I viaggiatori

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.

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.

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.

Quinn and Wade should have done more than just a kiss. In the early episode where Quinn is caught in the astroplane Wade was REALLY concerned about Quinn where as the others were concerned about the timer and put Quinn second. The show has gone downhill since the O'Connell's left, and is no-longer a show that I consider good enough to watch. I was very upset when the professor died, and again when Wade was captured by the Kromaggs. I really though Quinn and Wade was a GREAT match. I didn't believe anything would ever happen between Maggie and Quinn and I was VERY happy when nothing did. Maggie was nothing but a pain from the time she came on the show. In her second season she was a little better, in her first the 'competition'between her and Wade for Quinn was, umm, entertaining and I was rooting for Wade all the way, she was so much nicer.