Comments on: Six Objections to the Westphall Hypothesis

By: russell bates

russell bates — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 05:49:37 +0000

Hello, I am a TV writer and have a few qualifications therefrom (the only creative Emmy any STAR TREK series ever won, for the episode “How Sharper Than A Serpent’s Tooth”) to make one small comment. What most all of you have forgotten is that the focus of Tommy Westphall’s ‘dreaming’ was the glass snowfall globe with a miniature St. Elygius Hospital inside. The symbolism therefore, which almost everyone overlooked is that, within a finite universe, only a certain number of possibilities can be attained and the series was being ended by its creators because they believed they had achieved the very best of those finite possibilities. End of series, no great mystery, but a nicely symbolic syllogism all the same. Try it, you’ll like it!—-Russell Bates

By: Greg

Greg — Tue, 05 Oct 2004 22:52:55 +0000

It is fairly easy to accept that all of the shows are a product of T.W.’s imagination if we accept that imagination doesn’t rely on the same sort of logic as “reality”. Furthermore, given that T.W. is established as being autistic (and given that autism can be profoundly weird, insofar as the best and the brightest have a hard time determining what, precisely, it is) he has the potential for a super imagination (we have no reason to doubt that a fictional autistic boy can have a wild inner life). In othe words, I don’t see how the Westphal Hypothesis can be logically disproven unless we can first establish the rules under which a fictional autistic boy’s inner reality operates.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 05 Oct 2004 19:54:54 +0000

So by the logic used here, the real world (taken to be either what we’re in or the MTV show of the same name) is part of the giant St Elsewhere fiction. This is clearly false. (Or at least it was last I checked.) When did you check? How? Can I have a go? It strikes me that the truth conditions of this sentence (the claim that Weatherson has at some point in the past checked whether or not the world of St Elsewhere was the same as the real world) strongly implies that the “real world” is a construct of Brian’s imagination. Which would explain much if true.

By: Ray Davis

Ray Davis — Tue, 05 Oct 2004 19:09:05 +0000

Much more believable than a single dream—dangerously believable and nervously backed away from—was the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” episode which explained the show’s wobbly plotline as the junk-culture-sodden megalomaniacal fantasy of a nearly catatonic young woman who’d been institutionalized since 1996. But “Buffy” was always great on metafiction.

By: Simon

Simon — Tue, 05 Oct 2004 14:00:32 +0000

I'm also having problems with objections 3-5. My dreams can have many locations, and sometimes can even have me as a 3rd party observer rather than a participant- a camera, if you will. With that in mind, why do Joey and Friends have to be in the same city? I can dream I've visited New York and spent time with the friends even without leaving London. Why does Tommy have to leave his hospital bed?

By: Jacob T. Levy

Jacob T. Levy — Tue, 05 Oct 2004 03:16:15 +0000

Erik said: “We would feel there was a mistake if there was no Daily Planet in Batman’s Metropolis.” Or else we’d feel that Batman’s Metropolis was in a different fictional universe. (Earth-B was the standard pre-Crisis location for all the otherwise-screwy-continuity Batman crossovers from Brave and the Bold.) Superman is a fictional character. Superman existed on Earth-1 and Earth-2 and showed up on Earth-prime a few times and also existed in the Superfriends universe, the Christopher Reeve movie universe, and the Kingdom-Come-verse. Yet these are all demonstrably not the same fictional universe. Objections 5 and 6 are part of the comics-reader’s intepretive toolkit from the moment he or she becomes literate…

By: Bruce from Missouri

Bruce from Missouri — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 22:55:04 +0000

And I thought I had to much time on my hands…..wow.

By: Dnash

Dnash — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 22:48:51 +0000

all of “Newhart” was just a dream of the Bob Newhart character from “The Bob Newhart Show”. How does this impact the Westphall Hypothesis? According to the list, Elliott from the “Bob Newhart Show” checked into the psych ward of St. Eligius on “St. Elsewhere.” Hence, presumably TBNS is also part of the Westphall dream, just like SE. Which would make both the second “Newhart” show and “I Dream of Jeannie” dreams-within-a-dream.

By: bryan

bryan — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 21:55:48 +0000

1 and 2 are crap. that you don’t care for the westphall argument does not make it invalid, which is basically what they boil down to. 3 is the kind of argument that makes me groan when made in a big enough auditorium. 4 is not logical. against the argument that Westphall has created the worlds of all these tv shows you suggest that because the creators of these shows would not want westphall to have created them, he did not create them. Actually i think this is the kind of argument that would cause me to hit someone if I heard it in a large auditorium. However all is not lost. I’ve never seen a full St. elsewhere, and all I know about the last episode is what you wrote “P1. All of St. Elsewhere (except the last scene) takes place in Tommy Westphall’s mind.” now if the last scene does not take place in Tommy Westphall’s mind then there is still a world of St. Elsewhere’s, the question then become is how far does that world deviate from world of Tommy’s imagination, I would suggest a principle of least required deviation, i.e. that it only deviates as far as necessary to take into account the last scene. Once that last scene is taken into account is there any possibility of the worlds of other sitcoms that we’ve been arguing are within Tommy’s mind could be brought into agreement with the view of reality presented when Tommy wakes up? In cases where they can I propose that we suppose those worlds are existent outside of Tommy, although they may be existent within him as well.

By: phil

phil — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 21:09:40 +0000

All sitcoms are fictional. It stands to reason that they’re all a dream.

By: HP

HP — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 20:11:11 +0000

John, Hamilton: IIRC, in the Bob Newhart reunion show, Howard Borden reveals that he had a dream that he was an astronaut, and his best friend kept a genie in a bottle. I read that on the key that goes with the grid, and yes, it’s all tied to the Westphall Hypothesis. (The key is much more impressive than the grid, IMO.) In a more literary vein, has anyone here read Joseph Heller’s Closing Time? It follows the characters from Catch-22 in their old age. One chapter introduces a friend (IIRC) of Yossarian’s, who spent the war in a Schlachthof in Dresden with a writer named Vonnegut and a chaplain’s assistant named Pilgrim. His daughters tell him that Vonnegut wrote some sort of story about Dresden, but he doesn’t like books.

By: Hamilton Lovecraft

Hamilton Lovecraft — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 17:07:16 +0000

If I remember rightly, the finale of “Newhart” also posited that all of “Newhart” was just a dream of the Bob Newhart character from “The Bob Newhart Show”. How does this impact the Westphall Hypothesis?

By: John Davies

John Davies — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 16:51:47 +0000

Something else is interesting to me. There is no overlap between St. Elsewhere and the two other famous dream TV shows, Dallas and The Bob Newhart Show. Maybe all shows can boil down to three dreams.

By: digamma

digamma — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 15:13:18 +0000

So by the logic used here, the real world (taken to be either what we’re in or the MTV show of the same name) is part of the giant St Elsewhere fiction. This is clearly false. But not provably so. I could wake up one minute from now in my 1954 bed and say “Damn, that was a weird dream about what the world will be like in 50 years.”

By: Keith

Keith — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 14:37:04 +0000

From the ‘Pataphysical perspective, it’s possible that all of these characters in all of these shows are the product of tangentially related dreams, i.e. that each show exists in a soap bubble universe, Cheers next to St. Elsewhere and so on and so forth, and that their membranes are semipermiable, and thus characters unknowingly slip bewteen one bubble reality and the next and never realise it because the adjacent bubble worlds have enough surface details in common (including setting) to give the sense of continuity. Thus, each related show with common characters is a purmutation of each other. But all the soap bubbles are in Tony Westphall’s mind, which is also his bathtub.