Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome
- Written By // Nan Hagen
- Director // Adam Nimoy
- Music // Stephen Graziano
Reviews
// Earth Prime
// Think of a Roulette Wheel
// External Reviews
Worlds Visited
Earth Double Prime
It’d be home if only the Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t such an eye-pleasing blue…
Shrink World
The stress of the last slide forces Rembrandt to seek psychiatric evaluation.
Timer Status
Stolen by Arturo’s double.
Details
- The blue, smashed up Pontiac that Quinn spots on his street belongs to Bernie Massey, license plate number 3LAY495. Quinn says that he got rear-ended just before they slid off Earth Prime.
- Rembrandt tells the psychiatrist in a voice-over that they’ve been sliding for 18 months.
- The phone number of the Golden Bay Cab Company car is 555-0188.
- The car is number 47.
- Evil Arturo’s televised interview is being carried on channel 11.
- The headline of the San Francisco Chronicle on a wall in the Lamplighter bar reads: “49ers Clock Jets in Super XIX 43-10.”
- According to the cuckoo clock in Quinn’s house, he gets home from the bar exactly at 7 PM.
- The name of Wade’s [literary] agent is David.
- Three television stations covering Arturo’s museum dedication are KKBE, KOAD KGAB (which is the same station seen at the beginning of In Dino Veritas.
- The sliding exhibit is located in the south wing of the museum.
- The reset readout on the replica timer shows 23:59:59.
- The doctor tells his secretary to call Gate Haven Hospital to take Rembrandt away.
- A police cruiser outside the jail bears number 107.
Character Information
- Quinn has a neighbor named Mrs. Randall who lives a couple of doors down from him and another named Bernie Massey.
- The street numbers on Quinn’s house are 401.
- During the telephone call to her home, Wade says “give me back to mom and dad,” which means her parents are likely together.
- After she gets off the phone she talks about her sister’s reaction to the phone call but it’s unclear as to how many siblings she has.
- Rembrandt gives his manager, Artie Feld, eight per cent commission.
- Wade says that she doesn’t really follow football.
- Quinn had a classmate in his ninth grade homeroom class named Tom Canfield, who wore braces. Quinn says he and his friends used to call him “railroad tracks.”
- Quinn has a baseball card collection, a fact that will be brought back in The Guardian.
- Rembrandt says that he split with the Spinning Topps because of ego problems.
Notable Quotes
- “That’s right, why should you be the only one weeping? We get just as sad as you.”—one of Rembrandt’s back up singers on some changes that have to take place in the act.
- “Having a tea party, what does it look like I’m doing?!”—Arturo, to Rembrandt who asks him what he’s doing tied up in his own basement.
- “That scoundrel! That intellectually impoverished knave wanted me to win his Nobel for him. As you can see, I told him nothing.”—Arturo talking about his double and pointing to a blackboard on which he has drawn a very sour (though funny looking) frowning face with the tongue stuck out.
- “It is a disgrace, sir, to think that we share a common genetic structure.”—Arturo to himself.
- “They called it sliding. A name charming in its simplicity but wholly inadequate to describe the wonder of it all.”—the freaked out Dr. Whalen.
- “Oh, my God.”—Arturo. Three little words, so much debate…
Arturoisms
- “Hope for everything … expect nothing.”
- “Of course I’m the right one, you blistering idiot.”—Arturo, to Rembrandt.
Money Matters
- Money shouldn’t be a problem on Earth Double Prime because the Sliders can use any funds their doubles have in banks or at home. Later, Rembrandt has enough to bail Quinn and Wade out of jail.
- While it appears that Rembrandt skipped out on his doctor’s bill, he can be seen making a gesture to pay the stunned psychiatrist before he jumps into the vortex.
Nitpicks and Errors
- A close look of Bernie Massie’s car reveals that, with the exception of the plate, the car is the exact same one that Judge Nassau wrecked (twice) in Time Again and World. The damage on Massey’s car is concurrent with the damage sustained in Nassau’s first accident in Time Again and World. Also, both cars are blue, Pontiac four-doors and both have a silver luggage wrack on the trunk hood.
- Shortly after the four arrive at Quinn’s house, Arturo takes a moment of reflection in the basement looking at the blackboard with the final equation that partly proves the concept of string theory. At the end of the equation is a small happy face that Quinn’s double drew when he completed the equation in the Pilot. While this shows a good deal of research done by the people behind the scenes, the happy face begs the question of whether the same Quinn visited this world and finished the problem or whether the Quinn of Earth Double Prime drew the face himself.
- Both Quinn and Wade read the San Francisco Chronicle headline aloud as Super Bowl 19, but freeze-frame analysis shows that Bowl isn’t printed in the headline.
- When Quinn shows the professor that Roger Maris’ home run record (61 home runs in one season) the baseball card he is holding is from the 1991 Topps collection, as evident from the colorful border along the front of the card.
- Arturo produces an arrowhead from an alternate world along with several other artifacts he’s brought with him, but through all of the Sliders’ journeys thus far there has never been any mention of the four bringing items with them through the vortex. (Tormé has indicated that the arrowhead came from the Aztec World seen in the Acclaim Comic Blood and Splendor.)
