Flaming Moe's (aka A Moe-st Successful Formula)

Much like the concoction from which its title derives, "Flaming Moe's" (episode 8F08) was something of an overnight sensation. Debuting on November 21st 1991, it immediately cemented its reputation as one of The Simpsons' most electrifying entries. There was a certain panache to the episode, something that caught fire and captured viewers' attentions in a way that exceeded expectations even for a series that had already garnered such glorious notoriety. On the DVD commentary, it's noted by the production crew that "Flaming Moe's" was a really big deal when first it aired, regularly landing spots in contemporary top episode columns. Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood of I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide declare it to be "Possibly the best Simpsons episode" (of course, in their expanded edition they bestow that exact same honor on Season 9's "The Principal and The Pauper", which is...a minority opinion, to say the least). What was the reason for its breakout success? Was it the wonderfully self-depreciating guest appearance from Aerosmith? A testament to how much audiences loved Cheers (still yet to close its doors and give way to Frasier) and were willing to extend that love to anything that paid homage to it? Those were delicious extras for sure, but certainly not the main ingredient. The main ingredient was Moe. Slimy, despicable, lewd, greasy, backstabbing Moe. He's essentially a counterpart to the children's cough syrup that, as Homer fortuitously discovered, will transform the most low grade, kitchen-sink of cocktails into a luxury beverage, provided the alcohol is first allowed to get a little burned. You know that syrup, like anything bearing the Krusty brand, is dubious, cheap and in no way trustworthy, and yet there is something about it that keeps bar patrons from Springfield and beyond coming back for more. Moe is, on the surface, every bit as repulsive - the plot of this episode has him stealing Homer's recipe and passing it off as his own brainchild without qualms - and yet he makes for such an engaging, and weirdly sympathetic central figure. We shouldn't like Moe, but there is something so achingly, snivellingly human about the guy that whenever he's onscreen, we're totally absorbed.

"Flaming Moe's" feels like an important episode in the evolution of The Simpsons, being one of their earliest experiments in putting a supporting Springfieldian front and centre. It isn't purely a Moe show - Homer plays a pivotal role, and Marge, Bart, Lisa and even Maggie all get their chances to shine. But the dynamics happening within the household are definitely secondary compared to the dynamics happening inside the tavern, and in the strained friendship between Moe and Homer. The only episode before it that felt quite so radical, in terms of side-lining the Simpsons themselves, was "Principal Charming" of Season 2. By its third season, the series was feeling confident enough to try broadening its canvas further, taking advantage of the town's various other colourful denizens and exploring what kinds of stories could be supported beyond the snapshots of modern family life. Not all of their efforts were successful - a counterpoint to "Flaming Moe's" from the back end of the season is "The Otto Show", an episode centred on a character who doesn't prove strong enough to carry his own narrative, and whom the writers have wisely shied away from using too heavily since. Not everybody has the Moe Factor, that pining desperation to be loved and valued by a world he so bitterly resents. But there is a little Moe in all of us, for sure. (As a bonus, the extensive bar focus gives us the opportunity to see other prominent Springfieldians in bizarre after dark personas. Krusty as a pimp? A drunken Edna K attempting to pick up Homer? A well-groomed Barney with trendy wingmen named Armando and Raffi?)

The series was onto a winning formula with "Flaming Moe's", but what's curious is that they did not, for some time, make any serious attempt to repeat it. It was the first episode to use Moe as a main character, and for a number of years it was also the ONLY episode that could be conceivably described as Moe-centric. He had the occasional moment of plot significance here and there - he played a key role in the resolution of "New Kid on The Block" of Season 4, and "Secrets of a Successful Marriage" of Season 5 added the intriguing development of him coveting Homer's life, specifically his union with Marge - but was mostly restricted to asides in his bar room. It wasn't until Season 7, with "Bart Sells His Soul" and "Team Homer", that he started to be brought back into the spotlight. And for another episode in which Homer's friendship with Moe was the emotional nexus, we would have to wait five whole years, until "The Homer They Fall" of Season 8. Writer Robert Cohen, meanwhile, would prove something of a one script wonder, at least where The Simpsons was concerned, with "Flaming Moe's" being his only credited contribution (although he worked elsewhere on the series as a production assistant).

