This edition of The Lone Gunmen Total Recall features one of the episodes I remembered the most about and features a great guest star appearance by Stephen Tobolowsky.

The episode kicks of with Tobolowsky’s character coming home from work and going about his pre-bed ritual of watching TV, having a beer and going to the bathroom but unbeknownst to him, another man comes home and does the exact same routine, with the two men just barely missing seeing each other until finally they realize what’s going on when they accidentally get into bed with each other.  The other man and his wife are horrified by Tobolowsky (who we’ll soon learn is named Adam Burgess) but he accuses them of being in his house.

Byers and Jimmy go to meet Adam soon afterwards and they find out that he’s come with a crazy conspiracy about being from an alternate reality that aliens abducted him from and brought him to our reality, since his entire life has seemingly been stolen from him.  He offers up a tub of weird blue goo as proof and Byers quickly dismisses him as a loon but Jimmy notices a weird connector surgical implanted in Adam’s neck that makes Byers give him a second look.

Back at the Gunmen HQ, Frohike and Langly are skeptical when they find out the goo is udder cream and he’s still talking about aliens and alternate realities but Byers convinces them to perform an MRI to see what the deal with the connector is.  Using “Bessie”, Frohike’s homemade MRI machine, they find out that the connector is connected to a series of wires hooked in to various parts of Adam’s brain.  This definitely peaks the Gunmen’s interest so they head off with Adam to investigate his supposed house.  Adam seems to have intimate knowledge of the neighborhood and it’s resident’s routine which makes Byers hypothesize that Adam may have possibly been fed a feed of the house through hidden cameras, much like how people are able to become intimately familiar with TV locations.  Byers, Jimmy, Langley and Adam break into Adam’s “house” to search for hidden cameras while Frohike kills the power and stand guard outside.  Inside, the guys use handheld sensors to try and find any electronics and mark suspicious locations.  Adam gets impatient and uses a handheld saw to start cutting into the walls, eventually collapsing the entire wall of the kitchen, right in front of a pair of cops that have been called by nosy neighbor Rosey.  The guys then have to spend the night in jail but are sprung by Yves paying their bail.

Yves joins the guys in investigating Adam’s case and they get a lead when Adam flies into a rage when seeing a commercial for Maniac Marvin’s Electronics.  The guys got a hint of some sort of inner anger in jail when Adam flipped out on Langley and the guys, sans Frohike and Yves, head to Marvin’s store to question him.  Marvin claims he’s never seen Adam before but he has a picture of Adam with a dwarf woman hidden on his desk.  Outside, Adam flies into a rage again when he sees a standee of Marvin with a pair of midget wrestlers and slams Langley against the front window.  While the others are at Marvin’s, Yves and Frohike are paid a visit by a woman named Lois who claims to be Adam’s wife but is actually the head scientist behind a drastic behavior modification therapy.   Back at the HQ, Adam again goes crazy when he confuses Frohike for a midget wrestler named The Great Santini.  Yves finds out that Santini has a daughter named Sadie and the gang goes to pay her a visit.  It turns out that Sadie and Marvin are seeing each other and Sadie is Adam’s wife.  Adam’s real name is Charlie Muckle and he was an alcoholic, rageaholic, criminal who volunteered for Dr. Lois’ crazy therapy instead of going to jail for putting one of Marvin’s eyes out.  The treatment consisted of Charlie getting a virtual world fed into the connector on his neck and living the perfect life of Adam Burgess with Dr. Lois as his wife.  Confronted with how messed up his old life was, Adam/Charlie agrees to get plugged back into the virtual reality.

The guys are excited by having an actual, interesting story to write about for their next addition but Jimmy is disappointed by the ending of the story so he convinces the guys to help him reunite Charlie with Sadie.  The guys find that the hidden cameras at the site of Charlie’s virtual house are actually on the utility poles outside and they tap in and are able to stand in the front yard and talk to Charlie and are able to convince him that the virtual life is a sham and will never be as fulfilling as an actual life and they manage to get him to the wedding of Sadie and Marvin in time to stop it and get back together with Sadie.

This week the Gunmen get into a slapstick adventure as they try to get a story about a Senator’s indiscretions which ends up with them taking care of a baby.

The episode kicks off with the guys hatching a scheme at a rally for Senator Richard Jefferson (a parody character of Bill Clinton), who is running for re-election but one of his campaign workers, Barbara Bonabo, has recently died under mysterious circumstances.  Byers is in the crowd with a balloon transmitter that allows Langley to piggyback onto the transmission of a reporter’s earpiece and makes him parrot extremely hostile questions to the senator about the death Barbara.  The reporter’s producer spots Byers fidgeting with the balloon and puts two and two together with his reporter’s odd behavior and sets out in pursuit of Byers.  Jimmy tries to give a warning but is caught by the producer and weakly tries to suggest that he works for Geraldo Rivera.  The producer abandons Jimmy and tries to find Byers but ends up finding Frohike and Langley in the guy’s van instead, with Langley still going on a tirade about the Senator.  The duo spends the night in jail and their van is impounded.

Jimmy and Byers reunite with Frohike and Langley at the impound lot and they get a clue on their windshield.  Someone has written a RX number on it and Langley is able to find out that it was a prescription for tranquilizers for Barbra Bonabo.  The guys break into pairs for pretty much the rest of the episode as Jimmy and Byers try to infiltrate the Senator’s campaign to figure out who left them the clue while Frohike and Langley head to the doctor who wrote the prescription

Frohike and Langley are stopped from checking the doctor’s computer by an extremely stern nurse which forces Frohike to pretend he has a case of extremely painful gas.  Langley is able to hack into the computer and get an address for Barbara Bonabo.  The guys head over to find it’s an apartment and they find an abandoned baby, which they immediately deduce must be the love child of Barbara and the Senator, which would be a strong motive for getting rid of her.

Jimmy, meanwhile, is sent into the Senator’s campaign headquarters with a hand covered in forensic adhesive (from a “friend” in the FBI), in an attempt to get fingerprints from the workers inside.  He manages to get a job licking envelopes but when he sits down to work, notices his adhesive is coming off his hand so he attempts to glue it back down but manages to cover his arm completely in glue and gets both arms and pants covered in envelopes and papers.  He heads to the bathroom to clean up and overhears Senator Jefferson’s campaign managers, Brenda and Jock, angrily discussing the apartment and the cover up.  The guys think Brenda might be the mole due to how upset she seems about everything.

Frohike and Langley attempt to take care of the baby but the Gunmen HQ isn’t exactly baby friendly, they attempt to use a rubber glove as a nipple on a bottle of Yoo-Hoo and duct tape a clean diaper on him.  They eventually get desperate and call Yves, who immediately uses her womanly intuition to figure out that the baby is probably teething.  She questions where the baby came from and Langley almost blows their story but Frohike covers by saying it’s his.

Jimmy and Byers head back to the Jefferson HQ and Jimmy is called upon to help Brenda and Jock sober up the Senator for a meeting with a Woman’s Auxiliary group.  Later on, Jimmy approaches Brenda and lets on that he knows about the baby, which makes her and Jock decide to “take care” of Jimmy.  This actually means though that they attempt to bribe Jimmy with a bonus check and a job, which Jimmy angrily rejects because he actually believed in the Senator’s message.  Byers is exasperated that Jimmy ripped up the bribe check, which would have been a massive piece of evidence.

Back with the babysitters, Yves comes back to check on the guys and finds that they built an insane contraption that rocks the baby in the middle whirring arms carrying food and bottles.  Yves is horrified and forces Frohike to go to a Mommy and Me class where he has to wear fake breasts to nurse.  Frohike lets his guard down and accidentally reveals where the baby actually came from.  Yves is surprisingly gung ho about helping the guys expose the Senator but they only have a little over 24 hours before the election begins and Jimmy destroyed their best evidence.  To make up for it, Jimmy comes up with a plan to get fingerprints from everyone on the campaign by delivering coffee at the Senator’s big rally and getting the prints off the cups.  Byers matches the prints to the windshield and the gang confronts Brenda backstage at the rally but she didn’t have the cup they though she did.  It turns out Jock was the one who left the clue for the Gunmen, having become fed up with cleaning up the Senator’s messes.  Jock reveals to the Senator, Brenda and the Gunmen that he tried to pay off Barbara to stay quiet until after the election but she became distraught, got a prescription of tranquilizers and got into a car accident.  With all this revealed, the Senator decides to tell the truth at the rally.

Afterwards, the Senator arrives at the Gunmen’s HQ to collect his son, whom he names William Jefferson and Brenda arrives a short while later to gather up their baby supplies.  Brenda sees a report on the news that the Senator is still in the election, despite his confession, which gets an excited cheer from everyone.

This week the Lone Gunmen try to figure out “What Killed the Water Powered Car?” and avoid shady oil industry employee (and future Human Target) Mark Valley.

The episode kicks off with Jimmy giving a speech about heroes and we get a brief glimpse into the childhoods of the Gunmen; Byers tells his class that he wants to be a mid-level bureaucrat, Langley gets yelled at by his dad for playing on the computer instead of milking cows and Frohike forces the captain of the football team to admit that the Cutlass is the best car and claims he’s going to be a publishing visionary, like Hugh Hefner.

Back in the present (of 2001), Byers heads to the Freedom of Information office because one of his many, many requests for files has been granted.  The clerk gives Byers a massive box which Byers is confident is every file he’s ever requested but turns out to be a cinder block.  Frohike tells Jimmy to throw it out but Jimmy finds a single piece of paper in the bottom of the box.  Frohike tells him it’s junk and for Jimmy to shred it and Jimmy starts chuckling about how goofy the guy’s name on the file is, Stan Mizer, which catches Frohike’s ear and causes him to lunge for the power cord to shut off the paper shredder but he’s unable to catch it in time.  Fortunately, the guys have some advanced document reconstruction software are able to get a pallet number and an initial from the document.  Frohike explains that Stan Mizer invented the world’s first and only water powered car, which disappeared sometime in the 60′s after Mizer’s death. The guys figure that this document is proof the car is still out there and they head out to investigate. At the same time, Yves is working for shady oil industry employee Henry Farst, who is attempting to find the car as well.

Frohike and Byers head to the home of Mizer’s daughter, Shelly, who chased Frohike off in the mid 80′s when he tried to investigate the car.  Frohike mistakenly thinks the mailman is going to kill them and forces himself and Byers inside Shelly’s house.  She is understandably pissed but the guys manage to convince her to let them sort through Stan’s files.  They rummage through the basement and Frohike finds a childhood painting that Shelly painted of the car on what turns out to be a photograph of Stan and his best friend, J.T. Guthrie.  J.T. is the initials the guys discovered on the file.

Meanwhile, Langley and Jimmy stay back at HQ to try and track down the pallet numbers from the document but are unable to find anything when Langley notices that the file doesn’t have an FOI office stamp on it, which means someone planted it in their box.  They go to question the FOI clerk but find him murdered by Farst but evidence points to Yves as the killer.  Frohike, Byers and Shelly pick up Langley and Jimmy and the group heads out following their new J.T. lead but the Gunmen’s VW bus blows a tire and, much to the guys chagrin, left their jack at home in favor of night vision goggles.  Jimmy, in a rare moment of brilliance, thinks that if they can leverage the bus up with himself and a log, they can change the tire.  Jimmy puts his plan into action but accidentally flips the bus completely over and into a water filled ditch on the side of the road.  The group gets towed to the nearest farm, which luckily is the Guthrie farm and Jimmy and Langley are shocked when the current owner comes out and asks them if they are here for J.T.  The guys answer in the affirmative and the farmer takes them into the barn to meet “J.T.”, his prized bull who is scheduled for a rectal exam.  Langley is forced to face his hatred of cows by jamming his whole arm into J.T. and the farmer quickly catches on that they aren’t vets. Luckily, the rest of the group arrives and Shelly recognizes the farmer as Jason Guthrie, the son of J.T. and her childhood friend.

