I'm glad you like Season 4 because I never want anyone to have a bad time. I said the same thing to REWATCH PODCAST when they gave "The Exodus" a positive review. Grizzlor has done so much for the SLIDERS community. There is no subjective point of disagreement with him that in any way diminishes him. Season 4 is trash.
It's frustrating because there's clearly a lot of talent in Season 4: Marc Scott Zicree and Chris Black are highly engaged, Kari Wuhrer shows actual talent, but the majority of Season 4 episodes are clumsy, unprofessional, sloppy and dull, but the absence of Season 3's excesses make it seem less abrasive, obnoxious and unwatchable. If you watch "This Slide of Paradise," any TV episode that comes after "This Slide of Paradise" looks brilliant just by being not as incompetent and inept as "This Slide of Paradise."
But it's a terrible season. "Genesis" trashes the SLIDERS storytelling platform by making our home Earth a Kromagg outpost and Quinn an interdimensional refugee; he and Rembrandt can no longer compare parallel worlds with their own without angst and grief for the audience if not the characters. Jerry's performance in most episodes is sleepy and he is clearly hungover in most episodes. Cleavant Derricks retains his usual gusto, but his character has lost his everyman charm, his penchant for song, his comedic voice and the musical background that Tracy Torme brought to the character. Kari Wuhrer's performance is an improvement in that it's actually a performance, but it's so painfully performative and over enunciated and overconsidered. Charlie O'Connell has no idea what he's doing and has been overpromoted from playing Quinn Mallory's corpse and Jerry's occasional body double to a regular role for no good reason whatsoever.
The stories are unable to focus on parallel worlds. The script editor, when present, did a half-decent job of making the stories filmable and with some worthwhile ideas. But the ideas are entirely focused on technology rather than culture and the people living in these worlds: instead of facing dogma, prejudice, bureaucracy, tyranny, sexism, monarchies, and other forces of society, the sliders now fight spaceships, superweapons, superviruses, superdrugs, cryogenics, clones, virtual reality, virtual reality, cybernetics, cryogenics, bubble universes and superweapons.
Marc Scott Zicree contributed two teleplays to Season 4, introducing the slidewave and the slidecage and that's great, but when nearly every episode of Season 4 is fixated on technology, it's repetitive and monotonous and detaches the stories from characterization and cleverness. Despite Zicree giving up on the show after the first third of Season 4, the remainder of the year features his worst habits but without his inventiveness, wit or charm for most of it. Keith Damron does a good job with "Virtual Slide." Chris Black does a good job with "Slide By Wire." But they're the exception instead of the rule.
Wade's non-exit exit is an abomination in "Genesis," playing rape as a joke. Even worse is the follow up in "Mother and Child," where Jerry's reaction to learning that Wade was/is near is to hurry off camera without performing any reaction, likely because he was drunk. Every arc in Season 4 is treated with the same contempt: the team leaves Earth Prime in search of a superweapon. They find a superweapon in "Common Ground" and "World Killer" and and "Slidecage" and "Mother and Child" and "Revelations" and use none of them.
The need to save Earth Prime is their core mission in "Genesis" but mentioned incidentally in "Revelations." The search for Kromagg Prime is their main goal in "Genesis"; they have the coordinates and the means to bypass the slidecage in "Revelations," they don't use them. "Genesis" establishes that the sliders are being permitted to survive Kromagg outposts to locate Kromagg Prime; "The Dying Fields" and "Mother and Child" show the Kromaggs actively trying to kill the sliders and the plot is forgotten.
Ultimately, Season 4 is only superficially different from Season 3 due to the lower budget. But like Season 3, the fourth season alienated its most talented creator; it introduces arc elements that are forgotten almost immediately; it savagely mutilates another original cast member; it has an unwatchable season finale -- this time because it's tedious, a third of a beat sheet stretched out to fill the entire timeslot. And once again, they tied up their budget with another standing set -- a hotel instead of a cave -- and created a dull, repetitive look to nearly every episode.
Season 4 was billed as the return of SLIDERS with all the creative support and freedom it had been denied. And this is how it chose to use it. I would rather SLIDERS had been cancelled with Season 3.
