Re: Rewatch Podcast

Hi. Here are the notes for "Revelations" that I sent Rewatch Podcast.

As for the "Net Worth Redux," I am at the point where Quinn-2 and Wade-2 / Rick and Joanne are talking in person in the Dominion/ Chandler hotel. The majority of the plot holes are fixed except for Jack / Hurley's nonsensical plan for robbing the Magenta Towers.

I could write scripts on my tablet (with a bluetooth keyboard), but Windows 10 is still repatching my computers, so I won't be able to post the podcasts until tomorrow night. My password managers are stored on the PCs and I never commit passwords to memory.

Behind the Scenes Information Courtesy of Temporal Flux

Season 4: Luck of the Draw

  • When Marc Scott Zicree interviewed for SLIDERS, he was not entirely sure what he was getting into. He had a passing familiarity with SLIDERS. Most of the junior Season 3 producers had moved on. New writers were needed.

  • USA Networks (which owned Sci-Fi) had a VP who'd liked Zicree's writing on science fiction shows and recommended him to David Peckinpah.

  • Peckinpah hadn't been looking for a talented science fiction writer. As Season 3 showed, Peckinpah was not concerned with scripts he wasn't writing, he saw hiring screenwriters as the equivalent of hiring typists.

  • It was an astonishing stroke of fortune for a writer of Zicree's pedigree and caliber to be interested in SLIDERS and to be approached for a story editor role.

  • According to Temporal Flux of DoC: Zicree, in the interview with Peckinpah, repeated everything Peckinpah said in paraphrased sentences, echoing Peckinpah's views on production and scripts.

  • Peckinpah declared Zicree to be a genius and hired him as the Season 4 executive story editor -- a position that usually entails commissioning scripts, directing or performing rewrites, leading the writer's room,etc..

  • As noted in many interviews, the Season 4 budget was low. The writing staff consisted of David Peckinpah (1. executive producer), Bill Dial (2. co-executive producer), Marc Scott Zicree (3. story editor) and Chris Black (4. producer).

  • Most scripts would come from freelancers and need to be rewritten once submitted.

  • Because the writing staff was so small, the task of rewriting scripts had to be distributed and delegated and Zicree expected he'd take the approach of giving notes to writers on their treatments. When drafts came in, he would again write notes and he expected would distribute the task of rewrites among himself and his colleagues.

Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome

  • Zicree, at this point, began to further familiarize himself with SLIDERS, having long talks with his friend Tracy Torme, rewatching old episodes, reading the Dimension of Continuity articles and deleted scenes, watching Kari Wuhrer's movies.

  • He realized SLIDERS was in trouble: down two original (and essential) cast members, a problematic character in Maggie, the remaining regulars had gone from charming and lively to hostile and miserable.

  • To make matters worse, the leading man had forced his talentless brother into a regular role on the show.

  • According to TF: Marc attempted to make a meal of the mess. He wouldn't try to do the grounded SLIDERS of Season 1 - 2 -- he couldn't anyway. And he wouldn't do the movie ripoffs of Season 3 -- he had no budget for that anymore.

  • Instead, he'd try a more hard-sci-fi and myth approach.

  • He proposed an ambitious story-arc to really raise SLIDERS' profile: the Kromagg invasion of the sliders' home Earth. This way, the damage to the series in losing John Rhys-Davies and Sabrina Lloyd could be expressed and mined for drama. The Colin character could be a Kromagg spy, an altered clone of Quinn created from DNA samples taken in "Invasion."

  • It would be hinted throughout the season, however, that the Earth Prime invasion had been staged to manipulate Quinn into believing a false backstory, a theory all but confirmed by the third episode.

  • The season 4 finale would bring all the subtle clues into a massive climax and a shocking cliffhanger.

  • Looking at the interviews, it would seem that for episodes between the premiere and the finale, Zicree hoped for imaginative and intellectually challenging science fiction drama with more of a fantasy-adventure approach rather than the social commentary of Season 1 - 2, but with a focus on situational character drama rather than action and eye candy (which couldn't be afforded anyway).

The Other Slide of Darkness

  • According to TF: Peckinpah approved of Zicree's Season 4 arc. However, Peckinpah also took the task of writing the season premiere and immediately, the Zicree/Peckinpah relationship began to take a turn for the worse.

  • Peckinpah wrote the Kromaggs as overt soldiers, thugs, interrogators and torturers rather than distant figures acting through human agents -- and he also wrote Sabrina Lloyd out via sending her to a rape camp.

  • Zicree argued against these plot elements, providing Peckinpah with pages and pages of corrective notes and creative suggestions.

  • For example, Peckinpah misunderstood the concept of doubles and wrote a double of Quinn's mother to be played by a different actress.

  • Peckinpah ignored this and "Genesis" was filmed.

  • At this point, Zicree's protests took on the form of modifying his Season 4 plans. He proposed the concept of the Humaggs, suggesting these were the products of the rape camps. He suggested that the vaguely defined superweapon had sterilized the Kromaggs, requiring the camps.

  • Zicree believed that if this plot were present, it would force the episodes to focus on the sliders searching for Wade, giving him opportunities to resolve Wade's fate either via a guest-appearance or an offscreen mention.

  • Zicree was met with resistance and refusal by Peckinpah as well as Bill Dial. Dial had been unable to find work in recent years until his friend Peckinpah hired him for SLIDERS and his loyalty was to Peckinpah.

  • Zicree continued to argue for the Humagg storyline. This led to a rift between him, Peckinpah and Dial, who began to find him obnoxious.

  • Zicree also continued to contribute corrective notes to completed scripts, seeking to distribute the task of rewrites among the producers.

  • Dial refused to address the notes, declaring that all the scripts were adequate as written. Dial regularly refused to discuss stories in writers room meetings, preferring to play Solitaire on a computer.

  • Zicree chastised Dial for his negligence and demanded Dial's full attention. Dial came to despise Zicree and soon, Peckinpah hated Zicree as well.

  • When stories for the middle of the season were being determined, Zicree succeeded in getting two Humagg episodes commissioned due to the lack of alternatives on the table at the time.

  • He was also writing "Slidecage" and an episode of DEEP SPACE NINE.

The Exodus Part 1

  • According to TF: around this period, Peckinpah and Dial decided to drive Zicree off the show. They did this by destroying his Season 4 arc.

  • Zicree's Season 4 arc was building to the revelation that Colin Mallory was an altered-Quinn clone created by Kromaggs.

  • Dial and Peckinpah commissioned "Lipschitz Live," an episode with a Colin-double. They then declared that since a clone couldn't have a double, Zicree's plan for the Season 4 finale would need to be abandoned.

  • They did this despite the fact that they had bought the Season 4 finale story from Zicree already.

  • Zicree completed his work on "Slidecage" and gave up on actively contributing to SLIDERS, simply performing his managerial duties and letting Peckinpah, Dial and Chris Black carry on without Zicree's input.

  • As I look at Season 4, it would seem to me that with no story editor reviewing scripts or overseeing their commissioning, various oddities resulted such as (a) Rembrandt acting like he never met Dr. Jensen in "Slide By Wire" (b) "Virtual Slide," "Net Worth," "Slide By Wire" and "Data World" being the same computer world concept four times over (c) the sliders knowing Kolitar by name in "Way Out West" even though it was never spoken onscreen in "Slidecage" (d) the Kromaggs issuing a kill order on the sliders despite "Common Ground" establishing the sliders were off limits and (e) a truly puzzling Season 4 finale.

  • As articles indicate: the Season 4 budget was small. Only one story bought for Season 4, "God's Country," by David Gerrold, was not filmed.

  • Season 4 could not afford to let anymore purchased stories go unused -- meaning that Zicree's purchased Season 4 finale story had to be scripted -- by someone -- and filmed. No alternatives could be bought.

  • Bill Dial proceeded to take Zicree's story and remove the intended Season 4 arc elements. He then took what was left of the story and stretched it out to fill in the time, either by extending existing scenes to fill more acts than they'd been designed for or writing new scenes that simply reiterated previously stated information.

  • This approach to screenwriting is also predominant in Season 5, in which anything expensive or complicated to film would be removed and the remaining material would be stretched to fill the resulting gaps.

Paradise Lost

  • The original plot for "Revelations" as intended by Marc Scott Zicree was to begin with the sliders relaxing on a world in which Rembrandt would find a novel -- a science fiction novel with a plot that mirrored the human-Kromagg war.

  • What follows is my extrapolation of how the basic story could have gone -- I gave you the vague outline in earlier E-mails. What follows is me (as opposed to Zicree) fleshing out the vague into the more specific. My speculations are in italics. Anything not in italics was a definite story element as communicated by Temporal Flux.

  • The sliders would locate the author, who would help work out the secret of how to bypass the Slidecage.

  • The sliders would then slide back to Kromagg Prime.

  • Dial's script stretched what should have been no more than a teaser and a first act into the very end of the third act.

  • The original idea was that the sliders would land on Kromagg Prime and instantly cause an alert to go off. Their arrival is detected; the human inhabitants believe the sliders are the first of a Kromagg invasion and must be met killed on sight by soldiers who've been preparing for a Kromagg incursion for almost two decades.

  • In fleeing, Quinn is separated from Colin, Maggie and Rembrandt.

  • As Colin, Maggie and Rembrandt evade the soldiers, Quinn searches for his birth parents.

  • As Colin, Maggie and Rembrandt defend themselves, Colin begins to exhibit odd behaviour. He uses lethal force, casually murdering several of the soldiers without Rembrandt and Maggie seeing due to the confusion of the fight. They escape.

  • Colin, Maggie and Rembrandt find a safe place to hide and look up information to find Mr. and Mrs. Mallory.

  • Quinn locates his birth parents. They do not recognize him and believe him to be a Kromagg agent, either compromised or brainwashed. Quinn convinces them to hear him out, producing his microdot and a photograph of Colin, explaining that his foster parent-doubles hid him when his birth parents returned to Earth Prime for him.

  • Mr. and Mrs. Mallory protest: they never left their son with doubles. Their son died in the human-Kromagg war. And they have never heard of anyone named Colin Mallory.

  • We go back to Maggie and Rembrandt: Colin is holding them at gunpoint. They are his hostages; Colin will need them as leverage because if Quinn has found their 'parents,' then he now knows the truth.

  • Quinn and his 'parents' realize: there is no Colin Mallory. Never has been. All the sliders were scanned on arrival; the man known as Colin who came through the vortex is genetically almost identical to Quinn -- a clone with surgical alterations to make him look like a relative.

  • The invasion of Earth Prime, the appearance of Amanda Mallory, the microdot, Colin's convenient location -- all this has been staged by the Kromaggs to give them a way back to Kromagg Prime -- by sliding a Kromagg sleeper agent onto the Kromagg homeworld to shut down the Slidecage from within.

  • Quinn and his 'parents' race for the Slidecage control facility, realizing the truth. They have to stop Colin.

  • It's revealed that the Slidecage can be unlocked with the Mallorys' genetic code -- however, a clone wouldn't be able to access the controls. Nevertheless, Quinn is convinced that if the Kromaggs manipulated them this far, then Colin has some sort of plan for that place and that's where he'd go.

  • Quinn begins to wonder: what else has been a trick? Was the Earth in "Genesis" really his homeworld? Was the invasion real or was what he saw of it staged? What happened to Wade?

  • The Mallorys arrive at the Slidecage facility to find the guards murdered. Colin is inside with Quinn's friends; he orders Quinn to enter alone.

  • Quinn complies, shouting questions to Colin over comm-link -- is the Colin he knows in there under the sleeper programming somewhere? Is anything of the brother he loved real?

  • Colin mocks Quinn, declaring him to be an impulsive, gullible, impotent pawn, powerless and helpless -- completely controlled by the Kromaggs even now that he knows the truth, because Colin holds Maggie and Rembrandt's lives.

  • Quinn confronts Colin, succeeding in trapping him in one of the control center's chambers and rescuing Maggie and Rembrandt. But Colin has triggered a self-destruct sequence for the facility to explode, which will shut down the Slidecage and open the door for the Kromaggs to return.

  • Quinn uses his genetic signature -- the same as his 'father's' -- to shut down the self-destruct. But then he realizes that Colin has tricked him -- the self-destruct sequence was faked; what Colin really made him do was unlock the Slidecage.

  • Colin unlocks his chamber -- Quinn never succeeded in locking him in. Colin congratulates Quinn: Quinn Mallory is the Kromagg Dynasty's greatest hero. He has achieved his mission. Now he can die.

  • Rembrandt and Maggie make it outside the Slidecage facility, finding Mr. and Mrs. Mallory.

  • Then suddenly, in the air above, red vortexes appear and Kromagg manta ships emerge. Filling the sky. The Mallorys, Rembrandt and Maggie look up in horror.

