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[fraszier]

Still Life And Street

Frasier casually admits to believing that all the callers he helps over the radio will eventually become his slaves in the afterlife. A disoriented Niles - eyes wide and teeth clenched - clings frantically to the top of a staircase in the SAM's new M.C. Escher exhibit. Daphne swears she heard Queen Elizabeth II actually died in prison in the 1980s. Roz begins cracking Bulldog with a riding crop whenever he makes a lewd remark; his initial, predictable bluster about enjoying it quickly gives way to tears, then blood. "Damn drycleaners shrunk another pair of pants again." Martin booms as he plods through downtown Tokyo, 700 feet tall and naked as a crane.

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when the Seattle Chamber of Commerce cancels Frasier Crane Day.

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The Kranepus

Tired of Seattlites’ endless, ungrateful complaints about their families during the holiday season, Frasier begins jotting down a “naughty” list of particularly odious callers, co-workers and vaguely grouchy-looking passersby for whom a very personal Christmas Eve “house call” may be in the books. Martin laments the luxury condo lifestyle after becoming nostalgically fixated on the idea of tarring and re-shingling a roof. Roz tries to cheer up a recently-divorced Kenny by encouraging him to deliver gifts to underprivileged families. Daphne’s attempts to save time holiday shopping by cutting through various sidestreets are hampered by implausibly frequent encounters with unmapped cul-de-sacs.

 Encountering yet another dead end at the end of a filthy cobblestone road, Daphne takes a page from her old chimney-sweep uncle’s book and scales a series of pigeon-dropping-encrusted stovepipes and crumbling eaves to the top of a low townhouse, only to discover both Frasier and Kenny gruesomely bonded to the roof in a bubbling mess of fresh black tar, Kenny dressed in a cheap polyester Santa Claus outfit, Dr. Crane cloaked in dark furs with a luxuriously-enameled set of antique alpine ibex horns weighing heavily on his head, both still clawing their way towards the nearest chimney with rival glares of madness, as if depending on this one self-actualizing act to redeem the entire holiday season. Daphne cautiously extends a long sweepsbroom to within reach of one of the men, but the camera angle makes it unclear as to which.

During a crowded holiday-themed week at Nervosa, Niles keeps getting stuck with a beautiful but impractical chair made entirely of antlers. He sighs, ultimately taking a pained seat among its prongs and staring out the frosted window into the moonlit streets outside, toasting himself to the notion that, while far from inspired as furniture, on Christmas Eve it’s perhaps the thought that counts, and hopefully better than nothing. 

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Another Manic Sunday

Frasier attempts to reinvent himself as a teen idol. Niles buys a custom-tailored transparent plastic onesie to wear over his suits whenever he takes public transportation. Roz and Daphne stock up on Taiwanese makeup kits, unknowingly scheming to recruit each other into the same Multi-Level Marketing circle. Martin digs a flattened lead bullet out from between two back teeth.

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Frā-day The 13th

Frasier attempts to dismantle the ominous stigma of Friday the 13th by publicly kicking off a new tradition wherein he’ll use the date as an opportunity to do good deeds, and help out a lucky few underprivileged citizens at random. On the way to an important television appearance promoting the move, the doctor stops to check his teeth in the tinted window of a parked limousine, only to immediately be arrested for seemingly making threatening faces at the Mayor of Seattle.

Daphne goes shopping at an enormous new downtown megamall and quickly becomes completely lost. She calls Martin from a payphone for help, who agrees to come find her, wearily dressing, loading and pocketing his old service revolver, pulling the brim of a shabby rain hat low over his brow and taking a long, dismal look in his dresser mirror before sighing and stepping “back out into the fray, one last time.”.

Planning to negotiate the value of an upcoming raise, Roz secretly roots through Kenny Daly’s desk in the hopes of peeking at her own employee performance file, but finds a series of racy photographs of the station manager as a much younger, fitter man. She’s unable to get the beguiling images out of her head, but her sudden flirtations with Kenny are laughed off as transparently unprofessional attempts at hedging a higher raise.

Niles refuses to floss his teeth with anything less than a freshly-rosined horsehair.

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Rolling down the window of his BMW, Frasier uses psychological tactics to gleefully sow panic and potential violence among the malnourished patrons of a local hog trough.

