Let's solve a Frasier mystery - what is going on at the end of The Placeholder?

 

A long time ago, back when this blog wasn't even a year and a half old, I made a post about a Frasier end credits sequence (from the Season 5 episode "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do") that left me totally flummoxed, and which I declared then and there to be the series' weirdest. Looking back nearly nine years on, the whole piece now seems a little naive - in part, because I was still in the vulgar habit of double spacing between sentences in 2016, but more so because there is another Frasier end credits sequence that I've since decided would be a stronger candidate for the series' most baffling. Eddie barking incessantly at an hors d'oeuvre stand shaped like a moorish idol is an awfully random way to round off an episode focussed on Martin ending a long-term relationship, sure, but it doesn't add anything in the way of mystifying plot detail. It's a weird choice because the stand's presence is so incidental within the story proper that most viewers probably didn't even notice it was there on their initial viewing, but what's going on in the sequence itself is really straightforward enough. Eddie is barking at the fish-shaped stand because it spooks him. Why it would spook him so is unclear, as it's hardly the most outlandish prop ever featured in the series, but then as Groucho Marx so humorously observed, inside a dog it's too dark to read, and that goes double for a neurotic dog like Eddie. We could tack on some added significance, as I attempted in 2016 - if we assume that the stand in question belonged to Sherry, then we could interpret that final showdown as a visual metaphor for the ultimate incompatibility between herself and Martin (since Eddie, Martin's dog, regards it as out of place in his domain). I suspect, though, that this is likely a case of a "filler" ending. The writers wanted that final contemplative moment with Frasier and Martin at the bar to be where we left them for this particular installment, and there weren't any B-stories with Niles, Daphne or Roz they could have exploited. End credits sequences are often where we see glimpses of things happening on the periphery of the story, and I'd speculate that the idea here was to show us something of the party Sherry and Martin were preparing for earlier. In lieu of anything too elaborate, they simply had Eddie barking in its aftermath at the fish, now stripped of its hors d'oeuvres. It's a curious choice, but it succinctly communicates that the party is over, in more ways than one. 

So let's move over to our newly-declared champ of confusing codas, the sequence seen following "The Placeholder" of Season 11, the last season of Frasier, ever. (I am still in deep denial about the 2023 revival, because I will not accept Freddy Crane as either Jack Cutmore-Scott OR Martin 2.0, any more than I will accept him as Luke Tarsitano. Sorry, but we are fiercely for Trevor Einhorn in this house.) Debuting on October 14th 2003, this episode sees Roz attempting to pressure Frasier into dating an acquaintance of hers, an obnoxious insurance claims adjustor named Ann Hodges (Julia Sweeney). Frasier is loathed to date anyone for the sake of it, insisting that he's quite happy biding his time until Ms Right comes along, but Roz opines that he might regard Ann as a placeholder, so to keep flexing his dating muscles for when Ms Right finally does rear her head. Frasier later decides that he is in fact lonely and desperate enough to take Ann up on the offer, but immediately regrets it on realising quite how challenging it will be to keep his teeth gritted through each protracted second of her company. Things are further complicated when Kenny shows up with his visiting cousin (Krista Allen), whose name so happens to be Liz Wright (hardy har har), and who would clearly be a much better match for Frasier. Cue the awkward sitcom hi jinks, with Frasier attempting to blow off Ann and take a place at Liz's table. He inevitably ends up making a dire impression on both women, and while Liz makes an indignant exit, an opportunity forever squandered, Ann insists that he meet with her again tomorrow morning for coffee as compensation for their botched date.

The end credits sequence depicts the aftermath of Frasier's disastrous dinner; left alone at the restaurant, Frasier is approached by a man who takes a seat at his table and immediately starts sharing some photographs he has on hand. Frasier, who is perturbed by this development, gets out of the situation by faking a telephone call informing him of urgent business elsewhere, and leaves the man alone with his photos. Who was this man? What did the photographs he shares with Frasier have to do with anything we'd just seen? And what about the combination was so repellent to Frasier that he had to immediately high tail it out of there? There is nothing in the preceding twenty minutes to make it overtly obvious what is going on.

I'll admit that the credits sequence for "The Placeholder" was never one that stuck with me (not in the enigmatic way that the image of Eddie barking at that fish did), until I became aware of how many threads there were inquiring about it on the Frasier subreddit, and with no particularly conclusive answers being offered. The KACL 780 episode transcript was just as hazy, identifying the intruder as a man in a sports jacket who's attempting to push his photos on Frasier, but not linking it directly to anything else from the script other than Frasier's use of "the cell phone trick". We had seen Frasier pretend to receive a phone call with urgent news at two prior points during his date with Ann, so this part of the sequence is at least decipherable. The mystery lies with the man and the significance of his photos. I was intrigued enough to rewatch "The Placeholder" several times over, treating the whole arrangement as a puzzle that could be solved if I scrutinised the pieces long and hard enough.

