Luck of the Draw

Dispirited with their lack of progress, Wade asks Quinn to give serious consideration to staying on an idyllic world where there is no competition for resources and a bizarre lottery pays out cash just for playing. When Wade wins the Lottery, Quinn grows suspicious and discovers it’s little more than population control — and the winners are executed. Meanwhile, Rembrandt falls head over heels for another Lottery winner and asks the others if they can take her with them when they slide. She betrays him and turns him into the police, earning him a death sentence as well. Quinn and Arturo manage to rescue Rembrandt, and Wade is saved by a dashing young lottery winner named Ryan. The five manage to slide out, but Quinn is shot in the escape. The first season ends with an unconscious Quinn bleeding in Wade’s arms.

Worlds Visited

	Paradise The overall population of this Earth is less than half a billion people, and the pace of life is infinitely more relaxed. Read the full Travelogue entry »
	Sitting Moose World The Sliders, plus Ryan and Henry the dog, escape to this world from Paradise, but Quinn collapses in a heap after being shot in the back by a pursuant Lottery police officer. Read the full Travelogue entry »

Details

• Signs at the grocery mart advertise celery for 9¢, 12 apples for 25¢.
• The billboard above the grocery suggests “Drink BC Cola: Birth Control In a Can!”
• The Sliders each say they are staying in room 12 at the Motel 12.
• After asking the old man about a taxi, the Sliders walk past an antique shop with the word “Treasures” in the front window.
• That building lies directly beside the building marked “Public Transit Authority” where cars are courtesy of “Golden Bay Rapid Transit.”
• The license plate of the blue car the Sliders take is 3DUF173.
• The title of the magazine that Quinn gets his information out of is Economic Weekly with a picture of a white haired man in a dark suit with the caption “World’s Most Powerful Man.”
• The advertisement on the back appears to be for some sort of camera with the caption “Capture the Color.”
• Just before dinner, Quinn is reading some sort of almanac with “The 1995 Events Calendar” printed on the cover.
• Lottery Winner Julianne Murphy lives at 3107 Grandview Lane.
• The brochures that Wade gets from the Lottery read: “The Lottery: Winners Information Guide” and “The Lottery: What to expect on the big day.”
• Wade makes stops at both Gucci and Cartier, two very high-end stores, and then buys a BMW with her White Card.
• The brochure that the priest hands to Quinn reads “Stop the Lottery! Act Now, Save a Life.”
• Julianne is staying in Parlour B at the hotel.
• The Lottery Commission Police arrest Rembrandt at around 3:45 a.m.
• The right-to-life picketers hold signs that read: “Natural Causes Should Be the Only Causes,” “Stop the Lottery,” “President Elders The Whole World is Watching” and “Birth Control Yes! Lottery No!”
• After Rembrandt escapes, he, Quinn and the Professor get into a Ford courtesy car with the license plate 30VA284.
• When the police come looking for Wade in the ballroom, the timer reads one minute and 50 seconds to the slide. Two minutes and 13 seconds later, the vortex closes after they’ve slid.

Character Information

• Arturo says that the low prices on Paradise remind him of when he was a boy in England. “Of course, the prices were in sterling then.”
• Rembrandt mentions that he played a concert in Rome in 1983 and the city was very expensive.
• Arturo doesn’t like dogs.
• Wade says that she loves animals and misses her pet cat at home.
• Arturo enjoys fishing, as does Rembrandt.
• Quinn has never been horseback riding before this episode.
• One of Rembrandt’s cooking specialties is Trout Almandine.
• Rembrandt says that the last time he took a ride in a large limo was with the Spinning Topps.
• Wade tells Ryan that she was a Romantic Literature major in school. She once wrote a paper on Yeats.
• Rembrandt laments: “My dead relatives were a pain in the butt! I don’t care to deal with any of them!”

Money Matters

• Quinn asks to borrow a dollar but it seems Arturo has lost his wallet. Though it’s given back to him by a kind stranger seconds later, and Arturo pays the grocer one bill from it, money is not really a problem on Paradise where money is seemingly free.
• Later, at the cash machine, Rembrandt “orders” $5,000 and Wade “orders” $1,000 while a humble Arturo asks for a mere five dollar bill.

Notable Quotes

• “I’m English. We invented fishing.” — Arturo, to Rembrandt, upon being asked whether he fishes.
• “We’re not trying to catch blue jays, Professor.” — Rembrandt, to Arturo after he gets his line caught in a tree overhead.
• “Takes a sophisticated fly fisherman to haul in a monster like that.” — Rembrandt, while pointing to Arturo’s comparatively tiny trout.
• “I’m too young to die. Too famous!” — an angry Rembrandt as he’s being hauled away by police.
• “Don’t ever criticize my fishing again.” — Arturo, to Rembrandt after Quinn and the professor rescue him.

Nitpicks/Errors

• After Quinn bumps his head, he touches the wound with his left hand and his watch is turned around so the face looking inward. In the very next scene, from a different angle, he resumes touching his head but the watch has turned around to the standard position.
• The debate continues as to how to spell Wade’s last name, either Wells or Welles. The computer in the lottery spells it without an ‘e’ as do Fox and MCA press releases, the official Sliders web site for both Fox and Universal, as do many other print sources. Still, co-creator Tracy Tormé insists that the spelling should include the second ‘e’ as the scripts do as early as the Pilot and as recent as the third season’s The Exodus. The closed captioning also cites ‘Welles.’
• While the lottery winners are all lined up for the midnight toast at the ball, there are 15 of them, while the television host said only 12 winners would be chosen.

Neatpicks

• When Henry the dog jumps on Arturo, Quinn tells him to look at the bright side “at least he’s not biting you.” But if you look closely, that line was vocally added later and Jerry O’Connell says another word other than ‘biting.” The closed captioning reveals that Jerry actually said “at least he’s not humping you.”
• White Card? Get it? Carte blanche.

Rewind That!

The first video cycle to pick the first lottery winner flashes at least 63 faces before coming up with Julianne Murphy, including those of Arturo and Rembrandt. However, it should be noted that upon freeze-frame analysis, it’s evident that some of those faces appear twice. Then again, it should also be noted that the streetscape backgrounds behind many of those faces are very different which takes the time to show that there are Lottery machines all over the city. On the computer’s second pass to pick a winner, it cycles through only 26 faces but nearly all of those are carry-overs from the first cycle.

Guest Stars

• Nicholas Lea¹ as Ryan [Simms]
• Alex Datcher as Julianne Murphy
• Kevin Cooney as Ken Neisser

Special Appearance by:

• Geoff Edwards as Himself

Co-Starring

• Tim Henry as Agent Jones

With

• Mike Kopsa as Agent Wilson
• Nathan Vanering as Father Fergus
• Walter Marsh as Fatherly Man
• Kristina Matisic as News Anchor
• Ted Cole² as Friendly Man
• David Glyn-Jones as Elderly Man

Unaccredited

• Cameron Labine as Rollerblade Kid
• David Adams as The Operator
• Jason Gray Stanford as Bell Hop
• Charlie McGlade³ as English Charlie
• Mike Levy³ as Mike Levy

1. Canadian actor Nicholas Lea is better known as bad guy Alex Krycek on The X-Files but he also spent three years on The Commish as Officer Enrico “Ricky” Caruso. He would return briefly in Into the Mystic to wrap up the events of the cliffhanger.
2. Ted Cole would show up later as FBI Agent Reid in the episode Greatfellas.
3. McGlade and Levy are credited, but not seen, in this episode. It’s probable that their scene was cut from the final version.