Eye of the Storm
Mallory sports a tribal headdress, having just participated in a fire ritual. Suddenly his joking pleas to the gods result in a torrent of water roaring straight toward them! With the water at their heels, they manage to leap aside at the last possible moment. It’s time to slide out, and they arrive in a deserted town where a mysterious force field is slowly consuming everything in its path. They are surprised to see Dr. Geiger again, but he doesn’t recognize them. Suddenly, Geiger leaps into the energy barrier. Inside the Chandler Hotel, Stu, a bellhop, informs the Sliders that one day he found himself along with other survivors alone in this deserted world. The Sliders decide to confront that “man upstairs” for an explanation. They are shocked to find Dr. Geiger again. Apparently the Geiger they initially met was his alternate. Meanwhile, the unexplained energy barrier is moving toward the hotel and within a few hours, it will consume everyone. Dr. Geiger convinces Diana, against her better judgment, to help him split Quinn from Mallory’s body. But Geiger is secretly using the experiment to help him stabilize his own existence, from his disembodied state, in this Earth dimension. Meanwhile, Rembrandt and Maggie accidentally come across tens of disfigured people hiding in the basement and realize Geiger’s true intentions. They rush back to Geiger’s suite in time to stop Mallory from being transformed into Geiger. As the energy barrier enters the hotel, the refugees panic and charge up the stairs to Geiger’s suite. Once more, Geiger offers to help separate Quinn from Mallory. But the result is hopeless — they are inextricably linked like Siamese twins. When the sliding vortex opens, Rembrandt, Maggie and Mallory jump in. But the refugees break through the door and Stu shoots Geiger dead. Before Diana follows the Sliders, she pulls a switch to send the refugees back to their original Earth dimension.
Worlds Visited
Backlot WorldIs it Mallory’s communication with Cajero, spirit of the heavens, that brought torrential flooding to this tiny Mexican village, or is it just part of the Universal Studios backlot tour? You be the judge. |
FragmentOberon Geiger has sliced a section of a parallel world away and is containing it in the hopes of merging himself with someone else. |
Hill Valley WorldA DeLorean should be racing towards the clock tower any minute now. |
Details
- The Chandler Hotel is located on Wilshire Boulevard.
- No one has come in in the past six months.
- Diana gets the same energy readings from the force barrier that she got from Geiger’s stasis field on Combine World.
- The barrier doesn’t interfere with the timer.
- We finally get the definition of being unstuck: it kills all your doubles.
- Being unstuck is like “being caught in the surf, pounded by waves of space-time. As soon as you manage to pull yourself to shore the tide sucks you under again.”
- Geiger’s Combine equations don’t work macroscopically.
Character Information
- Mallory converted to a pagan religion.
- Rembrandt is tired of sliding and wants to go home.
- Doctor Geiger has spent the last six months trying to merge himself with others so that he is no longer unstuck.
Notable Quotes
- “Next time I decide to convert to pagan idol worship somebody please slap me silly.” — Mallory, escaping the flood he brought upon them.
- “I hope this world has chiropractors.” — Rembrandt, sounding a bit like the Professor after a rough slide.
- “What a surprise. Deadly wins again.” — Mallory, on the type of world they’ve landed on.
- “Oh, a scientist. Why didn’t you say so? Maybe while she’s at it she can build a lie detector out of coconuts.” — Stu, unimpressed with Diana’s credentials.
- “I thought I could change the fundamental structure of the universe to suit my needs. The arrogance.” — Geiger.
- “Go ahead. Take all you want. It’s federally insured.” — Officer Fletcher, on seeing Maggie and Rembrandt loot the deserted bank.
- “I know what I’m doing.” — Geiger, on splitting the Mallorys.
- “He’s the resident devil in this little corner of hell.” — Rembrandt’s description of Geiger.
- “So close.” — Geiger on his attempted merger with Mallory.
- “Finally.” — Geiger’s last word.
