before he could get there.  Because of that, Berlanti treated the CW shows (especially Flash) as though each season was the only one he was going to get; so everything they had in mind was put out there and not held back.

But that’s where I’m coming from, and I wouldn’t change it.  I think Music Video world and the serial killer idea would fit well together; but I wouldn’t add anything beyond that.  And really, the budget would probably just come down to extras and props; and even that could be cheated a little.  Imagine that the Sliders land in the “Green District” where all buildings, lamp posts, benches, etc are painted the same lime green.  It’s a ready made green screen stage in public where steamers could insert all sorts of cgi that’s only visible to their viewers and not in real life.

The idea came to me recently from watching ELeague Super Punch on TBS.  it’s a hit or miss show, but they recently did an interview with a guy using the handle TheSushiDragon. He produces a variety show on Twitch where he sometimes uses a cyber punk style harness with programmed hot keys that allows his videos to play like he’s in a video game as long as he’s in a green screen area.

https://www.fanbyte.com/features/guy-da … ns-twitch/

But yeah, I just see so much you can cram into stories.  I have a list of ideas on paper and in my head that I can pull from, and I’m constantly seeing new things as society evolves or I’m introduced to some piece of history I didn’t previously appreciate. 

How attached are you to the 'venus fly-trap' concept? I think with some minor tweaks it could be turned into a really touching and emotional episode - but that may be the complete opposite direction that you are after for this, lol. I'm not an expert on the technology itself, but there seem to be too many hurdles for the phone to actually work in practice. Spit-balling, as I have done zero research, but it appears that for a phone to work on another world, the carrier and service provider would need to be the same, the unique phone / chip ID would have to not be in use, and the contract would have to be continually paid.

The idea I had while reading your outline proposal was to frame the set up a little simpler. Reese simply connects his phone to Wifi on another world. He suddenly gets a ton of notifications from his social media page from his dead / disappeared sister. Every year, on the day of his disappearance, she posts a message on his wall, hoping that he is safe and ok, as on this world he was the one who had disappeared. She also shares several facebook memories on the day that they occur every year with the two of them. When Reese realises that this is a chance to see and reconnect with the sister that he lost, he tracks her down.

That leads into the usual Sliders scenario of 'will he or won't he?' in regards to telling her the truth that he is not her Reese. So I wouldn't have her having seen any other Sliders or Alt Reeses in this. It is a tearful reunion as she welcomes him with open arms, just accepting that he was back in her life with very few questions despite her burning need to know what happened to him all these years. But with the Sliders twist, as they share personal memories and moments, Reese's sister begins to realise that things aren't quite matching up. She begins to wonder if he was injured, or had an accident in some way, but is afraid to pry to deeply in case it triggers something. She desperately doesn't want this moment to end.

But as the timer counts down, that terrible guilt gnaws at Reese that he can't just skip out of her life after this. Not like this.

The final scene would be a classic Sliders zinger. It could be a new facebook status update on Reese's page, with his sister posting a simple smiley face - leaving it up to the audience to wonder whether she had been told the truth and eagerly awaits her own Reese returning some day, or whether he didn't tell her but left - leaving her just happy to know that her brother is alive and well - giving her some peace.

Again, probably the complete opposite direction you were going for that, but that was just what I thought whilst reading your outline.

https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/n … ray-shower

Another idea:

I’ve been seeing some of the conspiracy theories lately about how a COVID vaccine will secretly put a tracking device in people or worse.  Those conspiracies focus on the Quantum Dot idea:

https://www.sciencealert.com/an-invisib … nated-kids

Of course, Quantum Dots by design are a crystalline “ink” that is only visible under a special light filter; and they are researching the potential to store information on these crystals (much like the Sliders season five episode “The Great Work”).  Under both concepts, there is no mechanism that can send or receive signals.

But one conspiracy in particular caught my eye for a Sliders idea; so put on your tin foil hat for a second, and let’s take a tumble down the rabbit hole.

