Transcript for Episode 31: Frasier Has a Gay Dream
This is the transcript for the installment of the show in which we discuss the Frasier episode “The Impossible Dream.” If you’d rather listen to Glen and Drew than read what they say, click here. The transcript was provided by Sarah Neal, whose skills we recommend wholeheartedly.
Gil: And I quote: "His amaretto éclair is so sinful it will send you scurrying to your local padre for absolution."
[audience laughs]
Frasier: No, thank you Gil. I'm—I'm on a diet, you see.
Gil: Oh, come now. You know you want it.
Frasier: Oh, no, no, no. I really don't.
[audience laughs]
Frasier: Off you go. Bye-bye.
Roz: Oh, my god. It was Gil.
Frasier: I never said that.
Roz: Then why are you blushing?
Frasier: Oh, don't be ridiculous.
Roz: Your ears are turning bright red.
Frasier: I am not blushing.
Roz: You are.
Gil: [knocks]
[audience laughs]
["Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs" performed by Kelsey Grammer plays]
Drew: Hello, and welcome to Gayest Episode Ever, the podcast where we talk about the LGBT-themed episodes of classic sitcoms which is to say the very special episodes that also happen to be the very queer episodes. I'm Drew Mackie.
Glen: I'm Glen Lakin.
Drew: And in case that intro didn't tip you off, this episode is about Frasier, specifically—
Glen: If you didn't know that stop listening. Get out of here.
Drew: Actually, start listening to the first episode which is about Frasier—specifically the October 15, 1996 episode "The Impossible Dream," which we are calling "Frasier Has a Gay Dream"?
Glen: Yeah. That sounds right.
Drew: Yeah. This is the finale of the second season of Gayest Episode Ever.
Glen: No!
Drew: Cliffhangers. Suspense. No.
Glen: Are you going to shoot me?
Drew: Am I? You'll have to wait until season three to find out if I shoot Glen or not. Can you believe that we did 20 episodes?
Glen: Blink. Yes.
Drew: I'm kind of impressed considering that we literally did double what the first run of what our little podcast was.
Glen: Oh. Okay.
Drew: Yeah. We're ending Season 2 the way we started Season 1—
Glen: Drunk [laughter].
Drew: Drunk—with Frasier—along with Frasier.
Glen: Drunk on Frasier.
Drew: Drunk—I mean, yeah. I literally just finished re-watching the episode we're talking about and, more so than most things, it made me laugh. It was very nice to watch a show that holds up as well as it does.
Glen: Yes.
Drew: I would encourage everyone to listen to the first episode of the show if you want the deep background on Frasier, but we're going to do a little greatest hits right now. Glen, can you summarize your relationship with this TV show?
Glen: I watched it and enjoyed it. It was also the one sitcom I continued to watch throughout college as well.
Drew: I didn't, but I came back to it. Now I've seen everything, and I can't verbalize the reason for why I think it holds up so much better than say Friends or Seinfeld or any of the other NBC sitcoms from this era that I literally wouldn't want to sit through unless I have to—for this podcast. But I will sit down and watch Frasier if it's on. What's the difference, do you think?
Glen: Well the difference is, all of the other sitcoms are trying cultural jokes or pop cultural jokes or current events, whereas [with] Frasier, the joke was that all their references are classical or deep dives or things that are just way over our heads.
Drew: Right. Most people wouldn't know what the hell they're talking about anyway. I guess that makes sense. Style of humor aside from that—the thing with a lot of NBC's fancy-people sitcoms is that I feel like they're always trying to seem cool, and at least Frasier and Niles—they're not cool. They're socially inept, and they're awkward and nerdy about the things they like, but also—they seem classy? I don't know.
Glen: They unabashedly enjoy the things they enjoy. It's not like those characters are just—I mean, they are to a certain extent making fun of the things that rich people like. And to the credit of the actors, it seems inherent to the characters. It feels like a character choice rather than a joke, a lot of the things they enjoy—the fancy wines, the port, the cheeses, the places they go. And we're allowed to laugh at them, but it doesn't feel like the point of the show overall is to make fun of their tastes or their world. It really is about two intellectual children dealing with their blue-collar father. It's also a show where the characters can be both right and wrong. And Cheers had this sort of magic to it as well where Diane can—
Drew: She can be right, but she can undercut her point in the way she delivers it because she likes to think of herself as being refined and fancy.
Glen: Right.
Drew: I like that the show allows Frasier and Niles to be nerds. There is some poo-pooing of like, "Oh, whatever. You guys like those weird things," but it's not like on Friends where every time Ross brings up dinosaurs everybody's like, "Oh, god. Smart person." They are actually allowed to be pretty smart, and being smart is a big part of their characters.
Glen: Yeah. And to the point of Niles and Frasier, one of the things I noticed in this episode is that the best scenes of this show are between Niles and Frasier. You wouldn't think, necessarily, that the best scenes of the show have two characters who are almost exactly the same interacting [or that they] would have the most conflict and the most entertaining back and forth—but it does. They come from basically the same worldview, and yet somehow—
Drew: One is a Freudian and one is a Jungian. That is the biggest possible difference.
Glen: Mm-hmm. But they still butt heads all the time.
Drew: That's true. I never thought about that before. They do mine a lot of that character interaction. I think if you were a lesser writer you wouldn't know what to do with them because you would think they are the same—though they are not.
Glen: Yes.
Drew: This is basically why I wanted to start this podcast. I like talking to you about TV because it makes me think about stuff that I don't have answers to, but I feel like you often do.
Glen: Or I at least talk about it in a way that sounds like a confident answer.
Drew: I'm convinced. Do you think this is the best spinoff ever?
Glen: Yes.
Drew: I would too. There's some runners-up in there—and you know I've really been into Maude lately. But as far as taking a prominent character in one thing and turning him into something new that's not a stretch and making a world that works for him, they did something really magical with this.
Glen: My runner up was Angel.
Drew: Yeah. I've been feeling the need to re-watch Angel lately. I haven't watched it through since I moved to Los Angeles. I feel like [now having lived] here for a few years, I'll have a different take on it than I did when I lived in Santa Barbara. Frasier, though—Frasier, Frasier, Frasier. In case you don't know, this show was a big deal on NBC for 11 seasons and 264 episodes. It is a spinoff of Cheers. It stars Kelsey Grammer. If you listen to our previous episode, we talk about how it's coded as gay, but I'm going to real quick run through those points just in case you are lazy and don't want to listen to us talk about Frasier twice—which is rude. 1) There's the intergenerational divide between Frasier, Niles, and Martin—mostly Frasier and Martin because they're the ones who live together—where Martin doesn't understand the stuff that Frasier's into. He thinks it's fancy and silly. And a lot of gay men may have this relationship with their parents, particularly with their father. Gay women might have it with their parents as well. There's a lot that a gay person who has that sort of relationship with a parent could read into the Frasier-Martin dynamic as being very relatable. 2) Because Frasier was the prissy counterpoint to Sam Malone on Cheers they had to invent a prissier counterpoint on Frasier—and that is Niles, played by David Hyde Pierce who is essentially a more fey version of Frasier so [that] Frasier seems less gay. Third, aside from Kelsey Grammer, all the principle male actors on the show were gay: David Hyde Pierce; Dan Butler, who plays Bulldog; John Mahoney was not out in his lifetime but clearly was not a heterosexual man; and then there's Gil. Niles is to Frasier as Gil is to Niles where he has all those stuffy, silly, pompous, Crane qualities on max, like turned up to 11, and—
Glen: But still not an out character.
