Chips & Dips, Part Deux

(See the beginning of Part 1, below, for some exciting disclaimers! They apply to this entry as well!!!)

OK...So where were we? Chips. Brains. Entertainment. Right...

Look at how entertaining that episode of Sliders had been! Just imagine if you brought those pulse-pounding thrills to real life stuff, like the Blue Angels? Or, even better, to NASCAR! And NASCAR is really perfect, because if you had to find a real-life-fake-Kari to replace fake-life-real-Kari, who would you get? Danica Patrick, obviously. She’s a real hotshot, just like Kari was a fake hotshot in “Slide by Wire.” 

And while I have to confess that I’ve never found Danica hot—no matter how many provocative commercials with lesbian-dominatrix cops they stick her in, nor how much more they keep tarting her up with sleeker makeup and/or bodysuits. But see, here’s where implants come in. Take a look at Danica. Cosmetically speaking, she could probably benefit from the cold caress of science…but then it hit me that maybe she already has! She’s in NASCAR (or whatever). She’s a real athlete (heh heh)… Athletes use whatever edge they can get to get over the top. And while Danica’s rack isn’t anywhere near as spectacular as real-Kari’s, she certainly can pilot her hot rod as well as fake-Kari could pilot her plane… after she got implants!

That’s right. While lawmakers and various regulatory agencies have been writhing their hands over performance-enhancing chemicals, maybe they should have been worried about performance-enhancing implants. Here’s a means of really altering your body’s ability to compete: restructuring it! Feeling a little mediocre? Try an implant! How about grafting a star discus thrower’s arm onto a bullpen pitcher’s body? Or shark’s teeth into the gums of some hotshot pool player?

I’m sure you can see that the possibilities are limitless, and once you start looking at Danica and thinking about Kari, (in Sliders,) and if you consider how women never excelled at being race car drivers, (or as just plain drivers…sorry, ladies…) you start to get suspicious, don’t you? Like, just how does Danica make all those spiffy hairpin turns whilst pulling 50 Gs at 400mph? (Or whatever race car drivers do?) Nomenclature aside, I don’t think it’s her hairpins. 

You know how really great athletes always seem to have those tyrannical fathers? The ones that tirelessly dog their children all through their joyless childhoods to grasp some athletic brass ring or other? (Woods, Jeter, et. al.) Well, since all of society has agreed to consider race car driving a sport, for some reason, doesn’t it seem possible that maybe Danica Patrick has one of those imperious fathers as well?

Here’s how obsessed I became with the pattern I saw forming in front of me: I actually looked up Danica Patrick and her father! And it’s a good thing that I did, because otherwise, I wouldn’t know that her paw drives all her rigs around for her—when she’s not racing in them, I mean. That’s what he does for a living! Is that what you’d do with your time, if she were your kid? No matter how close you are, it’d be fucking embarrassing. Everyone can see that your sum total worth is wrapped up in the identity of your progeny…like some ontological mummy. Proud of your kid? You wouldn’t dream of leeching off another human being like that, unless you had no pride at all…or were one of those monomaniacal athletic dads!

(The distaff version of these guys is the showbiz mom, obviously, which I bring up because Danica has one of those too. Her mother handles her business affairs full time. What luck! Not every mother can find her child a spot in a commercial where they get to make out with a stripper/cop…)

So say you are one of those obsessive dad’s, and you have a dint of simple intelligence… you can see that the climb to the top of the heap is treacherous. Arms and legs wave out of a cluster of competitors, who are also climbing, and you have to grasp and clutch them and scramble over everyone else. You become part of that ugly writhing mass, like some nightmare out of Dante. Most of the climbers never see Purgatory—forget the Divine Apex of sooper stardom. To reach that next, highest level, you might need a little boost.

An elite sports dad, can see that need for a helpful push—however dim he may be otherwise. Presumably, Danica’s dad is one of these guys, so it’s likely he found out that destroying his child’s ego just wasn’t enough. It was time for some outside help—outside of nature even.

