Frasier/Headscratchers

• Why does everyone say that Lilith's evil? Sure, she divorced Frasier, but she did a good job of raising Frederick (although it didn't seem to stop him from going through the various phases that he went through, but that's another story for another time), and it seems that she does love him. Plus Frasier and Lilith have been known to put their differences aside and work a problem out together (although one had hilarity ensuing afterward). Bebe, on the other hand...
  • Most likely it's due to guilt by association, or rather, name. Lilith of course is a name from antiquity referring to the queen of demons (this is even lampshaded in an episode late in the series' run). I don't think anyone considered her evil, but rather, cold.
    • This Tropher thinks that the initial evil is only at the very beginning of the series, when the wounds are fresh. Frasier discovered she was cheating on him and divorced her for this reason. She however won a bitter custody suit (or at least was hinted once or twice to have been very bitter). Frasier was upset enough by these events to have gotten on a ledge of a major Boston building and nearly jumped. Overtimes the wounds heal, but for the first few years he's like most non-custodial fathers, rather bitter.
      • This troper has defended Lilith time and again, as his significant other hates the Lilith character and always remarks that the Frasier episodes with Lilith were all awful. While I completely disagree with that assessment, and I really enjoy Lilith, there are still plenty of reasons for the other characters to have a problem with her. 1) She cheated on Frasier when they were married, then left him, leaving him at one of the lowest points of his life. 2) At times she's beyond cold, approaching absolute zero. She laughed out loud at Maris's wedding vows, and when she was told that Niles was hurt by it, she responded by saying (right in front of Niles): "I simply responded with the genuine spontaneous emotion I was feeling at the moment. But, if Niles is not mature enough to accept that, if he is so pitifully insecure, if he is in such need of validation, then I guess for some sense of familial harmony, I do apologize." 3) She can be extraordinarily selfish, too. Example: she showed up at Frasier's condo, unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, at the same time Madeline was finally giving him another chance after their disastrous trip to Bora Bora. Madeline was horrified to see Lilith again and ran off, and Lilith barely made any effort to stop her, or to apologize to Frasier for ruining his one chance at getting her back. Instead she expected him to concentrate on her issues.
  • As for Bebe, Frasier DOES think Bebe is evil (he even said that she doesn't need to worship the devil because he worships her). On the other hand, she's a damn good agent so Frasier can't really complain.
    • To quote Niles: "You have to call her? I thought you just drew a pentacle on the floor and cried 'I Summon Thee' three times."
  • In Martin and Niles' case, it's well established that the Crane men in the past have been pathologically incapable of tolerating any of the women that one of them falls for (with the exceptions of the women they eventually end up with by the end of the series), so it's probably some automatic instinct with them. In any case, to be fair Lilith's cold and rather arrogant personality doesn't really help her case much; she's a pretty difficult person to like, especially based on first appearances.
  • Lilith's "evil" was very much downplayed starting fairly early on, replaced with coldness, implying it was more that she was a very cool, clinical sort of person and this upset a lot of people. She was actually portrayed fairly sympathetically, even unto the story pointing out that everyone treating her like she was evil was being a bit of a jerk.
  • It's a Running Gag. 'Nuff said.
  • They're Frasier's family, not Lilith's. She was already a cold person, and when they got divorced, Frasier had every right to be bitter, and his family every right to be bitter on his behalf. I'm sure that Lilith's family thinks of him in similar terms.
  • Also, notice how most of the "Lilith's pure evil!" jokes tend to take place at the beginning of the series -- wounds between Frasier and Lilith are still raw, there's bitterness on both sides, Frasier's family are less inclined to cut her any slack, and so on. By the end, a lot of water's flown under a lot of bridges, so the bitterness is in the past, as are the jokes.

