Thoughts on Sliders in Random (Page 3 of 3)

Well, this is enlightening. Maybe, in 2024, a version of Quinn who never created sliding is a sports commentator.

I'm glad to learn this. Sports are just lost on me. I'm very interested in fitness and nutrition, but I once went to a baseball game with my mother when I was 11 and my mother insisted that I bring a sweater and the sweater was too thick for such warm weather and I tied it around my waist and it fell to the ground at the train station and my mother screamed at me to pick it up and I screamed at her that I hadn't wanted to bring it in the first place and my mother screamed at me that if I didn't pick it up that there would be no baseball game for me and I screamed at her that it wasn't much of a threat because sports are boring and... I can't remember if we actually made it to the game.

Sorry, where was this going?

My personal opinion, shared by maybe nobody, is that Quinn was not actually smarter than Arturo. It's just that Quinn was willing to make leaps of logic and take guesses that sometimes turned out to be right and express guesses with more certainty than was warranted and improvisationally correct on the fly.

Arturo, however, did not like to make leaps and was a more methodical, deliberate and calculated thinker, which Arturo mistook for being slow or foolish when it was in fact more cautious and less reckless. Arturo would never have gotten everyone lost in the multiverse. Quinn was a daredevil and a gambler. Arturo wasn't dumber or smarter; he just had different strengths.

Well, Quinn has to exercise at least as much as Jerry O'Connell, and the sports justified why Quinn clearly did some running and weightlifting every day.

Thinking about it now, I imagine that Quinn's interest in sports, strategies, game theory, and how to throw a football, hit a baseball and sink a basketball led to his interest in mathematics, physics, engineering and quantum mechanics.

Yes, Quinn's bedroom in the Pilot is filled with sporting items and includes hockey, basketball, football and surfing equipment and merchandise. Wade "Summer of Love" and "Fever" have Quinn specify that he was a football player, a quarterback, and that he has a knee injury from the game. "Eggheads" draws on Quinn's background in football for playing Mindgame.

Quinn's baseball card collection is a key plot point in "Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome". Arturo is familiar with football in "Summer of Love" but claims to have only seen his first game in "The Guardian". "The Guardian" also establishes outright that Quinn is a boxer.

Well, I'm still converting SLIDERS REBORN to ePub, and once I get it all into Google Docs, you're welcome to take a pass at it.

I always thought Charlie was the one mocked for the "injured duck" run. I don't remember Jerry having it. I do remember fans noting that Charlie's body double in "The Unstuck Man" mimicked Charlie's run perfectly.

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Did you know that the Spinning Topps were based on a real life band called The Four Tops? I did not, but maybe you all did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Tops

Of course Temporal Flux knew that The Spinning Topps were based on The Four Tops. :-) And TF's theory on HOF that The Four Tops on Earth Prime had their place in history occupied by The Spinning Topps is intriguing and challenging because Rembrandt is too young for The Four Tops' history to apply to him without significant revision.

The Four Tops formed in 1953 and had the bulk of their career from 1953 to 1988, with their stardom achieved in 1965 ("I Can't Help Myself"), only to have lesser success by 1967 after the departure of songwriter/producer Holland–Dozier–Holland from Motown, but they had a resurgence in 1972 during a period with ABC-Dunhill Records, and continued to have hits from 1972 to 1977 and then 1981, 1983, 1985 and 1988. Their mark on music and culture was indelible and eternal.

But Rembrandt, according to the Season 4 Online Slide, was born in 1955. "Into the Mystic" says his last performance with the Topps was in 1986, "As Time Goes By" says he was 17 when he was singing with "The Shandells" and referred to as "Little Rembrandt", which would be 1972 or 1973.

Did The Spinning Topps, at some period between 1972 - 1986, achieve everything that The Four Tops did between 1953 and 1988?

This may or may not be the cause of the error that Temporal Flux notes in his Online Slide comments on HOF: The Online Slide says that "Can't Help Myself" was written by The Temptations, a 1960s-originating group. TF points out that song was actually written by The Four Tops, whose place in Earth Prime is presumably occupied by The Spinning Topps.

But The Spinning Topps, given Rembrandt's birth year in 1955, could not have written a 1965 hit song as Rembrandt would have been 10 years old and he's never been presented as that much of a prodigy.

One theory to which I'm partial but which doesn't work for the timeline is that The Spinning Topps achieved equivalent achievements to what the Four Tops did between 1986 to 1994 -- after Rembrandt had left them.

But it's unlikely that The Four Tops' 60s - 70s hits would have had the same impact in the late 80s and early 90s. It makes more sense to put achievements similar to The Four Tops into the late 70s for The Spinning Topps and put them between the late 70s to 1986.

I have been working on writing Rembrandt's eulogy for Tracy Torme. While the Professor, Quinn and Wade had a very metatextual perspective on honouring their creator, Rembrandt's eulogy is instead going to be a story about how he met Tracy Torme in the early 1980s, and how a twentysomething Tracy inspired Rembrandt to do something new with his talents, and how Tracy Torme changed Rembrandt's life forever and created a bond of friendship between them for which Rembrandt has always been grateful.