Jason tells the guys that his father used to work at the nearby Biznot Air Force base and the guys send Jimmy in to break in and try to find any information about Mizer and manages to find the original, unredacted file but gets into a fight with a base MP that turns out to be Yves in disguise.  The file gets ripped in half and Yves reluctantly agrees to help the guys, since there’s enough money in it for everyone.  The full file lets the guys know that something weighing about the size of the water powered car was stored at the base but then transfered to a storage unit at the bottom of a nearby nuclear missile silo.  The guys decide to investigate the next day but, unfortunately, Farst shows up having been tipped off by Jason, who accepts a bribe check.

Frohike frantically wakes the guys up the next morning due to the fact that the silos are scheduled to be demolished that afternoon.  Jimmy and Yves provide lookout while the guys rappel into the silo and search for the storage room.  Yves spots Farst driving away with the water powered Studebaker Lark, which Jason must have helped him get earlier. The guys discover another cinder block where the car used to be and are seemingly blown up when the silos are demolished.

Jimmy desperately works for hours to try and dig into the silo despite Yves’ arguments that there’s nothing he can do.  Both of them are happily surprised to find the guys walking toward them, having escaped through a ventilation shaft that dumped them out a half mile down the road.  Heading back to the Guthrie farm, Jason reveals that he couldn’t cash the check because of his guilt and Shelly, after seeing the dedication of the Gunmen, reveals that the car, at least the engine and frame of it, are in Jason’s barn.  Everyone goes to check it out and are cornered by Farst, who plans to kill them all and introduce the water powered car to the world for a tidy profit.  Jimmy acts quick and pulls J.T.’s “udder”, causing him to smash Farst through the barn wall.  Farst is carted off to the hospital and the guys celebrate by getting the car running  and Frohike takes her for a victory lap.

Next time the guys are reluctant babysitters when they find an abandoned baby while investigating a candidate for Senate.

In this edition of The Lone Gunmen rewatch, Frohike, Byers and Langley get a lead on a notorious Nazi war criminal who might be hiding out in New Jersey.

The episode kicks off with an extremely well done parody of a 40′s newsreel detailing the notorious “Poisoner of Alsace”, an unknown murderer of French Resistance members who killed using poisoned pastries.  We then cut to the main suspect, Madame Davos in WWII giving her son to a German soldier on a bicylce, carrying him off to parts unknown.

Cut to the present day and the Gunmen are getting more and more annoyed by their well meaning but dim witted new partner, Jimmy Bond, who is screwing up Frohike’s carefully crafted filing system, “washed” Langley’s keyboard by pouring water on it and more.  Frohike is ready to fire Jimmy, which would mean they would have no money again, but they get an intriguing offer that distracts them from the Jimmy problem.  A man named Michael Wilhelm arrives at the Lone Gunmen’s lair and tells them that he needs their help catching the Poisoner of Alsace, who he believes is a woman named Anna Haag, who has recently placed a personal ad in the local New Jersey paper looking for her son.  Wilhelm believes that Frohike would be the best choice to pretend to be her son, as her purported lover looks exactly like Frohike.  The guys accept the case and set about building a disguise for Frohike and they head off to New Jersey to find out if Mrs. Haag is the Poisoner.

Unfortunately for Frohike, the main way the guys figure out to identify if Haag is the Poisoner is by check her backside for a birthmark that all members of the Davos family have, which is in the shape of Germany.  Upon arriving at the Haag residence, Frohike immediately attempts to check for the birthmark but it turns out he’s looking at the maid.  Frohike introduces himself to Mrs Haag and she is overjoyed that her son is apparently back and she sets about hilariously mothering him, including giving him a set of leiderhosen her husband used to wear, gives him a bath, attempts to help him get into shape and, most worrysome to Frohike, offers him a special pastry, which Haag’s maid eats instead and dies.  All the while Frohike is trying to keep in contact with the guys and gather evidence.  Langley and Byers, meanwhile, have to deal with a nosy neighbor.

Back at the Gunmen HQ, Yves arrives and breaks in to gather some information from the guys computer and finds Jimmy recreating Risky Business.  After getting over his embarrassment, Jimmy stubbornly refuses to let Yves leave until she tells him that Michael Wilhelm is the real son of Madame Davos and has been working as part of secret German group that has spent years killing defectors.  He saw the ad and sent the Gunmen in as bait in case there were any traps and intends to leave with his mother and leave no evidence.  Yves and Jimmy head to Wilhelm’s hotel room so that Yves can confirm his identity and, in usual Yves fashion, claim a $1 million bounty on his head.  Jimmy is supposed to be acting as her lookout but he gets distracted and Yves just barely manages to escape Wilhelm’s hotel room while he’s busy on the phone.

Yves and Jimmy fill Byers and Langley in on what’s going on and Yves tells them that he overheard Wilhelm telling someone, in German, that the Gunmen have been spying on the wrong person and the guys figure out that the nosy neighbor must be the actual Madame Davos.  The gang is horrified to see Langley coming from Davos’ backyard, where he took a leak, to find him eating muffins she gave him.  Jimmy manages to force Langley to throw up and the guys, with Yves help, knock out Wilhelm when he comes to kill the guys and they make Jimmy up, Mission Impossible style, to look like Wilhelm and pull a con on Madame Davos, where they finally confirm her identity and she’s arrested.  Frohike says good bye to Mrs. Haag, who tells him that it felt like she had her son back for the last couple days and the guys head back to the HQ for their next story.

Next week (hopefully), the guys discover What Killed the Water Powered Car?.

This week’s episode of The Lone Gunmen swings away from the dark tone of the pilot to the more wacky adventures of the rest of the show and the guys gain their fourth member in the eponymous Jimmy Bond.

The episode opens with the guys staging an elaborate kidnapping of a Japanese whaling executive in order to find out the names and locations of his fleet.  They make the executive think he’s back in Japan and Frohike engages in a wire fu martial arts fight.  The entire thing literally collapses but the guys are able to get the info they need but they unfortunately spend all their money on the scam and have none left to pay the printer’s to get their next issue out.

While the guys try to figure out how to get some more funds, with Langley suggesting they cover their front page bikini girls, they are surprised by Yves arriving at their door, who they hadn’t seen since Frohike stole the Octium IV computer chip from her.  Yves tells them that famous hacker/golf aficionado Alex Goldsmith was murdered in what the cops suspect was a drug deal gone wrong and suggests that things are not as they appear so they guys decide to investigate.

The Gunmen kick off their investigation by visiting Goldsmith’s mother’s house, who tearfully requests that the guys print what a good person Alex was and that he would never get involved with drugs.  The guys try to find something on Alex’s computer but it’s been reformatted but they do find a check for $1 million in Alex’s prized golf bag (which Langley accidentally vomits in since he’s feeling nauseous from having to siphon gas for the trio’s van) from a company called Philanthropic Outreach Enterprises or POE.  Going through their financial records, the guys find a single, seemingly bogus, account for a James Bond.  The guys find out James Bond’s license plate number and track him to what they think is a clandestine meeting but is actually a practice for a football team made up of blind players, who use sonar helmets and a sound emitting football, which Frohike mistakenly picks up and is violently sacked.  The guys find James Bond, who prefers to be called Jimmy, and realize that he’s not a criminal mastermind, just an enthusiastic, dim witted jock.  Thinking they’ve hit a dead end, the guys try to head back to base but their van’s gas tank is empty again so Frohike and Byers head back to bum some gas from Jimmy.  While their gone, Langley makes his way back to the POE offices and tries to bluff his way into getting Alex’s job when he’s discovered by the vaguely European bad guy, who we saw murder Alex earlier in the episode.  Langley is kidnapped and dragged to the bad guys heavily guarded mansion, which Frohike and Byers are informed about by Yves.

Trying to figure out a way in, the guys decide to recruit Jimmy, who is pissed off after finding out that POE is just a front for an arms deal the bad guys are planning.  Jimmy angrily charges into the bad guy’s driveway and tells them he knows everything and that they are going down, which earns him a driver to the back of the head.  Fortunately the guys accounted for this and Jimmy is to covertly (by punching through a door) able to slip Langley a ghost modem and get him back in contact with Frohike and Byers.  Yves tells the guys that the best play is for Langley to do what the bad guys want and Langley does just that.  Yves drains the bad guys account and runs off, presumably with a couple million in a secret bank account.  Jimmy and Langley manage to escape and Frohike bends open a couple of bars of the front gate and the guys get away.

The Gunmen close the case by giving Alex’s mom the $1 million check Alex received and try to head back to their base, only to have their van not start for the third time, forcing them to push it back.  When they arrive, they are surprised to find their last issue of the newsletter printed and at their door, courtesy of Jimmy, who wants to join because he respects the guy’s attempts to “fight for the little guy”.

This week’s episode is a drastic change in tone from the pilot, which must have been pretty jarring when the episode first aired.  There’s tons of slapstick comedy going on, especially playing off the blind football players and Frohike’s opening martial arts fight.  It also puts in place all the regular characters with the addition of Jimmy to the team.  Next week the guys attempt to out a possible Nazi war criminal as Frohike goes undercover as her son.

Total Recall is back this week to take a look back at another TV show, this time the X-Files spin off, The Lone Gunmen.  The show debuted in the Spring of 2001 and only lasted a season before being cancelled but it was a fun spin on the X-Files “case of the week” formula mixed with a healthy dose of Weekly World News weirdness with the fan favorite trio of conspiracy theorists.

In case you don’t remember or aren’t familiar with them, the Lone Gunmen were introduced early in season one of The X-Files as Mulder’s friends, who publish a weekly newsletter with the same name as their group, detailing various government plots and conspiracies and who Mulder frequently goes to for information about said conspiracies.  Melvin Frohike is the leader of the group, an expert in photography, surveillance, electronics and engineering and makes for his shorter stature with a massive ego and confidence level.  John Byers is the most serious member of the trio, always wearing a suit and tie and has working knowledge of a number of sciences including chemistry, medicine and genetics and is the go-to member for representing the group when they need to appear credible.  Finally there’s Richard Langly, the group’s computer and hacking expert and the most paranoid and irrational member of the trio.  Langly is constantly worried about being bugged or tracked and usually contributes the most wild conpsiracy theories of the group.

The pilot of the series is pretty disturbing in retrospect as it effectively predicts the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  (Chris Carter and the other producers on the commentary for the episode say they believed they were creating the most fantastical scenario imaginable and could never have predicted something similar would happen later that year)  It’s also darker in tone than the rest of the series, as the guys are investigating the potential murder of Byer’s father. (Later episodes had the guys finding a car that runs on water, super intelligent monkeys and other, less dire scenarios

The episode kicks off with the guys breaking into a computer company in Baltimore and attempting to steal their new Octium IV processor chip, which the guys believe has hidden circuitry that will allow it to spy on the user.  While Langly distracts the guests at the gala unveiling, Byers and Frohike take a page from Mission Impossible and use a rope and pulley to lower Frohike from the ceiling to avoid the lasers on the floor.  Unfortunately for the guys, they have competition from Yves Adele Harlow, a sexy thief that Frohike has met before.  Yves disguises herself as a bearded gentlemen, overrides Byer’s winch controls and simply walks in to the room, sets off the alarms and steals the chip, leaving the Gunmen to take the fall, and the full body cavity searches.

The guys are released when they are found to not have the chip on them and they head back to their lair, where Byers gets a call that his father is dead.  At the funeral, Byers meets one of his father’s friends, Ray Helm, who worked with Bertram Byers in the government.  Helm hints that something is up with Bertram’s death and he meets the Gunmen at the site of the car accident that supposedly killed Bertram.  Helm points out the lack of skid marks and other evidence and says he believes Bertram was murdered.

