Thoughts on Sliders in Random (Page 1 of 3)

You stop worrying what other people think about you when you realize how seldom they actually do.

My impression is that Michael Mallory said he would help, then died before he could.  Young Quinn feels abandoned by his suddenly missing father.  The bullies sense his weakness and scale up the abuse accordingly, as the Code of TV Bullies requires.

He's a kid.  Kids yell at their parents over nonsense all the time.

Rewatching "The King is Back" and... it's so odd that Clinton Derricks Carroll is obviously not identical to Cleavant. Some fans have noted that there was no strict rule that doubles were all identical and surely genetic variations and fitness and health would alter appearances. But this explanation doesn't hold true in the episode: Sabrina Lloyd has clearly been directed to play Wade as though she's astonished by how Rembrandt-2 looks just like Rembrandt; she stares at his face searching for differences -- almost as though she expected Clinton's position in the shot to be obscured by inserts of Cleavant in editing and performed accordingly.

The script is written to present both Rembrandts as identical and indistinguishable. I can only think that Torme either wasn't on set when his script was filmed and that by the time production had filmed the scenes with Clinton playing Rembrandt-2 without filming Cleavant playing the same scenes, it was too late to fix it.

In Season 2's "Greatfellas," all of Rembrandt-2's scenes are filmed twice, once with Clinton and once with Cleavant, both alternating the roles, both standing at careful angles so that their physical discrepancies don't stand out, and with the shots intermixed with Cleavant always playing Rembrandt or Rembrandt-2 when in full profile.

"Obsession" offers a pretty clear guide for men on consent and respect for boundaries with women. Derek Bond claims to love Wade, but his approach is to invade her privacy without asking first. He isolates her from her friends. "She had to kill herself to get away from you," Quinn snarls at Derek as he cradles Wade's supposedly-dead but sedated body, "and you call that love!?"

And yet, I somehow lost this lesson and only got it back at the end of my twenties. I didn't understand how that happened, but now, I know why: it's because SLIDERS undermined its own respect for women by introducing Kari Wuhrer as Maggie Beckett, an actress shaped by men for the male gaze playing a character designed for the edification of men. Maggie is designed as something that a man would like to own rather than a person in her own right. SLIDERS further presents women as objects to be used and mutilated through Wade being sent to an offscreen rape camp and then being mutilated into a severed head in a computer.

As a result, I forgot about "Obsession," I forgot what it had to offer in how to respect the privacy and boundaries of women. I didn't believe in what the latter episodes professed, but I also had trouble rejecting what they had to say as untrue or wrong because those were the terms on which the show continued and concluded.

I got it back, mostly by giving a 42 year old Quinn in SLIDERS REBORN a teenaged daughter and forcing myself to study Wade Welles until I finally understood her as a figure of spiritual beliefs but also relentless practicality. And I know I got it back because most of my friendships today are platonic friendships with women. But it really speaks to how I felt for a very long time that SLIDERS was something that was ripped out of my life and left a hole in me where there should have been morality and consideration for the autonomy of others.

I sometimes think I would be such a different person if Torme had stayed on SLIDERS, if it had stayed in Vancouver -- but the truth is I'd probably be who I am now, I'd have just gotten here earlier.

Should anyone ever depend on an American television show for moral instruction? I don't know. It could be argued that I should have found something else. Every lesson learned from SLIDERS up to age 11 was a lesson lost by age 14 with Seasons 3 - 5.

My parents and I were not on civil speaking terms in my childhood, I had to work with what I had at age 10 and what I had to hand was SLIDERS.

In "Gillian of the Spirits," a double of Quinn Mallory's revered and beloved father, Michael, is revealed to be something else. He is an antagonist, a man who has been forced to act on behalf of greedy, manipulative figures who have armed him with a gun and directed him against innocent people, fueling him with desperation and self-preservation.

In the face of Michael's betrayal, Professor Arturo triggers the vortex and invites Michael to join the sliders. "A man shouldn't live unappreciated in his world," says the Professor, himself an unappreciated genius. The Professor empathizes with the man holding a gun to his chest, offering him a chance.

