Kromaggs...

Yeah, reboot was the wrong term; I meant that I don't think the show could continue with the OG cast or set in that iteration with the Kromags.

As I'm watching the last of series now, when they talk about the Kromags, the breeding camps are brought up; Peckinpah really doubled down on that - the 2 are pretty much inseparably linked and really poisons the well.

A complete reboot with a new cast and no Kromags could definitely work.

Can't argue much with that.

It isn't... quite what you think it would be.

The story is this one:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11KF … it?tab=t.0

ireactions is the author, but it's based on the idea that Torme had.  It's an approximation of what the story might have been.

I think the inherent problem with the Kromaggs is that the Season 4 Kromaggs are the natural evolution of the Season 2 Kromaggs.  If you have a militaristic society of sliding masters, I think the Sliders would become increasingly more likely to come across them.  I struggle with the idea that the Kromaggs have the manpower to invade (let alone hold) that many Earths.  But if we assume they can, I think the Sliders would start running into them more and more as their empire expands.  Especially if they were being tracked by the Kromaggs.

I think the natural evolution of that is what we never saw - what is the human reaction to the Kromaggs?  Some sort of human alliance that goes around rescuing Earths from the Kromaggs or taking the fight to them.  If the Kromaggs are the Klingons, it would be some sort of multiverse Starfleet.  If Sliders kept going, I gotta think that would happen.

So I think Torme opened the Pandora's box, and I think Season 4 is how that story would evolve.  I don't know if the design of the Kromaggs in Season 4 was the way to go, but I think the idea that we'd have an entire season where the Sliders were taking on the Kromaggs is where that story almost certainly was going to go.  You have an expansionary society that is actively tracking the Sliders and taking over worlds they are traveling to.  I don't know what else you do with that.

I can't imagine a Tormé-led season of Sliders being Kromag-centered. There's an infinite number of Earths (Also an infinite number of Kromag-invaded worlds, eventually, but still fewer that aren't). Maybe they run into them once a season. Maybe even twice. Just as a matter of not wanting to get too repetitious, though, there are too many more interesting ways to go.

It wouldn't fit into the show, but I'd love to see what happens when the Kromags invade an Earth whose timeline forked off from their own. It's not unthinkable that the Kromag Earths would eventually all wipe each other out.

Is he really? How parochial! ;-)

Anyway, if you are a purist and want Torme and only Torme:

Torme's idea was to simply pitch, "Quinn wakes up to find himself home," and not tell FOX, who hated the Kromaggs, that the Kromaggs were in the story, and to not let them find out until after the pitch was approved and the story was bought and the script was written.

I imagine this would have been a potential end for any Kromagg stories as FOX wouldn't fall for the same trick twice. Torme would likely have taken the opportunity to do away with the tracking device and clear Kromaggs off the board that way. But they could still be out there for a third Kromagg episode someday, however unlikely.

I don't think the Kromaggs were ever meant to be more than one episode every once in awhile.

I completely agree, actually.  But I think once you open that door, it's open.  And I think the natural evolution of "There's a group of humanoid monsters invading parallel Earths" is "humans form some sort of defense network."  There have to be advanced sliding humans who would form networks with each other to track Kromaggs or rescue Earths or whatever.  Which of course means some kind of multiversal war.  To keep with the Star Trek metaphor, there would be some sort of Mirror universe (an evil human earth that is doing the same thing the Kromaggs were doing).  I assume there would be Earths that would strip other Earths for parts for profit.  I assume there would be sliding tourism.  Who wouldn't want to slide and see worlds where history or entertainment went another direction?

My point is that the Kromaggs opened up the idea that there are advanced societies with control of sliding that are out there messing with other Earths.  Until that point, it seemed like only Quinn had access to sliding.  It changed the game.

And as far as the odds of running into the Kromaggs ever again, I think you're right but the show was really inconsistent with how the multiverse worked.  Quinn says in Summer of Love that there might only be six parallel Earths (which as ridiculous because I think Quinn had already seen or knew about more than that at that point).  It seemed like the way they slid wasn't 100% random as they interacted with related worlds a handful of times.  I've always kinda thought of it as sliding in "neighborhoods" in a city.  They stayed in a single "city" of the multiverse (the "human-led" city of the Multiverse).  And some neighborhoods look different from others, but sometimes you run into the same exact house design that just looks slightly different inside.  I think Quinn's timer wasn't powerful enough to get to the stranger parts of the multiverse where life evolved differently or whatever.

And I think the only reason I'd think the chances they'd run into Kromaggs more was the fact that one of them was being tracked.  If they didn't have the tracking device, I'd probably say that it's unlikely they'd ever see them again.  But if the Kromaggs are tracking them, they'd eventually come back.  And if they came back, would the sliders get drawn into that bigger world that was implied?

Not saying they should have.  But the door was opened.

I don't think that was the plan at all.  In fact, Quinn wasn't the one who was supposed to have the tracking device - it was Arturo, I believe.

It sounds to me like the Kromaggs were just supposed to appear a couple of times and be a mind-bending villain to the heroes.  Torme never watched any of season 4, and I don't think Sliders was planned that far in advance so it's not like they could've taken his notes and made any of it.

I don't understand the need/want to air episodes out of order.  Maybe I don't understand enough about how television production works, but they usually produce episodes in a certain order.  So shows will write and film the premiere first and the finale last.  They don't usually start filming the finale until the premiere has already aired.

So if they filmed Summer of Love before Prince of Wails, I don't understand why Fox would hold a finished Summer of Love for weeks when they could've just aired it.  In later seasons with larger episode orders, I figure you'd air completed episodes as soon as you can, and airing out of order would mean completing episodes out of order.  Which doesn't make sense to me unless it's an FX/post production thing.  But wouldn't Torme control that?

It gives the network the ability to chose which episodes to air during sweeps or other important parts of the year. Star Trek's first aired episode was "The Man Trap," the 5th episode to be filmed (6th if you count "The Cage"). The horrid "Charlie X" was filmed two episodes after "The Man Trap," but aired second. Network execs have long felt they were better at choosing which episodes would be most popular than the people who made the shows. They were wrong about that then and wrong about it now.

I feel like most streaming shows try to have the whole season completed before releasing the entire season all at once or releasing single episodes weekly.

Have no idea if that's the case with network shows, however I do get the sense that they are more organized than they were in the past, like if they're paying $ for a filming location or having a big celeb as a guest star, they'll film all of those scenes at once, even if they are spread out over the season, probably with alternate scenes we never see, just so the film editor has options.