What if you could go to a parallel universe? What if you could slide into a thousand different worlds? Where it’s the same Earth and you’re the same person, but everything else is different? And what if you couldn’t find your way home?
The above is the opening narration that would accompany the TV show Sliders to quickly give the concept of what I consider one of the greatest TV shows of all time. At its best, it was possibly the best show on TV.
Running from 1994 to 1999, the show had a troubled production with changes in network, an altered vision for the show and most cripplingly and evolving cast which meant that the promise of the whole show of seeing travellers through multiple dimensions trying to get back home was never really resolved.
These days, the concept of a multiverse is the current fad and we’re seeing it left right and centre. DC has played with this concept for years with the Arrowverse cross overs, most famously with the Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline. Marvel then went all in on it with Spider-Man No Way Home and Everything Everywhere All At Once brought the multiverse concept to the Oscars.
But Sliders did it decades earlier. And yes I’m sure others did it before Sliders, but Sliders did it best. The concept was extremely simple for something that dealt with the concepts of the Einstein Rosen Bridge, and all manner of physics and…complicated science stuff.
The idea was that there was a uni student called Quinn Mallory who whilst being a science nerd was also cool, and capable as a fighter if need be. He managed to invent a device which would open a portal to another dimension. Like all science guys in this situation he decided to test it himself before it was fully ready. He tested it with his sciences professor Maxamillion Arturo, and his would be girflfriend Wade Welles. They also managed to overload the portal and accidentally dragged a random stranger into the portal and that was washed up singer Rembrandt ‘Crying Man’ Brown played by Cleavant Derricks.
Finding themselves in another dimension, they would have to wait for a timer on the device Quinn made to run down before the portal would open once again. They soon learned that activating the portal early would cause them to land in a random parallel dimension and the show would follow the formula of taking them to different worlds each episode as they were on a quest to return home.
In the show’s early run, the show acted as a series of ‘what ifs?’ with each world having something different compared to the real world we lived on which in theory could have been our world but for a small difference. Examples include what if the Russians had beaten America in war and now ruled over the US, or what if dinosaurs had never gone extinct and somehow coexisted with humans.
These kinds of scenarios were brilliant for audiences to imagine what they would do in such circumstances. Other stories included what if a meteorite were heading towards the Earth, but that the nuclear bomb hadn’t been invented to tackle it, or what if a virus had all but wiped out every male on the planet.
Somehow the Sliders, which is what the main characters and other people who travelled from world to world became known as, would also tangle themselves up in whatever problem the version of Earth they were on faced. This would usually take the form of either Quinn or the Professor using their scientific knowledge to introduce technology we have to a world that doesn’t have it, such as inventing the nuclear bomb to take out the meteorite. Or it may be that one of the Sliders has a double on this particular world and they get mistaken for them which either puts themselves or their doppelgänger into danger.
For the first two seasons of the show, the what if concept was brilliant and smartly written. The cast all played great off each other and each week we’d look forward to seeing what inventive new world they arrived on. This even included smaller, but fun ideas that perhaps couldn’t be fleshed out enough to justify a whole episode, with the Sliders starting an episode on a world we’d get a brief glimpse of before sliding the characters off to the world which would be the main focus of the episode. A great example of this was a world that was plagued by a swarm of genetically modified spider wasps that were nearly indestructible.
I can’t put across enough how much fun the show was in its early years, although the wheels of the show started to fall off by season three. The show changed networks, may have had changes in its creative team and some of these started to lead to cast changes that ultimately would see the show lose its quality.
Now if you’re a fan of the show you may have different feelings about when the show did or didn’t start to drop in quality, but for many it was when it moved away from the ‘different choice in history’ approach to creating different dimensions to just coming up with random concepts and not having the same interesting route to getting to them. There was one episode where there were intelligent tornados and others which was clearly based on concepts of sci-fi or horror movies such as Tremors or Species. There was still fun to be had with these stories, but the show had got a different feel to when it first started.
The cast evolving along the way was another factor it’s in change of feeling.
Arturo was played by John Rhys Davies who people would recognise from the Indiana Jones films and may not recognise (as he was wearing make up) as Gimli from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The professor added a gravitas to the show that would eventually be lost when he exited the series, but filled many roles on the show. He could give a lot of the scientific exposition which meant that Quinn didn’t always have to. He was also lovably grouchy at times, and his being older than the Quinn and Wade meant he opened up different types of stories that could be told.
Wade would have an on off will they won’t they relationship with Quinn, but also have her own love interests if the story called for it. Quinn would also have other love interests if the story called for it, and with the early exit of Sabrina Lloyd who played Wade it meant that the show never really got to the Quinn-Wade love story everyone expected. Wade was also the lead female and a normal person who was brave, but not a science genius so she was relatable. Also being the only female meant a different range of stories were opened up to her.