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The Harbinger

A mortified Frasier keeps accidentally walking in on Martin having sex with his new girlfriend Bridgette in increasingly out-of-the-way places around the condo building. The doctor soon decides to loudly announce his approach into any room in the Elliott Bay Towers several seconds in advance, but ends up enjoying the showmanship and gravitas of the habit so much that he soon refuses to turn up anywhere else without first booming a dramatic “ALL YE BE WARNED - FRASIER IS NIGH!”, rattling and confusing his KACL coworkers and the patrons of Nervosa alike. In both locations, Martin and Bridgette can be seen scrambling out from behind doors and furniture in the background, awkwardly holding their pants and clothes together as Frasier basks obliviously in the attention of the annoyed-yet-awestruck commoners that now make up the scenery of his life. Niles and Daphne bicker over the pronunciation of “apricots”, with Daphne preferring the British way, and Niles an even more British way that Daphne’s never heard before. Roz takes up the miserable discipline of Cold Yoga.

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The Hellbound Hand

An exasperated Daphne borrows a meat-tenderizing mallet from Frasier’s kitchen, determined to soften Martin’s stiff hip up once and for all. Frasier and Niles’ search for the best manicure in Seattle starts as a team effort, but when the siblings each discover the other has been hoarding info on promising boutiques, their demands for exotic and unsafe treatments become aggressively competitive until both brothers’ fingers are reduced to mere nubs. Roz keeps removing her VR headset and returning to the mundane routines of her everyday life, but small details keep giving away the fact that she’s still trapped inside the SimSeattle2003 demo, immersed in yet another groundbreaking 128-bit level.

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Annex-rexia

While attempting to adjust his expensive new radio booth chair during a commercial break, Frasier accidentally gets it stuck two inches shorter than his preferred height, then rapidly develops a bloodthirsty on-air Napoleon Complex and declares war on Vancouver Island. Daphne buys Martin a novelty hat shaped like the top of the Space Needle from the tower’s gift shop, and the old man soon discovers its use as a convenient skewer, bending to to spear muffins, donuts and pretzels directly off of vendors’ shelves and toting them around for later consumption. Niles groggily trips on the cord from Maris’s nighttime rejuvenation pod on his way to bed, pulling it free from the wall. By the time their housemaid Marta draws the drapes in the morning, Niles is still frantically trying to mold 92 pounds of dust and collagen back into a vaguely humanoid shape. The KACL women’s bathroom keeps getting smaller, and Roz is convinced Noel and Bulldog are somehow responsible.

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A Reminder Of The Babe

Frasier starts suffering from phantom back, limb and organ pains, but can’t get diagnosed with anything specific, nor be helped by Daphne’s increasingly aggressive physical therapies, and starts to dread the apparent onset of a torturous psychosomatic illness. Niles accidentally pushes a child out of the way of a speeding bus while fleeing from a small spider, and is lauded as a public hero, though his daily handkerchief budget quickly skyrockets due to dishonesty-induced nosebleeds. Martin becomes obsessed with hunting down any remaining shipments of a candy bar that stopped being made in the ‘70s, accidentally blowing the lid off of multiple international sugar and cocoa cartels along the way, all to his annoyance as he’s served increasingly exotic fruit-based desserts at government honors dinners around the world while his craving for the unpretentious American treat increases by the day. Roz dates a dimwitted man with strong hands just for the time saved in opening Alice’s many jars of baby food. Eddie starts coming home with mangled new chew toys resembling handmade voodoo dolls of Frasier, eventually traced back to a disgruntled pagan ex.

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Freeing The Beast

Kenny Daly becomes addicted to the rush of shoplifting and turns to Frasier for advice, who unfortunately has recently become addicted to the rush of personal blackmail. Daphne obliviously joins a cult and innocently charms all the members away from the leader before accidentally knocking him off the Ballard Bridge with an enthusiastic gesture during a meteor shower. Martin reflexively yells at a basketball referee through his television during a live playoff game, and the entire stadium hears him, with several players collapsing to their knees in convulsions of horror and the ref himself vomiting uncontrollably. Niles and Roz keep having lurid sexual dreams about one another, and their normal witty repartee begins to take on an increasingly graphic and erotically-charged tone, to the confusion of their friends and family and arousal of numerous Nervosa eavesdroppers. Noel becomes obsessed with William Blake’s Great Red Dragon watercolor series and can’t stop envisioning himself as an enormous chicken-like creature, clothed in a red Starfleet uniform and still named “Noel”. Eddie secretly learns how to open doors.