I don't think it's unfair to say that "The Placeholder" is a fairly by-the-numbers installment of Frasier. Aside from introducing Ann, who would return in a more openly antagonistic role a few months down the line in "The Ann Who Came To Dinner" (I noted in my previous piece that Sherry is a divisive character among Frasier viewers, but oh boy does Ann make Sherry at her worst seem truly innocuous), the most notable thing about it is a sequence in which Frasier interacts extensively with a cat named Mr Bottomsley, whom Frasier is pet-sitting while his owner is out of town. The feline actor playing Bottomsley is such a delight - his reaction on being teased by Frasier about the prospect of a hot bath is simply priceless - and he and Frasier have such delectable chemistry that you really wish it hadn't taken this long for his latent cat person to come out (but then Frasier apparently had allergies back in 1996 when he met Kate Costa's cat). The rest of the episode is devoted to hitting largely familiar notes. For now, Ann herself plays like a cruder version of Poppy, an aggressively garrulous character we'd spent a couple of episodes with in Season 7, Frasier screwing up a date is certainly nothing we've never seen before, and the first act incorporates a sequence that heavily recalls the Season 4 finale "Odd Man Out", with Frasier once again having to contend with the stigma of being the only unattached adult in a restaurant. There's also a subplot with Martin agreeing to interrogate Niles and Daphne's Czech housekeeper Mrs. Gablyczyck (Lauri Johnson), whom they suspect of stealing; it's an agreeable enough diversion from the Frasier A-story, but is introduced fairly late into the runtime, what with Martin, Niles and Daphne also playing principal parts in that preliminary restaurant scene.

Even Frasier's tactic of staging a telephone call, purportedly from Niles after suffering a back injury, comes with built-in deja vu. We've seen variations on it in other episodes. In "Merry Christmas, Mrs Moskowitz" of Season 6, Frasier and Faye had each arranged for third parties to call them during their introductory meeting, to give them a quick out if their prospects weren't looking so rosy. "Cranes Unplugged" of Season 8 has a subplot with Niles and Daphne attempting to set Roz up with a man who is strongly implied to have resorted to this very trick after a single glance at Roz. This is a classic Frasier standby. So what does our mystery man do to warrant it on this most peculiar of occasions?

The first thing to note is that the man doesn't emerge from completely nowhere. If you pay attention to the extras in the backdrop during the date with Ann, you'll see that he's seated at the table behind Frasier. He isn't seen doing a whole lot other than toying with a wine glass and interacting with a waiter, but there is a shot where Frasier moves past his table that establishes that he's there by himself. He doesn't appear to take any interest in what's going on over at Frasier's end until Ann starts making a scene. And then when the credits are rolling he makes his own move. It would be helpful if we'd gotten a closer glimpse of what's actually in the pictures he shares with Frasier, but in my opinion they look like ordinary family photos (if you squint, I swear I see a child standing beside someone in a rabbit costume). This isn't a case of an overly zealous KACL fan wanting Frasier to sign his glossies, nor does it look like he's trying to set Frasier up with someone he knows. Whatever he's attempting to talk about with Frasier, he comes across as being somewhat down in the mouth about it (notice the dejected head shake as he takes his seat). A couple of possibilities spring to mind - the man might be trying to locate a missing person (in which case Frasier is acting like a bit of an arse in fervently not wanting to help him) or he's a lonely guy reaching out to another solitary restaurant patron by trying to strike up a conversation about his kids (in which case we're potentially meant to fill in the blanks that he's divorced and the kids are likely living with their mother). Frasier isn't in the mood for this; he was enjoying his consolation prize, in the form the souffle Kenny had ordered, and which Ann had previously declared was to die for, and this stranger is little more than an unwelcome intrusion in this moment of peace. Overwhelmed by the neediness of this man, he pulls out his phone and pretends that something's just come up, even if means having to abandon his souffle.