• It's really sad how often Frasier was mocked for taking in his aged father and making sure he was nominally healthy and happy... often by his father himself. To hear other people tell it, Frasier living with his father was the equivalent of a 40-year-old still living in his parents' basement, not a successful person being a responsible son.
  • It's a reflection of a general societal trend that judges, fairly or not, a person's success and character by their ability to ultimately separate themselves from their parents. As for Martin doing it -- to be fair, he's often established as being a pretty crusty and at times ungrateful person.
    • Frasier did separate himself from his parents, however. Frasier isn't living with his father, his father is living with him. That's a vitally important difference. Of course, ultimately it's just a running gag; the people mocking Frasier know full well he doesn't deserve it, but they think it's funny.
    • Yeah, but according to one episode, Agnes still lives with Principal Skinner. Doesn't matter what it is, it's more what it looks like.
      • That was Skinner's defense of the situation though, it is clearly not true.
      • I agree with that. With Frasier and his dad, you can see that it's his aging father having to live with him. With Skinner and his mom it looks like the other way around because she's so damn domineering.
      • I don't recall anyone who knew the real circumstances of Frasier's living situation thinking it was sad (or comparable to someone who's always lived in their parents' house). There were moments when Frasier would be speaking to someone who didn't know that he and his father lived together, and the person would make some sort of comment about it being sad when a middle-aged person lives with their parents, setting up some major awkwardness for Frasier. But I'm not aware of any situations where we had reason to believe that the person making the comment thought it was sad for a wealthy person to invite a convalescing parent into their home.
  • To be honest, I always thought that most of the issues about this seemed to come from either Frasier or Martin themselves; Frasier in his moments of insecurity about his romantic life and his age, and Martin in his moments of insecurity about no longer being the alpha-figure of the family and having to adjust to living in someone else's household and follow their rules. There was the episode where it's revealed that Frasier and Martin have been living together longer than Frasier's ever sustained a romantic relationship, which prompts some light-hearted teasing on the part of their friends, but the tension in that episode is driven by Frasier's insecurity, not anyone else. Aside from a few thoughtless comments alluded to above, it seems that most people seem to consider Frasier's willingness to open his home to his father quite admirable.

• So my problem with Niles/Daphne wasn't that they had no chemistry when they got together (BECAUSE THEY DID!!!), it was that it had such a bad effect on her. In the earlier seasons, she was so kooky and sweet and likable that it was obvious why he would be interested in her but later on, she's an unhappy (to me!), controlling shrew and he's giving her whatever she wants. It was kind of unsettling.
  • Agreed. At the end of the series, she was just a typical American sitcom love interest with a British accent.
  • It probably happened when Niles came to terms with the idea that Daphne isn't perfect. It would seem she took his revelation a bit too close to heart.
    • Props to the otherwise inferior season 10, which had Niles and Daphne having a lot of fun together. Once season 11 rolled around, Daphne got pregnant and hormonal (read megabitchy), but by her last scene in the finale she'd had a kid and went back to being nice.
  • I agree. At the beginning Daphne was a ditzy, charming Cloudcuckoolander and by the end she was just generic and bland.
    • • I don't think it's quite fair to say that Daphne is entirely demanding and walks all over Niles. Let's not forget the episode Murder Most Maris, where Niles does something that I've never seen a man in fiction do before. He calls Daphne out for having had him Exiled to the Couch. And it's revealed a few seconds later that Martin deliberately kept Niles out late at night because he felt Niles needed a break from Daphne's pregnancy induced moodiness during this difficult time, so it seems to me that Daphne was not always supposed to be thought of as in the right.

• Why are women so harsh to Frasier? I know he has an extraordinary knack for getting himself into situations where he looks to be hideously in the wrong, but whenever he invariably begs them to give him a chance to explain, roughly none of them actually do. And whenever he recognizes that he's in a relationship for the wrong reasons and breaks up with the woman, they always take it so badly - for example, when he was dating the ex-girlfriend of one of his callers and broke it off because of professional ethics, she treated him like he was some kind of creep instead of an upstanding person making a difficult but necessary decision.
  • Running Gag that was brilliantly subverted toward the end of the final season, when his "true love," "the one," or whatever you want to call her, played by Laura Linney, was very much still in love with him after a series of horrible disasters involving a broken-down car and a night with a creepy backwoods family.
  • No Sympathy.
  • I suppose also because of the fact that he has the knack for getting himself into situations where he looks like he's in the wrong; he might not be, but he's inadvertently pissed them off so much that they're inclined to think the worst of him anyway. Appearances count.
  • The "ex-girlfriend of one of his callers" was entirely unfair, but perhaps it's understandable that a mediocre person would react like that to being rejected in such a strange way in those circumstances. I just wish Frasier would have had the guts to keep his head and tell her something like "Remember you agreed I was right to tell him to leave you, and that was because of what he said about you, not because I promised you a replacement boyfriend." when she said something like "You tell my boyfriend to leave me and then won't go on dating me yourself for some stupid reason."
    • Yeah, Frasier considering or treating the woman as if she was 'mediocre' and high-and-mightily pointing out that she'd agreed that her previous boyfriend was right to dump her, however justified that point might be, would have really gone down well with her in that particular situation. Not.
  • To be fair to the girlfriend of the ex-caller, Frasier essentially advised her boyfriend to break it off with her, then started to make a move on her himself, and then very suddenly -- from her point of view, at least -- broke it off and started citing his professional ethics as a reason. Considering that there's a reasonable case to be made that if his professional ethics were as strong as he was making out they were he probably wouldn't have made a move on her or started dating her in the first place, it's not entirely unreasonable for her to conclude that he was merely dicking her around and hiding behind his 'ethics' as an excuse, and since she still doesn't know him very well at that point it's not like she has a lot of evidence to challenge that belief.

