Superb program that ended horribly

pschearer

I loved St. Elsewhere during its 1980's run. All the glowing statements here about the show are true. Few TV shows have reached the level of St. Elsewhere, and even fewer have surpassed it. But I felt insulted, even violated, by the series final episode.

****** S P O I L E R ******

For years I watched St. Elsewhere, coming to care deeply about many of the the characters, to the point of tears when the character played by Kim Miyori killed herself. Even the characters I loved to hate were important to me. The greatest creative works, from ancient Greek tragedy to the best of TV and movies, make you care about the characters. So when it was announced that St. Elsewhere was ending with a special episode that would tie up the plot lines, I was eager to learn what would happen to these people who had meant so much to me for so long.

Of the many story threads in that final show, I now remember only two. In the first, a hefty operatic soprano is brought into the ER with laryngitis before a performance. This gimmick was so obvious that it would have been barely laughable except that it signaled us in advance how we were to know that the show was over, and the anticipation made the plot trick work. When the fat lady sang, it was funny and we knew it was THE END.

Except it wasn't. The camera drew back to show the exterior of the hospital in a snowstorm, then the picture faded to the swirling interior of a snow globe containing the tiny shape of the St. Elsewhere building. We saw that the globe was being shaken by a child we recognized as the mute, autistic son of one of the hospital's doctors. But then we found that the boy's father was not a doctor at all but a blue-collar guy, and his grandfather was the "real life" version of yet another of the hospital's doctors. So the show's writers were telling us that the entire series was not just imaginary but the product of the imagination of a tragically damaged mind.

I was outraged and I am still fuming all these years later. I felt that I was being made a fool of for having cared for these characters. Of course, at one level they ARE imaginary since they are all fictional. But for the show's creators to take the characters that we were led to care about so strongly and reduce them to dreams or hallucinations was like a slap in the face to me.

I disagree with the poster who compared the St. Elsewhere ending with that of "Newhart". That series finale was one of the funniest and most imaginative events I have ever seen on television, and ending a comedy with such a huge laugh was absolutely brilliant. The fact that both series were wrenchingly revealed to have been dreams is insignificant compared to the fact that the Newhart ending was an absolute scream while the St. Elsewhere ending made me want to scream at the TV.

In all of TV I know of only one worse series ending, that of the British scifi series "Blake's Seven", when after four seasons, the writers wiped out the show's heroes in the last episode. "See? That'll teach you to care!" Don't these people have any respect for us at all?

score /10

pschearer 27 January 2006

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1276273/