The Gunmen decide to investigate and head to Bertram’s house, where Frohike finds evidence of blood on the freshly shampooed carpet and Byers and Langly find evidence of a government text file on the otherwise wiped computer talking about something named “Scenario 12D”.  Langly goes and recruits his hacking buddy Kimmy to help him break in the Department of Defense to find out what Scenario 12D is and runs into Yves at the shooting range but isn’t able to find out what happened to the chip.  Meanwhile, Byers and Frohike go to the salvage yard Bertram’s car was brought to to look for evidence and find that the car was already crushed.  Rummaging through the wreckage, Frohike is able to find a circuit board.  Heading back to the lair, Byers and Frohike are able to see that there is an integrated antennae on the chip, suggesting that someone would be able to remotely control Bertram’s car.  Langly and Kimmy are able to break into the DoD and find the description of Scenario 12D is a “Mid-Air Domestic Terrorism Scenario” but their attempt to download the full file causes them to come to the brink of being tracked until Frohike pulls the plug, despite Byers objections.  It’s revealed that Helm is behind the attempt to track the guys and, by extension, the death of Byers’ father.

However, the guys have a new theory about Byers’ father after they test the blood at Bertram’s house and find it isn’t Bertram’s, causing them to theorize that an assassin was sent to take out Bertram, since he seemed like he was going to blow the whistle on Scenario 12D, but slipped on the wet carpet and shot himself.  Bertram then decided to use the assassin’s body to fake his death and escape the government.  Byers heads back to Bertram’s house and finds his father there, who reveals that Scenario 12D is going to go from war game to reality, that night, as a shady part of the government is going to use a Boston flight to fake a terrorist attack on NYC and use the fallout to bump up arms sales.  Bertram has a solid idea of what flight it is and he and Byers decide to board the flight to attempt to find the bomb, using handheld carbon sniffers.

The father/son team doesn’t find any evidence of bombs, which makes them think that, just like Bertram’s car, the agents behind the attack might be using remote control to crash the plane.  Langly and Frohike are able to hack into the plane’s instrumentation and confirm that someone is remotely controlling the plane, but Langly doesn’t have enough processing power to break into the manual override of the plane. They also find that the plane’s target is the World Trade Center.  Frohike rushes out to try and convince Yves to hand over the chip so they can break the remote control and, eventually, she agrees and uses the Octium IV to remotely give Langly the processing power he needs and the pilots of the plane regain control just in time to pull up and just barely miss the WTC.  Byers is determined to reveal the conspiracy but Bertram tells him that he won’t testify, because he’s scared and his silence will keep him and Byers alive.  Byers returns to the Lone Gunmen HQ, thinking they won’t have a story for that week’s issue but Frohike reveals he stole the Octium IV from Yves and they excitedly get to work on their original story.

Next week the show shifts to it’s actual, fun and wacky tone as the guys get a new benefactor in the form of James “Jimmy” Bond and the guys investigate the death of a hacker.

Well, here we are at the final episode of the great Sliders Total Recall.  The Sliders have their final confrontation with Rickman on an island where a mad scientist has created a group of human/animal hybrids.

The Sliders arrive just off the beach of the island and swim to shore.  Heading into the jungle, the gang sees a chain of islands in the distance that makes Wade hypothesize that California on this world might have finally broken apart due to seismic activity.  The gang quickly realizes that someone or something is watching them and are attacked by a creature that looks like the poor man’s version of Ron Perlman as Beast (which basically all the creatures in this episode look like).  Maggie manages to knock the creature out with a rock and the gang heads deeper into the jungle.

Meanwhile, we find Rickman attacking another of the manimals who is drinking from a stream and we find out that because he’s been attacking these hybrids, it’s changed his DNA and made him a manimal as well.  Rickman has also formed an alliance with the leader of the manimals, Ceres, who Rickman has promised to take to another world with him.  Ceres reports that four humans have been seen in the jungle and Rickman orders Ceres to go and capture them.

The Sliders are ambushed by a group of manimals but are rescued by a female manimal named Alessandra, who takes out the attackers with a dart gun.  Somehow, Alessandra twists her ankle while running and Rembrandt has to carry her back to her home at the compound of the man behind the manimals, Dr. Vargus (played by Michael York, who you probably know best as Basil Exposition from the Austin Powers movies).  In the scuffle with the manimals, Quinn loses the timer, which is found by Rickman later. Vargus’ compound is protected by an electrical fence and is also home to another friendly manimal named Daniel.  Vargus is peturbed by the intrusion but becomes more accommodating when he learns the Sliders aren’t from the government.  Vargus explains that he bought the island, which was an abandoned sugar plantation and he began his experiments of combining human and animal DNA.  Alessandra and Daniel are his best results and the failures are released to fend for themselves in the jungle.  Vargus eventually hopes to use his research to cure diseases like cancer and Parkinson’s.  Alessandra develops a crush on Rembrandt, especially after he helps treat her ankle.  Vargus invites the Sliders to stay the night and agrees to supply them with guns and supplies so they can recover the timer in the morning but Daniel suspects the good doctor has nefarious plans and warns Alessandra, who helps the Sliders escape the compound.

The gang heads into the jungle and later the next day are caught in a net trap set by the manimals, under orders from Rickman.  Rembrandt is the only one who manages to escape and heads back to the compound to get help.  Rickman takes the others to the manimals base and reveals that he is going to spinal tap all of them and then slide off.  He also reveals that he and Maggie used to do the nasty, which makes her even more unlikable than she already was.  Rickman is about to spinal tap Wade when Ceres reports that Dr. Vargus is outside.  Rickman postpones his spinal tap and goes to meet Vargus, who is helping Rembrandt in exchange for Rembrandt giving Vargus his DNA.  Vargus offers Rickman DNA in exchange for the Sliders but Rickman refuses and Vargus leaves Daniel to be attacked while he escapes.

While Rickman is distracted, Rembrandt manages to sneak into the cells where the others are and frees them and they also manage to get both timers, which enrages Rickman when he finds out.  With Rickman hypothetically trapped on this world, the Sliders consider their mission accomplished and the original trio of Quinn, Rembrandt and Wade will use Rickman’s timer to travel home to Earth Prime while Maggie will use the Slider’s timer to go, somewhere (I’m assuming back with the survivors of her world).  Rembrandt says he has to go rescue Alessandra and agrees to meet the others at some nearby cliffs before the slide.  Rembrandt manages to free Alessandra but they are caught by Vargus.  Luckily, Ceres and Rickman choose that moment to launch an all out assault on Vargus’ compound, which allows Rembrandt to escape with Alessandra telling him she has to stay behind with her people.  Vargus is murdered by the manimals and they proceed to completely destroy the lab.  Seeing that the Sliders aren’t there, Rickman takes a pair of manimals and heads toward the cliffs because “Maggie will go to high ground”.

Rembrandt meets up with the gang and Quinn opens the wormhole to Earth Prime after kissing Maggie good bye.  Rickman arrives and Maggie tells the others to go while she holds them off.  Quinn refuses to leave her alone and pushes Wade and Rembrandt into the portal.  Rickman breaks away from Maggie and makes a swan dive toward the wormhole, which closes and causes him to anti-climatically fall off the cliff to his death.  Maggie and Quinn use the other timer to slide to what they think is Earth Prime but the tracking of the timer was damaged and they end up in a Blade Runner looking futuristic city, not knowing what they will do to get home.

This Slide of Paradise is a pretty shitty episode to go out on.  The episode is clearly inspired by The Island of Dr. Moreau but this episode doesn’t feature any of the variety of creatures that that book or even the horrible Val Kilmer movie version had.  Michael York is pretty fun as he chews scenery and does everything but cackles maniacally as the mad scientist Dr. Vargus.  After the build up over the entire last half of the Sliders’ chase of Rickman, the way he goes out is so cheap and, as I said above, anti climactic.  Even a generic fist fight between him, Maggie and Quinn would have been better than him stupidly diving off a cliff.  In case you’re wondering what happens later in the show, since this is the last episode we’re going to recap, the Sliders eventually learn that Earth Prime has been taken over by the Kromaggs, Quinn has a twin brother, they somehow fuse into one being, everyone but Rembrandt leaves the show and the show becomes about a resistance against the Kromaggs.  The final episode features Rembrandt volunteering to slide to the Kromaggs base, injected with an anti-Kromagg virus that has sucessfully freed one world from their control.  His fate is unknown.  Seasons four and five are just a complete mess and best avoided at all costs.  Stick with the first and second seasons for the best of what Sliders had to offer.  So that’s it, I’m going to take a couple weeks off but keep checking the site as I have an idea for another series to Total Recall.

We’re back this week for the penultimate episode of Sliders we’re going to cover here on Total Recall and it’s the Sliders take on vampires as Wade gets caught up with goth band Stoker, whose members are all blood suckers.

The gang catches up to Rickman and have been checking hospitals and morgues to see if they can find any evidence of him.  Wade follows a lead that a few missing girls were attending a concert by the band Stoker, who recently recieved a terrible review from Music Edge Press but nevertheless have a devoted following.  Wade becomes enamored with the lead singer and decides to go back and see the following night’s concert.

Rickman, meanwhile, has disguised himself as a priest and has made a deal with a corrupt blood bank doctor to give him a list of names of people who have compatible DNA to himself.  He goes and spinal taps a John Doe coma patient. Maggie picks up a clue from the local records that says there’s a Rickman buried at the local cemetery and they have to go dig him up to check if it’s him.  Quinn digs down to the coffin and, upon opening it up, find that it isn’t Rickman, but he did leave his military pin as a sort of “fuck you” to the Sliders.  Quinn leaves Maggie and Rembrandt to fill in the grave while he goes to investigate skid row, where a number of possible Rickman victims have come from.

While the others were grave robbing, Wade got dolled up for the Stoker show and then snuck on stage before the show and started playing keyboard and singing, which catches the eye of Stoker lead singer Morgan.  Morgan invites Wade backstage and she ends up singing with the band at that night’s show.  Quinn shows up and tries to talk to Wade about Rickman but Stoker drummer, Harker, grabs him by the throat and throws him aside.  Quinn is helped up by a man named Van Elsinger (Tommy Chong), who claims to be a vampire hunter and has been hunting Stoker for years.  Quinn agrees to help Elsinger kill Stoker and any of their vampire converts to free Wade, who Elsinger says is under Morgan’s spell and will be turned into a vampire if they don’t act quickly.  Quinn and Elsinger manage to take out a number of vampires, including Elsinger’s wife Charlotte, but they are unable to find Morgan before the sun sets.  Elsinger is attacked and has his back broken by one of the band member’s and stays behind to cover Quinn’s escape.  Back at the gang’s hotel, Quinn fills Rembrandt in on what’s going on and they prepare to head to the concert hall where Morgan says he’ll trade Wade for the timer.  (Morgan told Wade to bring him the timer after she inadvertently spilled the beans about it)

Back at the blood bank, Maggie manages to catch Rickman as he ends his dealings with the blood bank doctor by spinal tapping him but Rickman manges to clip her in the arm with a bullet and kills Stoker’s errand boy, who was gathering the band’s supply of blood. (It turns out the blood bank was doubly corrupt because it sold blood to Stoker and was supplying Rickman with names).  Rickman escapes and presumably slides out.

At the concert hall, Rembrandt, Quinn and Maggie are locked and loaded for vampires and take out the drummer, Harker, although it’s after Rembrandt gets electrocuted by Harker’s magical guitar.  Quinn heads out into an alley behind the venue and finds Morgan and Wade on a motorcycle.  Morgan knocks Quinn down and lets Wade off so he can take another run at Quinn but Quinn turns an old mop into a stake and kills him as he heads toward him.  Wade is free from the spell and the gang slides out to the season finale.

Stoker is not a great episode of Sliders but it does sprinkle some more alternate universe flavor than the last couple episodes have.  Bizarrely, there’s tons of references to Dracula in this episode but Van Elsinger has never heard of it.  They also mention that Bob Dylan doesn’t exist but Janis Joplin is alive and well (she’s apparently a crazy health nut).  Tommy Chong is pretty fun as a hippie Van Helsing as well.  The show plays vampire lore pretty fast and loose, Van Elsinger’s explanation for vampires is that the soul gets “freaked out” sometimes and can’t escape the body, so it requires blood to stay alive.  There’s also a scene where Stoker drummer Harker is clearly out in the daylight to terrorize a music critic when he should be bursting into flame.  A mediocre episode but nothing to offensive.  The last entry into our Total Recall of Sliders will hopefully be next week as the gang finally catches up to Rickman in an homage/rip off of The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Counting this episode, there’s three more episodes left of our Sliders rewatch.  After last week’s horrible Anaconda tie in, this week the show is back on track (or as much on track as late season three sliders can be) as the gang tracks Rickman back to the colony world with the survivor of Rickman and Maggie’s Earth.