Quinn appears and appeals to his father's decency and better nature, urging him to lower his weapon. And before leaving, Quinn forgives his father, telling Gillian to pass on the message that Michael Mallory's son will always love him.

SLIDERS declares that it is a capital mistake to put anyone on a pedestal, an error to think that Michael Mallory in this world or any other would be a perfect and flawless specimen of humanity. Quinn himself notes in "Luck of the Draw": "You don't get something for NOTHING." That's not cynicism; that's understanding that people act in their own best interests for their own gains -- and to think otherwise is foolish.

"Gillian of the Spirits" doesn't declare that everyone is innately self-serving or inherently kind. It simply states that people have the capacity for good or evil. Malevolence is never beyond anyone; the Bayside Power bureaucrats are evil and manipulative. But redemption is never unattainable; it is within reach in every moment of choice such as when Michael is moved by the sight of his dead son and lowering his weapon. In addition, rather than try to have Michael act against his own goals, Arturo suggests that they can have mutual goals if Michael joins the sliders.

I understood this after watching "Gillian of the Spirits" at age 11 -- but then my grasp of human nature got shakier and shakier with each episode of Seasons 3 - 5. Season 4 declared Quinn was a hero even as he became callous and indifferent to the suffering of others, abandoned Wade in "Mother and Child," and then abandoned his home Earth and Rembrandt in "Revelations." Villains were villainous for the sake of being so. The rock star vampires in "Stoker," the Season 4 Kromaggs, the evil doctor in "Map of the Mind" -- they were antagonists and therefore evil despite lacking motives or meaningful gains.

I tried to distance myself from the show as this happened, but it's clear that it affected me. In my late teens and twenties, I lost my confidence in human nature; I became convinced that anyone and everyone would always exploit any vulnerability or opportunity to harm others.

Every person who hurt my feelings through any slights large or small was David Peckinpah -- a deranged, malevolent force turning my life into a horror movie for reasons unknowable and unfathomable. They were Colonel Rickman, a diseased slasher killer wandering into my life. They were the Season 4 Kromagg space Nazis, incompetent fascist poseurs. They were the arcade manager from "A Thousand Deaths."

This is undoubtedly the cause of my numerous social difficulties in my twenties.

When David Peckinpah overdosed and his heart gave out from drug abuse, SLIDERS fans rejoiced. I was largely silent, but one of Peckinpah's sons posted on the IMDB forums, describing his father's two decades of sobriety -- until 1994 when Peckinpah's 16 year old son Garrett died suddenly from meningitis. In his grief, Peckinpah fell back into his addiction, lost the ability to run a TV show, and it killed him in the end.

It was strange: Temporal Flux had told me about this painful chapter in Peckinpah's history, but it never truly registered until years later, when I was rewatching "Murder Most Foul," a splendid episode that demonstrates Peckinpah's clear talent as a writer and producer as well as his joyful obsession with historical re-enactment -- gifts that he unfortunately didn't bring to any episode of SLIDERS that he didn't write himself.

At the end of "Murder Most Foul," Quinn invites a little boy, Trevor, to join the sliders, but cautions that there is no way to bring Trevor home. Trevor declines, deciding to enjoy his childhood fully, but promises to someday build his own sliding machine and find the sliders.

An autobiography can lie. But fiction can't; what a writer creates reveals himself fully whether he wants it to or not. Trevor was named after one of Peckinpah's children, and it's obvious that Trevor's promise to find the sliders again someday voices Peckinpah's own longing to be reunited with the son he lost.

Transmodiar could not understand why SLIDERS REBORN insisted on bringing in the Season 3 monsters for the final script when I have never expressed anything but disdain for the Season 3 monsters. When I told him that "Regenesis" would be "warmly dedicated to David Ernest Peckinpah, screenwriter, director, producer and loving father, husband and family man," Transmodiar crowed, "As well it should! Because it celebrates all the wrong he brought to the show!"

