Time Again and World

After a stellar first season and a promising start this year, we have hit the first speedbump of the series. As much as I may try to spin this, I am forced to conclude “Time Again and World” is not up to standard.

There is a promising premise. After witnessing a murder just before the slide, the Sliders see the exact same events play out again on the next world. Except this time, the murderee becomes the murderer, thanks in no small part to Wade shouting a warning. When this world’s dead man turns out to be a cop, Wade feels she has made a terrible mistake. But not all is as it seems. Unfortunately, this mystery immediately becomes complicated, and then rapidly descends to convoluted. As the show tries to keep us guessing about who to trust, we end up lost in a fog.

They certainly throw a lot at the Sliders—and us—during this episode. We get codewords, “Elsie…the rock…five-four.”  We get discs slipped into matchbooks, spies on every street corner, and factions of police inside the police. Even good old Gomez Calhoon is playing an angle. What we don’t have is a strong sense of what’s going on. We don’t learn the actual stakes until the end of the second act—an unabridged copy of the US Constitution.

Yup, turns out this world has been under martial law since the Kennedy assassination (performed by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.) And in that brief time period, every uncensored copy of the US Constitution has been destroyed. Every single copy but one. Judge Nassau, our murdered guy/murderer has that copy. And since his dead doppelganger handed a copy to Wade, that makes two. Nassau’s goal is to get his copy out to the public in the hopes they will rise up, and to do that, he’s opted for pirate radio. The Sliders team up with his daughter Natalie (Rebecca Gayheart) to make it happen.

They fail miserably. Fortunately for Nassau, there’s this thing called the internet. Yes, the internet exists here and evidently, the government has not cracked down on it. Thanks to Wade inadvertently making a copy on a public computer, Nassau’s mission is completed—unbeknownst to all our protagonists.

Yikes.

It’s just not a satisfying story. There’s so much running around and yet we’re spinning our wheels. The Sliders themselves are constantly guessing at the next move and it feels like we’re following each and every dead end in real time. They do manage to save the judge, but the true victory is both by default and too easy. Why didn’t Nassau use the internet in the first place? Because if he did, there’s no episode.

There are other serious problems with the internal logic of this story. The Sliders are threatened by unknown agents and are warned not to say anything about the murder. Except…they’ve already been questioned about it by the police. And since the unknown agents are cops and it’s hours later, they should already know that the Sliders already said nothing.

To maintain the mystery of this world, the Sliders can’t know anything about it. Except… they’ve already spent two weeks on a carbon copy of it! For everything to play out exactly the same, the two worlds have to be extremely similar—women’s facial hair stylings aside. If you want the Sliders operating blindly, have them on the prior world two hours.

Then there are the basic production problems. The crew is shaking off rust from its hiatus and there’s a whole lot of ADR to cover for it. Rembrandt flashes the “mean green,” but the currency is a different color. An overreliance on re-using establishment shots has Rembrandt visit the Top Hat twice and Quinn driving up to the Doppler in his BMW from the “Pilot.” Quinn gives the wrong time for the meet, Natalie appears with her arm in a sling despite not obviously injuring it on screen, and on and on. We learn “Elsie” is actually “L.C.,” but “the rock” and “five-four” remain mysteries.

And then there’s the cursed timeline. With only thirty-six hours to the slide and a clock establishing they arrived at 5 p.m., they ought to be sliding out in the morning; they slide out at night. By counting the amount of times day turns to night and the context clues provided by the props and characters, they well overshoot thirty-six hours. I say it here and I know I will say it many more times later—there is no excuse for such basic timeline errors. Of course if you’re going to take close-up shots of clocks, make sure they’re correct!

I also can’t shake the feeling this is a leftover script that didn’t get produced last season where the Sliders routinely overthrew the world order and enlightened the beknighted citizenry. “Next week, the Sliders arrive on a world where the Magna Carta has been stolen…” Except last season the episode would have somehow been funny. What do we get here? A magazine featuring Dragnet: The Next Generation and a Donny Osmond/Michael Jackson joke.

I do like the idea of sliding between two nearly identical worlds. Why not? It’s never fully explained by the show just where dimensions exist in space-time. Doesn’t it seem logical that dimensions that spin off from each other would tend to be in the same region? They’d seem natural targets for a wounded timer. By that extension, we could also argue that’s why every earth they seem to encounter is not only habitable but tends to speak English. The lag in timing between the two worlds is a lot harder to explain (sliding is never time travel!), but in the interest of plot development, I suppose we’ll have to let it slide this time.

It would be a lot easier to swallow had this episode been worth the contrivance.