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&^%$ you St. Elsewhere!

Guy Gardener

Guy Gardener

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I'm only half way through the new episode of Greys Anatomy, where TV's KITT the car "William Daniels" who once upon a time was winning awards for playing Doctor Mark Craig in the ubiquitous St Elsewhere... Is playing "unnamed Doctor" on the incredibly sleazy pulp melodrama.

IF!

If Unnamed Doctor is in fact truly and really the contentious "Mark Craig" well you know what that means...

Seattle Grace is locked inside that damn Snow Globe too!

It's like Paradise lost in reverse!
 
No, it means some people take a stupid ending to a series far too literally - only St Elsewhere is really Tommy Westphall's fantasy - anything else it connects to can be explained by the way the dreaming brain works, incorporating all manner of subconsciously stored elements...

So, fuck Tommy Westphall, and the horse he rode in on. Little bastard's probably been dead for years anyway...
 
^^^If we're going to talk dreaming brains, no one can dream a narrative like St. Elsewhere.

But, then, autism isn't dreaming either. Intellectually, Tommy Westphall could consciously conceive (inasmuch as these things are conscious, anyway,) the series' plots. But, could an autistic understand the emotions of the stories in that fashion?

"Tommy Westphall" is a metaphor for an idiot God whose ways are not mysterious, but pointless. Which I think is still an infamously stupid ending, but is the kind of thing some people think is Art.
 
Six Objections to the Westphall Hypothesis

Tommy could have dreamed of real places. With only a few alterations, the entirety of St. Elsewhere could still have happened. There is no reason to think that just because a person, or entire series, is part of Tommy's dream, that it doesn't "really" exist. People dream about real places all the time.

Besides, logically speaking, Tommy can't dream of something that he himself isn't even in!
 
It kinds of bugs me that there were six great seasons of this hugely influential show, but this stupid trick ending is the only reason people ever talk about it. It's like Ted Williams being reduced to "The guy whose head was frozen."

Justin
 
Because I'm a child, I just started viewing recently.

Watched two seasons in a week.

I'd give the TV a standing ovation every time someone would say "You're a PIG Urlich!"

He got treated more civilly on Voyager where they murdered him.
 
ST. ELSEWHERE, in terms of multiple plotting and ensemble casting, was a conceptual ripoff of HILL STREET BLUES, but since it ripped off from the best-----and left out the handheld cameras-----it was very nearly as excellent.
The funny thing is that when HILL STREET ended, I was fine with it, but when ST. ELSEWHERE finished the following year, I was seriously bummed. Even without the unnecessary snowglobe conclusion, I would have felt the same way. During that time, only L.A. LAW remained, which was almost never in the same league.
 
J.T.B. said:
It kinds of bugs me that there were six great seasons of this hugely influential show, but this stupid trick ending is the only reason people ever talk about it. It's like Ted Williams being reduced to "The guy whose head was frozen."

Justin
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Then he shouldn't have had his fucking head frozen.

Same applies to St. Elsewhere.
 
So?

I'm taking it that none of you watch Greys Anatomy, or watched the episode with William Daniels that may have been a St Elsewhere crossover?

It's 2012.

If someone wanted to bring back Saint Elsewhere they already did and it's called Greys Anatomy.

Shit.

Greys Anatomy (sorta) crossed over with the OC.

CHRISMUKKAH IS IN THE BLOODY SNOWGLOBE TOO!!!!!

A universe without Chrismukka!?

Oh the humanity!
 
One of the best scenes in St.Elsewhere was where Daniels was walking through the local park and started signing one of his songs from the movie "1776" where he played John Adams. I think it was toward the end of the series.

(If you haven''t seen it, get it. Great musical. We play it every July 4th.)
 
JustAFriend said:
One of the best scenes in St.Elsewhere was where Daniels was walking through the local park and started signing one of his songs from the movie "1776" where he played John Adams. I think it was toward the end of the series.

(If you haven''t seen it, get it. Great musical. We play it every July 4th.)
Click to expand...

In one episode, he also stated that he was "obnoxious and disliked.". I didn't watch every episode, but is saw that one!
 
David Kelly's "Chicago Hope" also referenced Saint Eligius Hospital in a multiple episode story set at a medical conference in Las Vegas. And since the Kelly-verse has always been pretty well interconnected, virtually all of his shows essentially share this connection to St Elsewhere.

And numerous other shows later established connections to "Chicago Hope", thus indirectly linking them to "St Elsewhere" in the process. (Most notably "The West Wing" which already shared a common "verse" with several of Aaron Sorkin's other projects, thus linking them to St Elsewhere as well.) Also, both "Chicago Hope" and "ER" regularly made references to one another, though inconsistently, with them sometimes treating the other as a real hospital across town in some episodes, and as nothing more than a fictional television hospital in others.
 
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J.T.B. said:
It kinds of bugs me that there were six great seasons of this hugely influential show, but this stupid trick ending is the only reason people ever talk about it. It's like Ted Williams being reduced to "The guy whose head was frozen."

Justin
Click to expand...

Nah, what bugs me is how half the net seems to want to use the ending to say another show is "in the snowglobe" - no it fucking isn't, it's a different show.

Kelley likes to interconnect his shows, but I'd be willing to be that it wasn't his intention to have them all (let alone everyfuckingthing else ever made) dismissed as being part of Westphall's dream.
 
The Westphall thing is neat to play with, but it's hardly original. Michael Moorcock and several other writers had already done the "my fictional universe connects with every fictional universe" thing years before St Elsewhere ended.

That said, the ending of St Elsewhere definitely is one of the best "f-you's" to the industry I've ever seen.

One thing that the Westphall thing does do, though, is illustrate how shows can be connected, even if the intention is not to connect them. I mean, like it or not, Homicide Life on the Street and Law & Order and its franchise do indeed share the same universe as The X-Files because of the Richard Belzer character crossing over between them. And the 1980s soap opera Passions exists in the same universe as Bewitched because of its crossover characters. Now all we need is for Belzer to make a cameo as his Homicide/SVU character on one of the American episodes of Doctor Who...

Alex
 
23skidoo said:
THomicide Life on the Street and Law & Order and its franchise do indeed share the same universe as The X-Files because of the Richard Belzer character crossing over between them.
Click to expand...

No, they don't. X-Files has been referenced as a fictional TV show in at least one Homicide episode.

The fact that Munch is in both X-Files and Law & Order/Homicide is irrelevant. It's simply two parallel versions of the same character.
 
The industrial military complex in the X-Files Universe made sure that there was also in congress with Mulder searching for the truth that there was a TV show about Mulder searching for the truth so that actual real stories about Mulder searching for the truth would come across as idiots and crazy people missremembering TV as reality.

It happens all the time.

Most TV is secretly real.

You know, except for Reality TV.
 
Lonemagpie said:
J.T.B. said:
It kinds of bugs me that there were six great seasons of this hugely influential show, but this stupid trick ending is the only reason people ever talk about it. It's like Ted Williams being reduced to "The guy whose head was frozen."

Justin
Click to expand...

Nah, what bugs me is how half the net seems to want to use the ending to say another show is "in the snowglobe" - no it fucking isn't, it's a different show.

Kelley likes to interconnect his shows, but I'd be willing to be that it wasn't his intention to have them all (let alone everyfuckingthing else ever made) dismissed as being part of Westphall's dream.
Click to expand...

What about Denny Crane? There's no way he's real! :lol:
 
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