Drew: Yeah. It's almost the inverse of the Crane boys. The Crane boys, despite all appearances—everyone might think they're gay, but they're not. In this case everyone has presumed that Gil is gay, and he probably is, but he's just not open about it. It's a weird way of making it seem like someone who acts gay actually is gay, even though we're supposed to take the opposite tactic with the Crane boys.
Glen: Past episodes or future episodes have made jokes that make it seem like Gil's in some sort of arranged marriage of convenience.
Drew: With a mechanic [laughs].
Frasier: Oh, Bulldog. You're behaving immaturely even for you. Granted the man is handsome, but no reason to feel threatened.
Gil: I must confess, I didn't notice he was all that handsome.
Roz: You didn't notice? You, of all people?
Gil: Just what are you insinuating?
[audience laughs]
Roz: Well, you know that you're a little—
Gil: For your information I happen to be a happily married man.
[audience laughs]
Frasier: You're married? To a woman?
[audience laughs]
Gil: Of course to a woman. You've all heard me mention Deb. Well, often have I said, "I must be running along now. Deb will be waiting"?
Roz: We thought Deb was your cat.
Gil: She is not a cat!
[audience laughs]
Gil: She is Mrs. Gilbert Leslie Chesterton, a Sarah Lawrence graduate, and the owner of a very successful auto body repair shop.
[audience laughs]
Gil: Honestly, the conclusions people make just because a man dresses well and knows how to use a pastry bag.
[audience laughs]
Frasier: Oh. That's the first time I've ever seen a man "in" himself.
[audience laughs]
Drew: And then maybe a tiny bit the whole thing that there's not a lot of sexual chemistry between Roz and Frasier, although they do have sex.
Glen: Yes.
Drew: If I remember correctly, they immediately resolve to stay friends after that.
Glen: Yes.
Drew: There's not romance.
Glen: Yeah.
Drew: So the episode we talked about in the first Frasier episode was "The Matchmaker," which was the third episode of the second season, and you theorized that they put this episode early in that season just to clarify to anyone that Frasier is not gay because he has a gay boss who hits on him and he has to act uncomfortable about it because he's not actually gay. This is the third episode of the fourth season. Can you think of any reason why they would run this episode when they did, because I couldn't?
Glen: No. I think—this is a running gag, and we'll get to it in the episode. But the gay element in this episode is played more for jokes than it was in the episode we talked about before.
Drew: Until it's played for serious at the end of this episode, which is actually kind of nice, I thought. We'll get to it.
Glen: I made a face which is why Drew said something.
Drew: "The Impossible Dream" aired on October 15, 1996, one month into the OJ Simpson trial, one week after the debut of the Fox News Channel.
Glen: Agh!
Drew: I know. And just two weeks later, we'd see The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror where Kang and Kodos impersonate Bill Clinton and Bob Dole because there was an election happening—just time context . It aired at 9:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, opposite a new episode of Home Improvement in which Al is asked to host an instructional video. He asks Tim to direct it, and guess what—they don't get along. It really doesn't work out that well. I'm not going to talk about Home Improvement on the show.
Glen: I'll find something.
Drew: I mean, if you can work some Jonathan Taylor Thomas plotline into—
Glen: Excuse you.
Drew: Well, if there was a character who was coded as gay, I feel like it would probably be him. Maybe the younger kid.
Glen: All right.
Drew: But they never approached anything close to that, and I don't think it's an interesting show. For the week it aired it was, however, the eighth most-watched show. Frasier was like 30, I think. It didn't do so well this week.
Glen: That's a crime against humanity.
Drew: Really bad, because this is a very good episode. Pulled in a paltry 10.5 million viewers. That's it. Overall, Frasier was the sixteenth most-watched show for the '96 – '97 season, just ahead of Spin City. This is absolutely dominated by NBC with the Top 10 including, in order, starting at number one: ER, Seinfeld, Suddenly Susan, Friends—Suddenly Susan got better ratings than Friends.
Glen: [exclaims incredulously]
Drew: Because it was between Seinfeld and ER and people just didn't fucking change the channel—better ratings than Friends.
Glen: That is bizarre.
Drew: And then moving down, right after Friends [is] Fired Up, and then The Single Guy.
Glen: Oh. I love Fired Up.
Drew: Fired Up is the best of the lesser NBC Must See TV sitcoms, but it's mostly because of Sharon Lawrence.
Glen: Well, yeah.
Drew: Yeah. I love her so much. This episode was written by David Lee, a gay, who also wrote episodes of Frasier, Wings, Cheers, and The Jeffersons. It was directed by Rob Greenberg, who wrote and directed the remake of Overboard.
Glen: [gasps!]
Drew: Remake with Anna Farris.
Glen: Right. Right. I can still gasp any time Overboard is mentioned.
Drew: I know. I was really excited just to mention Overboard. I actually think that's all the background I have. I don't have a preponderance of exposition this time.
Glen: Okay. So Frasier wakes up in a seedy motel.
Drew: Yeah. Keep going.
Glen: The lighting—I thought it was fantastic. It's shot sort of like a noir detective's office. And he's piecing together the night. There's a bottle of tequila. There is the word "chesty" tattooed on his forearm, and the shower is running in the bathroom. He's not alone—[gasps!]. Who is it? Well, out walks Gil. And my first thought was that Gil—the actor who played him—had a much better body than his head would have led you to believe.
Drew: Also, he's a food critic, and I assume that food critics probably would be not be necessarily in great shape. If you're a food critic and I just insulted you, I'm sorry. But you see him eating an éclair with great relish in this episode and he's in pretty good shape.
Glen: Your boss is basically a food critic.
Drew: Um. Anyway.
Glen: [laughs] So Gil jokes—
Gil: Well, look who's up.
[audience laughs]
Glen: Up as in aroused, perhaps?
Drew: I mean, everything's a double entendre in this. And then Frasier wakes up.
Glen: It was a dream!
