St. Elsewhere and the snow globe ending

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Michele Soavi’s excellent philosophical zombie film Dellamorte Dellamore is IIRC bookended by snowglobe sequences. The final scene is similar to the contents of the globe, but it appears to be more metaphorical than suggesting that it was literally imagined there.

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Wait, are you saying Denzel Washington was in a TV show???

I am, frankly, amazed someone put all this together. I am a huge fan of deep, interwoven threads in TV shows (think Babylon 5 or seasons 6-8 of Stargate SG-1), but this? This is beyond all that. And what’s truly awesome about this whole tracker is, given the breadth of the referencing shows, writers are practically continually adding to this web every time they make cross-references to TV in almost any other genre now.

500 years from now archaeologists will discover this and believe St. Elsewhere was some sort of religion or something that became pervasive and all-encompassing.

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Posted by mistake!

I would also like to remind everyone of this:

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It’s worth remembering the source of the theory –

http://www.slushfactory.com/content/EpupypyZAZTDOLwdfz.php

It’s a humorous essay by the late, great Dwayne McDuffie. He was making fun of the idea of overly serious comic book continuity by seeing what happened if you did the same thing to TV shows. He ends the piece by writing:

"So what does this prove, other than the fact that I’ve got too much free time? Well, my point and I do have one (I can steal this catch phrase because, as I’ve already proven, Ellen never existed), is that while guest-shots and crossovers can be fun, obsessive, cross-series continuity is silly.

It’s silly in comics too. Relax and enjoy the show."

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The show had a truely great cast.

Nope, the snow globe is NOT amusing. That gag got old for me after reading PKD’s novel Ubik, where it turns out the entire action of the story took place inside a group hallucination of superconducting corpsicles. Never read a PKD work again.

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Including Howie Mendel. And the car from Knight Rider.

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Living in Boston where St. Elsewhere is set and the building still stands what first bothered me about the show maybe being a dream was that in the opening credits an Orange Line train passes by the building going in the wrong direction for actual Orange Line traffic at that time. Trains on that side of the tracks would be heading for Dover Station from Northhampton Station not the other way around.

I wonder if the MBTA did a special run for the opening credits of St. Elsewhere? The trains and elevated tracks are now gone but the St. Elsewhere building (The Franklin Square House Apartments) still remains.

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Oh yes, miss this show. I mostly enjoyed when they would relax on the roof of the Titanic.

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I believe they call this a “brick joke”.

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Seconding recommendation.

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There are countless similar real world continuity errors with shows set in DC and the surrounding landscape and Metro system. (The “Cathedral Heights Station” for a pivotal scene in House of Cards, for example. Or the location of the Hydra Base in recent episodes of Agents of Shield being in Arlington Cemetery, based on tracking shots. ) You can drive yourself nuts trying to reconcile the whims of Hollywood writers and their mindfuckery.

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My names ben wheatley. I directed some episodes of doctor who. I got the art department to build a tommy w snow globe and I placed it inside the tardis. It’s part of the general dressing. I wonder what that does to the theory :slight_smile:

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That’s not writers, that’s location managers. Writers type things like “Ext., Secret Base” and location managers go through large folders finding places that could look like a secret base that they can get decent exterior coverage of. The director then picks one and they go to work, only to have everything go pear shaped the day off the shoot and the helicopter is grounded so they need to do it from a crane shot but that requires them to now have to drive over a bridge but they can only close two lanes and they have to do the tracking shot from left to right, hope they can avoid showing the Eternal Flame and the trash bins and just see how it goes.

You’d be surprised how much film and TV is just kind of made up on the spot due to circumstances. Especially b-unit exterior stuff. “Well, that’ll have to do,” is the catchphrase.

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“But don’t you see, now everything can be tied together, this is the last piece of the puzzle in the Grand Unifying Theory of Snowglobe!”

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Tommy Westphall and his snow globe universe can eat separate bags of dicks. Tommy because of autism exploitation, his universe because it’s lazy-ass writing that insults all of our collective intelligence.

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I know there’s an insult in here, and I’m pretty sure I know what it is, but this variant I’m going to chalk up to an autocorrect.

Or it’s some crazy-ass variant I’ve never heard before. You kids and your slang!

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