YMMV / Sliders

• Accidental Aesop: Start with Failure Is the Only Option. Any time an actor leaves, kill off his or her character. Let the bad guys Take Over the World. Have an oracle foretell that We All Die Someday and then end the series on a Cliffhanger. What else can viewers conclude, but that every sliding timer is an Artifact of Doom built by a Mad Scientist using knowledge Man Was Not Meant To Know.
• Angst? What Angst?: For someone he regarded as a father figure and close friend, Quinn didn't seem to grieve all that much over Arturo's death. A flash of anger in "The Other Slide of Darkness" is all we get. For that matter, Quinn didn't seem particularly concerned that Wade (his best friend) and his own mother were in the clutches of the Kromaggs.
• Alas, Poor Scrappy: As "meh" as Colin was as a character, he most certainly did not deserve the fate he suffered in the Season 5 premiere.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Wade starts the series as a borderline tomboy in appearance (leather jackets, jeans, boots, boyish haircut etc.) and by season 3 has completely shed this in favour of crop tops, tight dresses, short shorts and a more feminine haircut. Whilst the real world reason for this is almost certainly the backroom politics that occurred after Torme left (and would eventually lead to Sabrina Lloyd leaving), in-universe it is possible that Wade felt threatened by Maggie. After all, up until this point, she never had any real competition for Quinn's affections beyond the odd Girl of the Week. Now suddenly she finds herself travelling with a big-breasted, often hyper-competent soldier whom she intensely dislikes after what happened to Arturo. In addition, season 3 Wade is now a hardened sliding veteran who has come out of her shell - possibly this Hotter and Sexier version was always the real Wade, or possibly this Wade is just more willing to take proactive steps when something or someone is troubling her.
• Awesome Music: Seasons 3-5 may have been a downgrade in story material, but they did have an epic theme.
• Complete Monster:
  • "Fever": Dr. Darren Morton is a scientist responsible for releasing a deadly plague on to his world. Dr. Morton secretly inflected this world's version of Quinn Mallory with a virus he designed, giving him a clean bill of health and letting him infect millions of people with this virus. Dr. Morton's reason for releasing this plague is to kill off the poor, with the poor being left to die in the streets or sent to concentration camps, while the rich live in comfort. The agency Dr. Morton runs, the California Health Commission, is given emergency powers to deal with this situation, effectively turning California into a police state. Dr. Morton manages to capture the original Quinn Mallory and experiments on him to see if he has any of the virus left in his system. When another scientist helps Mallory escape, Dr. Morton has her shot.
  • "The Dream Masters": Master Cardoza and his chief lieutenant Gerald Thomas uncovered the power to master dreams themselves and turn San Francisco into their horrific kingdom. Cardoza, believing in ruling through fear, brutally suppresses dissent. Gerald is a vicious sadist who murders a man by mental torture just for bumping into him, and when he pursues heroine Wade to no avail, he attempts to torment and destroy her with her worst fears. It is revealed that Gerald and Cardoza, along with their followers, also throw those who oppose them into irreparable comas, and then attempt to kill the Sliders team to keep their stranglehold on San Francisco, believing their powers allow them to do all they want.
  • "California Reich": Governor Schick is the governor of California frequently likened to Adolf Hitler by the Sliders. In a world without World War II, Schick rises to power blaming minorities for crime and restricts their rights, even having them interned. Not satisfied with this, Schick has them lobotomized and mutilated to make them into android slaves on a grand scale, even children not exempt from his policies. Schick, planning to ride a wave of bigotry to the Presidency and enact his policies there, is one of the most sickening enemies the Sliders have ever faced.
• Designated Hero:
  • Quinn Mallory may be well-intentioned, but that hasn't stopped him from causing unforgiveable mass destruction. In the episode "As Time Goes By", he destroys an entire universe (admittedly not intentionally). In the episode "Dinoslide", he and the others return to a world they previously visited, only to find that a virus they inadvertently carried over has wiped out the native population who had no immunity to it. And he was the one who accidentally led the Kromagg's to Earth Prime, resulting in its destruction. For all this, on several occasions in Season 3 and 4 he was willing to settle down on certain Earths, leaving his friend's (who are only in this situation because of him) to fend for themselves, and also did not seem to concerned with finding Wade or saving Earth Prime in Season 4, being more interested in finding his home planet.
