The Kromagg Dynasty makes no sense

Well, I think it depends on a couple factors, and season 4 isn't a great resource for answering either question:

- (An old standard) - How does branching work?

- What kind of technology do the Kromaggs have?

- (Secret third question) - what is the definition of "conquer?"

Let's start with technology.  You're right in the sense that technology and surprise would make an invasion pretty easy.  The Kromaggs could send in human slaves (or even their own scouts, if properly disguised) to scout the world - find the military powers, and strike.  They could slide wherever they want and wipe out military bases with very little damage.  Imagine a Pearl Harbor-like attack from a Japan we didn't even know existed on a global scale.  The US, China, Europe, Russia, the Middle East, India/Pakistan wiped out simultaneously.  It'd take a coordinated attack, but I'm not even sure it'd take that many troops.

So invasion is easy.

Now let's talk about what "conquer" means.  Does conquering mean that they held the area indefinitely?  Or would it count as conquering if they simply took control for a long-enough time to take what they wanted (slaves/resources) and get out?    When they say they've conquered 150 worlds, are they still maintaining a presence in all 150?

And if they maintain an indefinite presence, does that necessarily mean that all soldiers on the conquered Earths are Kromaggs?  Look at the world in the USA show Colony.  Aliens (allegedly) invaded and conquered the Earth.  Then they set up a provisional government led by human traitors.  Not a single alien boot on the ground, and the Earth is still conquered.  If the Kromaggs used mind control or simply the threat of additional force, would that be enough?  Would Kromagg weapons in human traitor hands be enough to hold the worlds?

And if it was, could a skeleton crew of Kromaggs (skeleton being as few as possible - a million?  less?) hold the Earth with advanced-enough technology?  In Colony, there are drones all over the place.  Could that work to keep an Earth "conquered?"

Now let's talk about one of my favorite topics - branching.  As far as I'm aware, branching happens all the time with each decision.  Whether it's only big decisions (George Washington is shot or not) or minor decisions too (do I get a chicken or steak in my burrito) is up for debate, but either way, it's decision-based.

And the human/Kromagg decision was a looooong time ago.  Enough time for millions of human-led worlds to be created.  Presumably, that would also mean that there would be enough branching from Kromagg-led worlds to create millions of Kromagg-led worlds.  I always assumed that the Kromagg dynasty was made up of thousands of Kromagg worlds that united.  If that's the case, there's a nearly-unlimited source of additional troops to hold (way more than) 150 worlds.

"Kromagg Prime" implies that it's the main homeworld of the Kromaggs, but our sliders call our world "Earth Prime" arbitrarily.  To Logan, her Earth would be "Earth Prime" and ours would be "that weird Earth where the trains suck."  So I always thought it was just that type of naming.

(Please note that there's a chance that almost all my arguments are invalidated by season 4, which I haven't seen in a really long time).

None of the Season 4 Kromagg makes much sense now that we put on our thinking caps.
The Kromagg Dynasty envisioned by Torme and created by him in the episode "Invasion" would make so much more sense. Everything the Kromaggs do and what Mary tells Quinn could all be a mind game and deception.  Maybe that one world that the Sliders slide into at the beginning of the episode could be the only invasion they have mounted.

Everything about her being sent to Kromagg homeworld and raised to be the interpreter could be just lies, lies and more lies. The thought of them sliding for at least ten years is possible but the conquest of so many worlds with billions of emotional and violent homo sapiens dominating them would be a real challenge to keep subjugated.  Like Bonaparte in Spain, Germany in occupied Europe and Russia, the occupation troops would be constantly fighting "insurgents" and the drain on their resources would be huge.

Which brings me to the conclusion that Season 4 Kromaggs are just not logical and make zero sense.  Even the concept of breeding camps is stupid. A society as advanced as theirs would not have to resort to rape to procreate their species. they would simply use other forms and technology like artificial insemination, harvest female eggs, store them then fertilize them with the sperm donated by their soldiers.

