Eye of the Storm

At the beginning of the season, I noted that The Unstuck Man felt like an episode no one wanted to write. While an uneven outing, it navigated the loss of the O’Connell brothers and set the production team on a clear trajectory for the fifth season: find Colin, rescue Quinn from a science experiment gone awry, and defeat Oberon Geiger (Peter Jurasik), the person responsible for it all. Applied Physics took those elements and built them into one of the most important episodes of the series. New paradigms were established. The ship was righting itself. And then everything just… ground to a halt.

For the next 14 episodes, the Sliders went on low-stakes (and low-budget) adventures, holing up in monasteries, playing video games, hanging out with bikers, and pirating. Sure, occasionally we’d see loose ends from previous seasons anticlimatically tied up—Strangers and Comrades ended the hunt for the anti-Kromagg weapon and Requiem saw Wade sacrificing (?) herself to defeat the Kromaggs once and for all—but everything established at the beginning of this season remained ignored.

Until now.

So why did the Sliders writers wait until the penultimate episode to close the loop on Geiger and his mad quest to flatten the multiverse? Was it because they were still trying to determine whether or not Diana was spying for her boss? Was the plan they’d cobbled together falling apart?

Were they just as scared to write this episode as they were the premiere?

While “Eye of the Storm” manages to put a pin on Doctor Geiger, Diana’s shifting loyalties, and the separation of the Quinns, it was never meant to be—and it shows. Per the Year 5 Journal, this episode was originally envisioned as a mid-season Casablanca pastiche and not the final showdown between the Sliders and their nemesis. Considered too on-the-nose, production set it aside and kept ignoring it and their seasonal arc until it dawned on them that they had to do something, and they couldn’t afford not to use Eric Morris’ pitch of a composite world.

The end result, like Geiger’s experiment, is a disturbing patchwork of ideas and technobabble. Stripped of its Casablanca references and callbacks to previous episodes, all that’s left is a half-baked character study of Diana as she reconciles her feelings for Doctor Geiger and the Combine. And, for an episode with a bigger-than-average budget (production squirreled away money from cheaper episodes specifically for a spectacular end to the season), it looks cheap and terrible. Just ugly storytelling all the way around.

Before we get to all that poorly-lit drama, however, viewers are treated to one last embarrassing backlot adventure—traipsing through the Mexican village that floods whenever a Universal Studios Tour tram drives by. We’ve already seen Rembrandt and Quinn pass this way in Slither, so what’s accomplished besides burning three minutes of screen time? Learning Mallory is smothered in bear scat? The shocking revelation that Rembrandt is tired of all this nonsense and just wants to go home?

And he's not the only one; Diana also feels homesick, but replacing the crystal in To Catch a Slider cleared out the timer’s coordinates, so they’re sliding blind again. Why bring this up now, with one episode to go? Especially when the conflict is undone as the credits roll? It only reinforces how slapdash the race to the finish line is this season.

The Sliders next land in a pocket dimension situated around the Chandler Hotel. When they see someone running through the empty streets, they follow only to discover a disheveled Doctor Geiger standing before a sinister energy barrier, begging incoherently for mercy. Gone is the practiced confidence we saw earlier this season; when the Sliders pepper him with questions about their shared situation, Geiger just walks into the energy field and obliterates himself. That would be a hell of a way to end the teaser if Mallory didn't then punctuate the moment with a snarky comment.

Without reflecting on what they've just witnessed, the team heads to the Chandler and encounters an irate bellhop (Jay Acovone in his third role in three seasons) who provides the requisite exposition dump: a few dozen people have been trapped in this hellhole with no one getting in or out. Some of them have mysteriously vanished in the intervening months. And there’s a mysterious Man Upstairs who’s taken up residence in the penthouse.

