Technical Difficulties

Ray, it seems to me, has a very definite and sharply delineated comfort zone, and he is hostile to attempts to drag him outside it. (Note, though, that when he has no choice, he sucks it up and deals, as in "North." I love Ray tremendously in that episode.) The show manages a very clever irony because Fraser, who is accused of not being in this century and being the last of a breed and so on and so forth, is actually much more liberal and accepting and open-minded than Ray, who bristles with prejudices (against the Chinese in "Chinatown," against BDSM practitioners in "Chicago Holiday," etc.) and does not want to hear anything contrary to his world view. His extreme and over-the-top reaction to Fraser licking things is, I think, emblematic.