  • Inside the facility, Quinn and Colin battle, Quinn desperately trying to immobilize the man he sees as a brother and Colin the sleeper agent trying to kill Quinn. Brother against 'brother' fighting --

  • And the Kromagg ships descend upon this world in a triumphant homecoming.

  • To be continued in Season 5.

The Last of Eden

  • Dial's awkward rewrite of Zicree's plot involved ripping out most of the critical scenes.

  • The approach of stretching and extending the remains resulted in massive plotholes, obvious filler and nonsensical characterization.

  • Quinn and Colin have developed the means to bypass the Slidecage and have the coordinates for home. As Dial had removed the original outcome and decided on a wrong-Earth plot instead, he was required to provide some explanation for why the sliders make it to a completely different Earth.

  • His explanation was that Isaac Clarke changed the coordinates -- which does not account for why Quinn and Colin wouldn't protest this or why they couldn't simply apply the bypass formula to the correct home coordinates.

  • When all the sliders meet Mr. and Mrs. Mallory, they do not request the anti-Kromagg superweapon to liberate Earth Prime. Instead, it comes up in conversation incidentally. At this point, Quinn declares he will not be leaving Kromagg Prime and gives Rembrandt the timer to liberate Quinn's adopted and Kromagg-dominated Earth alone.

  • Quite inexplicably, Rembrandt is untroubled by Quinn abandoning Earth Prime and its people -- and is then told by Quinn he must go to Dr. Clarke to procure the weapon -- even though it was previously established that the Mallorys created the weapon.

  • This characterization is another "Mother and Child" level disaster of characterization, rendering Quinn as having abandoned his mission to liberate his adopted Earth, being uncaring about the fate of his mother and being indifferent to sending Rembrandt into a Kromagg war zone.

  • This sequence of events also makes no sense: if the sliders now think Clarke has the weapon, why didn't they stick with him instead of approaching the Mallorys?

  • Given that Quinn is the one who chose to search for the superweapon, why is he now uninterested in acquiring and deploying it?

  • Why is this shift in his goals not addressed or remarked upon by Rembrandt? Why is Rembrandt unconcerned that Quinn is abandoning him?

  • The reason these errors are present: writer Bill Dial sought to create a reason for Rembrandt to leave Maggie, Colin and Quinn alone with the Mallorys and needed to send Rembrandt to acquire exposition from Dr. Clarke about why this isn't the correct Kromagg Prime.

  • These measures were  separation and stalling tactics designed to extend an underrunning script as the central plot of the story had been removed.

  • Dr. Clarke's dialogue with Rembrandt is also nonsensical; he claims to have helped the sliders by providing the coordinates, except the sliders already had different coordinates which they inexplicably permitted Clarke to alter.
    Dr. Clarke claims he has evidence to convict the Mallorys for their war crimes, despite the episode clearly indicating that the Mallorys' anti-Kromagg weapon is known to the public with no consequences having come for two decades.

  • Once again, this is Bill Dial attempting to stretch out the remaining fragments of Zicree's story, having thrown out the bulk of the material.

  • Even with these measures -- measures that break the logic of this one episode, that break the character of Quinn Mallory, that break the Season 4 arc -- the episode still runs short.

  • As a result, the final act is devoted to a lengthy, prolonged and content-free chase sequence.

  • The episode ends with the vortex fired off a moving train yet inexplicably keeping pace with the train when it should be a speck in the distance.

  • This rewrite has been performed in a lazy, slapdash, inconsistent fashion -- largely because Bill Dial disliked Zicree and was disinclined to treat Zicree's ideas with respect, particularly when this altered Season 4 finale had been done specifically to spite and demoralize Zicree.

The Exodus, Part 2

  • This was Jerry O'Connell's final episode of SLIDERS.

  • According to TF: Jerry had enjoyed his Season 4 producer role because it allowed him to coast. He could show up late or inebriated without repercussions or consequence.

  • He now wanted to be executive producer of SLIDERS, not for creative reasons, but for more opportunities to coast and an increased salary.

  • Indeed, his writing, directing and producing credits on Season 4 were primarily for financial interest; he never wrote, produced or directed after SLIDERS aside from a token credit on the film FIRST DAUGHTER (written during Season 4) and a TWO AND A HALF MEN Internet parody.

  • Jerry sought the promotion but was not taken seriously by Universal.

  • However, he found a stronger bargaining position when the Sci-Fi Channel missed his contractual deadline for ordering Season 5.

  • Sci-Fi had never intended for Season 5, intending to draw SLIDERS' audience to Sci-Fi's original programming and then abandon SLIDERS.

  • That was the reason for the long period with no new episodes of SLIDERS while shows like FIRST WAVE and WELCOME TO PARADOX and FARSCAPE aired new installments.

  • The plan failed; SLIDERS' Season 4 ratings were too strong for Sci-Fi to cancel it if they could afford to renew -- but by this point, their money was tied up in the original programming. They had to find other avenues of finance.

  • By the time Sci-Fi found the money and renewed, Jerry was no longer obligated to return to the series.
    Jerry offered to return if and only if he were promoted to Executive Producer. Universal refused to promote him. Jerry quit.

  • Jerry offered to do six episodes of Season 5 so long as Charlie starred in all 18.

  • David Peckinpah and Bill Dial refused to hire Charlie for any more episodes than Jerry.

  • Negotiations continued. There were some personnel changes even without Jerry's issues: Peckinpah had been assigned to a different series, TURKS, meaning that while Peckinpah remained in charge of SLIDERS, Bill Dial would become the de-facto lead producer.

  • Dial hired "Virtual Slide" and "Lipschitz Live" writer Keith Damron to replace Marc Scott Zicree as the new Season 5 story editor.

  • Dial and Damron were now faced with having to write Jerry O'Connell out.

  • Dial changed his mind about Zicree's Season 4 finale.

  • He decided he would do the Season 4 finale after all -- as Season 5, episode 5.

  • In Season 5, episode 5, the sliders would land on the real Kromagg Prime, Colin would be exposed as a clone and a traitor, the invasion of Earth Prime would be revealed as a ruse.

  • Colin would be stranded on the real Kromagg Prime. Quinn would open a gateway to the real Earth Prime -- but fail to take Maggie and Rembrandt with him.

  • The next 12 episodes of SLIDERS would feature Maggie and Rembrandt with a new slider, a scientist named Melissa Hunter from the real Earth Prime who had worked with the FBI in recreating Quinn's slide-tech and gotten lost in the multiverse.

  • Jerry's sixth and final episode of Season 5 would be the series finale; Quinn would return to wrap up the show.

  • Then Jerry declared that he would return for no episodes of SLIDERS at all. He and Charlie quit.

  • Jerry declared in a chat session that he didn't want to return for Season 5 due to a budget cut. There was no budget cut; this was a lie.

  • Jerry would later change his story to quitting over a "contractual dispute" without elaborating on this.

  • When directly asked what he wanted to do as Executive Producer, Jerry replied that he thought SLIDERS had become like too "bubble gum" and he wanted it to be more like THE X-FILES -- utterly meaningless.
    Temporal Flux does not believe Jerry had any creative ambitions for SLIDERS whatsoever.

  • As a result of Jerry's departure and his refusal to perform an exit story, the Season 4 Kromagg arc would never be resolved.

Dust

  • Charlie O'Connell went on to feature in a season of The Bachelor in which his constant state of intoxication made him realize he was an alcoholic. He sought treatment and, I believe, recovered.

  • Jerry O'Connell felt no regret about leaving SLIDERS.

  • He believed that he would be a Tom Cruise level movie star, having achieved a certain level of fame for SLIDERS, JERRY MAGUIRE and SCREAM 2.

  • His performances won him rave reviews, although they were mostly the John Rhys-Davies coached performances of Seasons 1 - 2.

  • In interviews, he spoke of his numerous female conquests, his superior athleticism in fencing tournaments and generally portrayed himself as a goofy ladies man and teen idol heartthrob.

  • Jerry's opinion was that SLIDERS was a hit because the audience found him attractive, either as an object of desire or as a surrogate figure.

  • Immediately post-SLIDERS, he chose roles that flattered his ego as an attractive male specimen: the young astronaut in MISSION TO MARS, the leading man Lothario of the sex comedy TOMCATS, the leading man of the film DOWN UNDER. Jerry chose roles that were largely about his looks.

  • MISSION TO MARS was a critical failure and Jerry's performance was considered serviceable but bland.

  • TOMCATS was considered to be a masterwork of cinematic incompetence with crass, ugly, sexist humour and Jerry's performance consisted of sneering and mugging for the camera.

  • At this point, Jerry's fan following was largely depleted; the fan sites ceased to be maintained. Jerry had made a grave miscalculation, mistaking SLIDERS fans for Jerry O'Connell fans, something that became clear when TOMCATS bombed.

  • Jerry's appeal in Seasons 1 - 2: he was an attractive young man playing a sensitive, earnest, heartfelt scientist of intelligence and moral integrity. This performance had been achieved through John Rhys-Davies coaching Jerry.

  • Without John to guide him, Jerry's performances had no thought, no detail, no consideration, no characterization -- just vacant blandness or clumsy comedy.

  • Jerry also destroyed his earnest, sincere image after numerous girlfriends revealed that he had drunkenly cheated on them and in interviews where he bragged about random hookups with fans.

  • In a final, desperate bid at the movie star career he craved, Jerry signed to a Jerry Bruckheimer film.

  • For this film, DOWN UNDER, Jerry was keen to film in Australia for this buddy comedy.

  • Jerry was nearly fired off this film.

  • Ever since SLIDERS moved to Los Angeles, Jerry had received many invitations to nightclubs and bars and parties.

  • His star value and attractive appearance drew additional customers, after all. He was drinking heavily until the early mornings. He would stagger home and eat pizza and other takeout foods. By 2002 and shortly before DOWN UNDER was to film, Jerry was flabby and overweight. His performances were Season 4 poor or worse and now he didn't even have his looks.

  • DOWN UNDER producer Bruckheimer threatened to fire Jerry. Jerry agreed to get in shape, hiring a personal trainer to do a complete overhaul of Jerry's diet and lifestyle. Jerry agreed to quit drinking, to quit eating fried and processed foods, and to commit to the regular exercise he'd stopped around late Season 4 of SLIDERS.

  • Jerry got back in shape and found that he enjoyed sobriety. He filmed DOWN UNDER. It bombed with test audiences, although they reacted positively to one scene -- a dream sequence with a computer generated kangaroo.

  • As a result, the entire film was reshot to make the kangaroo the star and renamed KANGAROO JACK. Jerry ended up playing second banana to a cartoonishly rendered marsupial.

  • This was the end of the line for Jerry's movie star career; he could no longer be taken seriously as a bankable leading man and he was also not worth his price when more committed and capable actors with lower paycheques were available and hadn't alienated their fanbase or accumulated so many failures.

  • This crushing failure of ambition actually turned out to be a good thing for Jerry.

  • Needing work, he turned back to the medium he'd thought himself above -- television. He accepted a recurring and then regular role in CROSSING JORDAN with Jill Hennessy and began to rebuild his career as a working class actor who, if not at home, would be on the set or in the gym. He began taking acting classes again.

  • In 2012, in a sadly offline YouTube video, Jerry O'Connell did an interview and spoke extensively about SLIDERS.

  • He said that he often watched the episodes with his children and wife.

  • He kept, in his kitchen, a Season 1 photo of himself with his fellow cast members.

  • He said that John Rhys-Davies had been a mentor and father figure who had sold his car to Jerry. Jerry said he loved SLIDERS and regretted that the cast broke up. He said he would gladly reprise his role as Quinn if given the chance, but that NBCUniversal had no interest in reviving the property. When asked why the show had been so loved, Jerry admitted he didn't really understand it, but he loved the family environment and being with Cleavant, Sabrina and John. He missed them all.

  • In 2014, Tracy Torme received a phone call from Jerry. They had not spoken since Season 3. Jerry expressed his longing to see SLIDERS revived.

  • They made some calls. Cleavant was interested. Sabrina was in Rome and not available. John could not be reached. NBCUniversal was its usual unresponsive self. Jerry reached out to Funny or Die, the website, and performed in a spoof Kickstarter for a SLIDERS movie.

  • Why?

  • I have two theories. My first is that Jerry, now sober, a married man and a father of two, had done some hard thinking about his life and why his movie career never took off and finally figured it out. It's not the actor. It's the character he creates.

  • The key to becoming a movie star is playing an iconic, genre-definitive character who inspires the imagination. Indiana Jones. Spider-Man. Batman. James Bond, Mr. Spock. Dr. House. Superman. Lara Croft. Doctor Who.

  • In his career, Jerry had only ever played one character like that. Quinn Mallory was and remains Jerry's one and only shot at pop culture immortality.

