Rewatch Podcast (Page 6 of 6)

Not gonna lie - it is weird to hear you two reference me on your podcast. Especially when you're commenting on notes I gave to Ib so long ago I can't possibly remember saying them.

Nicely done, the both of you. I've greatly enjoyed your deconstruction of seasons four and five!

Thanks! It was quite a ride! Sad it's over but excited to be moving on to Lois and Clark! I have fond memories of the show through the entire run. Even the later seasons.

There's a pretty interesting, multi-page retrospective on LOIS & CLARK here: http://www.redboots.net/tnaos/lnc_history.htm

It's season-focused as opposed to episode-focused, but it's something.

Yep, we've got that page already. It actually led me to the forums that led me to the other Lois and Clark podcast and another small thriving community much like we have here at sliders.tv!

Is it still on The Hub / Discovery Family?

ME: "There is a series of 22 fan written LOIS AND CLARK novellas that make up the fifth season of the show as it was cancelled in year four for three different reasons." http://www.lcfanfic.com/thm-tufs.htm "I wonder if we can get Tom and Cory to review them."

MATT: "What three reasons? And I doubt they'll commit to reviewing fanfic like that."

ME: "Based on what?"

MATT: "Based on them wanting to review television, not fanfic."

ME: "It was well received."

MATT: "Then YOU review it."

ME: "I'm not even sure I'll survive this Rewatch. And what do you mean, what were the reasons? You said you read that retrospective I linked to."

MATT: "I did. It all sounded like it was cancelled because ABC/Disney was over the series. Eisner wanted his dumb World of Disney back on the air so he could replace Walt in the hearts and minds of America. The easiest reason is that Teri Hatcher cut her hair. That is an unimpeachable reason."

ME: "Wonderful World was Reason 1. Reason 2 was ABC's continued retooling of the series causing the ratings to slide bit by bit -- they fired the showrunner of Season 1 and mandated an action-oriented approach that the budget couldn't handle and also outlandish supervillains that could not be rendered properly on a TV scale at that era, meaning all the villains were campy, silly, embarrassing and alienating while gobbling up screentime that would have been devoted to the two stars -- and when you're selling your show on Teri Hatcher and Dean Cain and they're in it half as much as they used to be, the audience loses interest. The point where the ratings were totally destroyed, however -- was the wedding episode where ABC, at the last second, declared that Lois and Clark were not to be married after all and that something had to stop the wedding -- so Lois gets kidnapped and gets amnesia and is replaced by a frog-eating clone. This story arc lasted eight episodes and it drove viewers away in droves."

MATT: "Hahaahahahah! Yes. But that was season THREE."

ME: "By Season 4, the ratings were pretty much dead and despite a Season 5 renewal having been issued -- ABC, having destroyed the show, now stopped advertising it and re-negotiated to get out of doing Season 5. They were still unable to get out of it entirely -- until Teri Hatcher, after Season 4, got pregnant and her doctor said her pregnancy was not stable and she could not work and Season 5's start date would have to be delayed by months. ABC and Disney took that news and collectively declared that the show was done."

MATT: "Stupid babies ruin EVERYTHING!"

ME: "So there were lots of reasons."

MATT: "HAIR CUT."

ME: "Given how god-awful Season 4 was, I was pretty relieved when the show was cancelled and excited about SMALLVILLE -- But SMALLVILLE was even worse than LOIS & CLARK."

MATT: "Oh yeah?

ME: "SMALLVILLE is one of the worst shows ever made -- although it improved significantly with Seasons 8 - 9 only to weirdly implode on itself with the last half of Season 10.

MATT: "Hahahahahaha!  Ten seasons! You really commit to shitty television!"

ME: "Anyway! This Unaired Fifth Season -- it's really good! So well written! I think, because they had 12 writers on it -- and 1- 2 would go over all the drafts and revise them. I'm sure Tom and Cory could read them all and talk about them in their podcast. Surely they don't want to end on a down note!!!!!"

MATT: "Blecgh!"

ME: "What is the reason for your distaste NOW!?"

MATT: "It's a lot easier to read your one script than 22 novellas."

ME: "At one point, Tom said he assumes each REBORN script is 46 pages."

MATT: "I know. I laughed."

ME: "It's currently 285 pages. But it's 285 pages of Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo bickering. That's what the fans want, Matt!
Nobody really cares about the parallel worlds. It's all about these four messed up people and their weird friendship together. And their desperate efforts to graduate from community college!"

MATT: "Two HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FIVE pages??? Jesus!!"

Omg those are looooong scripts for Reborn! O_o

Hey btw everyone, we started archiving our shows on YouTube so if you're so inclined go and subscribe there: https://goo.gl/Y3U6dN

We can't seem to get a custom YouTube url yet but hopefully soon. The more subscribers the better!

Final trivia bullet points for the Sliders Rewatch.

Behind the Scenes Information Courtesy of Temporal Flux, Tracy Tormé and Keith Damron

Eye of the Storm Trivia
•  This episode was originally written by Eric Morris, a freelancer who suggested the sliders land on a merged world, encountering guest-stars from previous episodes who have been transplanted to this Earth and are trying to escape.
•  It was meant to be SLIDERS DOES CASABLANCA and to explore how people from different Earths might interact if trapped on a merged world of total contradiction.
•  Quite inexplicably, the production disliked the CASABLANCA resemblances -- but bought the script anyway.
•  By the end of the season, they had no to buy a new one and they needed a seventeenth episode.
•  They had Chris Black hurriedly rewrite it entirely and into the penultimate episode.
•  In the course of the rewrite, the focus on the composite world and the trapped inhabitants was lost, shifting almost entirely to Dr. Geiger and the plot of splitting the Quinns.
•  This episode was also the most expensive episode of Season 5.
•  Throughout Season 5, many episodes were filmed as cheaply as possible, cheaper than usual. The reason for this: production was stockpiling money.
•  They were going to use it for the series finale in which the sliders would return to Earth Prime and confront the Kromaggs once and for all.
•  At the mid-point of the season, production decided to abort the planned finale entirely.
•  Originally, Dr. Geiger's death and giving the sliders their home coordinates was another trick meant to lead into the following episode, although this arc would be abandoned for the actual series finale.
•  All the stockpiled funds were haphazardly thrown into this episode instead.
•  The episode was not significantly rewritten to make use of the money; the intended effects simply had more money put into them.
•  This episode features Jerry O'Connell's face (pulled from "Genesis") shown over Mallory's face.
•  This was achieved after extensive negotiation with Jerry's agent to finally permit them to use past footage and sound clips -- except by the time they got permission, the season was nearly over and it was too late to go back to "The Unstuck Man" and redub "Go! Go!" with sound from a previous episode.
Jerry maintained his refusal to appear, although he certainly had the time to do so.
•  Production had plans to wrap up the series without Jerry, but these plans were thrown out by Bill Dial who decided an another route.

