Easy Slider

Can I tell you a secret? I kind of like “Easy Slider.”

Sure, it’s a dumb hour of television and one of the weaker Sliders episodes produced. It won’t win a Hugo award, redefine the genre, or make Robert Floyd a household name. But “Easy Slider” is an enjoyable, stupid romp, and I feel the rush to judgment by fans oversimplified and unwarranted.

“Easy Slider” is guilty of one thing—being brain-farted into existence by executive consultant David Peckinpah. “I see Kari in tight leathers with motorcycles,” he pitched. “Now go with it.”

So they did. God bless ‘em, Bill Dial and his motley crew took that edict and transformed it into an escapade where Mallory joins a biker gang and gets laid, an episode stripped of subtlety, subtext, and idiosyncrasy.

They built a society where outlaws settle their differences with bike jousts. They wrote a scene where a Smoker—someone continuing to use banned internal combustion engines—has a leisurely public conversation about their renegade status while standing next to a contraband motorcycle. This created a world where the Air Quality Management District—a regional Southern California office—burns American citizens to death and strings them up as a warning to gasoline thieves.

Not enough for you? We’re also treated to numerous scenes of nameless bikers driving around the Universal backlot and some oddly disquieting polygamous sex scenes. It’s like, for one week, Sliders production went off their meds and crammed every weird trope or bad idea a writer could have into 44 minutes of screen time. Just to see what would happen.

This is the end result. It is pure madness. And it is way more entertaining than it has any right to be. It’s certainly a better way to spend your afternoon than watching Time Again and World.

Look, I’m at a point as a fan where I’m no longer expecting Shakespeare. I have been to top of the mountain, I have pulled the rose-colored glasses off, and I can see things for what they really are. This is the fifth season of Sliders; I just want to be entertained. “Easy Slider” delivers.

Many “classic” episodes are remembered fondly despite being as bad—or worse—than what’s delivered today. But because they were produced in the first two seasons, involve the original cast, or have one truly memorable scene amidst a script filled with inconsistencies, they get a pass. That doesn’t change the fact that Time Again and World was a piece of shit, even if it looked terrific and had some cool music. It is an unwatchable mess, and I hate it.

There are so many episodes that tried to do something gimmicky or high-concept, only to fall flat. We watched a living flame slide with our people, saw a crazy British colonel shapeshift with the help of brain fluid, and scratched our head over magnetic tornadoes. In the canon of this series, there’s a world out there where a man can turn into a dragon and another where one thousand humanoid robots killed every human being on the planet.

“Easy Slider” drops all that nonsense and embraces a reality where people who want to stretch their legs and hit the road cannot. So they fight for that right. (And party!) The Sliders get caught up in the middle of it for a couple days, and when their time’s up, they leave. There’s nothing earth-shattering at stake, just a few rounds of beer at the local watering hole and a quick fling with a local. It, like the amazing middle story of As Time Goes By, is what you’d expect happens between episodes.

The success of this episode rests heavily on Floyd’s and Lisa Akey’s shoulders. As Sam, the leader of the Smokers, Akey brings a believable dose of grungy sexuality to the part. You can see why Mallory’s so attracted to her; Sam exudes a charisma and confidence we haven’t seen in a female on this show in a long time. Given the amount of screen time Sam has, a lesser actor would have been in much bigger trouble.

I also buy Mallory’s horndog approach to sliding. The guy meets a girl who’s as big a flirt as him and works his angles; what’s wrong with that? Rembrandt did the same thing on countless worlds; even Maggie tried to seduce whats-his-name in “Slither.” It’s a bit much for Mallory to quit sliding to stay here, but considering he really has nothing personally invested in continuing to slide (Quinn’s gone as far as he’s concerned), he might as well stick with a world he can identify with.

Yes, there is a ton of forced plotting to make this story work. Yes, there are gaps in logic. But so help me, there’s an aloofness at play here that I can’t dismiss. Maybe it’s Peckinpah’s direction, the little visual cues (“1 Day Since Last Accident”), or the familiar bit roles. Maybe it’s Mallory’s mortified reaction to Sam’s gaggle of husbands that does it for me. I can’t quite pin it down. I just know I like it.

You might think this is another gag review on par with The Breeder. It isn’t. I really do like this episode, certainly more than others. Unlike the self-important character examination in Strangers and Comrades or by-the-numbers adventuring in The Java Jive, “Easy Slider” got me worked up. It made me feel something, even if that feeling is in the pit of my stomach.

Someone tuning in to the pilot on March 22, 1995 might get the bends if they were to immediately skip ahead to “Easy Slider.” I totally understand that, and I understand why fans were outraged the resources of a production like Sliders were pissed away on such a superfluous outing. But take a look back at the past five years. With bullets like El Sid, Dragonslide, and The Chasm chambered, haven’t we been doing that all along?