When I was writing "Slide Effects," I was deliberately putting little references to someone who has been a real friend to SLIDERS and SLIDERS fans, and some of the continuity and character elements come from this person instead of coming from the show.
The statement that Quinn's work in anti-gravity is a follow-up on unfinished research from his father does not come from the series. It is actually a reference to Temporal Flux saying he observed similarities between the 2000 issue of ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #1 where writer Brian Michael Bendis showed a 15 year old Peter Parker working in a basement lab with a blackboard of complex equations, working on a revolutionary adhesive formula that his father started but didn't finish before his death. (The formula becomes Spider-Man's webbing.)
Temporal Flux remarked, "Does that setting seem familiar to you? A basement laboratory. A blackboard equation. A son continuing the work of his dead father. The first scenes of the SLIDERS pilot movie center around very similar elements as we are introduced to Quinn Mallory. Was this Ultimate Spider-Man treatment an homage to Sliders? So far an answer is not forthcoming...but one really has to wonder given how closely the situations resemble each other... "
https://web.archive.org/web/20160809214 … spidey.htm
As far as I can tell, the Pilot did not establish what Quinn's father did or didn't do for a living in the Pilot; "Gillian of the Spirits" reveals him to be a mechanical and electrical engineer and "Genesis" declares that he was indeed a slider and that he was a member of a human-and-Kromagg society. "Invasion" establishes that Mary's world was invaded by Kromaggs at age six, so the Kromaggs have been slidetech equipped for at least 15 - 20 years and probably more.
Since "Slide Effects" asserts that Seasons 3 - 5 are all in continuity and all happened and merely happened to a different set of sliders (many different sets), it seemed reasonable to say that Michael Mallory was a scientist. And it seemed reasonable to imply that Quinn's work on anti-gravity was something his father started, a way to connect with him. It draws more on Seasons 4 - 5 with Michael Mallory creating slidecages and war zones between dimensions and superweapons than it does from Torme's version of Michael Mallory.
It was also a way to bring Quinn's father up: I wanted Quinn's reunion with his mother in "Slide Effects" to be shocking and deeply emotional. I was horrified by what Season 5 did to Linda Henning's character and always cringed at what Ms. Henning might have thought of her bizarre trajectory on SLIDERS. I wanted Quinn to be so relieved and overwhelmed to find his mother not only home but untraumatized and to put Michael's presence in the scene would increase the emotion.
I also wanted to imply that Quinn and Amanda had had some sort of fight between the teaser of the Pilot and the breakfast scene that would justify Quinn's emotional reaction to the sight of her from Amanda's perspective; that she'd said something she later thought her son might take more harshly than she'd intended -- and I decided to say she'd told Quinn to stop connecting with his dad through the anti-gravity research. Why didn't they seem to still be fighting in the Pilot?
In my mind, Quinn would have apologized, used his knowhow to fix the power, and no more needed to be said of it, but in "Slide Effects," when Quinn seemed upset at the sight of her, Amanda assumed the fight was not as finished as it had seemed.
But it was a reference to Temporal Flux's ruminations, really. I liked the idea a lot, I saw no contradiction with the series, and I found it useful when having Quinn react intensely to seeing his mother but needed them to resume (relatively) normal interactions afterwards.
And there are actually two more references to Temporal Flux. When Rembrandt says, "The Cryin' Man's always got a special place in his heart for his fans," this is referring to Temporal Flux saying, "To this day, Torme holds a special place in his heart for SLIDERS and its fans."
And the last is when Arturo tells the sliders, "Remember, home isn't a place; it's the people you're with." It's something TF once said. He said that no matter how lost Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo might be, so long as they were together, they were home.