(Editor’s note: Seasons 1 and 2 were reviewed under an earlier editorial standard and format. They’ll be revisited in the Second Look Remastered series, running January – June 2027. Subscribe to Processed Media (it’s free!) so you don’t miss the updates.)
Despite its good intentions, “The One Where Dr. Ramoray Dies” is an uneven mess of a Friends episode: for every great scene or moment, there are others where I just shake my head in amazement. The most obvious problem of course, is Eddie – after barely being established as a presence on the show, he’s personified as a jealous lunatic whose mental instabilities are paraded around as fodder for Chandler to react to. But what happens with Joey is no better, reducing him to the dumbest, most selfish version of himself (a character quality he never really embodied, despite it being attributed at times), all in order to quickly wrap up what should’ve been a rewarding character arc for both Chandler and Joey.
It’s quite frustrating to watch this plot line from beginning to end for the first time in years: what began with so much promise only two episodes ago is in shambles here, as Eddie reveals himself to be a crazy, depressed ex-boyfriend who immediately accuses Chandler of sleeping with his ex and killing his fish. Chandler reacts about the same as the audience: he barely has any words to reply, instead becoming a mime version of himself. There’s no attempt at making Eddie a human character (or Chandler an understanding one), and by the same token, there’s no attempt to do anything with Joey once he’s outside the Bing/Tribbiani residence.
The whole “Joey gets fired for shitting on his writers” really bugs me: Joey’s an idiot, but is he the kind of person who’d undermine the people employing him? On a purely logical level, what Joey does in this episode makes no sense. More importantly, it really sells him short as a character, essentially forcing him to move back in with Chandler because he’s instantly broke and has no way to feed and house himself. There’s an inevitable reconciliation in the cards for Joey and Chandler – but the meaning of it has already been ripped out, because Joey isn’t making this choice on his own; he’s doing it because the writers were afraid to leave their comfortable pastures for new territory, regressing from the complex things in play when they force Joey and Chandler to face life on their own. Instead, circumstances allow them to back out of their own personal maturities, a major disappointment for an arc that held a lot of promise.
But for all that “The One Where Dr. Ramoray Dies” does wrong with Joey and Chandler, it gets it right with Monica and Rachel (once they’ve moved away from the jokes about “I slept with x number of people” with all of them). It’s the opposite of the Joey/Chandler story, really: where the Joey/Chandler plot starts out promising, the Monica/Rachel one is executed much more cleanly, as Monica and Richard exchange their first “I love you”s and Rachel explains to Ross the difference between passion and intimacy. The Monica/Richard moment is just kind of a cute little thing between them, but the Rachel/Ross bit is really powerful: for the first time, it shows us that Ross and Rachel can work as a couple, a rare display of the two being understanding and honest with each other. It doesn’t start out that way (and Schwimmer plays up Ross’s immaturity with his jealousy over Paulo to the point where it gets really annoying), but Rachel’s little monologue is one of the strongest beats the writers of Friends ever hit with their relationship.
Other thoughts/observations:
- I love how quickly this show discards Phoebe. Her dialogue and screen time in this episode is essentially vaporized compared to the episode preceding it (though she does sing again, to which Richard asks Monica: “Phoebe’s got another job, right?”)
- Ross calls Paulo the “Weenie from Tarini”, which I believe is the last time he’ll ever be mentioned on the show, save maybe for once or twice in later seasons.
- the material in Rachel and Monica’s apartment is helped by the little gender-centric moments with the girls in the bathroom and the guys in the living room. Would you believe Joe Liebermann once called out Martha Kaufmann over the bathroom scene, saying it promoted unprotected sex?
- the writers of Days of Our Lives give Joey a hilarious farewell: he falls down an elevator shaft, his brain so damaged the only doctor that could save him, would be himself.
- when Richard asks Monica for a ballpark figure of the men she’s slept with, she replies with: “definitely less than a ballpark.”
- Joey really has to ask himself “why did they do this to me?” C’mon man.
- Up next: Eddie gets pranked in “The One Where Eddie Won’t Go”.