  • My other theory is that Jerry simply missed John, Sabrina and Cleavant -- and with John getting on in years, Jerry longed for a final reunion of all four. He wished to see the sliders reunited. Restored. Reborn.

  • Don't we all?

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Looking forward to you doing season five.  I don't hate it the way some people do.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

I've actually started a season 4 rewatch thanks to the rewatch podcast.  It's interesting revisiting the stuff... most of the time when I go and rewatch episodes its from season 1 & 2, and occasionally 3.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

I've actually started a season 4 rewatch thanks to the rewatch podcast.  It's interesting revisiting the stuff... most of the time when I go and rewatch episodes its from season 1 & 2, and occasionally 3.

That's how it was for me too. I liked a lot more of season 4 than I thought I would. And so far, Season 5 is not killing me like i thought it would. I remember not watching it originally except for trace bits here and there. I was not happy with the OConnell's being out and it was my silent protest type of thing. Looking at it now I can appreciate it much differently.

245 (edited by pilight 2016-01-14 07:14:37)

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Season five has some of the same problems as season four in terms of inconsistencies in the overall season arc.  Taken individually there are several really good episodes here.  There's a reason the 5th season ratings were good enough to merit renewal.

For the next podcast: The Unstuck Man is probably as good as could be expected for an episode where you're replacing half the cast.  Applied Physics is one of the best episodes of the whole series and by far the best of this season.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

I wonder if they're going to retire the Alan Rickman impression now

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Liking the behind the scenes stuff as ever, ireactions.

It's good to hear that Jerry's matured and come down to earth, and it was touching to hear that he keeps a photo of the original cast in his house. I wish that video was still online, too.

I do hope they can get back together one day. Not even to act, necessarily, but just for a reunion, maybe an interview. It would just be nice to think of them reuniting on good terms one last time.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

I've been writing up the notes ahead of time for the boys so I can get back to writing scripts. I just wrote up the trivia for a particular episode near the end, and in discussing it, I felt compelled to write up a list and description of The Ten Most Hated People in SLIDERS.

There's also "Cleavant Derricks ****ing hated this episode" and "This was the point where Cleavant lost all hope for SLIDERS and knew it was game over."

Re: Rewatch Podcast

New episode up. We're delving into S5 beginning with "The Unstuck Man" and "Applied Physics"

Re: Rewatch Podcast

pilight wrote:

I wonder if they're going to retire the Alan Rickman impression now

We were actually going to retire the whole Quick Impressions bit for the new season but since the behind the scenes stuff and deleted scenes is on par with how we did season 4, we decided to keep it in!

Alan Rickman lives on for us!

Re: Rewatch Podcast

tom2point0 wrote:
pilight wrote:

I wonder if they're going to retire the Alan Rickman impression now

We were actually going to retire the whole Quick Impressions bit for the new season but since the behind the scenes stuff and deleted scenes is on par with how we did season 4, we decided to keep it in!

Alan Rickman lives on for us!

Whoa, it's the voice of the DEAD!

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Behind the Scenes Information Courtesy of Temporal Flux

The Unstuck Man

  • This information comes from Temporal Flux of DoC and Robert Floyd, who played Mallory (I interviewed him last year for Earth Prime).

  • You can look at my notes on "Revelations" regarding the original plans for writing Jerry out of the series until Jerry refused to appear at all (they were going to do the original "Revelations" plot for episode 5, but end with Quinn escaping Kromagg Prime back home (to the Earth in the Pilot, not the one in "Genesis" but failing to take Rembrandt and Maggie).

  • Quinn would return for the series finale.

  • After Jerry severed all ties with the show, production decided to use old footage of Jerry and Charlie from Season 4 and have them 'morph' into Kromaggs to suggest they'd been replaced at some unspecified point in the previous season.

  • Jerry caught wind of this and blocked Season 5 from using his image or voice.

  • At this point, Keith Damron came up with the idea of Quinn regenerating into a different actor while still being the same character. He stole this regeneration concept from DOCTOR WHO.

  • A casting search located Robert Floyd, who'd been in numerous stageplays and guest-shows and was a classically trained Shakespearean actor (although his studies at the Royal Academy in England were curtailed due to a death in the family and a return to the States to be there for his loved ones).

  • Floyd bore some resemblance to Jerry and was hired on that basis. Looking at the Season 5 production, I get the sense he was not hired for his acting talent even though he was an incredibly gifted and devoted performer who had refined his craft magnificently with extensive training and experience.

  • According to Robert Floyd, the production was *extremely* unclear on whether he was playing Quinn Mallory in a different body or if he was playing a different character who could access Quinn's memories or if he was playing a merged version where both personalities had melded into a new persona. The script pages were contradictory.

  • (These contradictory pieces of information were also passed onto the Season 5 freelance writers who wrote most of Season 5's cripts, resulting in a seriously schizophrenic depiction of Mallory for Season 5, but we'll get into that later.)

  • Mr. Floyd (or Rob, as he prefers to be called -- you pick!) had to decide for himself what he wanted to do, so he proceeded to get plenty of Jerry O'Connell episodes on VHS and watch them. He hired an acting coach, John Kirby, to work out how to approach the character.

  • First, Rob worked out how to imitate Jerry's voice and body language; the delivery, the intonations, the accent, the pitch, the diction, the posture, the expressions, the movements, the motions.

  • Then, Rob and Mr. Kirby would review the scripts and pick out individual moments, deciding which parts were Quinn and which parts were 'Mallory.'

  • According to the scripts, although this was never definitively decided, the feeling was that Robert Floyd's Quinn Mallory was a fraternal double of the original Quinn: one of his parents had been a different person from the one that the original Quinn had had.

  • None of this was decided by the production, although a cut line of dialogue from "The Unstuck Man" indicates that Rob's Quinn had Michael Mallory for a father, meaning his mother must have been a different woman.

  • Originally, this episode would have Rembrandt and Mallory agreeing that Mallory would be called "Michael" (his father's name) to differentiate him from Quinn, but this was cut and dropped (although it remains in numerous draft scripts).

  • Rob's feeling was that by the mid-point of the story, Mallory is in control of the body, but Quinn's thoughts, memories and wishes are now informing and guiding his behaviour. That's why, when confronting Geiger, Rob uses Jerry's intonations and body language but doesn't imitate the voice.

  • Rob was very excited about playing Mallory and felt that Mallory would ideally be a character with a constant identity crisis, constantly making the audience guess whether it was Jerry's Quinn or Rob's Quinn talking, and occasionally melding together if in agreement.

  • Rob wanted his Quinn to be the cunning, self-absorbed, practical criminal while Jerry's Quinn would be a moral and idealistic scientist and both would conflict.

  • His only concern: he didn't want to only imitate Jerry, but he was cool with doing that so long as it was one part of an identity crisis.

  • That way, he wouldn't be copying Jerry, he would be paying tribute to "a great actor and the guy who really built the show."

  • Again, this didn't really work out, but you have to admire Rob's devotion and commitment to the role.

  • By that, I mean the opening scene with the body doubles for Jerry and Charlie: they used an unknown voice in production to voice Quinn saying, "Go! Go!"'

  • This doesn't make any sense: why didn't they have Rob impersonate the voice?

  • The answer: there isn't an answer. Rob wasn't called in to record the line and wasn't aware that someone else had performed it; he would have been happy to do it, but nobody asked him to.

  • The truth, according to TF: production didn't seem to expect that Rob to be doing a Jerry O'Connell impression, they were unaware of Rob being a gifted mimic and impressionist.

  • They simply noticed he looked a bit like Jerry.

  • The production, specifically Bill Dial, was also angry at Jerry for leaving SLIDERS under bad terms and not particularly keen on paying tribute to someone he was angry at.

  • Production certainly noticed that Rob could do Jerry's voice, but they didn't bother to change their recording plans and simply went ahead with using an unknown voice -- maybe a sound technician's? -- for the "Go! Go!"

  • SO GOD DAMN STUPID!

  • According to TF: Conrad Bennish Jr. was supposed to be in this episode, playing the doomsday preacher and five additional episodes.

  • Keith Damron, script editor for Season 5, said that Temporal Flux was mistaken / lying / wrong,

  • According to Matt Hutaff, who interviewed Tracy in 2009: prior to Season 5, Bill Dial contacted Tracy Torme and asked: what would Torme like to see in Season 5?

  • Torme said Bennish. Dial agreed. Torme later heard from the actor, Jason Gaffney, saying that plans were in place to fly him out from Vancouver to LA to perform in six episodes.

  • Then suddenly, the deal was cancelled and production was denying this ever happened.

  • Temporal Flux suspects that David Peckinpah simply saw a chance to sabotage something Torme wanted by blocking Gaffney's hiring.

Applied Physics

  • According to Rob: At this point, production still wasn't sure about how Mallory would turn out, and Rob decided to play this episode as Mallory in control of the body but constantly struck with Quinn's memories, which he considered a betrayal of his own body and retriggered the trauma of having once been crippled and unable to use his legs, only this time, it was his whole body.

  • Rob had hopes for this arc: perhaps Mallory would come to appreciate having Quinn's memories. Rob wanted them to share the body as distinct personalities.

  • This episode features Tembi Locke, who had a career playing recurring and single guest roles before SLIDERS. SLIDERS appears to be her first guest role.

  • According to Temporal Flux: The original conception for Dr. Diana Davis: she joined the sliders to betray them.

  • She was secretly looking for a way to help Geiger regain a hold in the multiverse.

  • She wasn't necessarily evil, just trying to save her mentor -- it was unclear how much of an enemy she'd be, but there was no plan to remove her from the series, so she and the sliders would have found a way to stick together.

  • This plan was abruptly aborted halfway into the writing of this episode.

  • The reason: the majority of the scripts for Season 5 were from freelancers and production found it too annoying to try to work in a multi-episode plot among freelance writers who would be working separate from the main writing staff (Chris Black, Keith Damron, Bill Dial) and the other freelancers.

  • This setup is unusual for American TV: usually, shows have a huge writing staff, but Season 5's budget kept them at three people plus David Peckinpah, who, at this time, was busy executive producing TURKS.

  • This is also the reason why the Mallory identity crisis would be abandoned.

  • The production couldn't keep it straight whether Mallory was a merged personality of both Jerry and Rob in a new persona, Rob with Jerry's memories, Jerry in Rob's body -- so the freelance writers got conflicting notes and instructions.

  • Some were told to write Michael' (as he was still being called) as a generic male lead, others were told to script him as a scientist some were asked to write him as a criminal.

  • Production would have to rewrite the scripts afterwards to make it consistent.

  • After all the headaches with this, the multi-episode plot for Diana was dropped as well.

  • "Applied Physics" is one of the most popular episodes of Season 5.

  • Chris Black studied past episodes extensively to write it, wanting to really mine Jerry's departure for emotion and had to rewatch episodes to choose clips that didn't include Jerry (as he'd blocked the use of his image).

  • During the writing of this episode, Bill Dial noticed that the Sci-Fi Channel was not sending him notes on scripts and not reviewing their cuts of the episodes.

  • TF points to this episode: note how the Kromagg's gun is aimed at Mallory's chest. Standards and practices for Sci-Fi at the time did not allow firearms to be aimed at heads.

  • Dial sent Sci-Fi pages where a character's head gets blown off.
    Sci-Fi sent no response, indicating they weren't reading the scripts.

  • This made Bill Dial very unhappy with dire consequences for SLIDERS to follow.

253 (edited by RewatchPodcast 2016-01-25 02:44:53)

Re: Rewatch Podcast

New episode up! Continuing with season 5 we discuss "Strangers and Comrades" and "The Great Work" http://rewatchpodcast.podomatic.com/ent … 8_51-08_00

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Behind the Scenes Information Courtesy of Temporal Flux, Keith Damron and Robert Floyd

Strangers and Comrades Trivia

•  This episode was written by Keith Damron, story editor for season 5.
•  He was always going to write episode 3 of Season 5.
•  Originally, the third episode of Season 5 was going to focus on Rembrandt.
•  On a Victorian-steampunk era world, Rembrandt would be caught up in an inventor's dream of exploring space.
•  He would be tempted to leave Maggie, Mallory and Diana, continuing the exploration of how without Jerry O'Connell, the show would collapse and have to be rebuilt.
•  Damron says this was too expensive, so he offered a trench warfare idea instead.
•  I do not believe Damron's claims that the story was rejected on cost grounds. The trench warfare story with tanks and gunfire and explosions would have been just as costly.
•  Likely, it was felt that Victorian steampunk costumes, sets and props were complicated while explosions are easier. Less thought. Less effort.
•  This episode also declares the Season 4 quest for the Kromagg Prime superweapon to be over.
•  Damron, in a chat, said that he pushed to end the Season 4 arc this way so that the sliders would not have to address this plot in every episode and could focus solely on single episode adventures.
•  It was felt that with the ongoing quest to stick Colin and split the Quinns, searching for Kromagg Prime was one ongoing plot too many.
•  For whatever reason, this episode fails to explain why the sliders haven't slid to Kromagg Prime with the Slidecage-bypassing equations.
•  Or why they didn't try using a Slidewave or the virus in "Mother and Child" or try stealing the weapon in "Revelations" even if it was from the wrong Earth.
•  This episode was written during a period when it was still undecided if Mallory would be a composite of Jerry and Rob, Jerry's mind in Rob's body or Rob with access to Jerry's memories, with the freelance writers getting conflicting notes.
•  According to Rob, the writers were extremely undecided on who Mallory would be during this stage.
•  As a result, Rob was scripted generically with the possibility of adding in Jerry-moments that were not added in.