But let’s credit him with a little more intelligence than the average sports dad. After all, Danica made it all the way. (Close enough to be famous anyway—I don’t know or care what the top of the race car biz is, exactly.) So he must be one of the elite sports dads, right? Savvy enough to know that the powers that be have become pretty savvy as well. They’ve tightened the PED net so that it downright smothers fakers and juicers. So what’s a dad to do?

I bet I know what Danica’s dad did, and I bet I know just how he got the idea. I bet. 

In 1999, the episode “Slide by Wire” aired for the very first time. Danica would’ve been around 17. (She’s 35 now.) And that’s probably right around the time when a kid’s competitive potential has peaked. For Danica, the writing was on the wall, and maybe it wasn’t not quite spelling out what her dad wanted. He’s been cajoling her to race around since she was in swaddling cloths. Maybe it was Big Wheels first, when she was so little that her legs could barely move the pedals. (He probably strapped little motors to one of those silly plastic trikes…Hang on tight, Dani! VROOM! Off she goes! Wave bye-bye!)  Then when she reached her toddler years, he probably moved her to motor scooters. She’d wear Xtra Tall pimp platform shoes, so she could work the pedals. In grade school, she’d get a ’73 Buick LeSabre, and then, finally, her very own stock car when she graduated to adolescence!

By now, she’s good! But her reflexes are a little dull here and there. Once in a while, her courage wanes, when it should be hot waxin’. And worst of all, somehow, she’s just not fast enough! Sure, she wins every single race she’s in, but she’s got to be ready to face the Big Boys now…The Gordons! The Andrettis! The Speed Racers! And her time is just not good enough!!!

And Danica’s pa can only work elite sports dad magic on her so for so long. He’s already yelled at and humiliated her for her entire childhood. He’s already denied her friends, romance music, television (except racing programs)… He doesn’t even let her finish high school! (She did eventually get her GED. True fact.) He’s running out of ideas!

Then one night, he’s watching SyFy. (which had a much less idiotic name back then: “The Sci-Fi Channel.”) And it comes to him…an erection…because he’s watching Sliders, and Jerry O’Connell’s looking mighty fine. (What is with people and their inexplicable attractions to frogs and race car drivers?) But he watches a little longer, and he actually gets caught up in the inane story line…And sure enough the featured episode is “Slide by Wire” with all of its muddled meanderings on the subject of sticking chips in chicks craniums to turn them into super-pilots, and well…

He starts whacking off to Jerry O’Connell…

But then it hits him! Chips! Not the potato or nacho kind, but computer chips! Danica! Her head! It’s perfect!

So he runs out to the garage, where all his race car tools are, and starts soldering together some sort of primitive circuit board-type thing, but it comes out looking less like the chip on Sliders than it does like a transformer for a toy train set. (It’s actually from a Hot Wheels set that he got Danica when she was a kid, and it’s now badly melted from all that soldering.) But hey, you have to start somewhere. So he’s all ready to saunter into Danica’s bedroom, knock a wedge-shaped hole in her head with maybe an XL flathead screwdriver or something, slip the chip into her, and then watch the magic take place. But then it occurs to him that proper scientific procedure requires torturing animals before you try something on a human being. (Even when the tests you perform on the animal are manifestly idiotic and just confirm something you already know, e.g. squirting oven cleaner into the eyes of rabbits.) 

So there’s Mr. Patrick. With a hardon. Because he’s thinking about Jerry O’Connell. But then he remembers what he was doing with his chip. And with Danica. And with the family cat.

So he goes to where the cat sleeping on a pile of dirty laundry. He pounces on  the unsuspecting critter, and it rightfully bites him on the hand. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, he’s had the foresight to don garden gloves. So he’s able to drag the animal out to the garage and dope it up with some spare Rohypnol he has lying around somewhere. He yanks out a hammer and chisel, makes a wedge-shaped slot in the cat’s head, and plops the microchip in.

