Friends Season 4, Episode 19 “The One with All the Haste”
Written by Scott Silveri & Wil Calhoun
Directed by Kevin S. Bright
Aired April 9, 1998 on NBC
Though “The One with All the Haste” lacks sci-fi medical experiments and prominently featured mice, Chandler’s random reference of Flowers of Algernon is a rather apt story for season four’s biggest plot twists to date, grounding its stories in characters afraid to let go of the things they’ve come to covet in their lives. Daniel Keyes’s short story tells the tale of a man and mouse given unexpected, temporary intelligence and what happens when they begin to lose it; though it’s not a perfect parallel to the tales of apartments, earrings, and romantic flings, it certainly provides a fascinating prism through which to experience “The One with All the Haste” – which is a fun, if slightly rushed, episode of Friends in its own right.
“The One with All the Haste” opens on Ross and Emily in bed – and for the first time, offers an rare opportunity for extended screen time with the couple. Though they’ve been together for six weeks, their whirlwind relationship has occurred mostly off-screen; we’ve really only been privy to the developing rapport between the couple, and most of that came in “The One with All the Rugby”. Ross and his newly-pierced ear try to keep Emily from taking another trip back to England – not only because he is madly in love with her, but because he’s become infatuated with the person he’s become with her.
Or so he says; as the events of “The One with All the Haste” would prove throughout its running time, Ross is very much himself in his new relationship with Emily, his pent-up impulsiveness and deep seated anxiety driving him to make decisions like getting his left ear pierced on a whim, because he knows Emily likes “dangerous” guys. “I love the Ross I am with you”, he tells her as she rushedly packs to travel across the pond yet again – as telling a sign as any that Ross is deep down the path of making another chaotic, misguided decision with the woman he loves, which certainly occurs when he makes his spontaneous, bombshell marriage proposal to her.
Before he does propose, “The One with All the Haste” smartly parallels Ross’s increasingly desperate mind state with Rachel, who is at her breaking point with living in Joey and Chandler’s apartment (especially after yet another waking rendition of “The Morning’s Here” by their theatrical neighbor). Her and Monica’s desperate attempts to appeal to Joey and Chandler are not much more than a humorous way to kill time until the episode’s big twist – which is what makes its own twist work so well, when the girls secretly switch their apartments back without negotiation (Joey getting a beer out of the fridge and sitting down before noticing is one of the best visual punchlines of the entire season). Like Ross, Rachel and Monica remember the life they had when they had the apartment of their dreams, the place where they most felt themselves – and one they felt slipping away, with every day spent in the grungy dwellings across the hall from their true home.
Their desperate action to regain control mirrors Ross’s nicely; and even though I do wish this season would’ve spent a little bit more time developing Ross and Emily’s dynamic, I do think Ross’s much-debated proposal makes sense for his character. Ross has seen himself in a world where he lets his feelings fester and agitate; it led him to an unhappy marriage with a lesbian, and last season, shriveled him into an insufferable ball of anxiety until he made the dumbest decision of his entire life. He’s seen that other version of himself – and though he’s still learning who he is around Emily (not someone who wears her underwear, he swears), he’s so unwilling to try and fight off his worst urges, that he up and just asks Emily to marry him, after she makes an offhand joke about it (thinking he would freak out by the mention of it, of course).
Though it’s such a surprising moment, it makes absolute sense for Ross as a character – and perhaps more interestingly, puts Rachel at an emotional crossroads, after she finds out the news in the episode’s final minutes (having just made out with Monica for a minute, in order to satisfy Joey and Chandler’s lingering anger over the apartment re-switch). Don’t look now, but it’s been a rather rough ride for Rachel since the season premiere, between losing a promotion, her apartment, and fumbling her way into her awkward, almost-completely-forgotten pursuit of Joshua; though she handles the moment with grace, the big unanswered question at the heart of season four by the end of this episode is how is Rachel going to react when the world she knows is threatened to be pulled away from her forever – in a lot of ways, this episode is the Flowers for Algernon moment for Rachel, who suddenly finds herself at an important emotional crossroad.
Smartly, “The One with All the Haste” ends before it can get to that point; but how it utilizes Rachel’s presence in the final moments to great effect is wonderful – if only a bit disappointing, if only because it refocuses Rachel’s story on Ross and the external factors around him, rather than the critical internal development that formed her arc in seasons two and three. Future episodes will determine the effectiveness of this choice, but it is a bit odd to hear the audience audibly react when Rachel hears the news of Ross’s engagement; it’s almost a bit of a betrayal of the story Friends is trying to tell in the moment, but more importantly, it feels like a moment that would’ve been better centered on Rachel’s discovery, rather than just depicting her reaction to it.
Nonetheless, “The One with All the Haste” takes a pair of rather limited presences, and breathes a lot of life into them with quality comedic bits, and a pair of fun, exciting reveals. Even if the episode doesn’t make enough emotional space to really dig deeper into Ross and Emily’s dynamic, or Rachel’s reaction to it, it certainly raises the emotional stakes for the final set of episodes in an interesting way – and quietly uses a fun literary parallel to do so, a relative (and welcome) rarity for the most popular American sitcom of all-time.
Grade: B
Other thoughts/observations:
- Sing it with me (and the actual singer of the song, Michal Connor): “The morning’s hereeeee!”
- Ross does not catch nearly enough shit for his New Kids on the Block-ass earring.
- Ross jokes about trying on Emily’s underwear, but he didn’t want to be “that guy”.
- Monica: “What should I wear to a Knicks game?” Chandler: “A shirt that says I don’t belong here?”
- Rachel’s mom got the Knicks season tickets in her divorce – which, given the news of this episode, you’d think might factor in some of Rachel’s decision-making this decision. Unfortunately, it’s something the show really doesn’t engage with – certainly would’ve been nice to get a Sandra Greene appearance!
- Chandler: “I’ve got a carton of milk I’ve had a longer relationship with!”
- So Phoebe just carries two decks of cards on her at all times?
- Ross, to Emily: “I’m always hearing about those foreigners coming in and stealing jobs. That could be you!”
- There’s nothing more satisfying than Monica’s “We’ll discuss it in the morning!” when Chandler and Joey go banging on their door after they discover the apartment re-swap (which was Phoebe’s idea, though she doesn’t feel great about it).
- I also love Joey telling Ross about his sister making out with his ex-girlfriend, fully ignorant of how weird that is for him.
- Really wish we had gotten a rendition of “Morning’s Here” at the Friends reunion, rather than whatever the hell that Justin Bieber segment was.
- Extended thoughts: “The One with All the Haste” has only two seconds of additional footage, making it one of the most unremarkable extended episodes of the entire series!
- Up next: Rachel (and Monica) briefly go off the deep end in “The One with All the Wedding Dresses”.