File Under "Fanatically Obsessive"

Last week on the season premiere of Fringe, there was a nice little shout-out to The X-Files, its obvious television antecedent. Actually, there were two. The first was in the first scene, when the guy in the apartment was watching the show (the image of Scully and Mulder was briefly shown on his TV set), and then later, during Agent Broyles's testimony before the Senate committee, one senator made a reference to more than 50 years of budgetary indulgences of "the old X designation" and Fringe Division.

While reading a post on TV Squad about these references, I followed a link posted by a commenter that's pretty seriously brain-bending. If you remember the 1980s TV series St. Elsewhere, then you'll probably recall that in the final scene of the final episode, it was strongly implied that everything that had happened in the six seasons of the show's run had been a figment of an autistic boy's imagination.

What I didn't realize is that, based on character connections, crossovers, references and other links between St. Elsewhere and other TV series, and further connections between those shows and others, there is a school of thought that contends that all shows within this web of connections would also have to be products of this boy's imagination.

This theory is referred to as the "Tommy Westphall Universe" (referring to the boy with the vivid imagination), and it encompasses nearly 300 TV shows going back as far as I Love Lucy and includes The X-Files, and thus Fringe as well, although this is debatable: the mythology of Fringe is predicated on the existence of a parallel universe, or possibly many of them, so I'm not sure that would count under the rules of the theory (yes, there are rules), or whether or not it explains how Fringe can link itself to the X-Files and have someone be watching The X-Files within the same episode. Ouch.

If you find this stuff interesting and feel like having your mind twisted, beat on, drop-kicked across the room, and otherwise blown for a couple of hours, have a look at it here.

Regardless of whether or not a sizable chunk of our collective television history was entirely the product of the imagination of someone who himself was a character on a TV show (just forming that phrase made my brain hurt), the simple fact that there are connections linking so many shows is pretty amazing on its own.