But there's no evidence that Kromagg Prime is the only Kromagg world, right?  And it sorta goes against the idea of branching.  Unless Kromagg worlds don't branch for whatever reason.

But, statistically, that's sorta ridiculous.  It's like walking out your front door and basing your entire opinion on the universe based on what you see.  There are infinite worlds.  The Kromaggs could've sent a million people through a million wormholes once a day for a hundred years, and they'd barely scrape the surface on the number of worlds there are.

I prefer to think of the multiverse in terms of the Earth itself, and worlds that you can slide to are all pretty similar to the ones around it.  The Sliders go to a ton of worlds, but there's not a ton of key differences.  Almost all evolved life.  Almost all evolved  (identically evolved) humans.  Almost all evolved pretty similarly in terms of language and culture.  Statistically, you should be able to slide a lifetime and not see more than one world where the United States exists in the form we know it (considering how insignificant the US is in the grand scheme of the universe).

So in my example, the Sliders spend their entire time sliding in one part of one city.  Humans evolved.  Everything is generally pretty similar to the worlds around them.  Some minor political differences but generally the same.  The sliders' timer is the equivalent of walking.

The Kromaggs are in a different part of the city.  Still mammals.  Still bipedal.  Still primate-evolved.  But not humans...so it's a different part of the same city.  To get to the other part of town, you'd need something else.  A car.  A train.  A taxi.  Something Quinn never developed.  Maybe (some) Kromaggs did.

In other parts of the world, there are other cities.  Dominant life that evolved from fish.  Or dinosaurs.  Or something completely different.  This would definitely take a train or a car or a plane.

Then there's other parts of the world where life either doesn't exist or doesn't exist in a form we'd recognize or understand.  You'd need something really strong (plane, ship, spacecraft) to get to that part of the world.

In my example, Kromagg prime would actually be in the human part of town which is why humans could slide there and Kromaggs could only slide to "human" worlds.

So the way I understand branching would lead me to believe that there are just as many human worlds as Kromagg worlds and mermaid worlds and dinosaur worlds.  The Sliders didn't interact with them because their technology limited them to the area they could "walk" to.  And it would only require the creation of better tech to see what else the multiverse could show.

Even if they did find other world with Kromaggs, that doesn't mean they would automatically join the Dynasty.  Think about what the reaction would be on our Earth if humans claiming to be from another dimension suddenly appeared in highly advanced ships.  How many people would support becoming part of their empire?

If they conquer a world and send every human to a processing world, where they all get a kill switch implanted, then you could subjugate the entire planet and leave one Kromagg, or maybe not even. Have a few humans whose eyes you watch through from the main world. I mean, it's still a stupid goal, but that's how you could conquer a bunch of worlds with minimal kromaggpower (as opposed to manpower).

Also, while the rules within a universe can change, the frequency at which they exist must remain similar so they can all coexist. Like, their 3 dimensional rules are their own, but the 4th dimensional rules can't be changed by them. At which point shop you need is an exponential dial for accessing frequencies of all alternate worlds.

I wonder about the Kromaggs. Everyone remarks how the Season 4 versions lose all their mystique and they become generic thugs.

But the truth is that the Kromaggs were simply Nazis in "Invasion," it's just that Torme's script made sure that we mostly see them from the sliders' perspective, and they're kept unknowable, distant and terrifying. Once you get up close and start revealing personal backstories, making each Kromagg an individual character and losing the disturbing uniformity of the Kromaggs, you run the same risk of taking the eerily unknown and rendering it knowable, commonplace and dull. And that's a problem even before you start asking about branching and multiple versions of the Kromaggs.

So, ignoring all of Season 4, how would you address the Kromaggs? How do you maintain their mystery? Furthermore, how do you defeat the Kromaggs in the event of needing to wrap up the story and how do you address the issue of branching where mere interdimensional travel alone should create infinite variations on them?