The Seer Trivia
•  John Rhys-Davies declared this to be his favourite episode of SLIDERS. (I'll explain later.)
•  As stated in earlier communications, Bill Dial was angry at Sci-Fi for no longer giving feedback on scripts or reviewing the finished episodes.
•  According to Temporal Flux: Dial decided to get back at Sci-Fi by ending SLIDERS on a cliffhanger in order to see them deluged in fanmail and complaints.
•  There had, originally, been some hope for a Season 6.
Sci-Fi had been experimenting with a low-budget model where shows were made for about $500,000 an episode (in contrast to Season 5's $700,000 - $850,000 budget, numbers from TF, although press indicates the Season 4 - 5 budgets were 1 million per episode, which TF has declared incorrect or I just remember wrong).
•  A Sci-Fi show called G VS. E had been done on $500,000 an episode -- until the production crew union shut the show down for making one crew member do the work of three.
•  Once that happened, the low budget Season 6 -- which would likely have seen the cast reduced to Cleavant and a new actor -- was off the table.
•  Dial knew Season 6 wasn't coming -- but he still aborted the planned ending in favour of a cliffhanger.
•  The original ending for the Season 5 finale: the sliders would return to Earth Prime and fight Kromaggs.
•  It would turn out that Geiger had tricked them, sabotaging their timer to reinstate him to reality.
•  The sliders would get control of Geiger and his technology and create a multiversal 'big crunch' effect where all realities would be collapsed into a single universe and the Kromaggs cast out.
•  The Kromaggs would be defeated, but there would no longer be a multiverse -- only one reality.
•  This would be the end of sliding and the series.
•  TF says he's not sure how well this would have gone over, but production was deliberately making many cheap episodes ("The Great Work," "Please Press One," "Heavy Metal," "To Catch a Slider") in order to use the saved money for this finale.
•  TF says Dial threw this out in favour of having Keith Damron write "The Seer" and threw the savings into "Eye of the Storm."
•  Dial ordered that the series finale end on a cliffhanger.
•  He felt that this would cause outrage and irritation for the Sci-Fi Channel and get back at them for ignoring SLIDERS.
•  He also hoped that the Sci-Fi Channel would notice and protest, thus giving Dial the attention he wanted from them.
•  The Sci-Fi Channel neither noticed nor cared, not during the show and not after the show.
•  No resolution for the cliffhanger was planned; production knew there would be no sixth season.
•  Robert Floyd held out hope.
•  During Season 5, Rob had been very sad that the Quinn/Mallory divide had been lost.
•  He was delighted to play scenes with Mrs. Mallory, Linda Henning, and he was a big fan of her work on PETTICOAT JUNCTION.
•  Rob deliberately did not watch the Pilot, wanting to play Mallory's scenes with Mrs. Mallory as raw and painful.
•  This episode confirms onscreen that Mallory's father was Michael but his mother was another woman as he does not recognize Amanda Mallory.
•  Rob liked these scenes because he was able to play the loss of Quinn, something he himself had felt since "New Gods For Old."
•  When Mallory says that a part of Quinn is still in him, Rob played this as Mallory telling a kind lie -- with the feeling that while Mallory didn't want Quinn back, Rob certainly did.
•  The ending of "The Seer" is considered by the fanbase to be the final betrayal of their loyalty where Dial and Damron could tell any story they wanted and told this one, resolving nothing, wrapping up nothing, creating a cliffhanger that would never be resolved.
•  Paradoxically, Cleavant was in favour of the cliffhanger, according to Matt Hutaff, who met with Cleavant at a CD signing.
•  Cleavant pushed hard for "The Seer" to end with Rembrandt leaping into a vortex aimed for home without revealing what happened next.
•  Cleavant felt that this way, the fans could imagine whatever they wanted being on the other side of the vortex. Maybe Wade. The Professor. Quinn. The real Earth Prime. A happy ending.
•  Cleavant also ensured that the ending has Rembrandt taking the broken timer with him. Cleavant felt that the timer could always be repaired on the next world and the adventure could begin again.
•  The fans have largely excused Cleavant from any blame for the cliffhanger.
•  John Rhys-Davies, at an August 2012 Toronto convention, was asked which episode of SLIDERS he liked best.
•  "What was my favourite episode of SLIDERS?!" John exclaimed.
•  After a moment's thought, he growled: "The last one."

