Friends Season 4, Episode 13 “The One with Rachel’s Crush”
Written by Shana Goldberg-Meehan
Directed by Dana DeVally Piazza
Aired January 29, 1998 on NBC
It would be a tough act for any episode of Friends to follow “The One with the Embryos” – and in a lot of ways, it’s a good thing that “The One with Rachel’s Crush” is mostly a much lighter, sillier episode, given it exists neatly between season four’s two major story arcs. However, “The One with Rachel’s Crush” is an underwhelming affair, even with the inherent lowered expectations – and that’s before it gets to its bone-headed ending, which features perhaps the most abrupt, frustrating end to a guest character arc in the show’s history, when Kathy and Chandler’s whirlwind romance suddenly comes to a painful conclusion.
Honestly, my favorite part of the episode is Monica’s ongoing identity crisis, which has spread from her romantic and professional life into her personal – turns out losing her apartment in a bet had side effects, primarily the loss of her as the group’s de facto hostess. It’s a perfect runner for a filler episode, and one that would’ve really benefited from some expansion, particularly if we saw how this loss of power was reflected in Alessandro’s, a bit of follow-up on her prominently featured identity struggles in “The One with the Girl from Poughkeepsie”. Even without it, though, Monica’s tireless pursuit of providing her friends a comfortable place, one completely under her control, is still entertaining, the one bright spot in an episode that elsewhere, is not much more than an underwhelming retread of ideas (with the regression of character to match).
That retread comes most obviously from Rachel, whose dream job at Bloomingdale’s has devolved into subjugation, when her department (presumably still reeling from the sudden loss of Joanna) is dissolved, and she’s sent to be a personal buyer. After helping an old woman shop for thongs, she finds herself in the employ of Joshua, a man trying to rebuild his wardrobe after losing everything in his most recent divorce. Being an attractive man, clearly of some financial stature, is just too much for Rachel to handle; she becomes a tittering teenager for the entirety of the episode, vacillating between ogling Joshua and struggling to figure out how to flirt with him – where she then reveals she’s never asked anyone out before, a reveal that is rightly met with eye rolls by Monica and Phoebe.
Though I certainly enjoy seeing Aniston flex some of her comedic muscles – particularly physical, like her facial expressions when looking at her and Joshua in the mirror – there’s a flatness to her character in “TOW Rachel’s Crush” outside of those moments, as she fawns over Joshua and mushes their driver’s licenses together so they can kiss. It isn’t a story without potential; but Friends never really takes a moment to explore what this means for Rachel, as the first potential serious romantic interest she’s had since her and Ross broke up. It’s odd, because the episode certainly leaves room for Ross to react a couple times, but at no point does this episode offer that to Rachel – without that, her entire plot feels like a holdover from the show’s first season, when her character was much more immature and insecure; like Monica’s haircut through much of this season, it just feels off.
However, the episode’s big stumble comes from Chandler and Kathy; after spending half of this season’s first and second acts building up their relationship, Kathy has mostly disappeared from the screen since “The One Where Chandler Crosses the Line” (she’s really not in “The One with Chandler in a Box” much, if we’re being honest), which has really limited Friends‘ ability to explore their relationship, save for one mostly Chandler-centric subplot in “The One with Phoebe’s Uterus”). “TOW Rachel’s Crush” opens with Chandler freaking out while watching her sexually-charged (and semi-nude?) play for the first time – which seems a ripe opportunity to bring Kathy a bit further into the fold, and examine Chandler’s growth as a human being a little bit – you know, since his last girlfriend cheated on him with her own husband.
Instead, Friends reverts back to its familiar, underwhelming self, regressing Chandler to his most insecure, manic form while pushing Kathy almost completely off screen, until effectively “killing” her off after Chandler discovers that him freaking out about her chemistry with her co-star (“It was like watching cousins have sex!”, he says, fully prescribing to Joey’s idiot savant theory). Friends only offers them two scenes together; one where Chandler freaks out and pushes her away, and another where a nearly wordless Kathy leaves him to discover that she immediately slept with her co-star after their fight.
To call this a disappointing resolution to their short-lived relationship is an understatement; it is crushing to watch Friends kill so much goodwill in one quick motion, removing a guest character in a way that feels, at best, like a rehash of old Chandler stories – and at worst, feels like a preview into the window of Friends‘ later seasons, where the show’s careful construction of its characters and their arcs were mostly thrown out of the window, in favor of much more superficial, self-serving storytelling. Again, there’s a stronger arc to be had here, one where Chandler’s repeated anxieties and trauma from his last relationship inform his insecurities as they build and compound over time; Friends proved last season it could do this with Ross (albeit in incredibly ugly fashion), but there’s no real attempt here to do this, mashing two incredibly insignificant plots together across a half-dozen episodes, which culminates in perhaps the most humiliating moment for Chandler in the entire series.
While it’s undeniable how much gravitas Perry brings to the moment through pure humor (“I think our second fight is going to be a big one!”), it really feels like a missed opportunity to tap into the pathos he always brought to his character. While Friends was perfectly willing to indulge in his weaker traits – at one point, he blurts out that he should be paranoid, given their entanglement began while she was dating Joey – but rather than use Chandler’s vulnerability as a springboard, it uses it as a punching bag (and in the process, robs Paget Brewster of ever tapping into her character beyond a few meet-cute moments and punchlines, a disappointing end to her short run on the series).
The egregious Chandler story ends “The One with Rachel’s Crush” on an incredibly low note; as soon as Chandler picks up the pants in Kathy’s living room, Rachel’s basketball ticket follies and Monica’s desperate attempts at relevance are relegated to mere footnotes, background noise against its incredibly dissonant, disappointing third act. And while there’s certainly an argument to be made that “The One with Rachel’s Crush” is a necessary episode – given Joshua’s presence leads to Emily’s introduction, and makes room for Chandler’s arc in seasons five and six – the only reason it is memorable is for how dirty it does the show’s best character.
Grade: D
Other thoughts/observations:
- Friends telegraphs how poorly this will go for Chandler when he exclaims to the person sitting next to him “I get to have sex with the star of the play!” He then proceeds to never sleep with her again.
- “It’s like someone wrote down my worst nightmare, and charged me $32 to see it.” “That’s a good business idea!”
- I really love the foosball court being used as a table – it’s a tiny bit of aesthetic, but adds so much atmosphere to kitchen scenes.
- “Please eat… Joey opened everything.”
- This episode is a bit awkward in retrospect, after hearing Tate Donovan talk about working with Jennifer Aniston right after their relationship ended, though it helps explain their stilted, uneven chemistry.
- I really wish we’d find out why Joshua’s wife burned his clothes; it has a vaguely early Boston Legal-ish vibe… and also might enlighten us a bit as to what kind of person Joshua really is.
- “Cookies and porn? You’re the best mom ever!”
- There’s a great little scene of Monica dragging a floor buffer up the stairs, and Rachel nonchalantly walking around her while she does it.
- Theories Joey believes have failed: the lone gunman theory, communism, and geometry.
- I will admit… this might be the one time the “we were on a break” schtick leads to a good punchline.
- Extended thoughts: not a lot here, but this episode lingers on a few Chandler punchlines – the best is letting his “match trick” run a few seconds longer, which is a great bit.
- Up next: A British woman comes to town in “The One with Joey’s Dirty Day”.