Drew: It was a dream. I want to talk about the actor who plays Gil. His name is Edward Hibbert, and he's done a bit of acting over the years. He's also a literary agent and represents, among other people, Chuck Palahniuk. He even negotiated the film rights for both the film adaptation of Fight Club and Gods and Monsters. I was like, "Oh, what a fun side career for him." Then I'm like, "Wait. That actually might be his lead career. Acting might be his side career." How fun for him. So Scene 2, we are in the KACL office, and Frasier's taking a call from a 14-year-old who's complaining about his parents. It is—
Glen: Macaulay Culkin?
Drew: Rory Culkin.
Glen: Oh. I was close.
Drew: Did you just guess that?
Glen: Yeah.
Drew: They sound the same. They have a very similar sounding voice. No, Kieran Culkin, a different—there's too many Culkins.
Glen: I'd watch that.
Drew: Too Many Culkins. They're probably all in Los Angeles. Do you have any reach around for a child calling into Frasier to complain about his parents being embarrassing?
Glen: No—other than it's sort of an overall theme in Frasier, the show, that Frasier is always embarrassed of Martin.
Drew: And vice versa.
Glen: Which isn't to say I don't have reach arounds for this episode because I do.
Drew: I will point out that whenever these scenes were filmed, it was not the celebrity caller that Kelsey Grammer was talking to but Arleen Sorkin—voice of Harley Quinn—who is married to Christopher Lloyd, executive producer on the show. She was just the fill-in voice for every single call, ever, and then they dubbed the celebrities in afterwards. As soon as the call ends, Frasier is like, "Please—you have to find a more interesting caller than a 14-year-old who's embarrassed by his parents," which is notable but doesn't seem so if you're watching this for the first time.
Glen: His show is going through a dry spell.
Drew: Yeah. He's not had good callers. They've been very boring.
Glen: He makes the mistake of telling Roz about his dream. He leaves out that it was Gil, but then Gil enters, and Frasier's lack of a poker face gives it away.
Drew: Roz is horrified at the idea that it might be her, which goes to show you how little chemistry they're trying to put between these two, like, "They're just friends and coworkers. Don't think about them that way." Roz certainly doesn't. Gil comes in trying to tempt—literally says, "I'm going to tempt you Frasier—with an éclair," which I'll point out is a cream-filled pastry that he wants Frasier to take a bite of, and Frasier is very uncomfortable. When he says, "I'm going to tempt you," Frasier's response is, "Really?" And it's a very—
Glen: It's very positive sounding.
Drew: Yeah. He doesn't sound scary. I would be interested to know what his motivation was there.
Gil: Knock. Knock.
[audience laughs]
Frasier: Gil?
Gil: Frasier, I've come to tempt you.
Frasier: Really?
[audience laughs]
Drew: And then—this is the only time we see Bulldog, right?
Glen: Yeah. Bulldog comes in a scene later to set up his show, which I had to piece together [that] this is the same day.
Drew: It's later that day. Yeah. That makes sense.
Glen: Yeah. And Frasier did have to take a call from Rudy, the crier.
Drew: Voiced by the playwright Christopher Durang, who also plays a different character in person in a later episode. Yeah. Bulldog's underused. I think this is that point where he's in the opening credits and sometimes he just shows up very briefly and doesn't really work into the plot. I do love Dan Butler. His impersonation of a macho jock is so good that even though I know he is a lovely gay man inside, Bulldog makes me anxious because he's so loud and I don't want him to come in and start yelling at me.
Glen: Barking at you?
Drew: Yeah. Like in that—he's not even mean. He's just loud and off-putting.
Frasier: Well, I'll see you tomorrow, Roz. Oh, oh, Roz. Roz, about that dream I mentioned to you earlier, I guess it goes without saying I'd rather you didn't share that with anyone else.
Roz: Oh sure.
Betty: Hi, Dream Boy.
[audience laughs]
Frasier: I hate you. Couldn't keep your big mouth shut, could you? Just exactly when did you find the time to spread the news?
Roz: You don't think I was listening to your show do you?
[audience laughs]
Bulldog: Coming through! Oh, Doc. I've got to rub this one in a little.
Frasier: Well, all right. Look, Bulldog, before you start to ridicule me yes. Yes, I had a dream about Gil, and yes it did have some—some erotic elements. But—you have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about do you?
Bulldog: I do now. Whoa!
[audience laughs]
Frasier: Let's just forget it. What delightful little jive do you have prepared for me?
Bulldog: Oh. I was going to tell you your show today just broke the snooze meter, but now I want to hear about you greasing Gil's cookie sheet.
[audience laughs]
Glen: I just love Roz. You know I love Roz.
Drew: I love Roz. We need to find an episode that gives Roz a lot to do for once. She basically is out of it after this. Right?
Glen: That's the strange thing about this episode. There's a lot of characters—regulars who aren't in the episode much, and there's not really a B- or C-plot.
Drew: No. It's just—
Glen: I mean, you can call the radio show sort of the B-plot.
Drew: But it ends up tying into the A-plot in a bunch of ways. I mean, that's what it's supposed to do, but it often doesn't. So Frasier and Niles meet at Café Nervosa—and I realize I misspoke on the Living Single episode when I said that there are only two people of color to recur on the history of Frasier—Dr. Mary and Kate Costas—Costa? Costas.
Glen: Well it's also his rival—his upstairs rival. I forget his name, but he's basically black Frasier and they always compete.
Drew: How many does he show up in?
Glen: A lot.
Drew: Okay. I forgot about him. I was going to mention the waitress. She's played by an actress named Luck Hari. She has lines sometimes, but she's in 11 episodes. She's the most recurring character on this show except for Gil, actually, and she is the Gunther of the show basically. She's there in the background, and sometimes she gets something to do, but usually not. So yeah, this is a Frasier-and-Niles episode, and they're talking about the dream.
Glen: Frasier-Niles scene.
Drew: It is the first Frasier-Niles scene in what is a Frasier-Niles episode. It's all about their dynamic together. And after some coaxing Frasier relates the dream to Niles, which sets up a really good Niles joke.
Frasier: Then the shower turns off. Out from the bathroom steps a man. All right. Go ahead. Let me have it.
Niles: Are you saying that now or is it a quote from the dream?
[audience laughs]
Glen: I actually thought that the story that Niles was telling—this is my first reach around of the episode.
Niles: So I returned to the dry cleaners yet a third time. I hardly need to tell you how the story ends.
Frasier: Just tell me when the story ends.
[audience laughs]
Niles: Fine. They realigned my pleats. The end.
Glen: And I thought that sort of applied to this episode—realigning the pleats whereas Frasier is sort of struggling with his sexuality or doubts of it.
Drew: And his straight lines.
Glen: His straight lines—and also, as we'll come to talk about, his career and his own self-worth in this episode is entirely about Frasier getting back on the right track.
Drew: That makes sense. I literally didn't entertain Niles' story for any other reason. It did seem fantastically boring and not particularly funny. Yeah. I can't remember exactly at what point they're in in the conversation, but Gil shows up literally for no other reason than to taunt Frasier and announce that he's aware that Frasier's having erotic dreams about him.