Right away, he can tell he’s onto something, because the cat dies. He starts calling pest control corporations, trying to interest them in a new “stray cat removal device,” but no one will even talk to him, so it’s back to the drawing board.

So it’s trial and error. And more error. And more dead pets. And winos. And he still can’t figure it out. Guess he should’ve got that GED, like Danica did.

Eventually he puts 2 and 2 together—figuratively speaking anyway. He’s thinking about computer chips, and it occurs to him that maybe this Silicon Valley place he’s been hearing could help him. Like many industry-based towns, it derives its name from the #1 local commodity—the stuff they build computer chips out of! And maybe his soldering iron and workbench just aren’t going to cut it, so long as he can’t get his hands on some of that stuff they have out there in Silicon Valley! Why didn’t he think of it before? He wants a computer chip that’s also a human implant, and both things are made out of the same material! Silicon!

A sound idea, I’m sure we can all agree. Unfortunately, it’s derived from a not-so-sound sense of spelling. (Again we witness the blessings of a GED.) Nevertheless, he grabs Danica by the wrists, yanks her out of her practice Spitfire or whatever, and pretty soon he’s hauling her to the local plastic surgery emporium so they can look into some specialty implants.

And the implant people are all like, well where should we start? And he’s like, can you get me something in a microchip? And they go, um what? And he goes, you know like the chips from Silicone Valley? And they go, oh! you mean a computer chip made out sil-icon! And he’s all like, huh? And they’re like, sorry dude, we do silicone implants, like, you know, tits and asses and things. And you know, if your daughter needs help with that, we’re totally here for you, but like all those other “implants” made out of silicon don’t really happen in real life, except but in the movies and stuff. And Danica’s dad goes, yeah it does, ‘cuz I saw it on Sliders once. And they go, dude Sliders is just a show. And he goes, yeah but Kari Wuhrer’s real and she’s got real implants and a slot in her head for them on the TV show. And they nod sagely and go, mmmhhmmm…true. And he's all like, see in this one episode of Sliders, she has this chip in her head and it makes her fly a fighter jet really good, and I want my daughter to win Nascar, so can you whip up an implant that we can shove in her head, please, pretty please? And they go, oooohhhh, well now that makes sense!

So pretty soon, PETA activists start turning up dead all over the country—their bodies missing various glands and organs an stuff. They’d all been last seen headed for demonstrations at some plastic surgery “clinic” called “A Better Vue of Yew,” located in Pimsqwat, West Indiana (or wherever Danica’s from). The place has been consuming vast numbers of test animals, only to barf them back out with microchip-sized slots in their heads. Truckloads of furry little critter corpses roll away from the place, which now has dark clouds boiling over it. Distant thunder rumbles. Eerie lights spill from the shuttered windows—all coral pink, laced with ochers and greens. The local townsfolk tremble and mumble. They sharpen their pitchforks and oil their torches and then turn back to another episode of Dancing with the Stars.

Then a commercial comes on, and they remember there’s something unnatural happening at the plastic surgery place—like, something involving the simulation of reality. So they get outraged, turn off Dancing with the Stars, and rush off to the “clinic,” which just happens to be located on this jagged, towering rock formation just outside of town.

But when they get there, it’s too late. The giant oaken doors of the plastic surgery place burst open, revealing its sleek, mod interior. (As sleek and mod as interiors get in burnt out, blighted mid-Western suburbs anyway, which basically means that there are potted plastic ferns and M.C. Escher prints scattered about. On a cheap end table, there are handfuls of outdated gossip, travel, and interior design magazines—the latter of which have nothing to do with the room in which they rest. And there’s spiffy linoleum tile in a pale, lime shade everywhere. It’s stained and dingy from years of use and negligence, and it doesn’t match the dismal manilla paint on the walls.)