If that all still seems rather random, I do have a theory about how it might be more closely linked to the happenings in the episode, more specifically the sequence where Frasier is alone with Mr Bottomsley. During the initial restaurant scene, we learn that Frasier is very excited about his recent antiques purchase, a late Regency fruitwood mirror - a thread that transpires to have been implemented in service of a sight gag where Frasier, feeling the chill, has wrapped himself up in an afghan and, cradling the cat in his arms, goes to inspect his new mirror, only to recoil in horror at what he finds staring back at him. The realisation that he might be transforming into a crazy cat lady (ie: his aunt Shirley) is what spooks him into accepting the date with Ann. No literal mirrors figure in the final uncomfortable restaurant interaction, but we see Frasier being spooked by yet another frightful reflection of his own desperation. This time, the caricature it assumes is not that of a crazy cat lady, but another stereotyped figure of social impoverishment, the downtrodden divorced father. It's enough to scare him away, not simply to escape a dull conversation with an overbearing stranger, but because he fears that this is the kind of culture into which he'll be assimilated if he gets too accustomed to dining alone. (Not that dining by one's lonesome is any near as stigmatic as either this episode or "Odd Man Out" would suggest.)

If only Frasier had had the willpower to stick to his guns when he told Roz in the episode's opening that he was quite happy living the single life. The saddest thing about this whole situation is really not that Frasier missed out on an auspicious relationship with Ms Wright, but that he ultimately wasn't willing to settle for a quiet evening in his apartment with the company of Mr B and his hearty bowl of nine-vegetable winter soup. I don't know about you, but it all sounds positively idyllic to me. The only intrusion he had to put up with was a fleeting appearance from Eddie, who was easily sent scurrying. There's a reason why the scene with Mr B stands out to me as the highlight of "The Placeholder" - sandwiched in between the cavalcade of human awkwardness and the non-stop pressure to conform to the standard of doing everything in duos, the tranquility of cat-sitting is a long, cool drink of water, a respite in which Frasier is able to enjoy night of privacy on entirely his own terms. What it absolutely is NOT is a sign of Frasier hitting rock bottom on the personal well-being scale. He was doing perfectly fine until the judgements of the outside world crept in, via the memories of how he had once (presumably) judged his aunt Shirley. Because we all know that there's nothing wrong with favouring the companionship of an animal friend over a dubious quagmire of social stresses. Later in the episode, Martin mentions how he'd confided in Eddie his concerns that Frasier needed to get a life, and while this is clearly intended as a hypocritical echo of Frasier's prior interactions with the cat (with the laugh track responding accordingly), all that Martin does here is confirm that talking to a pet is no big deal. At this stage Martin was also involved with Ronee, so surely the implication isn't that he's also lonely and desperate?

Odds are that Aunt Shirley didn't have to deal with the kind of grotesque social blow-ups Frasier suffered through with Ann, any more than she did bizarre interludes where strangers approached her and attempted inexplicably to talk her through their family albums, and I suspect she was all the merrier for it. 

A Fairy Tale (aka A Curious Case)

At first glance the title of Tony Ross's 1991 picture book A Fairy Tale might seem deceptive. It takes place not in a lush mythical kingdom, but in a grimy industrial city in the early 20th century and the narrative that unfolds is, on the surface, a predominantly down to earth one. The opening page has our protagonist, a young girl named Bessie, angrily rejecting a book about fairies because she can no longer relate to such concepts. Her yearning for books that are about "real things" lays out Ross's own ambitions to tell a story that says something authentic to children on the brink of the same disillusionment. Young readers who may be too old and jaded to believe in things like the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas, but are also feeling the bleakness of that void and wondering what else in life could possibly come along to fill it.

Like Ross's Oscar Got The Blame, A Fairy Tale is about the conflict between fantasy and reality, more specifically a child's inclination to use imagination as a means of reckoning with their world versus the pressure to live in the real world. In this case the conflict is largely internal. Bessie is quite a bit older than Oscar and at the stage in life where she is questioning the value of escapist fantasy, yet she is clearly reluctant to abandon that lingering sense of childhood curiosity altogether. Her insistence that fairy tales are about made up things is challenged when she gets to know her elderly neighbour, Mrs Leaf (full name later revealed to be Daisy Leaf), who suggests that she herself might really be a fairy. Bessie is initially incredulous, since Mrs Leaf does not meet her preconceived notions of how a fairy should be, but Mrs Leaf explains that fairies only look dainty and beautiful when they are happy; an unhappy fairy would look absolutely wretched. Bessie observes that if Mrs Leaf were a fairy, she would have to be very deeply unhappy, a comment she immediately regrets but that Mrs Leaf does not appear to take too personally. Mrs Leaf, it seems, is indeed a deeply unhappy woman - the source of her unhappiness is never explicitly cited, but can be readily deciphered by anybody reading between the lines. Over the course of the story, she and Bessie forge a close friendship that endures as the latter comes of age, experiences love and loss, and enters into her twilight years. By the ending, which takes us up to the present day, Daisy is still by her side, and it becomes apparent that the ageing process has worked rather differently for her.