The Feature Film That Never Was
•  After SLIDERS was cancelled, creators Tracy Torme and Robert K. Weiss, participated in online chats.
•  Both apologized to the fans for Seasons 3 - 5.
•  Torme explained that he had left SLIDERS because he was burnt out from the fights with the FOX Network.
•  He had fought hard in Seasons 1 - 2, only to get to Season 3 and see Quinn become an action hero and Rembrandt become a Navy gunslinger and Wade become a model and the Professor become the wise old man with no dark side.
•  At this point, Tracy's dad got really sick and was dying and Tracy very much didn't give a shit about SLIDERS in the face of family crisis.
•  He decided he'd rather hang out with his dad.
•  In public chats, Weiss said that he had left SLIDERS after Season 1 to focus on running his film and technology companies -- but he was approaching Universal about a SLIDERS movie.
•  Torme, in chats, said he didn't believe a movie would happen and that it was mostly Weiss operating on that front.
•  During this time, I asked Tracy over AIM: if he had one more SLIDERS episode, what would he do?
•  He said he would open with Quinn waking up in his bedroom to find time had been rewound to the Pilot. All the original sliders would be alive and well and back home; sliding was never created.
•  The situation would be revealed as a Kromagg trick along with any other episodes Torme didn't like or watch.
•  According to Temporal Flux, production sent Tracy scripts for Seasons 4 - 5, but he put them away in their unopened envelopes and refused to read them because he knew they would only drive him crazy.
•  Weiss, when asked which season of the show the film would resemble, said "Season 1.5."
•  Jerry O'Connell initially declared that he would not do a SLIDERS movie.
•  After TOMCATS bombed, Jerry said that he would do a SLIDERS movie if there were a role for Charlie O'Connell in the film.
•  After KANGAROO JACK destroyed his film star career and he was passed over for the role of Peter Parker in SPIDER-MAN,  Jerry said he was extremely anxious to do a SLIDERS movie.
•  Cleavant was keen to return and said that he'd spoken to Sabrina Lloyd and John Rhys-Davies. They would return if the original creators did as well.
•  Unfortunately, the movie revival never happened; Universal had no interest in reviving the series.
•  In an interview, Torme said that one idea that Robert K. Weiss suggested for a film was for Quinn to be unstuck and ending up in the bodies of different doubles.
•  Torme liked the idea but shot it down on the grounds that it was too much like QUANTUM LEAP.
•  Temporal Flux had some contact with Weiss and Weiss was mysterious on his intentions for the film, but TF said the likelihood was that the film would have been a remake of the Pilot but set in the present day.
•  The original cast would return but they'd be playing older doubles on an Earth where Quinn discovers sliding, not in 1995, but in whatever year the film was made.
•  It is, of course, only TF's theory and an idea TF came up with rather than what Weiss shared, but it certainly seems plausible as Weiss said he wanted to do "Season 1.5" and this would be a way of setting aside the continuity issues of Seasons 3 - 5 that could confuse a general audience, focusing on reintroducing SLIDERS with an entry-level story.
•  The proposed SLIDERS film was frequently teased but never greenlit.
•  Jerry O'Connell made an effort in 2013 to see a film revival, hoping to assemble Torme and the original cast to approach NBCUniversal.
•  He called Tracy Torme and they talked and met extensively and began reaching out to the key players.
•  Sabrina was living in Africa and unlikely to return to America for a few years.
•  Cleavant was enthusiastic.
•  John could not be reached.
•  NBCUniversal was once again not interested.
•  As of 2016, there has been no further development towards a SLIDERS film.

The 2009 Series Finale That Never Was
•  In 2009, Tracy Torme, while being interviewed for Earth Prime via Facebook, expressed a desire to write fanfic.
•  Torme told Matt that he would like to write a script for the fans.
•  He wanted to write what he termed "the officially unofficial series finale," unapproved by NBCUniversal or FOX or the Sci-Fi Channel, to be posted as a PDF on Dimension of Continuity and Earth Prime with the document to be added to any future SLIDERS DVD or blu-ray releases.
•  While Torme completed an outline, he did not finish the script and eventually left Facebook, needing to focus on paid projects.
•  Torme's story idea was for a script set in 1997, after the events of "The Guardian," effectively dismissing any episodes after his final story.
•  In this story, the sliders find that Logan's modifications to the timer have damaged its function.
•  Slide windows are getting shorter and shorter and the vortex is weakening. They are near the end of their journey and likely to be stranded once the timer fails.
•  They must begin to consider that their next slide could be their last.
•  Torme said that the story would ask: What if the sliders found the way home but Quinn didn't make it? And what if the sliders had to decide whether or not they'd lose their way home to save their friend?
•  This was as much as Tracy sent Matt.
•  Then Torme got busy with paid projects and pilots and he stopped working on the story.
•  He eventually ceased all Facebook activity and fell out of touch.
•  However, during my IM sessions with Tracy, I asked him how he'd like to end the series.
•  He said he liked the idea of Quinn and Arturo making a final, desperate attempt to get home -- by rigging the timer to send the sliders backwards through the interdimension, hoping that in sliding back across previous Earths, they can slide back home.
•  They'd confront numerous past enemies and friends and see the consequences of their actions on previous Earths.
•  Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo would get home while Quinn was stranded in a deadly situation -- and the other three sliders would go back to save Quinn but in doing so, they'd lose their route home and be sliders lost in the multiverse once again.
•  Quinn would be furious that his friends threw away their chance of home.
•  His friends would answer they were each other's world now and so long as they were together, they were home.
•  Quite strangely, Temporal Flux himself proposed this exact same idea once as a potential series finale, offering the sentiment that "Home isn't just a place, it's the people you love."
•  Would Tracy have used this ending for his proposed series finale?
•  I think it is likely it would have been his intention.
•  However, Torme was notorious for writing an outline and then writing a script where he'd diverge from the outline, struck by inspiration as he scripted the dialogue and action, so he may have changed his mind later on in the process.
•  While Torme's intentions never came to fruition, it inspired me -- because if posting PDF screenplays on the SLIDERS sites is good enough for him, it's good enough for me too.

"Slide Effects" and "The Long Slide Home" are two different stories. "Slide Effects" was a story Torme conceived in 1996 as a potential Season 4 premiere. He expected that he would not be happy with Season 3. His intention was that if he returned to the show for Season 4, he would use "Slide Effects" to dismiss everything after "The Guardian."

"The Long Slide Home" is a story Torme started (and did not finish) writing in 2009. It would have made no effort to explain why the original sliders were alive and well; it would have simply been set after "The Guardian" with no reference to any subsequent episodes. This would not have been "Slide Effects," this would have had the plotline of the sliders making a last-ditch effort to get home.

I was chastising Matt for his 2009 interview teasing a Torme story that never was, and Matt told me that "Slide Effects" was unintentionally the Torme story that would serve as the final SLIDERS adventure. I said then the interview should link to the "Slide Effects" script and he said okay.

ireactions > thanks for explanations

I have more quastions about Slide Effects, I've just read it today It's great, but I'm curious why did you negate all season 3, even episodes before Exodus? Your story resets the timeline to events between season 2 and 3 (and by this we can assume that after Slide Effects take place Sliders official comics with original cast and the timer ). But why to reject everything before Exodus? Coudn't sliders been kidnapped and put in this cave just before Exodus? This was your idea or Torme?

Second quastion - where did you get this number of 37 Quinns?

Is your Sliders Reborn also reject events from season 3-5?

Interesting, so I should read it too, but it can be difficult, because it's very long and English isn't my first language. But I hope I will try! And I understand that you explained why these all events from season 1-5 happened, but they are alive and happy in 2015?

For those of you who don't have the Lois and Clark DVDs, but still want to participate with us in the Rewatch, a Google search has turned up this: http://watchseries.cr/series/lois-clark … n/season/1
It's a bit buggy to use on my phone but doable. I've searched around and found some other you tube videos as well for episodes. Some however have static advertisements on the borders, with the main Lois and Clark episode scrunched up in the center. It's not great but again, it can work for those of you who want to follow along. First, try the site above though.