  • Part of the problem is Quinn's ability to both dive headlong into danger without thinking through the consequences of his actions and his frequent failure to adapt to any culture that doesn't conform to his late 1990s American suburban morality. Easily the best example of this is on Egypt World where he attacks a couple of the Pharaoh's men without having really having a clue as to why they were trying to forcibly detain a woman, nearly gets his friends killed inside of a pyramid they were thrown into as punishment, causes them to miss their slide window (thus potentially trapping them there forever), and then willingly leaves the faulty yet proven original timer behind (it still technically worked, they had just missed the slide window which added another 29 years onto the clock) in favor of a brand new yet completely untested one. For all they knew, this new sliding device (which was designed to slide a single casket a single time) may not have had enough power to go anywhere else.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Logan St. Clair, a once-off villain who was meant to be a recurring character but who never re-appeared due to Executive Meddling, but whose wild popularity with the fans led to her being included in seemingly half of the Sliders Fan Fics ever written. As an evil, sexy, female version of Quinn? Of course she's uber-popular!
  • Conrad Bennish, Jr. is amazingly popular with the fanbase. He appeared in only four episodes thanks to Executive Meddling, but he was an instant fan favorite. He probably appears in more fanfics than even Logan.
• Ethnic Scrappy: Rembrandt Brown started out with at least one foot in this territory, but fortunately the character displayed drastic improvement as the series progressed.
• Fanon: Because of her last name and her father being a military man named Tom, some fans are convinced that Maggie had an uncle who was a double of a guy named Sam.
• Fanfic Fuel: Colin's journey through the dimensions while unstuck.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Reviewers at IMDb are unanimous. Watch the first two seasons and then quit while you're ahead. You have been warned.
• Foregone Conclusion: Will the Quinn Mallorys be separated? Will Colin Mallory be rescued? Not a chance, considering that the actors who play them have left the show.
• Franchise Original Sin: The Season 2 episode "Invasion", which introduced the Kromaggs. Many fans frequently praise the episode, but then the Kromaggs became the sole focus of the series starting in Season 4 (after a season-long absence, no less). Much of what made them interesting was also discarded. Note that Tracy Tormé (writer of "Invasion") said at the time that he was against overusing the Kromaggs out of fear of what ultimately happened.
• Genius Bonus: The for-want-of-a-nail element is often implied, rather than stated outright, or is assumed but turns out to be wrong. For instance, the pilot assumes that the difference is that the US lost the Korean War, triggering the Domino Effect, but a passing remark implies that the Soviet Union and China united to become The Empire, rather than viewing each other as enemies as in the real world. The novelization adds that the differences went further back than that, such as Franklin Roosevelt surviving his fourth term and being succeeded by one of his earlier vice-presidents (who ran as an independent), the Emperor of Japan being executed at the end of World War II rather than being made a figurehead in the government (which played a large part in Japan falling to communism), and a few other things.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The episode "Season's Greedings" had lots of Christmas ads that were very commercialized. Nowadays they seem normal. Even at the time, fans made jokes about how the Sliders must be home if they'd landed on a world where Christmas was overly commercialized.
  • In "The Chasm", Rembrandt hallucinates Quinn accusing him of abandoning Wade in Kromagg prison. "Requiem" would reveal his Dark Secret. Instead of trying to fight off guards as he previously claimed, Rembrandt ignored Wade's pleas for help because he thought it was a Kromagg illusion. He realized too late he was wrong and carried the guilt around ever since.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Considering what "Requiem" revealed about his prison time, what Christina told Rembrandt in "Mother and Child" takes on a new meaning.
  "For what it's worth, Wade doesn't think you deserted her."
