Frasier found himself back in Boston for the first time in ten years, and it was to attend Cliff Clavin's funeral.





He hadn't been back since '08, when he had flown in for five hours - just long enough to watch them put his old friend Norm Peterson in the ground. Frasier hated going back to Boston. Everything about it made him sad, at a cellular level. All of his friends at Cheers had grown so old; so much faster than him, it seemed. It made Frasier feel a little guilty, and also a little relieved. If he hadn't escaped that life - a life of spending every waking hour in a bar in the basement of a seafood restaurant with a bunch of neighborhood lunchpail stiffs - he would probably be buried next to them by now. And so Norm was dead, no surprise, and now Cliff. He wondered who else would even show up to say goodbye. Sam had sold the bar and moved to Tampa. Woody was a paycheck-politician living in his wife's family's mansion. Rebecca seemed happy: two kids, now in college, a nice house in the 'burbs. He learned all of this when she sent him a Facebook friend request in 2013 - which he rejected - and hadn't thought of her since. He had lost track of where Carla even was. Boston only meant death to Frasier now. He knew that at some point, the list of people he cared about in Boston would be short enough, or old enough to lose that impulsive tug of nostalgia that dragged him back to say goodbye, and he wouldn't bother coming for the funerals; and that would be fine with Frasier. Boston, to Frasier, was a gleaming landscape of brand new skyscrapers spurting out of the graves of a life that he had mostly forgotten and largely regretted. "I hate this town," Frasier muttered, as the voice of Tom Brady greeted him on the loudspeakers at Logan airport the moment he stepped off the gangway and into the terminal. His old man, rest in peace, went to the grave cursing Brady's name after Super Bowl XLIX. Goddamn Boston.





But Cliff had been his friend once, and Cliff was dead, and Frasier owed it to him to pay his respects. He stopped by Cheers, knowing that it was a place where nobody would know his name anymore, to steel himself with Brandy before moving on to the funeral home. He sat at the bar, ordered a drink, and then was shocked to feel two small, strong hands yank him violently off the barstool and drag him back to the pool room.





"Hello, Carla," Frasier said, without turning around.





"You alone, doc?" Carla asked. Frasier felt a sting in his heart at the sound of her voice. Any pretense of confidence was gone. She sounded old, and frail. And afraid.





"Carla, what is this all about?" he asked.





"I knew you would come back," She said, and turned him around. She had actually aged nicely; older, sure, but her features were softer, more gentle somehow, as if life had finally stopped kicking her in the teeth long enough to live a comfortable middle age. He smiled a little at the sight of her, but the smile vanished when she spoke again. "I need your help. We gotta get to the people who killed Clavin. Or we'll be next."





"Cliff... was murdered?" Frasier wasn't entirely surprised; he had thought of murdering Cliff dozens of times. But hearing the words still gave him a chill. "What do the police say?"





"The cops won't touch it," Carla said. "It goes deep. Mob ties. Clavin really got himself in a pickle."





"But can't Woody pull some strings?" Frasier asked. "He's a state senator now, he must have some pull..."





"You don't understand, Fraize," Carla said, and wiped away an uncharacteristic tear. "Woody is behind it. He's behind it all."





Frasier collapsed to the floor. A decade of warning signs all piled into focus with mind-shattering clarity. How had he missed it? Woody's stories about Hanover, one after the other, were never the homespun ramblings of a dimwitted farmboy. They were tales of casual violence, of suffering, of madness. And Woody showed no signs of being affected by it at all. Like a sociopath. A harmless one though, stuck behind the bar of Cheers with no one to challenge him, to chase him out of his shell. Until 1993, that is, when Dr. Frasier Crane put him in city hall as a joke and then left Boston forever.





This was all his fault.





Frasier looked at himself in the mirror. The tanned, soft features of a middle-aged man who had lived two decades of casual leisure scowled back at him. And in that moment he was disgusted, not relieved, by what he saw. A coward, a wimp, a celebrity. He had created Woody the politician, and then he left. Maybe if he stayed, Frasier thought, he could have prevented this. But he ran off to Seattle to give bullshit Dear Abby advice to anonymous callers on the radio for money and drink Sherry with Niles while Woody slowly evolved into the monster that he always knew deep down was there. He had to put a stop to this. He felt the dirty air of the city seeping into his lungs, and it felt good. It felt powerful. It felt like revenge. Frasier was old and soft, he knew, but he wasn't dead. Not yet. He could still get a little dirty if he needed to. He would come for Woody, and he would bring everything he had left.





Goddamn Boston.





Cue the Dropkick Murphy's as the title card appears: "Frasier: Beacon Hill Nights." Next fall, only on Showtime.





