The World's Weirdest Frasier End Credits Sequence

As the entire world goes to pieces outside, I'm making a desperate bid to hold onto my sanity by focusing upon the most genial distraction I can possibly call to mind - namely, the most bizarre end credits sequence in the entire history of Frasier.  It's odd, and yet its oddness is of such a low-key variety that it tends to slip beneath most viewers' noses, so allow me to shine some rare spotlight upon this sequence and ruminate on why it's such a curiosity of mine.

Anybody familiar with Frasier will recall that the series always closed off each episode with an additional scene that played during the end credits.  Unlike Friends, which used a similar tactic, these sequences consisted entirely of visual narration and were accompanied by the show's signature ditty, "Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs", performed by Kelsey Grammer himself.  Actually, I know a number of people who find the closing credits to Frasier to be inherently weird upon the basis of that song, what with its random and slightly confusing lyrics.  Why does Frasier suddenly reveal a strange fixation with two culinary dishes which isn't even hinted at in the series proper?  I'm not certain if I would have gotten it if not for composer Bruce Miller's explanation in the sleeve notes of the series' official soundtrack ("Tossed Salad & Scrambled Eggs and Other Frasier Favorites") - he was instructed "not to mention psychiatry, crazy people or radio, but to make it germane to the show" and the whole tossed salad and scrambled eggs hook seemed like an appropriately zany metaphor for conveying the chaos of Frasier's day-to-day existence.

Ordinarily, the end credits were a place to give closure to a subplot or to throw in an additional punchline to a gag from earlier on in the episode (an obvious exception being the season finales, which usually consisted of a "Thanks For Calling" sequence that listed all of the celebrities who'd guest starred throughout the season as callers to Frasier's radio show).  Occasionally, you'd get something a bit more non-sequitur, and certainly no more so than in the closing sequence to the episode "Ain't Nobody's Business if I Do" of Season 5.

"Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do" is notable for being the send-off for Martin's long-term girlfriend Sherry Dempsey (Marsha Mason), who happens to be one of the series' most divisive characters - depending on who you ask, she was either a hilarious foil to the Crane boys' snobbery or an unbearably obnoxious character who'd already worn out her welcome by her second appearance.  It also shows an unusually ugly side to Niles, whose sole purpose here is to lead Frasier astray and then take no responsibility for his actions once the damage is done (in fact, this is the closest that Niles comes to being the out-and-out villain of any episode).  The brothers learn from Daphne that Martin is hiding an engagement ring in his underpants drawer and all three of them are a little testy at the prospect of him getting hitched to Sherry, whom none of them have ever gotten along all too swimmingly with.  Niles takes it upon himself to hire a private detective, just to see if there's any dirt to be dug up on Sherry - initially, this is not to Frasier's taste, but he eventually gives in and the brothers discover that Sherry has a long history of failed marriages.  They decide to discreetly impart this information to Martin, but naturally things don't go to plan - it transpires that Martin was already well-aware of Sherry's past and he's pissed off to learn that his boys have been snooping around behind his back.  It also turns out that Martin has decided to break it off with Sherry, because he realises that the two of them have very different ideas about where they'd like the relationship to be headed.  Frasier, misreading the situation, further screws up in his efforts to intervene with the break-up, but by the end of the episode, Martin seems to have forgiven him and the two of them share a nice bonding moment as the story fades out.  Oh, and Eddie barks at a wooden fish during the end credits.  That's where the weirdness comes in.

The weirdness of this sequence rests, primarily, in how overwhelmingly arbitrary it is.  The scenario itself is a fairly banal one (which I suspect is why most viewers don't really tend to notice it at all), and yet it seems so disconnected from anything that's gone before it that I can't help but get a little hung up on what it's doing there.  As with most things that I get particularly or unreasonably hung up on, inevitably I've wound up developing a whole lot of affection for this sequence; if you were to ask me about my favourite end credits Frasier sight gag, I wouldn't hesitate to pick out this one, all because it's such a bewildering oddity.

End credits sequences focusing extensively or exclusively on Eddie actually could be a bit more surreal or experimental than most, but they usually had some clear logical connection to the the events or themes of the preceding story, and frequently contained parallels with Frasier's own most recent predicament.  One of the earliest closing sequences to feature only Eddie, "Beloved Infidel" of Season 1, showed the dog alone in the apartment, and rolling around rampantly on Frasier's couch.  This is a direct continuation of a running gag in which Frasier naively believes that he's trained Eddie to keep off the couch, when in actuality the devious little cur has simply learned to jump off the instant he hears Frasier approaching.  In an episode where Frasier also learns of a disturbing historic incident that forces him to reevaluate his perspective on his parents' marriage, the image of Eddie secretly rolling his parasite-filled hide all over Frasier's luxury furniture also conjures up feelings of contamination and of unpleasant realities threatening to encroach something idealistic and pure - not least, Frasier's assumption that the Eddie menace is containable.  Clearly, Frasier does not live in the world that he's long assumed he does.

