Re-visiting 'Frasier' episodes

While I've been browsing blogs in the last few days, and checking a website or three, I found a set of quotes and scenes all relating to drinking coffee. They all come from 'Frasier' episodes. After a year or two of not watching it at all, I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed the series in general.
A good friend at work really introduced me to the world of Frasier. I'd seen a single episode here and there, but talking about the characters with my friend, who had a kind of infectious enthusiasm about the charcters and stories , convinced me it was worth checking out more seriously. So, today it was time to get out Series 7 from my DVD collection and re-visit a couple of episodes.

1. 'Dark Side of the Moon' - not one of my absolute favourites, but thanks to Anthony LaPaglia's guest role as Daphne's joyfully loutish brother Simon, it's a real showcase of what happens when families collide. This time it's her rough-and-ready background from Manchester vs Frasier's crazy little super-orderly corner of the universe. Simon is the dark side of the Moon family and Frasier is the neat freak who just isn't mentally equipped to deal calmly with this bumbling human hurricane. Not many people are, of course, and Simon's surprise visit (thanks to Donny-the-fiance's bungled efforts in organising a bridal shower party) takes a toll on all the characters, but the simple central fact of Frasier making his living a s a psychiatrist and self-styled sophisticate is the foundation of the comedy in this episode.

'Dark Side...' is also one of the rare times Daphne is analysed by someone outside the Crane apartment, and the analyst is having a hard time with this member of the Moon clan. Daphne is there to get compulsory anger-management counselling after a reckless act caused a mutli-car pile-up in the street below Frasier's apartment. Could she really be more like Simon than she's prepared to admit?

2. 'Whine Club' really shows off the Crane brothers' pretentiousness and intense rivalry at the same time, and the two issues are mutually reinforcing. There's also a 'love interest' for Niles -she not only pumps up his ambition but manages to poison relations between herself and the rest of the Crane group plus Frasier's closest colleague Ros, the producer at the rdaio station. In some ways, Mel the plastic surgeon/Niles's sweetheart (after relations had been permanently frozen with his wife Maris) is as disastrous to peace and friendly feelings as Daphne's brother Simon, but for comically different reasons.

During a scene where Niles is dressing to go to the wine club nomination, thinking he would simply be sponsoring his brother's bid for the coveted title, Mel starts to plant ideas in his mind. She slyly flatters him, 'helps' him alter his choices of tie and jacket -which the audience can see is simply re-engineering his image in her eyes and for her own reasons, stealthily assures him she doesn't want to get between him and his brother, and asks probing questions about why he isn't running for the title himself...

The show-down between the brothers, described in the sub-heading as "Gunfight at the Bouquet Corral" is a hilarious meeting of over-refined taste buds, spiralling tension levels and a spit-bucket's worth of seething hostility, since Frasier is finally faced with a totally unexpected chance of having the Corkmaster title snatched from him by his very own brother, who was coached by the new Lady Macbeth -Mel... Naturally, neither brother can stop talking about the end result, of Niles becoming the new Corkmaster. Niles floats on his own cloud, and Frasier fumes about rank injustice and hints at treason within the family. For Mel, though, the family brunch that Frasier originally planned as a gesture of hospitality turns sour. Like so many ruthless, selfish and crafty people, she is her own main blind spot: for all her manipulation of others, she is blissfully unaware of a very different effect as she talks down to a group. During the doomed brunch she just can't help being or acting in a way that perversely unites everyone against her -everyone except Niles, who hasn't come out from her spell yet.
One of the gems in the whole 11 seasons.