It was 1995, Toy Story would be the top grossing movie, Coolio’s Gansta’s Paradise was burning up the charts (look at me going all Casey Kasem on ya), and my exposure to science fiction on television had been mostly limited to Star Trek and professional wrestling. Truth be told, I was still more of a fantasy and horror reader, having not yet discovered the joy of a fantastic thought experiment being played out via good SciFi.
I don’t want to say that Sliders changed all that; that would be giving it just a bit too much credit, but it was one of those stepping stones on the path to SciFi fandom.
The show was short-lived, running only five seasons, but felt even shorter to me as I lost interest in it midway through the third of these five when it started turning into some “run from/battle with the aliens” show. And when you combine that with the loss of Professor Arturo, it seemed almost as though Sliders wasn’t content to simply jump the shark after the third season, instead bounding over it in a double somersault and delivering a kick to the head on the way for good measure. Oddly enough, it was the SciFi channel that finished the show off with seasons four and five.
No, to me, the first two seasons are where it’s at for Sliders.
More after the jump…
In a nutshell, you have four accidental travelers: Quinn (Jerry O'Connell), Wade (Sabrina Lloyd), Professor Arturo (John Rhys-Davies), and Rembrandt Brown (Cleavant Derricks). Using a wormhole, the Sliders take an initial jump (except for Quinn, who has gone once before) into an alternate existence. But when their jump goes awry and they have to bail out early, they find that they are lost in the endless alternate dimensions. The Sliders jump from alternate earth to alternate earth in an attempt to get back to their true home, Earth Prime.
Of course, it isn't (usually) as easy as just jumping as soon as they figure out they're in the wrong place. You wouldn't have much of a show that way. No, the wormhole is on a timer that has to frequently recharge, so the Sliders often have to get by in their new alternate Earth after each jump until a new wormhole can be summoned...except of course when this means they'd be killed, because, well, you wouldn't have much of a show then either.
There is some real fun to going back and viewing the episodes now. Firstly, it's amazing to me how dated the scenery looks already. The "timer" that the Sliders use seems to be a modified cell phone, you know, the bulky kind with the flimsy flip down talking piece. The hairstyles, clothing, and even the social climate in which it was made all feel, to me, to be strangely antique and kinda fun to watch.
The idea of alternative histories captivated me from the get-go. To that point, I hadn't spent much time thinking about how many little (or seemingly little) things had had to have happened to create the world that I live in today. Sliders dealt with that immediately; from Quinn's first jump into a dimension where little things were "off," like traffic lights being reversed (green for stop, red for go), global cooling in place of global warming, and so on. Talk about waking up the the possibilities--I was hooked.
If you never saw Sliders or if you don't remember the show (or if you just don't remember how good it was before it jumped the shark), then I present you with the pilot episode (thanks Hulu):
PS - The whole first season is available for viewing at Hulu. If you're interested, I've got a wormhole here that'll take you right to it: Slide on over...
Sliders: Before Sabrina Lloyd left (Wade) it was fantastic. After that -- it became craptacular overnight. And the way the character losses were handled was terrible. But yeah, those first two seasons -- outstanding fun.