With help from a new lawyer named Donny Douglas, Niles manages to put up a good fight against Maris's divorce attorneys, but soon Frasier's ethics are put to the test when Maris's lawyers say that her and Niles's marriage fell apart due to his feelings for Daphne and if Frasier tells the truth, it could hurt his brother's case.
Tropes:
- Accidental Truth: Niles did harbor feelings for Daphne, even though it was meant to be a desperate lie in order for Maris for prevail. Thankfully though, it's never revealed.
- Artistic License – Law:
- Martin tells Frasier a story where he once arrested a guy for murder, but he escaped from custody when reading him the Miranda Rights and when the suspect is in court, Martin committed perjury and said he read them in full and if he didn't the suspect gets to go free on a technicality and tells Frasier that, unethical as it was, it was still the right thing to do because the suspect had to pay for murdering a person. There are so many things wrong with this though, in real life, failure to fully read the Miranda Rights to a suspect does not invalidate an arrest, though even if that was the case, the interruption was the arrestee's fault, so lying that he did read them in full was entirely unnecessary. That and Martin said that he saw the suspect commit murder, so he didn't really need to read the Miranda Rights at all.
- Niles notes that Donny got his law degree from the "University of Las Vegas" (and cracks a joke about there being no problem finding tassels for those mortarboards). At the time the episode first aired, there was no law school in Nevada that had produced a graduating class (the law school at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas having only just begun its degree-granting program).
- Bittersweet Ending: Niles finally gets a settlement from Maris, meaning she cannot bankrupt him anymore. On the downside, Daphne is dating Donny.
- Blackmail: Niles threatens to reveal Maris' secret that her fortune came from urinal cakes instead of timber as she claimed, thus ending her bankrupting campaign over him once and for all.
- Dark Secret: Played for laughs; Maris' family fortune coming from making urinal cakes and not timber as she claims is treated as this.
- Establishing Character Moment: Donny is introduced as an apparent slob who changes his clothes and eats a sandwich while meeting with a potential client. He then picks up the phone and in seconds gets Maris' legal team to move the court date up by several months. Niles is so impressed he hires him on the spot.
- Foot-Dragging Divorcee: Maris, via her lawyers, is trying to drag proceedings out for at least another seven months so she can continue to ruin Niles' finances.
- Friendship Moment: Roz and Niles haven't always seen eye-to-eye but when she sees the toll his divorce is taking she puts him in touch with Donny and asks nothing in return.
- Heel Realization: Played with; when revealing that he intends to reveal the truth to Donny and let things fall as they may, Niles admits that he doesn't really know whether his feelings for Daphne really did negatively impact his marriage, and whether he might have done more to save it had he not essentially been committing a form of emotional infidelity. Frasier challenges this by pointing out that the only reason the marriage lasted as long as it did was because of all the hard work and effort Niles put into it.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Subverted; Niles initially decides to spare Frasier his ethical dilemma and come clean to Donny, but Donny reveals where Maris' family fortune really comes from before he can.
- Honor Before Reason: Frasier is far too ethical to lie, even if telling the truth will make things worse for his loved ones. However, in this episode, he states that he truly doesn't know if his ethics are truly what matter most.
- Original Position Fallacy: Niles endorses Frasier's refusal to lie under oath, despite Donny's exasperation... then Frasier admits that he can't lie under oath about Niles's true feelings for Daphne, proving Maris's case and torpedoing Niles's chances in court. Niles promptly starts hyperventilating.
- Space Whale Aesop: Martin uses a comet about to strike the Earth with the only hope of preventing it was to commit perjury as an example as to why Frasier should lie under oath. Frasier admits that he probably would lie under these incredibly specific and unlikely circumstances, but doesn't fail to point out the ludicrous, inapplicable and utterly unhelpful nature of the example.
- Take a Third Option: At the end, Niles manages to win against Maris when he threatens to reveal that her wealth stemmed from urinal cakes rather than timber unless she agrees to a settlement, therefore Frasier neither has to tell the truth or lie when going on the witness stand.
- Throw the Dog a Bone: Niles finally manages to triumph over Maris.
- To Be Lawful or Good: The crux of Frasier's moral conflict in the episode: he believes that perjuring himself in a legal proceeding would be unethical (lawful), but not doing so will destroy his brother's chances of getting anything remotely close to a fair settlement from Maris, as well as bringing him humiliation by having his feelings for Daphne exposed in public before a court (good). He's unclear about how he will act even as it comes down to the wire; Niles informs him that there will be no hard feelings if he follows his conscience and tells the truth, but when a certain revelation about urinal cakes is made the issue becomes moot.
- Further discussed by Martin, who fully admits that he lied under oath to ensure that a criminal that he'd witnessed committing murder was convicted.Martin: Now you may argue about whether or not I did an ethical thing, but there's not a doubt in my mind that I did the right thing.
- Further discussed by Martin, who fully admits that he lied under oath to ensure that a criminal that he'd witnessed committing murder was convicted.
- What You Are in the Dark: Discussed by Frasier and Martin. Martin argues that lying under oath is harmless when no one knows the truth of the matter, but Frasier sticks to his ethical guns and says that "ethics are what you do when nobody else is looking," and reminds his father that he's the one who taught Frasier that lesson.