• Very specific Fridge Logic issue: there's one episode where someone calls into Frasier's radio show, and his "problem" is that his radio is giving him orders. The gag, of course, is that as Frasier attempts to counsel him, the man interprets this as "the voice in the radio" giving him further commands. It's a funny gag, but it only just now occurred to me (again, Fridge Logic) that almost all radio shows run on a delay of at least a few seconds, making the gag virtually impossible. The conversation between Frasier, the caller, and "the radio" was perfectly in sync.
  • This is made worse by the fact that they use the delay as a gag in another episode when the caller keeps expecting to hear his conversation on the radio but can't.
    • Given how many times KACL changes station owners, it might help to imagine that the delay got added and/or subtracted by the new management. This also helps explain why Gil and Bulldog's shows alternately appear before or after Frasier's show without any consistency whatsoever.
    • Rule of Funny.

• Dad sure gets around a lot for needing a live-in caretaker.
  • I don't think he actually does need a live-in caretaker. If I remember rightly, in the first episode Frasier is horrified when Daphne reveals that she thinks it's live-in post, but he ends up having to comply because she was the only applicant Martin liked.
    • In "Dial M For Martin" Daphne realizes that Martin doesn't really need a live in caretaker, and decides to take another job. Hijinks ensue, and everything goes back to normal by the end of the episode.
  • The above person is correct. In the first episode, Martin moves in with Frasier not because he needs help all the time, but because he needs someone around 'just in case' - like if he falls and can't get up again because of his hip. Frasier originally hires Daphne as a part-time physiotherapist, not caretaker. She's only live-in because, as noted above, she was the only applicant Martin liked.
  • That and she does a lot of work around the house that Frasier would otherwise have to do himself or pay someone else to do

• How old was Martin when he served in the Korean war? If he's 64 in Season 4, and he's only 21 years older than Frasier (which is a cheat in and of itself, John Mahoney is only 15 years older than Kelsey Grammar), that means he'd have had to lie about his age, join the police force, possibly make detective, and then marry Hester by the time he... actually, forget it, nothing about Martin needing to live with Frasier makes sense at all, it's just the conceptual leap you need to make to enjoy the show.
  • Math time... In 1996 he was 64 which means he was born in 1932, which means when the Korean war started he was 18... sounds good so far. That war ended when he was 21 though, so Frasier must have been conceived when he was on leave. Then he joined the police after that maybe. Unless someone can find something in the show (I don't really want to dig through 11 seasons of Frasier for this little thought experiment) that contradicts that time line, there's no reason it can't work, albeit it is a little unlikely.
    • Slight issue- Martin didn't meet Fraiser's mother until after he joined the police force- they're explicitly stated to have met at a crime scene where she was working as a consultant. For her to be old enough to be a qualified psychiatrist, I'm reasonably sure she'd have to be in her mid 20's at least, so assuming Martin's roughly the same age, this widens the age gap between Martin and Fraiser somewhat- albeit, not catastrophically, just by at most 5 years.
    • Plus it's stated that Frasier's mother was pregnant with him at her wedding, so he was conceived fairly early in his parents' relationship.
    • Perhaps he was on the police force and in the reserve?
    • He made it quite clear that he was kidding about meeting Hester over the chalk outline of a human body. It was just a joke. We don't know when or how they met. Also, how the hell is an actor having an age difference of six measly years from his character a cheat?! Must it be exactly the same?!
      • He was kidding about them drawing eyes and a smile on the chalk-outline, but they did meet over a body. It gets refeered to a couple of time - like the time when Niles freaks out what "the dancing gingerbread-men" that they always had at their anniversary really were supposed to be.

• In the episode "Rooms with a View", Daphne passes by a hospital room near the end, and in continuing with the theme of a hospital having memories, there's a vision of Niles and Daphne welcoming a new addition to their family. I'm all for Crowning Moments of Heartwarming, but that's predicting the future, not remembering something. I guess one of the screenwriters must have been reading a little too much Through the Looking Glass. ;)
  • The whole point of this is showing that she can now think about the future again. While Niles is having surgery she breaks down and says "There's no tomorrow, no next year, there's nothing until he comes out of that operating room and I know he's OK." This little scene is her imagining the future - because she can, again.
  • The hospital is having a Flash Forward.
    • Translation: "It is a poor sort of memory that only works one way." ;P
  • What this troper found odd was that in that flash-forward thing they had two daughters. When their first child is born in the final episode it's a boy.
    • Two girls and a boy?
  • Daphne is psychic in bouts.
  • That's because of Reality Subtext; the producer David Angell died during the 9/11 attacks, and so the son was named David after him.
  • Could be that we were just seeing a possible future.
  • I always thought the whole episode was set in the future and the "present" was the hospital's memory.

