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[[File:s1cast4.jpg|frame|The cast members of seasons one and two, looking at something awful happening off-camera. ]]
'''''Sliders''''' is a [[Science Fiction]] show about four people who try out a device for traveling to [[Alternate Universe
The surprisingly competent final episode ended with a [[Cliff Hanger]] meant to try and push [[Sci Fi]] into giving them a 6th season: it had been clear from the start of production on S5 that [[Sci Fi]] intended to cancel it, having picked it up to get its viewers to watch their new shows. (Which failed. Season 5's ratings actually were good enough to normally get it renewed, but [[Sci Fi]] had committed to other shows already.)
Over the years, the series has been slowly released on DVD. Season 5 is scheduled to be released January 2012.{{when}}
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=== Trope-based episodes: ===
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* [[Corrupt Church]]: "Prophets and Loss"
* [[Determined Homesteader]]: "Way Out West"
* [[Digital Head Swap]]: In a universe where criminals are tried and executed live on television, a corrupt TV host killed someone on camera and then framed another guy by editing his head onto his own body.
* [[Driven to Suicide]]: "The Chasm"
* [[ET Gave Us Wi
* [[Final Solution]]: "Prophets and Loss"
* [[Find the Cure]]: "Fever"
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{{tropelist}}
* [[Aborted Arc]]: With maybe one or two exceptions, none of the multi-episode arcs this show started were ever resolved.
* [[Actor Allusion]]: In "The Guardian," Arturo tells his younger friends, "Your generation thinks nothing of seeing ''[[Indiana Jones]]'' thirteen times. Well, I happen to feel the same way about Mozart." John Rhys-Davies, of course, played Sallah in the first and third movies.
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* [[Alternate History]]: Most of the worlds visited fall into this category.
* [[Alternate Universe]]: For all the show's flaws, it is the most extensive exploration of this trope on American TV.
* [[
** There were a few exceptions, like that disgraced Kromagg leader who was in charge of the human atomizer thing in "Common Ground."
* [[Amazing Freaking Grace]]
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* [[Big No]]
* [[Blatant Lies]]: "We're from Canada."
* [[California Collapse]]: In one episode, they slide into a world where California has broken up into islands.
* [[Canon Discontinuity]]: Season 3's "The Other Slide of Darkness" stated that Quinn's double from the first episode gave the Kromaggs the sliding equation and is responsible for the Dynasty's activities. Season 4 onward ignored this development, which some felt didn't fit into established continuity in the first place.
* [[Captain's Log]]: Wade's diary, Quinn's videotapes.
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* [[Character Development]]: Rembrandt. He goes from a [[Dirty Coward]] concerned only with himself to an everyman who cares for his surrogate family to team leader over the course of five seasons.
* [[Chronic Hero Syndrome]]: Quinn
* [[Crapsack World]]: As the sliders visit many worlds, they encountered quite a few of these, beginning with the [[Death World|Ice Age world]] in the pilot episode.
* [[City of Adventure]]: For the first two seasons, [[San Francisco]], in nearly all of the worlds, is somehow majorly relevant to the world at large.
* [[Comic Book Adaptation]]: Circa Season 3, Acclaim Comics produced ten issues with various creative teams (with the eighth, ''Narcotica'', being written by Jerry O'Connell). A script for an eleventh issue (plus several pages of artwork) was completed and several future ideas (including a ''[[Quantum Leap]]'' [[Crossover]]) were being developed, but declining sales led to cancellation.
* [[Conspicuous CG]]
* [[Creative Differences]]: You bet.
* [[Critical Research Failure]]: In one episode they travel to a universe where the American Revolution failed. The people were unfamiliar with the concept of democracy, which has been around since Athens, and the British Empire was entirely ruled by Nobles, despite Parliament long predating the American Revolution!
* [[Cut Short]]: They actually ''don't'' [[You Can't Go Home Again|go home again]]. Or beat the bad guys, either.
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* [[For Want of a Nail]]
* [[Four-Temperament Ensemble]]
* [[Gave Up Too Soon]]: In the episode "Into the Mystic", the characters only have a few seconds to decide whether or not to stay on the latest parallel Earth they've landed on. To see if it's their home or not, Quinn tries a fence, knowing it is always squeaky ([[Call Back|something he does in the pilot]]), and it doesn't squeak. After they leave, a gardener with an oil can comes into view.
