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Sliders Season 1 & 2
Sliders follows four friends traveling from
one parallel world to another in the hopes of returning home to their
world. University student and basement scientist Quinn Mallory (Jerry
O’Connell) devises a way to travel between worlds at will, a process
dubbed “sliding” by his own sliding double. When showing off his
invention to love interest Wade Wells (Sabrina Lloyd) and his university
Professor Maximillian P. Arturo (John Rhys-Davies) it overloads and
screws up their only means of sliding home – a mobile phone sized remote
control. A fourth person, has-been singer Rembrandt “Crying Man” Brown (Cleavant
Derricks), is also sucked into the portal due to the overload and the
four of them must band together if they want to have any chance of
getting back to their original home-world.
Sliders is a very simple concept and a lot of fun. It is fun to see the
variations of the worlds, and how the smaller side characters change
from world to world, or rather how some of them don’t change. However
the simple concept of jumping from one world to another does become
rather repetitive when the episodes are watched back to back – the
second season episode introduces an alien race that prove to be
recurring villains in later seasons and a break from “look what’s
different on this world” shtick.
No doubt it would have been a blast to work on Sliders, with the cast
routinely playing their own doubles, often their evil doubles. The cast
are likable and engaging; it is sweet to watch the trials and
tribulations of Quinn and Wade’s relationship – particularly when
contrasted against the relationship shared by the many alternate Quinn
and Wades. Derricks as Rembrandt Brown provides a lot of humour as he
shrieks from one danger to the next, whilst Rhys Davies gives the whole
proceeding a touch of class. The quartet work well together given the
range of situations they are placed in, from doom and gloom to light
hearted comedy; Sliders has it all.
The major downside to the DVD presentation is that unfortunately the
episodes are not arranged in their intended order, but rather the order
in which they were originally broadcast – often out of sequence, which
does impact some of the story arcs, most notably the budding romance
between Wade and Quinn. As well as all first and second season episodes,
(23 in total) the collection also includes an audio commentary by show
creators and a behind the scenes featurette. |