The Great Work Trivia

•  We have our first freelance script of the season from writer Robert Masello.
•  Masello's original idea  for this episode: the sliders encounter an interdimensional library that is protecting information and history from the Kromaggs.
•  However, with "Strangers and Comrades" having Kromaggs, Dial and Damron decided to alter the story.
•  They made the futuristic interdimensional library a primitive island monastery with only the knowledge of this single world.
•  They removed the Kromaggs.
•  Dial and Damron heavily rewrote the story to make it as cheap and easy to film as possible.
•  If you look at this story, you can see all the problems of "Revelations," the Season 4 finale that was also scripted by Bill Dial off somebody else's story.
•  The action sequences and myth-arc relevant scenes have been removed.
•  The page count is then padded by stretching out existing scenes and adding new scenes with the new dialogue consisting largely of characters reiterating information that was already established.
•  This was Bill Dial's approach to running SLIDERS in Season 5, an approach that Damron followed in his own rewrites.
•  Several Season 5 episodes feature this overstretched, repetitive rewrite style, especially in "Please Press One," "The Java Jive," "Requiem," "Map of the Mind," "To Catch a Slider," "Dust" and "Eye of the Storm."
•  Other alterations: Masello told by production to write Mallory as a melded personality of both Rob and Jerry.
•  The script originally had Mallory using Quinn's scientific knowledge in performing the data-to-crystal transfer.
•  This was removed as Dial and Damron lost interest in the Mallory-identity crisis (for reasons to be further explored in the next episode's notes).
•  Matt Hutaff felt that "Strangers and Comrades," ideally, should have been the Victorian steampunk episode and "The Great Work" should have had the Kromaggs attacking the interdimensional library -- with the library's technology and information used to wrap up the Season 4 arc in some way.
•  Instead, "The Great Work" is simply overstretched fragments of a fractured story.
•  This attitude to scripting really disappointed actor Robert Floyd, who found it obnoxious to repeat already established information.
•  Floyd would meet with Bill Dial constantly, voicing his concerns about the repetitive scripts.
•  Floyd: "At least once a week, I would go in to see him. He would always have time and he would always work with me. We would go to lunch and he was a really special guy, a really loving guy who absolutely adored the show. He was so smart. But I felt like the producers and the writers were so under the gun to produce the show that they just didn’t have the answers."
•  The fans referred to episodes like "The Great Work" on the Bboard as suffering from "Season 5 Sabotage."
•  According to Temporal Flux, Bill Dial would systematically take great ideas like an interdimensional library and apply his bizarre scripting approach to rewrite them into unwatchable tedium.
•  Why was Bill Dial treating his own show in such a shabby manner for Season 5, especially when his nemesis, Marc Scott Zicree, had quit?
•  My theory: Bill Dial had dependent personality disorder.
•  He was overly dependent upon the encouragement and praise of others.
•  Before Season 5, Dial contacted Tracy Torme and Dial seemed hell-bent on impressing Torme, showering Torme in his plans for Season 5 with Jerry in six episodes.
•  Dial attempted to present Marc Scott Zicree's Season 4 finale story as Dial's own Season 5, Episode 5 story.
•  He wanted Torme to like him and was taking credit for Zicree's stories.
•  When the Sci-Fi Channel cut off contact with SLIDERS, Dial became depressed.
•  Temporal Flux provides a clear account of the Sci-Fi Channel's indifference to the show.
•  Sci-Fi had renewed SLIDERS for Season 5, but renewed too late to keep Jerry O'Connell.
•  Unable to rescind the renewal, they were now obligated to air a Season 5 they assumed would fail.
•  They stopped reading scripts or reviewing episodes.
•  They gave up on SLIDERS and I think this made Dial so angry and unhappy that he simply couldn't bring his A-game to the show, an A-game he'd shown in "Prophets and Loss" and "Asylum."
•  In contrast, Torme would have thrived under an indifferent network.
•  Torme would have loved to make SLIDERS with no network executives weighing in on his stories.
•  Dial, in contrast, felt abandoned and his writing in Season 5 reflects this unhappy state.
•  My thinking is that someone with such a poor sense of self maybe shouldn't be working in managerial positions.

255 (edited by pilight 2016-01-25 09:00:02)

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Oh God, that nonsense about "This isn't Earth".  Look, Diana was mistaken.  Either the fact of being in hyperspace or the buffer that's keeping them from sliding out is affecting her readings.  That's the simplest and most logical explanation.

ETA: Hey, they read my email which says pretty much the same thing!

Re: Rewatch Podcast

The whole thing with Diana experiencing combat stress makes me really wish they'd been able to continue the Kromagg war plot with Wade on the team.

We know Rembrandt got captured by the Kromaggs and it made him want violent revenge. We also know that Wade is a gun-hating pacifist, and Rembrandt is, at least if you take season 3 seriously, an ex-military officer. Rembrandt's response is about what you'd expect. But what would Wade's response have been to having to fight in a war?

On the one hand, like I said, Wade hates violence and warfare. She's a hippie at heart, and she was always very critical of Maggie's military persona and trigger-happiness. We're pretty sure she's never seen combat, and would probably find it very distressing.

On the other hand, we've seen that it's possible for an alternate Wade to be a military commander. How would being in a Kromagg camp change our Wade's feelings? Would she hold onto her pacifism, or would the trauma stir her to fight? Or would it be a mix of the two - a deep hatred of the Kromaggs and desire to see them wiped out combined with an utter inability to handle the harshness of war?

And how would this changed Wade play off Rembrandt's sudden thirst for vengeance? By the time season 3 ends, we're seeing a Wade and Rembrandt who have become very close friends - possibly even closer than Wade and Quinn at this point. How would Wade react to one of her best friends turning vengeful? How would Rembrandt react if Wade was reluctant to fight?

So much missed opportunity for character development...

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Okay. I've finished off all the trivia notes for Season 5, the Feature Film that Never Was and the 2009 Series Finale That Never Was. I just need to rewatch two more episodes ("To Catch a Slider" and "The Seer") for deleted scenes and then all my research for the Rewatch Podcast is done.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

This weeks episode is up for "New Gods for Old" and "Please Press One"

Re: Rewatch Podcast

I love coffee and I love tea
I love the java jive and it loves me


All respect to the Ink Spots.  That's where the title comes from.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Behind the Scenes Information Courtesy of Temporal Flux, Keith Damron and Robert Floyd

New Gods for Old Trivia
•    According to TF: This script was originally called "God's Country," written for Season 4 with all the sliders getting infected by nanites except Colin.
•    It wasn't filmed in Season 4, but rewritten and filmed for Season 5.
•    It was written by David Gerrold, a prolific science fiction writer who is famous for the Tribbles episode of STAR TREK and the time travel novel, THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF. It was a truly seminal novel about how -- oh, wait, you know this one. Never mind.
•    After two episodes where the Jerry/Rob identity crisis for Mallory was ignored, "New Gods for Old" uses the nanites to definitively declare that Jerry has been erased.
•    According to TF: Part of this was due to Dial's unwillingness to put any effort into showing Jerry O'Connell any respect in the series due to his anger towards Jerry for leaving the show.
•    The other part: Damron and Dial were having trouble managing the freelance writers.
•    They had given conflicting notes to the freelancers: some had been told to write Mallory with the name "Michael," while others had been told to use "Quinn-2" or "Quinn" or "Mallory."
•    Some had been told that the character was a Jerry/Rob blend, others had been told it was Jerry in Rob's body, others had been told it was Rob with a secondary set of memories from Jerry.
•    With all these contradictions and Dial's hostility towards Jerry O'Connell, the decision was made to just give up on the identity crisis arc. Dealing with it was interfering with Dial's preference for playing Solitaire during writers room meetings.
•    As a result: the scripts for "Strangers and Comrades" had no Quinn-moments added and "The Great Work" had all the Quinn-moments removed.
•    "New Gods for Old" declared that Quinn was gone now.
•    Robert Floyd was deeply disappointed by this episode.
•    Robert Floyd also loves this episode.
•    He called it an episode that had "Great writing with a great concept!" The ruminations on free will, self-harm, self-determination, collective thought -- he adored it.
•    And then, with the ending, Floyd said, "There was an emptiness. It took some cards off the table -- the one thing I wish we could have kept more than anything."
•    He was very disappointed that Quinn was gone.
•    On the Bboard, fans speculated that Floyd had asked the producers to end the merging plot so he wouldn't have to imitate Jerry.
•    Floyd flat out denies this. "I loved having them both; it was more fun to play as an actor."
•    He said he had gotten pretty good at his Jerry impression and could have kept it up for a whole season, although his preference was to do two minds in conflict so that imitating Jerry would be one part of a complex identity crisis.
•    Floyd approached Bill Dial and according to Floyd, Dial said that he felt "New Gods for Old" was one of Season 5's best scripts and he didn't want to change a thing about it.
•    Dial's statement is in stark contradiction to confirmed facts: "New Gods for Old" was a Season 4 purchase that had seen four different drafts.
•    Which leaves us with only one explanation from TF: Dial didn't want to rewrite all the freelance scripts to be consistent in featuring the dual personalities.
•    It was too much work. Solitaire was calling.

Please Press One Trivia
•    This episode was considered by Keith Damron to be William Bigelow paying homage to Season 1 episodes where the sliders encounter and defeat a dystopian regime.
•    Throughout Season 5, the production had a standing refusal against buying any stories they considered formulaic and declared their desire to avoid stories with the sliders teaming up with the local resistance.
•    (This also led to refusing broad alternate history concepts like a world where Nazis won WWII or where the South won the Civil War.)
•    However, Damron thought it would be great to do a story about the customer service experience from hell.
•    Interestingly, the episode's script is full of references to THE PRISONER, and around the time Season 5 of SLIDERS was filming, THE PRISONER star Patrick McGoohan was directing a COLUMBO TV movie on the stage next door to the Chandler.
•    Damron was deeply disappointed by the 'scoop' that abducts Maggie and the 'mini-scoop' that chases her around later.
•    The 'scoop' was meant to be a frightening truck with a mechanical claw to capture Maggie, and from reading the script's allusions to THE PRISONER, it's meant to be a Rover-esque horror.
•    (This might not make much sense to you if you're unfamiliar with THE PRISONER.)
•    Instead, one was a generic black van and the other was like a remote controlled car.
•    The claw was replaced with a tractor beam.
•    Damron added the scenes where Rembrandt reprimands Mallory for knowing how to steal a car in order to pad out the running length of the episode.
•    Arlo was originally a high tech rebel hacker teenager.
•    Damron rewrote the character into a disgruntled Data Universal employee.
•    With only three guest-stars and generic hallways, "Please Press One" is one of the cheapest episodes of Season 5, made due to determined penny pinching.
•    At this point, it was definitively known that Season 5 would be the final season of SLIDERS.
•    With no support from the Sci-Fi Channel and Sci-Fi having committed their future funding to THE INVISIBLE MAN and FIRST WAVE, they'd allocated nothing for SLIDERS.
•    Production knew this, and were therefore making plans.
•    The economics of Season 5 allowed the producers to make episodes for less than the $700,000 - $850,000 per episode, then move the saved funds to a subsequent episode.
•    This would be done on several episodes to come in order to set aside money for an epic series finale.
•    This epic series finale would never be filmed.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Maybe, now that it's at this point in the series, I should continue watching from where I left off...

...Nah.

Someday, maybe, but not today.

Author, artist, sci-fi nerd, rebel against the world, and self-proclaimed eccentric.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

ME: "I'm stuck on this part of the 'Net Worth' Redux script. I've finished everything else, I've fixed all the other plot problems in the story, except -- I can't figure out how Quinn is supposed to survive getting shot at with a bazooka that brings the hotel crashing down around him. I'm really starting to lose hope that I can come up with a solution."

MATT: "Why do they have to fire a bazooka? Is that set in stone? Couldn't the Rovers or whatever the fuck they are called have pirated a piece of tech from the Onliners? Some pulse technology that knocks everyone out without damaging the building?"