The gang first just misses Rickman after he attacks and kills a bunch of gypsies but they lock onto his trail and are surprised to find themselves back on the colony world.  They are also surprised to find the colony world is apparently home to dinosaurs, although Maggie moreso than the other Sliders because as Quinn literally says, “Been there, done that, got the t-shirt” (referring to the fact that the Sliders ran into dinosaurs already in “In Dino Veritas”).  Heading to the site of the settlers base camp, the gang finds it destroyed with evidence of a T-Rex around and, distressingly, a hillside of unmarked graves.  The gang presses on and comes across a soldier who fell into a pit trap after getting ambushed by Rickman.  The gang helps him out and he points out the direction of one of the scattered survivors camps, where Rembrandt is thrilled to find his buddy Malcolm living.  The gang also meets Gretchen, default camp doctor and who has been looking out for Malcolm.

Maggie and Quinn head out to track Rickman, promising to return to camp in the morning and later that night Gretchen explains to Wade and Remy over dinner by the campfire that the survivors inadvertently wiped out the native population with basic viruses like the flu.  The land was also pretty rich with game animals but the T-Rexes and other predators eventually wiped out most of the other animals.  There is one T-Rex in particular that is a constant threat to the camp and has resorted to eating it’s smaller cousins.   Maggie and Quinn get chased up a rocky hill by that particular T-Rex and spend a chilly night hiding from it.

In the morning, Remy and Malcolm go fishing and Malcolm tells Remy that he learned his hunting skills from a native boy named Bantu, who Malcolm taught to draw.  Malcolm and Remy are heading back to camp when they see a settler get picked off on the run by a T-Rex, to which Remy is shocked at how coldly Malcolm reacts; he says the man was stupid for being out in the open, alone.  Quinn and Maggie, meanwhile, catch up to Rickman but he leads them along to a cave and then causes a rockslide that closes the opening.  Quinn and Maggie attempt to dig themselves out but the T-Rex is trying to dig it’s way in to eat them.  Remy, Wade and Malcolm set out to find Quinn and Maggie when they don’t return to camp and arrive near the cave just in time to see Rickman slide out.  Rembrandt and Wade attempt to distract the T-Rex long enough for Quinn and Maggie to escape and Malcolm shows them a hiding hole in the ground where they are able to escape.  Back at camp, the gang still has a few hours before they can slide after Rickman and Quinn proposes that they should try to take out the T-Rex to protect the settlers.  Heading back to the original campsite, Quinn and the gang scrounge up the parts for Quinn to make a giant crossbow that will launch a compressed air tank into the T-Rex’s mouth, which Wade and Maggie will shoot, causing it to explode.  The crossbow fails hilariously, forcing Quinn and Rembrandt to heave the tank into the Rex’s mouth themselves.  Maggie and Wade manage to hit it and the Rex’s entire face explodes, ending that threat.

The other threat quickly returns however as Rickman is quickly back from wherever he slid to and takes Gretchen hostage, forcing Malcolm to bring the Sliders to him.  Rembrandt quickly realizes that something is wrong and convinces Malcolm to tell Rickman that the T-Rex killed them and, according to Maggie, Rickman will head to the cave in order to get proof.  Rickman does exactly that but notices that Maggie covered up all their tracks, including Malcolm’s, and blows the ambush.  Rickman takes Malcolm hostage and demands that Quinn hand over his timer, which Quinn relents to until Malcolm manages to throw sand in Rickman’s face and Quinn jumps on him.  After a brief struggle, Rickman activates his vortex and slides before Maggie can get a shot on him, forcing the Sliders to keep after him.

The dinosaur effects in Dinoslide are definitely improved from “In Dino Veritas” but they are still eye gougingly bad by today’s standard.  It’s not a terrible episode, especially compared to next week, and there’s a couple of nice character moments between Rembrandt and Malcolm.  Next week the gang faces off against vampires in “Stoker”.

This week’s episode of Sliders is a perfect example of how far the show had sunk from it’s smart, sci fi roots as it only exists as a cross marketing tool for Anaconda, released at the same time this episode originally aired in 1997 and also featuring Kari Wuhrer.  The plot feels like something that would have been rejected by 80′s shows like The A-Team or MacGyver as it involves snake poaching and drug cartels.

In a completely illogical move, Quinn and Rembrandt are on a separate vacation from Wade and Maggie in what would be Southern California on our world.  Apparently the search for Rickman isn’t a major priority and the guys aren’t worried about something happening that would make them not be able to link back up with the girls for the slide.  It just so happens that something does come up when the guys are bumped from their flight back to San Fransisco and the next flight isn’t till the following Wednesday, a week after they have to slide.  Fortunately there is a charter flight leaving immediately and the guys go to see if they can catch a ride.  The woman who booked the flight, Kyra, is reluctant to have the guys hitch a ride but the decision is made for everyone when a pair of jeeps with armed goons drives onto the runway and Kyra and the guys jump on Kyra’s plane and escape.  The guys learn that Kyra is a reptile expert who is transporting a pair of rare Triadder snakes back to the States for a medical company to research their venom, which might be able to cure Parkinson’s disease.  Unfortunately during the shootout, one of the locks on the snake cases was damaged and the male Triadder escapes and kills the pilot, causing the plane to crash in a swamp.  Quinn, Rembrandt and Kyra are OK and manage to get a brief mayday message out before their radio shorts out.  The trio decides to head to the nearest town and Rembrandt and Quinn reluctantly agree to bring the surviving Triadder female (still in it’s case) along as well.

Back in San Fransisco, Wade and Maggie return from their vacation and find out about the guys having to hitch a ride with the charter flight.  They learn that the charter wasn’t heading to San Fransisco Airport but to an airfield in Delgado, a country that is where Los Angeles would be on our world and is a humid, jungle controlled by tobacco cartels (tobacco being illegal on this world).  After negotiating with a charter flight of their own, the girls manage to rent a plane and head to the Delgado airfield and meet Carlos, who claims to be a friend of Kyra and has conveniently gotten a truck ready to go out and look for her and invites the girls to join him.  Carlos has to deal with a shady looking Australian man before they head out though and we learn that Carlos is not a good guy as he accused our Australian mate of trying to cut him out of the snake deal and then stabs and kills him, unbeknownst to the girls.

Back in the jungle with Quinn, Rembrandt and Kyra, the trio stumbles into an illegal tobacco field and accidentally sets off a warning flare that alerts a pair of guards.  Quinn manages to ambush one by jumping him from a tree and the male Triadder, who is seemingly following the trio, strangles the other guard.  Armed with AK-47s, the trio continues on their way to town, but when they get there, the townspeople are extremely unwelcoming, telling them that the snake they have with them is the Angel of Death and that they must leave.

Maggie, Wade and Carlos make their way through the jungle with Maggie acting like a horny coed around Carlos and Wade being suspicious of him.  When the trio stops for the night, they are attacked by a pair of goons who must have stowed away at the airfield(?) or followed them in the jungle.  Maggie and Wade manage to knock one of the goons out while Carlos kills the other in a nearby pond with his trusty knife.  The trio manages to get to the same town that Quinn, Rembrandt and Kyra got to the previous day and Maggie and Carlos go to get supplies while Wade stays with the truck and looks through Carlos’ bag and finds the severed hand of the Australian and is confronted by the same guy who called the Triadder the Angel of Death.  He tells Wade that Carlos is the devil and Wade runs to find a phone to call the police when she’s attacked by Carlos.  Maggie manages to knock him out and takes his gun and the girls continue down the road.

Quinn, Rembrandt and Kyra meanwhile, managed to find an abandoned tobacco kingpin’s mansion and take shelter in it from the increasing number of snakes that seem to be drawn in by the male Triadder’s hissing.  The snakes crawl into the mansion through the fusebox and water spigot but Kyra refuses to let the female Triadder loose, which pisses off Rembrandt and he gets more pissed when Quinn continues to agree with Kyra.  Quinn even considers staying on this world with Kyra, who promises him that after she sells the snake, they will be set for life.  Maggie and Wade pull up outside the mansion and find it overrun with snakes.  Wade tells Maggie that snakes hate fire so they go into the back of the truck to find some flares and instead find an awake Carlos.  Carlos forces the girls to go ahead and they make their way into the mansion.

Carlos forces Quinn to drop his gun and forces the Sliders back while he tells Kyra to look into his bag and she finds the severed hand.  It turns out that Kyra was going to double cross Carlos and make a deal with the Australian guy to sell the snakes on the black market and keep all the profit.  Kyra manages to weasel her way back to Carlos’ good side by saying that it was all Quinn and Rembrandt’s idea to steal the snake and Carlos is just about to waste the Sliders when the combined weight of a bunch of snakes knocks down the front door and a flood of snakes starts pouring in.  The male Triadder attacks and strangles Carlos but Quinn manages to free the female Triadder from it’s case and the snakes finally start to leave.

The next morning, the gang slides out while they let Kyra take the truck and leave.  She doesn’t get far because, in typical Sliders fashion, she gets her comeuppance when she’s attacked by snakes a little ways down the road.

This episode is like the Jaws: The Revenge for snakes in that it completely abandons any scientific knowledge or logic about snakes.  The Triadder snakes (which in reality are actually harmless Yellow Pythons) are seemingly able to communicate and control all other snakes and the snakes are able to form strategies leading up to the completely impossible feat of knocking a door off it’s hinges.  The background info on how this world is different from Earth Prime is completely throw away as well.  We’re down to the final three episodes of Sliders for this epic Total Recall and next week, the gang gets back on Rickman’s trail as he and they return to the colony world where the gang left the survivors of Maggie’s Earth and find it overrun with dinosaurs.

Taking a break from ripping off such beloved B-movies as Species and Tremors, Sliders this week pays homage to the Joesph Conrad classic “Heart of Darkness” as the gang finally catches back up with Col. Rickman.

The gang arrives on their latest Earth in the middle of a forest that is covered in yellow fog.  Maggie is able to breathe fine but the others are immediately coughing and unable to breathe.  Maggie leads the others out of the fog and Quinn reads from the timer that Rickman is still on world and they have a little over two days to find him.  Maggie goes back into the fog to scout but is unable to find anything so the group heads down a road that eventually leads to a run down looking town.

Quinn notices a clinic and figures they should check it out to get an idea of who might be potential victims for Rickman’s “spinal tapping”.  The gang catches the attention of a blind fortune teller, who warns Wade that Quinn is horrible danger and that if he enters the fog again, he will never come back out.  The rest of the gang is skeptical but Wade takes the seer, named Adra seriously and talks to her while the others check the clinic.  Maggie, Remy and Quinn discover that Rickman has already ransacked the clinic and ripped out the addresses of at least a dozen people.  Wade rejoins the group and tells them that Adra wants them to go take a look at girl named Lucy La Croix, who was attacked the previous night.

The gang heads up to the La Croix residence and Quinn confirms that it was Rickman since there’s a puncture wound on Lucy’s neck.  Rickman was rushed though and was unable to drain a full dose of brain fluid from Lucy.  Lucy’s father, Bunt, tells the Sliders he was able to get a shot off at Rickman and hit him, leaving a blood trail near the fog.  Maggie, Quinn, Remy and Bunt go to the where the blood is while Wade and Adra stay and try to help Lucy by performing some exercises that Wade remembers the people at the military base on Maggie’s world were doing to try and bring the victims of Rickman out of their comas.