And then join us in the other thread that we have dedicated to L&C! See you there!

http://rewatchpodcast.podomatic.com/ent … 9_53-07_00

There it is!

We could probably just read the transcripts of story conferences we've had out loud -- like where you say that SLIDERS REBORN is not canon, cannot possibly be canon, will never be canon and that Wade is dead god damn it and I say that technically every fanfic is canon, all co-existing on the same multidimensional axis in some form and "Requiem" point-blank establishes that Wade is alive.

Hey, all! Thought we were done with this thread Huh? Thought we were done podcasting about Sliders eh? Well, ireactions wouldn't let that happen, oh no!

Cory and I are super grateful for all the support you guys showed us during our time on Sliders and we're happy to present a special finale where Sliders Rewatch is REBORN to cover all six parts of ireactions' crazy magnum opus, Sliders Reborn! Sorry it took so long, but ireactions' scripts kept getting longer and longer like the Harry Potter books and it took us eight months to figure out what to say about this crazy thing and record something suitable. We actually got stuck when trying to say something coherent about the script where Quinn meets Mallory and had to stop and finish recording later. But we got it together and we hope you enjoy!

https://earthprime.com/podcast/sliders-rewatch-reborn

Here are the notes I sent Rewatch Podcast about SLIDERS REBORN which Tom alludes to vaguely in the podcast. http://freepdfhosting.com/f9f41f037b.pdf

There is one aspect of SLIDERS REBORN that I never talked about -- the podcast. https://earthprime.com/podcast/sliders-rewatch-reborn

Tom and Cory of THE REWATCH PODCAST expressed a desire to do a podcast to cover SLIDERS REBORN but (understandably) backed off when discovering the scripts were 4 pages, 95 pages, 151 pages, 46 pages and 144 pages with a 6,300 word novella as well. They'd been expecting 46-page screenplays.

But... the thought of hearing Tom and Cory's voices describe SLIDERS REBORN meant so much to me that I wrote a screenplay for them to perform where they would alternatively praise and pick away at my writing.

Being good sports, they proceeded to perform the script and send me the raw audio to edit. They were splendid. Tom was full of charm and enthusiasm as scripted; Cory had been written to be critical and mocking and he softened it with a gentle affection that I found touching. They'd also made numerous additions and ad-libs that I just adored. Strangely, when editing, I found I preferred the parts where they mocked and belittled my writing, so I trimmed any positive views to the minimum. They sent me two hours from which I cut an hour.

I actually wrote Tom's post above in which he expressed his alarm at the length of the scripts.

From a writing standpoint, it was fun to give Tom and Cory some of their trademark catchphrases and to also deliberately have them refer to past episodes with the wrong titles, to have Tom be charmed by my pastiche of the sliders and for Cory to note all the errors and plotholes. I think my favourite part of the podcast is when the boys mockingly recap 'Revolution' (6), a script that features Jerry O'Connell facing Robert Floyd. Here it is with their ad-libs.

CORY: "Okay. Part 5 of Sliders Reborn: it's a 46-page script called 'Revolution,' written by ireactions and published on June 6, 2016."

TOM: "June! So, it was eight months between 'Reminiscence' and 'Revolution'?"

CORY: "I guess life happened or something?"

TOM: (laughing) "Eight months to write... this."

CORY: "This one -- can we actually try to get through a summary?

TOM: "You can try. Uh, maybe we should play the usual music."

The plot summary background music begins.

CORY: (chuckling) "Okay -- so the script is mostly a dream sequence where Quinn is trapped in this mansion that's on fire and Quinn's in a room filling with toxic gas, and he hallucinates Mallory."

TOM: "This would be the character played by Robert Floyd in Season 5 -- the lab assistant that got merged with Quinn. So -- the whole script here -- it's mostly Quinn and Mallory talking."

CORY: "Yeah, Mallory asks Quinn how he ended up in this room filling with poisoned gas, and Quinn runs through his day: this lady in the merged San Francisco was buying tech from parallel Earths, building a virtual reality machine and bankrupting her company and putting all her employees out of work to build it. Quinn went to confront her and got really upset. He went to her house to sabotage her machine only to accidentally set off the hallucinogenic gas that the machine uses -- "

TOM: (verge of laughing) "Because the VR machine uses hallucinogenic gas. Because -- what?!"

CORY: "I don't know."

TOM: "Hahahahahah!"

CORY: "Let's try to get through this. The gas is not only a hallucinogen but highly flammable, Quinn's now overcome by the fumes, he's trapped in the house, he's hallucinating Mallory, and Mallory is trying to talk to him and figure out why Quinn was so fixated on this woman. Tom -- you finish the rest of this summary. I just -- I can't do it."

TOM: "Hahaha! Oh-kay... "

Tom takes a deep breath.

TOM: "Okay -- so it turns out, this lady -- she's Melanie Wallace -- a character who appeared for like one minute in the Season 2 episode with the psychics. She's a psychic. Quinn wanted her help to fix this broken multiverse, but Melanie's seen the future and there's just no hope, and she built this VR machine to... to give herself a perfect afterlife? I mean, I don't even... I don't even -- ughhhh."

CORY: "Keep going, you're almost there."

TOM: "Okay, so, Quinn accidentally detonated the gas. Melanie's dead. Quinn's dying. Quinn has lost hope for saving reality, Mallory gives him a pep talk, and this dream sequence helps Quinn find a way out of the burning house and survive and feel hope for the future? Okay?"

CORY: "Okay."

TOM: "Okay."

The background music ends.

TOM: "I don't even -- I don't think we exactly summarized this story.

CORY: "I think these 46-pages defy a synopsis."

TOM: "Well. You were right before -- all of ireactions' plots are sort of flimsy excuses to get the characters he wants together in the same room -- and for this story, he wanted to get Jerry O'Connell's Quinn and Robert Floyd's Quinn together in the same room.

CORY: (horrified whisper) " ... why... ?"

TOM: "Well, ireactions interviewed Rob Floyd, remember? So, as of this script, Maggie and Diana had joined the cast. And he said in his notes that he didn't feel comfortable leaving Mallory out because it'd be insulting to Rob Floyd -- I mean, they're not like best friends or anything, but they're friends. So he wrote this dream sequence script, y'know?"

CORY: (exasperated) "Jesus."

