Sliders, that underrated 1990s sci-fi show

Hell, there was that time the sliders brought a Species-ripoff creature to a new world; that's yet another apocalypse to their name.

 

Me, too! No Professor Arturo = no Sliders. I tried to watch it afterwards but it was no fun without him. How they got rid of Wade was awful. It's such a cool concept. It's just a shame the coke-heads at Fox just didn't care.

 

Sliders is a good example of how FOX was mucking with good shows long before Firefly. I wonder if the stories Rhy-Davies told were true, how he went to the writer's room and caught them watching "Species" and talking about what they could rip off from it.

 

Given the nature of a lot of the season 3 plots, I totally see that story as being true.

 

FOX is a business that has had different people running it at different times. I don't know if the people running the scripted drama division during the back half of Sliders' third season in 1997 were the same as the ones running it when Firefly came out, but I suspect they were the same ones running it in 1993-4 when M.A.N.T.I.S. was made. That was another show that started out with a fairly straightforward speculative premise (basically "What if Iron Man was Batman?") but was retooled midseason at network mandate into a more "sci-fi" show, which meant ridiculous random weirdness, terrible writing, and a finale so staggeringly bad that it literally hurt to watch. Nothing that happened to Firefly was remotely that bad; it was cancelled, sure, but at least it wasn't ripped to shreds and reduced to a pale echo of its original self before the end came.

 

Is it archived over at the wayback machine/web.archive.org?

 

I think that's The Dimension of Continuity, which is archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160422080707/http://www.dimensionofcontinuity.com/

 

Ah, yeah, I didn't think to look there. Thanks for the assist, Christopher.

Took some digging (since I haven't looked at the site in a decade and a half) but here's the relevant page with all of the behind-the-scenes history and drama I remember reading about:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160405203958/http://www.dimensionofcontinuity.com/bts.htm

 

And apparently the whole thing with Earth being conquered by the Kromaggs (the Earth the Sliders were from) as well as Quinn being some special kid were going to be revealed as a fake plot created by the Kromaggs all along.

Too bad they didn't go with that, would've been a great subversion.

 

It had a fun first season or two, then completely lost me.

 

I think i only saw it up to the start of the Kromaggs, some of the alt-history ideas were interesting such as the society where smart people competed in competition (instead of sport).

 

Sliders is one of those show were it's fun to just think about the concept. I know I have spent much time just thinking of cool, What if worlds and episodes. Like these 5

1 A world war San Fran was the Capital of America and Quinn's dad was the President of the United States and the White House was in San Fran]

2 A world that worships monkeys as Gods and lets them do whatever they want so you got monkeys running in the streets and people are suppose to just back away and let them do whatever.

3 A world were Canada exists were America is.

4 A world were cloning was invented in the 60's so this world has clones of JFK, MLK, etc living in the modern world and still young.

5 A world were San Fran has water canals like in France.

 

It lost me in season 3, then won me back in season 4 by hiring actual science fiction writers who knew what they were doing. I regret that so many people were driven away by season 3 that they didn't return when it got better again.

The Kromaggs had two starts, essentially. They appeared once in season 2, then were abandoned for the rest of the FOX run, then were reintroduced in the Sci-Fi Channel seasons in a redesigned and reinvented form, less like horror monsters and more like the show's equivalent of the Romulans or Cardassians, forehead-alien militarists played by strong-voiced actors. I think they handwaved the change by having them be a different variant of Kromagg from a different alternate Earth.

I've had occasion to read up on Indian history lately, and something like that actually did exist around the 7th century CE or thereabouts. Philosophers were celebrities, engaging in great public debates with royal backers, and these were huge festive events like the Super Bowl. The winners of a philosophical debate would be feted like royalty, while the losers might be banished, mutilated, or even executed.

 

Part of the reason why many didn't go back to SLIDERS for season 4 was since SciFi Channel got it, not every house had that channel. At that time, SciFi Channel was a premium channel and if you didn't have satellite or one of the packages, you wouldn't be able to see it. Remember, FOX was a basic cable channel.

I know this happened in my case.

 

That's a good point. Still, I'm sure there were plenty of people who had the channel but had still given up on the show and didn't come back. I think I only came back to it because I knew it had a new writing staff including some names I knew. And even then I was hesitant. But not everyone follows the behind-the-scenes news.

It's a bit like what happened with Sci-Fi's Flash Gordon series in 2007, I think it was. It started out mediocre and quickly lost viewers, so by the time it fixed its problems and became actually good in the back 2/3 of the season, hardly anyone was watching anymore, so it was doomed to cancellation. I can't blame the people who bailed on the first 1/3 of the season, but it's a shame that the show took so long to get its act together that most viewers never saw it.

 

I remember that with FLASH GORDON. I am glad I stuck around for the whole thing, but I can't say I'm surprised people bailed after the first few episodes.

 

Thats interesting, the last episode i saw was with the Kromaggs v1.0 then.

 

I've been rewatching bits and pieces of the first three seasons; it is amazing how easily I slid back into the show...and saddening how much I missed John-Rhys Davies.

 

The "Azure Gate Bridge" still gets me.

 

I see what you did there.