Nitpicks/Errors
- It’s so tiresome to use the backlot and trying to pass it off as a truly unique location. Case in point — Backlot World. Anyone who’s been to Universal Studios has seen this part of the tram ride. It’s not exciting. It’s not particularly funny. So why do it?
- Why couldn’t they have used Jerry O’Connell’s image at the beginning of the season?!
- I didn’t know that Geiger had the same face-morphing ability as Rickman.
- What are the odds that Geiger would hole up in the Chandler Hotel?
Neatpicks
- They finally wrap up a story arc. Who would’ve thunk it?
- Colin gets a casual mention.
- Cajero, spirit of the heavens, is named after Paul Cajero, a producer of the show. He last got a shout out in A Current Affair as the name of a trailer park.
History Lesson
Six months ago, Doctor Oberon Geiger took a chunk of a parallel universe and pulled it into hyperspace. It’s a three block radius of buildings, and, unfortunately, people.
The nugget of reality is sustained in a larger version of the energy barrier keeping Geiger intact at Geiger Applied Research. It allows Geiger to maintain a corporeal form, and most importantly, it allows him the opportunity to experiment on those trapped on this pan-dimensional fragment.
The Inside Slide
The working titles for this episode in pre-production were “A Slide is Just a Slide” and “As Space-Time Goes By.”
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“We had a freelance script called ‘A Slide is Just a Slide’ that had been lying around for months,” Keith Damron explains. “The story was supposed to be our mid-season encounter with our old nemesis Dr. Oberon Geiger. The original pitch from the writer Eric Morris was that our Sliders end up in sort of a “composite world”. A splinter dimension made up of fragments of worlds that our heroes had previously visited. The concept was interesting enough and sort of fit in with Dr. Geiger’s quest to combine the multi-verse. After a meeting with Eric we distilled the story down into a sliding version of Casablanca and had him write it.
“Our gang arrives in seemingly familiar terrain around the Chandler but are surprised to find this mini-Earth clogged with a hodgepodge of characters and structures that they’ve encountered on previous slides. This is not the smooth seamless utopian world that Oberon Geiger had envisioned. People from such noted places as skirted cops world, nudist world, gun slinging lawyers world, Egyptian world and Amish world to name a few, would wallpaper the varied environs. We would also meet a few familiar faces — Holly from The Alternateville Horror, Hal the bartender, the dreaded Kromagg Kolitar and even Barry Lipschitz. All of whom are thrown together into this extra-dimensional collage. All of whom are trying to find a way out through any means possible. When they discover that Rembrandt, Maggie, Mallory and Diana do posses such an out, they each try to entice, cajole, beg and even threaten our heroes for passage.
“The problem with ‘A Slide is Just a Slide’ is that we drew many of the classic film parallels to extremes and later regretted it,” he continues. “From a scene with Holly feigning affection for Mallory in exchange for the timer — to another scene with a bar full of drunken Kromagg soldiers belting out war hymns. We even toyed around with the idea of having Rembrandt take on the Victor Lazlo role — fueling the resistance movement to undo Geiger’s work and return everyone to their own world. Our version was just a little (a lot?) too much on the nose.”
A page one rewrite later, viewers got the mess they saw.
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Is that Jerry O’Connell’s face when Geiger works his magic on Mallory? It sure is. After all the legal hassles that came about at the beginning of the fifth season, production got permission to use O’Connell’s image. It’s footage from Genesis where Quinn is tortured by the Kromaggs.
Look hard, though; it isn’t easy to see.
Guest Stars
- Peter Jurasik1 as Doctor Oberon Geiger
- Jay Acovone2 as Stu
- Elizabeth Rossa as Sharon Fletcher
- Peter Jurasik completes the character arc of Geiger that he started in The Unstuck Man and Applied Physics.
- Jay Acovone appeared as Doctor Tassler in Sole Survivors and as Ben Seigel III in Way Out West.