• In the episode "Radio Wars" during the end credits Frasier takes the medication of the old lady who was trying to take a picture of his butt and throws it into his apartment, then closes the door, preventing her from getting her medication! Does it bother anyone else that Frasier kills an old lady?!
  • This troper was more bothered by the potential Family-Unfriendly Aesop in that episode. Even though Martin said Frasier did not bring the string of pranks on himself, he said that just about everything Frasier and Niles did as kids, even the stuff that didn't inconvenience the bullies, still incurred their ire. So offhandedly he was saying yes he did bring it on himself. I know Frasier and Niles are adults at this point, but what kind of a thing is that to tell your children? That's pretty much like saying "If you were bullied during your childhood, chances are you probably deserved it." Or to put it another way, it's like saying "The secret to dealing with bullies is to have a father that's even worse." Nice thing to teach the kids, isn't it?
  • The very next thing he says is that he intends to trade her the medication for the photograph, so there's no implication that he killed her. As for the second point, though, that's completely true... I'm a bit puzzled by Martin's sudden, "You boys did things to bring it on yourselves", given that earlier episodes expressed something more like 'bullies are bad but sometimes they have a Freudian Excuse'.
  • The old lady is the same one from earlier in the episode where Frasier is bartering her medication for the photo; the clear implication with the second one is that he's adding a 'stop taking photos of my butt entirely' clause to the earlier deal. As for the Family-Unfriendly Aesop, I always took it not so much as the boys bringing it on themselves as not making things any easier for themselves; after all, no one arguably deserves getting their car stolen, but if they leave it unlocked and unsecured in a bad neighbourhood with the keys in the ignition, it's not really going to be that surprising if someone rips it off; sure they have the right to do that in theory, but common sense dictates that someone who's already inclined to steal a car could particularly give a damn about their rights there. Similarly, Frasier and Niles were already pretty big targets for bullies anyway, so indulging in their pretensions to such a degree probably didn't make them any less of a target. Still a bit of a Family-Unfriendly Aesop because Frasier and Niles did and do have the right to go about however the hell they want without getting victimized for it, but then Martin's never been the most sympathetic observer of their pretensions anyway.
    • The episode didn't have a Family-Unfriendly Aesop at all: the lesson, as delivered by Frasier's speech at the end, was that you should Be Yourself regardless of how much mockery that invites. To do otherwise is to let the bullies win.
  • This troper interpreted it as more of an example of how Frasier/Niles and Martin live on opposite ends of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism. It's been established many times that Martin is more of a realist when it comes to how the world works and how people behave, whereas Frasier and Niles operate on naivete and optimism. Martin is also not afraid to say, "People suck and the world isn't perfect, and you can't change it by wishing." It would be like him saying, if you're gay that's your own business and you shouldn't be ashamed of who you are, but you can't expect to walk into a biker bar, acting extremely flamboyant about it and not expect to get your ass kicked. It may be harsh and sound like it's placing blame on the victim, but unfortunately it's true.
    • Another good example of this is the episode about Bob Briscoe being regarded as a hero for stopping a criminal with a gun. Only he and Frasier know that he was actually trying to use a pregnant woman as a "human shield". Frasier spends the whole episode trying to break down Bob's conscience so he will tell the truth, and when he fails, almost has a breakdown until Martin tricks Bob by saying someone has a gun, prompting Bob to put his own mother up as a human shield (which everyone sees).

• Frasier played so fast and loose with continuity that picking up errors is really an exercise in futility. You could go on for years. However, the one which always sticks in my head and which mystified me completely was when a caller to Frasier's show with an obvious French accent kept saying that her problem was with 'my monsieur' - a phrase which apparently baffled Frasier and which he couldn't understand. To the point of not even being able to make a reasonable, logical guess as to its meaning. This from a man who was a fluent French speaker? I think not!
  • She also had a lisp, but I could figure out what she meant easily enough. You'd think Frasier would be able to figure it out at least the first time she repeated it, even if he didn't get it immediately.
  • Agreed. That joke would have been much better if Frasier had just started speaking French with her and then be baffled by Roz's Death Glare.
  • To be fair, someone with a heavy accent switching between one language and another while speaking very hurriedly and being obviously upset at the time can be a bit confusing and difficult to follow at times, even if you are familiar with both languages in question. Frasier might speak French, but that doesn't necessarily make him a flawless translator (although the example in this case is fairly easy to guess, conceded -- we'd probably have to make a leap of faith under Rule of Funny).
  • Maybe Fraiser had been taking those pills for his back again!

• On one episode, a pre-school reject's Niles' and Daphne's baby's application because Roz named the child "Ichabod" Crane and they think its a joke application. Do the writers have any idea what people name their kids today? Real educators have seen so many Angels and Destinies and Apples and Moseses they wouldn't bat an eye at a child named after a literary character.
  • Well, a prestigious school like that one would never accept a child with as silly a name as Apple or Destiny or Renesmee, of course.
    • Well, unless they were super famous, like Apple Paltrow-Martin, or something. In the case of Daphne and Niles, they're just run of the mill people to this school. They weren't really losing out by assuming that it was a joke. Regardless, Rule of Funny.

