Sliders - season #4 (1998-1999)

SLIDERS - SEASON #4 (1998-99) starring JERRY O’CONNELL,
CLEAVANT DERRICKS, KARI WUHRER, CHARLIE O’CONNELL

The 4th season began with a whammy: it was high on thrills, on the grimness, and returned the Kromaggs to the forefront as the show’s primary villains; but, it was also high on revelations. Quinn and Maggie find Earth Prime after several months of sliding but discover that it’s been conquered by the Kromaggs. Rembrandt is rescued from a prison, but it’s too late for Wade; she’d been taken to another world for some breeding experiments (yuck). This followed the pattern of having the original Sliders being disposed of in particularly unpleasant fashion - again, a producer must have had a grudge against actress Sabrina Lloyd, who left for another TV series.

Quinn, briefly captured, reunites with his mom but she tells him that she’s not his birth mother(!) - his real parents are Sliders who left him with her when he was a baby. It’s further revealed that Quinn’s real parents hail from an Earth which they shared with Kromaggs (this part didn’t sit well with me; how could one Earth have 2 dominant species?); a weapon against the Kromaggs had been developed and may have been used, we don’t know. Oh, and, Quinn has a brother - Quinn is given the coordinates of the Earth on which his brother grew up on via a recording from Quinn’s parents.

Whew, that was a lot to take in just in one episode. It was also quite downbeat; the Kromaggs seem unstoppable by this point in their goal to conquer all other Earths and mankind was in a long losing war, with many casualties. We also get to see the eating preferences of Kromaggs - human eyeballs, a delicacy. Nice. The Kromaggs didn’t just fade into the background again but returned only a couple of episodes later in another ‘war zone’ episode, conducting pernicious experiments on humans and developing a specialized disintegrator beam.

Way back in the 2nd season, when the Kromaggs were introduced, it was mentioned that one of the Sliders had a tracking device implanted in them; we find out who it is. There was also a trippy episode, “World Killer”: the Sliders arrive on an Earth empty of people, a la The Quiet Earth; they find out that the Quinn of this Earth slid everyone off the planet except himself, by accident, 3 years earlier. The population all slid to another Earth and doubled the population there, from 5 billion to 10 billion people. One can imagine the problems and strains this created.

The Sliders didn’t find Quinn’s brother, Colin Mallory, until the 6th episode of the season. Colin was played by Charlie O’Connell, Jerry’s real life brother (Jerry O’Connell was now also a producer on the show), and his character was living in a backwards Amish-like community devoid of technology. Colin, however, had the same scientific bent as Quinn and was dabbling with electricity, to the consternation of the other residents. The Sliders had less than 2 hours to convince Colin of who he really was and get him to leave with them. Colin became the new, 4th, regular Slider, as the group’s objective was now to find Quinn’s real home world.

The rest of the episodes of the season alternated between heavy-handed anti-right wing polemics and seeing the nasty habits of the Kromaggs. Everything from the Christian right to far right conservatism was targeted on other-Earth worlds, betraying the obvious liberal bent of the producers/writers, who saw the ‘right’ as not much different from Kromagg tendencies. The Kromaggs (also referred to as ‘Maggs’ for short, or ‘Maggots’ by Rembrandt when he was really upset) quickly became overused, the easy villain to plug in for creepy thrills, and it became more about the conflict between humans and Kromaggs, rather than exploring Earths with a different history. Kromaggs were revealed to have mind powers, besides the higher technology they possessed, lending a slightly hokey tone to most plots.
The acting also witnessed a downturn. Jerry O’Connell was never the most subtle actor and began to phone it in this season. Wuhrer’s limitations really showed; she alternated between being a tough, military gal and a very kind, very loving Slider, who grew to really care for Quinn and Rembrandt rather suddenly. The result was a very uneven character, as if the actress couldn’t make up her mind on which way to go, and she usually overacted. Charlie O’Connell was the newbie in the acting biz, but he didn’t compare too unfavorably to the others, which isn’t saying much. Derricks turned out to be the better actor after Rhys-Davies departed; he was mostly angry during this season, looking for payback against the Kromaggs. The group now lacked that sense of a quasi-family of the first 3 seasons and the familiarity seemed forced.

There was one intriguing episode involving a virtual reality, a riff on the Matrix film released about that same time (it guest-starred classy actor Roy Dotrice). Otherwise, the season sort of limped to a concluding episode where-in the Sliders appear to find Quinn’s home world and his real parents, but there is, of course, a rude awakening. This at least suggested one more time, as it did once or twice previously, that there are many sets of similar Sliders sliding all over the place. In fact, one can even apply this concept to some of the episodes already seen: it may explain why Maggie is very sweet in one episode and very rough-and-tumble on another. Rather than uneven acting, the reason is that we are seeing two slight variations of the sliding group. But, this way, we’re probably giving the writers & producers too much undeserved credit for creativity.