Gil: Good afternoon, Frasier.
[audience laughs]
Frasier: Gil.
Gil: A little birdie tells me I was featured in your midnight movie.
[audience laughs]
Frasier: Very clever. Off you go.
Gil: Very well. See you tomorrow—or should I say see you in your dreams? [laughs]
[audience laughs]
Niles: In this dream of yours were there any cigars; bananas; or short, blunt swords?
[audience laughs]
Drew: Frasier says that he's 43 years old. It's a little late in his life for latency—which I guess is untrue. I tried to look up people who come out late in life, and by far it's almost always women—I'm sure there's someone who's done studies on this that can tell me why—Meredith Baxter being the ur-version of this story. It's never too late to come out, Frasier. Do you know about Fran Drescher's husband?
Glen: Yes. I also know about the show based on Fran Drescher's husband.
Drew: That was the best example of a late-in-life-man coming out.
Glen: But I like this scene. I like Frasier and Niles together, and I like when they try to approach simple problems with very complicated psychological approaches. One of the games they play is word association.
Niles: Perhaps we should tackle this from a free association standpoint.
Frasier: Oh, god. Must we?
Niles: Now. Focus on any detail in the motel room. What's the first thing that pops into your mind?
Frasier: A crescent-shaped lamp.
Niles: Perfect. Crescent-shaped lamp. Run with that. Crescent.
Frasier: Mmm.
Niles: Daphne Moon. French maid. Brass bell. Satin robe—
[audience laughs]
Frasier: This is my dream.
Niles: I was just showing you the process.
Frasier: You were three words away from a cigarette.
[audience laughs]
Niles: Your turn.
Frasier: All right.
Niles: Crescent lamp.
Frasier: Crescent. Croissant. Butter. Apricot jam. Hunger. Food. Diet! My god. I've been on a diet. Do you think that's useful?
Niles: You could stand to lose a few pounds.
Frasier: Just wait a minute. Gil is a restaurant critic. He's a gourmet. Perhaps he's symbolic of the food I've been denying myself.
Niles: That would explain why you're naked in the dream. It's when we're naked that we're most self-conscious about our bodies.
Frasier: Yes. Yes, and most vulnerable to the way society tattoos us—
Niles: Oh?
Frasier: —with labels about our appearances. Oh, my god. That's it, Niles. The dream is simply telling me that I've been too rigid about my diet.
Niles: Well, you'll know tonight. If this is the correct interpretation, the conflict will have passed from your unconscious to your conscious mind.
Frasier: Yes, the dream will have served its purpose.
Niles: And you will no longer be plagued by it.
Frasier: Oh, god. Niles, I've nailed it all right. I really have. Finally, for the first time in weeks, there will be no tequila bottles, no tattoo, no half-naked man in my bed.
[audience laughs]
Frasier: So then the rabbi says—
[audience laughs]
Glen: I love the writing on this show.
Drew: The waitress who comes in twice, she actually appears in another episode, playing the same waitress again. It's Pauley Perrette from NCIS.
Glen: Okay.
Drew: Do you know who that is?
Glen: Nope.
Drew: She was on NCIS for, like, ever. And now she said Mark Harmon assaulted her.
Glen: She's the—oh! The pigtail one?
Drew: Yes, that's her. Yes!
Glen: Oh. Then yeah, I am familiar.
Drew: With black hair. Yeah.
Glen: She didn't have black hair in this.
Drew: No. She radically changed her look. But by, I think, late '90s—I don't know when The Ring came out, but she had that look in The Ring and then NCIS happened after that. That's her big break into Hollywood.
Glen: Oh. Good for her.
Drew: Also, the credits credit her as "Pauley P." I don't know why.
Glen: Frasier thinks he has solved his dream problem, but then has the dream again.
Drew: With a variation.
Glen: A variation. A hot woman walks out.
[audience laughs]
Woman: Oh. I'm sorry. Wrong room.
Gil: That does it. We're finding another motel.
[audience laughs]
Glen: And then Gil is in bed next to him.
Drew: Did you notice that Gil wasn't shirtless in the scene where they're in bed together?
Glen: Correct.
Drew: I wonder why.
Glen: Maybe his character sleeps with a shirt on, but he can't shower with a shirt on.
Drew: I guess that makes sense.
Glen: Do you think Frasier, meaning Kelsey Grammer, had something in his contract where he didn't want to appear with a shirtless man in bed—that it's one thing to have a shirtless man in the scene with him, but having a shirtless man in bed with him is a bridge too far?
Drew: I thought about that, just because he wouldn't even really need to have it in his contract just because he's the star. He could be like, "I'm not going to do that," because he's pretty conservative and that just might not be something he would want to do. And also, the fact that Edward Hibbert is a gay man might have made him uncomfortable enough that he could pull that—but whatever.
Glen: Let's speculate wildly!
Drew: Actually, let's not speculate wildly. We actually—before the 30-minute mark—I think we've hit a good point where we can take a commercial break.
Glen: Let's capitalism wildly.
Drew: Yes. Yes. Listen to this.
["Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs" instrumentals play]
[Gayest Episode Ever promotes A Love Bizarre]
[an old promotional spot for NBC's Wednesday night lineup plays]
[Gayest Episode Ever promotes their Patreon and thanks their patrons]
["Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs" instrumentals play]
Drew: And we're back, and we're in the elevator with Martin and Daphne playing a very strange game that I enjoy.
Glen: Yeah. They're basically pretending that they're caught up in some sort of spy game for a stranger in the elevator.
Daphne: Someone followed me again last night.
Martin: Ah, you're just being paranoid.
Daphne: I'm telling you they're on to me.
Martin: Come on. Nobody could recognize you after all of that plastic surgery.
[audience laughs]
Daphne: That's what Marlena thought.
Martin: Marlena got sloppy. She never should have gone back to Zurich.
Daphne: I just don't want any more bloodshed.
Martin: [whispers] Relax. You're home free.
Daphne: You don't know the Woodchuck and his ways.
[audience laughs]
Daphne: Oh, we're terrible.
Martin: We are. You are. "The Woodchuck and his ways"?
Daphne: You know, we really should stop doing this. It's not nice.
Martin: Ah, you're right. We won't do it anymore.
Daphne: How'd you get the stuff through customs?
Martin: They never check the wooden leg.
[audience laughs]
Drew: I like that Martin can have fun with Daphne in a way that he really can't with his own children.
Glen: Yeah. This is also a reach around for me.
Drew: Please.
Glen: I mean, what they're doing is basically the resolution of the episode. They clearly are bored with their routine.
Drew: Yep.
Glen: To mix it up create these wild scenarios for themselves.