ME: "But the bazooka!"

MATT: "I mean, you're trying to reverse engineer a solution to a problem that is fundamentally stupid. So just change the problem to something less stupid. That whole scene is tard-level dumb, you should come up with a completely different scenario. Barring that, change the nature of the weapon and be done with it."

ME: "I didn't want to see it that way, I guess. I wanted to see it as an impossible situation, which Quinn tends to thrive on."

MATT: "Quinn doesn't thrive on that stuff."

ME: "What!?"

MATT: "He is adaptable at BEST. Quinn is not MacGyver. He is not going to engineer a solution out of getting hit by a bazooka."

ME: "MacGyver?"

MATT: "Have you never seen MACGYVER?"

ME: "Is that a TV show?"

MATT: "Are... are you fucking with me right now?"

[ME: "I've heard it used as a verb."

MATT: "I am gobsmacked."]

ME: "I'm reading the Wikipedia entry on MACGYVER now. But I always thought the best way to handle Quinn was to put the character in insane, impossible, no-win situations. And then come up with some absurd, implausible, nonsensical contrivance that allows him to succeed while using his genius to dismiss any plot problems that may result."

MATT: "See, and that's a problem that was perpetuated by the writers. Each member of the team had a particular skillset. Quinn was the enthusiastic genius. Arturo was the realist, the skeptic. Rembrandt was the street-smart voice. Literally, the voice. And Wade was the devil-may-care element of playful chaos. As time went on more and more things were subsumed by Quinn because he was easiest to write for -- he was the lead, after all. So he became the hacker, the sweet-talker, the fucking lockpick master. But if you are looking at a basics approach, Quinn should be totally out of his element when staring down a bazooka."

ME: "This Wikpedia page on MACGYVER is really inspiring. This reads like the greatest TV show ever made, Matt. 'The clever solutions MacGyver implemented to seemingly unsolvable problems – often in life-or-death situations requiring him to improvise complex devices in a matter of minutes – were a major attraction of the show, which was praised for generating interest in the applied sciences, particularly engineering, and for providing entertaining storylines.' This is totally what Quinn should be!"   

MATT: "I'm telling you -- Rembrandt needs to take center stage for a moment. Arturo needs to be a disbelieving boob."

ME: "Matt, MacGyver is the perfect model for Quinn Mallory! Quinn is going to beat that bazooka even if it kills me. MacGyver will lead the way!"

MATT: "God help us."

Re: Rewatch Podcast

I like how you edit out my amazing use of the word "gobsmacked" in our private conversation but manage to keep in my numerous "fucks" and casual mention of "tard-level dumb." smile

Earth Prime | The Definitive Source for Sliders™

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Okay, I added "gobsmacked" back in.

In other news, I have sent Sliders Rewatch all the deleted scenes and trivia for Season 5 now -- just hit send on an E-mail containing all the notes for "To Catch a Slider," "Dust," "Eye of the Storm," "The Seer," the feature film (never made), and the 2009 series finale outlined by Tracy Torme (never made). While I know a lot about SLIDERS thanks to Temporal Flux, I know far, far less about LOIS AND CLARK, so I suspect this marks the conclusion of my contributions to the Rewatch Podcast unless they want a guest. Looking forward to hearing what they do next!

Behind the Scenes Information Courtesy of Temporal Flux

A Current Affair Trivia
•    Information here is from Keith Damron.
•    This episode was written by the infamous Steve Stoliar, personal friend of David Peckinpah, former personal assistant to Groucho Marx and writer of Paradise Lost," largely considered upon its air date to be the worst episode of SLIDERS ever made.
•    He also wrote Season 4's "Net Worth," largely infamous for reportedly being a Sabrina Lloyd story without Sabrina Lloyd.
•    Stoliar pitched SLIDERS does the Lewinsky story.
•    It was wildly popular with Dial, Peckinpah and Black, but not Damron.
•    Keith Damron thought it was unlikely Universal would approve this story.
•    It was approved.
•    The script came in.
•    Damron, busy with other episodes, had absolutely no time -- none whatsoever -- to rewrite the script, and it was filmed almost entirely as written.
•    Unlike "Paradise Lost" (written according to production's preferences for monster movies and hacked up before and during filming) and "Net Worth" (crippled), this episode is genuinely representative of Steve Stoliar's skills as a writer.
•    Stoliar pitches a  simple, straightforward concept.
•    There's some weaknesses on display such as Rembrandt, Diana and Mallory's inability to realize why Maggie was disguised and some absurdities like the gang entering a room with the President despite holding a device that's counting down.
•    But there's also tremendous effort at world-building and an effort to define all the characters and make them more than their plot functions.
•    Paradoxically, there's also their reduction to plot functions: Bobby Hawks is appalled by the idea of faking a story, but ultimately goes along with it because the episode needed to wrap up.
•    There's effective, good-natured humour without the marked mean spiritedness of other SLIDERS stories from this era.
•    This episode had no script editor working on it.
•    Steve Stoliar is a decent writer. Not a master of the format, but he's decent.
•    SLIDERS blogger Ian McDuffie remarked that script-editor Keith Damron was arguably the worst writer to ever work on SLIDERS, but that "Sometimes, we are blessed with his days off."
•    Bobby Hawks is a pastiche of Matt Drudge.
•    President Jeffrey Williams is a pastiche of Bill Clinton, right down to the hand gestures.
•    Production did not have enough extras for the final press conference, so the extras were filmed in four separate shots and the shots were them combined into a single shot.
•    This episode, for scenes not filmed in the Chandler, uses a leftover set from the COLUMBO TV movie, "Ashes to Ashes."
•    (Does it really look so different from the Chandler that it made a difference?)
•    Oddly, that COLUMBO TV movie was directed by Patrick McGoohan, whose writing, acting and directing on THE PRISONER were homaged in the script for "Please Press One."
•    McGoohan stumbled into Keith Damron's office one day when looking for the bathroom, disappointing Damron, who wanted to pitch a PRISONER reboot -- and I admit that a Damron-PRISONER couldn't have been any worse than the actual reboot.

The Java Jive Trivia
•    The information regarding this episode is from Matt Hutaff of Earth Prime dot com and Season 5 script editor Keith Damron.
•    This is the first episode of SLIDERS with a Rembrandt double that doesn't feature Clinton Derricks Carroll.  (Error: I mistakenly thought Clinton was in "The Alternateville Horror." He isn't.)
•    This episode was written by Janét Saunders, David Peckinpah's assistant since Season 3.
•    They had a good relationship and Janét pitched him this episode for Season 5 and also another to come.
•    Janét had explored the Universal Backlot and found locations that could be used in this story.
•    In the original story, there was a lot of Depression-era gangster action with the story opening with Rembrandt rescuing Angie from the Dropper Daddy's Gang who just killed her boyfriend.
•    Angie was not a manager at the Velvet Slipper, merely a singer who helps Rembrandt get a job as a bass player.
•    Prohibition on alcohol never ended in this version; there was nothing about caffeine being illegal, and Angie's boyfriend was informing on some alcohol producing gangsters.
•    Angie would get kidnapped and the sliders would try to rescue her and fail, but succeed in bringing down the gangsters.
•    It was meant to be a showcase for Rembrandt and Cleavant's singing.
•    The original title of the pitch was "Black and Bluesey" and can be seen in the Odds and Ends at EP.COM.
•    Damron and Dial decided that caffeine would be illegal to add more of an alt-world flavour, which I think was a good idea.
•    However, the final product was impaired due to lifeless direction and a low music budget.
•    Music composer Danny Lux was too busy with scoring SLIDERS and THE PRACTICE and ALLY MCBEAL.
•    Bill Dial turned to songwriter friend Peter Andrews to write "He Must be Dreaming."
•    The filming of this episode was a popular event; even the hands-off Sci-Fi executives came to set to watch the musical performances.
•    According to Temporal Flux: Dial and Damron needed to make this episode another low-cost effort in order to redirect the money to the epic and expensive series finale.
•    This was, upon airing, considered to be one of the worst episodes of SLIDERS ever made.
•    But then, SLIDERS managed to make some more that were even worse.

Return of Maggie Beckett
•    Information here is from Temporal Flux and Keith Damron.
This is another episode by Chris Black ("Common Ground," "The Alternateville Horror," "Slide By Wire," "Way Out West" and "Applied Physics."
•    As with all Black episodes, there is a strong fascination with Maggie and Kari Wuhrer.
•    Chris Black wanted to address the role of Maggie's father in her life and Dial and Peckinpah were happy to let him do what he liked.
•    However, the prop department negligently got Maggie's last name wrong.
•    There is no real story behind this, but it speaks to how the production really didn't care about what the hell they were doing even if writers here and there did.
•    The character of the General in this episode is meant to be Tom Beckett from QUANTUM LEAP -- albeit unofficially.
•    Originally, the title for this episode was "Waiting for Beckett," but the title didn't clear the legal department for some reason. It was a reference to the Samuel Beckett play, WAITING FOR GODOT.
•    In Seasons 4 to 5, numerous space stories had been pitched, especially with the sliders landing in a spacecraft seconds before it launches.
•    Most of these stories were rejected until Chris Black pitched this one.
•    Damron and Black were then put in competition, both to create a space-based pitch that Dial and Peckinpah would agree to buy.
•    Damron pitched a sliders-land-in-a-launching spaceship story where the sliders accidentally take the spaceship with them to another world with an overpopulation crisis and the sliders have to decide whether to hand over the spaceship or withhold it -- because without the spaceship, they can't slide off this world.
•    Chris Black pitched something far simpler and his pitch was bought.
Damron good-naturedly declared it to be his favourite episode of Season 5.
•    This is the most popular episode of Season 5 among the fan base.

Easy Slider
•    Information below is from Temporal Flux of Dimension of Continuity.
•    This story was pitched because David Peckinpah's obsession with motorcycles was well-known to the staff, especially his assistant and the writer of this episode, Janét Saunders.
•    She thought he would insist on buying it.
•    Peckinpah was not in a lead role for Season 5, but he was technically still the boss.
•    The original pitch featured Kari Wuhrer heavily and was a Maggie love story.
•    However, Peckinpah's distance from the show meant he wasn't pushing for this episode to be made and it was on the verge of being rejected.
•    Then his mistress -- no, not his wife -- mentioned that a motorcycle episode could offer the chance for her to do some stuntwork.
•    Peckinpah commissioned the episode for this reason, although his stated reason was that he liked the costuming opportunities for Kari. "I see Kari in tight leather -- go with it!"
•    This Kari costume never happened due to rewrites.
•    According to Temporal Flux: When Cleavant Derricks heard about Peckinpah commissioning an episode to suit his girlfriend, he lost all hope for SLIDERS.
•    Cleavant realized that the show was not about making a series, it was just Peckinpah and Dial screwing around and with Sci-Fi unlikely to renew for another season after O'Connell's departure made them lose all faith, this was most definitely the end.
•    The other reason Cleavant was sure no renewal was coming: he knew Sci-Fi had committed their budget elsewhere for the next season of TV; they'd set nothing side for a sixth season of SLIDERS.
•    Robert Floyd, in contrast, was sure there would be a Season 6 -- the ratings were excellent, he noted. Sci-Fi would have to be insane to cancel their highest rated series.
•    Surely, Rob felt, given SLIDERS' first-place position on Sci-Fi, they would find the money somewhere.
•    Never in the history of SLIDERS has anyone ever been so very, very wrong.
•    This episode is also infamous for another reason: before Season 5, there was a prominent SLIDERS side run by a man with the handle of "The Expert."
•    The Expert had a lot of behind the scenes information on SLIDERS, frequently revealing plots of future episodes (although he would't ruin them). He had contacts in production.
•    Before Season 5, the Expert posted a ton of information on what was coming with episode plots such as Conrad Bennish Jr. returning, Colin getting blown up, etc..
•    Temporal Flux also revealed the plan for Bennish to return for Season 5.
•    The Expert also revealed that one planned episode for Season 5 was "Sleepless in San Francisco," a Maggie love story and various details of this story.
•    In a chat, Season 5 script editor Keith Damron declared that the Expert and Temporal Flux had made up all their claims and that none of these events would take place in the show.
•    Keith Damron said there was no "Sleepless in San Francisco" story.
•    Shortly after this, the Expert took down his site.
•    Fans theorize that these leaks were a sting operation to identify the Expert's contact, and he took down his site to protect his source.
•    The Expert's episode capsules remain online at EarthPrime.com and Temporal Flux purchased most of the Expert's SLIDERS materials.
•    I would also add that TF's reveals and exposes would, in time, come to equal if not dwarf the Expert's output.
•    Temporal Flux insisted that Jason Gaffney (who played Bennish) had been booked for appearances only for this to be abruptly cancelled and that the Expert's reports had not been wrong -- although, as with any TV show, some stories might not make it to air as initially planned (and reported on by the Expert).
•    Keith Damron maintained in chats that TF and the Expert were liars and had fabricated "Sleepless in San Francisco" and the Bennish arc.
•    This left a nasty impression on SLIDERS fandom. The Expert and TF are beloved figures of fandom.
•    Keith Damron, in contrast, was seen as the mediocre writer of "Lipschitz Live" and considered to have little to no credibility when put against the Expert or TF.
•    It's amusing that someone employed by the show was seen as an untrustworthy charlatan.
•    Meanwhile, fan figures of no official standing were seen as definitive authorities on the series.
•    Keith Damron was seen as attacking Temporal Flux and the Expert, and by extension, attacking the SLIDERS fan base who were the only reason Damron had a job in Seasons 4 - 5.
•    SLIDERS would never have made it to Season 3 or 4 or 5 without that devoted and campaigning audience.
•    Later on, Matt Hutaff was able to get his hands on a pitch for "Easy Slider." The original version as pitched.
•    This original pitch was exactly in line with the Expert's information on "Sleepless in San Francisco," the pitch Damron claimed didn't exist, the pitch Damron claimed that TF and the Expert had fabricated.
•    It was a rough version of what would become "Easy Slider" with the aired episode having made it Mallory's love story instead of Maggie's.
•    Matt was also able to get Tracy Torme to definitively confirm that Bennish had been scheduled for Season 5.
•    This made it blatantly clear that Damron, for whatever reason, had been lying and had done so with great malice towards the Expert and Temporal Flux as well as the fans, seeking to portray the fan experts as liars.
•    For this reason, moreso than his bad scripts and bad editing, Keith Damron is the second most hated man in SLIDERS.

