Joshua Lawrence Pike
The first two seasons are what I am going to review, the rest...was not good, the network took control and made it into a bad action adventure show, introducing magic of all things. I suggest you just watch the first two seasons and maybe a couple of the third for closure.Sliders was about four people who were sliding from one alternate reality to another. Before I go further I will talk about the charactersQuinn Mallory: Brilliant graduate physics student. He invented sliding.Wade Wells: She worked in a computer store and studies literature and poetry. She believes in the supernatural. A close friend of Quinn, she in fact has a crush on him that he does not know about.Professor Maximillian P. Arturo: He is one of Quinn's teachers. Contrary to what he thought Quinn had a lot of respect for him. He is a very learned man and believes in science and reason above all else. He is not someone who could easily make breakthroughs, or who was known to be great from the get go. He spent many many years studying and learning, part of him becomes resentful of Quinn because of this (but to his credit it does not show often)Rembrandt Brown: The only slider who did not choose to start sliding, a singer who was once in a successful band but left before they made it big and he did not. He was on his way to sing the national anthem at a stadium when he got sucked up.Most of the episodes have the sliders arriving on a world that differs from ours in some way, with a certain amount of time before they can open the wormhole again. Each wormhole takes them to a random world. This is because they had to mess with the sliding device to get off the first world safely and lack the equipment to reset it and get them home, if they miss the window the timer will become useless. Most of the worlds are alternate history's where one thing is different. For example, what if the USSR had won the cold war? What would cause that and what effect would it have? What if antibiotics were never discovered? What if we became obsessed with keeping our population low? In this show you have what very much feel like real people, just watching them chew the scenery is fun. www.JoshuaLawrencePike.com
ichwan_mil
Of all Sci-Fi shows on TV, I've found only two proving to be fresh, most engaging, and innovative...the first one is Quantum Leap that I reviewed just before, and the second one being Sliders.Sliders has made a refreshing concept of 'alternative-reality' world - it did not join the already-crowded time-travel ship, instead it decided to set sail with its own, dubbed "dimensional travel". The creators must think that inter-dimensional travel should not be less engaging than time travel - "Same time, same earth, different dimension", as it is spoken in the opening credit.They were right. I was among the ones who found it to be very engaging, brilliant and could not miss any single episode.The premise is clearly explained in the Pilot, which, in my opinion - ironically, turns out to be the best episode throughout the whole series. A group of four with different motives - Quinn Mallory, Wade Welles, Rembrandt Brown, and Maximilian Arturo - slide into a vortex which enables them to do inter-dimensional travel. The point is, they could not control into which dimension they will land next and they often end up being stranded in unexpected situations in earths they have no idea at all - a world where Russia rules America, another one where men are inferior to women, or one world where USA is still a British colony - the quartet slide from one dimension to another as I eagerly watched...Until the time came when they met their demise one by one; starting from Arturo who was shot, then Wade who was abducted by their archnemesis The Kromaggs, then Quinn followed when he was lost in the vortex - leaving Rembrandt alone. Well, actually he was not alone, there were others eventually came join him. Actually, the disappearance of a show's original protagonists is not something taboo - many shows actually do that without much sacrificing the quality of the show itself. What made this worse was, their demise is evoked by some dark motives behind the screen. Word has it that the actors who played the eventually-lost characters; O'Connell, Lloyd, and Rhys-Davies, were actually fired from the show or withdrew because of..well, say, conflicts of interest. Things only got even worse, when Tracy Torme, the show's mastermind, also withdrew and left the show's fate into a bunch of workers who -sadly- lacked ideas how to maintain an already-brilliant show.For the aforementioned reasons, my interest had decreased dramatically. The last season in which I watched every episode was Season 3, only a few of Season 4 that I watched, and I did not watch any of Season 5 (when all original casts but Rembrandt Brown had lost) at all.Rembrandt, while he was one of the starting lineups and stayed until the very end, was not enough. I don't by all means want to say that the replacement actors (Kari Wuhrer, Tembi Locke, Charlie O'Connell, and Robert Floyd) were bad - they've tried after all. Some episodes from the last two seasons actually had quite intriguing and potential plots, say "World Killer", "Genesis", and "Requiem" . But I think it's fair to say, that Sliders show has lost its spirit without Quinn Mallory, Wade Welles, and Maximilian Arturo.The worst of all is, of course, the very last episode, "The Seer". The episode itself is not that bad, but it provides a very terrible conclusion for the show. I realize, it was initially intended to be continued with the next season. But - again, thanks to those conflicts of interest - it didn't. And so, the real victim is the viewers like me who was left clueless, like it all has totally gone into the thin air.Many viewers had drawn inevitable comparisons between The Sliders and Quantum Leap. The most glaring one is that Maggie Beckett, one of the replacement slider is a nephew of Quantum Leap's Sam Beckett (very interesting indeed, though never officially confirmed that I know of). Both provide refreshing approaches to Sci-Fi show world and deal with uncontrollable travel and "the endless hope of getting home" though none has managed to get home until the end. But Sliders' fate is much worse than that of Quantum Leap. In Quantum Leap, Sam and Al still stayed until the very end. While I also hate Quantum Leap's cliffhanger ending, it was not contaminated by the so-called conflicts of interest, and at least it did not lost its spirit throughout the show. Needless to say, all episodes in Quantum Leap's last season are as good as those in the first season.To sum it up, although it has been more than 10 years since The Sliders were gone, I still wish that I might see them again in the future. But let's clear it out, to me, NEVER change the starting lineups. There is some hope, for it's the good of inter-dimensional travel show - while one character dies, the same character in another dimension may be still alive. Bring Quinn Mallory, Rembrandt Brown, Wade Welles, and Maximilian Arturo back to the show - I want nobody else - and get rid of those stupid conflicts of interest. I have been waiting for too long.
