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?