World Killer

“‘World Killer’ was my favorite of the scripts I wrote for Sliders, and a difficult script to write,” says Marc Scott Zicree. “Initially, Quinn’s double was too heroic and outshone Quinn. It was only on rewriting it that I hit on the notion of his irresponsibility and need to learn to accept what he caused and make it better. I liked the moral of that story very much.

“I was in on the whole process of that episode, from casting through editing. In fact, the director invited me to be on set for the entire shooting. The way we’d work was that, with each scene, the director would rehearse the actors with me watching. Then I’d huddle with the director and tell him what moments they had missed or what the intent of the scene was; then he’d go communicate that to the actors. They invariably understood and adjusted their performances. It was a great collaboration between all involved. I thought Jerry was great as both Quinns. To play the duplicate from the barren earth, I told him, ‘Just imagine him as the world’s biggest twelve year old; he always is sure he can pull something off until he falls flat on his face.’”

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“My goal with every script I write,” explains Marc Scott Zicree, “is to write a script I’ve never seen before. For instance, ‘World Killer,’ the first episode I did for Sliders, involves a world where a duplicate Quinn builds a sliding device without knowing what it does and when he throws the switch, a slide wave surges out and sends everyone else on the Earth away, so he’s the last man on Earth. He thinks he’s disintegrated everybody, so he’s been wandering around for three years as the last man on Earth, and when our guys get there, they say, ‘No no, you sent them somewhere, and now we just have to rebuild your machine and duplicate your experiment.’ They do that, and slide to another alternate Earth, where in an instant three years ago, the population doubled, so we see what that would be like, and we have to deal with the moral ramifications of whether we have the ability or the right to slide half the population back. That’s something I’ve never seen done before, and it’s also a story that requires a science fiction element.”

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When creating original episodes of the series, sometimes some interesting ideas get cut.

“There was scene that I had written for ‘World Killer’ that unfortunately got cut for time,” recalls Zicree. “I had these two nuns who were duplicates of each other because they were from two worlds that had been fused together. One nun wears a stone around her neck. Rembrandt asks, ‘Why do you wear that rock around your neck?’ and she says, ‘That’s how our Lord died, crushed under stones.’ It’s a little throwaway line, but it suggests a whole world of possibilities.

Other cut scenes include an angry Martha Stewart book and Rembrandt… as Pagliacci?

“Get to be Pavarotti and then—poof! Isn’t it a cryin’ shame?” asks the character wryly.

“Many [ideas] are in jokes that the people who get them might enjoy, but won’t really affect those who don’t get them,” claims co-executive producer Bill Dial. “In [‘World Killer’], the Sliders wind up on a world where the theater marquee behind them says the movie that’s playing is The Man Who Would Be King, starring Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. The joke is that for many years, John Huston wanted to make that movie, with that cast, but was never able to do it. But apparently, on that world, he was. We were told all along that audiences enjoyed the little differences, like the world in the pilot where red means go and green means stop—there are many things like that.”