But... I felt that Slider_Quinn21 understood it. Or at least acted like he did out of empathy and gentleness. Slider_Quinn21 worked with me so that the sequences of Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo fighting the dragon with aspirin and the dinosaur with hash butter and the underground predators with UV lights and the vampires with garlic puree were funny.

Slider_Quinn21 refined some of Rembrandt's quips and made sure that the sliders paid for all the items they took from the Doppler Superstore. Slider_Quinn21 also observed that the monster fighting sequences were far more interesting than Quinn and Quinn-2 firing sand and water through vortexes at each other, and he was very supportive of the conclusion of "Regenesis" where Quinn and Quinn-2 set aside their differences and work together.

At the time, I wanted the visual of the Season 1 - 2 team facing the Season 3 horrors with humour and levity -- but I see now that it was an effort to go back to "Gillian of the Spirits." People aren't against you; they are for themselves, but tragedy can sometimes make them think that poisoning themselves to numb their pain is their best route when it's not.

As Slider_Quinn21 would have to remind me in the course of my writing: people are not simply good or evil; they are capable of either and their ideas in themselves -- like doing horror movies with SLIDERS -- are not inherently good or bad until put into practice either with wit, charm, love and passion or grief, misery, indifference and contempt.

It's interesting that after "Murder Most Foul," David Peckinpah withdraws into monster movies rather than engaging in his gift for writing stories about older people interacting with younger people like Quinn and Trevor -- which is a talent Peckinpah shared with Tracy Torme given the excellence of "The Guardian." The age difference with Quinn and Wade being younger than Rembrandt and Arturo would have been perfect for Peckinpah's talents.

But never again would Peckinpah put his feelings about his children and his son into his writing; "Murder Most Foul" clearly struck too close to home; I wouldn't be surprised if "Trevor" had originally been "Garrett" only for Peckinpah to pull back. He didn't want to reveal his agony further; he withdrew from it; he tried to cauterize it with amphetamines and opiates. He fell into what a life of Annie Fish calls "cynicism. Of nihilism. Of existential horror taken to such a complete extreme as to become completely meaningless."

And I think that's why I unconsciously wrote SLIDERS REBORN's final script the way I did; to finish what Peckinpah started in "Murder Most Foul" but chose not to finish. "Regenesis" reveals that Dennis MacMillan didn't "drop out of graduate school to join a band"; he was caught stealing from a pharmacy which he did to try to settle his father's gambling debts, he failed and his father was killed.

"Regenesis" reunites Dennis with his restored father in the rebuilt multiverse and Quinn makes it happen, Quinn himself longing to be reunited with Michael Mallory. This is clearly an unintended yet obvious echo of "Murder Most Foul." At one point, Quinn asks his 15 year old daughter Laurel to trust him and Laurel snaps, "Trust you? I barely know you!" pointing out that they only learned of each other's existence 18 months previous and that they won't know if Quinn has what it takes to be a dad until Laurel is in her 30s -- another obvious reference to Peckinpah's misery over losing the time he should have had with Garrett.

These are the stories that Peckinpah should have written for SLIDERS. Not monster movies, not space invasions -- he should have written stories about sliding providing the opportunity to revisit tragedy and loss, not necessarily to erase them, but to address and recover from them. I see now that I wished to write the stories he should have for himself.

Because if you can forgive David Peckinpah for SLIDERS, you might be able to forgive anyone for anything and you might even be able to forgive yourself.

I was eating dinner with my favourite actress over Zoom and I shared with her my theory of why my moral compass crumbled in my youth and wasn't re-assembled until later. "A TV show might explain SOME of that," she told me, "but there was probably a lot of other stuff going on as well."

