(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.)
“The One Where Eddie Won’t Go” is a bad, bad episode. Not only does it give us Eddie the Raging Psychopath, but the rest of the episode is spent completely wiping out a great moment of character only a few episodes back – AND tops it all off by trivializing feminism! “The One Where Eddie Won’t Go” is easily one of the worst episodes of the season, snuggled up next to “The One with Russ” and “The One with the Super Bowl”.
Even though I try to watch each episode with a fresh mind, the many ugly memories of Eddie in this episode haunt me. After the thinnest of explanations for his severe onset of multiple mental disabilities, “The One Where Eddie Won’t Go” opens with Eddie watching Chandler sleep enthusiastically, and devolves quickly from that point. He’s into drying fruit, he stuffs a goldfish into his pocket, he hallucinates an entire trip to Vegas and back… all of a sudden Eddie’s a fucking whacko, and to serve one purpose: get Joey back in the apartment.
Now, everybody loves seeing Chandler and Joey together (we all loved Bert and Ernie as children, after all… these guys are basically the same, with slightly less homoerotic tendencies), but I think having him move back in so quickly was a mistake. They don’t even make it a sympathetic moment for his character: he has to move back in because he spent a shitload of money, had a puffed up ego over his short-lived soap gig, and shows up to his one audition completely unprepared. Does Joey deserve his redemption in this episode? Clearly he doesn’t: he goes right back to Chandler, who accepts his role as Joey’s safety net and financial cradle without a second thought (it’s never even a conversation we see on screen).
It’s all really, really painful to watch, topped off with Ross the Wish Fulfillment man, buying back one of Joey’s stupid porcelain animals and telling him a bunch of lies about how he admires his lifestyle – a total hock of shit, even if Ross tries to play it off like it’s sincere in the scene. But this is how Joey gets treated throughout the series: his best moments are buried with a shit ton of coddling by the people around him, and whatever moments of growth he does experience are either quickly ripped away, or force fed to the audience to the point where it becomes unbelievable.
But I digress – the Eddie stuff is terrible, but the most disturbing stuff is with the girls, who talk in New Age tongue the entire episode as they talk about Be Your Own Windbreaker, a book whose sole purpose is to undermine a woman’s discovery of her own power, and trivialize the entire foundation of feminism by reducing their conversations to a bunch of unintelligible bullshit about lightning bearers and stealing wind, and ultimately, a cat fight over nothing but who slept with what guy.
The episode was written by two males (Michael Curtis & Gregory S. Malins, who wrote two of the stronger episodes of the season, “The One Where Heckles Dies” and “The One Where Ross and Rachel… You Know”) and aired in 1996 – so I suppose it’s not a surprise that all this broad and somewhat offensive humor is thrown into what is essentially pointing a finger and laughing at any woman who tries to think about her life and her role in society and relationships.
That’s all there really is to “The One Where Eddie Won’t Go” – Joey’s dumb, girls are stupid, and Eddie is a psychopath, all of which are supposed to bring big laughs. Unfortunately, they only resulted in me shaking my head in disbelief at just how mindlessly awful this episode is.
Other thoughts/observations:
- Rachel brings up Paul during her argument with Monica, aka the guy she slept with back in the pilot.
- bald Gunther was on All My Children, a lovely dose of realism for Joey as an actor.
- Estelle used to do tickle pickle with Rex Harrison. Don’t try and imagine that in your mind.
- Ross dismisses Rachel’s babblings by turning her comment into a sex joke he finds hilarious. How funny!
- nobody ever really explains the presence of Joey’s hat; it’s really just a dumb, unfunny gag (except when Monica puts it on, which definitely wasn’t in the broadcast version).
Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate TOW Eddie Won’t Go. Horrible episode on all fronts! Also, for another egregious example of Joey being coddled, watch TOW Joey’s Big Break. Chandler’s coddling in that episode actually plays out just like Ross’s coddling in this one (ie. he finally gives Joey a much-needed dose of reality only to later retract it out of pity).
TOW Old Yeller Dies always struck me as just a throwaway episode. Also, if you watch the flashbacks in some of the later episodes, it seems odd that Chandler suddenly can’t grow a mustache anymore.
Anyway, giving credit where credit is due, I like the idea of Joey being conflicted between taking whatever job he can get and holding off for something bigger. It’s a conflict I think everybody in his/her 20’s can relate to. Plus, it might’ve been the only time we saw Estelle actually give him good advice. Or, at least, good advice for the kind of situation Joey was in (he was up to his armpits in debt).
The plot with the girls was stupid beyond belief. And I’m glad I’m not the only one annoyed by how just about every conflict they ever seem to have with each other is “You slept with a guy I really liked!” Gender stereotyping at its worst!
Just a nitpick: You call TOW Eddie Won’t Go the lowlight of Season Two. Yet, you actually gave TOW Russ an F while giving Eddie… a D. What redeeming quality did Eddie… have to give it a higher grade overall?
Because it should be an F – typo on my part. It’s fixed.
Hurrah, the return of the Friends reviews! Thanks for lighting up the day 🙂
It’s probably worth mentioning that The AV Club recently started reviewing Friends. I like the reviews on this site better, however, because they’re less tainted by nostalgia and a need to pander to popular opinion. Plus, you give episode grades, which is always a plus!