It could be that they were reluctant to go back to the Moe well too quickly after "Flaming Moe's" for risk of repeating itself. And while there would be a great many great Moe moments in the years to come (I am particularly fond of the character study he receives in the "The Love-Matic Grampa" segment of  "The Simpsons Spin-off Showcase"), there is no other episode that quite so astutely captures the essence of the Homer-Moe dynamic, a relationship that's not so much symbiotic as it is parasitic. It's nicely summed up by Moe's explanation for why his business has lately been being going through such a rough patch: "Increased job satisfaction and family togetherness are poison for a purveyor of mind-numbing intoxicants like myself." Moe is a miserable being who leeches off the misery of others. Somewhat ironically, given that he's later revealed to envy the life Homer has, Moe's success depends on keeping Homer from realising its full potential. He sells a temporary escapism that Homer is all-too willing to buy, and Homer in turn gives him a steady flow of income. Moe is always there for Homer, albeit not in the most wholesome of ways, and Homer is always there for Moe, even as the rest of the world is too contented to be drinking. What makes Moe's betrayal of Homer in "Flaming Moe's" such a searing gut-punch is not so much that he would take a recipe that Homer came up with and market it without procuring his friend's consent or offering him credit - this frankly is only the logical extension of an alliance that has always been fundamentally exploitative. It's that Moe no longer has any need for Homer the instant his own prospects are looking up. The longstanding threat to Moe would be if Homer were to overcome his habitual drinking and find fulfilment elsewhere, be it in either his family, his career or a more constructive hobby. Homer has, unbeknownst to him, always been the more powerful party in the relationship. But it ends up being Homer who gets left behind, once Moe finds fulfilment in a more desirable class of customer. 

For as beloved as the episode is, it contains a sequence that I consider to be highly underrated, seldom brought up when people talk about the most emotionally painful moments in the show. It occurs as Homer is confronting Moe at the counter of his now-packed bar, protesting that if there were any justice in this world, he would be credited as the drink's creator and his face would be featured on a range of crappy merchandise (ha ha, meta). When Moe does not take his objections too seriously, Homer indignantly exercises the power he's harboured all of this time and tells him that he's lost a customer. This is the kind of announcement that, a short while ago, would have absolutely devastated Moe. Now, he tells Homer that he'll have to speak up, as he accepts a seemingly unending rush of cash coming from all angles of the tavern. Moe isn't knowingly taunting Homer; he genuinely can't hear him above the clatter of the cash register or the clamouring of other patrons thirsting for a Flaming Moe. Once the most valuable asset in Moe's life, Homer now finds himself drowned out amid a sea of indistinct voices, a person of no particular importance to a bartender who is soaring his way up to the big leagues. There's a hilarious moment elsewhere in the episode where Professor Frink, attempting to crack the mysteries of the Flaming Moe, has a computer analyse it and declare the secret ingredient to be love. Really, he's only half-wrong. Homer sharing the recipe came from a place of love, but Moe did not reciprocate. In some respects it is a love story (albeit a toxic one), with Homer slipping into the archetype of the bitter ex who stood by their partner through times of hardship, only to be cast aside once success was in their grasp. I'd like to think it's not a total coincidence that the name of the beverage, no matter whose name is attached to the end, sounds suspiciously like a gay slang term. (Happy Pride Month!)