Strangely in the case of Wade she almost never met a double of herself and it’s never been clear to me as to why this was. The others would frequently meet their doubles on other worlds, but not Wade.
Quinn himself only stayed for four of the show’s five seasons and was the driving force of the show. Initially bright and enthusiastic whilst still being smart and heroic, in later years he would have a touch of greater sadness at the predicament his invention had gotten others into, as ultimately as characters were written out he had failed in his mission to get them home.
Rembrandt, or Remy as people would call him, started as mostly a comedic character who didn’t know the others and had a bigger personality. He was also always seeking fine and the spotlight as a singer, although a lot of this went away as he became used to the life of a slider. By the end of the show’s run he was the only original cast member left which was a real shame as he had to evolve from comedic side character to absolute lead and it didn’t feel quite right. He did a good job, but the stories by the end didn’t do him any favours.
One of the fun things with Remy and this show was that in real life Cleavant Derricks has a bear identical twin so filming episodes with two Rembrandts could be done much more effectively than could be achieved with the others.
In the third season of the show, we were introduced to Maggie, a new slider who was a bitter and hard as nails soldier whose world was destroyed. Her story was initially that she wanted revenge on a villain in the show who killed her husband, and she would eventually and uncomfortably become a rival live interest to Quinn. The dynamic of having Wade and Maggie not get along just made Wade seem under threat in the group as she didn’t offer being a soldier like Maggie and her typical role of damsel just made her feel as if she was being edged out…which eventually happened in real life with Sabrina Lloyd out and Maggie having to soften to fit some of Wade’s typical storylines.
By Season four with Arturo and Wade gone, the show introduced us to a version of Quinn’s brother Colin who was played by Jerry O’Connell’s real life brother Charlie. I thought this was a good idea for a story as it added a sibling aspect to the show and Colin was the ultimate fish out of water as he came from a world where he was basically Amish.
Season four also leaned heavily into a story from the show’s early run where they met a differently evolved race of humans who were for all intents and purposes alien invaders. The Kromags as they were known were alien looking beings who could fly spaceships and also had sliding technology. Having met the sliders as a one off story the season four and five run focussed on them trying to take over every dimension. This was a great idea.
If the show was to run for many more years it couldn’t simply be that the sliders were always searching for a way to get home and never achieving it. A war across worlds with this nazi like race of monsters was a great plot which only kinda got resolved by the end.
The fifth and final season had less of the kromags than season four which maybe leaned into them a bit too heavily, but also had to deal with more cast changes. Jerry and Charlie O’Connell both left the show and now Remy and Maggie were the two leads. The show introduced us to Mallory, an alternative version of Quinn, who other than one world where Quinn was a woman, had always looked exactly the same. This is interesting just because these days Marvel has leaned into the Spider-Verse where different actors who all played Spider-Man and there was no explanation for why the different versions all looked like different people.
The story with Mallory is that he was unable to walk and technology was used to merge him with an alternative Quinn Mallory who could walk. This gave the excuse of what happened to the original Quinn and in theory gave a way for Jerry O’Connell to come back so there could be both versions of Quinn co-exist rather than it just being a re-casting. Of course, this never came to be as the show was cancelled, but the Mallory version of Quinn wasn’t that likeable. Unlike most versions of Quinn, Mallory wasn’t presented as a genius and transformed the lead character of the show into that feeling you get when you have a step parent who wants you to call them dad…you’re not my real Quinn…
Lastly the show also introduced us to Diana who was from the same world as Mallory and had worked on the technology that merged the two Quinn’s. She gave us a science type who could do the exposition that Arturo or Quinn previously had but otherwise didn’t have much going character wise.
It’s a shame the show didn’t get another season or two to really iron out the cast changes and let the new dynamic find its feet as the show still had loads of potential.
Instead the show ended on a cliff hanger never to be resolved which is always a tragedy in television. With a solution to defeat the Kromags in hand, but no guarantee it would work, Remy slides back to his home world as the show ends using a barely functioning sliding device. Did he make it back to Earth prime, and did he stop the Kromag threat? We’ll never know.
The chances of a continuation of the show some twenty plus years after it ended are slim. Even if they did bring it back how could they possibly show what happened after Remy slid? The age difference of the cast and the fact that only a small if loyal fan base of the show would know what is going on means that a continuation is unlikely. The chances of a reboot feel higher now than they have in a long time with the current trend of multiverse movies out there. The good news is that a new version of the show could be a soft reboot and if it featured a new set of characters could easily reference and resolve the ending of the original show if they chose to. If a new show features a new Quinn, Wade and company it’d be harder to justify that there were versions of the same characters but twenty years earlier. But hey it’s a multiverse so they could find a way. There was one episode where they said time ran slower and Quinn met a younger version of himself, so maybe he could also meet an older version of himself and bring the original cast back or one or more episodes.
So until we next cover the awesome show, please join me in reading the final word of the article in a drawn out whisper…Slidersssss
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