For a more surreal example, take "The Show Where Diane Comes Back" of Season 3, which rounds off with a sequence in which Eddie upsets Martin by devouring his socks (actually, Eddie isn't so much "devouring" the socks as lying there and holding them impassively in his jaws - Moose, apparently, was a pretty impassive dog in real life and there are times when it comes through in Eddie).  This tiny snippet of Martin/Eddie interaction doesn't relate directly to anything that happens within the episode itself, but thanks to a small symbolic interjection, in which Eddie is shown in darkness with a thought bubble protruding from his head, reading, "I CAN'T HELP IT.  IT'S WHAT I DO," its inclusion here makes perfect sense.  It is a direct callback to Diane Chambers' play, the pretentiously titled "Rhapsody and Requiem", which used a very similar theatrical device (only sans the need for a thought bubble) for disclosing the inner thoughts and compulsions of its characters.  The emphasis upon the overruling influence of primal desires and instincts also fits in neatly with Frasier's own dilemma throughout much of the episode, as he spends the first half wanting to exact his petty revenge on Diane and the second hopelessly attracted to her, despite knowing full well that the two of them are not a good match.

The closing sequence to "The Impossible Dream" of Season 4 is weirder still, as is befitting for one of the stranger outings in Frasier's run. This is the episode where Frasier grapples with a recurring dream in which he's sharing a bed with fellow radio personality Gil Chesteron, and gradually comes to question if his subconscious is trying to tell him something about his sexuality.  By the end of the episode Frasier appears to have established that the dream doesn't stem from any latent sexual attraction to Gil but seems no more at peace with his subconscious (oh boy, Freud).  The end credits sequence suggests that Eddie too is greatly troubled by his own nighttime visions, which his case involve leaping up and down and being tormented by a plate of perpetually out-of-reach muffins upon the kitchen unit.  Eddie wakes up with a start, runs to the kitchen and starts jumping up and down in the same fashion as his dream self, but finally discovers that there are no muffins in reality and staggers back to the living room in defeat.

Eddie's dream also contains the rather odd detail of the kitchen clock showing that it's 3:11 in the morning - odd, because we are technically supposed to be inside the subconscious of a dog, and I'm not sure why such a detail would make a lick of sense in that context.  The answer to that being that Eddie's dream sequence was a straight-up recycling job, reusing footage from the closing sequence of "Author, Author" of Season 1.  That one also ended upon a much more upbeat note for Eddie, as he actually did make off with one of the muffins.

That fish in "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do", though - what does it have to do with anything that happens in the episode itself?  Actually, "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do" is a fairly atypical episode of Frasier in general, in that the focus is almost entirely upon Martin and Sherry's relationship and the Crane brothers' unease with it.  There's no subplot to speak of and Daphne, despite serving as a catalyst in a couple of key scenes, is given precious little to do.  The only scene that stands as a wholly independent gag with no really obvious connection to the main story involves Roz making a faux pas while trying to bluff her way out of a traffic ticket from a female police officer.  Even then, it feels like it was written in purely to give Roz some minimal involvement (although that's often the case for episodes in which don't involve Frasier's radio show - to put things into perspective, in Sherry's debut episode, "Dad Loves Sherry, The Boys Just Whine", Roz appears only at the very start of the episode to discuss the joys of being able to wear sandals again).  I can see why they weren't exactly spoiled for choice for end credits sequence material on this one.  Still, Eddie and that fish?  Where does that image even stem from?

Naturally, it's not quite as random as at first it might seem.  The wooden fish DOES show up within the course of the episode itself, although it's such a minor aspect of the mise-en-scène that you'd have to be particularly observant to notice it all, and even then odds are that you'd have long-forgotten it by the time we've reached the credits.  Myself, I had to go back and purposely look for the fish in order to pinpoint where it appears and attempt to make sense of that ending.  In the second scene, as Martin and Sherry are preparing for a party with some of Sherry's friends, we can see Sherry inserting cheese and olives on cocktail sticks into the wooden fish, which functions as a novelty hors d'oeuvre display.  Nobody ever references the fish, nor does the camera ever focus on it - it's a part of the scenery, nothing more.  There's nothing to suggest that Eddie feels particularly strongly about it either - for the entirety of the scene, he's facing in the opposite direction.

We could take a cue from the previous Eddie-centric endings and look for parallels or symbolism in the scenario that relate to the happenings of the wider episode.  My best suggestion would be that the conflict between Eddie and that fish represents the inevitable incompatibility between Martin and Sherry (Eddie is his dog, after all, and the fish was handled by Sherry and used as a prop at a party aimed primarily at Sherry's social circle - and yes, I'm definitely reaching with this one).  Given that the fish has been stripped of cheese and olives by the end of the episode, perhaps what we're meant to be looking at here is the aftermath of the party (which happens entirely off-screen), but there's nothing else visible in the scene to suggest it.  In the absence of any particularly compelling explanation, this may even be indicative of a deleted scene in which the fish was given slightly more focus; enough to make it suddenly being the centrepiece of the closing credits a bit more justifiable.

Or maybe the joke is that the fish, with its beady yellow eyes, is capable of intimidating even a champion staremaster like Eddie into losing his cool.  It still feels every bit as arbitrary a means of rounding off an episode about Martin and Sherry's break-up, but as an individual piece it suddenly gains a lot more clarity.