The hunting party reaches the edge of the fog and Maggie goes in to investigate.  Even with her higher tolereance, she starts to cough and feel the effects of the fog.  Rickman takes this time to reveal himself (and explain away the fact that he doesn’t look like Roger Daltrey anymore because all the DNA he’s been stealing from people has effected his appearance) but leaves Maggie to pass out as he hears Quinn coming in with a borrowed gas mask. Back at the La Croix house, Lucy wakes up for a brief moment but passes out again and starts to develop a fever.  Remy grows increasingly frustrated with Adra and Bunt not wanting to help Lucy with actual medicine and storms off.  Wade finds him in the La Croix still checking out something called “Witch’s Brew” and refuses to talk about why he’s so against fortune tellers and superstition.  Wade leaves him in the still and on her way back to the house, is attacked by Rickman but he doesn’t spinal tap her, just roughs her up a bit.  Quinn and Maggie go in pursuit but Quinn quickly feels the effects of the fog.  Maggie makes a couple quick shots at Rickman but is forced to try and help Quinn back out.  Both of them are hit by blowgun darts wielded by some savage looking natives, who Rickman has apparently allied himself with and they bring Maggie and Quinn back to their village.

At the village, Rickman explains to Quinn that when he arrived, these natives captured him and brought them before their leader.  He was going to kill Rickman until Rickman explained about Quinn and the others chasing him.  Quinn is soon shocked to learn that the mysterious leader is his double, specifically the double who helped him solve the equation of sliding way back in the Pilot.  Alternate Quinn has gone insane from sliding by himself for years and is worshipped as a god by the natives.  He explains to Quinn that Quinn will have to either kill him or Maggie will die.

Back in town, Remy and Wade have gotten some of the “Witch’s Brew” from Bunt, which he explains lets people breathe in the fog after drinking it, and also get a map and a special magic pouch from Adra, who reveals that she used to be one of the natives in the fog, until she fell in love with a man from town and gave him the Witch’s Brew to be able to see her.  Her people killed him and blinded Adra.  Remy and Wade set out into the fog and Remy finally explains what’s been bugging him by telling Wade about a friend he met in Haiti while in the Navy that was told by a fortune teller he would die one day and seemingly set out to prove the fortune teller right to Remy.

Back in the natives village, Quinn is brought into a cave and finds that Alternate Quinn is repairing Rickman’s timer, whose microchip burned out upon entry to this Earth.  Rickman escapes and Alternate Quinn explains to Quinn that he was the one who is responsible for giving the Kromaggs the ability to slide by giving them the formula.  The Kromaggs destroyed his world anyway and Alternate Quinn wants Quinn to kill him so that he will have the will and strength to save his Earth.  Quinn gets into a fist fight with him instead and manages to knock him out and recover the timer.  Remy and Wade arrive at about this time and manage to distract the natives with Adra’s magic pouch, which projects an image of her in a smoke cloud when Wade lights it.  Remy unties Maggie, who has been dressed in an animal skin bikini and was about to become some sort of sacrifice and the gang slides out when Quinn appears and activates the gateway.

Overall this isn’t a bad episode of Sliders and it does have some nice callbacks back to earlier, far superior, episodes.  Jerry O’Connell does a fairly good job doing his version of Kurtz from Heart of Darkness (although the crappy white Kiss makeup is not very well done).  There’s some good character stuff too with Wade and Rembrandt but Maggie is still just on the show to scowl and show off her T&A.  Next week is a completely stupid episode where the gang gets caught up with snake poachers in “Slither”, see you there!

This week features the brief but extremely welcome return of the Professor as Wade and Rembrandt talk about a previous world they were on that very much resembled the future from HG Wells’ “The Time Machine”.

The episode opens with Wade waking up from a nightmare about some horrible looking creature and she tells Rembrandt about it and says it’s from a world they visited a while back with the Professor.  Rembrandt says that Wade never told him what happened to her and Quinn underground and she tells him that he never told her what happened to him and the Professor.  Cue the Wayne’s World transition noise.

The original Sliders gang arrives on Wade’s nightmare Earth and Rembrandt gets himself tangled in some thorn bushes upon landing.  Arturo helps him out but they both get scratched in the process.  The Sliders notice that there are two other Earths in the sky, along with the moon.  They will soon find out the effect this has on the Earth they’re on.  The gang hears people nearby and goes to investigate.  They find some natives in a field, cooking food and the Sliders approach, hoping to mooch some food but they are greeted by spears.  Before they can explain, the ground starts shaking and a crack opens up and one of the natives, her baby and Wade all fall into the chasm. The crack closes and the guys are panicked that Wade is now buried alive.  The natives flee and refuse to help the Sliders dig.  Realizing that they need better tools than their hands and sticks to dig, the guys head out to steal the equipment they need if the natives aren’t going to help.  They corner one of the men who seemed like he wanted to help before and find out his name is Brock and that his sister is the woman who fell into the chasm with Wade.

Brock helps the guys get some rope and leads them to what looks like a massive ventilation shaft.  Quinn heads down first and finds that there is a massive industrial area underground.  Before the others can follow, the de facto leader of the natives, Keegan, arrives and cuts Quinn’s rope and captures Arturo and Rembrandt.  Quinn finds that the facility is some sort of giant shock absorber to help counteract the constant earthquakes.  The land above was engineered by a group of brilliant scientists and engineers, who then vanished, leaving the facility to waste away and causing the earthquakes on the surface to get worse.  Quinn finds Wade’s footprints (Wade survived the fall, the other woman didn’t and Wade found that there is a group of creatures living in the facility) and finds her cornered by a group of, we may as well call them Morlocks and that a Morlock mother has the baby.  Another quake hits and Quinn takes advantage of the confusion to grab the baby and run.  They don’t get far before Quinn is hit in the head by a rock and knocked out and Wade and the baby are recaptured by the Morlocks.

Back on the surface, Rembrandt and Arturo are having horrific reactions to the thorn bush scratches they received upon arriving.  Arturo discovers some sort of red, thorny growth is starting to come out of his arm and he scratches his arms bloody until he forces Rembrandt to knock him out with a punch.  Brock sneaks in a short while later and gives them some magic water that the natives drink to keep from being sick and also to heal wounds.  He also leaves them some fruit that tastes like whatever you want.  Brock also mentions that Arturo’s reaction would have been that strong if he was ill lately and Rembrandt learns about Arturo’s fatal illness.  With Brock’s help, they escape again and Rembrandt and Brock climb down the ventilation shaft.  They make their way into the shock absorber facility and run into Wade, who stole the baby back and is on the run from the Morlocks.  Luckily Quinn finds the gang at that moment too and has turned his shirt sleeve into a sling and forces the Morlocks to retreat with some well placed rocks.  The quartet hides for a while and Quinn reveals to Wade that he wants to have a bunch of kids to make up for being an only child.  The coast seems clear so the group heads out to a staircase that seems to lead up but have to fight off one more attack by the Morlocks.  Quinn and Rembrandt manage to punch out a bunch and throw some over the railings and the group makes it back to the rope and climbs back to the surface.  They find Keegan and the rest of the natives holding Arturo at spear point but Brock convinces the group that they need to leave their valley or they’ll eventually die from the earthquakes.  Most of the group leaves with Brock and the Sliders slide out.  In typical Sliders fashion, the person who was the biggest dick to the Sliders gets some sort of horrible comeuppance and Keegan finds himself the victim of a Morlock who makes his way to the surface thanks to the still attached rope.

After a few weeks of Maggie, it’s a breath of fresh air to have Arturo back, if only for one episode.  The original group had such a great dynamic that is ruined by Maggie’s constant bitchiness.  As far as the movie/pop culture Earths go, this is one is OK.  They got performers from Cirque Du Soleil to play the Morlocks, so that’s pretty cool and they definitely take advantage of the industrial setting to jump, flip and spin their way around railings, pipes and stairs.  Basically this episode just serves to prove how horrible a decision it was to kill off Arturo.

Sorry for the gap in between recaps but other things have been getting in the way but we’re back for an episode that rips off Species with a little Logan’s Run thrown in.

We find the gang still on the hunt for Rickman, although still no mention or sight of him this episode; just like our last installment.  The gang is trying to find their way through some sort of swamp, getting attacked by slime creatures (which actually seem like the Brain Slugs from Futurama) and Maggie gets one attached to her face.  Quinn manages to free her and the gang slides out but on the next world, Maggie collapses with some sort of green foam coming out of her mouth.  The others get her some medical help and discover that this world has made some incredible advances in medicine, including the ability to cryogenically freeze patients for transport to the hospital, effectively stopping further tissue damage.  There is also a mandatory organ donor program, which Quinn and Wade find out about soon enough.

At the hospital, the gang meets Dr. Sylvius, who reveals that while doing scans on Maggie, there was some sort of mass discovered in her stomach that is growing at an incredible rate.  While Dr. Sylvius explains this, Maggie becomes conscious and the first indication that something is wrong is that her eyes briefly turn insect like and she escapes through a vent to the hospital roof.  The trio of Quinn, Wade and Rembrandt find her throwing up up there and try to bring her back to the hospital but Quinn and Rembrandt get into a fight with guys who are revealed to be one of the units that tracks down organ donors, who have a wrist device that beeps when they are required to donate.  The “donor police” discover that Quinn and Wade don’t have the wrist devices and arrest them.  Rembrandt is sent off because he’s over 25 and he brings Maggie back to the gang’s hotel.

Rembrandt figures out where Quinn and Wade are but is stopped from going out by Maggie, who starts coming onto him like a drunken prom date.  Rembrandt shrugs off her advances but she keeps persisting until Rembrandt has to shove her off.  Maggie responds by revealing some sort of mouth tentacle and jumps out the window, clings to a nearby wall, and jumps down to the street.  Rembrandt reunites with Quinn and Wade, now registered as organ donors and they split up to find Maggie, following Dr. Sylvius’ assessment that she seems to be in some sort of breeding mode.

Maggie, meanwhile, buys or steals an extremely short dress and heads out to a bar to find a suitable breeding partner.  None of them seem to be up to her standards and one guy doesn’t take that very well, resulting in Maggie breaking his arm.  Maggie then trespasses into the pool area of a nearby apartment building and strips down and gets into the hot tub.  A curious security guard investigates and gets drowned for his efforts.  Wade figures that if Maggie likes hot water and steam and is looking for a man, the local health clubs are probably their best source to find her.

Wade turns out to be right and the trio finds Maggie at one of the spas but are too late to stop her from impregnating a guy in the steam room with her tentacle egg depositor.  Quinn gets a concussion from Maggie and she escapes yet again.  Wade and Dr. Sylvius try to extract the symbiote that hatches in the stomach of Maggie’s victim by lower the temperature of the body.  They are able to coax the creature out but kill the guy and the creature, shortly after, in the process.  Dr. Sylvius says that the creature in Maggie should be able to survive because it’s stronger but Wade is horrified that Sylvius would kill Maggie just to get this creature.  Sylvius wants the creature to study and replicate it’s growth ability to stop the organ donor program for both personal and financial reasons and activates Wade’s donor device when Wade threatens to tell Quinn and Rembrandt what she wants to do to Maggie.  Quinn makes a deal with Sylvius that they’ll capture Maggie in exchange for Wade getting deactivated and they find Maggie back at the hotel room.  Rembrandt manages to freeze her with one of the EMT spray guns and they bring her back to Sylvius’ lab.  They lower the temperature to just above the level that would kill Maggie and set a tropical aquarium on the other end of the room, hoping to lure the creature out and into the aquarium.  Sylvius grows impatient and wants to lower the temperature to killing levels but Quinn has the idea to offer himself to the creature to lure it out.  Quinn coaxes the creature out and tries to grab it and throw it in the aquarium but it gets loose and the gang only has a minute left to slide.  Dr. Sylvius tries to grab the creature but it forces itself down her throat and the Sliders are unable to help before they have to slide.  They leave Dr. Sylvius, taken over by the creature, targeting one of her male assistants.

This episode is completely a rip off of Species, which itself is already a cheesy B-movie and, in late season 3 of Sliders it’s doubly so.  The reason Kari Wuhrer was hired is made crystal clear in this episode as she’s constantly coming onto men, moaning and getting naked.  It stinks of FOX executives thinking they needed to “sex up” the show.  Fortunately for us, next week is the wonderful, but brief, return of John Rhys Davies as the original trio reminisces about a world that is very reminiscent of the future in HG Wells’ “The Time Machine”.

