Proposed Season Two Episodes

As mentioned in our reporting on Beauty World, season two showrunner Jacob Epstein wrote FOX executives in the summer of 1995 with a slate of proposed episodes for the new season. Of the 15 episodes pitched, less than half made it to air, so enjoy the following elevator pitches for what they are—a brief what if? into how the show could have evolved in 1996.

Beauty World

The Sliders land in a world where physical beauty counts for everything—handsome people are society's haves, unattractive people are the have-nots. On this world mediocrity flourishes because the only qualification for leadership is superficial. Stuck here for a couple of weeks, the Sliders must find work on a world where their intelligence and abilities count for nothing, and in the course of their travails, must defend a woman who has lost custody of her child because she is unfit (not attractive enough) to keep him. (For more details, visit our write-up on this lost episode.)

Family Values

Our heroes land in a world where the government has stepped in to stem the growing divorce rate by instituting a mandatory "re­education program." Rembrandt and Arturo are accidentally brought into this program which computer matches them with "potentially compatible" women, then convinces the couple into thinking they are ecstatically happy. Wade and Quinn must rescue Arturo and Rembrandt (who are convinced they don't need to be rescued) from truly hellacious mates.

Heaven

The Sliders enter a San Francisco that was rendered uninhabitable during the early sixties when the Cuban Missile Crisis turned into a shooting war. The population now lives underground, in a world that is designed much like the giant shopping malls on our Earth.

The dream of each citizen of underground San Francisco is to make enough money to buy a ticket to Heaven, a planet of green valleys and beautiful blue lakes, advertised to all as a paradise where one can live the good life on the surface of a clean world, under a warm and gentle sun.

As Wade falls in love with a handsome, heroic man (who harbors a secret that will shock her and force her to make a difficult choice) Quinn sets out to discover where Heaven is ... and the answer he comes back with will change this world forever and place the Sliders in deadly peril.

Gold Rush World

In a California where a loaf of bread costs five hundred dollars, the Sliders find the state going wild with gold fever. Big corporations, however, have brought up most of the land, leaving small-time prospectors with little chance of striking it rich—but that doesn't stop dreamers from coming in record numbers to the newly christened "Golden State." Arturo is a student of lost mines and their intriguing histories. When he befriends a crusty old prospector who claims to have found and then lost the mother lode in the mountains of northern California, the Professor talks his skeptical fellow Sliders into staking the codger and hunting the treasure. Arturo and Rembrandt catch a serious case of gold fever and the search for the lost mine turns into a dangerous adventure that severely tests the Sliders survival skills and spirits them into two disparate factions.

Modern Times

The Sliders land in an agrarian society on the on the verge of the Industrial Revolution. No cars, no modern conveniences. The major forces of society fear any radical changes. They are staunch defenders of the status quo. They even have organized groups whose sole purpose is to root out and destroy anyone inventing new machinery. Wade is sympathetic to this agrarian society while Arturo and Quinn are on the opposite side in a world where any kind of technical proficiency is seen as the devil's work and is punished accordingly.

The Nine Percent Solution

Arturo and Quinn are arguably two of the most intelligent people in our world. But not in this dimension, where many of the inhabitants have learned to use nine percent of their brains, compared to our three percent. Barely qualifying for menial minimum wage jobs, Quinn and Arturo suffer the indignities of the working poor while Wade and Rembrandt are forced to attend remedial learning classes. But when they fail to pass their finals, our Sliders learn what horrible solutions this world has devised to rid itself of the undesirable "lower class."

White Like Me

Racism , poverty, rage in the ghetto. On a world, it's the white experience. The Sliders land in a dimension where the racial balance is reversed. Country and Western is the protest music of the day (and the scourge of the black establishment, Funky Brewster is the most popular kids show. In a "Black Like Me" twist, Quinn, Arturo and Wade experience the frustrations many minorities live with in out world everyday. And Rembrandt learns how easy it is to ignore injustice when it's visited on somebody else.

High Tech World

The Sliders land in a world where all of society is "managed" by a computer program. It's the information highway taken to the extreme. Private industry, city services, medical care, even justice is meted out by computer. The Sliders encounter a young single mother who is caught in the crush of this cold system that has taken her child from her in a classic computer glitch.

They decide to help her correct this small yet significant miscarriage of justice which leads them down a trail through the high tech fortresses and bowels of San Francisco. It also leads them to a bureaucratic dead end which lands the Sliders in a criminal court. Judge Hard Drive preceding. It's not traditional court, it's justice determined by computer program.

Arturo manages to avoid a jail sentence and ultimately gets the others released as they track down the mysterious Mr. Bates who can correct the program and return the child to her mother.