Drew: Mm-hmm. And they pull other people into it, and that gets them through their day. That's a really good point. In the apartment Frasier and Niles are pouring over books in hoping of—in hope—
Glen: In hopes of?
Drew: In hopes of decoding the dream.
Niles: Here's something. Dreams as an expression of wish fulfillment.
Frasier: Moving on.
[audience laughs]
Drew: And then Martin comes in, and Frasier tries to talk to Martin about it.
Niles: Dreams can be rooted in childhood experience. Maybe Dad remembers something you've repressed.
Martin: Gee, I don't know. If it's about when you were a kid, I've repressed a lot of that myself.
[audience laughs]
Frasier: Niles this is not a dream I wish to share with Dad, thank you very much.
Niles: Well, we've exhausted every other interpretation, so I guess it's back to dreams as wish fulfillment.
Frasier: Oh, Dad. Would you mind listening to my dream to see if it conjures up any memories from my childhood?
Martin: Oh, come on. You're making too much out of this. It's a dream. Dreams are weird.
Frasier: Please, Dad. I wouldn't ask if it weren't really bothering me.
Martin: Well, all right. Go on.
Frasier: All right. It starts out in a little motel room. I have a tattoo on my arm—"Chesty."
Martin: See? That's weird.
Frasier: Yes. Then out from the bathroom steps a—all right, now before I continue, just let me remind you that this is a dream not to be confused with reality. Out from the bathroom steps a man—eating lion.
Martin: Oh, see? There, again—weird.
Glen: Yeah. Martin had paused with the mustard, and Frasier picked up on his discomfort and decided to spare his father the discomfort of his son having a man-on-man erotic dream.
Drew: And Martin's take on dreams is "Dreams are weird," like, "They don't mean anything." But what's interesting about what he says is that he talks about having a dream about Jayne Mansfield.
Martin: Dreams come; they go. They don't mean anything—except if you're lucky, once in a while you might have one that's a lot of fun—like you're hitting a home run in the World Series or you're in the jungle with Jayne Mansfield and she gets bit by a snake.
Frasier: Thank you, Dad.
Martin: You know who Jayne Mansfield is don't you?
Frasier: Yes, Dad.
You know what they do when you're bit by a snake don't you?
Frasier: Yes, Dad.
[audience laughs]
Martin: Wish I knew what I had for dinner that night.
Drew: And he's basically saying that no, dreams aren't worthless because they can be a form of wish fulfillment which is not helping Frasier at all.
Glen: Right.
Drew: Daphne says the dream is nothing to worry about because she's had same-sex fantasies before.
Glen: Which Niles encouraged her to describe in detail.
Daphne: There's no reason to feel self-conscious, Dr. Crane. We've all had dreams like that. I had one about a girl I shared a flat with once—a gymnast.
Niles: Go on Daphne this could be significant.
Daphne: Well, I remember we were doing stretches in the gymnasium when suddenly we decided to take off all our clothes and go for a bounce on the trampoline [giggles]. The next thing you know, I'm chasing her around the pommel horse [giggles]. Oh, never mind.
Niles: Don't stop now.
[audience laughs]
Niles: This could help us.
So when we did Friends, I talked about how I don't understand what Rachel thinks the fuck is going on because Ross is making all these weird statements around her. If she's not aware that he's in love with her, I don't know how she's interpreting his actions, and you just have to chalk it up to her just being maybe being willfully oblivious. I feel like this show actually does a better job cloaking Niles' stuff. Niles is horny and weird and awkward in the same way, but they just cover up better. So you can maybe believe that Daphne doesn't know.
Glen: Yeah. It's covered up with Daphne just thinking that Niles has intellectual curiosity.
Drew: Mm-hmm [laughs]. He does.
Glen: She always calls him Dr. Crane. Up to the point that they confess their love for each other she calls him Niles. And so towards the point of willfully ignorant, yes. She sees him as a psychiatrist first in many respects, and so when he's interested in her dreams she can tell herself, "Oh. He's interested in my dreams in a professional context." And I think they do—once she finds out about Niles she does sort of address how she was blind to it for so long. I don't remember how that goes down, but—
Drew: Probably psychic stuff.
Glen: I mean, the psychic stuff is involved.
Drew: She gets a real good dingbat moment shortly because her take on what it is, is [that it's] another form of word association which is entirely circular.
Daphne: Well actually I do have a theory of me own about your dream if you'd like to hear it.
Frasier: What the hell.
Daphne: Well, in your dream, who was in the shower? Gil. What is a shower? Running water. Who needs water? Fish. What do fish have? Gills. Do you see where I'm going?
[audience laughs]
Frasier: Insane?
[audience laughs]
Drew: Yeah. Yes. In the very small role she plays in this episode, I like that she offers her weird Daphne Moon spin on Crane Family psychiatry.
Glen: Yeah. I enjoy whenever they pull her character back to—
Drew: Shirley the Loon?
Glen: Yeah.
Drew: The end result of Daphne's little thing is that it might have something to do with a family pet like maybe a goldfish or something, and this ends up proving helpful for the conversation because as Martin is taking Eddie out to go to the bathroom—Eddie's a dog in case you were wondering why he's doing that to a human—she asks if Frasier ever had any pets like a goldfish or anything and he says, "Oh. That was always Hester's department." Hester is Frasier's late mom. She almost never gets mentioned on the show, right?
Glen: Correct. She's a big part of the season where Frasier's dating a woman who looks just like her.
Drew: Played by Rita Wilson, right?
Glen: Yes.
Drew: Who also plays young Hester, right?
Glen: Yes.
Drew: Okay.
Glen: Well, because of that.
Drew: Also, I want to understand the justification of the fact that Hester Crane in Cheers is played by Nancy Marchand who played Livia Soprano, and she's a very dissimilar character. There's—they have nothing in common, right?
Glen: No. Yeah. In Cheers she's sort of like the harsh and cold mother-in-law played to be from old money, kind of, and also Frasier's dad is dead in Cheers, I think.
Drew: Yeah. He lied and said that his dad was dead.
Glen: Yeah. In the Frasier lore she was a much warmer person. Intellectual.
Drew: She's a doctor. Even on Cheers she's a doctor.
Glen: Same intellectual curiosity but with a humanity, for lack of a better word, that would make her a good pair for Martin who doesn't share any of those interests.
Drew: I don't know what episode it, is but it's one where Martin specifically says, "The thing about your mother that I loved is that she liked all the fancy stuff, but she could also like the low-brow stuff, and you guys can't do that. It's very frustrating for me." That was a—it's a well delivered speech.
Glen: Yeah. Was that the same speech where he said the difference was that she never made him feel bad for not understanding her interests whereas Frasier and Niles do make him feel less than?
Drew: Mm-hmm. Right. With Martin having left the room, Niles points out that the tattoo "Chesty" is one letter off from "hesty," which sounds like their mother's name.
Glen: Speaking of reach arounds. Je-sus.
