Second Look: Friends Season 5, Episode 18 – “The One Where Rachel Smokes”

Episodes like “The One Where Rachel Smokes” are great reminders of what made Friends episodes work so consistently, even in episodes when storylines feel a bit disconnected and weightless. On a lesser series, “The One Where Rachel Smokes” could be an incredibly off-putting episode, with Rachel’s pandering, Monica’s uppity attitude, and Joey’s idiocy fueling something that is, on its surface, incredibly pointless and reductive. And yet, “The One Where Rachel Smokes” is a perfectly passable episode of Friends purely because of chemistry: their ability to make silly dialogue and goofy plot machinations feel lived in is acutely felt in the group scenes of this episode – and with an incredibly hilarious Chandler running joke holding everything together, it is one of many episodes of the series that is more than simply the sum of its parts.

At face value, “The One Where Rachel Smokes” is a total throwaway episode: Monica and Phoebe fight over hosting an extremely early birthday party for Rachel (which is really just a remix of “The One with the Dirty Girl” to some degree, as it parallels their behavior in the context of organization and decision-making), Joey and Ross are walled off in a subplot involving Ben and a commercial audition – and then there’s Rachel, who considers picking up a smoking habit so she can have more influence at her new Ralph Lauren job. In fact, these three stories almost feel designed to avoid any of the show’s serialized storytelling, splitting up its characters so the overarching relationship plotlines for everyone (except Joey, of course) are completely untethered from the events within “The One Where Rachel Smokes”. And though Friends‘ ability to execute said serialized stories is debatable, there’s no denying that the longer the series got in the tooth, the more distracted and lazy the show became in its one-off episodes, with its lowered narrative stakes and importance to the now well-established series.

The only place “The One Where Rachel Smokes” really avoids that, is by leaning hard into one of its best running subplots, with Chandler considering taking up the habit of smoking cigarettes once again (after first quitting in “The One with the Thumb”, before picking up the habit briefly in “The One without the Ski Trip” after Ross and Rachel’s breakup). And for good reason: Chandler smoking taps into the intersection of everything that makes his character great, allowing Matthew Perry to tap into the full range of neurotic emotions within Chandler Bing’s soul, in what often becomes one of the purest comedic expressions of the series. In this episode, Chandler doesn’t even smoke, but his reactions to Rachel smoking and his attempts to avoid picking up the habit again, make for some terrific comedic television – it’s so good it almost drowns out Rachel’s own presence in her own story.

Though that may have been for the best: Rachel in “The One Where Rachel Smokes” is good for a few awkward moments of Rachel trying to cover for her own lies, but in typical Friends fashion, Rachel’s own neuroses are treated with a distinct contrast to how Chandler’s are through the series. While both are ultimately in service of jokes, Rachel’s attempts are always presented as more feeble and unconvincing, which ultimately make her attempts to lie and manipulate the world around her feel cheap and pathetic. Chandler’s quick wit and willingness to lie make him a natural vessel to funnel chaos and uncertainty through; Rachel, partially because of just who her character is, is not equipped with these personality traits, and it makes her stuttering, passive attempts to ingratiate herself with her new boss and co-worker feel a lot more flat and one-dimensional.

It still makes for a fun story, but most of that is derived from the aforementioned, well-documented cast chemistry – and Chandler’s presence in the story, rather than Rachel’s own actions within the narrative. And it’s definitely better than the other two stories of the episode, which feature Phoebe being passive-aggressive about ice and cups for Rachel’s abrupt surprise birthday party (for good reason, as Monica’s being Monica and taking charger of everything), and Joey’s attempts to ride Ben’s coattails into a job for a soup bowl commercial. Both of these stories, while disparately connected by the thin underpinning of people fighting against their own inherent natures (or in Monica’s case, failing to do so), don’t work super well in concert with each other: Monica and Phoebe’s personality contrasts have been already been featured in plenty of more interesting, consequential episodes, just as Joey’s uncanny ability to accidentally self-sabotage himself is a semi-running theme of the show’s first and second overarching acts – and in “The One Where Rachel Smokes”, neither of them do really do anything to illuminate the episode’s themes meaningfully, further rendering its interpretation of these established character pieces to be rather weightless and silly.

At least Joey and Ross’s story is able to fall back on some Friends Bro’ing Around to switch up the neurotic vibes stemming from Rachel and Phoebe’s approach to their individual conflicts – without it, “The One Where Rachel Smokes” is really a collection of funny Chandler moments surrounded by an incredibly forgettable episode of recycled plots, highlighted by Phoebe being super bitchy about Monica being possessive (which… duh) and Joey’s ever-slow descent into pure idiocy, two elements that never make for a particularly profound half hour with the Central Perk Six. But as with many middling midseason entries, all it takes is one strong Chandler running gag to save an episode from complete mediocrity.

Other thoughts/observations:

• “Dude, that’s my girlfriend.” Joey: “So I’ve got to shut it down now?!”
  
• Joey not only slept with one of the casting directors, but the other one saw him in act in a play. Guess which one he wants to avoid more?
• I appreciate Friends feigning a bit of pathos into Joey’s inability to say his single line during the audition (Ross insists he did it to help Ben), only to reveal Joey’s more satisfied to hear that Ben ultimately didn’t get the part.
  
• “Unwilling to steal from work… interesting.”
  
• Chandler: “I rued the day once. Didn’t get a whole lot else done.”
  
• Nancy smokes Newports, which raises a lot of interesting questions about her college years.
  
• I absolutely love the bit over the closing credits, where Chandler shows up at Rachel’s job looking for a cigarette, and immediately begins sucking on the lit cigarette in her boss’s hand.
  
• For an episode about a birthday party, nobody seems to care at all about the party except Monica and Phoebe. Weird choice for a throwaway plot, when it could’ve just as easily been some one-off character we’ve never heard of (or even better, a celebratory party for Ben getting the role, which would’ve kicked off some fun jealous Joey subplots, and brought Monica and Phoebe into the fold of the audition).
  
• “One day you’re Drake Ramoray, the next day you’re eating ketchup right out of the bottle.”
  
• Extended thoughts: There are a lot of great extended bits in this version of the episode, which is one of the longest of the season. The best are Rachel’s attempts to convince everyone to get on the patch with her, and Monica catching Chandler trying to sneak away with a cigarette during the birthday party, which ends with a great menthol joke.
  
• Up next: Joey’s grandmother pays a visit in “The One Where Ross Can’t Flirt”.