Twisted Cross
"Nazi World was (I believe) rejected because it wasn’t fresh," said Jon Povill. "It really is a pretty standard/expected road to take for an alternative universe show to take—and considering the pilot dealt with Soviet World and there’d already been an episode where we lost the American Revolution, it seemed reasonable to nix Nazi World."
The Twisted Cross has been whispered about since the series launched in 1995. Fighting Nazis seemed like a pretty bog-standard adventure for a show about parallel worlds, so why didn't it ever come to fruition? Many rumors pegged the episode to being in development during season two, but all research points to that season filming everything that went into production save Beauty World, which was pitched by Jeanine Renshaw and developed by Nan Hagan before being discarded (or possibly used for season three).
No, the truth is that Twisted Cross forms a very important part of Sliders' creation—its pitch materials. While it never went past that—as Povill and Earth Prime note, it's pretty redundant—it did set the stage for the kind of adventures the Sliders could have. Below is the the half-page idea; while many of its beats would be incorporated into Last Days, it does show that Tracy Tormé was thinking about the execution of this story a little differently. Enjoy.
The Pitch
The Sliders are trapped in Nazi-occupied America.
They learn the ugly truth about this world’s history and the Second World War, fought in the thirties and early forties:
- The British army was destroyed at Dunkirk;
- Churchill was assassinated by Herman Hesse;
- The Soviet Union fell to a successful blitzkrieg;
- Canada was overrun by a Nazi invasion force;
- The Germans blew up the Panama Canal;
- Patton’s army was defeat in the battle of the Mojave;
- The Nazi war machine swept onto the East Coast and over the border from the Canadian prairie; and
- McArthur’s ambitious amphibious landing behind Nazi lines ended in disaster on the coast of New England.
America has been an occupied nation for fifty-two years.
The Sliders must avoid the Gestapo and stay alive for eighteen days—the amount of time until the gate can be opened.
Arturo makes a startling discovery—the atom has never been split on this world—in fact, that course has never been charted in even the vaguest of ways.
The Sliders make a bold trip across the state to link up with some underground scientists.
Quinn and Arturo must weigh a difficult moral dilemma—should they create an atomic bomb in an attempt to overthrow the Nazi empire? By doing so, they will be responsible for unleashing the horror of nuclear weapons on a world that they must soon leave behind.