Tommy Westphall

"I don't understand this autism.  I talk to my boy, but...I'm not  even sure if he ever hears me...Tommy's locked inside his own world.  Staring at that toy all day long. What does he think about?"

   A lot of people only seem to remember St. Elsewhere for its ambiguous ending, like the entire thing might have been fake. But St. Elsewhere also broke ground in other places. For instance, it had one of the first butts to be shown on prime-time television. So, you know, that's something. Not that that's anything too shocking. It was, like, Fred Willard's, or something. We all expected it from him sooner or later. But, anyway, the ending is also important.

   This is one of my most favorite subjects. It combines television with confusing canon-y bits with meta stuff. Basically, the ending of St. Elsewhere revealed the entire thing to (possibly) take place inside a snow globe owned by Tommy Westphall, a young autistic boy. St. Elsewhere often crossed over with other TV shows, and those shows crossed over with other shows sometimes, and so on, until a good 80% of everything on television may or may not take place inside the elaborate imagination of an autist. Yes, including that show you're thinking of right now. (It was NCIS, wasn't it? It's always NCIS.)

   No, I wouldn't be able to explain the entire thing to you. A lot of the shows that cross over just frankly kind of suck, for one. I'm not touching that. It's still great, though.

   Anyway, I'm bringing this up now because I recently stumbled across this, which provides logical arguments to claim that all our favorite fictional shows are not necessarily fictional, and provides six points against that. Which is good. A lot of stuff outright contradicted itself, like who the president was and stuff. Be sure to read the comments section there, as there might be some good stuff down there, too, who knows. Maybe you could tell me what's down there, as my brain just kind of switches off whenever someone uses a little question mark symbol for an apostrophe.

http://tar.weatherson.org/2004/10/04/six-objections-to-the-westphall-hypothesis/