When you write fanfic, you try not to do what's been done for...or carefully disguise it. I'm not a huge fan of gunplay so I try to limit its use (says the guy who wrote "Nobody Move.") When I think of Sliders and guns, I think 4th season. Lots of Kromaggs, lots of wartorn worlds, there are plenty of weapons in the 4th season. However, if you guessed the 4th season has the highest percentage of eps with guns, you'd be wrong. Stunningly enough (at least to me), the 2nd season was the most trigger happy season with a full 100% featuring a weapon drawn on a Slider. If you count the Pilot as one episode, then the first season also hits 100%. Guns, guns, guns, everywhere you turn. Next to the timer, it must be the most frequent prop of the show.

Want to get the full effect? Put on a weapon-happy song in your MP3 player (I found the Transplants' "Diamonds and Guns" to be quite appropriate; Moby's "That's When I Reach for My Revolver" could be amusing too.) and then just sit back and do a mental fast forward of the show starting with the Pilot, each scene featuring someone pulling out a gun or threatening someone with one. I didn't make it to the 5th season before the song ended.

It's a fun video montage project if someone has the equipment and the episodes for it. If I were art director, I'd throw in a few "sanity be damned" shots of Quinn, you know the ones where his face gets all scrunched up as he flies into a rage. (See late third season, e.g. "Slither.")

Sliders, for all its creative leaps, ends up completely reliant on the gun. The first episode to break away is "The Guardian", which relies on good old fashioned fisticuffs. Third season episodes that didn't use guns usually resorted to swords, knives, and other miscellaneous weapons. The total number of Sliders eps where one of the Sliders is in mortal peril is probably around 85% an unscientific estimate, but think about it, how many eps you can name where no one was in any danger of being killed? Once you have that list, remove the eps where they were captured or threatened with bodily harm. What do you have left?

Even stories with much bigger threats, "Last Days" (asteroid) still prominently features a revolver. Why is this? Is it simply not possible to do a Sliders script if no one is in danger of being killed? Are the alt-world adventures not enough? Apparently not. Maybe that 1st season Exec Producer was refering to lack of plot devices when he whined that it's so hard coming up with new ideas.

Re-examining my own fanfiction, I found I'm on the right side of violence. In the 15 'major' works I've completed (2 as yet unaired), I turn to the gun six times. Sometimes I didn't even remember writing the weapons in; it just becomes ingrained. I do know that taking away the mortal peril of the slide makes it 3X as difficult to write something with enough action as the original series.

It must be extremely draining on the characters to repeatedly be faced with death every other day. No wonder Quinn became so hard as the series wore on. It has to desensitize you. We look on in indignation when he says something heartless like "Been there, done that, got the T-shirt" when he's talking about war and murder, but it's true. Every week he's nearly killed. He's been sentenced to death a half dozen times; he's died twice. Every original Slider but Rembrandt is killed at least once in the third season (only Arturo didn't come out of it.)

Anyway, just a little treatise. I leave you know with images from the 2nd season:

A bounty hunter pulls a gun on Quinn in Into the Mystic. Rembrandt blows a snake's head off. Quinn is thrown back into a hotel room with guns at his back in Time Again and World. Weapons are drawn and shots are fired at the Top Hat. L.J. fires his automatic weapon into the sky. Sid holds a gun to a man's head at an ATM. Weapons are drawn in a subway. Shots ring out everywhere. Michelle guns Sid down. Weapons are flashed as a house is searched. Quinn and Arturo are shot with tranquilizer darts trying to escape the Australians. Quinn apparently kills a man in a duel. Guns are fired on a pistol range...some extremely wide. A man is shot down in a bar. A child attempts to shoot a CEO. Quinn throws his guns down. Immigration raid a corner. Kit Richards is shot in the chest. Dennis wildly waves around his rifle due to bad acting. Daelin is shot by a crooked cop; she returns fire and kills him. The Bureau of Anti-Tech raid Mike Mallory's home at gunpoint. Mike Mallory holds aim on the Sliders as Quinn tries to talk sense into him. Weapons are drawn as Wade tries to escape the clutches of Derek Bond. Kromaggs fire phasers at the escaping Sliders. Arturo pulls a gun on the others in his basement. A poacher fires at a dinosaur and keeps his firearm trained on the Sliders. Guns appear everywhere when Rembrandt crashes a wedding and they pretty much remain out in the open the rest of the episode. Kenny and Gillette hold Quinn and Wade at gunpoint and later Wade's double tries to kill them, shooting Gillette instead. And so the season ends with sirens in the distance...

R317