Invasion Seasons 1 & 2 DVD Box Set Region 1 NTSC Seasons 1 & 2 DVD Box Set Region 2 PAL

(Sliders Story No. 22, starring Jerry O'Connell) written by Tracy Tormé directed by Richard Compton music by Anthony Marinelli produced by Mychelle Deschamps (and Jon Povill, Tony Blake and Paul Jackson) Production # K0811 Story: The Sliders discover a world that appears to have been invaded by an unknown species called Kromaggs, who arrive in bizarre flying Manta Ships. Why is Quinn's timer somehow linked with the invaders' technology? And why do the Kromaggs take sudden, intense, fearful interest in the four Sliders?

DVD Extras include:

• "The Making of Sliders" featurette (14 minutes) with Jerry O'Connell (Quinn), Cleavant Derricks (Rembrandt), and writer/creator Tracy Tormé.

Announced as a brand new episode some time after the broadcast of the story with season two's last production code, "Invasion" took over a position as the season two finale in my mind, and since it continues to have the most deserving content for a finale amongst all of season two's stories, it has kept the post. At long last, this series made serious strides to grow beyond its "Gilligan's Island" arc and give the four Sliders a continuing goal larger than the otherwise series-ending desire to return home. And it did so in ways that allowed for a lot of sci-fi concepts and entrappings to be explored and made mysterious. Practically every scene in this story introduces new information and moves the story forward, while also providing a ton of exciting visuals. In short, this episode is a big sci-fi winner in Sliders second season, and critical to understanding the continuing mythology of the show.

The opening wormhole effect is done on the cheap, employing the now much overused clip of the wormhole interior and little else.... but considering what comes later in the episode, who cares? After a typical humourous bit of banter between the regulars, the story enters one of the longest and strongest stretches of sci-fi exploration ever on the show. The interest is squarely on the new invading army debuting on the show here, and the regulars draw out a constant stream of answers to some expertly posed questions regarding them.

In one of the most brilliant strokes, the Kromaggs keep to the shadows mostly, which helps heighten the creep factor and the sense of mystery surrounding them. Nicely done.

Many kudos are due to the production crew during the opening segment, firstly on the design of the Kromagg craft. Perhaps even better is the rich montage of sound effects layered all throughout this sequence, easily the most essential and effective element creating the heightened, creepy sense of atmosphere for our protagonists' investigations. The series "Sliders" had been very focused on displaying mere present-day human social differences up until this point, but this story successfully shifts gears to tackle the more traditional sci-fi arena of species differences and mismatched technological stages and goals, and one gets the feeling that many of the production technicians were eager and waiting to cut loose like this. Awesome.

As the story goes on, it squeezes in many an opportunity for trademark humour, while tension is expertly built up with wordless visuals, now that certain design elements have been successfully established.

Later on we come to the least traditional and most bizarre part of the story. All the stops are pulled out here, until the Sliders and the audience are forced to ask deep questions about the truth of what is really going on. Rembrandt gets a particularly good moment that shows us more about his family than we have ever had on the show before. Nice one.

Una Damon, who would go on to appear in feature films like "Spiderman" and "The Truman Show", gives an incredibly moving performance as Mary here, starting very subtly and gradually becoming more and more interesting as the episode goes on. Nice work.

Anthony Marinelli produces his best season two Sliders score here, creating a compelling action theme used for several of the story's key scenes, and generally backing the Kromagg threat with a variety of dark music that alternately highlights their menace and otherworldly mysteriousness as appropriate for each scene. Very good stuff, and probably my favourite music overall from the season.

Sliders scored an important winner with this episode. Not only does it raise the stakes far higher than ever before on the show, it also rendered the characters' long-term goal of finding home something that the writers and producers could now achieve without automatically triggering the end of the show. In fact, it looks from this point like they had all kinds of good things for the show's future mapped out in advance. From here, you want to see the Sliders get home for the next chapter in this new saga, of course after maybe a dozen more episodes exploring the unknown as they had been doing and perhaps discovering one or two other new long-term hooks for the show's future. Anticipation for golden opportunities in season three could not have been higher.....

Season Two Rankings:

Seasons 1 & 2 DVD Box Set Region 1 NTSC for the North American market: in the U.S. in Canada	Seasons 1 & 2 DVD Box Set Region 2 PAL for the U.K.

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