1 (edited by QuinnMallory_C137 2021-07-07 17:50:10)

Topic: Mr. Mallory - a Slider?

I've been reading the ireactios story 'Slide Effects':

In it, there is a line of dialogue where Mrs. Mallory is talking to Quinn about the night (last night) he knocked out the power (as we see him do the night before their maiden slide.)

Mrs Mallory says to him "But I shouldn't have told you to stop working on your father's equations."

Excuse me - what. This implies that not only was Michael Mallory also an engineer or applied physicist of some kind but also was working in the same field that Quinn was.......anti-gravity?

Also Wade's comment, "You wanted to build a hovercraft with string theory. It's part of how you relate to your dad."

His absence could easily be explained by the fact he was also a Slider.
In "Gillian of the Spirits" he is shown to be very familiar with technology as well, I can imagine that would be a simple extrapolation that.

EDIT: I didn't realize I was reading ireactions screenplay at first.

Re: Mr. Mallory - a Slider?

In my personal opinion, I think making Michael Mallory a slider also takes away from the charm and the wonder of Quinn disovering it. I am a big fan of the Slide Effects story and ireaction's script, but I think truth be told, we don't know what line of feild Michael Mallory was in. I think even Torme didn't know what to do with that at first.

Here's the thing though. Some later episodes imply that he's into physics like Quinn, but that could also be an alternate universe version of him. Also, being that half of Slide Effects is a Kromagg simulation, it's largly possible that the Kromaggs gotten some things wrong about Quinn's personal history. (How would they even know who Quinn's mother and father are?)

Re: Mr. Mallory - a Slider?

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.

Re: Mr. Mallory - a Slider?

Very insightful retrospective! It's also really nice you put all these odes in from Spider-Man and TemperalFlux. And you're right, it did increase the emotional tension between Quinn and his mother. ireaction's is a fantastic writer. I wouldn't have thought to increase the emotion there by bringing up Michael Mallory.

Why weren't Quinn and Mrs. Mallory fighting in the pilot? I guess I never assumed that they were fighting to begin with. She seemed so cheery when Quinn came downstairs. I know Slide Effects establishes it but does the Pilot establish that Quinn knocked out the power the day before we first see him here? Forgive me. It's been a while since I've seen it.

But ireaction's does it bueatifully for creating a reasoning for why Mrs. Mallory would believe her son is upset. Of course Quinn might be a little traumatized having watched all his friends die in seasons 3-5, but Amanda wouldn't know that. Her assuming the fight from before isn't over makes perfect logical sense.

Re: Mr. Mallory - a Slider?

Thinking about this some more and I have come to the conclusion that "Slide Effects" is entirely an ode to Temporal Flux. At age 15, I was deeply confused and upset by the arbitrary randomness and sheer cruelty that the show displayed towards Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo.

Temporal Flux spent a lot of time on AOL Instant Messenger with me, telling me the ins and outs of why the onscreen product was what it was. He brought understanding and reason to a chaotic and horrifically savage set of circumstances. And he told me also that he believed that SLIDERS could come back. He couldn't be absolutely certain, but he believed that it was possible that Quinn and Wade and Rembrandt and Arturo would slide again. He made me feel hope, he made me envision the sliders restored and made whole and standing at the edge of a limitless future of wonder and boundless adventure.

And re-reading "Slide Effects" now, it's clear that "Slide Effects" is an attempt to make the reader feel the way TF made me feel when I was a child: that there is a bridge from the chaos of Seasons 3 - 5, that there is a path to redemption, that the original quartet will inevitably find their way back to each other and step into the vortex once again.

That's why his view that sliding was unfinished theory from Michael Mallory is in the story. That's why his sentiments about Tracy Torme's heart and the sliders' true home are in the dialogue. "Slide Effects" is how he made me feel.

Re: Mr. Mallory - a Slider?

That is very heartwarming. I believe that was Torme's goal with coming up with the concept of Slide Effects. He wanted to give fans hope that Sliders would return in a much happier way without the body horror of seasons 3-5. Yes, the story has its plot holes and is not without its fault, but what story is really?

Slide Effects in my opinion represents a bueatiful representation of repairing the series without any unhinging regrets or longstanding questions. In essense, TV is supposed to make you feel happier inside. I can see where ireaction's is at when he says that thinking about the obseene horror that happens to the characters in the later seasons makes you feel saddeded in a way. Ireaction's wrote Slide Effects as an open sourse material so people can make their own sequels to it. That's why I chose Side Effects as the starter point for my fanfic series. And weirdly enough as it is, writing fanfiction is weirdly healing in a way.