St. Remedius Medical College: “The Dream of the 1970s”

The Enduring Universality of WGON in Philadelphia

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

Because of a quirk in evolutionary development, Earth at the end of the 20th Century was isolated from the rest of the galactic community for multiple reasons. Had humanity and its cousins evolved a mere 10 million years earlier, the entire solar system would have been bombarded with radio, laser, and gravity-wave confirmations that indeed we were not alone. 20 million years earlier, and sentients would have regaled at the various stars in the sky gradually shutting off as the Great Shields, gigantic neutronium nets intended to block outgoing radio emissions, blocked all but infrared light escaping their systems. However, for various reasons, terrestrial life had no experiments in non-cetacean higher intelligence after the Cretaceous, and the ancestors of both common humans and Denisovians, had they had access to radio telescopes, would have hooted and hollered over a local radio spectrum that was remarkably empty and had been since the beginning of the Pliocene. No live broadcasts, no acoustic beacons, no functioning lighthouse pulsars, nothing other than emissions from the sun and Jupiter, and as soon as humans developed the first radio and television transmitters, they worked overtime to rectify the situation.

While most radio broadcasts from Earth lose their coherence a few light-hours out, requiring higher and higher power to so much as send a Top 40 countdown to Saturn, that didn’t mean that others weren’t listening in. Much of the lack of received radio from the rest of the cosmos was due to most civilizations moving to gravity wave signals and other methodologies that required advanced technologies and higher physics to receive, much less transmit. Others simply looked at radio as a medium for the terminally obnoxious. Others understood that to hear others, one often had to shut up. Various condensers and repeaters remained around the edges of the solar system since the days of the Larkash to translate radio into more accessible communications, so the other intelligences of our immediate galaxy started paying attention about the time Earth television entertainment began its current phase. Sadly, that was during the 1960s, where several species planned to turn our sun supernova as a response to the pilot episode of My Mother the Car.

This is not to say that these intelligences didn’t understand that human culture was a ruby in the rough. Many took fascinating parallels to Earth college students, in making cheap and free entertainment into a framework for further cultural integration. Hence, with the wave of contacts starting in the late 1980s, both xenoculture majors at St. Remedius Medical College and the latest set of ambassadors and emissaries had multiple cultural touchstones in common, including line-for-line memorization of such shows as the Canadian anime series Space Battleship Edmund Fitzgerald and the remarkably popular 1970s sitcom WGON in Philadelphia.

As was typical for 1970s American situation comedies, the premise for WGON in Philadelphia was simple: the station was just one of a multitude of independent TV stations established by rich families wanting local narrative control and federal tax writeoffs, built to take advantage of a former nuclear fallout shelter and bunker in Pennsylvania. When the dead started to rise from their graves, hungry for the flesh of the living, WGON’s EMP-hardened facilities left the station with a significant ratings advantage when other stations fell to the dead, to raiders, and to a loss of power, fuel, food, water, and medicine. With a five-year supply of diesel and preserved food, will the WGON crew be able to keep broadcasting until things return to normal, before the hungry dead breach the walls, or until new warlords build anew atop the remains of the old world? And can they remain entertaining?

As with other popular human entertainments, the secret of WGON‘s universality was its collection of wacky and quirky characters, including:

