Second Look: Friends Season 5, Episode 21 – “The One with the Ball”

Throwaway episodes are the boon and bane of Friends, especially in its middle seasons; for every clever mid-season entry like “The One with the Free Porn”, there are forgettable, sometimes even regrettable episodes like “The One with Ross’s Thing” or “The One with the Screamer”. This balance would skew towards the latter as the series continued, but season five strikes a surprisingly strong balance between episodes like “The One Where Ross Can’t Flirt”, season five’s bottle episode, and more diminutive efforts, like “The One with the Girl Who Hits Joey”.

On the spectrum of those episodes, “The One with the Ball” falls squarely in the middle; while it takes one of the show’s most pointless concepts ever (the titular ball throwing game Ross and Joey start) and turns it into a rather charming display of Friends‘s personalities, it also features a lame Rachel subplot – and more importantly, an incredibly weird resolution to one of Phoebe’s briefer, more disappointing early season plotlines, with the final appearance of Officer Gary providing a strange emotional backdrop for an otherwise frivolous episode.

Of the many romantic interests across the ten seasons of Friends, Phoebe’s brief fling with Gary is one of the show’s oddest, a plot that was clearly designed to fill a couple empty episodes, but really should’ve been resolved in the course of “The One Where Ross Can’t Flirt”. There’s just not a lot about it that makes sense, even beyond the dissonant image of seeing Phoebe – who has spoken at length about the abuses she faced from the state when she became homeless – becoming horny for a cop (though “The One Where Ross Moves In” did establish Phoebe’s proclivity for men with badges, it still feels weird). Gary’s introduction, as a serious romantic interest of Phoebe’s, seemed to be solidified by his introduction to the men of the Central Perk Six in “The One with the Ride-Along”, as the incredibly rare situation where a one-off or recurring characters having plots independent of the character they’re romantically involved with (for example, Richard and Janice have precisely one episode each where they hang out with other characters, which Gary equals in a three-episode arc).

Given that, it feels like Friends is really investing in the character as it builds towards its season finale (even though there’s a real obvious lack of chemistry with Rappaport and Kudrow/the rest of the main cast) – so when Phoebe decides to move in with Gary after see-sawing about it for half the episode, it feels like Friends making a statement to move forward with her character, and continue its strong run of Phoebe-focused stories that have enriched so much of seasons four and five (and with “The One with the Embryos” and “The One Hundredth”, provided two of the best episodes in the entire series).

And then, after their first night living together, Gary SHOOTS A BIRD THROUGH HIS BEDROOM WINDOW as they cuddle in bed – which may be the most insane thing that happens in an episode of Friends. Was there no other way to abruptly write off the character in the course of writing and producing this episode? And after spending the last hour of the season convincing the audience that her relationship with Gary was quickly building to something meaningful? From every angle, it’s an incredibly strange, disappointing series of creative choices by the Friends writer’s room: after introducing his character in such odd fashion, then pushing him into a full on subplot with other characters to integrate him into the group, Friends is ditching his character only an episode later (and in highly unsettling fashion; the man shoots a fucking gun out his window to QUIET A SINGLE BIRD; it’s sociopathic!).

While it seems like a silly plot that can be easily forgotten, it is abrupt in a way that feels like it wasn’t properly thought out, either for Phoebe’s character or how it affected the building narrative momentum of her character and those around it (though it’s a bad subplot, there’s also an entire plot of Monica trying to compete with them for the title of hottest couple, offering a brief window into a Friends where multiple couples coexisted). And with Gary exiting stage right as quickly as he entered stage left, the entire arc of Phoebe’s character in this episode – coming to terms with the anxious, uncomfortable decision to move in with Gary, which she eventually convinces herself is a good idea – is cut off at the knees, negating its value as drama or comedy with how flippantly it is all dismissed.

The strange creative choices continue with Rachel, who decides to spend $1,000 on a sphynx cat she doesn’t really want, which she proceeds to complain about for the entire episode, before trying to pawn it off on people on the street. Though I guess there’s some nascent connective tissue about making terrible, short-sighted choices that ties this to Phoebe’s disastrous first day living with Gary, but it never comes through, as Rachel spends most of the episode just being a terrible human being. Not only does she owe Monica money when she buys the cat, but she then takes advantage of Gunther, selling him the cat and making a $500 profit when it wall said and done – it’s a real bad look for Rachel, and the less time spent thinking about the terrible, almost vindictive feeling construction of her character in “The One with the Ball”, the better.

Thankfully, “The One with the Ball” redeems itself with its silliest, most pointless plot: the titular game of catch, which begins with Joey and Ross, and slowly grows to incorporate the rest of the group over time. And sure, there’s basically no plot to this story whatsoever (the most dramatic moment is when Joey has to pee) – but it is also an absolute delight to see the qualities of Friends characters make their way into the “game” as it grows over hours and hours. Monica’s competitiveness, Chandler’s utter lack of athleticism, and Joey’s casual confidence are all highlighted across the episode; it’s so simply and effortlessly executed (despite what a challenge it must have been to complete takes without forgetting lines or dropping the ball), it brings an incredible amount of charm to the episode – which turns out is exactly what it needed to not be consumed by a selfish Rachel and Phoebe’s unhinged boyfriend.

Though not a perfect midseason episode, “The One with the Ball” contains one of the best thumb-twiddling plots of the entire series, which is almost enough to overshadow the poor construction and execution of the other two-thirds of the episode. Unfortunately, the stink of Gary and Rachel’s cat still linger, especially when Friends tries to tie them all together through the aforementioned ball game (Phoebe ends the ball game, not out of spite, but sadness). But even though its two-thirds of a disappointing episode, the ability of the writer’s room to spin comedic gold out of absolutely nothing makes the longest game of catch in Friends history a memorable piece of an otherwise unremarkable episode.

Other thoughts/observations:

• Joey: “Is Staten Island really an island?”
  
• Another Gary red flag: he brings Phoebe into a full-on interrogation room to ask her about moving in together. Guy’s a fucking weirdo.
  
• What’s with the two-second jazz interlude randomly in the score during a scene transition? Wish we got that more often!
  
• The cat plot is lame, but it’s good for a few jokes about everyone not understanding what it is – including Gunther, who asks if it’s a snake after he buys it from Rachel.
  
• Chandler saying “baby doll” and “pumpkin” is as unsettling as it sounds.
  
• Chandler’s anxiety about Monica potentially asking him to move in is a fun undercurrent, and gives Gary the one funny joke of his entire arc, when he tells Chandler he’s not ready to move in with Monica just yet.
  
• Monica calls out of work… to the restaurant she runs? It make-a no sense!
  
• Up next: Friends barrels towards the end of season five with “The One with Joey’s Big Break”.

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