** In their defense, didn't they also see a Newspaper headline about a Sports Team winning a championship; a team which in reality had moved to a new city since the start of the series or was that a different episode.
*** And since they had been gone O.J. Simpson had been arrested and was still on trial, they had trouble believing that the world could have changed so much in just two years.
* [[Giant Spider]]: In the episode "Summer of Love," the Sliders first land on a world where the United States has been mostly devastated by these. A mix of a spider and wasp (yes, [[Nightmare Fuel|flying spiders the size of your head]]), they were genetically engineered for pest control--namely the actual killer bees... And ironically enough, a few queens escaped from the labs and suddenly the cure became a lot worse than the plague.
** In "Rules of the Game," one of the death traps sees Rembrandt stuck to a metal web and being threatened by three robotic spiders.
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* [[Girls with Moustaches]]: In one episode, the characters travel to a world where women have mustaches. Rembrandt complains about how it feels to kiss a woman with a mustache and Wade comments that now he knows how women feel.
* [[Glory Days]]: Rembrandt used to be a singer in a Motown band, who dumped him once they got famous. He's in the middle of staging his "big comeback" when he gets accidentally sucked into a wormhole along with the rest of the team. For the first season, he refers to himself as "[[Manly Tears|The Crying Man]]," a nickname he acquired from his one hit song, though this becomes less and less as the show goes on due to [[Character Development]].
* [[Good
** '''CAPTAIN''' Maggie Beckett.
* [[Government Drug Enforcement]]: In one of the [[Planet of Hats]] worlds they visit, because Einstein had been a neuro-chemist instead of a physicist, the government mandates psychotropic drug use by everyone, and the alternate Quinn is a leader of an [[La Résistance|anti-drug resistance]].
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* [[It Got Worse]]: You may think Kari Wuhrer was just hired as eye candy, but her contributions are positively Shakespearean compared to those of any of the zombie-like regulars who came on later.
* [[Jerk with a Heart of Gold]]: Arturo, though most of his counterparts were just plain [[Jerkass|jerkasses]].
* [[Kick the Dog]]: If you think John Rhys-Davies being fired for criticizing Season 3's writers (basically saying what all the fans were thinking) and the way Arturo's death was handled were bad, read [https://web.archive.org/web/20120324154130/http://earthprime.com/interviews/cleavant-derricks.html this interview with Cleavant Derricks]. Turns out that after "Paradise Lost" wrapped filming, a producer told Rhys-Davies that he was fired... casually... ''in public''... '''in front of the rest of the cast and crew.'''
* [[Kid From the Future]]: {{spoiler|Thomas Mallory in "Roads Taken."}}
* [[Kirk's Rock]]: Featured in the episode "Electric Twister Acid Test"
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* [[Matriarchy]]: One Universe, as a Patriarchy Flip.
* [[McLeaned]]: {{spoiler|Arturo, Wade, Quinn. Their actors all left the show on bad terms (not surprising, given the aforementioned behind-the-scenes turmoil), and their characters paid the price}}.
* [[
* [[Mister Seahorse]]: Rembrandt in "The Prince of Slides"
* [[Motorcycle Jousting]]: An episode features this as part of a parallel universe that seems heavily inspired by ''[[Mad Max]]''.
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* [[Once an Episode]]
* [[Opening Narration]]: The network agreed that explaining the [[Mind Screw|weird concept]] of [[Alternate Universe|Alternate Universes]] to new viewers at the beginning of each show was pretty important.
* [[Our Wormholes Are Different]]: In order to generate a wormhole, you would have to convert the entire mass of the planet Jupiter into energy. I don't think you can do that with a TV remote<ref>Egyptian timer</ref>, a cell phone <ref>original timer</ref>, or a [[Sega Genesis]] controller<ref>Rickman's Timer</ref>.
** But it's a really ''small'' wormhole. And maybe he [[Back to The Future|stole plutonium from the Libyans]].
*** Good news! The same theorists that came up with the 'mass of jupiter' equation have also postulated how much power it would take if you used Dark Energy as the source of negative pressure. Being a much more abundant energy source, you would now require the "mere" output of several megaton nuclear warheads to get a decent size hole in the universe going.
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*** In the same episode, Tracy Tormé's wife appears as a bridesmaid.
** Any time Rembrandt met one of his doubles, they didn't have to resort to fancy camera tricks, as one or the other Rembrandt would be played by Cleavant Derricks' twin brother Clinton.