The first post-Professor episode is an OK take on the zombie genre with “Sole Survivors”.

The Sliders arrive on the zombie infected Earth after escaping from an unknown situation on a previous Earth that had Quinn tied to a cross, which Quinn hints had something to do with the locals seeing the Sliders arrive through the wormhole.  Almost immediately, Quinn is bitten on the thigh by a zombie but, with no knowledge of what’s going on, isn’t too concerned about it.  The gang sees bodies everywhere and they eventually make it to a warehouse that seems to be inhabitated, or at least safe with it’s barb wire fence and safety lights.  Wade sees signs of a flashlight inside.  There are warning signs on the fence warning that it’s electrified but Quinn wagers that the survivors wouldn’t waste any unnecessary power and tests the fence.  He fakes getting electrocuted, which earns a laugh from the other Sliders, even Maggie.  The gang scales the fence and goes to investigate the warehouse.

The gang finds a bunch of plants and herbs growing but Maggie thinks the place is abandoned and questions that Wade saw anything.  They get into a catfight with Maggie calling Wade soft for crying about the Professor and Quinn and Rembrandt defending Wade’s toughness.  It seems like Maggie’s chief personality quality is “bitch”.  Wade is proven right when they see more flashlight flashes in another room and Quinn and Maggie go to investigate.  They find a survivor named Debra.  Learning that Quinn is bit, she immediately writes him off as dead, explaining that he’ll quickly become one of the infected.  Her boyfriend was bitten and turned and bit Debra on her stomach, but she is apparently immune.  Refusing to give up on Quinn, the Sliders make a deal with Debra that if she shows them how to get to the nearest hospital, they’ll come back and help her repair her generator.

Arriving at the hospital, the gang quickly learns that everyone has either died or left.  Quinn’s condition quickly gets worse as he’s develops the infected’s sensitivity to light and green eyes.  Not wanting to put Wade and Rembrandt in danger, Quinn tells them to go back and help Debra while he works to find a cure.  He wants Maggie to stay with him for the unspoken job of putting down Quinn if he can’t find a cure.  Wade and Rembrandt decide to go to the next closest hospital and Remy fixes up an abandoned jeep.

At the hospital, Quinn worsens and is sedated while stumbling down the hall by another survivor, Dr. Tassler.  He and Maggie lock Quinn in a room and Maggie learns that the company responsible for the zombie outbreak is Geni-Trax and their weight loss supplement Lipron.  Lipron was a bacteria that attacked fat in a person’s body and an antidote was supposed to be taken to kill the bacteria once the desired weight loss was reached.  However, something went wrong and people started to crave fat and eventually started attacking and eating others to get more fat.  Dr. Tassler himself was infected but he managed to regulate the bacteria with massive doses of the corporate antidote.

At the next hospital, Rembrandt and Wade manage to gather a bunch of medical supplies and also a research packet about the infection.  They have to fight off a hungry zombie but make it back to the city before their jeep kicks the bucket.  Back at the hospital, Quinn manages to slip out when Dr. Tassler and Maggie return to his room to give him more sedative.  Debra’s generator goes out and a swarm of zombies burst in, including Quinn.  Debra manages to scare off the other zombies with a wall of flame from an oil barrel but Quinn jumps the flames and manages to fix the generator.  He takes a sample of Debra’s blood and then heads back to the hospital where Dr. Tassler injects him with the corporate antiodote just in time before he completely succumbs to the infection.  Dr. Tassler works through the night and manages to create what he thinks is the cure from Debra’s blood.  Maggie and Quinn go to meet Rembrandt and Wade outside for the slide but learn that Debra has been captured by a group of zombies that came out of the sewer.  The gang follows and manages to beat down the zombies and rescue Debra.  Dr. Tassler inoculates the rest of the Sliders and he and Debra decide to remain and start curing people rather than sliding with the Sliders.

Sole Survivors is an OK episode that’s a competent take on the zombie genre.  It definitely doesn’t do anything too original (although the source of the infection is pretty clever) and the zombie effects are definitely hampered by the mid 90′s TV budget.  There’s surprisingly no mention of Rickman but it might just be that they were scrambling to cast Roger Daltrey’s replacement.  The show seems to be going out of it’s way to make you hate Maggie, every thing she says is delivered with pure bitchiness.  I do sort of love that it take Wade 5 seconds to figure out what Quinn wants to do with Debra’s blood while it take Maggie what seems like a few hours to come to the same conclusion.  Next week, the Sliders pay homage/rip off “Species” as Maggie gets infected with a horny alien parasite.

We’re back to Sliders after our unscheduled website downtime last week.  It’s part II of The Exodus and it contains the moment when Sliders ended for a lot of fans.

When we last left off, Quinn had found Earth Prime with Maggie but Maggie was unable to breathe due to something in the atmosphere.  Quinn manages to slide back Maggie’s Earth and she recovers but her husband, Steven, is pissed at Quinn for his flirting with Maggie and Maggie is pissed at Quinn for not leaving her to die and continuing the mission to find a new Earth for the base survivors.  Rembrandt and Wade also get pissed at Quinn because he tells them that he has the coordinates for Earth Prime but feels they shouldn’t slide until they help the survivors slide to their new world.  Rembrandt blows up on Quinn, telling him he’s sick of him playing God and that he obviously cares more about strangers than his friends and then storms off.

Rembrandt and Malcolm go to a church service and Rembrandt tells Malcolm that they have a way for him to get off of this world, but he has to keep it a secret.  Rembrandt then begs Wade to get Malcolm’s name on Colonel Rickman’s list of candidates but Wade says that Rickman has limited the criteria even more to include brain chemistry and DNA makeup (which doesn’t raise any red flags apparently).

Maggie and Quinn head back out to try and find a habitable world for the refugees and, after six worlds, finally settle on an Earth that seems to be thousands of years behind development wise and has an indigenous, primitive population, but has enough resources for the refugees to survive.   Maggie and Quinn report back to Rickman, who orders that preparations to slide begin immediately.  Steven reports that his estimates about the carrying capacity of the timer were off and that they’ll only be able to carry around 140 people, as opposed to their earlier estimate of around 300.  Arturo decides to recheck the calculations while Wade and Rembrandt mange to get Malcolm’s name as the last one on Rickman’s list.  Meanwhile, with the pulsars closing in on California, a mob of civilians storms the base, thinking there are fallout shelters underneath it.  Rickman orders his troops to fire at will and they massacre the people trying to break in.

Going by Steven’s numbers, Rickman orders that the people of the base be broken up into two groups, the group that will actually slide and a group that will think they will slide but actually be left behind.  He says that this is to avoid the base collapsing into chaos.  Arturo finishes up his calculations and tells Rickman that they can probably safely carry another 100 people to the new world but Rickman claims he has enough people “for his needs” and that they will go with the numbers they have.  Arturo tells him that his decision is tantamount to murder and that he’s going to recommend Rickman be relieved of command.  Rickman responds to this by, what I’m going to refer to as “spinal tapping” from now on, and attacks Arturo with a syringe.  Luckily, Wade and Rembrandt are able to interrupt before Rickman can finish but the Professor is left in an extremely weakened condition.

While the Sliders look after Arturo in the base hospital, Rickman and Maggie begin dividing the base personnel up into their two groups.  Maggie grows worried that Steven seems to have gone missing and asks for permission to look for him, which Rickman refuses but he says he’ll go look while Maggie finishes up with the personnel.  It’s Steven who finds Rickman, but unfortunately just after he spinal taps someone in the base church.  Rickman kills Steven to prevent him from sharing his secret and almost kills Malcolm as well, who wanders in just in time to witness Steven get killed.

After seeing that Arturo was attacked by the same person with a syringe as the other coma patients, Wade and Rembrandt head out to try and find Rickman and convince him that someone with medical experience is attacking his people and will most likely slide with them.  It’s in Rickman’s office that they discover a convenient newspaper with an article about how Rickman was the only survivor of his unit in this Earth’s Gulf War and contracted some sort of disease where a fungus destroys his brain tissue.  Wade finally puts it together that Rickman must be stealing people’s brain tissue to keep himself alive.  The pair head back to the hospital to tell Quinn this news and find themselves locked in, presumably by Rickman.

Maggie, meanwhile, learns from Rickman that Steven was “killed by civilians who broke into the lab”.  She seems broken up about this for a couple seconds and then starts to supervise the slide of the Alpha group to the new world.  Back at the hospital, Quinn manages to MacGyver up a rocket propelled gurney and the group heads out to stop Rickman, who is the last one to slide.  Rickman pulls his gun and takes aim at Quinn but Arturo steps in front of him and takes the bullet.  The Sliders let Rickman go as they rush to help Arturo but he is mortally wounded.  With no choice, Wade, Rembrandt and Quinn decide to head as deep underground as they can and hopefully survive the pulsars long enough to follow Rickman to the refugees’ new world (thanks to Steven modifying the gang’s timer to be able to track wormholes).  The gang, along with Malcolm, are able to slide just seconds before the Earth explodes from pulsar radiation.

The gang finds the refugees setting up a base camp and explain to Maggie that Rickman has been attacking people and killed Steven and Arturo.  She and Quinn lock and load and head out to kill Rickman, who is out by a nearby river scouting a second base location.  Rickman manages to ambush and fight them both off and then opens up a wormhole and escapes.  Quinn explains they can follow him but will have to wait a few hours for the timer to count down.  The Sliders have a funeral for Arturo on the edge of a cliff and then prepare to slide out on their mission of revenge against Rickman.  Maggie asks to join them and says that she gave up her military commission.  The Sliders apathetically agree she can come and they head out.

This could have been an amazing episode of Sliders but they do so many stupid things character and plot wise that it’s the beginning of Sliders steep downhill ride to oblivion.  It takes the characters way too long to figure out that Rickman is evil, considering he does everything short of eating a puppy to prove how evil he is.  Arturo’s death is a confusing and insulting combination of the character first getting reduced to a drooling idiot by Rickman’s partially successful attack and then having him get shot in a shot that is a cheap Matrix rip off where the bullet travels in slow motion and it seems like maybe it’s going to get sucked into the portal like in “Double Cross” but does hit the Professor.  There’s also complete inconsistency from the first part of the episode like, for instance, in the first part it’s established there’s a force field around the base but in this episode there’s just a shitty chain link fence keeping the angry civilians out.   If this is where you stopped watching Sliders, I wouldn’t blame you, but we’re going to keep trucking till the end of Season 3.  Mentally prepare yourselves.

Well, here we are, The Exodus, the two parter that definitively changed, and most people think killed, Sliders and sent it down it’s path to awfulness that was season four and five.  Let’s get right into it.

We kick off the episode on some sort of military base where a female officer detects some sort of space event and calls a scientist to warn him about it but she’s attacked by someone with a syringe and is unable to finish her call.  Cut to the next day and the Sliders arrive in the middle of looting in downtown LA.  They learn from a bum that the US and Russia are still in the midst of the Cold War but don’t get much else before a car careens out of control near them, flips and explodes.  The gang rescues the driver, who Arturo recognizes as Dr. Vladimir Jariabek, a fellow Cosmologist.  Dr. Jariabek manages to tell the Sliders with his last breath to warn someone that the “pulsars are on 87 degrees, not 86″ and then dies, not just from the car crash but from being shot as well.  At that moment, the Sliders are surrounded by the military, led by *sigh* our future fourth Slider, Captain Maggie Beckett (Kari Wuhrer).  Maggie demands to know if Jariabek said anything but the Sliders aren’t saying anything and manage to trick and overpower Maggie and her men.  Quinn locks Maggie in the trunk of her car and the gang heads off to Jariabek’s office at Cal Tech to find some more information.