• In the episode "A Midwinter Night's Dream", Niles turns up at Frasier's apartment dressed as a pirate after having been thrown out of his home by Maris. He tells the story of his attempt to spice up his marriage by leaving a map to his whereabouts for Maris, and waiting in the linen closet wearing nothing but an handily-positioned eye-patch. However, unfortunately Maris was unimpressed, giving him just enough time to put his clothes on before kicking him out. Which begs the question: why the hell did he put the pirate outfit on?
  • Presumably because Maris was freaking out in her typical neurotic and high-strung fashion, he had to get out of there quickly and it was the closest thing to hand.
    • Fair enough, but there was also a question in my mind regarding this: why did Niles have a full pirate outfit in the first place if he only planned to play with Maris using just the patch and cutlass?
      • The way I think of it is Niles rented a pirates costume for this occasion, arrived home took off his suit etc and placed them in the laundry then took the cutlass and patch from the pirate costume and put them on, leaving the pirate costume in the bag on his bed then, when the maid found him and started screaming, he panicked ran out of the closet and headed to his room and, in his panic, grabbed the first available set of clothing (the pirate costume) hence why he was wearing it when Maris chucked him out,. Another alternate explanation is that, although he was only wearing the patch and the cutlass in the cupboard, he would still have needed to get from his room to the closet (especially as he would be leaving a lot of clues to his whereabouts round the house as part of the game) so maybe he put the full costume on to 'get into the spirit of things' and protect his modesty until, after getting in the closet he could undress to just the patch and cutlass? this would mean that the pirate costume was the first, and only, set of clothes he could get his hands on after the maid found him.

• Exactly what was going on in Niles' mind in "Dial M For Martin"? While the episode is hilarious, there's something in the way he acts that his actions were more than just unconscious ones...Was he really willing to hurt his own father just to make Daphne stay? Creepy.
  • He wasn't trying to hurt Martin, conciously or subconciously. It was all a misunderstanding. His acting may have made it look like it was intentional, but that's just Rule of Funny. Fraiser involes a lot of farce and one of the big jokes in farce is misunderstandings.
  • There could also be an element of Unreliable Narrator here. We're viewing this from Martin's perspective, and Martin has been accidentally primed by a chance comment from Frasier to be paranoid over Niles' intentions towards him in relation to getting Daphne to stay. It's equally possible that in actuality, Niles' "She can't leave! She just can't!" bit was a lot less sinister towards Martin, but Martin just blew it out of proportion.

• I'm watching the episode where Sam comes to visit Frasier, and Daphne mentions that she doesn't understand the American obsession with sport. How the heck would an English woman not be familiar with sport obsession?
  • You know how people talk when they're just being flirts.
    • Yes, but it's one thing to play down or deny personal traits when flirting, it's another to deny one that applies to an entire nationality. It's not exactly a little known fact, there's a good chance Sam could have responded with "Doesn't England have tons of football hooligans?"
      • Yeah, like Sam isn't ten times as much of a flirt himself!
      • And let's face it, Daphne's an attractive woman and it's an off-the-cuff comment meant mostly inoffensively in a flirty conversation; Sam's hardly going to provoke a Misplaced Nationalism shouting match over it by bringing up hooliganism.
  • Played for Laughs?
  • Good old Hypocritical Humor at work. Also, she's possibly using 'sport' in this context to refer to sports like baseball, basketball and American Football, which are not incredibly popular in Britain and which many British people fail to see the point of just as many Americans no doubt fail the point of sports such as cricket and football/soccer. Besides which, Daphne could simply just be someone who's not overly interested in sport -- believe it or not, such people exist in both Britain and America -- and is bringing up the 'American' obsession with sport simply because the people she's talking to are all, you know, Americans.

• In one or two episodes it is established that whenever Niles does something he considers immoral, his nose bleeds as a psychosomatic manifestation. However, this is completely dropped the other 99% of the time he does something he knows is wrong in almost every episode of the series.
  • Specifically, he has nosebleeds when he tells an outright lie rather than just doing something a bit dodgy. And in a very nice Continuity Nod, in scenes when he is involved in a deception you can often see David Hyde Pierce briefly touch his fingers to his nose at one point. Seeing as Niles isn't usually the focus of the shot when this happens, I imagine it's an unscripted touch.
    • He tells outright lies (full, complete, flagrant lies, down to the very wording) all of the time. I couldn't list all the episodes in which he does it if my life depended on it. It's just the way the show rolls. He gets the psychosomatic nosebleeds in maybe two or three episodes at the very most. If he touches his nose, he doesn't do it a whole hell of a lot, or else I think I would have noticed it.
    • This episode takes place fairly early in the series' run (series 3, if I recall). Since Niles gradually becomes a bit less neurotic over the course of the series, this could be a symptom of his development in this regard.
      • Episode 3 would be closer; The episode where it was introduced was early in the first production year.
    • Sometimes throughout the series, you can catch Niles sniffing after lying (even when his nosebleeds aren't referred to at all). This isn't consistent, but a good Running Gag if you look for it.