TOM: "Hahahahah! He said -- he says in his notes -- he sent the script to Rob Floyd, and Rob thanked him, but Rob never got back to him with what he thought, probably because Rob hasn't seen that many episodes of SLIDERS and didn't understand it."

CORY: "Well, I've seen every episode of SLIDERS and I barely understand what's going on."

TOM: (snickering) "Yeah."

CORY: "You've got a psychic creating a VR machine that uses hallucinogenic gas that explodes, a video game company, a terminal illness, Quinn being obsessed with the VR machine, and the VR machine creating a digital afterlife because... ?"

TOM: "Because it creates a situation where Quinn's trapped in a burning building and hallucinating and the hallucination of Mallory gives him information that helps Quinn escape."

CORY: "I think -- I've generally liked Parts 1 to 4 of SLIDERS REBORN. There's some issues in ireactions' approach -- he has a lot of tricks where he obviously works out the scenes he wants before he works out the plot, and he dresses it up with humour and jokes and it's all good."

TOM: "But this time -- it's not."

CORY: "This is where his tricks don't work. The story's a mess."

TOM: "Yeah. The main appeal of ireactions' writing is that he captures the voices of the actors which you said before. But I don't think he pulls it off for Robert Floyd's Mallory -- mostly because Mallory never had a strong voice on the show, so really, ireactions doesn't have anything to work with."

CORY: "You're exactly right. I can excuse pretty much all the problems with Parts 1 to 4 because they get characters I really like back, but Mallory isn't one of those characters."

TOM: "Also -- in Parts 1 to 4, all the references to the past were really effective. But here -- Mallory tells Quinn he's beaten all these bad guys in the past, the CDC, the Prime Oracle, the Zercurvians -- and there's all these descriptions of people Quinn's helped -- but I couldn't remember who any of these people were."

CORY: "I did know who all these people were -- Gillian, Holly the hotel manager and her son, uh, the kid from the Western episode -- but it felt like this joyless shopping list."

TOM: "Well, yeah, especially the kid from the Western episode that you love so much. 'Come back, Quinn! Come back!'"

CORY: "Gnnrrrghhhhh!"

TOM: "Throughout that, I felt ireactions was really trying. He comes up with an arc for Quinn. He finds a way to show that Quinn's scientifically talented, but Mallory knows people. But the plot's too scattered. It's just too convoluted to work Mallory into the story and give him something, like, substantial to do."

CORY: "It just shows that ireactions' strengths are in writing Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo -- and if those four characters aren't on the page in some form, his style just falls apart."

In terms of authorial intent, Derek Bond saw the Kromaggs. He may have seen them farther down the line.

Derek doesn't say, "I've just seen where they're going next." He just says he sees where they're going and he could easily be referring to Seasons 3B, 4 or 5.

The reason this scene has become somewhat distorted: Jerry O'Connell expressed great fondness for this alt-world, declaring it would be his ideal paradise, and Jerry's off camera remarks have confused the perception of the actual scene where Jerry performs with Quinn with great frustration and distaste for the situation.

I don't know why else Ms. Hills would have kept a photograph of Quinn aside from the wish for her child to know the face of the father.

To me, this doesn't say that Jane Hills and Quinn Mallory didn't have sex. It says to me that you personally don't care for the idea of Jane Hills and Quinn Mallory having sex.

There are certain things in SLIDERS that I don't care for either and which I personally don't consider 'canon.' This includes about three-quarters of Season 3 and all of Seasons 4 - 5. However, I do consider any and all fan fiction canon, up to and including all the contradictory and mutually exclusive and unfinished Season 6 fanfics.

There is simply no other onscreen reason for why Jane Hills has kept a photograph of Quinn Mallory. It isn't open to interpretation. Storytelling isn't ambiguous just because information isn't stated outright in dialogue or shown onscreen. Jane keeping that photo of Quinn is a shot that imparts a very specific piece of information; that she is keeping the image of the father of her child for her child to one day see.

If we dismiss non-verbal visual storytelling in a visual medium, we might as well claim that because we never see Quinn build the sliding machine, it could be a reasonable 'interpretation' that he didn't actually build it and in fact stole it from Doc Brown's junkyard.

We might as well claim that because Wade never explicitly says she has a crush on Quinn in the Pilot, we can 'interpret' it to say that she in truth hates him and is actually planning to murder him so she and Amanda can open a bed and breakfast and rent out his room.

To claim that Jane Hills and Quinn didn't have sex in "Love Gods" is not an interpretation because it's not actually interpreting the visual information onscreen. It's simply denying that the information is there at all.

This one time, an ex-girlfriend and I were watching "Love Gods." My ex was a Scientist and she said the episode made no sense whatsoever. "Why is it even necessary for women to have sex with men?" she asked. I said Arturo observes that "Love Gods"' alt-world doesn't have that technology.  "But artificial insemination isn't even hard, it's just a sperm donation and a turkey baster. It's been happening since  the end of the eighteenth century!"

So, if you really hate the idea that Jane Hills and Quinn Mallory had sex, I suggest you write one of your screenplays where on this alt-world, we discover that there's a double of Amanda Mallory who's running her dead husband's biotechnology firm. Quinn donates a sperm sample and contacts the double of his mother; he gives her the process for artificial insemination and asks her to help Jane get pregnant that way, and end forced breeding for men by introducing a more efficient technology for pregnancies. Jane and Quinn never had sex, but Jane still has a reason to keep the photo and see Quinn as the father of her child.

Alternatively, you can just ignore it. That's okay too. There's an episode of STAR TREK where there's a scene that I ignore. It's the first episode where an evil duplicate of Kirk tries to rape a woman. At the end of the episode, Spock tells the woman that she probably enjoyed being assaulted and then smirks at her.

It's deeply hurtful and offensive. Leonard Nimoy deeply regrets performing the scene. Fans have generally elected to ignore it and not make it part of their perception of how they see Spock. Spock is a beloved character and nobody sees Spock as someone who thinks women want to be raped. It was a mistake. I don't know if Quinn and Jane having sex was a mistake; I try to be sex positive and respectful towards all the swingers and polyamorous people I've known and befriended, but if you don't like it, I trust that you have a legitimate distaste for it.

