Sliders: The Fourth Season

A truly mixed bag
First the technical stuff:

In a very good move, the disks in this set are single-sided! An improvement over season 3. The box (exterior and interior) design is similar to season 3 with different art/colors. It's a 5 tray digipak design with a tape hinge that's glued to a flexible green translucent plastic "wrap around" cover. The portion of the cover hidden by the slipcase has episode information screened on it, which is nice and a first for this series. Video is Full Frame (1.33:1) as originally broadcast, and looks very good. Audio is English Dolby Digital 2.0. There are English subtitles. Disks 1, 4, & 5 have 4 episodes each with disks 2 & 3 having 5 each. From all appearances, "missing scenes" have been restored to the appropriate episodes.

Comments about the season:

Sliders moved from Fox to the Sci Fi Channel beginning with this season. The first episode garnered the highest premiere rating that the Sci Fi Channel had ever received up until...

Better VERY late, than never
It took a big swift kick in the tush to get Universal Studios to FINALLY release season four of Sliders and now we fans own the DVD before they are all in their 70s and in rocking chairs! It was probably the studio's latest battle with the bootleg industry that finally got them listening.

Although this season lacked the humor of the other three seasons (I deeply miss John Rye Davies) this season has the most action of any other. Unlike any other season the Kromags were given a role as a group of villains identical to the Nazis. Many episodes were actually downright scary.

The very best episode of all is "California Reich", in which the sliders land on a world that still discriminates by race and surgically converts blacks into faceless beings called "eddies". The last part of this episode is really a shocker.

One very major change is the character of Cleavant Derricks. In the first three seasons the character "Rembrandt" was a bit similar to that of...

Very Underrated Season
Season 4 of Sliders is actually a much better season than the ultimately disappointing 3rd season, as the show returns to the basics and concentrates on building the chemistry between the travelers instead of the movie-spoof of the week format the now departed David Peckinpah forced on us in the previous season.

Some of the very finest episodes of the series are in this season, presenting some novel sci-fi concepts and furthering the show's mythology.

There's an episode where an alternate Quinn accidentally slides his entire world away, an episode where all citizens are forcefully medicated by the government, an episode where the sliders are turned into computer data, and episodes dealing with themes as diverse as racial cleansing, reality television, an anti-Kromagg virus, the technological divide, cloning for body parts and rapid aging.

This is truly this troubled but fascinating show's last hurrah and well worth adding to your collection.

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