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Material Bads

Bulldog rents a helium tank to fill promotional balloons for KACL’s upcoming March Madness event, stashing it in the radio booth days in advance. When it silently springs a leak in the middle of Frasier’s show, the resulting increase in the pitch of his voice is initially comical but eventually disastrous. Daphne becomes convinced a decorative new suit of armour in Niles’ apartment is moving whenever they take their eyes off it. Niles scoffs at this as a superstition belying psychological issues of mistrust that need to be reconciled with therapy despite the obvious clanking and clattering noises coming from off-screen as he steadily raises his voice. Roz’s new thrift store cowboy boots attract so many lewd, unwanted comments around the radio station that she ends up buying a matching bandolier and starts openly carrying a loaded six-shooter. By the end of the week, Seattle is wallpapered with wanted posters for “Calamity Roz”, the ominous silhouette of her floor-length duster and wide-brimmed hat creating an eerie silence every time she fills the Café Nervosa door. Awoken hours early by a piercingly shrill, unrecognizable noise from the radio, Martin blearily makes his way out of bed and through the apartment, pouring milk into one of Frasier’s antique jewelry boxes and absent-mindedly eating thousands of dollars in precious gems, a pained scowl creasing his face with every laboured bite.

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Matters Of Self

Bebe convinces Frasier to start working “jump scares” into his radio show to appeal to a younger audience, leading to numerous traffic accidents among his rush hour listeners. Martin’s foam Seahawks finger begins acting as a dowsing rod that points accusatorily at the most recent person to tell a lie. Niles invents a particularly dainty new sport designed to cater to his limited athletic skills and flexibility, conning Daphne into believing it’s a hallowed American institution that merely never made it to the UK. She’s impressed with his apparently flawless performance until the whole scheme is blown by Martin’s arrival in the park bleachers, foam finger heavy on his hand. Bulldog considers a new marine-themed nickname, but can’t choose between “Bullshark” or “Dogfish”, eventually compromising with “BullDog”.

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Phoning It In

Roz’s mood grows worse by the hour after repeatedly forgetting to take her radio earphones off before standing up to leave the booth, yanking them jarringly from her ears. To make matters worse, Frasier can’t stop bragging about his bespoke new wireless headset, while simultaneously refusing to allow anybody else to try it on(”I’m sorry people, but these form-fitting earpads have been tailored by the finest Swedish artisans to fit only my auricles.”) as he walks freely around the station, ultimately forgetting to take it off during a trip to the men’s room and loudly broadcasting his activities to all of Seattle, while a paralytically whiplashed Roz cringes on the floor several feet from her console. After a successful dynamite fishing trip, Martin and Duke begin discussing what other routine activities could be improved by the high explosive. By the end of the day, most of McGinty’s has been destroyed, as well as numerous parked cars outside and the subway tunnel running underneath it, but the boys have almost mastered dynamite billiards, dynamite darts, and dynamite toilet plunging. Niles desperately attempts to hide the fact that he’s allergic to Daphne’s new perfume, bolting across the room to violently sneeze every time he subtly sniffs her hair.

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Cry Havoc

Noel accidentally trashes the KACL archives room while playing a one-man Quidditch game involving wiffle balls on a fishing pole attached to an old mop. Roz gets turned indigo by a wine-filled dye bomb after trying to steal Gil Chesterton’s gourmet lunch from the communal fridge. Hunting for a towel, she stumbles onto Noel frantically attempting to re-record years of archived radio tapes from scratch with a cacophony of wildly inaccurate impressions. Martin develops the irritating habit of reaching forward from the backseat of Niles and Daphne’s car and depressing the gas pedal with his cane whenever he loses patience with their cautious driving. Frasier follows Bulldog around Seattle for nearly an hour, waiting until he’s walking through as crowded an area as possible before shouting “THERE’S THE SON OF A BITCH NOW! GET HIM! GET HIM!” in his most irresistibly commanding voice, compelling dozens of passersby to swarm the uncouth sports host and savagely rain down blows upon him with their fists, shoes, pipes, trashcan lids, anything and everything they can get their hands on before eventually coming to their senses and realizing they have no idea who this man is, by which time Frasier has long since disappeared - merely another grim face in the crowd.

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Clench Press

Daphne begins effectively saving time on both her household chores and physiotherapy sessions by only ironing Martin's clothes while he's wearing them. “AHHHHHH! THAT’S the stuff!”, the freshly steamed old man exclaims. A clumsy waiter spills champagne on Frasier’s tuxedo trousers during an important pre-Opera soiree at his condo. Spying an opportunity to impress the high-ranking Opera board members by distancing himself from the proverbial common man who “puts his pants on one leg at a time”, Frasier attempts an enormous, two-footed flying leap into a fresh pair of slacks, crashing through the glass balcony doors and over the railing without having even come close to the pants, which a embarrassed Niles is left holding open in front of the speechless party guests. Roz strikes up a relationship with the automated “cashier” in a self-checkout line.

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The Fringes Of Society

As late autumn’s chill begins to creep down his collar, Frasier decides to grow his hair out at the back, similar to how he wore it when he first moved back to Seattle a decade earlier.