Nonsense! Also, as we were talking, it occurred to me why, even today, I find the Quinn Mallory character as fascinating as I did in 1995. I was watching the upscale in progress of "The Young and the Relentless" which has a ridiculous scene where Kyle Beck holds the timer hostage from Quinn and Quinn, despite being Jerry O'Connell, doesn't throw Kyle through a wall and take the timer back. The character is occasionally mismatched to the actor and it's interesting because Quinn Mallory is an introvert -- a person consumed with the interiority of his world, with his internal thoughts and calculations -- but he is played by Jerry O'Connell and Jerry O'Connell is an extrovert, a person mostly consumed with exterior action and behaviours.

One of my backburner projects has been to build a website for some of my fanfic and -- part of the problem has been graphics. I occasionally take a break from real work to look for photos of a present day Jerry O'Connell to try to capture who Quinn would be at age 47 -- and it's not easy.

Jerry and Quinn have the same face. But Jerry's in-character expressions, mannerisms, body language and overall demeanor are totally different from his real life persona. When Jerry smiles, he shows all his teeth. His body language is wide, his posture is open.

It is shockingly difficult to find a photo of Jerry O'Connell smiling like Quinn Mallory.

Quinn Mallory's smile is subtle and reserved. He smiles because he's amused by some point he's observed in a highly internal fashion. His posture is guarded and withdrawn, he is quiet and secretive.

And onscreen, there's an interesting effect with an extroverted actor playing an introverted character. When performed correctly, Quinn is low-key and cautious, but there are flashes of Jerry's real world personality. It plays as though Quinn is fundamentally an introvert -- but he has the capacity for abrupt and sudden physical action or external behaviours -- only after internally calculating and considering it.

O'Connell, when in character as Quinn, restrains his physicality until specific moments where he unlocks it -- such as in "Prince of Wails" when he abruptly declares that Arturo is the sliders' prisoner or in "As Time Goes By" when he pretends to cower before Dennis but then swings hard. O'Connell being at odds with his character and controlling his true self except when it's opportune not to -- it actually emphasizes how Quinn is a thinker.

More essays from Annie Fish, who is writing a SLIDERS book!

https://www.patreon.com/posts/58482053

Do you guys think Maurice Fish got his name after Maurice Hurley, a TNG showrunner who tracy bumped heads with?

That's a great point about Hurley too.

Or who tracy' s Stephanie was. 

So now we know cleavant singing at candlestick park and Stephanie are two musts for a collector's edition.

Stephanie went through several iterations in the pilot script’s development (starting as just a mean girl bully on campus - Stephanie Sweet), but the filmed scene had her as more of a Daelin prototype (including an abusive boyfriend).

For any who didn’t know, the actress for Stephanie was Melanie Pearson (now Bradshaw).  The second sample in the reel below was her role as Alison Oliver in The Byrds of Paradise.  It would have been filmed the same year as the Sliders pilot, so a gauge on what Stephanie would have looked like:

https://youtu.be/CbhakL4v6UA

Speaking of Robin, did anybody know she was a champion surfer (I think in Hawaii)?

Obviously tracy grew up in California, but I wonder if she influenced the existence of the Remmy surfing scene.

Not sure if we have a sliders comic books thread but I got to admit the tone of them feels pretty different than the show at times to the point where I still haven't read them all despite owning them all.

Jerry's narcotica was pretty good though..

I'm looking for any/all sliders fans who would like to help develop and expand the following stories:
- Axis powers win WW 2 (how was the U.S. divided among the powers?)
- Faaaaaabulous world (16.8 percent of world pop. plays for the other team)
- Waterslide (sliders land in a gigantic sub and need to get to the surface)
- Slides of Sorrow: Prof. Arturo, Rembrandt and Quinn must carry an unconscious Wade through several worlds.
- Sliders origins: How did the sliders become who they are today?

I did this in Earth 214, and I followed the same logic as the Man in the High Castle.  Germany got the East Coast and Japan got the West Coast. 

I think I also did something with the Zimmerman telegram so Mexico had control of something, but maybe that was another alt-world.

