10 TV Finales That Messed With Your Brain
1. St. Elsewhere - ‘The Last One’
Shaping the television landscape in the 1980s and paving the way for medical dramas like E.R., Chicago Hope and Grey’s Anatomy, St. Elsewhere also boasts the most bizarre series finale of all time: one that divided cast and crew when they were making it and the show’s entire audience when it was broadcast.
In the final minutes, the scene cuts from snow-covered urban teaching hospital St. Eligius - the setting for all 6 seasons and 137 episodes - to a room in an apartment building. Tommy, supposedly the autistic son of Dr. Donald Westphall, one of the show’s central characters, is playing with a snowglobe. His father, a construction worker, comments that he wishes he knew what his son was thinking about… and the camera zooms in to the snowglobe, revealing a perfect replica of the snow-covered St. Eligius inside.
The implication was that the entire show - every character, every storyline - had been the introspective daydream of an imaginative autistic teenager. That was audacious enough, and blew viewers minds when it was first broadcast in 1988.
The thing is, in the last three decades those implications have expanded… because, like many other network TV shows, St. Elsewhere crossed continuities and characters with other shows being broadcast, which in turn crossed over with other shows… all of which were also now revealed to be figments of Tommy’s imagination.
Today, they call it the Tommy Westphall Universe, and it encompasses at least 419 American television shows, including classics like M*A*S*H*, Cheers, Columbo, Friends and Doctor Who, everything in the Criminal Minds, NCIS, CSI and Star Trek franchises, and even modern day TV like 24, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead.
Now that messes with your brain.