So the doors burst open, as I said, and out shambles Danica—pretty much in the form you know her today. Her stare is a little bit more glassy. She’s a little more obviously in need of a drool cup. For Danica, a living state—in the traditional sense—has given way to highly attenuated bondage to the brand new implant that rattles around the slot in her skull. This transition challenges the very reptile stem of her mind. A synethesiac funnel cloud spins over the bedrock of her brain pan, twisting scents into shades into whispers and then back again. Satellite radio signals latch on to her chip and then toss 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny” into her ear canals, where the song’s bass lines fall like rocks down a bottomless well.

Danica lets out a tittering cry that none of the townspeople will ever forget. They recoil from the fathomless despair that flashes from her eyes, there, in the torchlight. And then they bolt out into the night—the persecutors now persecuted by a recognition of something much larger than themselves—something more ineffable than their own sense of righteousness.

TO BE CONTINUED IN ANOTHER EXCITING ENTRY SHORTLY!!!

Chips & Dips, Part 1

(Translator's Note: Most of what you read here was written a while back--like 5-10 years ago. Many of the references are dated, and I would not write in this voice at this point exactly. I have done what I could to clean up the entry without ruining its spirit. (Or whatever.) Inevitably, that approach will probably lead to some inconsistencies. I even had to write some new shit to glom it all together! Anyway, I had this lying around, and it seemed like as good a place as any to try to resuscitate this blog...

I've divided this into multiple entries--the others soon to be published--as its length was unwieldy. Keep an eye out, diehards! All 2 of you...

One more thing: I actually do like Kari Wuhrer and feel a little bad about some of what's written about her here. So--to Kari, or anyone that loves her--my apologies. It probably won't seem like it, my intentions were somewhat affectionate, if kind of opportunistic...)

In these days of cyber-blankout, it seems like every time you turn around some bundle of nerves is agonizing over how quickly society is evolving. (Or devolving.) They're all a-twitch with angst over the possibility that we've lost our moral, or biological, or theistic compass. Like we ever had a compass to begin with.

And one thing that really seems to yank their cranks is the possibility that we might be "playing god"—and in particular, how we might be trying to build people. I don't get it. If god didn't want us to build people, why would he/she/it/you/whatever have given us the capacity to do so? It's not as though people haven't had all kinds of time to get used to the idea. As far back as the Middle Ages, they say, cabalistic rabbis were running around making misshapen people out of clay! They'd send these golem things out to beat the shit out of anti-semites throughout Europe. And you know those rabbis were down with god, so if there were doing it—and today even educated MD's are doing it—why shouldn't anyone make people?

Another thing that happened a while back there—though not quite so long ago as golems and all of that other pottery shit—was Mary Shelley wrote some book about a dude building a dude out of other dead dudes. Apparently, she was a "Romantic," which at that time was code for "free-loving hippy," and just as you might expect a hippy to do, she made up all sorts of ludicrous shit about recycling (as in building new guys out of dead guys) and "green" energy. Dr. Frankenstein—the dude that she made up who made new dudes out of dead dudes—he used lightning to bring his homunculus to life. (Though, to be fair, that actually only happened in the movie, over which Mary Shelley probably did not have script approval, being as she'd been dead for around 200 years or so at that point. In the book, the dude used chemicals or some shit to build a dude, just like they do in real life now.)

So as I said, we've all had plenty of time to digest the idea that making people of our own is not only OK, but that it's probably what god wants us to do. It's only right and natural, as they say. (I mean, at least if we occupy ourselves with making people, we won't have the time to do something really bad, like making it so we can't get each other pregnant—or harvesting stem cells from the castoff fetuses that result from unwanted pregnancies so that millions of people wouldn't have to suffer from various godawful ailments. Because that would be immoral. Right?) 