I know nothing about music, so I have been doing a lot of research and reading to better understand Rembrandt's life: he was born in 1955, according to the Season 4 Online Slide. But where was he born? What was his first encounter with music that made him embrace James Brown soul and R&B but also Beethoven, Mozart and Tchaikovsky and the other classical greats? What was his inspiration to drop out of high school and join the band The Shandells as under the diminutive stagename of "Little Rembrandt"?

How did the Topps first meet and form? What were their first successes? And why did Rembrandt leave them?

Searching for similar figures in real life history is where I learned what most people probably knew already, that The Spinning Topps are a reference to The Four Tops.

Being able to use the real life history of The Four Tops and Levi Stubbs has been both help and hinderance because The Four Tops started decades before The Spinning Topps could have even met. But it also shows how music is such an integral part of Rembrandt Brown, Cleavant Derricks and Tracy Torme, and how much Tracy Torme loved music and Rembrandt to attach Rembrandt to musical history in this way.

Why would Peter Parker and Quinn Mallory fight... ? It seems to me that they would have a lot in common, given that both Quinn and Peter have had to deal with:

• Flesh craving zombies

• Giant slugs

• Dinosaurs

• Killer robots

• Bloodthirsty vampires

• Underground predators

• Mad scientists trying to collapse and combine universes

• Artificial twisters

• Sorcerers

• Dream Masters

• Clones of themselves

• Clones who presented themselves as brothers

• Confusing revelations about their parents and true origins which may or may not have been true

• Being 'combined' with another person in a 'merging' and then 'lost'

But I understand. You want to know who would win in a fight. Honestly, I would defer to the needs of the plot and come up with options for Peter to win, for Quinn to win, or for the fight to lead to a draw.

In these match-ups of this nature, Batman is a popular character to often be pitted against another superhero, and fans always like to have Batman win. The reason: it is fairly straightforward to have Batman defeated by the Hulk's superstrength or Thor's hammer or Ghost Rider's chains. There are more variations in how Batman could defeat more physically powerful characters.

It's more unexpected if a less powerful character defeats a more powerful one. And yet, because this is such a common approach, it has paradoxically made it highly predictable that Batman will win the fight.

We have a similar problem with Quinn and Peter where, because Peter has superpowers, there are a lot of obvious, straightforward ways in which Peter could beat Quinn, and it is more challenging for Quinn to beat Peter. But then it's obvious that most writers will have Quinn win the fight because Quinn's victory will be more challenging and Peter's victory would be very straightforward, except the straightforward is now the unexpected and the expected is the difficult -- you get my point.

So, I guess the fight unfolds this way: Spider-Man sees Quinn breaking into big box electronics store to steal parts needed to fix the timer. Spider-Man pursues Quinn, tries to escape the store only to find Spidey's webbed off the entrance and then Spider-Man confronts him. Quinn is terrified of the webbing and freaked out by Spider-Man's emotive mask and white eyes and swings wildly. Spider-Man easily dodges every punch, grabs Quinn, and throws Quinn backwards.

Quinn lands in the housewares section and Quinn realizes: Spider-Man's hands gripped the surface of Quinn's shirt without Spider-Man's fingers actually squeezing the fabric; Spider-Man has the ability to stick to surfaces by manipulating the interatomic forces of surfaces, increasing the co-efficient of friction.

Quinn starts crawling through the housewares, grabbing a toaster, ripping a control board out of a mini-fridge, yanking a lens out of a projector, and hurriedly assembling these items to the back of a microwave just as Spider-Man gets the drop on him. Quinn triggers the microwave and Spider-Man discovers he can't stand; his feet keep slipping off the floor and he is sliding all over every surface like he's been coated in grease.

Quinn has used his contraption to reverse Spider-Man's adhesion powers, inverting the interatomic forces so that Spider-Man can not stick to any surface at all. Quinn lets Spider-Man slide into a wall and then Quinn grabs Spider-Man's web shooter and webs Spider-Man to immobilize him and switches off the microwave.

Quinn then explains to Spider-Man: he's sorry for robbing the store, but there's a crisis facing this parallel universe. Quinn can tell from Spider-Man's webbing and advanced yet homemade costume design: Spider-Man is clearly a scientist, an engineer and a chemist. And Quinn needs Spider-Man's help...

After averting the crisis, Quinn and Peter elect to stay in touch and do a monthly podcast together.

I don't believe in book burning, but if I could burn one book, it would be Brad Linaweaver's novelization. I would settle for it being erased off the face of the Earth.

Let Brad Linaweaver be remembered for his masterpiece, MOON OF ICE, as well as THE LAND BEYOND SUMMER and his BATTLESTAR GALACTICA novels and his DOOM novels. Let his non-contributions to SLIDERS be forgiven as an unfortunate set of errors in judgement on the legacy of a man who did better work elsewhere. And then let his work on SLIDERS be forgotten.

Let him be honoured and remembered for his best and not his worst.

I cannot stress enough in the name of Wade Welles' leather jacket that the opinions of ireactions on anything -- up to and including Brad Linaweaver's SLIDERS writing -- are not the consensus views of Sliders.tv.