Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing St. Elsewhere, a medical show which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1988.  The show can be found on Daily Motion.

It’s Christmas in Boston.

Episode 4.11 “Santa Claus Is Dead”

(Dir by Leo Penn, originally aired on December 18th, 1985)

It’s the holidays and, of course, Westphall is depressed.

Are we surprised? It’s Christmas. Everyone else is making an effort to spread some holiday cheer. Westphall is being his usual glum self. Westphall is — and I know this is just going to be the most shocking reveal ever, so I’ll give you a chance to get ready for it — an agnostic who doesn’t celebrate the holidays. WOW! Who would have guessed?

Yes, yes, I know: Westphall is supposed to be the moral center of this show, the man who takes all the burdens of running the hospital on his shoulders. That may have been the writers’ intention, but for the most part he just comes across like a self-righteous bore.

Lizzie (Dana Short) and her boyfriend, Rick (Casey Siemaszko), visit Westphall for the holidays. Rick seems like a genuinely nice guy who is sad because he’s away from his family and their Christmas traditions. Westphall isn’t much help. When Rick gives him a present, Westphall smiles glumly. When Rick talks about how it’s Christmas Eve and his Catholic family usually attends midnight mass, Westphall says that he and Lizzie should go to a movie because “there won’t be any lines.” When Rick and Lizzie decide to go to the midnight service at St. Barnabas and agree to take Tommy with them, Westphall says that he won’t be joining them. If Rick, a Catholic, is willing to spend Christmas with a bunch of Episcopalians, the least Westphall could do is set aside his boring agnosticism for one night.

Dr. Craig hosts his annual Christmas party. Feeling sad about Stephen, Craig drinks too much and ends up crying in the kitchen. When Ellen tells him that it’s time to go to St. Barnabas, Craig refuses and complains that he can’t worship a God who would so “arbitrarily” kill his son. My heart broke for the Craigs. Still, there’s always something annoying about people who have no problem believing in God when bad things happen to other people, then have a sudden crisis of faith as soon as something bad happens to them. On the one hand, I felt Mark pain.  On the other hand, there was a part of me that thought, Hey, Mark — your son was a drug addict who got high and drove. What do you expect God to do about it?

At the hospital, the man hired to play Santa Claus (Aaron Fletcher) has a heart attack and collapses right in front of a bunch of horrified children. At first it appears that Santa is going to live, but after surgery he has another heart attack and dies. Because Axelrod was Santa’s doctor, Dr. Auschlander’s grandson, Max (Danny McMurphy), accuses Axelrod of killing Santa.

Fortunately, before Santa died, Max did tell him that he wants a snow globe to replace one that belonged to his grandmother. (Max accidentally broke it.) After Santa dies, Max’s grandmother discovers that a gift has been left for her under the hospital’s Christmas tree. It’s the snow globe! So the old man really was Santa.

And now he’s dead.

The episode ends at St. Barnabas. Westphall shows up at the service, and Tommy, who usually tries to hit his father, runs down the aisle to hug him. Meanwhile, Dr. Craig walks in the rain.

Wow, what a depressing Christmas episode. It was also a pretty moving one. I will admit that I started crying as soon as Santa had his heart attack. Seeing Santa in the hospital brought back memories of sitting with Dad when he was in home hospice care. I was the one who was there when he died, and I was the one who sat there for two hours, waiting for the hospice nurse to arrive. Back in 2023, I had no idea that would be the last time I would ever give him a Christmas present. As this episode showed, there’s a lot of sadness in the world, but there are also those moments of happiness and, if we’re lucky, community.

Yes, Santa died. But at least he got to deliver one final gift.