All That moralistic agonizing seems to have given the endeavor of people-making a bad name, which is ironic. Not only is it another expression of human imperatives —to know and to do—it's encouraged social progress. Consider, for instance, feminism. Did Frankenstein just make a guy? Of course not! For every Monster, there is a Bride, and where he may be a drooling idiot, she is a lightning bolt of feminine defiance! Hell, half the time the story gets told, or adapted or ripped off, or whatever, the Doctor doesn't even make a dude. He makes chicks! Now you even get more progressive variants wherein the Doctor is a chick! So see? Often in making people out of nuts and bolts, and bones and clay, and clods of meat, and mats of hair, and sutures and cardboard and whatnot, we find ourselves practicing social egalitarianism—without even trying! Yay, us!

Look at The Stepford Wives! Everyone (that is, everyone who's just escaped from a time capsule from the 1970s) is always talking about what a feminist classic it is… How it is the true successor to Rosemary's Baby, which makes sense, being as both stories were written by the same hack, utilizing the same "Mad Libs for Writers," apparently. In that movie, a whole bunch of dudes make a whole bunch of chicks! So it really must have been feminist, right? Um, ok, well I'll grant you its feminism may seem sort of dubious, in retrospect, but it's still less questionable than the feminism of Rosemary's Baby, wherein Mia Farrow behaves as though she's both completely stupid and completely pathetic.

But OK. I'm getting off topic. (Which means I'm going to skip my insightful discussion of plants making people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, thus promoting a green agenda and other progressive stuff.) Because the topic is, actually, Sliders. You know, that Quantum Leap ripoff TV show from the 80s. (Or was it 90s?)

The great thing about Sliders—even better than all the great stuff about The Stepford Wives, or Rosemary's Baby, or maybe even Frankenstein—is the way in which it makes you think. It contains boatloads of social commentary, and lots of hardcore scientific fictionalization. But it's not all boring and Asimov like. It knows just when to titillate you with some reconstituted jizz jazz from somewhere or other. (It ripped off Jurassic Park twice.) And that's why I'm not embarrassed to say that I watched the entire show in order on Netflix recently.

You probably think you're above Sliders, I'll bet… And that may be a valid point. However excellent it may be, paradoxically, you have to've reached a pretty degraded point to actually feel OK about watching it. Aside from the fact that Sliders is a big memory quilt of high concept script ideas, it's also full of affable, cute young folks, especially by Season Four, when it'd decisively reached its formalist period (if a show like this one can even have a formalist period). They’d just dumped John Rhys-Davies from the cast. You know, that racist pig who played Gimli in Lord of the Rings, and who will probably be elected president of the US any day now. (So what if he's British? That didn't stop Boris Johnson from being elected POTUS.) Getting rid of him was a pretty good idea anyway, but it really marked the point when the show got good. It was a Jump the Shark moment in the classic sense—not so much the thing that showed that the show was now bad… (er, uh,) but rather a sign that the show had just hit its apex. Sure, there’s nowhere to go but down, once you've hit yr apex. But no one says you have to take that plunge right away!

Sliders sure didn't. Without that porcine Professor character, there were nothing but young pretty people left—especially Kari Wuhrer. I'm told that a lot of people do (or did) find Jerry O'Connell dreamy. Speaking for myself? Well… I kept waiting for the Sliders gang to teleport to a world full of giant, sentient frogs, so Jerry O'Connell could slip down into a big ol' pond, with just the top half of his head sticking out of the water. He'd just peacefully float around there till some nice, fat dragonfly flew by, and then PLAT! His giant gooey tongue would flick out like a fishing lure! Gulp goes the dragonfly! Then Jerry O'Connell could go back to tranquil semi-somnolence. Occasionally he might hop across some lily pads, or swim speedily and nimbly, pushing himself about with surprisingly long, spindly rear legs… And the other Sliders would feel real sorry to have to leave him there, on Frog World, but they'd recognize that it was for the best, because now ol' Jerry was in his Real, Happy Place. Y'know?