**

My fan theory for the Wrong Arturo situation -- I feel like the sliders deliberately did not pursue whether or not they had the right one. They were too afraid that they didn't. They denied it. They pretended he was their professor. They needed him. And he fulfilled the role well. By Season 3, aside from one outburst in "Rules of the Game" and one in "Murder Most Foul," Arturo has gone from a brilliant, cranky, fatherly, controlling, bombastic, gentle man -- a genius and a good guy but a bombastic ass -- to becoming the cuddly grandfather who rarely has a harsh word for anyone. It's like he knew who the sliders needed him to be and proceeded to exaggerate all of Arturo's positive traits.

Well, in "Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome," Wade is confused by the alternate Professor wearing bifocals which we see the Professor subsequently wearing. The Professor is familiar with football in "Summer of Love" when Quinn aims a rock at the spider wasp; the Professor says Wade and Rembrandt took him to his first game ever in "The Guardian." Both scripts were written by series co-creator Tracy Torme, so is the inconsistency deliberate or did he just make a mistake? When asked about this, Torme said it could be a clue; Torme would later say he personally thought the wrong Arturo slid.

My read on the Professor is that he is a deeply isolated human being. He's lonely: his wife is dead, his son hates him, his friends lost touch with him as he fumed over never getting the recognition he deserved by his fellow scientists. As a result, he is self-involved, bitter and thinks only of himself. When surrounded by Quinn, Wade and Rembrandt, however, he regains what he failed to build or hang onto.

He has a daughter in Wade who adores his perspective and is entertained by his grandiosity. He has a true friend in Rembrandt whose loyalty and great heart is accompanied by a love for the arts that Arturo shares. He has a son and student in Quinn and Quinn recognizes the Professor's genius where the Professor's colleagues never did. When Arturo doesn't have scientific discovery, students to inspire and partners with whom to share his life and adventures, he starts to fall apart. He needs all three to stay whole and when he's whole, he cares about people besides himself.

In "Prince of Wails," he turned his back on science in favour of politics and became the Sheriff of Nottingham. In "Eggheads," he turned his back on science despite flaunting his scientific achievements; he was more interested in fame and then cheated on his wife and fled his life and marriage. In "Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome," he chose not to slide, never developed the friendships he did with the sliders and sank further into his self-isolation.

It's interesting: Torme wanted the Professor to be cowardly, writing him so in the Pilot. John Rhys-Davies felt insulted to be asked to play the Professor as shrinking from danger or lacking integrity and played against the script. There was a constant friction between Davies and Torme with Davies wanting the Professor to be the lead character, Quinn's teacher and the unambiguous father figure of the group and Torme wanting the Professor to have a dark side and be insecure and threatened by Quinn's genius. In the third season, Torme was no longer present and despite Davies' conflicts with David Peckinpah and Alan Barnette, Davies got his way and the Professor by Season 3 is exactly what Davies wanted him to be (aside from being dead).

The result is that the Professor is a brilliant man of integrity (as Davies wanted), but he never got his due in the scientific community, never saw his genius recognized -- and the Professor is frustrated that Quinn's intelligence exceeds his own because it implies that the Professor's own genius maybe wasn't that special after all.

There's a hilarious irony to that because Quinn absolutely reveres the Professor's scientific abilities; the Professor is jealous of Quinn when Quinn is probably the only scientist who ever respected the Professor, which leads to a very interesting father-son/teacher-student dynamic. I feel John Rhys-Davies didn't fully appreciate that.

But a part of that is also due to the relationship between Jerry O'Connell and John Rhys-Davies. When filming SLIDERS, Davies apparently took O'Connell under his wing and taught him how to read scripts, indicate moments, create rapport, convey Quinn's intellect and problem solving -- so a lot of what we see onscreen from Seasons 1 - 3B is Jerry O'Connell, a very young actor, performing with all the experience, skill, decisiveness and thought of the much older and more experienced actor giving O'Connell instruction and guidance.

Jerry O'Connell's body is performing with John Rhys-Davies' talent which is why in Seasons 1 - 3B, Quinn seems to have a wisdom, gravity and perspective beyond his years; it's Davies's wisdom, gravity and perspective. Which is why the Quinn-character changed so suddenly and immediately after Davies was fired. But Davies also took the view that the offscreen relationship between himself and O'Connell should be reflected in Arturo and Quinn, and on that, he and Torme disagreed.

If you read the Pilot script, written before anyone had been cast to play the characters, the scene descriptions really emphasize how frightened and terrified Arturo is when looking at the vortex or when facing down the Revolution or when impersonating his Communist alternate. The script was written with Raul Julia in mind. John refused to play this. http://freepdfhosting.com/9d9d444de9.pdf

John got his way, much to Torme's frustration, in Season 3.

And by the time John was fired, he realized what Tracy had been up against and his opinion of Tracy's work was now different.

The Pilot also has a lot of scenes of Quinn trying to flirt with a girl only for her and her friends to mock him; it's hard to imagine Jerry O'Connell being laughed at by women after he asks a girl named Stephanie out. That makes no sense visually; Stephanie would have told Jerry O'Connell: "Oh, that's so sweet, thank you, Quinn, but I have a boyfriend. You are a very cute boy, though, and I promise you there is some girl out there who sees that and is single."

(Or she would have told him, "Yeah, thanks but no thanks, Jerry; I know you're a player who never remembers anyone's name in the morning and don't get me wrong, you might have the best body I've ever seen and your hair is sexy but you're disloyal, shallow, untrustworthy, and I think you might be stupid. Like, I actually think you might have some kind of reading disability that you haven't even tried to fix because you've been coasting through life on your good looks.")

(Jerry seems to have grown the hell up, though; his recent podcast with Macaulay Culkin where he reflected on parenting and how to encourage his children speaks to a quantum leap forward in empathy and consideration.)

SLIDERS expert Temporal Flux says the Quinn/Stephanie scenes were filmed but cut. They may have been cut for time, but they may also may have been cut because they made no sense whatsoever visually.

John Vs. Tracy: This is strictly theoretical on my part: Tracy Torme strikes me as an extremely argumentative person. John Rhys-Davies strikes me as an extremely argumentative person. This is not a good combination of personalities. However, Torme and Davies are deeply passionate people who take their work personally and put their whole heart into every page and every scene, so it was a good combination of talents.

John said in a podcast this past year that he regretted being so adversarial with FOX and the producers. "I should have won hearts and minds," he said. Torme probably regrets nothing but resents everything, judging from his past remarks. I'm a big fan of both of them, but I confess -- I have had two former writing mentors, one like John and one like Torme. Both were brilliant. Both had this unfortunate attitude: if something isn't done the way they would personally do it, it's bad / stupid / poorly conceived / made by a talentless person / done for selfish and self-destructive reasons / worthless.