There is a belief by some that a vaccine will implant a mechanism that acts like a signal carrier for 5G.  In effect, it would turn the human body and it’s electrical impulses into a cell tower creating a near zero cost human infrastructure for expanding the ability to sell high speed broadband service in less populated areas.  Of course, the conspiracy concern is that having that signal in your body will scramble your soul and prevent you from going to the afterlife.  My concern would be the more obvious one - sounds like a cancer generator to me if it were to be real.

Now let’s look at this from a Sliders perspective.  Our group lands on a world and discovers that the timer read-outs are scrambled.  As they investigate, they discover this world has willingly went down the human cell tower route; and like cigarettes, the population doesn’t really care about the side effects because they’re addicted to the smooth, fast paced, cool life that the high-speed service offers.  Even on our world, people knew cigarettes were bad for them long before the lawsuit was won; people just didn’t care.  We’re still that way with trans fats and many other things too.

But the Sliders have a dilemma on cell tower world.  With all ability to buy or sell also tied to the injected transmitter,  they either must try to undertake a journey with no resources to a rural, secluded area far away from any people and timer interference; or they have to give in and accept the injection knowing that they will then become a signal emitter unable to be near the timer and leave this world.

The twist of the story would relate to something we don’t think about much - how often do the Sliders willingly let someone else hold the timer?   You see, that’s the other part of the conspiracy theory I didn’t mention - these same people believe social distancing is meant as training because when people stand too close together, the human cell tower signal doesn’t work.  So after all the Sliders’ suffering and near starvation during a run from civilization, the solution to the Sliders problem was to just let someone from that world hold the timer.  The signal would stop working and the timer systems would no longer be jammed.

It could be an interesting way to look at how we judge other people’s decisions and how we sometimes run from them because we don’t understand their point of view; but in the end, we’re all still human beings with the same virtues and vices no matter what form they take.

My regret is that there are possible similarities to the season five episode “New Gods for Old”, but I think there are more than enough substantial differences.  The key would be to look at the comparisons to people’s attitudes on things like cigarettes and how our culture was built around them for so long (especially in the 50’s and 60’s).

I tried to forget, Grizzlor. There was a really dark period in 2005 where I would get upset any time I was in a restaurant and saw sliders on the menu, and on one of these days, there were sliders at the restaurant, I got my foot stuck in a sliding door, I was cleaning out my house and found a Motorola phone, and then I tried to escape into DOCTOR WHO with a novel called "The Stealer of Dreams," by Steve Lyons where the Doctor, Captain Jack and Rose land on a parallel Earth -- I mean, an Earth colony -- where they realize that fiction doesn't exist.

There are only news periodicals and history and science and engineering books. There are only documentaries and news shows on TV. People who write fiction, sing, draw or create are arrested, imprisoned, and either treated psychiatrically or lobotomized. The sliders don't understand how this can be and begin to investigate by splitting up. I mean -- the Doctor and friends split up.

The Doctor/Quinn and the Professor convince a police officer to let them accompany her on a ridealong where she arrests numerous people who are in schizophrenic rages and have become violent and dangerous. Wade/Rose meets a renegade fiction writer. Captain Jack/Rembrandt tries to locate the local resistance.

Captain Jack/Rembrandt is arrested for being an artist, institutionalized and about to be lobotomized. Wade/Rose begins to experience the same hallucinatory delusions that the Doctor/Quinn and Arturo have observed in the criminals being rounded up. Rembrandt barely escapes the lobotomy and the sliders regroup in the asylum lab and realize: the population is suffering electromagnetic radiation from a revolutionary new power system that disrupts the human mind and prevents vulnerable brains from distinguishing between fiction and reality. (There's also some stuff about planetary micro-organisms of energy that are better suited to a DOCTOR WHO story than a SLIDERS story.)

The Doctor/Quinn and Arturo devise a cure and heal the population. Months later, the Doctor and friends/the sliders return to see that this world is once again beginning to create and dream and hope for the future. I read this novel and I wept for SLIDERS and the misbegotten hackwork of script editing that was "Map of the Mind."

