I’ll admit it. I thought that Doorways was just a rip-off of Sliders.
However, it was made two years earlier, and there have even been claims that Sliders borrowed from Doorways.
It is hard to miss the fact that there are quite a few similarities. But there really aren’t any connections between the two.
The other curious fact about this one is that it was written and executive produced by George R.R. Martin.
This was back before he even began his Game of Thrones series of books, and was best known for his series of fantasy novels, Wild Cards. However, he already had a fair background in TV as he was a producer and writer for the TV series Beauty and the Beast, he’d written episodes for the Eighties revival of The Twilight Zone, and Deadly Nightmares, and his novelette Nightflyers had been made into an almost good but forgotten film.
Now, while this is usually called a TV movie (although it seems to have gone direct to video, or was perhaps released on cable) it was intended as a pilot for a TV series for ABC. They liked it enough to order six episodes and then dropped it before they were made.
If you’ve seen Sliders, you’ve got the general idea already. It involves travel between alternate Earths, and the characters have to keep racing to find the doorway that will lead them into the next world. We do get some nasty aliens and their human trackers chasing them, and the mysterious girl, Kat, who appears in our world and drags the hero along with her, has some interesting alien technology which is sort of an organic/electronic hybrid.
One of my favorite Eighties actors, Country singer Hoyt Axton, makes a welcome guest appearance as a friendly wanderer in an oil free world. One would like to think that they’d keep running into alternate versions of him (as they do with another character) but I don’t suppose it really matters.
When you watch failed TV pilots, all too often it isn’t hard to see why they failed. I can’t say this one is bad — it is reasonably entertaining, and would be far more satisfying if it didn’t end on an unresolved cliffhanger.
But I can’t help but think that the competition at the time included Babylon 5, Deep Space Nine and The X-Files.
Doorways has the feel of a nice try which would have run as a mid-season replacement and never made it past those first six episodes.
Oh well. I guess George would have better luck eventually.
rivets on the poster 