Second Look: Friends Season 4, Episodes 23 & 24 – “The One with Ross’s Wedding”

Friends Season 4, Episodes 23 & 24 “The One with Ross’s Wedding”
Episode 23 written by Michael Borkow
Episode 24 written by Jill Condon & Amy Toomin (story), Shana Goldberg-Meehan & Scott Silveri (teleplay)
Directed by Kevin S. Bright
Aired May 7, 1998 on NBC

“The One with Ross’s Wedding” is undeniably the biggest episode of Friends, and one of the landmark sitcom episodes of the 1990s; not only is it a transatlantic two-parter shot almost entirely in Britain, it is also the third-highest rated episode of the series, following “The One After the Superbowl” and the 2004 series finale. Its largeness also comes from its narrative importance; “The One with Ross’s Wedding” is arguably the most monumental episode of Friends in the whole series, with its big, expected Rachel/Ross twist – and of course, its unexpected Monica and Chandler twist, an impulsive creative decision that would ultimately shape the course of the show’s remaining six seasons.

Knowing that, it’s not surprisingly how unevenly “The One with Ross’s Wedding” balances its lighter and heavier elements; as the narrative momentum builds into its second half, Friends‘s fourth season finale relies on a series of light, effortless subplots (like Joey’s emotional roller coaster and the Gellar/Waltham budget fights during the rehearsal dinner) to keep things moving in between the pair of explosive plot moments centered around the Gellar siblings. The result is a rather messy, though wonderfully entertaining, 42 minutes, one that’s able to do just enough to make Ross and Emily’s relationship more engaging and intriguing as it barrels towards its now-iconic cliffhanger – even though the other relationship it catalyzes ends up being the far more interesting development.

If there’s one real place “The One with Ross’s Wedding” falters, of course, it’s with Rachel, a character who has spent most of the season’s second half mired in the depressingly unfunny, fruitless pursuit of Joshua, and finds herself being oddly guilted into going to see her ex-boyfriend marry a woman he met but a few months ago. And for most of the double episode’s running time, Friends struggles to find the pathos in Rachel’s 11th-hour decision to confess her love to Ross, just as he’s about to walk down the aisle with Emily; it seems it would be an easy task, for Rachel to be the rational one not jumping on board with Ross impulsively marrying someone on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. And yet, “The One with Ross’s Wedding” often treats her as the irrational one, isolating her from everyone (except Phoebe) for the first 40 minutes of the 46-minute finale; particularly in the second half, where she is treated as an annoyance by the ticket agent (Jane Carr, in one of many British cameos) and the person seated next to her on the plane (a pre-House Hugh Laurie), neither of whom can understand why Ross would entertain reconciling with the disheveled, desperate woman in front of them.

There are hints of Rachel’s decision-making perhaps not being her greatest asset at the moment (though “The One with the Fake Party” is not a great episode, it does work as supporting evidence), but there’s little pathos given to her choices here, other than the flashbacks we experience with her during “The One with the Invitation” – which, given how messy and dramatic they were, also don’t really work entirely well as convincing cases that Rachel suddenly feels she’s still in love with Ross, and needs to express it immediately.

Ultimately, the logic isn’t entirely sound – but for the purposes of providing a dramatic undertone to the finale, Rachel’s attempts to get herself to London provide a bit of narrative propulsion to break up the London scenes, and also ensure Phoebe’s scenes (filmed earlier in the States, as Lisa Kudrow was pregnant at the time) were still tethered to the main narrative, with her attempts to warn everyone of Rachel’s impending arrival. It’s a bit of manufactured tension, but it works where other attempts in this episode fall flat, like Ross and Emily’s conflict over the half-destructed wedding venue they arrive to just a few days before their wedding.

It’s really all of the London stories that Friends stretches itself a bit too thin trying to build tension out of; like Chandler and Joey’s tiff, where Chandler gets embarrassed by Joey’s gleeful excitement at being a tourist in London – or Jack Gellar’s fight with Emily’s parents over price gouging them on wedding costs, both bits of narrative with a bit of unnecessary mean streaks running through them. They both lead to some great comedic moments – Joey “going into” the map, or Stephen Waltham (a wonderfully dry Tom Conti) drunkenly dismissing his wife Andrea (a scene-chewing Jennifer Saunders, doing a lot with very little in her role) -but they require the episode to lean into some of its bad habits, relying on pure toxicity to drive its comedy, in place of having actual moments of irony or humor (like Chandler’s bomb of a toast, the one moment his frustrations feel justified) to set the stage for the episode’s two big twists.

The first of those twists, of course, is arguably the smartest sitcom plot twist in history; after Ross rushes in Chandler’s room to dance about his wedding day, it’s revealed that Monica (hitting an emotional low at her brother’s second wedding, where someone somehow confuses her for her mother) hooked up with the one man she said she’d never date back in “The One at the Beach”. Though it would take seasons five and six for Friends to really define what a great decision this was, the canned British audience reaction in the episode says it all; Monica and Chandler make a perfect comedic pairing for Friends writers to play around with, Chandler’s nihilism and Monica’s insane sense of control giving the series an entirely new romantic energy to play with in future episodes; even though it’s only used for a few punchlines in the final minutes of the episode, the Monica/Chandler reveal retrospectively becomes the center of the episode, the Ross/Rachel material suddenly becoming a secondary plotline in its own episode, in a series that’s been obsessed with the two since “The Pilot”.

