“Sliders” was a Science Fiction (Sci-Fi) TV series that aired from 1995-2000. It’s one of those “oldie, but goodie[s]” if you know what I mean.
The tag line sums it up very nicely.
Four people just found a gateway to another dimension, but they forgot one problem… how to get back!
I’m personally not a fan of The X-Files or anything like that, but I really did enjoy watching this show. I just finished watching the entire show, seasons 1-5, on Netflix with Watch Instantly! Well, almost entirely, there were about 8 episodes that Netflix did not have available to Watch Instantly (it’s like a little scam that Netflix tries to pull thinking we’ll never realize that they would rather slow our watching with rentals). 😛
The show was at times very interesting and at other just plain old interesting. I did, however, notice a number of flaws in the story line and other facts that were distributed randomly. I didn’t let any of those get in the way of an honest rating for this show, because I enjoy watching these older shows and movies usually more than brand new shows. 🙂
If you haven’t seen the show and are planning to watch it or catch-up on some episodes then you may not want to read the details below (possible spoilers)!
One big annoyance that I had with the sitecom as a whole is that the worlds that the original four always slide into are the same as their original with different twists, such as communism and lack of technology. What’s funny is that their duplicates are always there as well and one of them usually holds a pretty powerful position in the alternate world…so the double takes advantage of that situation to make sure they slide to their next world safely.
Another funny thing is that in alternate worlds your double may or may not exist. They would, however, never play with these cases in the stories that were released. When a character died on the show, they would never be seen again. Now that doesn’t make those worlds very alternate does it?
Also, they stress time and time again that the slider device does not allow them to move forward in time or backward in time. They always end up in the same year and same hour and same minute…only a different world. They tend to mess this up two or three times in one of the seasons and say that they are in the pas. Then a new sliders asks in one episode if they slide to the past on another world and they aren’t sure…of course not! The prof. and Quinn already decided that they were not affecting time travel…so where is the confusion? Only in the writers minds. 😛
I’ll have to say, the two worst actors on there are Rembrandt ‘Crying Man’ Brown (Cleavant Derricks) and Colin Mallory (Charlie O’Connell). At times they can be decent, but I get sick of Rembrandt Brown always having the role where they land in a world where things aren’t perfect and always asks questions like: “I have one question. How can you people blah blah blah..on this world?” like it’s any of his business and his duty to make everything perfect.
He has to be one of the most annoying ones on the show. And then in the fifth season he begins to run the opening lines on the show…just pathetically read if you ask me. 😛
Colin Mallory, Quinn’s older brother, plays a very poor role of being behind times (technologically) and he has a terrible accent. Blah.
Also, it seems that the focus of the show shifts three or four times off course from the original focus in the show. The start sliding just to be the first in the world to see what happens, but then they immediately run into the problem of not being able to return home. The show follows this and runs with it for a couple seasons, but you can tell that the writers are drying up and running out of ideas. Shows start going from minor twists to enormous twists. Not that dinosaurs couldn’t rule the earth in an alternate universe, but the lack of anything that different and then all of a sudden everything is that different is just a little confusing and crappy.
Then, after the crazy worlds with primitive people and animals…we got the whole Kromagg (or however it’s spelled) thing. The Kromaggs were on basically every alternate world that they slid into after they saw them the first time. Kind of stupid how they tried to save every world from the Kromaggs. Honestly, if you’re just sliding so you can get back to your own world wouldn’t you just lay back and enough each world or hunker down in the war zone worlds? I wouldn’t be wasting the time trying to save each alternate world, because they are alternate for a reason. You can’t make them all the same as your own and who says your own is better anyways? Just not very well thought out if you ask me.
I would be sitting out on the beaches and hitting up the popular tourist sites and snapping pictures! Not risking my life to save a world and each time narrowly escaping into the vortex and into another world, only making it by a minute or less at times.
Over all, it’s a good show from start to finish. Worth watching if you can find the time. Just don’t keep notes every time you see something that doesn’t add up or contradicts what has been previously outlined. The best thing to do is just sit back and enjoy the show! If you want to see some comments on the show by other fans who loved the show, but found that it was ruined or flawed in some way then check out this group f comments on Sliders from TV.com.