What’s going on? Can the Sliders help everyone get to safety on another world? The Sliders react to this crisis by going to their usual room and calmly talking while Rembrandt looks out the window and wonders if they’ve slid into Hell. There's no shock or sense of urgency; as we later learn, the experiment that unstuck Geiger destroyed all of his doubles. Why aren't Diana or Mallory rattled by what they saw only minutes before? From their perspective, the Geiger they knew must be gone. This initial hotel room scene could have been a powerful moment for the two of them to process some grief, giving Diana even more emotional whiplash when it's all reversed later in the episode. No one expresses concern; after all, the timer's still working.

But how is anything else?

To wit: the bellhop says their predicament started six months earlier, and as we learn, Geiger literally scooped a chunk of a world out of its dimension and plopped it here. We don’t see any power, and there can’t be any working plumbing. So where are the food and water coming from for people to sustain themselves? More important, how did Geiger achieve this in the time provided? As described, he flits between worlds when unstuck, with no control over when he arrives or leaves. He lived in that stasis field in “The Unstuck Man” because it was the only way for him to interact with an environment. How did he then anchor himself to the reality he stole the Chandler from for any length of time? How did he acquire all of the equipment that makes this final phase of his experimentation possible? Did this plan start moments after he vanished in “Applied Physics?”

What is going on?

No one seems to care until Mallory, inexplicably frustrated by stomping from the floor above (has he never lived beneath someone before?), leads the Sliders upstairs to discover the real Geiger, who admits he brought the Sliders here in order to set things right. His theories? Garbage. His calculations? Flawed; the Combine would never have worked, and he hopes Diana can help him undo his mistakes before he dies.

The conflict now established, the rest of the A-story revolves around Diana juggling her outrage toward Geiger with her loyalty to the Sliders. When Geiger teases he can separate the Quinns, Diana refuses to consider it until Mallory insists they give it a try. “I’m the patient, right?” he asks. “That’s why we came, isn’t it?”

While all of that’s happening, we get scene after scene of pointless investigation by Maggie and Rembrandt. First it’s checking out the barrier; still can’t get through it? Yep. Then it’s stealing from an abandoned bank, only to discover a beat cop (Elizabeth Rossa) has been hiding mysteriously disfigured people in the basement vault. None of this leads to anything except a nice moment of vulnerability from the officer. The person behind the mutilations is never in doubt (it’s Geiger), and the motivation is so dumb that it strains credulity.

For a story centered on Diana and her journey as a scientist and as a person, "Eye of the Storm" spends precious little time actually examining those relationships. She initially bristles at the thought of working with Geiger again, but after several empty conversations where it's obvious he's playing her again, Diana agrees to help only to be betrayed again. David Peckinpah's direction does her no favors; in one scene, Diana is looking right at Geiger as he aims a laser at himself and starts glowing in ecstasy while he attempts to merge with his former lab rat. Oblivious right to the very end.

It turns out Geiger stole this little piece of reality to try and find someone he could merge with the way the two Quinns are joined. But why? Just summon the Sliders, give them the same song and dance, and try with Mallory. Considering that’s what he ultimately attempts anyway, why try (and fail) for six straight months?

His scheme exposed, Geiger relents and tries to separate the Quinns for real, but he cannot—they’ve been joined together too long. Nor can he retrieve Colin, or even tell the Sliders where he may be. I'd dive deeper into the emotional implications of these outcomes, but the show didn't, so why should I?

Diana is able to turn off the barrier and return the pocket dimension (and the people living here?) to its point of origin before Geiger dies; his parting gift is everyone’s home coordinates. Given his past actions, I fully expect this to all be another miserable fake-out on his part.

And so “Eye of the Storm” ends, every bit the mid-season encounter it should have been. Keith Damron laughably admits in the Year 5 Journal that he didn’t want to kill off Doctor Geiger because he wanted to save him for a “grand finale” in a potential sixth season.

Sir? There is one episode left. You're not getting another stab at this. Let Oberon Geiger go; it's not like you spent much time thinking about him to begin with.