Thankfully, “The One with Ross’s Wedding” never really has time to ponder this oddity; it has to move forward to Ross and Emily’s wedding, leaving their hookup as an open thread to be picked up on in season five. After the rehearsal dinner (where Monica also has to see her mother get horny over Jack’s negotiating skills) and the morning after, Friends drops all its subplots about Joey’s homesickness (hooking up with a bridesmaid played by Olivia Williams doesn’t hurt), Chandler’s anger, and Emily’s anxiety (which is never really a thing, since she’s only in like three minutes of the episode), to clear the runaway for the final minute of the episode, where Friends smartly plays chicken with the audience before dropping (what it thought was) its biggest cliffhanger of the hour.

“And I take thee, Rachel…”

Knowing that the original plan was to have Ross stay married to Emily (Helen Baxendale, pregnant herself at the time, didn’t want to film in America, so they just wrote her off instead), there is a bit of this moment that feels false – but if we start to retrace Ross’s steps backwards through season four, Friends does lay a bit of groundwork to suggest that Ross did propose to Emily out of desperation, spiraling after losing Rachel twice (one his fault, once not) and willing to cling onto anything he can find to try and put her behind him. But it’s not entirely convincing, and so when he does blurt her name out at the end of the episode, it feels a bit like Friends testing the waters to see if it can quickly back out of the corner it wrote itself into, if by suddenly reintroducing a spark between its two leads, nobody will notice the lack of mechanisms to organically produce said spark leading up to that final moment.

And to its credit, the moment – absent of context of season four, and the larger narrative arc of the series as a whole – does work, Rachel’s presence unsettling Ross just enough for him to make the kind of silly, revealing mistake he does in this moment. Even more importantly, Friends lets us all sit in that uncomfortable moment, extending it when the priest asks Ross and Emily if they “should continue”… the silence it ends season four with is deafening – and even though I’m sure most 1998 audiences would’ve predicted this was effectively the end of Emily and Ross’s arc, it still ends the season with a surprising amount of uncertainty, a suggestion of new dynamics to come in season five (that would mostly be abandoned, save for the status quo-altering Monica/Chandler relationship I can’t wait to revisit next season).

“The One with Ross’s Wedding” has a lot of strange energy; not just because it was filmed across the pond, and featured enough British comedian cameos to shift the show’s comedic tone a bit. It makes for a weird hour because it asks the audience to commit to a pair of romantic narratives that have wildly different stakes and potential; and the second Monica and Chandler is introduced into the two-parter, the harder it is for Friends to convince us, and itself, that this isn’t the shiny, new thing Friends should be spending time exploring. Throw in a Richard Branson cameo, a bride who barely features into her own wedding, and a lot of scenes of Phoebe yelling into a phone in an empty room, and it’s a surprise “The One with Ross’s Wedding” works at all, beyond just a garish hour of caricatures bouncing off each other in unfamiliar settings.

With great touches of humor and little mini-narratives running through the hour, “The One with Ross’s Wedding” keeps such a breakneck pace, it only starts to feel odd when it really slows down, like Ross and Emily’s strange conversation about canceling their wedding, or the aforementioned Rachel motivation that’s oddly missing from the hour’s opening minutes. As it barrels through its third act reveals, however, it is obvious audiences were watching a sitcom realizing the height of its own popularity, a bi-contential affair that manages to ascend its many, many cameos and unnecessary dramatics of the first half hour to deliver one of the show’s better season finales (which isn’t saying a whole lot, but still – credit where it is due), complete with the Monica/Chandler reveal, arguably the best rom-com twist television had ever seen (and has never been able to quite match since, ending a revitalizing, return to form season on a narrative high note.

Grade: B

Other thoughts/observations:

• “You do a good thing, you get a *check*”. When Friends is not forcing Monica/Ross stories on the audience, it allows itself room for really fun moments like that one.
• Of course the first music choice for B-roll of London is… “London Calling”.
• “Of course with salmon, you’d have to worry about the chickenella.”
• Monica’s fear of her mother loving Emily more than her is a fun little subplot the series unfortunately would never get to explore in future seasons, as it would hurriedly write her off in season five, never to be mentioned again.
• Keep the Sarah Ferguson cameo, dump the Richard Branson cameo – that’s my hot take.
• Phoebe arguing with everyone on the phone is my favorite bit of comedy, especially when she gets hung up on by the Waltham’s housekeeper.
• “No, because he’s in love with the British chippy!”
• This was the first appearance of Judy Gellar since “The One with the ‘Cuffs”, and Jack’s first on-screen appearance since “The One with the Princess Leia Fantasy.”
• Chandler’s Melba joke is solid… the sex doll joke, not so much.
• “You thieving, would-be-speaking-German-if-it-weren’t-for-us, cheap little man!” Go get ’em, Jack!
• Aniston is so good in the scene where she congratulates Ross and decides not to say anything to him. It’s a shame the finale didn’t give her any more time to explore her insular feelings, because she gives so much in that moment that isn’t revisited ever again.
• Hugh Laurie’s plane guy is right though – her plan is a terrible, terrible plan, the kind only bad people would think of actually executing.
• Extended thoughts: the Extended Version of the episode is four minutes longer, expanding on Rachel’s attempts to get to London, and adds more dialogue for Phoebe in her solo scenes. My favorite, though, is Chandler and Joey discussing his Spanish condoms in the episode’s cold open.
• Up next: That’s (finally) a wrap on season 4 – good news is Friends reviews return June 11 for season 5! Plus, expanded Second Look Remastereds of seasons one and two will follow this fall, as I unify all my coverage of Friends over the years to one home. And season six in 2026, so bookmark the home page and stay tuned!