Database Abstraction Switcharoo (2)

So I was continuing with my transition to PDO and I did encounter a rather annoying problem. When using MySQL Boolean or Natural Language searches, I couldn't get placeholders to work. Period. I tried everything I could think of and consulted numerous forums. Even put a question out there on stackoverflow.com but no answers in a week. I don't know if I'm overlooking something obvious, but I've been pretty thorough. I make sure my array has the exact amount of correctly-named variables and I reference each in the query only once. I get no useful error messages to give me even the first clue about what's giving it the grump. Grrrrrrrr.