Sliders

I think most people familiar with the show would say that it started off as a really original and interesting show. The 'what if" concept really worked for it. But as time went on, the show became something worse than repetitive. It abandoned the original premise of the show. They stopped being mainly concerned with getting home and started being more concerned with these Kromag things. That's about where the original cast started to fall away one by one. They still show re-runs on the sci-fi channel, and I catch the early ones when I can. That's when the show was enjoyable. In the last half of the shows six seasons, it was unwatchable.

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.

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.

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.

This was one of my favorite shows when I was in high school and college. I was really into sci-fi at the time (especially "The X-Files"), and I had a huge crush on Jerry O'Connell, so this series was right up my alley. The original premise was intriguing: a professor and his student discover a way to create wormholes into parallel universes, to which they would briefly visit before returning to their own earth. Unfortunately the device that allows them to do this gets damaged and they are stuck in a parallel world with no idea how to get home. So they keep "sliding" from one random world to the next, hoping to eventually return to "Earth Prime". Do they return? I have no idea, because after the first few seasons the show took a sharp turn for the worse and became almost unrecognizable. While most shows jump the shark at some point, this show jumped about 10 sharks early on. It's a shame because it was one of the few intelligent shows going at the time. If you are new to the series, I would rent the first two seasons, and maybe the third. Once John Rhys-Davies leaves (whose character was one of the backbones of the show), it's not worth watching anymore. My rating is for the first few seasons, not the anomaly it became after that. I guess one could say the show itself slid into a horrifying "parallel universe", never to return again.