My proposal: there are no Kromaggs. There is only one. The first Kromagg experiments in sliding caused the destruction of their home Earth and ripped all their variants out of reality, leaving behind only one -- a Kromagg who became unstuck like Dr. Oberon Geiger. Unlike Dr. Geiger, this Kromagg found a way to create doubles of himself -- using dimensional mirroring to generate copies who would be anchored in reality. Over time, he created enough doubles to form an army while creating a hive mind between them all -- so the entire Kromagg Dynasty of billions is simply one consciousness spread across multiple beings. Furthermore, this hive mind has come to the conclusion that it's the only living being in reality that is 'real,' everything else is simply a quantum possibility that need not be granted consideration, empathy or understanding.

And then there comes the issue: how would you defeat this hive mind? I'd suggest a psychological attack. Assuming SLIDERS stayed on track and didn't blow up any regular cast members -- maybe around Season 3 or 4, I'd have an episode in which the sliders are hit with a reality warping weapon and spend an episode in our reality where their lives are a TV show. In some future episode, during a mental attack on the sliders, they deliberately 'upload' their memories of this Earth where the Kromaggs are a fictional creation into the Kromagg hive mind. The idea that human writers of fiction could create the Kromaggs causes the hive mind's sense of self to implode and collapse and every Kromagg in every reality becomes catatonic due to an existential crisis.

My other idea is that the sliders would rally an army of fat craving zombies, rock star vampires, giant radioactive slugs, killer robots, malicious amusement parks, cybernetically enhanced pilots, Dream Masters, fire-breathing dragons, intelligent flames, wizards, psychics, animal-human hybrids, breeder parasites, dinosaurs, Morlocks and super-intelligent snakes to fight the Kromaggs.

The problem with using them at all is that the mystery will always fade away.  When you create a villain like the Kromaggs or the Borg, they're supposed to seem insurmountable.  That's why it's so thrilling to see our heroes escape at the end.  Like Invasion and Q Who, our heroes don't *win*, but they're lucky enough (with help) to escape to live another day.  But the threat is always there that they'll come back.

The problem with an enemy like that is that a) you've set yourself up where they have to come back (Chekov's gun), and b) each time you use them, the magic will fade away.  Our heroes will be more prepared the second time, but if they escape with their lives each time, luck/help can't keep getting all the credit.  Maybe the odds weren't insurmountable.  Maybe the villain wasn't that good in the first place.  It's why the Kromaggs aren't able to do much damage to the Sliders, even though they'd conquered hundreds of worlds.  It's why the Borg slaughtered everyone at Wolf 359 but couldn't destroy Voyager.

I think that's why Torme didn't want to do it.  It's a Pandora's box that would end up being less fun no matter what.

But I don't see why them being fallible makes them any less scary.

As I recall (although I could be mistaken), it was Marc Scott Zicree who wanted to bring the Kromaggs back in an effort to do an epic storyline for SLIDERS and in an attempt to compensate for SLIDERS having lost the Professor and Wade, but Peckinpah executed the opening installment of this arc with "Genesis" his way and it only got worse.

However, it raises an interesting question. What did Tormé want out of the Kromaggs?

The thing about "Invasion" is that Tormé deliberately wrote it so that it was impossible to ignore the Kromaggs. The tracking device meant the sliders would doom their world by going home, requiring that any finale involving home would involve the Kromaggs.

Tormé said in an interview that he wanted to do a sequel to "Invasion" where it would be extremely surreal and it would not begin with the sliders landing in another Kromagg invasion. In fact, the sliders wouldn't even realize they were in a Kromagg story until they were in the middle of one.

He would reveal that this story was "Slide Effects," a Season 4 premiere in which Quinn wakes up to discover he is home and time has been rewound to the Pilot. It's 1994, Wade's at Doppler's, Rembrandt's working on his career, the Professor's teaching and only Quinn remembers sliding. More interestingly, Tormé's plot had Quinn encountering doubles of familiar characters: Ryan, Gillian, Sid -- and Logan St. Clair.

