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…
