When the series finale of St. Elsewhere, fittingly entitled "The Last One", aired on May 25th 1988, viewers were hit with a double whammy of strange and unsettling surprises. The first and most infamous of these was that bizarre twist ending involving Tommy Westphall's snowglobe, which gave rise to the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis, when it suddenly became fashionable, around the dawn of the new millennium, to speculate that around 90 per cent of US television was nothing more than an idle daydream inside the head of a fictional child.
The nastier and, in my opinion, infinitely more fascinating of these surprises occurred after the story itself had ended, during the closing credits, where somebody had evidently figured that a particularly memorable way of hammering home the finality of that ending would be to kill off Mimsie, the much-beloved MTM kitten. Hence, we have what may just be one of the most freakish, outrageously morbid end-credits sequences in television history. Sweet little Mimsie, who'd previously always rounded off an installment of St. Elsewhere by appearing in a surgical mask, was here seen unconscious and hooked up to a bleeping electrocardiogram, while the show's regular closing theme played softly in the backdrop. Admittedly, that announcer did take the edge off the sequence somewhat, talking over Mimsie's final moments in order to plug Eric Roberts in To Heal A Nation and Late Night With David Letterman, but he had quietened down by the time that distessing flatlining became audible, and stunned viewers watched in silence as Mimsie used up the last of her nine lives.
Actually, if word of mouth is to be believed, this wasn't the first time that Mimsie had met a disturbing end in a series finale. Short-lived 1970s sitcom Texas Wheelers allegedly concluded with an animated Mimsie stepping out from behind a wagon wheel and being shot dead, although the evidence has yet to make its way to YouTube (in the meantime, I'd be tempted to dismiss it as an urban legend, although this Chicago Tribune article from 1985 seems pretty convinced that it happened).
Established in 1969 by Mary Tyler Moore and then-husband Grant Tinker as the production company for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, MTM Enterprises selected Mimsie (in reality a rescue shelter cat adopted by Moore) as its mascot in a playful nod to the MGM lion. A winning blend of wryness and sheer adorableness, the logo enjoyed a long and prosperous run over the following three decades, as MTM Enterprises expanded its list of productions/distributions and found ever-more charming ways of tweaking Mimsie's appearance order to personalise it for each show (for Hill Street Blues, Mimsie was decked out in a police cap, for The Steve Allen Show, the cat wore Allen's trademark glasses, etc). It was a non-stop parade of all-out, irresistible cuteness (that alledged Texas Wheelers ending notwithstanding) so it's no surprise that when that St. Elsewhere closer came, everybody was left completely gobsmacked. Whose particularly deranged idea was it to kill the little mewing angel?
Of course, the closing to St. Elsewhere didn't actually signal the end of Mimsie's career - her likeness continued to grace variants of the MTM logo well into the 90s, including the MTM Home Video logo that appeared on VHS tapes in 1992, until the company became defunct in 1998 - but Mimsie herself passed away in 1988, soon after that final episode to St. Elsewhere aired (she was 20 years old, which sure as heck isn't a bad age for a cat). As deeply unsettling a stunt as that final St. Elsewhere variation may have been, there is something strangely poetic about the manner in which, by lingering extensively upon the last moments of waning life in an infirm animal, it encapsulates a sense of time sadly but inevitably running out. I tend to think of it as less a morbid means of deliberately toying with its viewers' emotions than as a poignant reminder that all things must reach their natural end. It's a total oddity, even by the standards of weird and disturbing media logos, but it's not without its elegiac merit.
To my understanding, the "flatliner Mimsie" variant isn't featured in re-runs of "The Last One", although some report it showing up on the official VHS release of the episode (if anyone who owns a copy would like to confirm this, it would be very much appreciated). You can watch it in full without that pesky announcer here:
Mimsie was still alive when the episode aired, but died for real shortly afterward.
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