Frasier Online Episode Guide -> Season 9 -> Episode 9.07

The Two Hundreth

It's a momentous day in Frasier's career - he's celebrating his 2000th show on KACL! Frasier is excited to have perhaps Seattle's most celebrated person, Bill Gates, on the show (especially as it appears that Bill is a fan of Frasier's show), but is also surprised when Bob "Bulldog" Briscoe also drops in! When Bill finally arrives, the station is bombarded with calls for Bill about Microsoft and it's software - leaving Frasier's nose a little out of joint. Never mind - he takes his tape of the 2000th show and places it with the other 1,999 tapes of his show in his wardrobe-cum-storage unit. As he leaves for dinner with the rest of his family, he notices out of the corner of his eye that one of the tapes has been placed in upside down, which leads to Frasier dicovering that one of his show tapes has been replaced with a tape of Hall And Oates! Daphne owns up that she used the tape to test out her new boombox, but the tape got jammed in the machine.

All of this leads to Frasier appealing on his show for anyone who has a copy of the show from 6 years ago, which doesn't generate any responses. So he and Roz go down to the KACL archive to try and see if there is a copy there. They find a box marked 'Best of Crane', but there are are only a few tapes in there - Kenny tells them they have a space problem and re-use a lot of the tapes. They also discover Bulldog, who tells them that sorting out the archive is his new job. This all leaves Frasier feeling very depressed, until Martin tells him that a dedicated fan rang the station and told them he has a copy of the show. Frasier and Niles prepare to meet Tom, a man who treats Frasier as a God.....

- Bulldog drops into Frasier's 2000th show:
Frasier: Thank you for coming down to help celebrate my 2000th show.
Bulldog: Yeah, yeah, congrats - didn't think you'd last 2 weeks!

- Callers flood the switchboard to speak to Bill Gates:
Roz: The board is lighting up! Wow, who even knew we had a line seven!

- Niles didn't listen to the show, so asks Daphne and Martin what happened:
Martin: I just listen for five minutes in case he asks me what my favourite part was.
Daphne: I just say the call from Tacoma - there's bound to be a call from Tacoma!

- Roz rejects Bulldog's advances - yet again:
Bulldog: Bulldog's still got it!!

- After Martin shows Daphne how to hide damage to Frasier's artifacts:
Martin: I'll show you how to make ginger ale look like 50 year old brandy

- Tom's Frasier Crane wall

- Tom found listening to Frasier's show interfered with his job:
Tom: That's why I quit my job

- Frasier sees something is amiss with one of his artifacts:
Frasier: My double handed amphora! Alright, no-one leave!
- Turrns round to an empty room

Episode 100 of 'Frasier' was somewhat disappointing due to a good story being somehat wasted with a not especially amusing script, but I was hoping that the lessons would be learnt from it and 100 episodes later, a better one would be the result. However, I was disappointed yet again. Dispensing with the location footage was a good idea, but Bill Gates's cameo role was just shameless self promotion. Thankfully, Dan Butler made a welcome visit as Bulldog - hopefully his job at KACL means we will see more of him in the future. No, the real problem with this episode was the central storyline - we all know Frasier is meticulous and very anal, but his behaviour about one missing tape was too obsessional to be interesting leaving Frasier and Niles' meeting with Tom proving the highlight of the show - especially his Frasier wall in place of a window, but I found the attempted parallels between Tom and Frasier's collection much too heavy handed. All of this leaves an uneven episode that has the odd good moment but the rest is depressingly average.

Rating

70 %

NB: This episode has a slightly extended running time (running to about 40 mins with adverts), and when originally broadcast on NBC, was followed by a Clip Show hosted by Bob Costas where the cast discussed the show to date and showed various out takes from the 200 episodes before it.

Avg. Viewer Review: 66.0%
Total Number of Reviews: 2