Since then, I occasionally re-read "The Stealer of Dreams" but implant the sliders into it and it always seemed right -- until now. Reading DECLASSIFIED made me realize -- it's not really a very SLIDERS-esque attitude to have technology or a new discovery or alien lifeforms being the cause of society's problems. It would be more in tune with SLIDERS' original vision to have fiction become made illegal based on some cataclysmic event to our culture -- perhaps Orson Welles' accidental hoax in convincing listeners that Earth was being invaded by Martians led to hyper-restrictive censorship. But then how would you have the sliders enter, resolve the situation and leave? I suppose it wouldn't be a very SLIDERS-esque attitude to have everyone madly hallucinating until Arturo magics up a convenient cure.

Golly. I don't know how to write SLIDERS. This is a painful admission after writing nine SLIDERS scripts. Whoops.

(By that, I mean I don't know how to write Temporal Flux/Tracy Torme style SLIDERS scripts. I can write Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo scripts.)

One thing we haven’t looked at yet - the throw-away world.  Another of my favorite things with Sliders was spending a minute or two on some world at the start or the end of an episode - usually just enough for one good joke.  Imagine this one from Arturo’s worst nightmares - the Sliders are on a world where everyone looks like a mime.

There’s only a few minutes on this world, but Alli spots an ice cream stand and needs a treat to make this day better.  Reese is happily on board with the idea, and Bennish is off in the distance away from the group. Gibbs isn’t interested in ice cream; he says they don’t have enough time.

Alli and Reese have ordered and are waiting for their ice cream to be scooped when Gibbs leans over to Alli.

Gibbs - “Have you wondered why everyone looks like a mime?”

Alli shrugs.  It’s one of the least weird things she’s seen this week.

Gibbs - “Back in the 1700’s, people wore white make-up and wigs to cover up a lot of things.  Hair loss.  Rashes.  Scars from skin conditions.”

Alli and Reese have their ice cream and are excitedly about to take their first taste as Gibbs finishes.

Gibbs - “All caused by the symptoms they had from untreatable syphilis.”

Alli and Reese stop and slowly turn their heads to look at Gibbs.

Gibbs - “I was saying we don’t have enough time to figure it out.”

The mime-faced clerk reaches out to hand Alli her change, and she refuses with a disgusted “you keep it” gesture.  Reese is looking around for a garbage can when Bennish finally walks up and snatches the ice cream cone from Reese’s hand and takes a big lick with a smile.  Reese looks on in horror knowing the information Bennish does not.  Gibbs lets out a big laugh.

https://www.danceshistoricalmiscellany. … h-century/

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/310 … dered-wigs

I wonder if TV would have to have body double workers. For THE FLASH, maybe you'd hire a number of body doubles for Grant Gustin and Candice Patton who agree to social distancing and constant testing for the duration of the filming block. They perform any physical intimacy for filming and then deepfake technology is used to replace their faces with the likeness of the lead actors.

Effects are very much on the rise in TV and not just for science fiction and fantasy dramas. I recently saw a visual effects reel for PARKS AND RECREATION, a half-hour sitcom about people working in government. https://www.reddit.com/r/PandR/comments … l_effects/

WHY would this show need special effects, you might ask? Isn't it an office drama? The effects reel shows that most of the crowd scenes were created via computer effects, a more advanced effect of the doubling/editing used in "A Current Affair" for the president's press conference. Much of the background of the City Hall building interiors were apparently a green sheet with a lot of foot traffic and surroundings put in later.

What looked like expensive location filming in Washington, DC and various national parks and an aquarium were apparently shots with painstakingly recomposited backgrounds. All the outdoor storm conditions on camera were computer additions to shots filmed on indoor stages. Even when there was location, effects added all the birds and assorted wildlife in post. And no one really drives a car on TV these days.

https://youtu.be/cQ54GDm1eL0

This is a deepfake of Obama swearing. The technology is there if they want to have a rotating team of self-isolating body doubles perform the motions so that Grant Gustin and Candice Patton can kiss on FLASH. There are other examples I’ve read about where celebrity faces are grafted onto the bodies of adult performers, but I can’t give you examples because I don’t watch porn. I’m not against it, I just feel they don’t make it for me.

I would take an opposing viewpoint and note what attracts many to entertainment - escapism.  A brief opportunity to become immersed in the fantasy of a life you would like to have - such as being wealthy or having super powers or for some just having funny friends.  Under that thought, I think many would really enjoy seeing the life that they haven’t been allowed to have for months and months.