Drew: What would you use as a nickname for Hester? I just have never met a Hester and don't know what you'd call—Hessy? Hettie? Hettie.
Glen: Hedley? Let's watch some Herman's Head.
Drew: I thought you were talking about Hailey Lamarr—Hedy Lamarr—Hedley Lamarr. So they rush out, and—
Glen: Basically harass Martin.
Drew: He's very put off by it. Frasier is very forceful.
Frasier: [with Niles] Dad. Dad!
Martin: What?
Frasier: Did you ever have a nickname for mother?
Martin: Oh, for god's sake! Does this have to do with that stupid dream?
Frasier: Dad, this is really important!
Niles: Any pet name? A term of endearment?
Martin: Well, when we were first married I used to call her "Honey," and then there was a time after that that I started calling her "Sweetie."
Frasier: I'm sure there's a delicious anecdote behind each one of those, but did you ever call her "Hesty"?
Martin: Hesty?
Frasier: Oh, come on! Think, man!
[audience laughs]
Frasier: Even once? Once in all the years you lived together?
Martin: Well, I don't know. I guess. Maybe once.
Frasier: Oh, thank you Dad. Well, there it is. I must have heard him call her "Hesty" once and neatly tucked it away into my subconscious.
Niles: Of course! It's so obvious. Gil is a food critic. Food, criticism—[with Frasier] mother! It's the classic Oedipal dream.
[audience laughs]
Frasier: Yes, yes. Only I was so frightened by my sexual urges to be with my mother that I transformed her into a man [laughter]. Oh, what a relief. I've been wringing my hands over nothing. It's okay. All I want to do is have sex with my dead mother—
[audience laughs]
Drew: Which is like a nice callback to the game that Martin and Daphne were playing of saying weird things in the presence of complete strangers, but he actually means this one.
Glen: It's also a line that I like because it can really only be pulled off in Frasier.
Drew: Step by Step never used that line, I don't think [laughs].
Glen: No. But alas, dead-mother sex was not the solution to the dream problem, and Frasier has the dream again. Cannot sleep. Is awake with his books.
Drew: I want to mention specifically that he is in the motel, and he hears someone showering, and he's like—
Frasier: Mom?
[audience laughs]
Frasier: Mommy?
Glen: Patience, Daddy.
[audience laughs]
Drew: [laughter] "Patience, Daddy." That makes him wake up, screaming.
Glen: But at least in the title card for that scene it's like, "Thank god it wasn't the dead mom thing," because yeah—like, you want to fuck your dead mother.
Drew: But that became an episode later.
Glen: Yes. That became a major story line.
Drew: Was she there for more than one episode then?
Glen: Yeah. I think she was in a few episodes.
Drew: I know Rita Wilson plays the mom in an old family video, and then in the episode where you see all the apparitions of the women in Frasier's life—
Glen: Yeah. She's also there.
Drew: Yes.
Glen: I love that scene so much.
Drew: I want to know what the timeline is, though, because it's never made clear when she died. But the Rita Wilson version of Hester doesn't like Diane but also is not approving of Lilith, so I guess she would have had to have met Lilith at some point? But we never saw that happen. I guess she might have died after Cheers and before Frasier. Anyway.
Glen: Well, Frasier and Lilith were basically almost—they were together on Cheers for a while, so she could have met her at any point. But Martin also can't sleep because of the three Slim Jims he ate before bed.
Drew: Why would a Slim Jim keep you up?
Glen: It's spicy. Old people are kept up by heartburn.
Drew: Oh. I haven't had a Slim Jim, maybe?
Glen: You're also not an old man.
Drew: Well, I didn't know they were spicy.
Glen: A little bit—any sort of cured meat or something with a lot of nitrates.
Drew: Are nitrates delicious or something?
Glen: I'm not going to get into this. Save it for Katherine.
Drew: Katherine, are nitrates delicious? Please tell us. So yeah. Martin's like, "Don't worry about the dream. The worst-case scenario is that the man-eating lion leaps on top of you and mauls you." This doesn't help, and Frasier's like, "Okay. I need to tell you the full story. It was not a man-eating lion. It was a man. It was my coworker, Gil Chesterton." This whole little scene that follows is a very good distillation of the Frasier-and-Martin dynamic because he kind of freaks out and—
Glen: Starts cleaning everything—with the same sponge.
Drew: Yeah, that's not good.
Frasier: The dream was really about me in a motel room with a male companion, Gil Chesterton.
Martin: You don't care if I ever sleep again, do you?
[audience laughs]
Frasier: Dad. Dad, please. I'd really like to discuss this.
Martin: No. Frasier, please—this makes me very uncomfortable.
Frasier: Dad, please?
Martin: I know. I know. Your generation, men talk about everything. Everything's out in the open. You know what really drives me crazy is the way you all touch each other. Everybody hugs, you know? In my generation it was a handshake. That was good enough. And maybe you felt especially close to someone, you'd touch them on the shoulder, but never for more than two seconds. And don't talk to be about football players patting people's butts and everything because that's different. That's sports. That's like war. Now goodnight son.
Drew: But Frasier stops him from going back to his bedroom and says, "No. I actually need to talk to you about this." What is very interesting about what he says is that he is explicitly naming off all the reasons his character seems gay, which shows a level of self-awareness both of Frasier as a character and the show that most TV series would not be capable of.
Frasier: I've exhausted every other possible interpretation of this dream. It's impossible. My subconscious is trying to tell me something about my sexuality.
Martin: Oh, that's ridiculous.
Frasier: Oh, is it? I was sensitive as a child. I didn't go in for sports. God, it's every cliché in the book. Surely it must have occurred to you at some point. You refused to take me to see West Side Story on my eighth birthday.
Martin: Well, because of the gangs. That's scary for kids.
Frasier: Even gangs that dance?
Martin: Especially gangs that dance.
[audience laughs]
Glen: But I thought it was sort of well-tread territory at this point. I actually found this scene and this conversation lacking, on one hand, because we covered this in the episode we already talked about which is two seasons ago. And also—I don't know that Martin or Martin's point of view and the way he calms Frasier down—it's missing the "and I would have loved you anyway" element of it. Basically, he calms Frasier down by saying, "Listen, you're very introspective."
Martin: Yeah. Okay. I get—yeah, I thought about it. But no, Frasier. No. I don't believe that. And you know why? Because you would have known by now. You're unconscious or whatever the hell you call it could no more have kept its yap shut than the rest of you.