These are good, ideas,
1. Axis powers win: I had an idea where Japan took over the U.S., and it eventually developed into Axis powers world. I could actually see the Sliders in Japanifornia. New York and some northeast states would be Italian, and the southern states German. There is a focus on military science. All jails and camps moved to Australia, to keep the Fatherland 'pure'.
@Slider_Quinn21: I did not picture the entire west coast as Japan's but it's a good idea.
@RussianCabbie_Lotteryfans: The episode would be about infighting, how some of the axis powers believe that they should have gotten a better deal, and WW3 happens because of that.

2. Faaaaaabulous world: I wanted each letter of the LGBT to be their own tribe, with their own history/culture.
@Slider_Quinn21/RussianCabbie_Lotteryfans: The idea of who is a better parent would be explored through the various tribes. Some colors of the rainbow shine brighter than others!
I believe that the 'adoption upon request' idea has merit, and should be a separate world.

3. In my excitement, I may have bitten off more than I can chew. The most common places like Quinn's lab/Dominion hotel are being worked on, and I wanted to have a story or two finished by the time the park and other common areas were done. In the meantime, here is a picture of Faaaaaabulous world's version of our Sliders:

excellent, will have to check this out.

always thought roads taken was a nice departure from a lot of the far we got in later seasons.

I don't really see Quinn as bisexual. Entirely too much of Quinn's character decisions are based on sympathy that is specifically for women and there's a glowing smile on his face in "Greatfellas" when the conwoman kisses him and there's at least five to seven years of longing for Daelin Richards and a crush on his grade school teacher -- I don't think Quinn is exactly Tim Drake when it comes to revealing a character to be bisexual. Wade, on the other hand...

I've spent a lot of time writing Quinn's life and thinking on his backstory and the reason I prefer to think that Quinn has had sex with a number of women: it's clear that he's a sexual being and I don't wish to condemn Quinn -- a friend -- to celibacy if that wouldn't make him happy. That said, Quinn in the Pilot is clearly a shut-in, averse to human contact, withdrawn and secretive, hiding his pursuits behind a wall of deflections and deliberately ignoring Wade's obvious crush. The number of sexual partners for Quinn is not high.

In my mind, the stories "Virtual Slide" and "Roads Taken" happened with Quinn and Wade. Quinn is shown to be intimate with simulations in "Virtual Slide" and lives out a marriage with children in "Roads Taken".

In my fanfic, SLIDERS REBORN, Quinn is restored with the original sliders in 2000, but after getting them all home in 2001 and undoing the Kromagg invasion, Quinn does not see them again until 2015 for various reasons. I imagined, in my head, that Quinn had at least one romance that didn't work out and I have, in my mind, imagined who this woman is before Quinn met Wade again in 2015 (again, this is fanfic). I concocted a whole character for her, but it never came up in the actual fanfics I wrote; I knew my audience wanted Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo, not Quinn and some nobody who didn't factor into the original sliders' lives. I just didn't want SLIDERS REBORN to inflict celibacy on Quinn for 14 years.

Quinn's life is defined by one fine mess after another and I like to think that his sex life has been as much a disaster as, well, sliding.

Strictly my head canon. For example, I've never spoken to *any* fans who believe Quinn and Logan had sex. And there is no onscreen certainty that they did; I just think it makes for a better story if Quinn had sex with Logan and then has to deal with the fact that he had sex with himself and that his double was having a sexual affair with the Professor. That's a very interesting character complication too worthwhile to throw away, at least for me.

There is no rule against slash fiction and homosexual or bisexual characters -- original or not, TV characters or not.

While I did ensure that every new registrant signed over to me their eternal souls and I intend to use that to the fullest extent of appropriate moderation (no homophobia / fat shaming / doxxing / misinformation / deepfake pornography / racism ), there is absolutely no rule against slash fiction nor will there ever be any rule against slash fiction. If you consider Quinn Mallory gay or bisexual, you go ahead and write that story. I myself seem to be watching a lot of short YouTube films about lesbians these days, I am not averse to LGBTQA content and SLIDERS fans who are -- well, you can find that one guy on Parler, I'm sure.

