Last Days

Season 1
Airdate: 4/5/95
Rating: 4.5/5

“Yes, others take note. The first casualty of sliding is dignity.” – Professor Arturo

The Sliders arrive on a world where an impending asteroid threatens to eradicate all of civilization. They are in a race to see if they can escape the world’s impending doom.

The middle of the street is just not the place to land after a slide, but luckily the area the Sliders arrive in is deserted. As soon as they arrive into town however, an array of abandoned vehicles, police officers and distant vandalism awaits them. The Sliders find refuge in an electronics store, while curious of all the mayhem in the streets.

Mr. Moon the store owner, warns them of the coming asteroid. As serious as the situation is, you can’t ignore his amusing sarcasm, “you people just crawl out from under a rock?” The asteroid is scheduled to arrive in two days, but the Sliders find themselves with a timer counting down with three days until the slide. Rembrandt decides to leave the group while Quinn and Wade head off together to find their families. They all pledge to regroup before the impact and Arturo is left to find an answer before their lives become history.

Arturo teams up with one of his former students, Conrad Bennish Jr., in anticipation of creating an atomic bomb to destroy the asteroid. It’s interesting that on this world Einstein rigged the bomb during WWII, simply because he didn’t want to accept the responsibility of its destructive powers and the moral issues that it came with. You would think Bennish would be one of the last individuals to solve Einstein’s secret, but he’s also the type not to know how to handle the power. Arturo is the leader of the two, given Bennish’s loud rock music and extreme indulgence of cream soda.

Wade and Quinn try to find some sliding equipment as well as their undiscovered relationship. I believe this episode begins to slow down it’s pace when the two try to develop that relationship. It’s something that needs to be addressed between them. However this scene is just too long and there’s too little dialogue between the two, to the point that it gets tiresome. Rembrandt going off on his soul search finds himself at a wild party but eventually to his roots of church work. He ends up helping those at a local church shelter who are in need of a warm meal. I conducted a poll among Sliders fans about whether they would party like no tomorrow or repent and help. To my suprise nearly 90% said they would party like no tomorrow. I guess we know how this world is going to end up in a time of extreme sudden world changing events.

Although this episode contains ‘end of days’ human behavior like unruly party animals and last minute so called ‘born agains’, I don’t think the subject was entertained nearly to the degree it should have been. One question that arises is how the government trusted Arturo and Bennish’s bomb after Einstein supposedly failed at his. Some of the most entertaining elements of this episode however, is Bennish’s obnoxious behavior and the race against time. Bennish annoying the Professor with his extreme rock music and Mr. Moon’s greed is the most humorous part of the episode.

You would think this type of episode would be completely boring with disaster movie after disaster movie being made. More often that not they’re corny B type movies. But with an atom bomb, the Professors brain, Bennish’s wild antics, Rembrandt’s soul searching and Quinn and Wade’s love bring interest to the episode. It’s easily one of the better episodes of the season.  The Sliders wait in anticipation to see if the atomic bomb will save the earth, their time till the slide and the countless lives who feel the end is near. Although this episode contains some flaws, it’s a rather basic and entertaining subject for sci-fi and the realm of parallel worlds. All in all, I think you should find this episode quite enjoyable for a troubling last days scenario among the lives of our heroic team of Sliders.