* [[Recurring Extra]]: Alternates of various folks would sometimes crop on different worlds.
* [[Recycled in Space]]: One of the most persistent complaints of Season 3. The vast majority of the episodes ripped off a number of movies, including ''[[Tremors]]'', ''[[Twister]]'', ''[[A Nightmare on Elm Street]]'', ''[[Species]]'', ''[[Anaconda]]'' and ''[[The Island of Doctor Moreau]]''.
* [[Recycled Set]]: A common complaint of later seasons, as diminishing budgets meant heavily re-using the standing sets (such as the Chandler).
** "Slidecage" reuses the futuristic standing sets from the short-lived ''[[Time Cop]]'' TV series, which had been cancelled shortly into Season 4's filming. Writer Marc Scott Zicree has stated he wrote the episode to make use of the great sets that were going to be torn down.
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* [[Slow Motion Drop]]
* [[The Smart Guy]]: Arturo. Also Quinn to a lesser degree.
* [[Smart People Know Latin]]: In one episode, the protagonists end up in a world where being smart and well-educated is cool (they pass a punk on the street with a boombox blasting classical music). The episode's [[Big Bad]] is a mobster who constantly likes to quote phrases in Latin and gets annoyed when the others have no idea what he said. At the end of the episode, right before sliding, Quinn turns around and spouts a phrase in Latin, which turns out to be an insult.
* [[Somewhere a Paleontologist Is Crying]]
* [[Sorry I Left the BGM On]]
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* [[Spot the Impostor]]
* [[Springtime for Hitler]]: In "The Weaker Sex" Arturo tries to throw an election by weeping in front of the camera, but it backfires and his approval ratings go up.
* [[Stargate City]]: Seasons 1 and 2 are filmed in Vancouver
* [[Teen Genius]]: Quinn
* [[This Was His True Form]]
* [[Tim Taylor Technology]]: "MORE POWER, MR. MALLORY!"
* [[Time Paradox]]: In one universe, time flows backwards. The Sliders still go forwards in time, however, and Quinn ends up stopping something that put him in jail, after he started out there. The result is.. [[Nightmare Fuel|Not pretty.]]
* [[Troubled Production]]: The production of this show has quite a story. The first two seasons had many episodes broadcast [[Out of Order]], along with the show being "cancelled" at the end of both seasons before fan petitions kept [[
* [[Unlimited Wardrobe]]
* [[Unpredictable Results]]: Their own "sliding" device, about the only thing consistent is that it drops them in a location somewhere close to the entrance point between the two dimensions they travel between. Later seasons gave them the ability to at least control when they are going to travel and which dimension they are going to. But since they don't know their home destination they still have to travel to different dimensions sequentially to find it.
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** The major arc of Season 4 had a far different ending in mind. Originally, the team was supposed to make it to Kromagg Prime, where it would be revealed that Colin was unknowingly [[The Mole]], an altered clone of Quinn created by the Kromaggs. The Sliders' Season 4 quest would have been a Kromagg deception to re-conquer their home Earth, with it also being revealed that Earth Prime had never been conquered at all. The Kromagg plot was hinted at several times, but the plot was largely dropped due to resistance from David Peckinpah. With the final resolution aborted, the arc was altered and the related loose ends fizzled.
** Tracy Tormé intended Ryan to be apart of the team for a few Season 2 episodes, creating a love triangle with Quinn and Wade.
** John Rhys-Davies was contracted for the entire third season and would've stayed if not for the behind-the-scene bitnerness. Scripts for "Sole Survivors," "The Other Slide of Darkness" and "The Breeder" were being worked out before his departure. A script for "Sole Survivors" with Arturo is available [https://web.archive.org/web/20120531094634/http://earthprime.com/scripts/sliders-scripts.html here].
** Logan St. Clair was intended as a recurring nemesis.
** "In Dino Veritas" was conceived as a mere [[Bottle Episode]], but Jerry O'Connell was allowed to film his part in ''[[Jerry Maguire]]'' and the special effects proved to be more elaborate than at first thought.