But that's me… You, apparently whack off to him, despite his overinflated head, weird amphibian features, lobster red complexion, buzzing nasal voice, etc., etc….

My fave spank material was Kari. I'm pretty naive. I didn't even know she was surgically, uh, augmented for a long time. I mean, they'd done some really nice work, and you got plenty of chances to ogle it during her time on Sliders. They were pretty great knockers. I mean, they were big, but not too big. I know: for some of you out there, there is no "too big." Boobs, schlongs, guns, cars, nuclear payloads… If you're baseball fans, you probably just want fast balls and home runs—damn the small ball and strategy and all of that.

Speaking of baseball, once or twice I’ve thought about it while whacking off to Kari. Otherwise I explode too soon, and the fun's over too fast, and speaking of explosions and altering the human body, did you know that one of Kari's boobs exploded? Yep. Pop! Can you imagine how embarrassing and traumatic that would be?!!? Here we have a very poignant dramatization of the whole "Why Thou Shouldst Not Play God By Messing Around With The Human Body" spliff! I mean, I feel sort of dirty even writing about it—for Kari's sake, and my own, because I'm probably blaspheming something or other.

Kari's personal, explosive disaster was laced with metatextual irony. She'd already hammed it up in an episode of Sliders called "Slide by Wire." (From Season 4, in case you wanna go toss it in your Netflix queue.) In it, Kari made oodles of (possibly self-deprecating) references to "implants." I'm not sure if she was delivering them with a straight face, because her acting isn't good enough.

Still… Here's a quick summary of the important stuff for you: The Sliders gang barely escape a humorless, militaristic world with their wormhole-generatin' "timer" that looks suspiciously like a Betamax remote control, circa 1982. (Interestingly enough, the wormhole looks like the video game Tempest, also circa 1982. I'd see a pattern here, except the other exponent—The Sliders gang—looks like the dinner theater troupe that they've probably mostly become, circa the present day.) I have to say, I found it really special that the Sliders writers started the episode in medias res. (Latin for "right in the middle of some shit.") Just like they do in every other episode of the show. I was even more impressed when they threw in a curve ball. One the Sliders gang had actually been left behind when they slid out Military World! And they'd slid off with her doppelgänger! Guess which gang member it was! Go on—guess!

Well, I think it's pretty obvious what happens from there on out… A bunch of soldiers show up and grab real-Kari, who they believe is fake-Kari. (They probably also believe her tits are real, just like I did.) And they take her back to one of those military labs, where everything—from the linoleum to the lighting—is as glaringly white as a Baldwin in a snowstorm. And this mad scientist chick shows up, who also thinks that real-Kari is fake-Kari. And she's a real-bitch—probably because she's jealous of just how spankworthy both the real and fake Kari’s are.

And it turns out fake-Kari is some hot shot fighter pilot. And now, to survive—because everyone in this parallel militaristic universe is paranoid about “the enemy” attacking and/or stealing state secrets—real-Kari has to make-believe, convincingly, that she's fake-Kari, which would be a challenge on a good day, because, as I was saying earlier, Kari's acting is, well, a little fragile. I mean, it's probably very difficult for Kari to play real-Kari, let alone fake-Kari. And then to have to play both of them at once!?!

Eat your heart out, Michael Fassbender! thespian-Kari does an adequate job here. And that's a good thing, because the plot is a challenge as well—for everyone from writer to actor to viewer… It turns out that in this dark, militaristic universe, the U.S. is gaining an edge over the Russians. Or maybe it was zombies. Or aliens. I really can't recall. Maybe it was these inter-dimensional wannabe Klingons called "Cro-Mags" that serve as recurring villains in the show's late, great episodes. They run around in shitty latex makeup, waving laser guns and ranting about "honor," as they try to enslave humanity throughout the multiverse. (Yes. This high-tek conquering species is called "Cro-Mags." How retro-futurist is that?) (Don't check me on the spelling though.)