From the text alone, there might be some ambiguity regarding Daisy's claims to fairyhood. Ross never flat-out confirms that she is a fairy, much as he never flat-out confirmed what was really going on in the text for Oscar Got The Blame, although in both cases the illustrations appear to favour a particular conclusion. For the first half of the story it seems entirely possible that Daisy is simply humoring Bessie, by giving this frustrated child one last peculiarity to chew on before this kind of fanciful imagining becomes totally inaccessible to her. Bessie notices things about Daisy that make her different to others but do not, in themselves, prove that she is a fairy - for example, her vegetarian diet and her tendency to forage for wild berries (berries that she warns Bessie would be poisonous to anyone not of elfin origin). Then, as Bessie grows into an adult, Ross insinuates more heavily that there might indeed be something genuinely uncanny about Daisy. She does not show up as anything more than a ghostly smudge in Bessie's wedding photographs, although we are offered the glimmer of a rational explanation, with her husband Robert thinking nothing of it and insisting that no picture he's been involved with has ever turned out quite right. Bessie also observes that as she has come of age, Daisy only appears to have gotten progressively younger, although we could still chalk that up to Bessie's friendship bringing out a new lease of life in Daisy. But is there any way to make sense of Daisy's remarkable longevity, and the fact that she's still with Bessie at the end of the book, other than to concede that she is exactly what she says she is?

Bessie's initial distaste for fairy tales stems from her assessment that they do not reflect reality, but at the same time it is clear that she is not exactly satisfied with what reality has to offer. We sense that she turns on childhood fantasy as angrily as she does because she sees it as having betrayed her in not reflecting the world as it really is. And when she attempts to discuss her unanswered questions with the other children at school and gets predictably ridiculed for it, she becomes frustrated with the intolerance of the non-elfin world in not allowing room for such thought. Bessie cannot relate to fairy tale fiction, but nor does she feel at home in the world in which she's required to take her place; in many respects, Daisy's quest is less about convincing Bessie that fairy tales are real than it is steering her toward the qualities worth celebrating in a world that does not align with childhood expectation. The things she encourages Bessie to see as remarkable are, on the surface, very small and ordinary ("Have you ever had a magic moment...a summer afternoon when the sky's so warm the world stops, or the night before Christmas when you can feel the happiness in the air?"). The real world harbours ample magic, but it manifests in subtler, more unassuming means than one might find in an archetypal children's storybook. It is notable that when we first meet Bessie and Daisy, their respective living spaces are marked by dominant colours that point to the state of their internal worlds. Bessie's bedroom is blue and shady, reflecting her general gloom and dissatisfaction. Daisy's living room, by contrast, is green and vibrant, evoking both her connection to nature and, by extension, the fairy domain she describes to Bessie as being covered in grassland. It also hints at Daisy's latent vitality, and at the other hidden depths she possesses, something underscored in having her house's exterior seem as gloomy and disconnected from the natural world as everything else in Balaclava Street.

Daisy tells Bessie that the human world and the fairy world exist simultaneously, and together, but are like two sides of the same coin. Ordinarily they can't see each other, although cracks will occasionally appear between the two, allowing fairies to wander through into human dwellings, only for them to retreat in an instant. The implicit message here is of the duality of life, as Daisy teaches Bessie to consolidate the harshness of reality with the ephemeral blessings it also brings, which Bessie must be alert to in order to seize and appreciate. The cruelty of the human world takes many forms, ranging from the teasing Bessie receives from her schoolmates when she lets her fairy agnosticism slip to the onset of the world war that will eventually claim the life of her beloved Robert. Ross's story centres on the transformative power of the friendship that persists between Bessie and Daisy and how both parties are mutually lifted from their respective solitude and despair. The friendship proves physically transformative for Daisy, but it also visibly changes Bessie's world. As the two grow closer, the illustrations depicting the happenings in that grimy industrial burg already seem brighter and more colourful. The street outside Leach's shop, in which Bessie and Daisy have their second encounter, looks warm and lively, even beneath the clouds of factory smog, and populated by other individuals who are likewise seizing the moment (two men engaged in intimate conversation, a boy hoop rolling). Sharp-eyed readers might notice that littered through the book's illustrations are various hidden fairies and gnomes, lurking somewhere within the corners or, in the case of the illustration depicting the military cross issued posthumously to Robert, right within plain sight. It is a charming touch that seems to bear out Daisy's words about the fairy world always being connected to the human world and the magic intermittently seeping its way in, but the real revelations are in the broader sense of atmosphere and how alive Bessie's ostensibly humdrum existence becomes when she is sharing these experiences with Daisy. Ross's description of the Whit Monday they spend together seems hauntingly reminiscent of Daisy's earlier words on the magic of a summer day in which the sky is so warm that the world seems to stop. Nothing especially out of the ordinary happens. Daisy watches Bessie participate in a parade, they have a celebratory meal in the church hall and then walk home together. But each individual moment is fused with an elation that Bessie wishes could go on forever. It proves a day more magical than any fairy tale.

