My personal preference would be what I did with SLIDERS REBORN, but that's completely insane and unmarketable.
My compromise: I would like to see a new pilot with Temporal Flux's 2000-era idea for a redux. It starts with the original Pilot scene: Quinn says he thinks he knocked out the power.
Cut to 2023: Quinn Mallory (O'Connell) is a burnt out 48 year old tax accountant who lost his passion for science after a blackout in 1994 that knocked out power to all of San Francisco for two days. He was never able to recreate the apparition he saw in his basement in 1994 and assumes that he imagined it, he never got anti-gravity to work, and he simply gave up. Quinn is now divorced, he hates his job and he wishes he were dead.
Wade Welles (Sabrina Lloyd) is a daydreamer who lost her enthusiasm for computer engineering after a failed startup that ended in her filing a sexual harassment lawsuit and getting arrested for fraud (accounts differ on the validity of the charges). Wade now spends her days writing tedious smartphone reviews, she's also Quinn's ex-wife, she hates her life and she wishes she were dead.
Rembrandt Brown (Cleavant Derricks) is a coffee bar owner who failed to hang onto his 15 minutes of fame during that period when he was a soul singer. Running a jazz themed coffee house today, Rembrandt is content but only truly comes alive on open mic nights.
Professor Arturo (John Rhys-Davies) is a genius who failed to gain recognition for his brilliance and has been drummed out of nearly every university in the state for being a bombastic ass; he now makes a living writing high school study guides for struggling science students and he hates this world and wishes he were dead.
Due to a combination of lethargy and laziness, both Wade and Arturo find themselves at Quinn's tax shingle to get their tax returns done. Wade is stunned that Quinn is on the verge of having his job replaced by a self-serve tax return app.
WADE: "Quinn! What... what happened to you?"
QUINN: "I -- I -- I -- I dunno."
WADE: "I just don't understand it; you had that one day where you told Hurley to stuff it, quit your job, asked me out -- and ever since then, it's like you made a jump but can't stick the landing."
QUINN: "I don't... I don't remember asking you out. Sometimes, it feels like that was someone else."
Arturo is enraged that Quinn abandoned science, saying Quinn was a brilliant student and now files tax returns.
ARTURO: "You could have changed the entire field of quantum mechanics, but then you abandoned your pursuits to fill out forms!"
Quinn's phone rings. He answers it, then drops the receiver and goes limp.
ARTURO: "What the devil is the matter with you now?"
QUINN: "My mom had a heart attack. She's dead."
ARTURO: " ........................................... but upon further consideration, Mr. Mallory, perhaps I'm being too hard on you."
Wade and Arturo assist Quinn in a blur of funeral arrangements. Weeks later, Quinn is clearing out the old Mallory house. In his basement, he discovers that his mother left his old lab intact, never touching his failed experiments in anti-gravity. Quinn reviews some of his old VHS journals and finds a tape he doesn't recognize. He plays it in an old, creaky VCR. Quinn is shocked by what appears to be a message from someone who looks like him but isn't him, offering suggestions on how to modify his anti-gravity equipment. Quinn makes the adjustments, compiling hardware that was left behind by this strange doppelganger for him, parts of a retrofitted Motorola flip phone that form a timing device with a countdown clock. Quinn activates this machine.
A vortex opens and sweeps him off to a parallel world. At the age of 48, Quinn Mallory finally becomes a slider. After his first brief visit to a parallel Earth, Quinn's timer brings him back to the basement and Quinn finally understands: it must have been a double who asked Wade out on a date, quit his job, and made several leaps forward in Quinn's life that always made Quinn feel like he was chasing himself and never catching up. Quinn finds more tapes left behind by this double, describing the concept of sliding, the mechanism of the timer.
Quinn calls Arturo and Wade, urgently wanting them to see his discovery. Arturo throws aside his latest study guide and dives into his car, eager for a distraction. Wade, worried about her ex-husband, hurries so quickly out of the jazz themed coffee bar where she types her articles that she forgets her laptop. The coffee bar owner, Rembrandt, finds it at the table.
Quinn, waiting for his former professor and ex-wife, watches a video segment where his double cautions Quinn about a hardware limitation in the timer. "This is important. No matter what happens during a slide, under no circumstances can you ever -- " the VHS player suddenly goes dead from dust and degradation.
Arturo arrives. Wade pulls up moments later, briefly answering a phone call telling Rembrandt she appreciates his offer to drop her laptop off at the Mallory house since it's on his way. She tells Rembrandt she's going to owe him a sizable tip for bringing her laptop.
Quinn shows Wade and Arturo into the basement, showing them the sliding machine, showing them the vortex. Wade is delighted. Arturo is humbled. Wade wants to explore. Arturo is unsure. Quinn is eager to escape his dead-end job and failures and grief over his mother and eagerly activates the vortex. He worries that it lacks the power to transport three people. He increases the power output. The vortex expands to swallow Quinn, Wade and Arturo -- and then it rips through the house and catches Rembrandt who has just arrived holding Wade's laptop.
The sliders land on a world where they face an impending tidal wave and Quinn is forced to trigger the timer early, losing his home coordinates, leaving the timer damaged and only able to track the next window of opportunity for random sliding, leaving Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo nomads amidst the interdimension...
And the adventure begins again.
(They will never do this, they'll just reboot. But this would be a dream come true.)