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Near the end of Season 4, "My Brother's Keeper" features a clone of Quinn, with a lot of talk how he is and isn't actually Quinn. The clone is only designated as Mallory, leading to Rembrandt to question, "They couldn't even give him a first name?" Keep that in mind a few episodes later when Season 5 starts.
  • In "The Return of Maggie Beckett" (written by Chris Black), Rembrandt rattles off some of the ways he believes E.T. Gave Us Wi-Fi, including Velcro. "Carbon Creek" (co-written by Black) would see just that.
  • Fourth Episode of Season 1, The Prince of Wails, became similar to the premise of Code Geass, where the crushing of the American Revolution led to America being ruled by British Monarchy and rigid hierarchy being the norm with the "republic"—especially the United Republic of Europia and Japan—being ruled by a collection of aristocratic houses rather than the masses. Both series also ended up using the failed American Revolution's ideas to reignite democratic governance by the protagonists.
• Memetic Mutation: It's tapered off a bit in recent years, but the "Everything I Say Is Right" scene from "Prince of Wails" used to be a fairly popular reaction image, even launching an unofficial website.
• Mis-blamed: While there's a lot to blame producer David Peckinpah for, the trend of movie rip-offs in Season 3 isn't one of them. The real culprits were the FOX executives that he answered to.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The fever-induced hallucinations Wade has in "Fever" are pretty scary.
  • Those giant flying-wasp-spider things. Plus the one that got through.
• Replacement Scrappy: The show went through quite a few cast changes, the most infamous of which was the replacement of Jerry O'Connell with Robert Floyd. This was sort of a hybrid between The Other Darrin and an outright replacement: Floyd's character was ostensibly an alternate-dimension double of O'Connell's character, Quinn Mallory. (Why he looked, acted and sounded absolutely nothing like his "double" is handwaved with a Techno Babble explanation in his first episode.)
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Maggie became really likable in the fourth season premiere and stayed that way until the series finale. It's worth noting that Maggie underwent a significant personality (and even appearance) change at that time. Once Wade left the show, Maggie became more compassionate, fun and emotionally open. She basically absorbed many of the characteristics Wade had had previously (while still keeping some of her own strengths from before). In a way she was originally a Replacement Scrappy for the Professor but then became a popular successor character to Wade.
  • For those that feel he was an Ethnic Scrappy in Season 1, Season 2 sees Rembrandt lose those qualities, cut down on the It's All About Me complaining and generally toughen up.
  • The Kromaggs in season 5, though not because of any positive change like Rembrandt and Maggie but by virtue of being the only remotely watchable aspect of that season.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Before becoming Trip Tucker, Connor Trinneer played Samson in "Prophets and Loss".
  • Before breaking out on MADtv, Will Sasso played recurring hotel clerk Gomez Calhoun in the first two seasons.
  • A young Julie Benz is in one episode, and Sook Yin Lee plays a soldier in the pilot.
• Seasonal Rot:
  • Universally, season three, during which Maggie was introduced, Professor Arturo had a bridge dropped on him, Quinn Mallory ceased being the genius he once had been, and almost all plots were movie rip-offs. The debate is how much the show recovered, if at all.
  • Season 4 doesn't get as much flak as seasons 3 and 5, but it was still the season that started the Kromagg Plot Tumor.
  • The entirety of season five was a pain to watch even for those who liked seasons 3 and 4. Especially getting rid of Jerry O'Connell in one of the lamest excuses for a recast, and de facto killing one of the most beloved characters of the show. All within one Slide. It goes downhill from there.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • In the season 3 episode that ripped off Species, Quinn jumps into the vortex which is off-screen... then he can clearly be seen standing up and walking away.
  • Some monsters are painfully obvious CG. The dinosaurs aren't the worst; there are also a huge spider, a giant beetle, and "spider-wasps" that all look really out of place in a live-action series. And then there's the worm...
  • The "rip in the universe" effect in "As Time Goes By" is awful.