Bessie cannot actually stop time, of course. The blissful Whit Monday she would have gladly inhabited for all eternity is followed immediately a time leap, in which Daisy becomes a young woman and her perspective on life somewhat changes. She begins to identify as Bess, and her unanswered questions about the existence of fairies are largely put to one side. She and Daisy still talk about it, but have contextualised it as a fond memory of a bygone time in which Daisy had playfully tried to make her believe in fairies. Now Bess's interests lie with more adult pursuits, such as her job in one of the local factories and her romance with her colleague Robert. The idyllic future she might have built with Robert is savagely ruptured by the coming of war; Robert goes away to fight and is killed in action. Bess is naturally distraught, but Daisy is able to support her through the grief until, some years later, "the sadness about Robert turned into happy memories, just as Daisy said it would." Implicit in this line is, I think, the most salient hint regarding the source of Daisy's own implied sadness when first encountered by Bessie. Daisy does not reveal much about her background, other than to suggest that she became stranded in the human world after being unable to find her way back to the fairy world, although we might well have read some significance into her identifying as Mrs Leaf. With that in mind, Daisy's assurances of light at the end of the tunnel following the loss of Robert could be taken as stemming from personal experience. Perhaps when she described being unable to get back to the fairy domain she was speaking at least somewhat metaphorically, referring covertly to the loss of the life she had previously known when her husband was with her. Eventually, it seems that her sorrow transmuted into happy memories, but it took the renewed joy from her friendship with Bessie to get her to that point. Daisy is now able to return the favour by being there for her friend amid her own voyage through grief. But even before Daisy had clearly always helped to fill a hole in Bessie's life. From what we know of Bessie's school life, she was teased and something of a misfit among her peers. There is a passing reference to her mother and at one point we get to meet her uncle Harold, who is a pigeon fancier and points to the birds' homing instincts as an example of the inherent mysteriousness of life. But by all indications Bessie felt more of a connection to Daisy than she did her own flesh and blood family, who stay largely out of the picture. Daisy helped the lonely Bessie find a sense of belonging the real world once before, a function she is able to keep on fulfilling for the adult Bess.

Ross's story ends more or less where it began, with Bess and Daisy in the present day, as close knit a pair as they've always been, although the two of them have now switched places. As we can see from the closing illustrations, Bess has grown old while Daisy now looks young and dainty. By now, Bess feels that she's finally attained clarity for those unresolved questions she had many years ago regarding the existence of fairies. "Maybe old friends never notice the changes in each other. Now and again though, a faint memory comes to old Bess. Something about fairies looking young and beautiful when they're happy...stuff and nonsense, she knew there were no such things...she'd always known." Ironically, Bess's sense of closure on the matter arrives right as Ross gives the reader what looks to be irrefutable proof of Daisy's fairyhood. Is Bess's ageing intended to be symbolic of her relinquishing of childhood fantasy? I would argue not. While the story closes on an unmistakably poignant note, it still reads to me like a positive ending. The implication is that Bess no longer feels the need for fairies, because she has found assuredly the fulfilment she'd long deemed to be lacking in the real world, and is contented with the friend she has, who also just so happens to actually be a fairy. Her friend too could not be happier. Significantly, the final illustration, which has the two friends walking along 1991-era Balaclava Street, appears to show them heading out of the urban environment that has dominated the narrative and in the direction of a distant stretch of greenery. The feeling is one of transcendence, as if the fairy world is their ultimate destination. Their hands linked, we see them bridging the gap between the young and adult worlds, with youthful innocence and graceful maturity co-existing side by side. The pair compliment one another perfectly. Far from a mournful story about the inevitable abandonment of childhood awe, A Fairy Tale is an optimistic yarn about its endurance, and its ability to grow and develop along with us. Life is filled hardship - in that regard it's not so different to a fairy tale - but we've a valuable ally in the magic that floats up through the cracks.