Monday, February 6, 2006

BRAIN TRUST

"Brain transplants, Britney Spears having another hit record,
The Rolling Stones going on a farewell tour and actually meaning it,
Me caring about anything that happens on Wisteria Lane,
Jessica Simpson winning an Oscar, Jessica Alba winning an Oscar,
Jessica Simpson becoming Jessica Alba Simpson."
Dr. Cox
'Scrubs'

Looking through his list of of all the things that will happen before Carla won the lottery, one might think that it would be the doctor's reference to 'Desperate Housewives' that might have been more of a concern to me. But "me caring about anything that happens on Wisteria Lane" is just vague enough so that within the framework of Toobworld, he could be referring to a Wisteria Lane anywhere else in the country.

Then again, we know that both 'Scrubs' and 'Desperate Housewives' more than likely take place in California. Fairview, the town where the housewives live, is situated near an alkaline desert; that's where Mike was taking Zach's "dad" to kill him. And the SeaWorld in San Diego was featured in several episodes of 'Scrubs' when Elliot was dating the marine biologist guy.

So maybe both shows are located close enough to each other so that Dr. Cox might have been aware of the small news stories that came out of Wisteria Lane, Fairview, so often - houses burning down, suicides, murders, guys locked in basements......

But that's not the reference in Dr. Cox's diatribe that interested me. It was his belief that brain transplants had not yet happened. Ross Geller was of the same belief when he tried to show Joey Tribbiani how stupid the plotline was for the Toobworld version of 'Days Of Our Lives', when "Dr. Ramoray" was going to get a brain transplant from one of the female characters.

What none of them knew, nor could even have suspected, was that a successful brain transplant had already transpired by the fall of 1999. A top-secret government project placed the brain of a man named Michael Wiseman (who had fallen in front of a subway train) into a genetically perfect body.

(It's my belief that this "shell" was cloned and developed from tissue donated by a former government employee back in the 1960s named Eric Loengard as seen in the TV show 'Dark Skies'. For more on that, check out this post.)

Michael Wiseman - now known as "Michael Newman" - escaped from his government handlers in the spring of 2000, and we have never learned what his fate turned out to be. Whatever happened, the government was able to clamp down on any reports of the project leaking to the press. And thus there was no way for Dr. Cox to have known that such an operation as brain transplants could already be checked off his list.

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

"If ever we needed a brain, now is the time!"
Squiggy Squiggman
'Laverne & Shirley'

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