So in the alternate, militaristic-universe, the U.S. is gaining a strategic edge over “the enemy” (whoever the fuck that may be). And the way that they're doing it is by sticking implants in people. And—get this—now real-Kari might be in trouble, because the paranoid, militaristic Powers that Be are going to discover that real-Kari has no implants, like fake-Kari did—and is therefore an impostor. 

So. Kari. Implants. Real/fake. If we're not dealing with self-reflexive humor, then, well, everyone involved—from writer to director to actor—is as oblivious as Oedipus. (Pre-Colonus.) All of this "implant" stuff is played with not the slightest nod or wink, which, given what a self-consciously cornball show Sliders is, seems beyond significant. The usual gags— that at best lead to groaning, at worst to apathy—are conspicuously MIA or AWOL. (Let's use militaristic vernacular here, since this is World of the Wars or whatever.)

What we have here is a jet-flying, adrenaline-pumping episode that is so overwrought and weighed down by a sense of gravity that it only sort of ever gets off the ground. In particular, there is this hand-wringing over implants. Bad old implants! Man wasn't meant to alter man—no matter the necessities! Global endgame is no excuse. Only god gets to alter man. But is it really hand-wringing? Maybe it’s nudging and winking…

Whether or not the writers’ had subversive intentions, I'm probably making the ostensible story sound more churchy than it really is. I will say—flat-out—that I find the episode's moral objections re: implants to be outright hypocritical. Look what implants did for Kari. (Real-real-Kari, I mean…the actress.) Until they exploded anyway. She's cute, but those altered jugs were, you know, were a fine embellishment on what god did…a (relatively) small artist's touch that, nevertheless, elevated The Cute to the The Sublime…or The Spankworthy anyway.

When you get down to it, all the bad guys in this episode of Sliders are trying to do is stick wires and chips in people's heads to make them better than god made them. What's wrong with that? They shove all these wires or whatever into the skulls of fake-Kari and the other pilots, squash down their craniums so nothing is sticking out, and then they turn the little spitfires loose! Presto! These pilots are even hotter shots than they were before! And they're not just doing loads of corny tricks like the Blue Angels do. They're saving lives. (Well, not Soviet lives—or alien, or "cro-mag" lives or whatever—but like, who's counting them?)

In other words, these scientists are not contradicting god's purpose; they are achieving it. One of god's big slogans—as we all know—is "thou shalt not kill." (It's as ubiquitous as "we have the meats"!!!) And isn't saving lives the opposite of killing? It's, like, putting lives back that would have been taken. Or something.

I know what you're thinking at this point: hardcore porn. But despite all the cyborgasms, this isn’t West World. Not a pant, nor a pint of unmentionables happens here. Instead, the scientists on militaristic world get greedy and fuck everything up. They want the pilots to be too good too much of the time, and the human resources department of the individual pilots, aka their bodies, start to suffer severe trauma. They get sick, delusional, and mean, just like my dad!

And then some Poindexter or other comes up with a really dumb idea. He thinks the scientists should start taking stuff away from god's creations to alleviate unnecessary stress. Any moron that understands this augmenting nature stuff could've pointed out the logical error this guy was making! When mucking around with Creation, you don't simplify… you elaborate! You don't streamline… you embellish! A lot!

It almost makes you think these idiots haven’t read Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau, or Re-Animator! Or at least seen the movies. Remember that part in Re-Animator where Jeffry Combs says, "Parts…I've never done whole… parts…" And then decides to stop trying to resurrect corpses, but instead to bring life to dead arms, legs, and, of course, heads. How did that go for him? He mistook amputation for success, and the goal always, always has to be glomming. What else can bring you super pilots? Or super boobs?

