Ed Flanders And Norman Lloyd Ended ‘St. Elsewhere’ With A Snow Globe, And Even The Cast Couldn’t Agree What It Meant

For six seasons, St. Elsewhere asked viewers to believe in a run-down Boston teaching hospital called St. Eligius, and then, in the last minute of its final episode, it seemed to take the whole place away. “The Last One” aired on NBC on May 25, 1988, and it closed on an autistic boy named Tommy Westphall, played by Chad Allen, staring into a snow globe while his father set it on top of the family television. Inside the glass sat a tiny model of St. Eligius.

So was it all in a little boy’s imagination? The short answer is that the writers meant you to think so. Producer Tom Fontana has said plainly that the point of the scene was that the series took place in Tommy’s mind. What the show never did was spell it out, and the bigger idea that grew from that snow globe, the so-called Tommy Westphall Universe, is a fan theory, not anything NBC ever put on screen.

What Did Viewers Actually See In The Final Minutes?

The episode had already done the heavy lifting of a finale. Ed Flanders, who had walked out of the series as Dr. Donald Westphall in 1987, came back for it, and Westphall was set to run the hospital again. Dr. Daniel Auschlander, the gentle chief played by Norman Lloyd, died. Then Westphall and Tommy stood in Auschlander’s old office and watched snow fall outside the window.

That is where the picture cut away. The hospital’s exterior shook, and suddenly Tommy was sitting on the floor of an ordinary apartment with a snow globe in his hands. Auschlander was there too, alive, and he was now Tommy’s grandfather. Westphall walked in wearing a construction worker’s hard hat, an everyday dad home from the job. He told his father he didn’t understand his son’s autism and wondered aloud what went on inside the boy’s head. Grandpa sent Tommy to wash up for dinner, and Westphall put the globe on the TV as the camera moved in on the little hospital. Nobody ever said the word “dream,” and that silence started an argument that has outlived the show.

Why Did The Writers Choose A Snow Globe?

The ending came out of a writers’ room that liked to push its luck. The story for “The Last One” is credited to Tom Fontana, John Tinker and Channing Gibson, with the teleplay by executive producer Bruce Paltrow and Mark Tinker, and all five shared a 1988 Emmy nomination for drama writing, according to the Television Academy.

Fontana had kept a list of wild ways the show could end, and when the cancellation came, he carried it into a meeting with Paltrow. According to The Telegraph, one option had Dr. Jack Morrison confessing he was the second gunman on the grassy knoll, and another wiped out the entire cast in a nuclear explosion. When Fontana pitched the snow globe, Paltrow’s verdict, as Fontana later told it on the Imaginary Worlds podcast, was hardly a rave: “Well, it’s not the worst one. Go ahead and write it.” The Telegraph and TVLine both describe Paltrow calling it “the least bad option.”

Paltrow came around once it aired. “A lot of people found it very disturbing, and others were absolutely blown away,” he told St. Louis critic Eric Mink. “I’m delighted with those who liked it, and I’m very sorry about those who didn’t.” Paltrow died in Rome on October 3, 2002, at 58, so the man who pitched the scene has done most of the explaining since.

What Did Tom Fontana Say It Meant?

Fontana has never been coy about the intent. “What I wanted to say was that this show, this series took place in the mind of an autistic child,” he told The Telegraph. “It is not real, and it’s over now.”

He has also defended the gamble. “I think we were consciously trying to be audacious,” he said in a 2018 interview with the Paley Center’s Paley Matters, adding that a show shouldn’t wrap up every single story, because in its own world the story keeps going. On the podcast, he added that the idea “adds a whole other layer” to what an autistic person can or cannot do.

The audience was split right down the middle. “The response in the mail was about 50/50,” Fontana told PRI’s The World. “Half of our audience hated, hated, like wanted to come to the MTM lot and burn us to the ground, and the other half thought it was fitting part of the show.” As it turned out, the actors who lived inside that snow globe were just as divided.

Why Couldn’t The Cast Agree On It?

Norman Lloyd, who was 73 when the finale aired and spent six seasons as Auschlander, never made peace with it. “I said at the time we were shooting, ‘This is a cheat,'” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2023. According to TVLine, he also called it a letdown, saying he wanted the experience “to be maintained as a real one, not a dream.” Lloyd died in May 2021 at 106.

David Morse, now 73, who played Dr. Jack “Boomer” Morrison, felt the leap was simply too far. “It’s too much. It’s just too big a leap,” he told EW. Bonnie Bartlett, now 97, who played Ellen Craig opposite her real husband William Daniels, suspected a motive. “They really wanted to kill the show,” she said, and in a 2012 EW interview she was blunter still: “I thought it was terrible.”

Chad Allen, who was 13 when the finale aired, remembered being puzzled himself. “I thought I knew what it meant, but it was so weird, especially for my younger mind,” he told EW. Ed Flanders, the father in that final scene, died in 1995 at 60, so his view of the twist is one we never got.

Is The Tommy Westphall Universe Real?

Here is where canon ends and fan theory begins. In January 2002, comics and TV writer Dwayne McDuffie wrote an essay called “Six Degrees of St. Elsewhere.” His point was simple: if St. Elsewhere happened in Tommy’s head, then every show that ever shared a character with it must live there too. McDuffie meant it partly as a joke about crossover logic, but fans took it seriously anyway.

The chain is longer than you might think. Fontana went on to run Homicide: Life on the Street, which crossed paths with St. Eligius, and that show’s Detective John Munch later turned up on Law & Order and The X-Files. Melbourne playwright Keith Gow and his friends began charting the links, and Mental Floss counted more than 400 series that could be traced back to that snow globe. None of it was ever confirmed on screen.

The man who started it all ended up loving it. “I was stunned!” Fontana told PRI when he first saw the chart, and he has said the theory “basically means that Tommy Westphall is the mind of God,” a line Mental Floss also quoted. Talking to Paley Matters, he admitted the idea first “completely devastated” him, because the writers had believed their show was a speck in the universe, “and then it turned out that our show was the universe.”

Chad Allen grew up, starred on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman as Matthew Cooper and is one of the stars still with us from that frontier drama’s cast. Now 52, he left acting in 2015 and earned his doctorate in clinical psychology in 2020. And the snow globe itself? It never went back to a prop warehouse. “You know, I still have the snow globe,” Fontana said in 2018, thirty years after a little boy shook it and sent St. Eligius into the snow.