Series: Sliders: The Fourth Season was the season that almost never happened. Fox had once again cancelled the show and it ended up moving to the Sci-Fi Network on cable television. Given the petty squabbles occurring all the time behind the scenes, this move was somewhat surprising since most people figured it had gone on too long as it was; the show killing off Professor Arturo and losing Wade to a breeding camp only a few of the many changes that drove fans crazy from the last season. The premise of the show was sound enough; Quinn Mallory, a genius graduate student looking into creating anti-gravity technology, inadvertently opened a wormhole to another dimension. Upon further experimentation, Quinn invites his graduate advisor, Arturo Maximilian and close friend Wade Wells to see what he has discovered. Their increased mass forces a last moment need for additional power, Quinn going too far and including a passerby by the name of Rembrandt Brown and his car to be sucked into the wormhole too. The net effect of this happenstance is they are shifted into a parallel universe closely aligned with our own; essentially the same Earth that took a slight deviation from where ours did at some point, altering it in some way. The first translocation, or "slide", left the group of adventurers on a world where the weather was deadly, a mega-twister about to engulf them so they broke the established "rule" that typically forced them to stay for a specific, ever changing, period of time; thus sending them on a series of exploits where they tried to get back to their home, a great many such worlds almost identical (one of them in the early seasons was the same except for a single squeaky hinge on a door).

If all of that sounds familiar to you it is because shows where the lead characters are explorers finding themselves in all new surroundings each week fill the books in the television universe. From Star Trek to Time Tunnel to Quantum Leap to Stargate SG-1 and hundreds of others over the years, such shows have allowed the audience to root for the good guys as they make their way through tough spots, assisting others as they try to find what they are looking for. Because it was on FOX, that meant the network tried very hard to keep the arcs to a minimum and allow a stand alone nature to the episodes to exist (making it easier to sell in syndication as well as deal with preemptions due to sporting events broadcast by the network so often). The general rules were fluid depending on who produced, wrote, and directed a particular show but the general idea was that the slides all took place within a 25 miles radius of San Francisco, you could not materialize inside a solid object, the sliding window only lasted a few moments, and there were limits regarding the mass of what went through the portal. The wormhole was controlled via a small handheld device that appeared to be a television remote control that had a countdown timer to let the travelers know when the next window would open up, various outside forces effecting the portal. If you missed a slide, you were theoretically stuck in that world for 29 years before another opportunity arose, and at least initially, the sliding was done completely at random with no means of tracking where they had been or where they were going ahead of time.

The "canon" of sliding differs with each fan club or website, even the subsequent comic book and paperback releases applying the rules haphazardly at times, but as the show progressed, the dynamics of "how" it worked changed to accommodate the plots as written rather than set in stone as hardcore science fiction lovers wanted. Season four of the show therefore began with a bit of weirdness involving months passing since the previous slide, Quinn and Maggie Beckett landing on a burnt out husk of a city that they believed was "Earth Prime", or Quinn's home planet. Maggie was a poor previous season replacement for the departing Professor (who was fired for being outspoken about the show's direction) and did not fit her role as a tough military pilot turned covert operative in the slightest. As a pinup girl in a string of grade Z movies, she was okay but her acting was very weak and she did not get along with Wade (cutie Sabrina Lloyd) so the original cast member was not only written out of the show but consigned to a Kromagg breeding camp as her fate.

Apparently, the season was designed to show the alternate universe species as a big threat, kicked off their home world by Quinn's biological parents. In the act of doing so, the kromagg women were rendered infertile, making it just a matter of time before they died out, the pacifist human contingent not upset enough to kill them just because the kromaggs ate human eyeballs as a delicacy. Able to save Rembrandt but not Wade, they slide to other worlds and eventually found Quinn's brother, Colin living on an Amish world of backworld technology, Charlie O'Connell proving less suited for acting than even Kari Wuhrer (Maggie), if that was indeed possible. The overall theme of the show therefore switched from the importance of getting home to fighting the genocidal kromaggs on multiple Earth's; the writers freed up to embrace this new approach as the warmongering kromaggs were given the look of a cross between Nazi's and ape men (not unlike the newer versions of Klingons). Like Star Trek: The Original Series, the show allowed the writers to poke fun at every day people and ideas without the negative consequences using the allegorical style science fiction has long held dear too. Attacks on religion were common, anti-military sentiments abounded, and even a few pokes at scientific exploration were skewered along the way.