@ireactions: for me, Sliders has always been about exploration. I wanted Fab world to be like 'the weaker sex' where the shoe is on the other foot. I believe that the LGB's are being pushed out in favor of the T's. This would be a major conflict point of the episode.
If this were to become a lego adventure, I would make it easy to digest and accessable to as many people as possible, no kinky stuff.

On love...

Why is the SLIDERS novelization of the Pilot so terrible? It always struck me as strange that Brad Linaweaver's novel wasn't at least mediocre; I mean, he already had the story and just needed to convert it to prose.

Thinking about it recently: my take is that Tracy Torme's Pilot script is a love story, but Brad Linaweaver wrote the novelization as a hate story.

Linaweaver's writing career was defined by writing novels that expressed his contempt and loathing for Nazism and Communism. His magnum opus was MOON OF ICE, a novel about an alternate history in which Nazi Germany developed the atomic bomb first. Linaweaver developed his writing skills by penning angry essays about the triumph of capitalism over communism, Libertarianism over National Socialism. He wrote from a place of anger and contempt against that which he (not necessarily wrongly) judged to be evil.

Then he was handed a SLIDERS script to turn into a novelization. One would think he'd be a great choice. Unfortunately, Linaweaver's novelization is a cruel, grotesque affair. The emphasis is on Soviet America's violent bloodshed; the novel opens with the sliders observing a crowd being gunned down by soldiers massacring civilians and children with Linaweaver delighting and relishing the corpses and splatter, all of it giving voice to his hatred for Russian communism.

Linaweaver seems to disdain America and Americans too, however, but it's self-superiority as opposed to hate. Linaweaver is mocking towards academia and Arturo, mocking towards Wade's feelings towards Quinn, mocking towards Quinn's class and wealth in the family being able to afford a gardener. Linaweaver writes from a default level of looking down on others when writing Earth Prime. His writing turns to loathing and contempt once the story moves to Soviet America, laying out everything in the most repulsive fashion: the streets, the smells, the food. Everything under Linaweaver's pen is dirty and unpleasant, moreso in the parallel world of the story.

This may be why Linaweaver also did such a terrible job on the SLIDERS episode guide. SLIDERS: THE CLASSIC EPISODES was over a year late and with all the episode entries based on the shooting scripts with Linaweaver never bothering to watch the episodes and creating errors in his already slapdash plot summaries. Why did he do such a lazy, indifferent job on this next SLIDERS book?

I suspect it's because hate is cunning and cruel and knows loyalty to nothing and no one, not even its most devout practitioners. I suspect that Brad Linaweaver liked SLIDERS' scripts, he liked Torme, and he therefore couldn't tap into the fuel that made him write with passion. As a result, Linaweaver was paralyzed: he couldn't write SLIDERS: THE CLASSIC EPISODES as the only content he ever wrote well or would ever want to write: he couldn't write a hate story.

In contrast, Tracy Torme's Pilot script is a love story. The Pilot is about how Tracy Torme is in love with the United States of America. Now, we can argue whether or not anyone should love a piece of land or a government. We can note that Torme grew up the son of a wealthy musician, that Torme was able to enter screenwriting and earn a great living, and that Torme's love for America is because Torme had the great fortune to be born into privilege and comfort and associates that fortune with the country. We can certainly be aware that America has treated its citizens abominably.

But regardless, Torme's love for America is heartfelt, sincere, loving, patient and kind. While Torme's love for his country is at times boastful, arrogant, rude and overly insistent on its own way, it isn't resentful nor does it rejoice in wrongness. Instead, Torme presents the contrast between the United States of America and the parallel Soviet America through a series of gentle jokes.

In the United States of America, the legal system allows an injured worker to profit from his own misfortune and an opportunistic lawyer to ensure a payoff for a percentage; what's more, the legal system is daily entertainment. America's entertainment is filled with opportunity: an over the hill entertainer like Rembrandt Brown believes he has a second chance, radio news is provocative yet relatively harmless.