• Why does Martin's numberplate that's supposed to be an abbreviation of "Road Warrior" have an E in it?
  • If you don't have room for the "io" in "Warrior" you'd be better off with an "e" there than an "i" or an "o." The suffix -er is strongly associated with "one who does something," so even though it isn't actually used in the word "warrior," it would probably make more sense to people than an ending it with the last two letters "ir" or "or." Well, actually, the option that would make the most sense would be to choose something that fits, but Martin's not the type to worry too much about something like that.
  • The whole point of the gag, let's not forget, is that hardly anyone who sees the plate recognizes the intended abbreviation.
  • Chances are, someone has already personalized a numberplate that was closer to "Road Warrior" and that was the best he could get.

• Why didn't two psychiatrists (or anybody else for that matter) realize that Maris was anorexic? If someone in the viewer's family was anorexic, I can imagine that a lot of the jokes about her verged on Dude, Not Funny.
  • On the contrary, this brother to an anorexic actually found the jokes somewhat cathardic.
  • She's not anorexic, she's an Eldritch Abomination. Consider the totally impossible details.
    • She's an anorexic and surgical addict (the only time we kind of sort of see her is in a flashback in which Niles is talking to an emaciated, fully bandaged woman and saying, "Do cheer up, Maris; they can always take more off next time") whom everyone, including occasionally Niles himself, jokes about being a Humanoid Abomination. They're exaggerating. Although there is that one time Roz seems to have genuinely mistaken Maris for a coat rack she wasn't getting a very good look and it's not the show's way to dip into Magical Realism. Before his death people made jokes about Michael Jackson hardly looking human after being made so skinny and deformed by his own surgical addiction; that didn't make Michael Jackson a literal Humanoid Abomination.

Niles: The [4 digit] code into here is the same as Maris' ideal weight. This many pounds and this many ounces.
Frasier: My God, no one could possibly weigh that little and live!

• What was the point of the new station manager, the black haired woman that became an eventual love interest? She was kinda bitchy and in her intro ep, she told Frasier to do a show about sex, but didnt bother saying that it was about infidelity and how it affects others until the end of the episode!
  • The point there, though, was that bitchy or not Frasier was just taking an knee-jerk opposition to anything she was suggesting, regardless of whether or not the idea may have had merit; if he's reacted with a bit more of an open-mind he could have come to this conclusion himself (i.e. that doing 'themes' needn't be as tacky as he feared) or discussed it further with her until this became more apparent; instead, he starts digging his heels in from the start.
    • Frasier started out doing themed episodes on his radio show. While he may have slowly decided that themed episodes were unnecessary, annoying to do with exactly one theme for two hours, and/or inefficient and unfair to callers whose problems were important but didn't fit the subject, then tacky once he stopped doing them, it's still an odd contrast.
    • But that's the whole point; Frasier himself clearly at one point could see the value in doing theme shows, but objected here because he was automatically objecting to anything Kate said. Note how he didn't bring up any of these possible (reasonable) objections at the time; he was at least in part clearly just objecting because it was Kate doing the suggesting, not because the idea itself wasn't totally without merit.

• How did Frasier get the job at KACL in the first place? His early shows with Roz are disasters, showing he has no real experience of radio at all. He's just a random psychiatrist from out East wanting to move back home. Wouldn't they, at the very least, have asked for a demo tape or something before giving him the gig?
  • Maybe they gave him a tryout in his interview and he impressed them but his nerves took over on his first few shows? After all, its only his first show that's shown to be a disaster, and who hasnt had a nervy first day at work??
    • Especially considering that first day at work was being broadcast to (potentially) hundreds of thousands of people.
  • It wouldn't be surprising if most people listen to his show for the entertainment value of his blunders. I'd listen to it in the car. The best part about this theory is that Frasier would be mortified if he knew.