Logan's presence in Tormé's storyline is peculiar because in no variant on Earth Prime with Quinn Mallory could have Logan St. Clair. They're the same person. All the other characters would indicate to Quinn that sliding wasn't a dream; he recognizes them all from his adventures.

I wonder if Logan's presence would be a hint leading to the eventual revelation: the entire scenario is a telepathic simulation created by the Kromaggs.

Also intriguing: "Slide Effects" was devised this way because Tormé was trying to get past FOX's resistance to any Kromagg sequels. His solution was a story that, as pitched, wouldn't be a Kromagg show. It'd be the story of Quinn waking up to find that he's back at the beginning.

It's strange how Tormé conceived "Opportunity Cost" four years before Matt Hutaff submitted it to Slide It Yourself...

As a Season 4 premiere, "Slide Effects" would re-establish the show's premise for a new audience. But with any subsequent Kromagg stories being fraught with difficulty -- network distaste, losing the mystery -- maybe it'd have been necessary to deal with the Kromagg tracking device in this episode.

I wonder if maybe Tormé would have had "Slide Effects" end on a bittersweet note: the sliders realize -- due to the inoperable, unremovable tracking device, they can never go home. Maybe, the Kromaggs aren't meant to be the central villain, the primary antagonist. Maybe they're simply a plot device that ends the ongoing arc of the sliders searching for home. That was their goal for Seasons 1 - 3. With Season 4, they're forced to accept that they can't go back and they mustn't keep trying.

And maybe the Kromaggs, having cut the sliders off from home, open a new path for the sliders. These are Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo, after all. So they are not crushed or broken by home being permanently denied them. Instead, they are heartwarmed by having had the chance to revisit home one last time, even in an illusion.

They are strengthened by the knowledge that even within a comforting dreamworld of home, they found their way back to each other and gave each other the will to break free. And they step into the vortex once again, no longer searching for home but instead giving themselves to adventure and infinity with the knowledge that so long as they're together, they are home.

And maybe that's what the Kromaggs were meant to do. They were supposed to make the sliders more commited to sliding than ever before.

It's just a theory...

Well, I think it all depends on what Torme's vision for the show was as a whole.  Again, Sliders is a bit of an anachronism in the sense that it took place in an era of TV that's virtually unrecognizable these days.  With TV so serialized and shows constantly looking to reinvent themselves, the idea of a show where the studio can run the first season completely out of order seems ridiculous.

But remember, Torme was trying to go against the curve.  The only reason we know/care that the episodes were shown out of order was because Torme was trying to tie them together.  He did add things (the Bennish scenes on Earth Prime, for example) that were meant to pay off down the road.  The Torme run was mostly unserialized, but there were little pieces that Torme wanted to include that would've made it bigger and grander than the TNG background he came from.

The issue with Torme is how many of those threads went unpulled.  The FBI/Bennish stuff was from the 3rd episode of the series and was never revisited again (in two seasons of Torme control) so it's hard to tell if that was even something he meant to ever bring back up.  So while the Kromaggs might've been his way to reinvent the show after the Peckinpah stuff, there's a chance he would've never mentioned the tracking device again if he'd stayed on the show indefinitely.

Well, I'm just saying it either could've been forgotten entirely (like the FBI/Bennish storyline seemingly was) or it could've been used as some sort of post-finale scene where a manta ship opens up a vortex en route to Earth Prime and we fade to black.  I don't know if he was necessarily setting up a war sequence....he liked dark endings that imply more danger than anything else.

Now here's the question I'm interested in - did he abandon the FBI storyline or was he never really planning on using it?  Did he stop it because Bennish was instrumental and FOX didn't like Bennish?  I'm not sure I remember reading anything about that, honestly.

Disclaimer: everything below is based on memories and impressions of chatting with Torme via AOL almost two decades ago and may be coloured by personal bias and filling in blank areas with guesses and it was written hurriedly during a lunchbreak.