The homeless man ranting about communism is a silly curiosity. Capitalism and the free market allow smart young women like Wade Welles to turn down thousands of dollars in sales today for tens of thousands in a month. Trickle down economics allow Quinn to find all the scrap parts he needs to build sliding.  The power of the US dollar is so prevalent and strong that everyone can have some.

In Soviet America, the legal system is a quagmire with TV court being for fascist show trials and entertainment is for suppressing free thought; the TV lawyer is a deadly interrogator, the homeless communist is a political leader, and holding the US dollar makes one a target of the communist regime. In Soviet America, everything that Torme loves about America has been twisted into something bizarre and uncanny, but Torme emphasizes the peculiarity and baffling humour of the situation and plays it all for laughs. Rembrandt's capture, interrogation, trial and sentence are played as comedy.

Torme doesn't play it for too much danger or fear; Torme clearly doesn't like communism yet, unlike Linaweaver, Torme doesn't use the Pilot to hate what he disdains. Instead, Torme uses Soviet America to create a sense of unfamiliarity, homesickness and longing for what he loves.

The characters are striving to return home; the skewed inversions of the United States in the Soviet America are all to emphasize everything that Torme loves by noting their absence in this world. Furthermore, ends the visit to Soviet America by offering the hope that even in this terrible place, what Torme loves might still be saved.

The Pilot novelization is a story of hate. But the Pilot script and the Pilot episode offer a story of love. A story of Tracy Torme's love for America.

I haven't finished the Pilot novel but I will say I found it superior to the Back to the Future novelization (which I did like but didn't find it came close to the movie).

Sliders comics are discussed here:
https://www.justanotherfanboy.com/2022/ … andom.html

And now we go off topic. Remind me to file a report with the Sliders.tv administrator about this.

I read the BACK TO THE FUTURE novelization when I was in school and thought it was a bit bland, especially with Marty McFly, a character who was so endearing on the screen and so oddly charmless in the book. Looking at it now, though, I've come to realize: BACK TO THE FUTURE is a movie. The story is not well-suited to prose and Marty McFly is not an effective character in the medium of novels.

The reason: Marty McFly in the BTTF script is a bland, reactive character. Marty has no character arc: he doesn't overcome any failing or flaw. Instead, the character arcs are entirely with George McFly: George overcomes his insecurity about his writing, George learns to assert himself, defend himself and stand up for himself. George learns to express his feelings in writing, in love and if need be, with his fists.

Marty is a helpful bystander, but Marty's problems -- not playing music at a school dance and not having a car to drive his girlfriend out to a camping trip -- are all solved by George and Lorraine's actions, not Marty's. The novel is unable to mine Marty for any characterization because, as far as the script goes, he doesn't have any.

Why does Marty McFly work in a movie? It's all Michael J. Fox. Fox gives the character a winning impishness as he skateboards to school and hangs onto a truck for added speed, in his defiance towards the principal mocking his father, in his donating a quarter to the Clock Tower fund. Fox conveys Marty's horror at his mother being sexually aggressive towards him. Fox sells Marty's astonishment when meeting a teen version of his father and trying to see his dad's older face in this younger man's visage. Fox infuses Marty with desperation, amusement, wonder, mischief, daring and fun -- almost none of which is in the original screenplay.

This is why the original actor for Marty, the very talented Eric Stoltz, was fired from the role. Stoltz is a great actor, but Stoltz could not make Marty work because there was nothing on the page for Stoltz to play and he didn't have Fox's gift for putting his own personality into otherwise characterless characters. And this is also why the novel doesn't work; the script was not designed to work in any medium other than the motion picture in which an actor -- as opposed to a novelist -- would bring Marty McFly to life. Marty McFly needs Michael J. Fox's empathic connection with the audience to truly come alive.