I don't subscribe to that personally. I believe that every creator approaches their work with their own specific interests, priorities and goals. I believe that work should be reviewed in terms of what the creator was trying to accomplish and whether or not they accomplished it. Torme's goal was character comedy and social satire ("The King is Back"). John's goal was hard science fiction and heroism (like your version of "The Exodus").

Their visions weren't 'right' or 'wrong' -- they were just different. They chose not to see that because having an argument was apparently more important than being good partners who would be mutually supportive and value what each other had to say.

Torme's vision of Arturo, if you read the Pilot script, is clearly not a strong, broad, heroic Englishman. His vision of Arturo is clearly Raul Julia (Gomez from THE ADDAMS FAMILY) playing the cowardly Dr. Smith from LOST IN SPACE. The heroic, fatherly Arturo is a part of the character, but he is buried deep and will take a lot of work to uncover. Torme's vision of Quinn, if you read the Pilot script, is clearly not a tall, handsome football player. His vision of Quinn is clearly more like Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker in SPIDER-MAN 2000 (and Jerry was desperate for that job until Maguire defeated him in auditions).

The result is that Torme was perpetually at odds with the onscreen versions of these characters versus what he had imagined in his mind. With Quinn, Torme was able to adjust things accordingly and was happy with Quinn's hair and wardrobe. With Arturo, Torme couldn't control John; Torme wanted Arturo to be 60 per cent insecure and irritable and 40 per cent fatherly. With Seasons 1 - 2, John got it to 50/50; by Season 3, it was John's preference that took hold: 95 per cent fatherly and 5 per cent grouchy.

Personal Preference: In my view, the uneasy 50/50 compromise that neither John nor Tracy liked was the correct ratio. It's hard to do ongoing character development in 90s TV of standalone episodes, so giving the character both sides in equal measure allows for the most range in each episode.

That said, I confess that in writing my own SLIDERS stories and when writing Arturo, I generally defaulted to John's preference of Arturo being 95 per cent the cuddly grandfather. The reason: "Slide Effects" is Arturo's resurrection and I wanted him to be the father figure in every sense. And SLIDERS REBORN shows Arturo 20 years after the Pilot and I decided that Arturo would be at his most assured, mature, decisive and capable and with sliding having brought out the absolute best in him.

Stephanie: Torme has a fixation on the character of Stephanie that I'm not able to explain. In 2009, Torme contacted a fan site. He wanted to write fanfic. He offered to write "The Unofficial Official Series Finale of SLIDERS" and wanted to provide a PDF screenplay. His story idea for "The Long Slide Home": the sliders, just after the events of "The Guardian," discover that the timer is malfunctioning. Slide windows are getting shorter and shorter. Their next slide could leave them stranded. The timer is soon to give out. The sliders rig the timer to send them backwards through the interdimension, revisiting every previous Earth in all previous episodes, hoping to make it home before the timer fails permanently. They revisit the outcome of every Earth they affected for better or worse. In the course of doing so, the sliders are able to dispense with the Kromaggs and Logan St. Clair in quick, throwaway plot points. The focus is on the sliders.

The ending was open to whatever Torme decided when he got to those pages in the full-length script: they might all make it back home and stay. Alternatively, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo might make it home but lose Quinn; they would return to save Quinn but lose their way home and be lost again but feel heartened to have each other and hopeful that, having found a way back once, they would again in time. Due to health issues and paid work, Torme never finished this story, but in the more detailed outline that he furnished, the sliders are having dinner with Stephanie and her husband while trying to figure out why the timer is misbehaving -- so Stephanie was clearly important to Torme.

Quinn and Wade: The relationship between Quinn and Wade is drastically different by "Luck of the Draw" where Wade seems to be done with her ongoing infatuation/flirtation with Quinn. I like to think that in between "The King is Back" and "Luck of the Draw," Wade realizes something weird about Quinn: he knew she was crushing on him the entire time, he knew she had feelings for him for the entire time they were working together at Dopplers -- and yet, he ignored it and refused to address it, and she doesn't understand why and Quinn is unwilling to explain -- and it's not until "The Guardian" that we learn that Quinn has post traumatic stress disorder that has led to a very withdrawn personality covered by the Jerry O'Connell charm.

Jerry O'Connell as an Actor: My theory about Jerry O'Connell is that he was a naturally talented actor with excellent instincts for performance, but no technique or discipline until John Rhys-Davies trained him -- and once John left the show, Jerry reverted to all of his worst habits as an actor: skimming script pages, only reading his dialogue, delivering approximations of what was on the page rather than what was actually written, not reviewing the context of his character's words, and generally undermining the character instead of inhabiting the role. One of the worst examples of this is "Slidecage": Quinn is scripted to think that Maggie has been killed and Quinn is in agony, thinking he's lost yet another friend. Jerry performs these lines with a hungover tiredness -- which implies that Quinn either does not care that Maggie is dead or somehow knows that Maggie survived when there is no onscreen reason for him to think so.

Another is "Mother and Child" where the script clearly specifies that Quinn agrees with Rembrandt that they have to rescue Wade and says warningly, "We don't have much time." But onscreen, Jerry O'Connell tells Rembrandt, "I don't know if we have enough time" and hurries off camera from Rembrandt, suggesting that Jerry isn't interested in saving Wade and doesn't care that Rembrandt is upset. Having reviewed this scene far more than is medically safe, I got the impression that Jerry was drunk when performing this scene and hurried off camera because he had to throw up.

Jerry's Ego: Why did he do this? My suspicion is that Jerry, overweight when he was a young boy, developed a drunkenly overinflated ego when he became a handsome teenager and twentysomething and became overfixated on his looks rather than his talent, and he believed that being attractive was all that mattered for his career. Most of his post-SLIDERS roles were chosen specifically because they showcased him as an attractive man; he forgot that his popularity through SLIDERS was because viewers perceived Quinn as a sensitive and empathetic man with his looks being present but secondary.

After SLIDERS, Jerry spoke of SLIDERS with contempt and disdain, calling it "very cheap," saying it was a show made "with dry ice and toothpicks" and when asked if he would ever do a SLIDERS movie, he said, "Not a possibility" and refused to discuss it further. SLIDERS was the only reason he had an adult career; he trashed the show while he was in it and he denigrated the show after he left.