I asked Torme back in 2000 about his plans for the FBI plot and his answer was appropriately SLIDERS-esque. He explained to me: his approach to a story is not to lay out precisely what happens when and to whom. Instead, he creates a concept and a beginning that will allow him multiple options for additional stories and conclusions. Due to the improvisational nature of television, it's important to have lots of different paths available rather than a strict plan from which any deviation means losing direction.

In the case of the FBI, Torme and Weiss wanted to create an alternate group of interdimensional travellers who would be professional and authoritarian. These federal agents would stand in stark contrast to the awkward ragamuffins that are the sliders. When the sliders encountered them, they would be in opposition.

Extrapolating from what Torme said: where the sliders blunder into situations, the FBI would be coolly mission-oriented, seeking to acquire intelligence, weapons and technology. Where the sliders are unwitting forces of anarchy who bring down governments, the FBI consider it appropriate to uphold existing power structures.

To me, Torme's view opens the door to many potential conflicts: the FBI want to reproduce biological weapons, but the sliders want to destroy them. The FBI want to help the fascist regime put down the resistance that the sliders have joined. The FBI want to curtail the interdimensional interference that the sliders regularly cause. The FBI consider the sliders to be domestic terrorists while the sliders view them as authoritarian pawns.

According to Torme: Bennish's presence on the federal agents' team makes the agents seem more professional in contrast and also showcases Bennish's hypocracy: he sides with whichever side he thinks will benefit him most.

Also according to Torme: to wrap up the FBI plot, if needed, numerous options existed. The FBI and the sliders could come to a truce where the FBI can't take the sliders home but can take messages for their families. The FBI catch up to the sliders and, because John Rhys-Davies wants to leave the show, the FBI manage take Arturo and only Arturo home (but, if John changes his mind, the FBI accidentally take the wrong Arturo home and the right one returns to the group).

One idea that Torme was keen on but chose not to pursue: the FBI weren't actually investigating Quinn's disappearance in "Summer of Love." They were investigating Michael Mallory's disappearance, had been for years, believing he faked his death to join a foreign power to help them make weapons. The FBI believed the vortex to be some unknown armament. Quinn's disappearance made them suspect that Quinn had been recruited by his father.

This would lead to a story where the FBI, investigating on a parallel Earth, could clear Michael's name and find that Michael had gone into hiding to protect his family and country. Alternatively, Michael could've been a traitor (like in "Gillian of the Spirits") and Quinn would embrace the Professor as his true father figure. The FBI plot could end with Quinn having hope that his father was still alive back home. Or it could end with Quinn knowing that a confrontation with his father was lying in wait should he ever get back. But when Torme wrote "The Guardian," he no longer saw Michael Mallory as secretly alive; he now saw Michael's value as the ghost of Quinn's childhood.

... this is what it was like to talk to Torme. In fact, I think this is why, nine years later, Transmodiar talked to Torme and Torme couldn't remember what his plans were. He hadn't planned. He'd imagined multiple paths of potential development.

None of the above is the secrets SLIDERS was building to reveal. This isn't the uncovered mythology of the series. They're just things Torme thought about doing but may not have done and probably wouldn't have done because other possibilities would have presented themselves over time. Quinn was supposed to be an awkward geek; that wasn't what was onscreen, so Torme changed his approach. Also, Torme was working with Robert K. Weiss and Weiss would've had his own ideas for what might come.

During our talk, the only certainty Torme was absolutely sure of for the FBI was this: if SLIDERS had been more successful, it'd occasionally be necessary to do an episode where the regular cast would have limited onscreen roles to get ahead on another episode. This happened with THE X-FILES where supporting cast members would take center-stage for a week. In that event, there might have been an episode devoted to the FBI and Bennish having an adventure.

Torme's philosophy of writing is neatly summarized in Quinn's speech about stardust in "The Guardian." Torme didn't make plans; he made possibilities. And as time passed, those possibilities would be dismantled and reconfigured to form new paths. That's what we should expect from the co-creator of SLIDERS.