Eye of the Storm

// E0803 · Originally aired January 28, 2000

Diana’s final confrontation with Doctor Geiger on a fragment of a world leads to a startling revelation—he has the ability to split Quinn from Mallory.

Teleplay // Chris Black
Story // Eric Morris and Chris Black
Director // David Peckinpah
Music // Danny Lux

Reviews

// Earth Prime

Why did the Sliders writers wait until the penultimate episode to close the loop on Oberon Geiger? Were they just as scared to write this episode as the premiere?

// Think of a Roulette Wheel

Time and again and again and world again World.

// External Reviews

Martin Izsak

Worlds Visited

Backlot World

Is it Mallory’s communication with Cajero, spirit of the heavens, that brought torrential flooding to this tiny Mexican village, or is it just part of the Universal Studios backlot tour? You be the judge.

Fragment

Oberon Geiger has sliced a section of a parallel world away and is containing it in the hopes of merging himself with someone else.

Hill Valley World

A DeLorean should be racing towards the clock tower any minute now.

Details

The Chandler Hotel is located on Wilshire Boulevard.
No one has come in in the past six months.
Diana gets the same energy readings from the force barrier that she got from Geiger’s stasis field on Combine World.
The barrier doesn’t interfere with the timer.
We finally get the definition of being unstuck: it kills all your doubles.
Being unstuck is like “being caught in the surf, pounded by waves of space-time. As soon as you manage to pull yourself to shore the tide sucks you under again.”
Geiger’s Combine equations don’t work macroscopically.

Character Information

Mallory converted to a pagan religion.
Rembrandt is tired of sliding and wants to go home.
Doctor Geiger has spent the last six months trying to merge himself with others so that he is no longer unstuck.

Notable Quotes

“Next time I decide to convert to pagan idol worship somebody please slap me silly.”—Mallory, escaping the flood he brought upon them.
“I hope this world has chiropractors.”—Rembrandt, sounding a bit like the Professor after a rough slide.
“What a surprise. Deadly wins again.”—Mallory, on the type of world they’ve landed on.
“Oh, a scientist. Why didn’t you say so? Maybe while she’s at it she can build a lie detector out of coconuts.”—Stu, unimpressed with Diana’s credentials.
“I thought I could change the fundamental structure of the universe to suit my needs. The arrogance.”—Geiger.
“Go ahead. Take all you want. It’s federally insured.”—Officer Fletcher, on seeing Maggie and Rembrandt loot the deserted bank.
“I know what I’m doing.”—Geiger, on splitting the Mallorys.
“He’s the resident devil in this little corner of hell.”—Rembrandt’s description of Geiger.
“So close.”—Geiger on his attempted merger with Mallory.
“Finally.”—Geiger’s last word.

Nitpicks and Errors

It’s so tiresome to use the backlot and trying to pass it off as a truly unique location. Case in point—Backlot World. Anyone who’s been to Universal Studios has seen this part of the tram ride. It’s not exciting. It’s not particularly funny. So why do it?
Why couldn’t they have used Jerry O’Connell’s image at the beginning of the season?!
I didn’t know that Geiger had the same face-morphing ability as Rickman.
What are the odds that Geiger would hole up in the Chandler Hotel?

Neatpicks

They finally wrap up a story arc. Who would’ve thunk it?
Colin gets a casual mention.
Cajero, spirit of the heavens, is named after Paul Cajero, a producer of the show. He last got a shout out in A Current Affair as the name of a trailer park.

Guest Starring

Peter Jurasik¹ as Doctor Oberon Geiger
Jay Acovone² as Stu
Elizabeth Rossa as Sharon Fletcher

Peter Jurasik completes the character arc of Geiger that he started in The Unstuck Man and Applied Physics.
Jay Acovone appeared as Doctor Tassler in Sole Survivors and as Ben Seigel III in Way Out West.

Script Archive

Click on the links below to download rare scripts, outlines, and memos associated with this episode.

The Inside Slide

The working titles for this episode in pre-production were “A Slide is Just a Slide” and “As Space-Time Goes By.”

· · ·

“We had a freelance script called ‘A Slide is Just a Slide’ that had been lying around for months,” Keith Damron explains. “The story was supposed to be our mid-season encounter with our old nemesis Dr. Oberon Geiger. The original pitch from the writer Eric Morris was that our Sliders end up in sort of a “composite world”. A splinter dimension made up of fragments of worlds that our heroes had previously visited. The concept was interesting enough and sort of fit in with Dr. Geiger’s quest to combine the multi-verse. After a meeting with Eric we distilled the story down into a sliding version of Casablanca and had him write it.

“Our gang arrives in seemingly familiar terrain around the Chandler but are surprised to find this mini-Earth clogged with a hodgepodge of characters and structures that they’ve encountered on previous slides. This is not the smooth seamless utopian world that Oberon Geiger had envisioned. People from such noted places as skirted cops world, nudist world, gun slinging lawyers world, Egyptian world and Amish world to name a few, would wallpaper the varied environs. We would also meet a few familiar faces—Holly from The Alternateville Horror, Hal the bartender, the dreaded Kromagg Kolitar and even Barry Lipschitz. All of whom are thrown together into this extra-dimensional collage. All of whom are trying to find a way out through any means possible. When they discover that Rembrandt, Maggie, Mallory and Diana do posses such an out, they each try to entice, cajole, beg and even threaten our heroes for passage.

“The problem with ‘A Slide is Just a Slide’ is that we drew many of the classic film parallels to extremes and later regretted it,” he continues. “From a scene with Holly feigning affection for Mallory in exchange for the timer—to another scene with a bar full of drunken Kromagg soldiers belting out war hymns. We even toyed around with the idea of having Rembrandt take on the Victor Lazlo role—fueling the resistance movement to undo Geiger’s work and return everyone to their own world. Our version was just a little (a lot?) too much on the nose.”

A page one rewrite later, viewers got the mess they saw.