copperncherrio
So, over break I watched season 1-4 of Sliders, my dad's favorite show of all time (American show any how). It's a great concept show where a boy genius (college boy) creates a remote that helps you travel through multi dimensions. The group (professor, girl, genius, and singer) travels from multiple versions of our world to find their way home.Season 1 and 2 were EXCELLENT, season 3 was alright… the show got pretty bad when the cast changed (either by being killed off or otherwise). I stopped watching by season 5. I watched the first episode and I just felt disappointment. Only one of the original characters from episode is there and the other characters are annoying and SUCKS.ARG. Other than that, the concept of the show is outstanding in the first two seasons. They come to the world where multiple theoretical extremes are implemented on a world that we know and our heroes figure out how the survive the world until they can use the Timer again so they can move to the next world.Some of the great worlds are major what ifs. For instance, a world where nuclear bombs were never invented, Russians won the Cold War, sexism is reversed where women are dominant over men, among many other things.Some however got silly, a universe with vampires being one of them.My favorite world however was the one where academia was treated with popularity like that of sport stars and movie starts. It's bizarrely brilliant. People chase after the brilliant for autographs and their biggest sport is based on math and science questions mixed with the idea of Othello.
ryanpseudo
Unfortunately I cannot review each season separately, because the first couple seasons deserve a much better rating than the subsequent ones. The Crew: The show starts out with the usual cast: unexpected male called to be a leader in adverse conditions who finds his confidence and strength through various challenges; the older sage/ wise man/ elder who has experience in all things, but never lives up to the hero; the cute girl next door who has always loved the hero, but never built up the courage to tell him, and the tension builds with each time he saves her; and the comic relief/ strong guy who has no idea whats going on but makes quippy comments and punches people who don't like the hero. In the third season they lose wise sage, and add obnoxious fox. Foxy warrior women only make a show better if you like the person, but this one just seems to pick fights and make bad choices. Her good looks don't matter if the character is ubiquitously hated by all viewers/ characters. The Idea: The show is based on the cast traveling to parallel Earths trying to get back to theirs. The first many episodes have no intertwined plots, and are based solely on the peculiar differences between worlds, and the struggles that causes to stay out of harms way and help the locals overcome tyranny and oppression. The show could have gone on this way so long as they kept thinking up new clever ways to make these worlds different, but they didn't. They started taking from age old plots of scientist mixing animals and humans, invisible person only one crazy person can see, dinosaurs, underground morlocks, back in time to change your worst moments...the works. In season 3 the plot changes to tracking down a murder, even though there's been murders in every other world, this one needs to be stopped, and they go on a rampage trying to stop one guy who's always one step ahead. It's been done. The comic relief stops being comic relief in season 2 and becomes debbie downer. The nerdy hero boy learns boxing and kung-fu at some point and stops being beat up all the time, and wails out the pain. The girl next door becomes a major whiner too, and completely stops pursuing hero-boy. Overall Jist: The first couple seasons are good, but after that they really seem to be riding it to the bank. The acting gets over the top, the stories becoming trite, and the whole situation becomes a joke. Everyone has a sliding device. Nobody knows how to use it. Everyone's hunting everyone. Weird earth-bound aliens are some overarching evil that really done't seem to do as much as people give them credit for.