It is noteworthy that, while Homer is obviously shocked by Moe's bald-faced pilfering of the Flaming Homer recipe, and his move to rename the beverage to accommodate his own legacy, it does not at first create such a dire rift in their friendship. Soon after, Homer is seen back at the bar, casually chatting with Moe about his recent increase in business and if his drink might have had something to do with it. It's only when Moe is approached by Harv Bannister, a representative of Tipsy McStagger, the major food and beverage chain that wants to purchase the recipe to the Flaming Moe, that we see the seeds of real rancour being planted. Moe refuses Bannister's bid, and is assured by Barney that he made the right call, since "Only an idiot would give away a million dollar recipe like that." Words that, unbeknownst to their speaker, cut Homer to the quick. But is it the money that's really gotten him down? What's tragic about the situation is that it had seemingly never occurred to Homer that his home recipe could be marketed and sold for such a lucrative sum. He was simply sharing his tip for a delicious drink as a friend trying to help out another friend who was struggling with low beer stocks, and for the purposes of them sharing an intimate moment as two best mates. It also seemingly doesn't occur to Homer, until the end of the episode, that he wields another certain nefarious power in this equation, in that he's the only person besides Moe who knows the secret ingredient of the coveted beverage. Homer could very easily have sabotaged Moe's trade out of spite, and yet it takes some serious whittling down to get him to the point where he's prepared to do that. Vengeance is not on his mind, and nor is blackmail. At one point he tries exploring his legal options, but is advised that he has no case by Lionel Hutz, who is amazed to discover that books can be a source of useful information, not just fancy decorations to make an office look better. What Homer really wants is acknowledgement from the so-called pal who used him and discarded him so callously. When he returns to the bar, now the hottest joint in Springfield, and has to enter through the bathroom window on account of not being on the exclusive guest list, and pointedly orders a Flaming Homer, it's not so much a demand for belated shares or credit as a plea for validation. It is jealousy, and not envy (and no, the two are not interchangeable) that drives his reaction.

It is not within Homer's interests to lose the established harmony that he has with Moe. We see the vital function the bartender plays in his life within the opening scene, which has Homer retreating to the tavern to get away from the disorder of Lisa's slumber party. The dealings of the slumber party are their own bit of otherwise disconnected weirdness, showcasing an unusually sinister side to Lisa - being host to four of her schoolfriends transforms the ordinarily down to earth middle child into the cackling leader of what's framed as nothing less than a malevolent cult, dabbling in freaky rituals involving candle wax and attempting to assimilate Bart into their ranks by way of a forced makeover. They also jinx him, albeit in the schoolyard sense (remember how annoying it was to get jinxed as a child, and bound to silence until somebody released you by saying your name out loud? Why did we ever accept that as canon?). It all gets a bit too self-consciously silly once Bart flees to his bedroom and the girls get through the locked door by removing its hinges, but it serves its purpose in creating a situation that's sufficiently strange and chaotic (Bart leaps out the window, potentially injuring himself, and Maggie is seized by the party as a consolation prize and caked in make-up) that Homer's first instinct would be to remove himself entirely. Moe is his go-to diversion whenever he's unwilling to handle the responsibilities of being a parent (consider that it's unclear if Marge was also in the house, so he potentially left those kids unsupervised, or whenever reality in general gets too overwhelming. The cruellest knock-on effect of Moe's betrayal and meteoric rise to bartending stardom is that it subverts the arrangement, transforming Homer's default method of escapism into an omnipresent symbol of personal oppression. We see this during a dinner table sequence where the subject of the Flaming Moe keeps coming up (the other Simpsons at least are aware that Homer is the true creator of the beverage, but not entirely mindful in how they discuss it around him). Finding his family are not soothing his spirits, Homer excuses himself, reflexively, with the announcement that he's going to Moe's...only for it to hit him like a ton of bricks that Moe is, in this instance, the problem and not the (temporary) solution. His attempt to find a new watering hole at the ironically named The Aristocrat (where the bartender threatens him on entry with a shotgun and gets extremely pissed off when Homer has the gall to request a clean glass) confirms that Moe's services won't be so easily replaced. Homer and Moe were once invaluable allies in their mutual loserdom. The cold reality - that Moe has ascended to luscious new heights while he's been left to wallow in the gutter, becomes a force so inescapable that it has a far more potent effect on Homer's perception than any alcoholic beverage, immersing him in a world where everyone (men, women, children and daisies alike) bears Moe's cursed, pug-like mug.