And these scientists don’t just mess around with a little nipping and tucking here and there—you know, remove a hand here or an anus there, because they think it makes the human body more attractive, or elegant, or funny. They toss out the whole body. And now we’re really in Lovecraft territory, because what we’re left with is a bunch of jars full decapitated heads, floating in some amniotic crud. Each jar contains the noggin of a hot shot fighter pilot who’d supposedly died in a past mission. And there are electrodes stuck all over the jars, which apparently allow the pilots to control these super-jets as thought they were right there in the driver’s seat! But even better! Because the brain-wave-to-jet connection is direct—it skips the pilot’s body with all its fallible reflexes. In a sense, the pilots become the planes. (Well, their brains do anyway. The rest of their head is still floating in a jar, and the rest of their body is medical waste.) 

And so that bitch scientist who runs the whole operation wants to decapitate real-Kari (who I think she now knows is real—or fake from her perspective—I guess—but I don’t remember for sure, because, let’s face it, this whole thing was getting sort of convoluted at this point). She wants to stick her head in a jar too. (One shudders to think what she might do with the rest of Kart’s smokin-hot bod. Visions of Ed Gien scamper about like sugar plum faeries with sewing machines. See, that’s the fun of creative homonculizing. It’s not just about science. It’s not just a perversion of nature and desire. It’s not merely a disturbed and disturbing art form. It’s a fun arts-and-crafts project! ) 

But meanwhile, we rejoin the rest of the Sliders gang, who are off in a parallel universe full of technophobes. And they’ve discovered that fake-Kari isn’t real-Kari right at about the same time that the scientist bitch is figuring out real-Kari isn’t fake Kari! (Talk about parallels!) They notice that she has this sort of slot for a SIMM card in her head, and it’s malfunctioning and giving her these really bad migraines. And they decide to take pity on her and bring her with them when they leave the luddite-universe to go back to the militaristic-universe. At first, I wondered why they’d forgive fake-Kari and trust her after she pulled that switcheroo, causing them to ditch real-Kari. That’s when I noticed that this Kari—fake-Kari—was in heat!

Real-Kari’s pretty much always flirting with Jerry O’Connel, who seems oblivious to her, uh, openings. (Maybe because he’s waiting for her to deposit a sac of eggs on a nearby log so he can splurt all over it and make tadpoles—or whatever else frogs do to have sex.) But fake-Kari’s no wallflower. She drags Jerry onto the floor of some club where luddites dance cheek-to-cheek, and she dry humps him and asks why they’ve never made the Beast with Two Backs. And he says, well gosh, our work’s too important to let sex get in the way of it. And the whole time he stares off into space like he so frequently does (maybe at a fly buzzing over a plate of buffalo wings that someone left behind). 

And of course it doesn’t really matter, because once they figure out that fake-Kari has a defective chip, they drop the idea of any sort of coupling. (Though I figure that’s why they don’t ditch fake-Kari now: because she might put out later.) And they escape Luddite-World in a hilarious bit where Jerry O’Connel pretends he’s a wizard and puts on a light show with their oh-so-deathly-important but always misplaced dimension-changing remote. This Tetris-inspired display scares the technophobe simpletons off. And then they go back to Military-Word and get real-Kari and dump fake-Kari so she can reconcile with her kindly husband from whom she’d bitterly separated because she cared more about planes than pricks. (No wonder she’s so horny at this point!) It warmed my heart to see how the spouses made up in the space of 30 seconds after years of acrimony. And it never would’ve happened without the Sliders gang. They do good work!

So the Sliders go zipping off to another exciting adventure, and I went slipping off into another alcoholic coma and dreamt of a parallel world wherein I could bang Kari till the cows came home—no matter how many implants she had or where they were. But here’s the thing: in the shower the next morning, I found myself forming the first waking thoughts of my day, and they were all about last night’s TV—as they pretty much always are. And I abruptly had a really good  idea: What if somebody threw chips into the heads of real life hotshots—only not to suit some dark, military agenda—because that always goes badly—but to entertain people?