Random – Why did you leave Jerry……. WHY?!

The childhood of Ginger kids is generally traumatic at best. Spurned by their peers and bringing shame to their parents for birthing a red devil, the Ginger kid is almost certain to hit adulthood with some significant form of emotional scaring. Some of them even start blogs about it.

Fortunately for you, dear reader, the Ginger ninja was too busy to acknowledge his cultural pariah status. Between hunting down defenceless animals with my bare hands, giving my year 6 teacher a nervous breakdown (easily one of the primary school highlights), or just being completely awesome; things were fairly busy back when I was a tiny ball of ranga fur.

But just to mix things up a little, the folks decided to pick up the house and live in the Middle East for a couple of years. Seems they suddenly developed the urge to house their young family next to a live minefield – work that shit out.

My backyard only less grassy, more “Lawrence of Arabia”

Now as you might expect, Ginger kids show up in the Middle East as often as dingos take babies – about once every 20 years. And walking outside either meant being pelted with stones, being molested, or being scorched alive by the desert sun.

Luckily for me, one of the best things about living in a third-world country though is the incredible selection of TV shows. You have Arabic soaps, Arabic news, Arabic talk-shows, Arabic cartoons, Arabic action movies – everything you could ever want should you speak Arabic. Don’t speak Arabic? That’s okay though, we lived close enough to the Israeli border (hence the minefield) to get half a dozen different TV channels from there……. in Hebrew instead.

But for the rest of us, the show selection was slightly limited – generally a nauseating mix of “Happy Days”, “Remington Steel”, and “Little House on the Prairie”. We were occasionally blessed with some home grown television though – “The Bushtucker Man” would come on once a week, and if we turned the volume up enough we could just hear those sweet nasal tones of Les Hiddins under the awful Russian dubbing (yes, Russian – God knows why).

Oh dearest Les – I always knew you should have been MacGyver

There was one beacon of civilisation though; one faithful lighthouse in the maelstrom of electromagnetic boredom – Sliders

John Rhys-Davies : the only man I’ve ever seen wearing
a bow tie without having a conviction for sexual assault to go with it

Sliders was one of the few shows we got regularly in English – sure there were both Arabic and Hebrew sub-titles covering half the screen; but my sister and I still got to revel in the wonder of Jerry O’Connell fighting dinosaurs, being fondled by strange alien women or trapped in some bizarre alternate-reality prison while the token black guy, the token scientist-fat guy and the token pretty girl watched on as “Cue-ball” got them out of yet another bubblegum crisis.

I only bring up the legendary Sliders because I got a hard drive full of TV shows for Christmas. Besides the Mentalist, Dexter and Big Bang Theory, it was stocked with all 88 episodes of slider-lovin’. Looking for a bit of a flashback, I loaded up the series pilot and started from the start. Well half flashback, half already seen everything else on the drive except Dr Who….. and I had to force myself to say no to the Doctor.

No – I will not get in the back of your Tardis,
regardless of how much candy you claim to have

A week later and I wish I’d never gotten any Christmas presents.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the first four seasons of Sliders – I could the handle terrible acting, god-awful special effects, and nonsense plots because it was all fun and occasionally thought-provoking. Even after they completely aborted Wade and the Professor in season three, the fourth season still managed serious awesomeness. But Jesus Christ am I glad I never saw season 5 as a kid.

Besides dumping the O’Connell brothers from the line-up and replacing Jerry in the clumsiest plot turn in the history of television (“Look! It’s still Quinn Mallory, he just looks completely different, has the intellect of house brick, and we call him Mallory instead of Quinn”), the entire season had no purpose. Every season previous, the sliders were searching for someone’s homeworld – first to get back to where they started, then to Quinn and Colin’s real homeworld.

Season 5 – Quinn and Colin are gone, and none of the remaining team can return to their worlds……. SO WHY THE HELL ARE THEY STILL SLIDING? The entire season is spent jumping the fucking shark.

There was one upside to season 5 – it was a launch pad for two of television’s greatest assholes.

I’m sure there are federal laws against
bearing the children of either of these two

Both the Janitor and Dr Kelsoe play minor characters in different Slider episodes – and neither of them are recognisable. The Janitor got forced into a shitty little role as a security guard in some alternate world where motorcycles were illegal (?). Kelsoe got an episode long role, but still had to play a limp-wristed palaeontologist that discovers an ancient stasis chamber with someone still in it, only to get driven off the dig by a bunch of illiterate, unwashed Mexicans claiming to be “protecting the spirits”.

No wonder these two play the characters they do – Ken and Neil, we here at the Ginge salute you.