The Breeder

Well, I caught this wonderful episode again yesterday and decided to do a small review. It is still one of the worst episodes, right up there with SLITHER, THIS SLIDE OF PARADISE and LAST OF EDEN (among others). In short, the Scientology commercials running during the breaks were more believable than this story.

• The sliders fall out of the wormhole, but Maggie appears not to. They ask where she is and she stumbles out from behind a bush, indicating she landed some distance away (unlikely unless the wormhole moved, and we have no indication that was the case).

• I may be mistaken on this, but it looked to me like Maggie was already holding the fake-looking creature on her face before they actually showed it flying at her and apparently landing over her mouth. I only caught a glimpse and may be mistaken, but it looked like bad editing.

• Quinn brags that he's erasing the last world's co-ordinates from the timer. What exactly is the point of that? It's not as if they're going to invoke them by accident... but should they land there again by chance, they'll be able to cross-check the co-ordinates and know to stay away from any swampy areas.

  (the prior three observations from the first 5 minutes of the show alone)

• Remmy says he should take Maggie to the hospital, she snaps at him and instead he takes her to the apartment. I guess he forgot about all the frothing at the mouth she had been doing earlier, as well as how she managed to rip apart a vent to escape.

• When Quinn is attacked in the apartment and Remmy is locked out, Rembrandt freezes the door knob, then kicks the door in! Freezing the knob wouldn't make any difference if he was just going to kick the door in.

• Maggie, who is looking for mates and has a whole city-worth to choose from, returns to the aprtment to get Quinn.

• After one of the creatures comes out of the male in the cryo room, Wade and the doctor rush in with no safety precautions at all and no knowledge of what the creature can do. Good thing Maggie didn't contract ebola.

• When the clichéd evil doctor says she only has to push one button to have Quinn and Wade become organ donors, it looks like she points at the space bar, or the ALT button. (like a keyboard would be designed like that anyways).

• When trying to lure the creature out of Maggie, Quinn gets awfully close with his mouth open.

• The parasite has much in common with THE FIRE WITHIN's flame creature. Both are seen only briefly in their native habitats before being dumped in specially contrived parallel worlds (Flameboy on Oil World, Breeder on Organ World), both were inexplicably sentient and capable of English speech, and neither taught us much of anything about the Earth they came from (Was there a human population? Was there much of ANYTHING beyond bogs/oil fields?).

  Incidentally . . . remember Ryan, Henry, David, Diana, Sid and Michelle from years past? Well, the third season was over TWICE as long as the previous two put together, and the only extra Sliders our heroes managed to hook up with were a supernatural talking-flame creature and a supernatural, talking, stomach-dwelling worm.

• Well, SPECIES comes to mind as the most obvious one, especially with the lame pool sequence.

• The goofy looking creatures in the beginning looked like the creatures from the classic Trek episode OPERATION: ANNIHILATE.

  These two were the most obvious and I think there are more based around the creature coming out of her mouth, but I can't think of what the title(s) of that/those films were.

• Rembrandt and Quinn jumping at the two guards pulling a woman away. They just arrived on the world, know nothing of it or the woman, Maggie needs to be taken to the hospital and they decide to interfere with a group of guys bigger than they are. At least they got their priorities straight, I guess. :)

• For a symbiont whose primary concern is staying warm, it sure doesn't have many qualms about taking Maggie outside . . . at night . . . wearing only skimpy lingerie.

• Big surprise, it's alien Maggie. And she does it numerous times with her magic honeycomb + electricity effect eyes (complete with what appears to be a nictitating membrane) resulting from a creature in her stomach!

• What was that THING moving around inside Maggie's face near the beginning? I suppose it makes sense that the creature would need some kind of link to her brain (if that's even what the facial contortions represented), but how was this removed when the creature crawled back up her esophagus?

• When Remmy throws her out the window, she should fall judging by the way she exits it, but instead she flies straight across to the next building, defying both gravity and momentum.

