Thanks to the wonders of Hulu and Netflix I was recently able to finish watching the entire series or Sliders.  Back when I was in high school I really liked the series, which originally aired on Fox, but, like many other shows, it was cancelled and later moved to a cable network - and I didn't have cable. I really wanted to find out what happened to the gang after all these years so I started watching with from the beginning.  I know that there is Wikipedia, and I could have easily found out what happened, but what's the fun in that?

In any case, I started watching the series from the beginning and it was hard to contain my disappointment. This series was better (or at least seemed better) when I was a teenager.  The outdated technology was an easy pill to swallow, after all it's something we're used to seeing going back to older series, but what was problematic was the bad acting and the bad script writing...oh, and the story too!  The underlying premise is this: there are parallel worlds to ours (there is an actual physics theory that supports this as far as I know), and some genius college student built a machine that allows you to travel between dimensions. Then there was a snafu and this group of people couldn't get home, so they were sliding from dimension to dimension.  The premise is good, it's actually been explored before in other scifi shows like Stargate SG-1. The only problem (well other than the bad writing) was that there was no end game with this series!

Season 1 seemed to be mostly about the dimension of the week. This was interesting to tell you the truth, it had a Star Trek (original, TNG, Voyager) feel to it. Then the writers decided to introduce an overarching villain, the Cromags. OK, an overall story arch is good...but then they left the whole Cromag thing hanging while they explore some weird mighty-morphing-brain-stem-stealing general. This was a major fail.  Then two of the main characters are either killed or captured (and never to be seen again).  The final blow was when Quinn Malory, THE inventory of sliding technology (at least in "our" dimension) gets fused with another Quinn Malory who looks nothing like him (apparently the actor wanter to do something else in lieu of the show). In any case, the last season seemed like a lame duck. It grew on me, I can't deny that, but what do they do at the end? Remy (the last original slider) goes into the wormhole, presumably to his home world, but he might also be dead. Then the 3 other sliders are left hanging out there.

In the end, there is no closure in this series! It's like someone shot it to death (maybe around season 2), and just let it bleed out, with no purpose, and apparently no effort to resuscitate it and patch it up.  Since the trend sees to be to look at old franchises and remake them for today's audiences, this might be a good series to revive at some point this decade.  I'd really like for someone to tackle to topic of interdimensional travel little better than the writers of this series did.