Glen: This moment was an opportunity for a lovely little conversation about a blue-collar, masculine dad realizing that he may have two gay sons and being okay with it—maybe being worried at the time, but working that out on his own because he knew that they couldn't help who they were and he had to make peace with having two gay sons. And that's not, like—he's still clearly very uncomfortable with it and uncomfortable with Frasier bringing it up. And whether you want to argue that he's uncomfortable because he doesn't like any sort of touchy-feely conversation or whether he's uncomfortable with Frasier talking about the gay elephant in the room—and if he were really so comfortable with Frasier being straight, then in that first scene in the kitchen where he pauses with the mustard when Frasier says he dreamed about a man, then he wouldn't have been so freaked out. He [would have been] like, "Oh. Well, Frasier's not gay. Sure. Clearly that dream about a man is meaningless." So he clearly does have issues with it.
Drew: Okay.
Glen: In the first episode we talked about, I remember him just being—he and Niles were able to joke about it.
Drew: They were laughing quite loudly in the kitchen.
Glen: Yeah. And I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with Martin having the hesitation or worry, but I think it deserved a conversation more than what we got, especially because the dream itself is pretty much just treated like a running joke, and it could have been a great build up to an earnest moment between Frasier and Martin about Martin's side of it. And I do think that there is worthwhile perspective to be had from men from Martin's generation having to raise children they didn't quite understand—which is the premise of the show, yes. But it's not usually specifically in terms of sexuality, and I would have been interested how the show viewed Martin getting over that aspect of his sons' lives and at what point he made peace with who they were or who they could have been.
Drew: So he does explicitly say, "Yeah, it occurred to me. Maybe I thought you were gay," but this is before the episode where Frasier confronts him about not being able to say "I love you." There's an episode where they actually—he can tell Eddie that he loves him, but he can't tell Frasier that. So he has a difficult time having those conversations, which maybe is an out for why that conversation doesn't come as far as it does. But I also agree that the out they do give him is kind of cheap—
Glen: "Well, clearly you're not gay."
Drew: Right. "—even though I thought you might be, but apparently you're not. So, you're not. So case closed. Go to bed."
Glen: Yeah.
Drew: But it works. It works for Frasier. Frasier, who is seriously thinking, "What if my subconscious is actually trying to tell me something?"—that's not what ends the conversation. We're going to get there in a second. I'm trying to think if there's another thing I want to say about this. I feel like because Martin doesn't tell his sons that he loves them but clearly spends time around them and accepts them as different as they are, that's about as close as he will ever come to accepting a potentially gay child—just because you can love your gay kid and still be uncomfortable around homosexuality. That you still love your kid is actually the meaningful of the two gestures. I guess the only thing that doesn't work completely well for me is the out Martin gives him. So he says, "I'm going to bed, and you better go to bed too, Frasier, because you have to wake up early for work."
Martin: You're going to be all worn out before the show tomorrow.
Frasier: What a tragedy that would be.
Martin: Now what are you complaining about?
Frasier: Oh, I don't know. I just haven't had any really interesting calls lately. I'm beginning to question whether I'm bored with psychiatry.
Martin: Well, you'd never know it with the way you've got your nose stuck in all those books.
Frasier: That's true. The one saving grace about this dream is it's given me a chance to flex my analytical muscle a bit.
Martin: So, maybe it wasn't so bad after all.
Frasier: Wait a minute. Could that be what this has been all about? I've been so intellectually unchallenged lately by my show that my mind had to create a dream that defies interpretation just to give me a challenge?
Martin: I don't know. Keep talking you're making me sleepy.
[audience laughs]
Drew: And he's very excited about the fact that the reason he was having this recurring dream was specifically because he was bored, and his brain needed a challenge—and only he can truly challenge himself because he's that smart.
Glen: Which I like. I like the ultimate resolution. I just wish—there was no point for the gay context of the dream if that conversation with Martin wasn't going to be meatier. It could have been any sort of dream puzzle.
Drew: Right. I wonder why they picked—
Glen: They picked it because it's easy laughs and—
Drew: Frasier is Frasier, and also, the writer is gay.
Glen: Yeah. The writer's gay, and also it is a very clear—it's something that is brought up all the time, repressed homosexuality. It was brought up all the time in the '90s.
Drew: On every sitcom we've talked about.
Glen: And so it was something obviously easier for audiences to digest as opposed to "What if my subconscious is telling me to kill someone?" I don't know. I don't know what the alternative dream puzzle would have been.
Drew: Red universe, blue universe—I don't know. So he goes to bed, and he's back in the motel once again. There's a knock at the door, and it's Dr. Sigmund Freud.
Frasier: Come in.
Freud: Dr. Crane—Dr. Sigmund Freud.
[audience laughs]
Frasier: Oh, my goodness. This is quite an honor.
Freud: The honor is all mine. I gave you a complex psychological problem, and you solved it.
Frasier: Wow. Thank you very much.
Freud: You are a brilliant psychiatrist.
Frasier: Oh, that's very flattering [laughs]. There are so many things I'd like to ask you.
Freud: In good time, my boy. In good time. Right now we have more important matters [sprays breath freshener].
[audience laughs]
Drew: Played by Byrne Piven, father of Jeremy Piven.
Glen: No.
Drew: Yeah.
Glen: Huh!
Drew: Freud congratulates Frasier on solving a psychological puzzle that Freud takes credit for, which is interesting because it's still Frasier's brain. Frasier's like, "I have so many things I want to ask you," and he's like, "All in good time, boy," and gets into bed and beckons him. I like the ending shot of looking up at the high rise, and you see the light in Frasier's apartment turn on. I like the weird variety of camera shots we got in this episode, which are just not what you normally see on Frasier or a sitcom.
Glen: Yeah. The dream sequence was very well shot.
Drew: What do you make of the end-credit sequence?
Glen: Oh. Hulu skipped me ahead.
Drew: The end-credit sequence is Eddie at the counter and there's like a plate full of muffins, and he's jumping at the counter to the point where he can see the muffins but can't reach them—and it's shimmery, like, you know, a TV dream.
Glen: Oh, because it's his dream.
Drew: Yeah. And then he wakes up and goes to the kitchen where there are not muffins on the counter, but he's jumping up anyway. That's it.
Glen: You always wonder about your dog's dreams.
Drew: I do. I think he's chasing things—possibly chasing me.
Glen: Sometimes he's very confused when he wakes up.
Drew: Wouldn't you be if you didn't know what dreams were?
Glen: But don't you think that dogs can reason out something about dreams? I mean, clearly, not looking at Eddie's experience—he thinks there's muffins in the kitchen when there's not.
Drew: Mm-hmm. I don't understand their sense of time and place. Thurman will continually go to the same spot where he saw a cat once thinking the cat will still be there, even though it has not been there hundreds of times and has only been there once. He still looks for the cat.
Glen: Well, if you want a reach around for Eddie's dream, it's that dreams are constantly sending us on quests without actual ends.
Drew: That's true. They really don't go anywhere, usually.
Glen: And then you wake up thinking, "What is the meaning of this dream?" Eddie thought the meaning of his dream was to go get muffins on the kitchen counter, but there were no muffins. We wake up thinking that our dreams are trying to tell us to do something when really they're not.