• Derek Downall, the anchor of WGON’s evening news show: a former big shot anchor in Washington DC, Derek made one bad relationship decision too many, and found himself transferred to Philadelphia for a new girlfriend who broke up with him shortly after setting up at WGON. Now that said ex-girlfriend is clawing at the front gate in order to sup on his face, Derek starts each day and each episode explaining to her the latest developments with the station and the people inside, figuring that “at least I can’t talk you to death any more.”
• Maury Chestwick, the dangerously senile station owner, who comes down from his office every episode to drop five minutes of random racial and sexual slurs before shuffling back to impersonate the silk ficus in his office window. (This is meant quite literally: the ficus’s name is “Sharon,” and those barging into Maury’s office find them recreating scenes from classic movie musicals.) As much as the rest of the crew would love to toss Maury out the gates and blast “Yakety Sax” on speakers while live-broadcasting the next ten minutes of mayhem, Maury is the only living person who knows the location and access codes to a massive bunker in the hills outside of Monroeville with food and supplies for another fifty years. How long can Maury and Sharon require all-hands meetings for their renditions from Paint Your Wagon before the rest of the staff decides that the bunker isn’t worth the pain?
• Sherry Masterson: WGON’s station manager fought her way to her current position by any and all means necessary, and no zombie apocalypse will keep her from being the best out there, even if the competition is increasingly sparse. Whether it’s patching diesel tanks or negotiating with banks of survivors for weapons and antibiotics in exchange for PSAs, Sherry’s scream every episode of “We’re staying on the air!” became the show’s most popular catchphrase, with her comment “As God as my witness, I didn’t know an ammo dump could go up like that” as a close second.
• Bill Needham: WGON’s afterschool star still goes by the name of “Cankles the Clown,” but in an age where the dead walk, his daily program focuses less on juggling and somersaults and more on essential reading, alternating between explaining shortwave transmitter operation manuals and renditions of classic novels. All while in full Cankles makeup, of course: Bill is a consummate professional. Each season, the Christmas episode featured Bill’s multi-character voice work on a story chosen by viewers still able to broadcast their requests, with the most famous being his quandary between two seven-year olds dying of zombie bites wanting to hear both William Burroughs’s Junkie and Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, and writing a last-minute mashup to make them both happy.
• Kate Katt: the WGON receptionist is the first line of communication between the staff and the outside world, and sometimes she lets her howitzer Missy, located right outside the bunker door and able to be pivoted 180 degrees in seconds, respond to inappropriate requests.
• Scott Chapman: previously the morning traffic helicopter pilot, Scott now runs recon and shopping mall scavenging missions up and down the Delaware River while suffering delusions of being a 22nd Century starship pilot. Whether he pinpoints warlord hideouts or drops long enough in front of an abandoned but still-stocked strip mall pharmacy to snag bandages and stool softeners, he is never seen out of his carefully constructed one-piece “uniform,” with his “trilaser” (really a flare gun) in a naugahyde holster at his side. When walkers regaining their sentience see the repainted call letters “USS BILL CLEMENTS” dropping fast on their heads, they’d better watch out!
• Lorenzo and Daymond: If it’s broken, they fix it. True, the station is down to two main cameras because they’ve scavenged all of the others for parts, and they have no idea how they’re going to repair the helicopter the next time Scott decides that the Klarnon Empire has gone entirely too far, but it beats working retail, especially with the current state of shopping malls outside. In fact, compared to most of the horrible jobs they’ve had, WGON really isn’t as bad, but they’re still looking for just the right shunt that would allow them to access something called “DARPANET,” of which even they don’t know what it does, just in case they need to get the hell out and leave everyone else to their fates. Their favorite phrase is “Wake up and smell your eyes.”
• Todd: Todd was the head security guard at WGON’s front door. Now he’s a head on a fiberglass post at the front gate, occasionally opening his eyes and attempting to bite at passing flies. He’s just close enough to the main gate that Derek’s ex-girlfriend can just reach inside to touch his face, and when she can squeeze in far enough to grab Todd’s stick, they’re going to wander off together forever. Derek, of course, has absolutely no idea, and assumes that his late ex is reaching and snarling for him, not the guy she left him for.

Sadly, WGON in Philadelphia‘s ratings weren’t especially good, thanks to being directly opposite the science fiction parody sitcom Lepton, and it was cancelled after four seasons. That didn’t stop a cyberpunk revival with about half the original cast members, set in a devastated post-Singularity nightmare advertising world, that ran in a syndication package for 13 episodes in the early 1990s, and reruns, DVD sales, and streaming kept it in front of young impressionable college students as the original broadcasts reached gravity wave repeaters throughout our galaxy and replicated it throughout the universe. To this day, the traditional greeting of new alien species reaching out to Earth is “Wake up and smell your eyes,” with the expected response being “’cause your house is burning down!”

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

St. Remedius television WGON in Philadelphia