Sliders

When Slider's debuted I was in heaven, OK the F/X weren't Hollywood grand but they did what they could with what they had, the cast was great and the story was engaging. Season 1 was wonderful, season 2 (actually season 2 was the second half of season 1) was almost as good. The season 3 came and brought the deadly David Peckinpah, who's Indian name is probably "He-who-has-no-talent" . Mr. P promptly decided that the show was too cerebral (i.e. his low I.Q. couldn't figure it out) and got rid of the creator, the good writers, and the finest actor on the show. He replaced the actor with a bimbo nicknamed Captain D-cups and got a movie rental card to replace the writers (go ahead, count how many plots in seasons 3-5 are direct rip off of a popular movie). And thus a great show died, only to have it's corpse hung on strings and forced to dance for Peckinpah as he moved it to the Sci-Fi channel where he had even more control and less creativity. Alas poor Sliders....

The original Sliders, featuring O'Connell, Rhys-Davies, Lloyd and Derricks, had potential: a Quantum Leap that held up better from a hard sci-fi POV.

Sure, the alternate worlds differed along only a narrow spectrum (no worlds where Aristotle's corpus was lost at sea or where the Spanish were beaten back by the Aztecs and Mayans--in short, nothing compared to Poul Anderson's Time Patrol novels), but for TV, it was forgiveable. The show could have served a real allegorical purpose, like the original Star Trek episodes, smuggling in controversy in veiled, science-fiction form under the radars of network censors.

And maybe it tried, and maybe it would have tried harder, but either the writing so petered out that the original stars split or the stars bolted and the writers scrambled to patch together the vehicle that had been abandoned. Down goes Sabrina Lloyd, then John Rhys-Davies, then the star, Jerry O'Connell. By the time Cleavant Derricks' seniority finally grants him the dubious honor of doing the opening voiceover narration, the show's been utterly gutted.

Maybe there's something philosophical in the program's blandness: an episode on a world without aluminum doesn't use that lack for anything more than a plot complication amid a standard good-guys vs. bad-guys story. Maybe the message in these all-too-similar worlds is that no matter how wacky the axiomatic differences among quantum realities, it's all same-old, same-old.

Network TV should be relieved at that news.

Sliders had the intriguing premise of a group of people being able to open up a vortex & journeying to parallel earths in alternate dimensions.The fact that a college kid in the present was able to create such a device in his basement to make this happen never seemed realistic to me.We are talking about technology such as this as being thousands of years in our future.But aside from that it was a nifty premise,& not one overdone on TV.The cast was wonderful & enjoyed a terrific chemistry.The story lines were endless,since each earth was different from their homeworld.Sliding into a new & unknown world was exciting,we walked with our sliders as they tried to discover what kind of earth they had come to,what were the differences,the dangers,& how best could they survive until the vortex would open again & propel them to their next earth? The scripts could range from satire to horror to science fiction.The early seasons with the original cast intact were always the best.Sadly, as the seasons went on the scripts declined in quality.John Rhys-Davies was the first to quit due to the poor writing of the show & not being allowed mush input.The creators of the series unfortunately had problems with network "suits" as to the direction of the show.That is a problem that happens all too often with TV sf series. By the end of the show's run,only the engaging Cleavant Derricks was left from the original cast.Able actors replaced the originals but were never could recapture the magic of their relationships.It was a disappointing end to what began as a fascinating show.

This show was great. After John Rhys Davies left the show (complaining that the scripts were starting to get too stupid, which they were) it was still pretty OK. When Wade and O'Connell left the show became total garbage. Nothing on Crying Man, he was always very good, but the stories became much too lazy and stupid (very bad writing) and Quinn's brother was awful.

SciFi has spent this week running episodes of Sliders from the early seasons, and man, did I forget how good they were.

The early episodes of the show, particularly the pilot, were fantastic-- the alternate worlds were well thought out, and I'd think about the plausibility of them as I lay in bed at night before drifting off to sleep.

Too bad they had to dumb it down and start ripping off movie plots in later seasons. I mourned the loss of John Rhys-Davies, his character was great. And to replace him with boobs-on-patrol Kari Wuhrer was pathetic. It was a completely obvious attempt to boost ratings by grabbing the eyeballs of the geek-horndog set that also lusted after Scully and Seven of Nine and religiously watched their respective shows.

To sum up, don't waste your time watching any episodes from the later seasons.