I really like most of Tucker's scripts. One of the things I wanted to accomplish with SLIDERS REBORN and failed to do -- I wanted to popularize the screenplay format for fanfic. Prose has never made sense to me for stories about TV characters. The screenplay format uses the language of television.
However, where I failed, Tucker may succeed because SLIDERS REBORN was really a novel written in screenplay format whereas Tucker's writing is more convincing as a teleplay. Tucker's scripts are filmable on a TV budget, even a low 1990s Sci-Fi Channel budget. Tucker's scripts could be filmed and aired within the length of a TV timeslot. Tucker's scripts convey the drama and characterization through onscreen action, actors conversing and physical interaction. Tucker's locations are achievable and filmable. Tucker's budgets are modest and workable.
"The Alternateville Horror" and "Lipschitz Live" under Tucker's keyboard are effective rewrites, presenting Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo in these stories and infusing the poor Sci-Fi Channel era casting with the original charm of the true quantum quartet. Tucker's Arturo is a little too aggressive but it's still wonderful to imagine "The Alternateville Horror" with the Dominion Hotel and the *real* sliders facing the interdimensional ghosts. "Lipschitz Live" has a terrific presentation of Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo reacting to a world of total TV and also cleverly addresses two bizarre plotholes from the aired version, neatly repairing the oddity of MacArthur Mallory (?) and the sliders nonsensically failing to recognize a friend as a double, simply through altering areas of characterization and adjusting some scene placements.
"Roads Taken" is the most satisfying with a love story that was written with Quinn and Maggie more appropriately reconfigured into Quinn and Wade's story, showing all the tentpole moments and critical scenes of a more conventional romance and marriage that Quinn and Wade don't get to have in their lives as sliders. Tucker creates a bittersweet longing with "Roads Taken," not just through Quinn and Wade experiencing a life they won't get to keep, but for the reader longing to see Quinn and Wade in this story.
The best of the lot is probably "The Exodus" where Tucker takes John Rhys-Davies' original plot of an Earth facing a cataclysm and survivors having to choose what to preserve for the next world. It's a striking counterproposal to the aired "Exodus." The self-important, bombastic, large scale pseudo-epic of "The Exodus" two parter is rejected. Instead, Tucker presents "The Exodus" as a small, personal story of ordinary people in a situation too big for any of them, surviving at the fringes of a larger and more disastrous global event, doomed to die until the sliders appear in the middle of the situation. The locations in Tucker's "Exodus" are limited within a tightly restrictive geography. This is what "The Exodus" should have been. SLIDERS is better when it is small and intimate.
Tucker is the future of SLIDERS.