At Jariabek’s office, Arturo discovers that Jariabek was studying pulsars, remnants of a collapsed star that are heading toward Earth and will irradiate the entirety of Russia, which the Sliders assume is a good reason someone would want Jariabek dead.  The gang is interrupted yet again by Maggie, who manages to actually capture the Sliders this time and brings them back to her base.  Quinn is questioned by Maggie and her commanding officer, Col. Angus Rickman (played by The Who member Roger Daltrey) and is uncooperative until another member of the base, Dr. Steven Jensen, asks Quinn if his timer is for traveling to parallel worlds.  Quinn acknowledges that it does and Steven excitedly explains that he’s been able to track the coordinates of wormholes but they have been unable to send people through without them getting lost into oblivion.  Quinn makes a deal with Rickman to help Steven develop his technology to be able to send humans through safely and in return, he’ll let the Slider slide out on time.

Using the power chip from Quinn’s timer, Quinn and Steven are able to stabilize the wormhole generated by Steven’s timer.  Quinn also learns that Steven and Maggie are married and that Maggie used to be a fighter pilot until Steven was in a skiing accident and paralyzed.  She took a job as an intelligence officer to spend more time with him.  It’s good timing that the duo is able to stabilize the wormhole, because Arturo detects that the pulsar that has already irradiated Russia is just the first wave of pulsars that will irradiate the entire surface of Earth in 43 hours.  Rickman orders that Maggie and Quinn use the newly stabilized wormhole to find a new Earth for as many survivors as they can slide through (which Arturo and Steven manage to cap at 300).  Rickman also orders Wade to create the list of people who will slide as she’s impartial.  Meanwhile, Rembrandt meets a young kid named Malcolm, who’s stepmom was the officer that was attacked in the opening of the episode, and who he bonds with over their shared history of being told they weren’t talented when they clearly are (Remy with singing, Malcolm with drawing).  Malcolm tries to show Rembrandt a way to sneak off the base but Rembrandt runs into some sort of force field.

Maggie and Quinn set off on their scouting mission and the first Earth they land on is a world populated by giant versions of everything, most notably golfers and rabbits.  Clearly not suitable for a new home for the survivors, Maggie and Quinn move on and slide to a world that is seemingly identical to Maggie’s Earth, complete with a double of her that captures Maggie and Quinn.  Brainstorming how they can outsmart Maggie’s double, Maggie explains that she’ll probably be overconfident and respond to flattery about how impressive she is.  Quinn manages to distract Maggie’s double while Maggie sneaks up behind her and knocks her down, while Quinn grabs the timer and they slide out.

Back at the base, Rembrandt and Malcolm are heading to Malcolm’s quarters to meet his dad when they find him unconscious outside, in the same way Malcolm’s stepmom was found.  Rickman refuses to believe that there’s someone attacking people on the base but we soon learn that he is the one who is attacking people.  Rembrandt asks Wade to add Malcolm’s name to the list of people who will slide to the new world, but Rickman has ordered that only people with Type O- blood can slide.

The last world that Maggie and Quinn slide to in Part 1 is seemingly Earth Prime as they land in Quinn’s neighborhood and find his mom and the squeaky gate.  Quinn’s mom also found the locket that Quinn had hid under his bed and was going to give to her on the day he slid for her birthday.  The reunion is broken up by the fact that Maggie apparently cannot breathe on Earth Prime and Quinn and Mrs. Mallory quickly rush her to the hospital.  The doctors are puzzled why Maggie cannot breathe but Quinn realizes he’ll have to slide to save Maggie.  He says goodbye to his mom and carries Maggie into the portal.

Be sure to come back next week for the exciting conclusion of The Exodus, where we’ll unfortunately have to permanently say good bye to one of our beloved foursome.

We’re coming into the home stretch of our Sliders recaps and that means things are going to start going downhill fast.  ”Paradise Lost” is the epitome of what Sliders would unfortunately become where lazy movie homages replaced intelligent social commentary.  Paradise Lost is a half baked Tremors knock off that feels like a rejected X-Files script.

The action picks up with geologist Michael Levy, who is frantically calling his boss Laurie about some sort of discovery he’s made outside the small town of Paradise.  Unfortunately for Michael, a couple of guys from town interrupt his call and drag him to a cliff overlooking a barren section of beach.  Michael is forced down to the beach and the men pull the ladder up to the cliff up.  Something starts moving under the sand and Michael is quickly caught and dragged under the sand.

The next day, the Sliders arrive on world and head for town.  They run into Laurie, working on a flat tire and looking like she’s about to get brained with a tire iron by creeper townie Bud.  Quinn rushes over to help and, after fixing the flat, Laurie gives the gang a ride into town.  Paradise is an extremely small and weird town and all the townsfolk give the Sliders suspicious stares.  In need of cash for a room and food, Wade and Rembrandt get jobs at the local restaurant, owned by the seemingly charming Parker Whitmore.  While Wade and Rembrandt get to work, Quinn heads with Laurie to Michael’s campsite while Arturo checks the gang into the local hotel.  While waiting for their room to be ready, Arturo notices a picture from the hotel’s opening in 1941 which seems to have current owner Alice in it, looking like she hasn’t aged in a day.  She says it’s her grandmother and Arturo heads out to question some other townspeople.

While the Sliders are investigating/working,  the sheriff, Sheriff Burke, heads out to the site of a killing and worries that “she” is getting hungrier and that they’ll have to feed the Sliders to “her”.  He instructs Bud to collect the blue goo that “she” has left.

At Michael’s campsite, Quinn and Laurie manage to find what Michael wanted to show Laurie, he has readings about something massive moving underground.  Putting the specifications into a handheld detector, Laurie and Quinn head out to follow the source of the readings.  Back in town, Arturo attempts to get some information at the local bar and manages to learn from a fellow bar patron named Fred that there’s some sort of creature nearby.  Arturo is interrupted by Sheriff Burke, who claims he needs Arturo’s help identifying what they think is Wade’s body.  It’s actually the body from earlier and Burke and Parker leave Arturo to be sucked underground by the creature.

Wade, a little while before Arturo got fed to the creature, discovered that the townspeople ritually eat the blue goo and that it seems to let them live for longer than normal.  A waiter at Parker’s restaurant named Tom, died earlier in the day and Burke claims at the secret meeting that he was 103.  Unseen by Wade and Rembrandt, Tom reverted from his youthful appearance to an elderly one when he died.  Parker finds Wade spying on the meeting and ties her up.  The next morning he tells her that he wants her to be his new wife, to replace his old wife Trudy, who is the only elderly looking towns person, having refused to eat the blue goo.  Wade tries to escape by smashing Parker in the head with a vase but Burke arrives and prevents her from leaving.  Parker and Burke get into an argument over Wade and in their struggle, Parker is killed.  Quinn, Laurie and Rembrandt arrive at that moment, the latter having to get rescued from jail by Quinn after Burke knocked him out for asking questions.  Quinn manages to knock out Burke and take his gun and the group learns from Trudy that the creature lives in a cave by the ocean and that Arturo might still be alive because the creature saves it’s victims until it gets hungry.  Somehow finding some demolition charges, the gang heads out to find the cave and blow up the creature.

Arriving at the beach, Laurie stupidly wanders off to follow her seismic detector and is captured by the creature as well.  Quinn picks up the detector and leads Wade and Rembrandt to the cave.  Burke arrives at the cave about the same time and starts to open fire on the Sliders.  While Rembrandt shoots back with a shotgun, Quinn and Wade manage to get inside and discover the creature has been spawning, explaining it’s increased appetite.  They find Laurie and Arturo cocooned to the wall in a state of suspended animation and free them.  They unfortunately learn the Michael was eaten when they find his watch in a pile of blue goo.  Wade leads Arturo and Laurie out while Quinn sets up the charges.  Rembrandt runs out of  bullets on the beach but manages to use a flare gun to blow up an extremely convenient fuel can next to Burke and Remy heads into the cave.  Quinn tells him to follow the others out a side tunnel and finishes setting up the charges but has to fight off Burke, who gets thrown right into the waiting jaws of the creature.  Quinn manages to get out of the cave just before it blows and they end the horror of Paradise.

Pretty much everything about this episode is terrible from bland guest stars (especially the guy who plays Parker who is like the poor man’s Casper Van Dien) to atrocious CG for the creature to an uninteresting “world” that could just be a weird little corner of Earth Prime as everything seems to be the same except for the fact that a giant worm is running around this small town.  Sliders is at it’s best when you get to see the scope of the changes that the gang is encountering like all the Britishness of Prince of Wails or the intellectual advertising of Eggheads.  Next week is part 1 of what many feel is the episode that killed any chance of Sliders returning to the excellence of season 1 and 2 with “Exodus”.

This week the Sliders tackle a classic staple of alternate reality/dimension fiction as they journey to a world where Egypt remained the dominant force in the world and Los Angeles is now pyramid covered New Alexandria.

The episode begins with the gang excitedly wandering down the main drag of New Alexandria and Arturo theorizing that Alexander the Great must have been defeated in the ancient past, which allowed Egypt to maintain and extend it’s reign until the present day.  The gang also sees that the pharaoh has recently died and will be sealed in his pyramid the next day.  Unfortunately the gang’s fun exploration, as it so often does, is interrupted when Wade loses track of the guys and wanders down an alley, right when a group of workers are carrying a huge box toward the pyramid.  Whatever is in the box breaks a claw through the box and grabs the woman who seems to be supervising.  Wade goes to help but gets trapped by the thing as well.  The guys arrive to help but are held back by security men, ordered by a very pharaoh looking official.  Quinn manages to break through the security and uses a nearby metal pole to pry the claw away from Wade and the girl and forces the claw back into the box.  The pharaoh looking official, who is named Kheri-Heb and is in charge until a new pharaoh chosen, orders Wade and the girl, named Sheilah, to be sent with the other slaves to the pyramid since they touched the “sacred scarab” and Quinn is ordered to be brought to the hospital for some sort of experiment.

In the van on the way to the pyramid, Sheilah tells Wade that the thing in the box is a genetically engineered scarab that is to be a guardian of the pyramid and the slaves will be it’s food source.  When they arrive at the pyramid, Sheilah is brought inside but Arturo manages to rescue Wade.  They have very little time before the slide so they are forced to leave Sheilah to head back to the Chancellor to wait for Rembrandt, who went to rescue Quinn.

Quinn, though, is beyond rescuing because he’s being used in an experiment the scientists of New Alexandria have been conducting where they kill patients and then attempt to bring them back to life and record their death experience.  When Rembrandt arrives at the hospital, all of Quinn’s blood has been drained and he’s flatlined.  Quinn sees all of this through an out of body experience and Rembrandt angrily forces his way out of the hospital.  Quinn then goes to heaven/the afterlife and plays a quick game of catch with his dad, who tells him it isn’t his time yet, and then Quinn is revived at the hospital by Dr. Deera Mubaric (special guest Apollonia).  She is anxious to hear about his death experience but Quinn refuses to say anything unless she takes him to the Chancellor hotel, which she agrees to do.

Quinn and Deera arrive at the hotel to find that the rest of the Sliders are not there.  Earlier, heartbroken over the news that Quinn was dead but wanting to do something to honor him, the trio of Arturo, Wade and Rembrandt snuck into the temple to free Sheilah, who told them about the Necrology department at the hospital and their death experiments.  With the chance that Quinn could be alive, the trio has only 90 seconds to decide if they will slide without Quinn or be stuck on this Earth and look for Quinn.  Arturo opens the portal but none of them jump in.  Unfortunately, before they can go find out about Quinn, the pyramid is sealed to prevent the scarab from escaping, it having gone on a rampage, possibly because of the portal opening.  Quinn sees a news bulletin about the pyramid being sealed and an intergalactic portal being opened inside by three individuals.