It’s a bit odd to think of a depiction of once normal life as escapism, but that’s where we are now.

To pull out an archaic example that could be useful in an alternate reality idea - why was it once hilarious to throw a pie in someone’s face?  It was a very visual act of humiliation most often used as a protest to authority or a spite on the wealthy.  No one could commit such an act in real life, but it certainly was funny to see that humiliation fantasy lived out in a way that wasn’t “harmful”.

Starting in the vaudeville and silent movie era at the turn of the 20th century, the pie slinging fell out of favor in the 1920’s because people were prospering.  But as the Great Depression took hold leading through World War II, the practice returned to popularity for its reward of venting frustration.  As the decades wore on, the meaning of the “pie to the face” began to fade; and ultimately you don’t see it much today because it’s not clear for many why that’s even funny.

But that’s a look at how culture can change, and how we’ll change through the course of this virus.  Some changes will stick and some won’t.  Handshakes I see going away because few will probably miss the practice; but many other aspects of pre-COVID life are likely things people would like to see again.

The future of kissing and sex scenes on tv: dolls and trick editing.

https://www.cracked.com/article_28013_s … dolls.html

Are they still using physical currency in America?

In 2017, I was at a coffee shop with my niece and attempted to pay for the two coffees with bills and three pennies. The cashier SHOVED the three copper coins back at me. "Pennies have been out of circulation for three years!" she exclaimed at me. "Three years!" My niece laughed at me. I later threw the two of the pennies at a man in a movie theatre who was texting in the middle of the film, hitting him once in the back of the head and once in the neck. The kid confiscated the third one before I could throw it.

**

I've thought about TV as escapism and I understand that, but personally, it's not what I watch TV to find. I watch TV for inspiration and aspiration. To me, BROOKLYN NINE NINE is a half-hour sitcom about goofy police detectives and represents what policing should be. Never has BROOKLYN NINE NINE been declared more out of style by the viewing public. Even the actors are ashamed to be associated with police; they have been pooling their salaries to bail out protesters as an apology for making small fortunes playing the most disliked professional class in America.

This is a time when police are viewed as violent, delusional thugs. They think their public image shouldn't suffer from being caught on video as they randomly spraying pedestrians and front porches with tear gas and rubber bullets. They think they can wash it all away with a speech where a police officer rants that their violent savagery recorded on camera shouldn't be judged for the violent savagery reflected on camera.

There's been a lot of fan chatter that Season 8 of BROOKLYN NINE NINE should, without explanation, show the cast now working at a post office or a hospital or a newspaper or a high school. That the charm of the characters doesn't require that they be police officers because the cast of BROOKLYN NINE NINE shouldn't be cops. That people as good as Jake, Amy, Terry, Boyle, Holt, Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo would never be cops.

I've been watching BROOKLYN NINE NINE for years and I have never seen such lovable cops in a show with such suspicion, disdain, alarm, distaste and frustration with the institution of police. Every police officer outside the regular cast is generally portrayed as corrupt. Prone to abusing their power for political or financial gain. In league with various criminals. Or at best too inept to do any serious harm.

On BROOKLYN NINE NINE, cops who aren't in the Nine Nine are like the ones we're seeing all over social media these days. The black Sergeant Terry is arrested by a non-Nine Nine cop for walking down the street outside his house. Captain Raymond Holt is constantly suffering for being black and gay. Essentially, the Nine Nine is Temporal Flux in a world of David Peckinpahs.

The Nine Nine precinct is perpetually at odds with the rest of the New York Police Department. In Season 6, the Nine Nine declares war on the NYPD. Throughout all this, the cast of the Nine Nine insist on being the best people they can be and being the best crimefighters they can be even when the police in the city around them are not.

There's a lot of talk about BROOKLYN NINE NINE changing itself in Season 8 to address how TV no longer wants to glamourize police. But BROOKLYN NINE NINE has never offered an escape into a world where all police are great; it was a journey into one precinct where these dysfunctional people were great at their police jobs and surrounded by the police we see today on YouTube and Twitter as filmed by bystanders. So my hope is that BROOKLYN NINE NINE simply keeps doing what it's doing.