• One early episode deals with Frasier purchasing a painting from an art gallery and finding out that it is a forgery -- the artist says as much, and would presumably sign an affidavit to that effect. The gallery refuses to refund him and Martin mocks his attempts to call the police on him. Frasier is reduced to contemplate getting revenge by tossing a brick through the gallery's front window. I wonder what Martin was thinking. Fraud is indeed a crime! If it's hard to prosecute through the police, why not file a lawsuit? No art gallery would want the negative publicity of being accused of selling a forgery (especially by someone with a public profile like Frasier's) and would immediately refund his money.
  • Police Are Useless seems to be what they were going for there. In Real Life, of course, probably even the most hardened and obnoxious forces would not laugh at you and hang up just because the felony you were reporting happened to have to do with an artsy subject, but this is the same force that produced Marty. It is to be assumed that most of them are as biased against anything artistic, intellectual, or stereotypically snooty as he is.
    • Either that or over-worked. Seattle is a large city, and -- although I've never actually lived there -- I assume the police department has limited resources and a high amount of violent or high-profile felonies to deal with; Martin even says that the police have murders, rapes and muggings to be dealing with. Even in the fraud department there's probably all sorts of things going on. Sadly, a single forged painting is unlikely to be a high priority or receive much of a response -- even if Frasier did lodge a report, there probably wouldn't be much time or resources to follow it up.
  • Frasier considers the possibility of a lawsuit, but Martin talks him out of it by saying that even if he does win, it'll take years and the lawyer bills will be enormous.
    • In reality, such a lawsuit would be extremely unlikely to actually reach court.
  • Another question raised by that episode is: would not the artist be extremely angry that a gallery has sold a painting misrepresenting it as hers? Yet she vanishes from the narrative quickly.
    • Probably -- but that's a separate matter from Frasier's complaint against the gallery. In either case, the gallery could easily claim they bought the painting in good faith from the artist's representatives (she seems to be quite wealthy and successful, so it's unlikely she handles all her own sales personally).
  • Also Frasier considers giving the gallery bad publicity on his radio show, but Niles cautions him that doing so would be slander and they would sue him for every penny he had; if Frasier was telling the truth this would not be slander, and it would only cost the gallery more money and prove Frasier's point when he has the proof they swindled him right there on his wall, should they try to sue him. Admittedly Niles is no lawyer, but you would think perhaps Frasier would look into it a bit more if he was really that desperate to get his money back.
    • Niles is well aware that when Frasier's in a snit he tends to get loud, overdramatic and start shouting without thinking through the consequences, and if he's left to vent on the radio he's probably going to say something he'll end up regretting. Especially since while Frasier can prove that the painting is forged, he can't prove that the gallery knowingly sold him a forgery, and if he was to say anything of the sort (and given what we know about Frasier, given a head full of steam and the opportunity to rant he'd probably let slip something of the nature) the gallery could easily claim they were taken in by the forger as well, and it's likely no one could prove otherwise. Net result? Lengthy legal proceedings, Frasier probably ends up losing. Niles is bringing him back to reality to make sure he doesn't go off all half-cocked and get himself into trouble.
    • I have talked this over with several friends who work in the art world, either as artists or in galleries, and all agree: the gallery has a legal and ethical responsibility to vet the works they sell. Whether or not it's fraud (which would require them to have knowingly misrepresented the painting) is almost irrelevant.

• One thing that annoyed this troper is the episode when Nanny G made an appearance. Frasier ended up naked in her big showbed on stage when they lost track of time. She makes him get out of bed, perform a ridiculously awkward looking dance while dressed as a baby while leaving the stage. What i want to know is why he couldnt just have waited in the bed (which was scripted to fly into the rafters) until the show was over and then slip away. It was handwaved that it went up fast into the rafters but, so what? Even if he can't handle high-speeds or heights he has a bed to hide in so he can't see the height and/or throw up in. The bed has a headboard so its not like he would have been squashed against the roof or anything.
  • I can only guess that there would have been no way to get down while the bed was in the rafters and if he waited until the bed was lowred back down, he probably would have been discovered.
  • Another possibility is that they were panicked and not thinking clearly. As I recall, all this was happening in the middle of a live show, so they weren't in a position, mentally or physically, to be thinking straight.

• During the first half of Season 6, Frasier is unemployed for a long time... Yet he can still afford to live in his luxury apartment, pay for Daphne's work, and in general spend money just like he did when he was working. Where does the money come from? It's not like the series takes place in some fantasy world where monetary problems don't exist. Roz is unemployed just like Frasier is, and she clearly has to cut down her expenses. There's even an episode where Frasier is (wrongly) worried about Roz spending too much money while unemployed, yet his own spending doesn't seem to bother him at all. And when Niles is divorcing Maris, he has to move from his luxury apartment to a much more modest one, change his car, eat cheap food, and so on, even though he's still working. Maybe Frasier has a lot of savings or something, but in that case the writers could've at least mentioned it.
  • Frasier lives in a condo, i.e. he owns it. They also establish early on that he invests a lot, and unlike Niles he still had all his credit cards(and would still have a really good credit rating after only a few months of unemployment. He seems to be unemployed for about three or four months. Doesn't seem like it would be hard for him to keep up his usual routine with for that long.
  • Frasier was also paid more than Roz while they were working and thus was able to save more and was in a better overall position when they were finally not working. And when he's concerned about her spending, it's specifically about her spending money that he gave her to help with essentials on frivolous luxuries -- in typical Frasier fashion he's wrong of course, but it's suggested that Roz isn't exactly careful with money either.
  • Also, Frasier's parents have a cabin in the mountains, so they must have been either comfortable or smart with money. Roz's parents are divorced, so they probably lost a lot of money there (assuming they had more expensive lawyers than Frasier's and Lillith's).
  • In season 5, "Roz and the Schnoz", Roz tells Daphne about a lot of cosmetic fix-its she had when she was young. In season 3 she mentions wanting a butt lift. Maybe she's got a thing for cosmetic surgery (it seems to be common in the Frasier-verse... Maris and Mel, for example).