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** ABC was contemplating a version of this show called "Doorways" before a shuffling of upper management caused its main champions to jump ship (and, evidently, end up at FOX). The guy developing the pilot for them? ''[[George R. R. Martin]]''. (source: [http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/his-beautiful-dark-twisted-fantasy-george-r-r-martin-talks-game-of-thrones/ here])
** Even after it was a given that Jerry O'Connell wouldn't be back as a regular for Season 5, he was willing to return for guest appearances to allow Quinn to be written out effectively. Reportedly, the deal was for six episodes, but a sticking point for Jerry was Charlie. It boiled down to Jerry wanting his brother in for all of Season 5 and production refusing - so the deal fell apart.
** After Sci-Fi picked up the series for a fourth season, Tracy Tormé made a play to return as executive producer. (Fellow co-creator Robert K. Weiss was also interested in getting back in the game.) This didn't happen because the studio was contractually obligated to keeping David Peckinpah onboard. Tormé couldn't stand the thought of working with Peckinpah again and couldn't convince the higher-ups to remove him. [https://web.archive.org/web/20120611025021/http://earthprime.com/tracy-torme/tracy-torme-2009.html This interview] features some ideas Tormé had in mind for Season 4, as well as other parts of the show's run.
** The idea was thrown around of revealing that Maggie's biological parents were Colonel Rickman and her universe's version of Wade (this would have meant Maggie's universe was in the future compared to ours).
** There was a proposed episode that would have shown what happened to Wade after she was taken to a Kromagg breeding camp without Sabrina Lloyd having to return to the show, via the gang coming upon a device that made them experience past events from the perspective of other people. Maggie would have been Wade, Diana would have been Mrs. Mallory, Mallory would have been a Humagg soldier in love with Wade, and Rembrandt would have been a sympathetic Kromagg scientist.
** Fox wanted to renew the series for a fourth season but it would just feature Quinn and Maggie alone. This is why season three ended on the cliffhanger where Rembrandt and Wade slide back home with Quinn and Maggie following but ending up in a different dimension. This plan ended when [[Sci Fi]] decided to pick up the show.
* [[What If]]
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** It's also been stated that the wrong Arturo slid and that there were several hints placed that showed this.
** Confirmed by Tormé himself, after over a decade of keeping silent on the matter, he considers the "Wrong-Arturo" from Earth-Double-Prime to have been the one who slid with the regular Sliders, thus the reason for the horrified "Oh my God" from the Aturo left behind.
** If he ''hadn't'' left the show, Rhys-Davies probably wouldn't have been available for the [[The Lord of the Rings]] films.
* [[Written by Cast Member]]: John Rhys-Davies has story credit on "The Exodus, Part 1" {{spoiler|(the episode where Arturo is killed off)}}, though note that he had no input into the script. His [https://web.archive.org/web/20060713231343/http://www.dimensionofcontinuity.com/lostep.htm original story] bore very little resemblance in details and execution to the finished product. Played straight with "Way Out West," where the story originated from Jerry O'Connell (who by then was a producer).
* [[You Can't Go Home Again]]: Subverted when {{spoiler|they actually make it back to their home Earth, but only have a few seconds to decide to stay or not. They leave after Quinn tries a fence, knowing it is always squeaky, and it doesn't squeak. After they leave, you see a gardener with an oil can}}.
** Averted in "Genesis", but the sliders leave {{spoiler|because the kromaggs conquered Earth Prime}}.
* [[Your Mind Makes It Real]]
* [[Your Universe or Mine?]]
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** [[Fridge Brilliance|Its implied a few times that the Timer is purposely directing them to realities that are ''close'' to its home dimension, possibly explaining why apart from huge historical changes, the world remains fairly similar to Earth-Prime. The implications of the Multiverse mean that these sorts of eventualities ''would'' exist.]]
** The above and this cross over in the episode (or was there more than one?) where it's stated that Dinosaurs never died off. Not only did dinosaurs remain recognizable in their original species and forms over the ensuing millions of years, and not only did humans still evolve just as normal, but human ''society'' proceeded exactly like ours did to the point of dinosaurs being put on the endangered species list. Yes, that's right, in a world where we developed alongside giant, carnivorous, almost impossible to contain and almost certainly impossible to domesticate creatures, humanity would still view wiping them out as a ''bad'' thing.
*** If dinosaurs had only survived in the Americas, human society could develop in Eurasia similarly to how it developed in OTL.
* [[You Fail Economics Forever]]: This show is full of [[Alternate History|Alternate Histories]] written by people who usually write, y'know, [[Did Not Do the Research|sitcoms and stuff]].
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[[Category:Sci Fi Channel]]
[[Category:American Series]]
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