1) David Peckinpah
2) Keith Damron, hated for his 'outreach' to SLIDERS fans and also for his Year 5 Journal where every bad Season 5 decision is documented.
3) Bill Dial, hated for the Season 5 finale and Season 5 in general as well as sabotaging Season 4.
4) Jerry O'Connell, hated for abandoning the show and lying about why, claiming that there was a Season 5 budget cut (there wasn't).
5) Kari Wuhrer, hated for abusing Sabrina Lloyd.
6) Peter Roth, hated as the FOX executive who demanded John Rhys-Davies be fired
7) Robert Greenblatt, hated as the FOX President who declared the Season 3 monster episodes to be superior to Seasons 1 - 2.
8) Steve Stoliar, hated for writing "Paradise Lost."
9) William Bigelow, hated for writing "The Chasm."
10) Doug Molitor for the Slide it Yourself fiasco.

•    The story original "Easy Slider" pitch is here: http://earthprime.com/etcetera/the-original-easy-slider
•    There exists the possibility that Damron, as an staff member, was obligated to say what he was told to say by his employers.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Tom and Cory remarked, when talking about "Please Press One," that they didn't get why Mallory is described in Bboard posts and newsgroup posts as a "con man" character. There is little to indicate this onscreen. This was something Robert Floyd and Bill Dial talked about in interviews; how Jerry's Quinn was a scientist and Rob's Quinn would be a street-smart criminal. Onscreen, this doesn't really play out and it's a massive misconception and misunderstanding. Jerry's Quinn was perfectly street-smart in his own way. As early as "Prince of Wails," he convinces an armed resistance to consider him an ally. Quinn could also be arrogant and self-absorbed, so the idea that Quinn was some sort of Steve Urkel geek while Rob's Quinn could be the muscle is just baffling. I'm not really sure how to make the identity crisis work in terms of what we saw onscreen.

My suggestion would be to present Mallory as a genius just like Quinn -- except Mallory's genius is myopically focused on money and little else; his grasp of mathematics extends only as far as finances and is useless for sliding and science, and with a running joke that the sliders would never consider Mallory's moneymaking scam artist skills to be admirable or even recognize it as intelligence.

One thing I have been trying to do for SLIDERS REBORN is create a role for Robert Floyd. A role where he could play Mallory and be interesting without having to impersonate Jerry -- in fact, they'd be onscreen together in a buddy cop sort of way. But I've been unable to figure out Mallory's character. It's a bit embarrassing -- "Slide Effects" was me selecting what I liked about SLIDERS and dismissing all the rest, while SLIDERS REBORN has me trying to embrace every facet of the series -- but Mallory and Colin are two characters I just can't figure out.

I don't care about Colin in the slightest, but I feel really bad about Mallory's exclusion, because Rob *really* engaged with SLIDERS. It is the worst reviewed season, described by the series creator as the worst year of the show with the production team creatively disengaging from the show and documenting their disinterest online. But Rob did his very best with the material and he paid tribute to Jerry O'Connell and Quinn Mallory and he honoured them -- which makes me feel bad that I have yet to find a way to return the favour in my anniversary special.

266 (edited by pilight 2016-02-06 23:09:19)

Re: Rewatch Podcast

It's hard to get a grip on Mallory because he was written so inconsistently.  The people actually running the show couldn't decide who he was, I don't know how we're supposed to.

267 (edited by RewatchPodcast 2016-02-08 18:43:30)

Re: Rewatch Podcast

We're really on the home stretch for the Sliders Rewatch. We all love Sliders but we hope you'll stick with us as we get into Lois & Clark after this!!! But, our latest episode is live now where we discuss "A Current Affair" and "The Java Jive" http://rewatchpodcast.podomatic.com/ent … 0_36-08_00

Re: Rewatch Podcast

In a hilarious note, the boys erroneously refer to "Paradise Lost" as the episode with animal human hybrids -- but later, they agree that "A Current Affair" wasn't as bad as the "worm crap" episode! But all things being equal, Tom notes a mistake in my notes -- I thought Clinton Derricks Carroll was in "The Alternateville Horror"! I can't remember why I thought this. Maybe I thought I saw Clinton in "Alternateville" in the wideshot with all the doubles?

This is the first time in recorded history that I have made a mistake. Now I know how the rest of you must feel.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Oh man, it's gonna be sad when y'all are done with Sliders!

Maybe you could review some of Sabrina Lloyd's stuff for us before you have to jump? I know one of you (can't remember who) went through her filmography a while back. That said, I know you do have plans for the sendoff...

270 (edited by RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan 2016-02-09 13:15:46)

Re: Rewatch Podcast

ireactions wrote:

Okay, I added "gobsmacked" back in.

In other news, I have sent Sliders Rewatch all the deleted scenes and trivia for Season 5 now -- just hit send on an E-mail containing all the notes for "To Catch a Slider," "Dust," "Eye of the Storm," "The Seer," the feature film (never made), and the 2009 series finale outlined by Tracy Torme (never made). While I know a lot about SLIDERS thanks to Temporal Flux, I know far, far less about LOIS AND CLARK, so I suspect this marks the conclusion of my contributions to the Rewatch Podcast unless they want a guest. Looking forward to hearing what they do next!


Your Sliderscast "episode" was so great, I hope we get more of those from you.


The Rewatch guys have done an incredible job. And thankfully, Sliderscast is back again and are terrific as well.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Wow, getting a bit teary eyed thinking about wrapping up our Sliders discussions! You guys have been so great and we couldn't ask for a better group of listeners who love the show as much (or even more) as us. Well, here is episode 39 in which we discuss "The Return of Maggie Beckett" and "Easy Sliders." http://rewatchpodcast.podomatic.com/ent … 1_15-08_00

Re: Rewatch Podcast

All good things must end... but you guys've been amazing. And still will be amazing, I'm sure, going forward.

Thank you in advance, for being there with us through all of it, again.

273 (edited by RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan 2016-02-17 08:48:17)

Re: Rewatch Podcast

RewatchPodcast wrote:

Wow, getting a bit teary eyed thinking about wrapping up our Sliders discussions! You guys have been so great and we couldn't ask for a better group of listeners who love the show as much (or even more) as us. Well, here is episode 39 in which we discuss "The Return of Maggie Beckett" and "Easy Sliders." http://rewatchpodcast.podomatic.com/ent … 1_15-08_00

It would be great if you did some interviews with people involved in the show.  Writers, producers, actors, etc. Comics folks.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

What's next?

Requiem.  Well, points for trying to resolve the Wade mess.  In my head canon she escaped from the Maggs shortly after this episode.

Map of the Mind.  Interesting world concept gets underutilized.  Seems like this episode should have a profound long term effect on Diana, but it actually has almost none.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

The new podcast is up! When doing the graphics for EP.COM, I couldn't bear to use any screencaps from "Requiem" or "Map of the Mind," so I used something else.

Behind the Scenes Information Courtesy of Temporal Flux

Requiem Trivia
•   The following information is from Temporal Flux of DoC and also Michael Reaves, writer of this episode.
•   For much of Season 4, Marc Scott Zicree had pleaded for the chance to write Sabrina Lloyd out properly -- either through learning she'd escaped the Kromagg rape camp offscreen or having Sabrina Lloyd guest-star.
•   This, along with other arguments, eventually had David Peckinpah and Bill Dial engineer Zicree being ousted from the show.
•   However, given fan enquiries, Dial decided to resolve the Wade plot. He expected it to be done with a guest-star claiming they'd met Wade and she was alive and well.
•   Writer Michael Reaves, a freelancer, pitched a story for Season 5: Rembrandt becomes telepathically entangled with a woman from another dimension.
•   Dial and Damron decided to have Reaves adapt this plot to resolve Wade's arc by revealing that Wade had been surgically mutilated and turned into a computer. Reaves wrote the script and made the best he could of it.
•   Quite inexplicably, Bill Dial had this script altered from Wade definitively dying to Wade being somehow still alive.
•   Reaves said that Dial attributed this instruction as coming from the Sci-Fi Channel.
•   That cannot be true: the Sci-Fi Channel was completely hands off for SLIDERS in Season 5, much to Dial's fury.
•   The directive could only have come from Dial and Damron.
•   Reaves felt this was pointless: everyone except Robert Floyd knew Season 5 was the end.
•   Dial and Damron declined to allocate the budget necessary for the script -- the cryogenic pods holding Wade's body, the fleet of Kromagg manta ships -- and hacked up the script in their usual fashion.
•   Anything expensive or complicated to film was cut.
•   The remnants were stretched out to fill the space.
•   Then they contacted Sabrina Lloyd's agent and requested that Sabrina return to play a rape victim turned mutilated corpse who'd been stuffed into a computer.
•   ....................................................
•   Sabrina, after SLIDERS, had found an excellent role on an ABC sitcom written by Aaron Sorkin.
•   Sabrina had heard about Wade's fate in "Genesis" and been repulsed.
•   She had not ruled out doing guest-appearances until she'd heard about "Genesis."
•   Shortly afterwards, she declared she would never return to the series.
•   On an interesting note -- at this point, Kari Wuhrer had paid Sabrina a visit some time during the filming of Season 5.
•   Kari apologized to Sabrina for verbally abusing her and explained herself: Sabrina had been seen as an actress, Kari as a blow-up doll.
•   Kari had been jealous and was now very ashamed and regretful.
•   Sabrina had accepted Kari's apology.
•   However, Sabrina would not accept this role in "Requiem" for less than $40,000 -- Cleavant Derricks' salary per episode.
•   This is functionally a refusal from Sabrina, declaring that she would only return to this series if paid as the lead actor.
•   Production refused to pay her rate and were prepared to go ahead with the script using a body double and a soundalike.
•   Cleavant contacted Sabrina Lloyd and pleaded for her to do the voiceover.
•   Sabrina consented to do one day of audio recording.
•   The episode was filmed.
•   Shortly after this episode aired, Michael Reaves visited the SLIDERS message board to offer a public apology to the fans for this monstrosity.
•   This episode was so bad that Matt Hutaff, when reviewing it, was compelled to redesign EarthPrime.com to allow for a new rating lower than F.
•   Matt, in his analysis, is exasperated by the behaviour of the timer: "Invasion" establishes that the timer can only open an exit gateway on the world where it opened an entry gateway.
•   Yet, "Requiem" has the sliders back in the garden world at the start of this episode -- a world that the timer had exited from and never re-entered.
•   As a result, the sliders should be stranded, yet this does not appear to be the case.
•   Cleavant Derricks fucking hates this episode and you can tell.

