St Elsewhere

Before ER and Chicago Hope, there was St. Elsewhere. Set in an urban teaching hospital in Boston’s South End, the residents of St. Eligius were tasked with taking care of patients that other hospitals didn’t want.

St. Elsewhere is not only credited for having one of the best episodes (“Time Heals”) in television history, but for also jump-starting the careers of Helen Hunt, Ed Begley Jr., Howie Mandel, Mark Harmon, and Denzel Washington. With such prestige, you wouldn’t expect the series finale to reveal that the entire series was nothing but the imaginings of an autistic child.

At the end of the series finale, the camera pulls to a wide-shot of the hospital to reveal that the building is actually inside a snow globe that’s being held by an autistic child. And who is this super-imaginative kid? As it turns out, the autistic child is the son of Dr. Westpall, the Director of Medicine for St. Eligius.

To make sure fans knew that the past 6 years were a waste of time, they included this line as the child stared into the snow globe: “I don’t understand this autism thing, Pop. Here’s my son. I talk to him. I don’t even know if he can hear me, because he sits there, all day long, in his own world, staring at that toy. What’s he thinking about?”