• A more generalised question related to the previous one- where does Frasier's money come from in the first place? Firstly, he moved from Boston to completely start over so it's not as if he'd have a long established practice in Seattle (as Niles does). Secondly, a job as a regional talk radio shrink can't be paying all that much- it might pay decently but the circles Frasier moves in are those of Seattle's elite. Thirdly, Frasier really spends extravagantly. The investment explanation is a bit of a stretch- I suppose it might be possible if, during his time in Boston he made some really, really good investments, but as a relatively young psychiatrist (it takes a helluva long time to qualify as one) I'm not sure where he'd amass the amount of capital that would enable him to live this sort of lifestyle.
  • Celebrity, even if comparatively local, can still grease plenty of wheels; he might necessarily not be rolling in as much dough as some of the people he's hobnobbing with but having a name people have heard of could still probably open plenty of doors that could have otherwise been closed to him. As well as investments, he also probably makes a bit of money off endorsements, appearances, that kind of thing.

• When Niles is going through his divorce, why is he so broke? I get that Maris was super rich, but as a psychiatrist, wouldn't he (maybe) be at his brother's level who at this point is on radio? I mean, they both love the same stuff, and have the same tastes, it just seems odd to me that he would not be able to afford to keep up the lifestyle. That storyline seemed to be about how Maris was the sole moneymaker.
  • I think Niles was just more reckless with money than Frasier. Look at his apartment. It had three floors just for one person.
  • Maris had co-signed on all of his credit cards, and during the divorce she was able to freeze them all as well as their joint account, rendering him effectively broke until they could settle.
  • Plus, being married to someone who not only was incredibly wealthy but also had her own over-indulgent habits clearly instilled in Niles some bad habits regarding spending and money management he found hard to shake once he was kicked off the gravy train -- such as the purchase of the apartment and expensive antique writing pens -- while Frasier, although clearly comfortably well off, is in nowhere near the same financial position that Niles was in with Maris, so no doubt had to learn to be more frugal and careful with money if he wanted to sustain himself in a comfortable fashion. Plus, throughout the series Frasier is consistently depicted as usually being endowed with just a little bit more common sense and practicality than Niles. So while they're about equal in taste and habit, Frasier probably saves for a rainy day while Niles not only refuses to contemplate the possibility of a rainy day but refuses to acknowledge it even as he's getting soaked.
  • And lastly, one of the reasons Niles hires Donny to represent him during the divorce is when everyone points out his original team of lawyers were overcharging him and may be prolonging the divorce themselves to make more off of Niles.

• In the first-season episode where Niles and Daphne are alone at Maris's house in a thunderstorm, how did Daphne call Frasier to let him know that she was staying there after the storm knocked out the electricity? The episode aired in 1991, the first modern mobile phone network was activated in Europe in 1991, and I've seen no further evidence of either Daphne or Niles having a first-generation handheld portable phone. I didn't think any but the most electrically-secure phone networks stayed on and supplied power to the attacked phones when the power was out.
  • Phone lines generally run on a a completely separate electrical network than electrical utilities. The More You Know...
    • Cool, thanks. In retrospect, checking against my (now apparent apparent) assumption and experience on Google would have solved that. At least this will answer the question in the rare case that someone else comes here with the same concern.
  • Also, Frasier premiered in 1993. Characters have been seen with cell phones on many occasions before that episode, in fact they're difficult to miss.
    • In fact, Frasier is shown owning one of those first generation, suitcase-sized portable phones in a season 7 episode of Cheers that aired in 1988. So it wouldn't be out of character for Frasier to own a cell phone in 1993, and if Frasier has one, you can be sure Niles has one too.

• You'd think people as well-educated as Frasier and Niles would know that that Burke quote is apocryphal. (Niles claims he's got it framed.)
  • 1) Lots of people believe in things that aren't really true just because those beliefs suit their worldviews for whatever reason, 2) just because it's apocryphal doesn't mean it can't have meaning to Niles.