Map of the Mind Trivia
•   Information from this is from The Expert, Keith Damron and Robert Masello.
•   This is another story pitched and bought from writer Robert Masello ("The Great Work").
•   This story was also highlighted by the fans of an example of "Season 5 Sabotage," their term for great ideas that would be rendered in inefficient and counter-intuitive scripting.
•   Robert Masello sold the story of a world where artists and creators of fiction are considered to be insane and institutionalized as delusional liars.
•   His plot had two of the sliders (Rembrandt and one of the others, unclear who) stuck in the asylum while the other two tried to break them out.
•   (Robert Masello doesn't remember much about this script aside from knowing it was wholly rewritten.)
•   Rembrandt was to be imprisoned due to this world having outlawed music.
•   The story was rewritten entirely by Keith Damron.
•   There was originally greater emphasis on the guest-stars, the inhabitants of the asylum.
•   Keith Damron removed the majority of this material.
•   Originally, there were no science fiction technology elements, just a situation in this asylum setting.
•   Keith Damron decided to rewrite the script to feature high tech neural remapping in which artists and creative people are lobotomized.
•   He also decided that Mallory and Diana would be in the asylum instead of Rembrandt.
•   To further extend this rewrite, and due to the rewritten plot running short, Damron introduced the idea that Diana being remapped would grant her telekinetic powers.
•   The plot of Diana developing telekinetic powers was added to the story at a late stage due to the script running short due to Damron having removed the scenes focusing on guest-stars.
•   Further evidence of the script running short is Rembrandt telling Diana about how they repaired her mind, which was seen onscreen mere minutes previous.
•   Robert Floyd expressed tremendous exasperation with these script pages being so repetitive.
•   Bill Dial told Floyd that these scripts were due to freelance writers not being up to standard.
•   Floyd offered the view that Dial was so under the gun to produce the show that he couldn't do the rewrites. This can't be correct; this is script editor Damron's script from Masello's story.
•   I believe Floyd was fooled.
•   Dial had a reputation for being an angry, vindictive man towards writers who gave him trouble (Marc Scott Zicree), but he either treated actors differently or he just really liked Robert Floyd.
•   I think Dial liked Floyd so much that he told Floyd whatever it took to make it feel like Dial agreed with him but was powerless to do anything about it.
•   The truth is, Dial preferred computer games over working on scripts.
•   On a more uplifting note -- six years after "Map of the Mind" aired, a DOCTOR WHO novel was released. THE STEALER OF DREAMS, by Steve Lyons.
•   In this story, the sliders -- I'm sorry, I mean the Doctor and friends -- land on a world where fiction is illegal.
•   In this tale, Quinn and Arturo investigate the police officers cracking down on illegal fiction creators, Wade falls in with a fiction-creating rebel and then Wade starts to go insane and become incapable of separating fact and fantasy and believing sliding to be a delusion, while Rembrandt is institutionalized for being an artist.
•   No, sorry -- I meant the Doctor investigates the police, Rose falls in with a rebel and starts to go insane and Captain Jack is institutionalized.
•   Rembrandt/Captain Jack discover that the mental institution is filled with insane, delusional people who can't tell fact from fiction, while outside, Rose/Wade is beginning to suffer the same as she explores a world without imagination, without creativity, devoid of hope and dreams.
•   The sliders -- no, the Doctor and friends -- sorry, sorry -- discover that there are pollutants causing mass hallucinations and psychotic outbursts which led to the criminalization of fiction.
•   Quinn and Arturo -- I mean, the Doctor -- devise a cure and expose the police management as all suffering from hallucinatory psychosis and in need of treatment.
•   A few months later, the gang revisit this world to find that the population is healing and beginning to write and draw and create again.
•   I read this novel and wept for SLIDERS.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Sorry for the silence on the actual podcasts themselves, I've been a bit burnt out after compiling all the trivia. I agreed with Cory and Tom on pretty much everything in this season, especially Maggie forgetting how to fight in "A Current Affair" and the pathetic mini-scoop in "Please Press One." However, I strongly disagreed with them regarding "The Return of Maggie Beckett" and the original draft of "Requiem."

The Return of Maggie Beckett
I don't think the scenes of Maggie and the General are padding at all -- they show two people with a pre-existing relationship, a relationship they are trying to insist they don't have, only to fall back into that. The General wants to be an interrogator, not a father. Maggie wants to be a prisoner, not a daughter. But they keep relating to each other as they know each other. Why doesn't Maggie just say she's from a parallel universe? Because she is insanely and horrifically overwrought at how the legend of Margaret Allison Beckett highlights the General as a loving and devoted father when she damn well knows he was nothing of the kind -- she's angry and enraged and she is engaging with the history of this Maggie Beckett to demand answers.

While I despise Bill Dial and Keith Damron's repetitive filler, that is because all it does is repeat the same information for no reason. With "The Return of Maggie Beckett," it's about creating an uncomfortable space with two people who both know each other extremely well and don't know each other at all, and the irony is that this would be true even if Maggie were talking to her actual father.

The fact that Tom has seen lots of hardass generals in other TV shows is -- honestly, I can't even see that as a legitimate criticism. A hardass general was precisely what this story needed for Maggie; there is no drama if the General is a perfect father figure. That's just personal taste. Of course, that's the Rewatch Podcast, and naturally, one expects their tastes to permeate the podcast, but I don't see that as a fair critique of a story.

Regardless, it's kind of cool that Tom and Cory are looking at the episode through this lens of whether there is padding, because it's a lens I gave them, along with the question of whether or not characters get introduced by name. I certainly can't tell them not to apply it as they see fit. :-)

Requiem
As for the original script for "Requiem," first, I think we have to give Michael Reaves a pass on the general storyline (Wade is now a rape victim turned into a computer) and on points of continuity like Diana knowing the ins and outs of Kromagg computers. He was a freelance writer! He assumed there'd be a few previous Kromagg episodes (as opposed to one) and naturally, that sort of thing would be adjusted as rewrites took place. That said, he does make one massive error in his script; he has Rembrandt claim that Colin, Quinn and Maggie rescued him in "Genesis." The pointless DNA scan Tom notes is also an error, but not one that condemns the script.

I do not believe there is such a thing as a bad storyline. It's all about execution -- and Mr. Reaves' execution is superb, heartfelt and emotional. The basic idea -- Wade is now a computer -- has been met with universal contempt from SLIDERS fans, but I think Reaves takes his marching orders and pulls them off magnificently.

We begin with a brilliant teaser -- shifting from an idyllic world to a horrific battlefield where Rembrandt has a vision of Wade Welles. Trauma upon trauma and then a desperate plea from Wade -- and the fans -- find her. Find her before it's too late. It's ridiculous that this becomes a priority in Season 5, Episode 11 when it hasn't for the last THIRTY TWO episodes, but that's not Reaves' fault, and he has Michael note how the task of finding Wade is as impossible as ever with "a gazillion Earths" out there.

Then we get to a Kromagg prison camp and Rembrandt is forced to confront both his trauma and ours -- losing Wade, feeling helpless, seeing Wade treated as less than worthless and taken away. The grief and anger is palpable, re-triggered by the setting and then Wade's voice suggests some potential salvation -- only for the sliders to see a massive fleet of Kromagg ships. Wade's voice guides them through the facility, but she's a ghostly voice, a distant figure -- just out of reach to us -- and then we finally get to her.

We find "a glowing translucent container. In this high-tech sarcophagus, bathed in nutrient fluid, comatose and intubated, is the body of Wade Wells. Electrodes snake from her shaved head to monitoring apparatus." Wade has been mutilated, stripped bare, reduced to a biological component in the Kromagg war machine. The alien invasion has twisted our show -- and Wade -- into this abomination.

Rembrandt's horror and grief are agonizingly scripted -- the helplessness, the fury. It's an awful decision from the producers, but Reaves sells the maddening rage, letting Rembrandt express the fans' anger towards the situation  -- and then Wade's fate seems dwarfed by the larger scale of the Kromagg fleet about to conquer Kromagg Prime and then the multiverse. Wade's body, her personality, her spirit -- all of it's been erased by this awful beyond awful Kromagg invasion plot.

And then Rembrandt gets her back. His love for her reaches Wade inside her pod and she reawakens. She overrides the Kromagg's control of their fleet. The Kromaggs reduced her to a cog in a spaceship, but the sliders' love for each other has trumped that. From trauma and horror has come transformation as Rembrandt and Wade's love for each other allows her to become an inviolable force that can save everyone.

Wade releases Rembrandt from his grief and loss, telling him the Kromaggs killed her a long time ago, giving him and us closure -- and then she destroys the Kromagg fleet and herself. Wade saved us all -- and now she's gone forever. And Rembrandt stands on a roof, looking down at the people walking about, none of them knowing that they owe their lives to Wade Kathleen Welles. Reaves has no choice but to make Wade into this, but he gives her an ending and he offers the fans and Rembrandt a small measure of peace.

And Michael urges Rembrandt to believe in the multiverse, in infinite possibilities, that he and Wade are linked and some version of Wade out there may exist and he will see her again someday.

The aired version of "Requiem" makes cursory, fumbling, muddled attempts to present any of the above. Had Reaves' script been executed properly -- I can't imagine any SLIDERS fan being happy with it in that only the return of the original cast would have made them happy. But it would have been a moving, emotional and forceful episode and a tribute to Wade and the sliders.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

ireactions wrote:

•   Shortly after this episode aired, Michael Reaves visited the SLIDERS message board to offer a public apology to the fans for this monstrosity.

I wish I had been around at the time to see this. I remember watching this abortion of an episode in shock that they could actually do what they did.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

This was his post: http://hof.slidersweb.net/celebs/12088.html

He later sent Matt the original script for "Requiem," which I maintain is a very good piece of work.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Thanks for that. At least he attempted to reach out to fans and explain things. I hated it so much - I've not watched it since it was aired, and I don't ever plan to.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Am I the only one who thought a DNA scanner was a perfectly feasible thing for the Kromaggs to have, given the setup?

I'm only going off the podcast here - like everyone else here, one watch of "Requiem" is enough for me for a lifetime - but what if the Kromaggs are searching for genetic anomalies? Errors in the code, abnormalities that might express themselves in a future Humagg? Your DNA isn't just your species, it's also your genetic makeup, and it's extremely plausible that the Kromaggs want to screen out anything that might cause weakness in future generations.

(Standard disclaimer: Requiem is still awful and irredeemable. I like a lot of episodes of Sliders that many people hate. I think "The Breeder" was an awesome deconstruction of what Sliders had become: Maggie as monster and invasive succubus, death all around. "Sole Survivors" is, I think, the best damn episode in season 3. Even "State of the ART" had some good stuff. "Requiem" is like a festering wound on the series.

I'm glad people wanted to resolve Wade's story. I hate that this was what they ended up with.)

Re: Rewatch Podcast

New ep for "A Thousand Deaths" and "Heavy Metal." ENJOY! http://rewatchpodcast.podomatic.com/ent … 5_20-08_00

Re: Rewatch Podcast

RewatchPodcast wrote:

New ep for "A Thousand Deaths" and "Heavy Metal." ENJOY! http://rewatchpodcast.podomatic.com/ent … 5_20-08_00


Cool! Thanks!

Re: Rewatch Podcast

For next time...

To Catch A Slider is goofy fun.  The look on Maggie's face when Remmy tells them the timer they've been using isn't Quinn's original is priceless.  Apparently that never came up in her previous two years of sliding.

Dust is the worst episode of Season 5, even worse than Requiem.  Rembrandt in particular is out of character.  The Sliders know what Bigelow is digging up is meaningless, a hotel rather than a sacred tomb.  They know the "guardian" is just a aluminum siding salesman, not an important historical figure or a supernatural protector of the Chandler.  They know the Packers religion is based on lies and misunderstandings.  And yet, despite knowing that there is no real meaning for either side, Rembrandt is insistent on leading the Packers into a potentially deadly confrontation with Bigelow and his team over nothing.  The Rembrandt I know would have been trying to talk the Packers down from using violence against Bigelow, to defuse the situation.  He would have told them the God they seek is in their hearts and minds, not a hole in the ground.  He would have never encouraged them to threaten someone like Bigelow, who hasn't hurt anyone and is just trying to learn about his world's past.  It's an atrocity of mischaracterization that destroys whatever credibility the show had left.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

intangirble wrote:

Am I the only one who thought a DNA scanner was a perfectly feasible thing for the Kromaggs to have, given the setup?

I'm only going off the podcast here - like everyone else here, one watch of "Requiem" is enough for me for a lifetime - but what if the Kromaggs are searching for genetic anomalies? Errors in the code, abnormalities that might express themselves in a future Humagg? Your DNA isn't just your species, it's also your genetic makeup, and it's extremely plausible that the Kromaggs want to screen out anything that might cause weakness in future generations.

(Standard disclaimer: Requiem is still awful and irredeemable. I like a lot of episodes of Sliders that many people hate. I think "The Breeder" was an awesome deconstruction of what Sliders had become: Maggie as monster and invasive succubus, death all around. "Sole Survivors" is, I think, the best damn episode in season 3. Even "State of the ART" had some good stuff. "Requiem" is like a festering wound on the series.

I'm glad people wanted to resolve Wade's story. I hate that this was what they ended up with.)

