The Java Jive

I really want to like this episode.

I don’t always (as clearly evidenced by some of my other reviews). Sometimes you can just tell you’re in for a trying hour and the only surprises come from just how baffling the final decisions prove to be. But this episode is not like that. It has strong fundamentals. It has style. It has one of the best musical numbers of the series. And yet… something isn’t working, and that is very frustrating.

At long last we are given something resembling an episode teased by Tracy Tormé years ago but never delivered—a noir story featuring Rembrandt. Rembrandt has been underutilized for a few weeks now, but Cleavant Derricks comes off the bench and dominates like the triple threat he is. We get some vintage Rembrandt—he sings, he plays cards, and, in a new twist, we get to see a villainous version of him. Villainous may be too strong a word, but he is a bad guy. So bad he murders a man in cold blood in the teaser. This is a promising opening.

We’re then thrust into a world where Prohibition is the name of the game. There are gangsters and night clubs, crooked cops and drugs. Except here the drug of choice is caffeine, the latest stimulant a health-conscious Congress has taken away from the American people. Forget heroin, these people are willing to kill for Diet Coke.

Our gang isn’t here to overthrow the world order. This is a contained story where they come to the aid of one person, one Angie Morgan (Jennifer Leigh Warren) whose boyfriend has been murdered (by alt-Rembrandt) shortly before the arrival of our crew. Personal need (lack of funds) and the promise of helping a woman in distress is more than enough to engage the Sliders, but the lure of getting to ply his trade makes this a no-brainer for Rembrandt. But things are never so simple. When a drug kingpin snatches Angie, Rembrandt goes to the rescue.

And… it just doesn’t work. Why? While I have quibbles here and there with the plot, this story does not make the kind of glaring errors that mark the bad outings nor does it demonstrate any lack of caring. Costume? Score? Props? All solid. We have a refreshingly diverse cast of guest stars and everyone pulls their weight. They even get the timeline right, which as we well know, is far from guaranteed on this show. So what went wrong?

Perhaps the story is too contained, lowering the stakes. This certainly isn’t the first time the Sliders have involved themselves in a small situation that they could have easily walked away from, so what is different this time? Does Angie’s drug dealing ways cause her to lose sympathy with us? She certainly doesn’t seem like a bad person, and c’mon—it’s caffeine. Yet a laced packet of caffeine nearly kills Diana, so Angie is far from an innocent.

Are the villains not threatening enough? Dropper Daddy (Dwayne Adway), the head of the gang, seems like a cold fellow. And we already know his goon Brownie (alt-Rembrandt) has no issue killing a person. But our team doesn’t directly deal with either of them until the end. The goons Rembrandt engages with seem pretty easy to defeat, and not just at cards.

Have we lost a sense of danger? Let’s face it, the Sliders get nearly killed every week. They have a gun drawn on them in over half of the episodes. Have we just become numb to it? I was tempted to say they weren’t in any real trouble this week, but Rembrandt and Mallory did get stuffed into a meat locker to freeze to death and Maggie and Diana were fired upon. The trouble is there, but it doesn’t resonate.

Or maybe it’s a sense that we’ve seen this before? This is the third consecutive episode where someone is abducted. While there are no direct callbacks, past episodes do seem to haunt this one. The most obvious is Greatfellas, which also dealt with gangsters, Rembrandt doubles, and ended in a shootout. But even the mundane State of the A.R.T. came to mind as Mallory escaped the meat locker in similar fashion to Quinn and Rembrandt’s breakout.

Since the pieces don’t come together, I have to lay the blame partially at the feet of the director, Jeff Woolnaugh. This is his third outing with Sliders and his first since third season's The Other Slide of Darkness. I feel bad about this, because he did a lot of things right here. The noir atmosphere is great. The Chandler, redressed as the Hippo Club, has never looked better. And the musical number is outstanding.

Let’s conclude by praising Peter Andrew’s number, “He Must Be Dreaming.” I don’t think the show has played a full song since “Tears in my 'Fro”, all the way back in the first season. Warren does a terrific job with the first two verses, and when the emotion prevents her from going on, Derricks brings it home with a belter verse of his own. Just as you’d expect the show to cut away to the next scene, a dance troupe comes out and does an extended revue. I suspected a need to pad the script, but we have a copy here at Earth Prime, and it runs long. Spending six minutes on a musical number is a choice, not a need.

Ultimately, it’s only that number that’s going to make this episode more memorable than The Great Work or Please Press One. And that’s a shame, because I really wanted to like this one more.