Jerry's Redemption: I really like the Quinn character, and it made me really angry that Jerry did this to a character I really care about and look up to. However, as I've gotten older, I've learned more about addiction and alcoholism can be as insidious as any chemical dependency, so I try to focus on how Jerry has changed.

He didn't get fired off KANGAROO JACK, but he was nearly fired because by that point, his heavy drinking and fast food and lack of exercise had caused some serious, William Shatner-esque weight gain. He stopped drinking, devoted himself to health and fitness, and while his kangaroo movie didn't set the world on fire, Jerry returned to the life of a working TV actor, kept healthy and fit, worked steadily, got married, had children and started treating SLIDERS with respect. He did a video interview where he talked about how John was his acting mentor and taught him so much; he said he kept a photograph of the original cast in his kitchen so as to always remember the high point of his career; he said he loved playing Quinn Mallory and missed him and would gladly play him again; he said that SLIDERS was a part of him. He would always carry it proudly and hold it warmly in his heart.

He knows he screwed up. He knows he blew it. He knows that Quinn Mallory is his career-defining role, the character who would have rocketed him into pop cultural immortality. He knows that William Shatner will always be a starship captain and that Jerry O'Connell will always be a slider. He didn't care about SLIDERS before, but he cares now and he's sorry. That matters.

He also called Torme a few years ago, having not spoken to him since Season 3. He was trying to see if SLIDERS could be revived; he has continued to call Torme regularly; he has been talking with John about a revival; he mentions SLIDERS every chance he gets. He got his life back on track by the early 2000s. He's trying to get SLIDERS back now. He probably won't succeed, but he's trying. Trying counts.

This is strictly theoretical on my part.

Yeah, I'm not sure what to say about Stephanie, but out of deference to the (co)creator, I put her in one scene of my SLIDERS scripts and had Quinn silently recognize her but not interact with her. Temporal Flux identified the actress who played Stephanie in the unbroadcast scenes as Melanie Bradshaw (born Melanie Pearson) and he provided a link to her reel -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbhakL4 … e=youtu.be -- and I described her based on the reel. I didn't really know what else to say about her, so I didn't highlight her.

**

In "Last Days," Quinn tells Wade as they're having dinner that he didn't know she could cook and Wade says, "They're a LOT about me you don't know" (referring to her crush) and Quinn says, "Like what?" and leans forward to kiss her. To me, this tells me that he has known all along, returns her feelings, but been unable to verbalize it, act on it or even acknowledge it for reasons deep within Quinn's psychology.

Going back to the Pilot, it's noteworthy that when Wade greets Quinn at Doppler's, Quinn's reaction to her overtures and acquiring hockey tickets for them is so deliberately avoidant: he doesn't make eye contact, he doesn't stop to really interact with her; he keeps walking; he fiddles with his name badge -- it's like he can't quite engage with Wade despite having clearly developed a friendship with her, and Wade doesn't seem offended, like she's used to Quinn being distracted and elsewhere mentally.

It's also significant: despite being athletic, charismatic, warm and looking like Jerry O'Connell, the Pilot clearly establishes that Quinn barely has any friends. He's pleasant with his classmates, but they have no idea what he's working on. Quinn's only confidant is his cat. When Wade visits Quinn's house, she looks around to take in the wallpaper; she has never been there before despite she and Quinn supposedly being "buds." Quinn seems incredibly averse and isolated and it doesn't make a lot of sense.

When Quinn comments that kissing Wade would be like "incest," it strikes me as another level of avoidance, and when he asks her, "What's with the tears?" later, it's so obvious what the tears are about that it strikes me as a deflection. When we get to "The Guardian," it's intriguing that Quinn refuses to explain why he wants to train his younger self in the art of beating people up with his bare hands. He can't bring himself to explain until the end; it's the same distance we saw of his life in the Pilot. Quinn describes being unable to relate to his classmates; he's smaller than they are and younger than they are.

Quinn strikes me as traumatized; it's why he doesn't have a lot of friends, why he locks up his feelings, why he hides his work; why he won't disclose aspects of his past. The incandescent charisma of Jerry O'Connell makes him seem well-adjusted, but the details of his life and his choices are telling and I don't think Jerry O'Connell is Quinn Mallory. I think Jerry is just the skin that Quinn Mallory wears to hide the damage.

I don't believe that Tracy Torme and Robert K. Weiss intended for Quinn to be traumatized in the Pilot. I don't believe that Jerry O'Connell intended for Quinn to be traumatized. I think that Quinn's trauma was something unintentional that Torme decided to capitalize upon. In the original Pilot script, Quinn is genuinely written to be absolutely clueless that Wade is attracted to him. Torme imagined Quinn as Tobey Maguire (or someone like Tobey Maguire, at least).

However, when Jerry O'Connell plays scenes that were intended for an actor who looks like Tobey Maguire and doesn't change his natural demeanor, it creates a disconnect from the scripted content and the onscreen images. Jerry O'Connell plays Quinn as cheerful, warm, confident and charming -- so why is he blind to Wade's interest and why does he hide his work in his basement and why isn't he close to any of his classmates and why has Wade never been to his house? Tobey Maguire's Quinn would have been too shy to imagine Wade would want to come over. What's the reasoning for Jerry's Quinn? It's unclear, but the result is that Quinn seems damaged in some way.

An explanation only comes in Torme's "The Guardian" when Quinn explains that he skipped two grades and was smaller than his classmates and haunted by the death of his father at the age of 10. This itself is also peculiar because in the Pilot, also written by Torme, we see a photograph of Quinn with his father. Quinn is played by Jerry O'Connell who is clearly not 10. In fact, Torme deliberately wrote the Pilot with the idea that Michael Mallory was still alive; that he'd faked his death for mysterious reasons and gone into hiding. However, by "The Guardian," Torme had changed his mind.

Torme retconned Michael Mallory's death in "The Guardian" so that he now died when Quinn was a little boy instead of in his late teens. He altered Michael Mallory, turning his death into a deeply traumatic event for Quinn that, as Quinn himself says, caused Quinn to become isolated, hiding in his basement and losing a certain degree of social acclimation that he would otherwise have. This appears to be Torme's attempt to explain why a character played by Jerry O'Connell could be a withdrawn misfit. It wasn't something Torme planned to do from the start, but he decided to add the trauma to reconcile the difference between the character Torme imagined and the actor who ended up being hired.