Date of first slide

Earth Prime has it as 27 September 1994

I believe that was the original set up. And oddly enough it is 2 Torme written episodes that contradict each and create the confusion. The pilot shows that Quinn's diary (tapes) are dated in the fall (I believe September) but the next episode "Summer of Love", Rembrandt asks the hippies if the year is 1995.

I remember back in the old mca netforum days coming up with a half baked idea to explain the time difference between the pilot and summer of love.

For an extended time, they stay on the Michael Mallory world at the end of the pilot trying to figure out how best to return home, and they finally arrive on a solution that requires them to have the least amount of variance as possible from earth prime’s vibrational frequency before they make the attempt.  This means they need to wear the same exact clothes they had on the day they left earth prime.  But Mrs. Mallory has donated some of their old clothes to charity in the time they’ve been there, so now they go on a quest to find them.

It was a bit wacky, but that could have fit with the tone pretty easily; and it would have offered a deeper look at the differences on that world as they find where the clothes ended up.

While the Pilot's date is fairly assured, most of the series following that gets really muddled.  Into The Mystic still makes no sense with the whole OJ stuff.

I don't think Torme forgot. I think when writing Summer of Love, he knew it'd air in 1995.

There's another curious contradiction in Torme's scripts: Quinn Mallory's childhood. I've always found it fascinating.

The Pilot says that Michael's died during Quinn's teens. The family photograph in the Mallory kitchen shows Jerry posed with Linda Henning and Tom Butler. But "The Guardian" declares that the death of Quinn's father at age 10 (and caused Quinn to become socially isolated and racked with guilt over how his final words to his dad were spoken in anger). This is a massive discrepancy. Michael Mallory's death was originally a sad event in Quinn's late adolescence. But Torme subsequently presents it as a traumatic event in Quinn's pre-teen years.

I don't think it's a mistake and I don't think Torme forgot. I think it's a deliberate retcon on Torme's part to reconcile Quinn Mallory being an awkward, isolated nerd who is played by the charismatic Jerry O'Connell. In the original Pilot script, Quinn is shown to be terrified of asking his attractive neighbour, Stephanie, out on a date, and when he summons the courage to do so, he is mocked for his efforts.

The script was clearly written before Jerry was cast and it's hard to imagine Jerry performing such scenes. It seems like Stephanie was cast and the scenes were shot, and Torme clearly had some fixation on this character as she appeared in his notes for his unofficially official series finale screenplay that he never completed. The scenes were cut from the Pilot, but even then, there was a discrepancy between Quinn being scripted as an awkward geek who was a slightly toned down Steve Urkel and Jerry's performance where he plays Quinn with glowing confidence.

Torme decided to revise Michael Mallory's role in Quinn's life, making him a life defining trauma. Torme also wrote in an explanation for Jerry's athleticism being at odds with Quinn's shyness; he skipped several grades and was physically smaller than the classmates who bullied him. I think the inconsistency regarding Michael between the Pilot and "The Guardian" is really the creator noting the inconsistency between Quinn's actor and Quinn's character. The retcon merges Jerry and Quinn into a unified whole.

Matt Hutaff completely disagrees with all of the above and thinks the backstory was always the backstory and that Jerry played Quinn in the Pilot photo because otherwise, you wouldn't recognize Quinn in the photo.

It's interesting that CHUCK, which is sort of like QUINN MALLORY: THE SERIES, had a similar situation: the original Pilot script for CHUCK had our geek hero, Chuck, also crushing on his next-door neighbour, Kayla Hart (Natalie Martinez). Kayla was to be a wild, free-spirited music lover and Chuck, a Best Buy computer technician with extremely low self-esteem after getting kicked out of his engineering program at Stanford, would be so awkward around Kayla that he couldn't even say hello to her at an audible volume. However, shortly before filming, writers Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak felt that CHUCK's leading lady was plainly Yvonne Strahovski's Sarah and that they would never be able to fully capitalize on Martinez in the show as anything but a temporary guest-star. They also felt that giving Chuck too many love interests would be deeply implausible for such a damaged and isolated character, so they cut Kayla Hart from the script and released the actress.

Schwartz and Fedak have, as far as I know, never attempted to write Kayla Hart fanfic. In contrast, the Stephanie character seems highly significant to Torme. I have absolutely no idea why; the character never appeared onscreen, never showed up in a later episode, was never (to my knowledge) repurposed into another character.

In Torme's (unfinished) notes for the PDF screenplay he wanted to write as an officially unofficial series finale, the opening is set shortly after "The Guardian" where, due to Logan St. Clair's modifications in "Double Cross," the timer begins malfunctioning. Slide windows are getting shorter and shorter; the sliders regroup on an Earth where the super-continent Pangea never disassembled and they are welcomed to a family meal by Stephanie and her husband. Torme's details concluded here, but the plot to follow was that Quinn would rig the timer to send the sliders backwards through the interdimension, revisiting past Earths, seeing the outcome of their interference in previous episodes, and hopefully getting home before the timer burnt out.

In Temporal Flux's view, Torme's writing has often represented different aspects of his life and obsessions. Rembrandt was a representation of Torme's love for his father's music. Bennish represented what was the dominant counterculture in Torme's youth, the hippie. The Kromaggs seem to emerge from Torme's fixation on UFOs and spaceships. So what does Stephanie represent to Torme and what is her significance? Is she an insert for Torme's wife? (I dunno.)