- When Wade and Rembrandt arrive at the museum, two different reporters shove two different microphones in their faces but both bear the name of the same station: KKBE.
- During Rembrandt’s session, about two-thirds into the episode, a mantel clock shows the time as 11:15 a.m., but the doctor’s secretary is about to leave and Rembrandt mentions that it’s getting close to 6:30 p.m., the time when he was to meet the others for the slide.
- One of the major differences that the Sliders note is the paint job of the Golden Gate Bridge; on Earth Double Prime, it’s blue. On Earth Prime, it’s not painted red for aesthetics, it’s painted that way so that barges and other ships won’t crash into it. It’s unlikely that the designers would choose to paint it blue in the mid-1930s on any world.
Neatpicks
- “I guess I felt I was glad it wasn’t my brain he was after. I mean, how would you feel?”—Rembrandt, to the psychiatrist, in a reference to Into the Mystic.
- “You should have seen this guy, on one world he, he introduced a strain of antibiotics and single-handedly stopped the plague!”—Quinn, to his mother, in reference to Arturo’s medical feat in Fever.
- “All I did was jury rig the detonator, the fissionable material was already there.”—Arturo trying to downplay his heroics in Last Days.
- Arturo (or is it Arturo’s evil double) mentions “the world where I met my late wife,” a reference to Eggheads.
Guest Starring
- Kristoffer Tabori as Dr. Whelan
- Stacy Grant as Miss Vonbaeck
With
- Don MacKay1 as Artie [Feld]
- Deanne Henry2 as Mrs. Mallory
- Carlton Watson3 as Sebastian Smith
- Tom Pickett4 as Leeroy Hopkins [Maurice Fish]
- Brian Arnold56 as Barry King
- Linda Ko as Tanika
- Tina Klassen as Miss Jennings
- Mike Mitchell as [Museum] Guard
Unaccredited
- The actor and actress who portray Wade’s parents.
- Don MacKay also appeared as Rembrandt’s manager Artie Feld in the Pilot.
- Deanne Henry also appeared as Mrs. Mallory in Into the Mystic.
- Carlton Watson guest starred as the reverend of the San Francisco Community Church in Last Days.
- Tom Pickett appeared as Maurice Fish in The King is Back.
- Brian Arnold appeared as the SFN science corespondent in Last Days.
- The name and character of Barry King is meant to be a take-off on Larry King, complete with suspenders, silver hair, gravelly voice and glasses.
Script Archive
Click on the links below to download rare scripts, outlines, and memos associated with this episode.
February 2, 1996
Writer's Draft
February 13, 1996
1st Pink Revisions
February 15, 1996
1st Blue Revisions
February 15, 1996
1st Yellow Revisions
February 28, 1996
3rd Blue Revisions
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The Inside Slide
The working title for this episode in pre-production was “Our So Called Lives.”
· · ·
“‘Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome’ was one of our best shows,” says Tracy Tormé. “It didn’t necessarily have that much tension in it, but I liked all the stuff with, is Quinn crazy? Are they really home? What happened to the Professor? Why has he turned evil? I also liked the ending, where the two professors battle it out and we don’t know which one comes with us, and then framing it all with Rembrandt and the shrink, which I always thought was a fun idea.”
· · ·
“The idea of Rembrandt and the psychiatrist was an old idea of mine that I wanted to do for a long time, and the idea of them being home but not really being home,” Tormé says. “I was almost finished with the outline when I suddenly got permission to do Invasion, so I jumped off that story and started Invasion. I later did a rewrite on [this episode] as well as working very hard in the editing room on it, so even though I’m uncredited, it feels like my show. It’s definitely one of our best.” And it became another of Tormé’s favorites.
· · ·
This marks the first time that Adam Nimoy, son of Leonard “Spock” Nimoy, directs an episode of Sliders. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley with a major in political science, Nimoy later attended Loyola University where he received a law degree and he soon went on to become an entertainment lawyer. The directing bug hit Nimoy when he became an apprentice under Nicholas Meyer on Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and he went on to helm episodes for Star Trek: The Next Generation, NYPD Blue, The Outer Limits and Deadly Games. Nimoy has become a Sliders fan favorite for directing two more of the series’ most memorable episodes, Slide Like An Egyptian and The Guardian.
“Sliders was a great opportunity because it allowed me to work with a very talented ensemble cast,” Nimoy said in a Fox press release. “The show offers the youth excitement of Jerry O’Connell and Sabrina Lloyd playing off the seasoned veterans like John Rhys-Davies and Cleavant Derricks. That combination created limitless dramatic opportunities for me to explore.”
· · ·
As a result of Tormé’s input, many of his trademark in-jokes are evident. For example, in the episode Quinn says the old, blue Pontiac belongs to one Bernie Massey, named after a person Tormé has grown up with since the second grade.
· · ·
So, which Arturo slid with the others? “Only I know for sure,” Tormé says. “And I hope to clear this up in a future episode, but if I told you now it would spoil all the fun.”
· · ·
Fox had originally slated this episode to air on April 26, 1996 but decided in early May to show it on May 3 instead.