In this other post, I remarked that with "The Breeder", SLIDERS tried to make a sexy porn movie and through incompetence made a body horror movie that isn't sexy but in fact repulsive in every way.
https://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php … 123#p13123

I wonder: if SLIDERS can do any sort of story in any genre, what are the pornographic, sexual stories of SLIDERS? Oddly, I don't think anyone needs to make them up; they have already been told but the sex was offscreen. By this, I mean that if SLIDERS were to do a sexually charged story that had sexual fantasies, the sex should be character and plot relevant. And SLIDERS has (mostly) written, filmed and aired these stories. However, there is not one SLIDERS sex story; there are four, one for each of the four original sliders.

I think Quinn's SLIDERS sex story was probably in "Love Gods" where he agrees to father Jane Hills' child. If there had been an actual sex scene, I think it would be about this older lady trying to make it as pleasant and romantic as possible for this reluctant but understanding college kid and also show that Quinn is someone who guards himself very much, holds himself apart -- and that he's giving Jane Hills a degree of intimacy that he doesn't usually grant anybody at all and trusting her to love and care for the daughter he'll never know. A sex scene would have added a lot of weight to Quinn bidding her farewell at the end of the episode.

I think Wade's SLIDERS sex story would probably be in "Obsession" where Wade has intense memories of having sex with Derek during their past life where their sex scene would be intensely trusting and warm and add to why Wade feels an instant connection and familiarity with Derek when she meets him again. This would make Wade feel more violated when Derek reads her mind without permission and add to the theme that consent is a conversation and Wade having consented to sex and intimacy and potential mindreading with Derek in the past does not mean that consent is eternal.

I think Rembrandt's SLIDERS sex story is probably in "The Weaker Sex" where Serena flatters, wines, dines, seduces and dumps him and a sex scene would be a parody of the male gaze where Rembrandt is the object of conquest which would make his lie about him dumping Serena when she dumped him funnier.

I think the Professor's SLIDERS sex story is probably in "Double Cross" where his double was cheating on his wife with Logan. I imagine that a sequel to "Double Cross" could reveal that the Professor found a disturbingly detailed diary from his double about having sex with Quinn's double. This leads to the Professor and Quinn have to deal with the painful awkwardness that their two doubles had a sexual relationship and think about how gender in some ways dictated their father-son bond. Meanwhile, Rembrandt finds it hilarious and Wade is mortified.

I think "Love Gods" might have benefitted from some more characterization via a Jane/Quinn sex scene, but "Obsession" and "Weaker Sex" would not have been deepened by additions; what's already onscreen is completely sufficient. And a Professor/Logan sex scene might have been interesting character work for a sequel to "Double Cross" where Quinn and Arturo are desperately trying to never ever ever discuss how how their doubles were having an affair, but it wouldn't be worthwhile for "Double Cross" itself.

If SLIDERS were to tell sexually-charged stories well, these stories would require the sexuality and fail to function if the sex were taken out. It wouldn't be like "The Breeder" where the sexuality is completely at odds with a non-humanoid biological form seeking to reproduce through infestation.

A Sliders porn story would be them discovering someone using sliding technology for exploitation.  The pornographer finds a world where someone like Beyonce isn't famous, pays her double a relatively small amount to star in a porn film, then brings it back home and makes a mint.

Just to be clear, we are all aware a Sliders porn movie was actually made?

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0385226/

Definitely.

I sped through for the only parts I cared about - what did the timer and vortex look like?  (and that is a dude in the background, so no need to censor)

Production values were on par with season four, and it included a legally distinct version of the opening monologue of each episode.  They also did respect the worst parts of the formula (including turning back to talk before the exit slide).

I will get to the other stuff later, but for now, I want to thank TF for his service to SLIDERS in watching the porn parody and encourage him to seek therapy and any other assistance needed in having seen even a few frames of what I am sure was a horrific and disturbing viewing experience.

I tend to highlight how Marc Scott Zicree risked life and sanity on that terrible day where he locked himself in an edit bay with all of Kari Wuhrer's direct to VHS movies to figure out how to write for Maggie in Season 4, but watching whatever the hell this thing was to make screencaps sounds much much worse.

Please have a hot beverage and think of better days.

I see that I misunderstood the question.  I tried to put the concept of porn into a Sliders context when you were looking for the reverse.