Drew: Have you ever had a recurring dream Glen?
Glen: Yes.
Drew: Do you want to share it?
Glen: No.
Drew: [laughs] Okay. Great. I agree with your analysis on that. That's the end of the episode. I like this episode. This episode, oddly, is maybe more dear to me than "The Matchmaker" episode. I don't know why. It might just be that I've seen this the most times. I like watching Frasier and Niles do full on smarty-pants mode, and—
Glen: Well, I prefer the matchmaker episode. So I guess we're like Frasier and Niles in the way that we have pretty much the same worldview and yet disagree in the details.
Drew: Am I Frasier or are you Frasier?
Glen: I'm more of a Niles I think.
Drew: Okay. Great. So there are actually two other gay episodes of Frasier we could talk about. There's the ski lodge one.
Glen: Mm-hmm. I definitely want to talk about the ski lodge one.
Drew: But there's also the one with Patrick Stewart where he dates Frasier because of a misunderstanding. I forgot about that one. I want to do both of those.
Glen: Yeah.
Drew: The name for the latter episode is "The Doctor is Out." Such a good episode. But that's a conversation to have another season because this is the end of the season, Glen.
Glen: What?
Drew: We're done.
Glen: But not for too long because we have a Patreon now, and they will yell at us.
Drew: We do. So we will be back with a bonus episode in August. I know what I want to do. I want to do the episode of the cartoon that we've been talking about, which most of you probably will not have seen—but trust us. We will take you by the hand and guide you through this episode, and it will be a fun, weird trip. You will be very surprised how gay a Saturday morning cartoon in the '80s could be. Saturday morning cartoon?
Glen: Yeah.
Drew: But we're going to take a few weeks off. I am going to get some rest, and then at some point we'll be back with more one-off episodes, never letting more than a few weeks in between, and then a whole season at some point. I don't know what shows we should talk about. If you have ideas, you should tell us. Glen, if people want to yell at you about what shows we should do in our third season of Gayest Episode Ever, what Twitter account should they tweet at?
Glen: @IWriteWrongs—that is "I," "write" with a W, then "wrongs." And then I'm on Instagram @brosquartz—that's B-R-O-S-Quartz.
Drew: Someone literally posted—so the ALF art that you drew—which you should check out Instagram if you want to see by the way. Glen drew some really great ALF art.
Glen: It was holdover art for our patrons.
Drew: But there's something about in the raw, like, as something that was just meant to be filler until the real thing came—I love it so much. Someone replied and they were like, "Oh, BrosQuartz." I don't know what they thought your handle was, but the "Bros" they didn't understand, and also they didn't know what Steven Universe was. So every time you said it they were just like, "I don't know what that is," but now they do because they saw it on Instagram. If you want to see my Instagram with Glen's gay ALF art go to @KidIcarus222. Yes, that is a video game reference. And then I'm on Twitter @DrewGMackie M-A-C-K-I-E. This podcast is on Twitter @GayestEpisode, and it's on Facebook at Gayest Episode Ever. You should subscribe to us wherever you'd normally find a podcast. If you look somewhere where a podcast usually is and we're not there, tell me, and I will put the podcast on there.
Glen: Podcasts are usually on my phone. I don't see it on my phone.
Drew: Are you my mom? Are you my mother right now?
Glen: Yeah.
Drew: Yeah. Also, please give us a rate and review. We're going to be off for a few weeks, but it's always nice to come back and see something nice that someone has written about us. I'm actually going to read one of those right now, because I thought it would be—it's something I wanted to share on the season finale.
Glen: Wait I have a mystery for you first.
Drew: Well, okay.
Glen: So the podcast episode where you're interviewing me did end up on my dad's phone, and he does not know how it got there. I don't think he listens to this podcast. I never told him about this podcast, but somehow that episode is on his phone.
Drew: Is he on Facebook?
Glen: Probably. I don't know. He's not my friend on Facebook.
Drew: You're not friends with your dad on Facebook?
Glen: No. He doesn't really use it anyway.
Drew: Okay. That is weird.
Glen: Why is it weird?
Drew: I don't know how a single episode—
Glen: Oh. I thought [you meant] that it was weird that I'm not friends with my dad on Facebook.
Drew: I mean, that is also kind of weird.
Glen: Whatever. I post anime pictures, usually. What is he going to get out of that?
Drew: Confusion. Disappointment. Rage. The review that we got, it comes from a user named icarusx3—that's very close to mine—and this person wrote, "I started listening for the name. I like to listen to many different opinions. Drew is charming and he sounded so young and sincere."
Glen: Oh, boy, was he wrong.
Drew: "At first, I didn't like Glen, because he sounded so mean to Drew." This is a real review, by the way [laughter]. Yeah. "Now, after listening to many episodes, I love them both. Glen is that marvelously dry friend I once had who no one—"
Glen: Who died.
Drew: "Who no one else quite got. Drew is his perfect foil, and they truly know of what they speak. You need to listen to all the episodes. They are unique and new, and you will learn fascinating—" [laughs].
Glen: Maybe these people should try sitting in a small room with you, talking across a microphone.
Drew: If they listen to all 30-something episode of this show, it would be as if they had sat in a small room with both of us for quite a while—probably would be very tired of us.
Glen: Guess what—my Season 3 resolution is to be even meaner to you.
Drew: Go for it, and see what the ratings have to say about that. Gayest Episode Ever is a TableCakes podcast. TableCakes is a Los Angeles based podcast network. We're doing other shows, and probably in the hiatus between this season and the next season we're going to debut two new shows. So please go to tablecakes.com, or just stay subscribed to all the social media for this because we'll promote them through that. But I'm working on a sort of true crime/more history research show that I think is going to be really good. Go to tablecakes.com to hear about all of our shows and once again if you like what we're doing and you want to help that Season 3 come a little bit faster, go to patreon.com/gayestepisodeever. You can give us a dollar. We will take a dollar, and we will take whatever else you can possibly offer us. One of the reasons we're going on a break is that this is a lot of post-production to put these episodes together, and I just need a break.
Glen: I don't do any of it.
Drew: But given a little more cash, maybe we can farm the show out more often to a freelance editor who is not me, which I'd be fine with. Glen, you're on your—who are you texting, Glen?
Glen: I'm texting you.
Drew: I don't think you are.
Glen: No. I'm not.
Drew: Okay. Well you've checked—
Glen: I checked out.
Drew: You clearly have. All right. Well.
Glen: I entered when I heard my name. What more do you want?
Drew: "At first I didn't like Glen, because he sounded so mean to Drew"? That's where you entered?
Glen: Yeah.
Drew: I think that's a good place for you to enter. All right. This season's done. I'm tired of this.
Glen: Bye forever until season three.
["A Dream of You and Me" performed by Future Islands plays]
Katherine: A TableCakes production.