I too quite liked Sole Survivors. smile
I felt that Infected Quinn's behaviour and use of intellect etc was one of the few times in Season Three where he was in Character as his Season 1 & 2 Characterisation.

"It's only a matter of time. Were I in your shoes, I would spend my last earthly hours enjoying the world. Of course, if you wish, you can spend them fighting for a lost cause.... But you know that you've lost." -Kane-

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Send to last episode is up. This week we discuss "To Catch a Slider" and "Dust." http://rewatchpodcast.podomatic.com/ent … 1_09-08_00

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Boys, I just watched that segment of "To Catch a Slider" where Rembrandt says "Farm Boy" -- except he doesn't. He clearly says "Fog Boy." He started calling Mallory that in "The Unstuck Man."

What was the other episode where he said "Farm Boy"? Maybe he said "Fog Boy" in that episode too.

I dunno how Tom and Cory think they can make a podcast about "The Seer" upbeat. "The Seer" left me so traumatized I had to get my cable disconnected and I didn't dare watch television for years, terrified I'd fall in love with characters only to see them mutilated and replaced one by one. *shudders*

I think what I shall miss most is doing the banner images for each podcast. You will not believe the weird crap you have to do to stretch a screencap to 800 x 300.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Check 33:59 on Heavy Metal. Captions say Farm Boy on Netflix but I bet it's a mistake and he does say fog boy. The enunciation is probably what screwed up the caption writer maybe? I dunno how those things work. And relistening to the clip from To Catch A Slider I can defiantly hear it clearer now and yep it does say Fog, but the captions again say Fatm! 11:59 in that episode on Netflix. Wtf caption writers?

Re: Rewatch Podcast

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/450x400q90/922/zbotSY.png
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/450x400q90/922/Lq3kWX.png

Re: Rewatch Podcast

I have a friend who works in closed captioning and he works off what he hears as opposed to what's in the scripts.

I guess the boys could take things in a more positive direction by talking about all the would-be SLIDERS revivals that never were. The Feature Film That Never Was. Tracy Torme's Series Finale. Jerry O'Connell's redemption as he made an effort to restore the original cast only to fail miserably.

But wouldn't all these ultimately be disappointments because they didn't happen and all we were left with "The Seer"?

God. This is so depressing. I'm going to call Laurie.

ringringring ringringring

ME: "Laurie! I'm sad!"
LAURIE: "Is this about that fucking TV show?"
ME: "The Sliders Rewatch podcast is ending! And it's going to end on a down note! How can it not!?"
LAURIE: "Haven't you watched lots of TV shows that were all about bad situations with no way out and no hope at all and then things either turned around or were conveyed in a fashion that made you okay with it?"
ME: "Unless there's a nineteenth episode of SLIDERS I missed because I was obsessing over your problems, it's not going to happen."
LAURIE: " ... It's been sixteen years. Why are you not over this yet?"
ME: "The sliders were my friends, Laurie. My favourites. That's why I made you one of them in a fanfic. A fanfic in which you made TV Tropes!"
LAURIE: "That was super-flattering. Are the podcasters seriously saying their last SLIDERS podcast is going to be a death march?"
ME: "No. They say they'll find an upbeat note."
LAURIE: "Well, trust them. If they weren't good, you wouldn't spend so much time writing up factoids for them."

Re: Rewatch Podcast

You know, I'm really excited to see Tom and Cory take on LOIS AND CLARK. It was an early adopter of the superhero soap opera format and, like any prototype, it had impressive advances matched with critical design failures and poor implementation of good ideas. But it was a frontrunner. You didn't get to THE FLASH and ARROW and AVENGERS without LOIS AND CLARK making the first stumble along the trail its descendants blazed.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Make sure that it is WELL noted in the first L&C rewatch that it basically led to Sliders being made! Otherwise we might all be over at "doorways.tv" complaining about how the accent on the fourth person to play Cat isn't as authentic as the second actress'. smile

Earth Prime | The Definitive Source for Sliders™

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Oh man oh man. It's almost here. Our last episode of the Rewatch Podcast featuring Sliders! I can assure you, especially you iReactions, you can rest easy. It's going to be a great last episode for us, despite the obvious sadness of the ending of the series proper. We had a great discussion and in the end, you are getting a super sized podcast when it releases tomorrow sometime.

Two hours, Twenty-nine minutes, and 30 seconds.

It's almost like we didn't want to say goodbye! But I promise you we aren't just rambling, rather we had so much to say, especially about our special bonus material. I can't wait for you all to hear it!

Re: Rewatch Podcast

tom2point0 wrote:

Oh man oh man. It's almost here. Our last episode of the Rewatch Podcast featuring Sliders! I can assure you, especially you iReactions, you can rest easy. It's going to be a great last episode for us, despite the obvious sadness of the ending of the series proper. We had a great discussion and in the end, you are getting a super sized podcast when it releases tomorrow sometime.

Two hours, Twenty-nine minutes, and 30 seconds.

It's almost like we didn't want to say goodbye! But I promise you we aren't just rambling, rather we had so much to say, especially about our special bonus material. I can't wait for you all to hear it!

Can't wait to hear it! You guys were awesome in covering Sliders.  The bonus material sounds intriguing!

Re: Rewatch Podcast

And here we are again, standing at the edge of infinity, looking into the darkest abyss. A place where there is no mercy, no escape, no hope and no way out -- but for some reason, there are rock star vampires and amusement parks that feed on negative emotions and toy cars with laser cannons. A place where even Marc Scott Zicree lost the will to go on after "The Chasm." Truly, this is the darkest timeline.

I can't remember if LOIS & CLARK got this bad. Let's find out! :-D

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Here it is! Our discussion of the final 2 episodes of Sliders "Eye of the Storm" and "The Seer." And as promised, a little something extra at the end to take us out with a smile on our faces. Thanks to all of you for listening, we've had a blast! We hope you join us for our next big rewatch for Lois & Clark starting in just a couple of weeks.
http://rewatchpodcast.podomatic.com/ent … 9_03-07_00

Re: Rewatch Podcast

To answer one question from the podcast -- seen in "Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome" in the office of Rembrandt's therapist:

http://s21.postimg.org/jzdc7tv5j/Sliders_s02e09_Post_Traumatic_Slide_Syndrome_m4v.jpg

;-)

Re: Rewatch Podcast

ireactions wrote:

To answer one question from the podcast -- seen in "Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome" in the office of Rembrandt's therapist:

http://s21.postimg.org/jzdc7tv5j/Sliders_s02e09_Post_Traumatic_Slide_Syndrome_m4v.jpg

;-)

Awesome! We guessed right!

Re: Rewatch Podcast

RewatchPodcast wrote:

Here it is! Our discussion of the final 2 episodes of Sliders "Eye of the Storm" and "The Seer." And as promised, a little something extra at the end to take us out with a smile on our faces. Thanks to all of you for listening, we've had a blast! We hope you join us for our next big rewatch for Lois & Clark starting in just a couple of weeks.
http://rewatchpodcast.podomatic.com/ent … 9_03-07_00

A big thanks to you guys for this podcast.  I wish it could somehow be on the blu-ray (if there is one) as audio commentary or bonus material.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

Hey, who's the voice of Wade?

**

It was very touching for "Slide Effects" to be treated as a *real* episode of SLIDERS. Matt and I recently had a conversation where I chastised him for his 2009 Tracy Torme interview announcing a SLIDERS project that never took place. Matt replied that "Slide Effects" was, albeit unintentionally, the SLIDERS project because without the interview, "Slide Effects" wouldn't have been written and that whether by design or accident, "Slide Effects" is the series finale of SLIDERS.

**

I was particularly struck by the music Tom and Cory used during their dramatic readings -- it really captured the eerie sense of unreality behind the scenes.

**

I totally agree with Cory that the Professor's first scene in the story is very forced and unnatural. Of all the random people with whom Quinn could get in a car accident, it happens to be the Professor? How the hell does that happen? It happens, as Tom observes, because Torme said this was to be a one-episode story and I limited myself to 46-pages (46 minutes). Tom wonders where the commercials would go. I have no idea whatsoever. I needed the Professor back as soon as possible and I felt he should be yelling.

**

The idea that Rembrandt told Quinn there was a steakhouse he had planned to eat at after the game is indeed, as Cory states, a retcon never once established on the show. Whaddya gonna do, right? I figure you can justify it  by adding in other details that were established onscreen.

**

Cory, quite reasonably, describes the explanation for Seasons 3 - 5 as "cumbersome." The idea that Seasons 3 - 5 are the amalgamated experiences of 37 Quinn-doubles combined and streamed into Quinn's head as a telepathic simulation to torment him, resulting from a completely DIFFERENT simulation meant to be a simulation of Earth Prime -- Tom struggles to wrap his mouth around that explanation and audibly loses steam halfway in.

Oddly, Torme's explanation is very simple -- the Earth Prime situation is revealed to be a Kromagg trick along with Seasons 3 - 5. Yet, the details visibly strain to justify why the Kromaggs would do any of this. Torme didn't come up with a motive.

I settled on, "The illusion of Earth Prime is meant to psychologically motivate them to find home -- but we got Seasons 3 - 5 because there was a GLITCH."  Still, it's hard to explain why the Kromagg felt the need to deliberately subject Quinn to Seasons 3 - 5 outside the plot requiring that he do so and a vague sense of sadism.

Then comes the need to declare that Seasons 3 - 5 happened, just to a *different* set of Quinns -- and the result is the Kromagg going Full Diggs to lay out the Earth Prime simulation, the glitch, and me trying to liven it up by having the Kromagg take on the forms of different Season 3 - 5 characters. So what we have here is a situation where the general overview appears acceptable -- Seasons 3 - 5 were a Kromagg trick -- but when we get into the details, it becomes quite convoluted.

I imagine Torme would have side-stepped all that simply by focusing on the Earth Prime situation and barely referring to the episodes after his departure, making the confrontation more about the Kromaggs tempting the sliders with a permanent illusion of home because even if they got home for real, the Kromaggs would destroy it. But that just wasn't where my interest was -- I wanted to do Forrest Gump style scenes of the original sliders inserted into "Mother and Child" and directly repudiate The Scene. As a result, "Slide Effects" took a turn into metatextual fan writing.

**

Tom and Cory note that the Care Bears style conclusion seems similar to "The Dream Masters" -- which is hilarious, because I have never seen it. I've also never seen "Electric Twister Acid Test" or "Easy Slider" and no force on Earth can make me watch them. The only reason I noticed the similarities myself is because screencaps were present in Ian McDuffie's episode blog.

**

Cory said he was confused by where the room was that the sliders wake up in -- it's meant to be just a cave, which I thought I established with the Kromagg referring to "an underground chamber," but I guess an extra INT. CAVE would have helped.

I appreciated the boys reacting to the final scene and the shock. I just did that because I didn't want it to be a uniformly happy ending -- it needed a touch of darkness so that Seasons 3 - 5 have some emotional impact.

I think the reason "Slide Effects" manages to transcend its issues, however, is because, as Cory and Tom note, it is focused entirely on Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo. Splitting the Quinns, Kromagg Prime, sticking Colin -- all that's labelled as the concerns of different sets of sliders. Torme's plot was splendid and it's a shame it wasn't the premiere for the Sci-Fi Channel years. I was very pleased that Cory noted that the happiest ending for SLIDERS is one where they're having wonderful adventures together.

**

I look forward to the boys getting into SLIDERS REBORN when it's done. REBORN has an alternate explanation for the sliders' resurrections and I suspect it's just as cumbersome, but it served my ends. "Slide Effects" is a vision of SLIDERS being filmed in 2000; REBORN is a vision of SLIDERS being filmed in 2015 with the conceit that SLIDERS was an X-FILES-level hit that just never got revived until last year.

**

There was some other behind the scenes stuff, but I think I shall post that when Cory and Tom start the LOIS & CLARK rewatch. And I shall be following along and responding to every single episode and watching two episodes with them every week! I have no behind the scenes info on LOIS & CLARK (unless you want scandalous rumours about Dean Cain's lovelife), but I love superheroes and will be thrilled to revisit the 90s with our podcasters.

Re: Rewatch Podcast

ireactions wrote:

Hey, who's the voice of Wade?

**


An error that we didn't credit the voice of the lovely leading lady of MY life, Jane. We needed someone to do Wade's part, as it didn't seem right to include scenes without her too. We toyed with the idea of using Garageband's voice transformer to pitch my voice up huger and make it into a female, but Cory asked if Jane would be game and she was hesitant because she's not actor but wanted to help.

And so, after a late night gathering with some friends, I coached her through her lines at about 1 in the morning, then edited them together over the next few HOURS as GarageBand was being buggy for some odd reason, and then sent it to Cory who combined it with the episode proper and released it! The time crunch is why we failed to properly recognize her but don't worry... I'll make it up to her in my own special way. wink