I want to see the cast of BROOKLYN NINE NINE continue working at being funny and good even as they have to practice social distancing and wear masks. I want the cast facing down an absence of protective equipment and facing down their union leader whom they hold in contempt. I want to the Nine Nine struggle with cops now being loathed and despised when the Nine Nine represent the best of what police can be and make the audience laugh in the face of it all.

I don't want BROOKLYN NINE NINE to offer an escape from reality. I want BROOKLYN NINE NINE to keep facing down reality, showing what police are but also what they *should* be and what policing should aspire to become.

I have this bag of pennies I've been longing to imbed into the back of a theatre texter's neck.

Why do you carry $200 cash? Isn't that a bit much to have as you wander the streets? Do you use it to bribe informants to find celebrities to photograph? Did Allison Mack invite you to join her cult?

Saw this earlier - “America in an anger incubator”:

https://www.chron.com/news/article/Amer … 376110.php

It reminded me of another old idea - Rage World.  It would have played off the legends of Jessica Savitch and her habits of losing her cool:

https://youtu.be/GpVuxgSxFFE

Savitch’s career ended in an on-air display where she appeared to be drugged; speculation being that it was an attempt to address her issues with medication.  Shortly after her final broadcast, she died in a car crash.

But what if Savitch never sought help and never took the medication?  It could have led to an “I’m mad as hell” moment similar to the movie “Network” which would morph into a media landscape designed to stoke anger for ratings.  We live in that world now to a large extent, but giving an over the top example could shine a little light on our current world and how we are manipulated by media.

So how could this work into a Declassified story?  Well, we have Bennish who has a great capacity to make people angry.  A talent agent observes a skirmish Bennish starts with the on-edge pedestrians of this world, and the agent offers to make Bennish a star.  As they walk away, a tv in a window displays a show coming back from its commercial break.  It’s Matt Laurer on the Today Show.

Matt clearly has a black eye, and he’s meekly looking at the camera trying to introduce a story.  Then Savannah Guthrie leans over and starts screaming at him about something he said leading to her jumping on him and beating him with her fists.  Off to the side Al Roker is laughing and cheering her on.  That’s an example that would never be filmed (nobody’s giving Laurer a job doing anything), but this is what Bennish is walking into without realizing.

So what do the Sliders do?  Do they try to save Bennish?  Do they sit back and enjoy the show?  Does Bennish learn anything from this adventure?  Of course, the other Sliders would need their own plot as well to fill out the story; but it’s all a seed of an idea to explore anger and how it can too easily consume and control people especially if leaders are egging it on.  Perhaps a look at where we’re headed if we continue down our current path; and an opportunity to think about if that’s the people we want to be.

Saw this article recently:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p … 0-1023376/

Buried in the Green New Deal is a geo-engineering initiative to fight climate change.  Geo-engineering has been debated for some time now; and it amounts to quick fixes for our climate problems while, I assume, we work on the underlying cause of climate change.  Basically, geo-engineering buys you time.

Of the various ideas, Solar Engineering of some sort is usually the go to idea.  In modern thought, that equates to filling the air with reflective particles to simulate the cooling effect caused by ash from a massive volcanic eruption.  So, we use air pollution to fight the effects of air pollution.

Another idea for Solar Engineering?  The infamous space mirror:

An that’s what brings us to our Declassified idea today.  I would title it “Eclipse”.

What if Sputnik failed?  Eisenhower would have never created NASA.  Without the existing space program and the Cold War space race, Kennedy would have never made his inspirational speech announcing an attempt to shoot for the moon.  With the wars and civil unrest and economic crises that followed after Kennedy - well, did the space program happen only because it was running in the background and other presidents didn’t have to think about it?  Would other countries pass us up as we were distracted?

Imagine a world that recognized the climate crisis and decided to use the “fix” to crush an unprepared United States at the same time.  A giant space mirror in geosynchronous orbit over the United States - plunging it into permanent darkness.  America eclipsed in progress and in fact.

I see the episode as something that plays with the idea of light.  In complete darkness, light is the attractor - it draws you in and draws others to you.  The vortex is an enormous source of light; and the Sliders entry to this reality is like a signal flare.

