Here’s a riddle; what connects Cheers, Jag, Lost, Leave it to Beaver, Married… with Children, The X-Files, and Breaking Bad all together? One little boy and a snow globe. A little boy named Tommy Westphall.
Tommy Westphall was is a child who is on the spectrum and was seen for a brief glimpse on the series finale of the 1980s show St. Elsewhere. That show was about life in a hospital called St. Eligius, and the drama that happens therein. Tommy himself appears in the show as the son of the hospital director. However, in the last five minutes of the last episode of the show, we see Tommy holding a snow globe as his father walks into the room.
The mystery deepens
However, his father is dressed as a construction worker. He sees his son and says “I don’t understand this autism thing… he sits there in his own little world.” As the camera fades out, we see that inside the snow globe is a miniature St. Eligius – showing that the entire show was really in Tommy Westphall’s daydream.
But what does this have to do with any other television show? Well, it turns out, two people noticed way too many crossovers to be just simply incidental. Keith Gow and Ash Crowe began working together and discovered that over 440 shows on English language television fit into the St. Elsewhere television universe, which means that all 440 of these shows are actually just the complicated machinations of an autistic boy named Tommy Westphall’s mind.
They have created a 20 page flowchart along with an enormous site map of this theory – a theory which suspiciously has very few holes in it.
Wait, what?
To begin to understand this theory, sometimes it is easiest to understand the chain by tracing the line backwards to the source – Tommy Westphall. In this example, let’s start with the British show Dr. Who. The Dr’s time/space travelling machine, the Tardis, can be seen in the BBC show Red Dwarf in a garage for machines built by a company called “Weyland-Yutani.” That company also created components for the spaceship in the TV show “Firefly.”
The Weyland-Yutani company is a client of the multidimensional law firm Wolfram and Hart, which is in the shows Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Wolfram and Hart also represent a manufacturing firm called Yoyodyne, which was mentioned the The John Larroquette Show. John Hemingway, the star of the The John Larroquette Show, once called in to a radio talk show hosted by a man named Frasier on a show of the same name. Frasier was a central character in Cheers for a little bit. The doctors on St. Elsewhere went to Cheers at one point, and it was revealed that St. Elsewhere may have just been a giant imagination inside of Tommy Westphall’s head.
That means that everything from the Tardis and the entire Dr. Who universe to Fraser and even Buffy the Vampire Slayer all occurred in the same universe.
Everything is linked
Another interesting facet which links a lot of these shows together are the similar brands, specifically Morley’s cigarettes. The cigarettes appear in shows such as American Horror Story, The Americans, Breaking Bad, Judging Amy, Seinfeld, ER, Fraiser, That 70’s Show, Walking Dead, all the CSIs, Prison Break, and Bones.
There are many more eerie coincidences which happen throughout all of these shows which allude to other shows. Maybe it’s nothing and we’re being paranoid. But maybe, just maybe, every single show we have grown to know and love are just the intricate machinations of the imagination of an autistic child in Boston.
