Open Threads

The Day Thread is in Tommy Westphall’s Imagination

I don’t much care for fan theories and any non-canonical stuff as far as my fiction goes, but the Tommy Westphall multiverse really floats my boat.

So who is he and what am I talking about?

SPOILER ALERT FOR ST. ELSEWHERE

The 1988 series finale of St. Elsewhere (creatively titled “The Last One”; yeah, take that, Friends) ends with character Donald Westphall looking out a hospital window at the falling snow. The camera continues pulling out until we see the hospital is in a snow globe held by Donald’s son Tommy.

This leads to the interpretation that the whole show took place in the snow globe, in this kid’s imagination.

Here’s where it gets fun: because characters from St. Elsewhere crossed over to other shows, those shows by extension, also only exist in this kid’s head.

For example, the doctors from St. Elsewhere once visited Cheers. Cheers begat Frasier, and Frasier also appeared on an episode of Wings. And so on.

As of 2017, the multiverse included 441 shows, including:

  • The X-Files  553468
  • Firefly
  • The Wire
  • Doctor Who
  • Arrested Development
  • Breaking Bad
  • Oz
  • Seinfeld
  • M*A*SH
  • Friends
  • The Cosby Show
  • Star Trek (all of them)
  •  Three’s Company
  • Full House

Guys, none of them were real!

Here’s a diagram mapping out all the connections of the Westphall multiverse (click on it for a larger view):

a24

And if you don’t care about that, today is also the birthday of Jimi Hendrix, Bill Nye, Sharlto Copley, Jean Grae, and Frank Dicksee (lol).