Wade Welles

Wade Kathleen Wells is a fictional character on the show Sliders played by Sabrina Lloyd.

Character overview

She is from San Francisco, and works at Doppler Computer Store while attending North Shore Junior College, where she studies literature and poetry.

She works at the store with Quinn Mallory and has a crush on him, of which Quinn is completely unaware. On later slides, she falls in with love with Quinn; in the episode "In Dino Veritas" she says that she would do anything for him, even die for him. She has a sister named Kelly, with whom she shared a bedroom growing up, and her father's name is Don. Wade is a computer expert. Her personal beliefs include a belief in supernatural powers.

Wade's last name is sometimes spelled Welles and sometimes spelled Wells. Her driver's license, shown in "Summer of Love", indicates that her birthdate is May 15, however, she also said she is a Virgo, which puts her birthday between August 23 and September 22. She said she was 23 in the episode "Time Again and World" which was in 1996, which means Wade was born in 1972 or 1973.

Life while sliding

How it started

On September 27, 1994, one of Quinn's doubles talks back at the boss, Mr. Hurley, and gets Quinn fired. He also kisses Wade. Hurley and Wade don't know that this was a double and thought it was the same Quinn they knew. Wade found this out later that day when Quinn invited both her and Professor Maximillian Arturo to his house to show them the sliding technology (technology to travel between parallel universes). Quinn, Wade, and Arturo all went sliding, and Rembrandt Brown, who happened to be traveling in the area was accidentally pulled into the vortex. For years, the Sliders continued to slide to different dimensions trying to find their way home..

During their adventures, Wade is a valuable asset to the group; creatively solving problems she and the group encountered along the way. At the beginning of the group's sliding, Wade didn't get along well with Rembrandt or the Professor. But, over time this would change and Wade would grow close to them both; especially Rembrandt.

Loss of a friend, and gain of an enemy

Wade was grief-stricken when Maximilian Arturo was shot by Angus Rickman. Maggie Beckett, who joined the remaining three sliders after Arturo's death, ridiculed Wade for her grief over Arturo's passing and saw this as evidence that Wade is weak. Indeed, Wade resented having to prove herself to Maggie. Wade and Maggie never got along. This began to change when Wade saved Maggie from a zombie in "Sole Survivors" and the two seemed to bond and become friends after they killed a T-Rex together in "Dinoslide". At the very least, Maggie and Wade both seemed to realize that they needed to work together and behave decently toward each other in order to cope with the crisis they dealt with and survive. Conversely, Wade was irritated at Maggie's desire to kill Rickman (who also killed Maggie's husband in addition to Arturo) out of revenge. This is presumably because Wade, herself, would never take another life. Quinn appeared to have romantic interest in Maggie when she first started sliding, which might have angered Wade since Quinn could never see that Wade liked him. During this time period, in the episode "Stoker", Wade got mixed up with the wrong crowd. It was revealed at the end of the episode that Wade felt lonely. Quinn reminded Wade that she has him and Rembrandt, but she said she felt she needed to be reminded of this more often than some people.

The slide home

Wade and Rembrandt were able to slide to Earth Prime (though Quinn and Maggie weren't able to for three months). Shortly after Wade and Rembrandt returned to Earth Prime, the Kromaggs took over. Although Wade and Rembrandt shared a prison cell, they couldn't talk much because they knew the Kromaggs would be listening and perhaps playing mind games (so the person they appeared to have been speaking to may have actually been a Kromagg imposter). Eventually, when Rembrandt wouldn't tell the Kromaggs what they want, they threatened to send Wade away to a breeder camp. When Rembrandt still wouldn't follow their orders, Wade was sent to the breeder camp. Although Rembrandt felt a large amount of guilt after this, Wade didn't blame him at all for what happened.

Requiem

After 18 months since they had been separated, Wade was finally able to telepathically communicate to Rembrandt through the multiverse and send the sliders to the Earth she was being held. Wade was being kept in a Kromagg science experiment to invade their homeworld; an experiment where her brain was being used as a computer along with other humans the Kromaggs had captured. Wade was able to sabotage the experiment so the Kromaggs wouldn't be able to invade. Rembrandt wanted to save Wade from the Kromaggs, but it wasn't possible to physically remove her from the Kromagg experiment. Rembrandt wanted to stay behind with Wade, but Wade wouldn't let him and made him slide to the world the others slid to. Wade destroyed the control panel of the experiment and blocked the Kromaggs from entering. It wasn't made clear whether she survived until the episode "The Seer", in which the titular character informed the surviving sliders that he had foreseen the deaths of "the Professor, and Miss Wells".

Beliefs

• In the episode "Dinoslide", Wade said she was a vegetarian. Sabrina Lloyd was also a vegetarian at the time the episode was made.
• In the episode "Into the Mystic", Wade said she believed in the supernatural. These beliefs are further examined in the episode "The Other Slide of Darkness".
• In the episode "The Good, the Bad, and the Wealthy", set on a world where gunfights were commonplace; Wade used the prevalence of guns on that Earth as a general argument against the ownership of firearms.
• In the episode "The Prince of Wails", Wade stated that her favorite revolution was the sexual revolution. Also stated in the episode "The Weaker Sex", Wade believes a world run by women would be a lot better than run by men. This is evident from her statement, "You can't blame women for reacting like this." Wade has feminist leanings, and her connection with Quinn helped him get a job.
• In "Obsession", Quinn notes that Wade is "a sucker for all this past life stuff".

Fears

Wade has a fear of blades or razors which is shown in The Dream Masters where one of the Dream Masters invades her dreams, after she defies him. In these dreams, he is shown to be holding a blade to her throat. In the episode, it is explained by Arturo that she had once been mugged by a knife-wielding assailant, leaving her forever after afraid of being attacked by blades of all sorts.

Sabrina name

• In "Into the Mystic", Wade says she has a friend named Sabrina who is interested in witchcraft. This is an inside joke aimed at actress Sabrina Lloyd who plays Wade,^[1] and may also allude to the teenage witch, Sabrina.

References