• Maggie sticks to walls too. Note to writer: she has a goofy monster in her stomach; she was not bitten by a radioactive spider.

• Maggie falls a very long distance and lands on her feet (as alien Maggie) and walks away. Alien or not, that would have done some damage to her body if the plot was logical. I think I just answered my own question there. :)

• How exactly did the creature get down Maggie's throat without blocking her air passage?

• When the creature gets the woman at the spa, it appears to be several feet long (as the woman was pretty far away when it came out and got her), but when it comes out of Maggie at the end, it is 2 feet long at most.

• Also, the woman at the spa is presumably dead but when we see her in the shower, her head is lolling back and forth a bit (or, they just never explained why she'd be alive).

• Why must the creature go after members of the opposite sex if it can put eggs inside anyone? Given S3's track record, I'm surprised they limited themselves by saying this and not slipping in a lesbian sequence as well.

• "I want you, baby!" from alien Maggie

• "I'm looking for a man." from alien Maggie

• "What do you do?"
  "Reproduce." from alien Maggie (talking to spa worker)

• "You can't... stop me!" from - you guessed it - alien Maggie with a ridiculous voice.

• "Next time you have an opinion different from mine, tell me. I'll listen" - this heartwarming (read "gut-wrenching") line is from Quinn and is one of many bad lines revolving around Remmy's sudden urge to talk of discrimination. There's nothing wrong with that in principle, but its use here felt like filler with little substance (which is what it was).

• The flying ST:TOS style creatures

• The creature inside Maggie

• Those stupid effects used for "evil alien creature in your stomach" eyes

• The Sliders land on Cryo-world in a pile of leaves . . . which do a very poor job of covering up a mattress. You can even see Rembrandt's feet getting caught in the camouflage netting!

• When Maggie starts physically changing early on, her eyes get morphed to be larger/stretched (see also under the PHYSICS/BIOLOGY DEFYING category)

• The guy who gets his arm broken. It looks like a shirt sleeve filled with cloth when she breaks his arm (no sound effects of bones breaking either).

• When the creature comes out of Maggie at the end, you can tell that the monster is not coming out of her mouth but is being raised up from behind the other side of her head.

• Seeing the evil doctor wrestling with the rubber monster in her mouth. Priceless.

• Rembrandt's cryo-gun looks like a reject from the goo guns from GHOSTBUSTERS 2.

• What a surprise, alien Maggie wins again... with a number of leering shots of her chest, a sequence where she strips in front of a woman at a spa, goes nude in a pool, etc, etc. Granted, the fully nude sequences were hidden to some degree (the spa sequence less so than the pool.)

• Rembrandt's discrimination/oppression speech used as filler.

• Quinn getting upset over Wade saying "now all I see is death" and assuming she blamed him. This was horribly forced and badly written.

• The puddle surrounding Maggie's abandoned dress. As she's sinking into the hot tub it's dry, yet as the guard approaches it's wet.

• Quinn breathing in Maggie's face to get the creature out.

• Just about the whole episode.

• Some other funny things are the detectors used to harvest people. Surely there is a better way than having to have people patrolling the streets with the detectors (after all, they did manage to have people stamped for organ donation in the first place). Granted this could have been explained if only someone in control had used the organ harvest world as the plot and not the stupid "monster in my stomach" routine we were subjected to. It seemed as though two different people had written the episode (any ideas about that?).

• Also suspect was the one minute warning at the end of the episode. It seemed like more than 1 minute passed from the warning till they slid, but I did not time it.

In summary, this episode sucked. Some scenes were unintentionally funny, most were cringe worthy and the whole project was pretty much unwatchable without plenty of barf bags handy.

1/2 out of 4. (I'm in a generous mood.)

I caught the new Mariah video with JOC and found it was not that bad (the first Mariah video in almost a decade that didn't make me nauseous); furthermore, JOC's performance was superior to what we got to see in THE BREEDER. But while both the video and BREEDER consisted of numerous suggestive and gratuitous shots of an attractive woman, the video had better writing going for it.

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