Religion and social norms were the focal point of episodes like Prophets and Loss, Just Say Yes, California Reich, and The Chasm. As outsiders, the team is immediately caught up in using their "we're from Canada" ruse to the unsuspecting population that generally doesn't care as it forces their values on the group. The internet and computers played a big role in shows like Net Worth, Data World, and Virtual Slide where the team had to figure out what was going on to keep from being trapped. Stand alone episodes such as Lipschitz Live poked fun at day talk television hosts while racial issues were explored in numerous episodes like The Dying Fields, Mother and Child, Revelations, and California Reich; showing the evils of treating people differently. In all then, it was a pale season compared to the first two half seasons but did have enough going for it on average (compared to the last season or even the third) to merit a rating of Rent It. This would be a great series if handled correctly and an updated version would probably suit me fine as long as the internal logic was consistently held by the writers better. Just so long as the show doesn't borrow so heavily from the past or go too far out of the way to "surprise" people, an update would fit perfectly in with other remakes of recent years, perhaps better if the right people were found.

Picture: Sliders: The Fourth Season was presented in the original 1.33:1 ratio full frame color as originally aired on the Sci-Fi network ten years ago. There was a marked decrease in visual quality from the previous seasons due to budget cuts and moving to Los Angeles away from far cheaper on production costs locations in Canada. The grain, aliasing, and compression artifacts did not help this one any either, each standing out as needing some remastering as far as I was concerned. The fleshtones were generally accurate but the detail was light, almost as if the resolution was toned down on purpose, some macro-blocking taking place on expansive fields of single colors (skies and the night time). Of all four seasons released to date, this was the worse by a big margin.

Sound: The audio was presented in a 2.0 Dolby Digital stereo English with optional English language subtitles. The vocals and score were easily heard but not showing as much separation or dynamic range as the previous seasons for me; limiting it to being called the bare bones. If you've listened to other shows from around the same time on the Sci-Fi Channel, you'll know what I mean when I say it was largely a passive aural experience.

Extras: I know what you're thinking. You figure that since diehard science fiction fans are the most loyal, dedicated fans of anything and have proven time and again that they are willing to shell out money for extras that this would have all kinds of goodies to enjoy, right? Well, unless there were some extremely wel hidden Easter Eggs (speaking of which, the holiday comes up in a few days, followed by the official release date of the set itself), there was nothing on the discs to qualify as an extra at all. There was a brief episode outline on the case but that was it! I consider this a wasted opportunity but given the animosity between many of those involved with the show and the rights holders, it is not unexpected.

Final Thoughts: Sliders: The Fourth Season was not great television but it did have a fair amount of episodes that at least reminded me of the potential the series has started off with. I viewed it as a guilty pleasure even ten years ago when it first aired so Sliders: The Fourth Season was the result of a series of compromises that looking back upon, might not have been the best idea but was better for most because like the translocation events (slides) the team went on, there was always the chance that it could get better or a writer would slide something by the producers. Most of the clunky episodes were the result of going back to the same well a few too many times but as many as there were, the struggles behind the scenes kept the lowest common denominator dynamic at work more than the writing, the fifth season sinking to even lower depths as I recall. Fans of the show will find enough to appreciate this as a purchase when it comes out next week but even the DVD changes of moving to single sided, dual layered discs probably won't compensate for the material included; the order of the episodes on the discs in the proper order as shown IIRC.