• Spiritual Adaptation: El Sandifer argued that this was the closest we got to an American version of Doctor Who. It concerns a group of people (including an English professor) travelling through worlds via an unreliable machine they can't seem to work while trying to get home.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Logan St. Clair, as evidenced by her frequent use in fanfics. She put a new spin on doubles for the series, could match Quinn in the brains department and be far more ruthless.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • "The Exodus" two-parter. Consider: a doomed world, the Sliders racing to save everyone they can, finding Earth Prime, the death of Arturo, the addition of a new Slider (one who's not shy about causing inter-group conflict) and the emergence of a new Big Bad. On paper, these sound like some pretty interesting (if not epic) ideas that would provide a wealth of storytelling potential. But the execution? Well, Tracy Tormé and many others consider them some of the worst episodes the series ever produced - if not the definitive examples.
  • "Summer of Love" features a world where the hippie movement persisted to the present day. The show's setting of San Francisco was the epicenter of the hippie movement in real life, but you'd never know it from watching the episode. The timeline's point of divergence is placed sometime in World War II,^note apart from the random non-existence of astrology several decades before hippies existed, meaning that the episode never engages with the reasons why the movement declined in the real world.
  • "Last Days" features a world where nuclear weapons were never invented. Although the episode does note that this resulted in World War II continuing until 1950, the geopolitics of the present day seem to be the identical to the real world – including conflicts where nuclear weapons are a major factor, such as the Arab–Israeli Conflict.
  • "Eggheads" features a world where intellectuals are as famous and popular as athletes or movie stars in our world. However, the culture around intellectuals is presented as Incredibly Lame Fun rather than actually being framed as stylish or fashionable to the audience's eyes. Also, this world's Quinn is the star of a Fictional Sport called "Mindgame", which combines quizzing with physical activity: the two aspects of the sport don't really mesh together, equivalent to something like combining basketball with singing. (Quinn's entire subplot could be rewritten with him as the star of a real-world sport with almost no changes – and it would even make sense in-universe, as it's already established that Quinn played high school football).
  • The entire premise of the series itself, wasted by the execution, if you consider even the early episodes as disappointing. To quote John Rhys-Davies:
  I like SF. I love intelligent SF. We had the most wonderful series concept with Sliders, but we did everything that had been done before and we did it every damned episode. We did Species. We did Tremors. We did Twister. We did War of the Worlds. We did The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996). It was out of control, just out of control. In the end, Sliders wasn't the worst experience I ever had. I was just disappointed. Again, I love SF. I'm a passionate believer in Sliders. The series could have been great. The public always understood that of Sliders. The public understood that you could go anywhere in the galaxy. The writers, though, would try to graft a Law & Order story, or something they had done or seen before, onto Sliders and just make the characters work around it.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The first time the Kromaggs appeared, they were just sufficiently not-quite-human to make them uncomfortable to look at. Subsequent returns made them look more human.
• Villain Decay: The Kromaggs. Season 2's "Invasion" showed them to be quite threatening, as well as calculating and simply quite unpleasant to look at. When they came back for Season 4, however, the make-up was less elaborate, and they were overall more generic bad guys. Some of the mental tricks and careful planning remained, but things could also get hammy depending on the episode. Fans also objected to the heavy-handed Nazi allegory the writers started using.
• The Woobie:
  • Quinn Mallory got hurt a lot. And then his dimension gets taken over, and then he gets fused with another character (for a half Jonas Quinn and half The Nth Doctor situation.)
  • Rembrandt takes over the role in season five, and is much better at it. Hell, even Rembrandt in the pilot. He's on the cusp of his comeback as a famous singer, when (through no fault of his own) he gets sucked into a wormhole while driving by Quinn's house, subsequently crashes and abandons his beloved Cool Car in a nuclear winter universe, gets arrested by commies in a Soviet-ruled universe, and then gets stuck sliding for the rest of the entire series.
  • Mary from "Invasion", she's a human captured by the Kromaggs, and even though she turns out to be working for them, it is almost certainly due to brainwashing/ Stockholm Syndrome, and it's also implied they keep her in a cage and almost never let her out, as they reward her by giving her an hour of freedom, and she sheds Tears of Joy over this. We also never see her again, making you wonder if she's still their prisoner.

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