A killer asteroid is scheduled for impact with the Earth before the next slide, and each Slider deals with the oncoming catastrophe in his or her own way. Rembrandt decides to party like it’s 1999 until depraved party games force him to reevaluate what truly matters. Wade and Quinn search for their families and discover Quinn’s double had attempted to time travel; Quinn fails to convert the equipment into a sliding machine, but he does succeed in making out with Wade. Saving the planet thus falls to Arturo, who enlists the aid of the obnoxious Conrad Bennish, Jr. In this America, Albert Einstein refused to accept responsibility for the consequences of the atom bomb, and proclaimed there was not enough fissionable material on Earth to make one work. Arturo and his flaky student have just two days to prove him wrong.
![]() | Asteroid WorldYou guessed it. An asteroid is set to strike the West Coast in a few days, and everyone has worked themselves into a hedonistic frenzy. |
Arturo has enough to buy time on Mace Moon’s internet computer.
At the beginning of the episode, Mace Moon confronts a meter maid who has given his car a ticket. He insults her and rips up the ticket. At the end of the episode, as the Sliders are walking down the street, the action in the foreground shows the meter maid returning to give him another ticket.
In 1943, Albert Einstein declared that the Trinity Program, the progenitor of the Nuclear Age, was a failure. Einstein and his colleagues attributed the failure to the Adiabatic limit, a theory that states that there isn’t enough fissionable material in nature to create a nuclear explosion. In reality, Einstein felt guilty about unleashing the nuclear genie on the world and flubbed his finding purposefully.
Without nuclear weapons technology, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was unable to drop hydrogen bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. World War II ended in 1950 as a result, although it’s unknown how this affected the economy or the social structure of the United States. “Fat Man,” the bomb prototype, hung as a Smithsonian museum exhibit labeled “Einstein’s Folly.”
Forty years later, astronomers began tracking an asteroid entering the inner solar system. Yeoman 2956, it was called, was charted to be on a direct course that would intercept Earth’s orbit around the sun. The Union of Concerned Scientists met to consider what could be done to avert the threat.
As the asteroid came closer to the earth, alliances were formed. People in Northern and Southern Ireland shared a day of prayer. The six month truce between Serbs and Muslims continued to hold. Unfortunately, Israelis and Palestinians continue to fight. Pope John Paul II was told by his doctors to rest because his unwavering in preparation for the last day has left him exhausted.
Tormé admits that he and Jacob Epstein “hated” the first draft of the script which prompted the two to greatly rewrite it. “We rewrote the entire show — in a hurry — from top to bottom thinking “uh oh, this could be a disaster,” Tormé says. “It ended up being what we thought to be one of our best shows.”
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The boyhood photo of Jerry was actually supplied by his mom. “The art department called up my mom and asked for pictures of me when I was much younger,” he says. “That was the slimmest one that they could find.”