Sliders, les mondes parallèles

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.

For the first three years of Sliders, this show was an intelligent, original and fascinating example of perfect scifi TV. The acting was mostly above average, but the character dynamics of this odd group (a whiz kid, his wannabe girlfriend, his college professor and a washed-up singer who got into sliding by accident) and the writing were what really made the show. Unfortunately, the show began to go downhill when the original cast was shaken up with the departure of the formidable John Rhys-Davies as the Professor, and jumped the shark completely when it lost Sabrina Lloyd as Wade. I'm sure many salivating teen males would disagree with me on the pointlessness of Kari Wuhrer, but it's clear to me that she added nothing but cleavage to the show.

A show with great potential that should have continued for years.

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.

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....

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.