Quinn and Deera head to the office of the architect to see if there’s another way inside while Arturo, Wade and Rembrandt actually run into the architect in the pyramid.  He tells them there’s a way out that they have to go the computer room to unlock but before he can show them where it is, he’s eaten by the scarab.  The trio dodges the scarab and makes it to the computer room.  Both groups figure out around the same time that the pyramid is able to rotate and that if it’s aligned in a certain spot, an underground tunnel will be revealed.  Quinn also finds another timer in the office of the architect and Deera reveals that the royalty of this Earth are able to slide.  Quinn and Deera dodge the New Alexandria PD and head for the pyramid while Rembrandt dodges the scarab looking for the secret tunnel, but isn’t able to find it.  Wade notices that the pyramid seems to keep stopping in the same spot during each rotation and so she freezes it in that spot, luckily right when Quinn and Deera arrive in the tunnel under the pyramid.  Arturo, Wade and Rembrandt make their way through the pyramid and follow Quinn’s voice to the boarded over secret tunnel.  Rembrandt breaks through and the gang escapes just before the scarab arrives.  With the NAPD coming up the tunnel and the scarab behind them, the Sliders decide to use the new slider to slide out, even though there’s still 13 hours on it’s countdown.  This means they’ll still be randomly sliding but they accept it and slide it.  Deera, meanwhile, goes to stall the police and send Kheri-Heb down the tunnel, where he’s grabbed and eaten by the scarab.

There’s some great emotional moments in this episode from the trio of Wade, Arturo and Rembrandt reacting to Quinn’s “death” to their, monumental at the time, decision to not slide.  Some of the other stuff is not so strong, like the absolutely terrible CG scarab and some of the Egyptian sets and costumes, which range from ok to extremely cheap looking.  Overall it’s a pretty fun episode.  Next week, the gang slides to a world that is populated by giant worms straight out of Tremors.

This week the Sliders find themselves in Westworldesque role playing theme park and the Professor is brainwashed into believing he’s the Sherlock Holmesesque detective, Reginald Doyle.

The gang arrives on an Earth that is completely focused on business and work and anything not work related or could effect work as been banned.  The dress code is black suits, which makes the gang get some strange looks from the populace.  Arturo slid into a garbage can entering this Earth, so he leaves the group to get some new clothes and clean up.  On the street, a man accidentally spills his coffee on Arturo and Arturo goes off on him, which catches the attention of, what I’m assuming is, security.  They believe he’s something called a “fracture” and they give him a sedative and take him to the “eval center” for treatment.  The rest of the gang learns this from their trusty source of exposition, Diggs and they buy some suits and head to the treatment center.

Arturo, meanwhile, is under the care of a Dr. Bolivar, after no trace of his identity could be found by the staff and because of that, they assume Arturo is someone extremely important to the government whose identity has been protected.  Dr. Bolivar explains that Arturo’s brain needs to rest from the fracture so he’s going to become detective Reginald Doyle.  The rest of the gang arrives at the clinic and bluffs their way into discovering that Arturo has been taken to Park 91-9, a recreation of Victorian England during the Jack the Ripper murders.

Quinn, Arturo and Wade head to the park and blend in with a line of people waiting to get in.  They find out from their new friend, Erin, that they are in the line for people who are going to be actors in the recreation, which is the only outlet for acting left on this Earth.  The gang all gets assigned roles with Wade being a “tart” aka dancer/hooker with Erin, Remy being a cop and Quinn doesn’t really have an identity until they find the Professor.  They are given an introduction to the park by Dr. Dunhill, who is to be referred to in the park as Inspector Reed of Scotland Yard.

Quinn, Wade and Rembrandt head out into the park to look for Arturo and Quinn is soon pick pocketed by a group of scamps and the timer gets stolen.  Remy sets off in pursuit, but loses them.  Later that night, the gang catches up to the Professor, who arrives on the scene the latest Jack the Ripper murder.  Quinn’s attempts to snap Arturo out of his hypnotic state results in Arturo acknowledging him as his assistant, Marples and so Quinn goes with Arturo to keep an eye on him while Wade and Rembrandt keep an eye out for the timer.  The latter duo learns that the “murder victim” was one their fellow role players and that Erin is hopeful about being a “designated victim” because it’s a featured role.

Back at Reginald Doyle’s flat, Arturo is going over the evidence from the crime scene while Quinn attempts to bring him out of his fantasy.  Quinn sees that Arturo seems to have to look at his pocket watch every hour to reinforce the hypnotic state.

The next day, Quinn spies the kid who stole the timer and manages to catch up to him.  The kid seems to be sort of boy genius because he claims to have taken apart and put the timer back together and that the components are “so last year”.  Arturo arrives and the kid manages to escape.

Later that night, Erin and Wade are part of a stage show and afterwards, Erin finds a rose and a note on her dressing room mirror stand, which says she’s going to be the next victim.  She excitedly heads off to get killed but unfortunately, something goes horribly wrong and she is actually murdered.  Arturo, still playing the detective, is completely unaffected and gathers evidence from this new crime scene.  Dr. Bolivar confronts Dr. Dunhill in his office and claims they need to call in the actual police but Dunhill claims that could compromise the mental health of their patients, who are some of the most important people in the country.

Back at his flat, Arturo/Doyle makes the discovery that the previous notes left by Jack the Ripper and the shoe impressions he took are different from the note and footprint found at Erin’s murder, which he deduces means that there are two different killers.  He also hypothesizes that this latest killer has medical experience due to the depth and precision of the throat cut.  Out to breakfast with Wade and Rembrandt, Quinn spots their timer thief being accosted by a man nearby and Quinn goes and helps him escape.  It turns out the man was park security and that they have orders to catch the kid on sight.  Repaying the favor, the kid has one of his buddies pass the Sliders a note to meet him that night at the local blacksmith shop.  The trio manages to convince Arturo to come along but the group is almost run down by a carriage.  Quinn saw the Scotland Yard crest on it and Wade sprains her ankle.  Arturo heads back to his flat to think about this new development and carries Wade back to treat her ankle.

Quinn and Rembrandt go to the meet with the kid, who explains that his name is Trevor and he’s on his yearly month of play in the park.  Trevor also says that he saw the killers shoes at Erin’s murder but Quinn doesn’t think that’s any evidence that can help.  Arturo, meanwhile, gets a package from his landlady and sees it’s the crime scene reports he requested from Inspector Reed earlier.  With this new evidence, Arturo seems to have cracked the case and leaves Wade at his flat to go to Scotland Yard HQ.

Arriving at Scotland Yard HQ, Arturo confronts Dr. Bolivar, who has been role playing as the Chief Inspector and says that his handwriting and footprint match those found at Erin’s murder and that he believes the other murders were faked to frame Inspector Reed.  Caught, Bolivar sedates Arturo and brings him into his lab to try and figure out who Arturo told about his revelation.  Bolivar gets the names of Quinn, Rembrandt and Wade and instructs Reed to arrest Quinn and Rembrandt on the basis that they are accomplices to Arturo, the Ripper.  Bolivar then goes to kill Wade, himself fracturing and becoming the Ripper.  Wade manages to fight him off in the flat and runs out into the street.  Trevor sees what is going on and finds Rembrandt to help.  Rembrandt and Quinn, a short while earlier, had managed to find Bolivar’s lab and Arturo.  Quinn remained behind to get Arturo back to normal and they reunite with Rembrandt and Wade after Rembrandt managed to rescue Wade from Bolivar in an alley.  Reed arrives in the alley with the intention of arresting the guys but Trevor points out that he recognizes Bolivar’s shoes from the other night and asks why Bolivar would be wandering around with a knife.  With things kind of sorted out, the Sliders have to slide out and Trevor claims that someday he’ll build his own sliding technology and find the gang.

The best part of this episode is easily Arturo running around as Reginald Doyle.  I would watch a whole series of John Rhys Davies as a Victorian era detective.  It’s a little disappointing that no one else even tries to do an English accent but I guess no accents is better than horrible accents.  Next week the gang fulfills another mandatory check mark of alternate reality/history fiction by sliding onto a world where Ancient Egypt remained the dominant force up the modern day.

Sorry about the unexpected two weeks off from Sliders recaps but we’re back this week to celebrate Christmas and for the Sliders, that means taking down a corrupt mall president.

The gang arrives on the main Earth for the episode after barely escaping from a world populated by jungle tribes that Wade inadvertently sent into a rampage by smiling at one of the men, which in their culture meant she wanted to have his children.  The gang lands outside a church and Quinn notices a nativity scene and guesses that it must be almost Christmas.  Wade wants to go into the church and give thanks for their escape and the guys agree.  While Wade goes to light a candle, Arturo is asked by an attractive young mother to hold her son for a minute while she goes to light a candle as well.  Arturo gladly accepts but the gang loses track of the mother and they rush out of the church to find that she hopped onto a shuttle bus and abandoned her baby.  The gang determines to head to the Sky High Plaza, the destination for the shuttle, and they leave the baby with the pastor of the church.

The gang arrives at the escalator to Sky High Plaza, a mall that is literally in the sky on a set of tiers.  On this Earth, malls are more than just shopping centers but house schools, housing and hospitals.  People work and live in the malls and basically become indentured servants and slaves.  The gang tries to buy some food but learn that the mall only accepts “Plaza Cards”.  Fortunately for them, two of the executives are passing by at that moment and Rembrandt is able to get them jobs.  Wade is distressed to see that the executives are doubles of her sister Kelly and her father Don, but they don’t seem to recognize her.  The gang is hired to be a part of the mall’s Christmas display, with Arturo, of course, playing Santa and the rest of the gang as elves.  Arturo tries to impart the true meaning of Christmas onto the kids of the mall, who are extremely greedy and rude, and while doing so spots the baby’s mother, who he learns is named Carol.  Carol explains that she left her baby so he wouldn’t become a slave like she is to the mall.  She has to wear a special wrist device that the gang noticed another man wearing earlier that seemed to shock him as he was trying to escape the mall.   Quinn, who gets a new position by flirting with Kelly, manages to get a list of Carols who have to to wear the devices and Arturo sets out to visit each one.  Quinn also learns the wrist devices are put on people who don’t pay their debts immediately when they are due and it’s basically impossible to ever pay it off since the mall takes half of what the workers make for housing and then another percentage of earnings have to be spent in the mall.

Wade, meanwhile, runs into her “father” in the food court and he invites her to have dinner with him at his house.  It’s a little creepy since he doesn’t know she’s kind of his daughter but nothing happens and they have a nice time together.  Don explains that his wife and second child died during childbirth and that he and Kelly moved to the mall a short while later but he regrets it now because Kelly has become a cold, calculating businesswoman.  Also meanwhile, Rembrandt becomes obsessed with shopping, buying dozens of gifts each for Quinn, Wade and Arturo.  Quinn realizes that the constant commercials that play on the TV and in the mall have some sort of subliminal messaging in them.

Arturo manages to find Carol and convinces her they can help her get her bracelet off and get her baby, Alexander, back.  Quinn does more digging into the mall’s files and learns that Carol, and many others, took out massive loans from a firm called Crestview Financial.  The gang learns that Ted Bernsen, the evil, greedy mall president, is behind Crestview as part of his scam to increase the malls profits.  The gang and Carol decide to get evidence on Bernsen and while Carol lets Quinn and Wade into Bernsen’s office, Arturo and Rembrandt get Bernsen out of his office by teaching a group of kids about the evils of consumerism and the true meaning of Christmas.

Wade and Quinn attempt to hack into Bernsen’s computer but they trip a security program that gives them only 60 seconds before security personnel is alerted.  Kelly arrives at that moment and threatens to call security herself but Wade manages to convince her that she is the sister she never had from a different Earth by recounting past events from Kelly’s life.  Kelly deactivates to security on the computer and she and Quinn and Wade get all the evidence they need on Bernsen and they deactivate all the wrist devices and clear all the debts.  Bernsen tries to escape when confronted with the evidence but Quinn easily catches him and punches him out.

With everything resolved the Sliders, along with Carol and baby Alex, have Christmas dinner at the Welles’ house and then have to slide out.

As far as Christmas episode go, Season’s Greedings is actually pretty good.  It dips into the cheese quite a bit but it’s got a bunch of fun stuff going on and some crazy character stuff as well, like Arturo revealing that his mother and two aunts were killed in a bombing during WWII and that he had to spend four months in an orphanage until his father returned from fighting in India.

Next week the gang heads to an Earth where stressed out workers can take part in elaborate role playing games and Arturo gets to play Sherlock Holmes, on the trail of Jack the Ripper.