All while Homer's sanity is slowly degrading, Moe is living his dream life. He becomes the toast of Springfield, a community that typically struggles to be the subject of positive conversation, as illuminated in an opening interview with boxing champion Dedrick Tatum ("That town was a dump. If you ever see me back there, you know I really [bleep]ed up bad!" Yeah, I feel the exact same way about the town I grew up in.) He even gets a romantic interest, in the form of an alluring bar maid named Colette, an obvious parody of Diane Chambers, the character played by Shelley Long on the popular NBC sitcom Cheers. Colette was originally intended to be voiced by Catherine O'Hara (best known for her roles in the Beetlejuice and Home Alone films), who had recorded a vocal track, but she was ultimately replaced by regular cast member Jo Ann Harris due to a feeling that there was an insurmountable mismatch between O'Hara's performance and the character's visual presentation. The prospect of female companionship has Moe at his most skin-crawlingly lecherous; the very public job interview he conducts with Colette is comprised of nothing but wall-to-wall sexual harassment, although Colette seems unfazed and capable of holding her own against him. With that in mind, the optics of having her eventually sleep with Moe maybe aren't so great, even as a nod to the Will-They-Won't-They between Diane and Ted Danson's character Sam Malone, but having them enter into a relationship ups the poignancy in terms of what Moe has to lose on an emotional level when his fortunes inevitably crumble. It pays off at the end. The purpose of Colette's character is, ultimately, to get us to an unsubtle swipe at Long's decision to leave Cheers in 1987. Alone again, Moe informs Homer that Colette "left to pursue a movie career. Frankly, I think she was better off here." This could be perceived as a little mean-spirited, given that Long's cinematic career never reached the same heights as her work on Cheers (although it should be noted that Long also left Cheers because she wanted to spend more time with her family, which she was struggling to do on the show's shooting schedule, so exceeding her success on Cheers was maybe not her top priority). The statement is, however, contextualised as an expression of pathos on Moe's part - Moe might have been happier with Colette around, but of course she wasn't better off with him. Having gained a fleeting taste of intimacy, Moe is restored to his former solitude, left to ruminate on the likelihood that, in the end, he might have amounted to only a stepping stone on someone else's path to glory.

Colette's arrival turns out to be only the beginning of what later becomes a more intricate homage, complete with a Simpson-ized recreation of the iconic Cheers title sequence and a parody of the theme song, "Where Everybody Knows Your Name" by Gary Portnoy. It has to be said that this portion of the episode is a little peculiar, as it's not altogether clear what this is supposed to represent within the context of the episode. The first time I saw it, I remember thinking it was meant to be a TV promo for the Flaming Moe, but it isn't directly framed as such (despite the song playing like an advertising jingle). Now, I think it plays more like the opening to an alternate reality sitcom in which Moe's bar is the focus (a forerunner to some of the concepts later explored in Season 7's "22 Short Films About Springfield") and the hub of a thriving and welcoming community. We see the beginnings of what looks like a typical Cheers installment, with Barney walking the bar in the manner of the late George Wendt's Norm and being greeted enthusiastically by everyone within, including a bartender who is blatantly meant to recall Woody Harrelson. There is, however, an unsettling subversion to this sense of social kinship, suggesting that while Moe might be drawing in bigger and hipper crowds, they are still fundamentally there for release from life's cruelties, and probably no better of for their reliance on the Flaming Moe. The accompanying stills paint an ugly picture of bar life and the intoxicating effects of alcohol, with bar patrons fighting and making one another bleed (anticipating our trip into the actual Cheers bar in "Fear of Flying" of Season 6, in which Norm got drunk and angry and threatened to kill everyone inside the bar). The seemingly disarming ditty, meanwhile, is replete with troublingly bleak lyrics. Compared to the Cheers theme, which was about finding solace and belonging with like-minded souls who valued your existence, these lyrics are focused on the diversionary powers of the drink itself. Get a load of this: 

 

"When the weight of the world has got you down,

and you want to end your life.

Bills to pay, a dead end job,

And problems with the wife.

But don't throw in the towel,

Cos there's a place right round the block

Where you can drink your misery away." 