As his new mane reaches a good length, he feels something of a new lease on life. Unfortunately, this attitude is not shared by Martin - in fact, after several arguments over trivial interactions, Frasier notes that his father has been acting grouchier and more guarded than ever. Frasier attempts to discuss the issue with Niles in Nervosa, but his brother seems to be having a particularly foppish day, with little to offer other than condescending witticisms and glib, preemptive refusals to let Martin move in with him(“After all, what would Maris think?” the younger therapist says in reference to his five-years-divorced ex-wife). 

Seeking out Daphne, Frasier finds her scrubbing his oven wearing black tights and a baggy denim jacket. He questions her about Niles’ and Martin’s strange behaviour, but yields only a rambling barrage of kooky familial anecdotes and several surprisingly accurate psychic readings of various objects around the kitchen. 

Plopping down onto the sofa, exhausted, Frasier absent-mindedly runs a hand over his head and down to the thick mass of curls at the base of his skull. His attempts to contemplate the situation are ruined by Eddie staring silently at him from the other end of the couch, and he eventually flees to his room.

Frasier makes his way back to Nervosa several days later, not having bothered to shave and now sporting a light beard. Asking for his usual at the till, he’s befuddled when a large mug of draft beer comes sliding down the mahogany countertop into his hand. The doctor looks up to see none other than Sam Malone standing behind the counter, wiping down the glass case of biscottis with a dishrag. “Sam! Good heavens, what brings you here?!”, Frasier exclaims with awe. “Well, we couldn’t leave Woody in charge of the place again!” the ex-ballplayer chortles. “Last time, Cliff and Norm convinced him that lagers and pilsners were free on days ending in ‘y’!”.

The doctor strokes his beard with a curious awe as he notices the rest of his old Cheers buddies seated at various tables around the cafe, swilling beer and shooting the blue-collar breeze. Seeing Martin wander in - sans cane and wearing a tacky checkered blazer - Frasier rushes over to introduce his father to the rest of the gang, but “Martin” has no recollection of his own son, claiming his name is Sy Flembeck before sitting down at the upright piano where the espresso machine once stood and loudly improvising an obnoxious new jingle promoting the coffee shop to the tune of “Turkey in the Straw”.

Returning home with a high-end men’s grooming kit, Frasier spends the next few days recreating multiple, subtly-different hair and beard styles from his past, noting the various changes to furniture and artwork around the apartment and relishing a parade of no-strings-attached sexual encounters with old flames - several of whom have not lived in Seattle for years - all of them gathering their things and leaving without a word the next morning after he slips into the bathroom for a pre-breakfast trim or wax. 

Before long, the doctor begins to create wild new ‘dos he’s never worn before, revelling in the variety of the lives being warped around him as he’s dragged by the mohawk to punk rock concerts by a temporarily childless, heroin-addicted Roz, enjoys a powdered-wig fueled week of 18th-century aristocracy, and dreadlocks his way into a smoke-filled radio booth to emcee another afternoon of KACL’s all-reggae lineup with Gil Rastamon and Noel Hempsky.

Months and indeed years pass as Frasier experiments with countless hairstyles, the people around him going through a wild series of phases and personalities along the way. Niles and Daphne - whose nuptial status Frasier has long since lost track of - assert that the time it takes for hair to grow through so many different lengths will inevitably see people going through changes, but Frasier points to the brief existence of one Franklin Crane - a preteen second son with his apparently-current wife Lilith that had appeared while Frasier began wearing a ponytail, and vanished the day he cut it off, along with his former marriage. Niles and Daphne claim to have no memory of such a person, though they seem to get a look of vague recollection as Frasier exasperatedly knits his fingers behind his head. 

Storming out into the street, Frasier pauses to carefully pull a plastic shower cap over his mop of locks, protecting them from the light drizzle beginning to fall. The doctor knows he has long since become obsessed with finding the “right” hairstyle, and thus the right life, having transcended the realm of mere barbers and salons into expensive and exotic hair restoration treatments and wigs made from all variety of human and animal hair, but each new bang, fade, curl, sideburn, rattail, wing and pomp only raises another maddening combination of pros and cons, lives and deaths, riches, diseases, lovers, spouses, careers, crimes, profound honours and shattered legacies that prove impossible for one man to settle on. As torrents of rain begin to pour, he heads to the men’s fine goods shop yet again, this time purchasing nothing but an old-fashioned straight razor. 

The credits theme plays over a shot of Frasier sitting on the floor in the middle of his empty condo, with a shaved head and face, completely alone.