This one would not be about changing the world; it would be a pure survival story.  ireactions once mentioned how Sliders could be a different genre each week if it wanted, and he was right.  This episode would be a suspense thriller with a touch of horror.

How can you go sideways with culture to make a Sliders backdrop?  The real world is always dropping ideas.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/29/investin … index.html

As you see in the article, this change isn’t new; it actually happened in the background years ago when most people weren’t paying attention.

Kodak Film is now Kodak Pharmaceutical.  Who would have thought that in 1995?

What other companies could you use this kind of strange twist to create a comical situation?  Well, what if an all-in commitment to the 1980’s New Coke destroyed the company making it necessary to refit into a cleaning product company?

https://www.cnet.com/pictures/things-yo … th-coke/2/

Imagine one of the Sliders picking up a Coke can without examining it closely and taking a drink?  On that world, people might think they were drinking cleaning chemicals!  As concerned citizens rush the Slider off for emergency medical treatment, it could be a good opportunity to explore an alternate history health care system casting a light on how ridiculous it can become.

I have a question for you, TF. How would you shape your ideas into a story for the sliders (Alli, Reese, Gibbs, Bennish or Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo)? What is the introduction, situation and climax for the characters? I ask you this because this is a part of the SLIDERS code that I personally cannot crack even when a visionary like Nigel Mitchell was holding my hand. When writing my own SLIDERS stories, I had a very clear vision for who I wanted Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo to be in 2015 and what I wanted sliding to be -- but I did not have any gift for conceiving interesting parallel worlds.

Nigel worked with me, coming up with alt-histories, backstories, little details of visual or societal data -- but I don't think I used it well. Ultimately, my SLIDERS stories featured the character interactions I wanted and Nigel's parallel worlds were a backdrop or Season 3 Diggs-type scenes where someone explains what the world is in a monologue or a conversation. And it was adequate -- but it wasn't the sliders doing what SLIDERS should have them do and what you and Nigel would have them do: get caught up in the culture and workings of an alternate history, encounter inversions of our own struggles, and come out the other side with renewed perspective and even enlightenment.

How do you tell a story with your alt-history concepts? What would the beginning, middle and end of these stories be?

This is a really good tutorial in how to write SLIDERS stories. The twist with Bennish is great. I will try to apply it later in theory as a post on this forum.

I mildly disagree with some of TF's views on SLIDERS stories, but given my inability to write them without story ideas from Nigel Mitchell, Tracy Torme and Transmodiar, I'm not sure anyone should agree with me. I would personally be intrigued by a SLIDERS reboot where Quinn and Wade are teenagers. TF astutely says this is redundant as teenagers already feel like the world's rules exist to annoy them and older adults would have a more meaningful reaction to being put off by a parallel Earth. Personally, I think teenagers being predisposed to irritation towards any and all social and societal conventions is precisely why it's a great idea.

I don't really disagree with TF saying he prefers stories where the sliders *don't* save the world and merely survive it. I would say that I like them when they're done well, but it is *very* difficult to write convincing stories where four strangers in a strange land with no resources can somehow topple the dominant regime and bring the local revolution to victory. This is probably why the first episode of SLIDERS was scripted to have the sliders succeed in rescuing Commander Wade Welles of the Revolution but revised to have them fail.

The sliders' success in defeating royalty in "Prince of Wails" required numerous contrivances: that the Professor looks like the municipal despot, that the sliders wander into an assassination plot against the prince, that they then just as conveniently blunder into the rebels and so on. It's incredibly uplifting and endearing, but by the time we get to "Prophets and Loss," the charming and amusing coincidences to have a few hapless civilians defeat a brutal regime has become a lazily executed formula rather than a plausible course of events.

I don't feel I made a mistake in my SLIDERS stories taking on the tropes of a superhero story with resurrection, restoration and the sliders saving the multiverse like it's DOCTOR WHO -- but I would say that I don't think anyone would want an ongoing series of SLIDERS stories to be anything like my deliberately limited mini-series. I've gotten enough fan mail to know that fans *definitely* wanted Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo restored and to know who they'd be in the present day -- but once that was done, they would have wanted ongoing SLIDERS stories like the ones TF comes up with.