 

The closing hook, which insists that "Happiness is just a Flaming Moe away", is juxtaposed (amusingly and harrowingly) with a final still showing Homer peering in from outside the bar, his face pressed up against the glass with all the plaintive longing of that kid outside the McDonald's in Santa Claus: The Movie, the patrons within every bit as indifferent to his suffering. Ultimately, the purpose of this sequence is to further accentuate Homer's loneliness, excluded from the celebratory culture surrounding the drink  he personally devised, its touted release from reality totally inaccessible to him.

Colette ends up serving as the moral centre of the story, when she discovers that Moe owes everything to the friend he wronged and continues to mistreat. She convinces Moe that he could put things right by selling the Flaming Moe recipe to Bannister and splitting the profits evenly with Homer. Moe agrees to do so, but is thwarted by Homer, whose despondency has reached its boiling point. Just as Moe is about to sign a contract with Bannister, he appears from the top of the tavern, his coat draped over one half of his face in the style of the Phantom of the Opera (a neat little visual hint at how severely his status as an outcast has warped him), loudly bellowing that he knows the secret to the Flaming Moe to be "nothing but plain, ordinary, over-the-counter children's cough syrup". Bannister gleefully tears up his contract and scarpers. A week later, the high street is awash with vendors selling their own versions of a Flaming Moe, as Homer sheepishly returns to his old hangout to find it devoid of life or business. The only reason anyone would have set foot in Moe's bar was for the joy of downing that exclusive beverage. The community was all a sham, and nobody was going because they liked the tavern itself. Levelled to Homer's lowly status once more, Moe invites his old friend and former greatest customer back inside with open arms.

I will admit that as a child, although I liked the episode as a whole, I was never totally satisfied with how it ends. It comes down to this one simple point - Moe never explicitly apologises to Homer for stealing his recipe, nor does he admit to any wrongdoing. The closest he came to that was when he'd earlier conceded to Colette, "He may have come up with the recipe, but I came up with the idea of charging $6.95 for it." Homer apologises to Moe for his act of sabotage, which Moe graciously accepts, but it's easy to get the impression that Moe still isn't completely reciprocating Homer's goodwill. In truth, the episode ends the only way it can, not with any overtly tender displays of reconciliation, but with two wounded exes finding their way back to each other's arms on the understanding that they're the only ones who actually will lick one another's sores. The Homer-Moe arrangement is imperfect, and there's not much pretending otherwise (Homer's proclamation of "You're the greatest friend a guy could ever have" seems designed to ring a little hollow), but both men recognise that they need the security of other to fall back on. Moe might have betrayed Homer and dropped him like a rock at the first whiff of prosperity, but when all of that's been stripped away from him, he's happy that Homer's still there, and ready to take advantage of that all over again. For now, he makes one concession, in the form of a complementary beverage, which he identifies as a Flaming Homer, giving his sole patron the belated validation he'd desperately craved. We leave our heroes in their deserted dive, mutual underdogs grateful for a little taste of sour affinity.

PS: I dedicate this review to the late George Wendt, who gave a surprisingly unnerving performance in "Fear of Flying".

 

 

PPS: It dawned on me that I got through this entire review without so much as a mention of Mr Hugh Jass. That won't do, since the man is such a class act. The prank calls (one of Moe's earliest raison d'êtres) were now nearing the end of their initial run, with the following episode, ""Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk" boasting the last of the season, not long before "New Kid on The Block" brought them to a formal conclusion of sorts. At this late stage we were getting into overdue payoff variations where things went awry for Bart, and what a pleasure they were. The most disarming detail here isn't the improbability of Hugh showing up, or even his nonchalance about the whole encounter. It's Bart's brutal honesty in explaining to Hugh that this was a prank call gone wrong and how he'd like to bail out right now, when he could so easily have hung up then and there and left Hugh flummoxed. At heart he really is a nice young man.

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 avalanche 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 that Frasier endured at the hands of Ann, any more than she did bizarre interludes where strangers approached her and attempted inexplicably to talk her through their family snapshots, 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 Bessie 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 during her own voyage through grief. But even before then, before Daisy's companionship had clearly always helped in filling 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 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 with 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.