Second Look: Friends Season 2, Episode 23 – “The One with the Chicken Pox”

(Editor’s note: Seasons 1 and 2 were reviewed under a previous editorial format and standard, and will be revisited in the Second Look Remastered series, running December 2026 through March 2027. Subscribe to Processed Media (it’s free!) so you don’t miss out!)

Phoebe’s got a boyfriend in town – which means there’s really nothing going on in “The One with the Chicken Pox”, one of many Phoebe episodes where we laugh about her failed romances and bohemian nature. As a character, she’s only got two real arcs on the show: her brother (in seasons three and four) and her eventual husband (tacked on to the final season in order to throw her a bone) – everything that focuses on her outside of those moments is so inconsequential to the world of Friends. By the 48th episode, however, it’s clearly been established that Phoebe’s the least important character on the show, as she spends another pointless half hour with a man she apparently cares about, but will never be mentioned outside the context of this episode.

Sure, every network comedy has episodes where the writers are clearly running out of ideas for the season – with 13 hours to fill, there’s a lot of time to be filled in, and there’s bound to be half hours where nothing happens that really matters. Where Friends always struggled is finding something to ground those kinds of episodes in – just look at the three basic plots of “The One with the Chicken Pox”: Phoebe gets a rash, Joey works with Chandler, and Monica and Richard spend all of their scenes in the bedroom. There’s certainly possibility in these stories, but there’s no attempt at finding anything interesting there: it’s all good for a few laughs, and everybody gets to go home early at the end of the day.

When these episodes inevitably occur, the only thing they really need to maintain to be enjoyable is pretty obvious: it has to be funny, which “The One with the Chicken Pox” really isn’t. To say a young Charlie Sheen is wasted is an understatement: he’s so tame and measured, it doesn’t really feel like him and Phoebe have known each other for as long as they say, or that he’s visiting for something other than a piece of ass. Their plot is really just an excuse for some sex euphemisms, as they rub each other with Monopoly pieces and try to undress each other with pot holders covering their hands. The show doesn’t really even nail anything down in terms of how Phoebe really views Ryan – is he like David, a man that Phoebe loves and can never have, or is he just some hot guy to nail once every couple years, like a Leap Year sex fairy. Do they need to establish this? I suppose they don’t, but without anything else to justify the presence of the plot, it really just feels empty. Nobody has feelings – or a noticeable lack of one – and without any definition, Ryan’s visit quickly reveals itself to be just another “let’s waste some extra time doing random stuff to Phoebe” time-padding story lines.

However, this is kind of what we all expect whenever we realize we’re watching a “Phoebe episode”: the real disappointment of “The One with the Chicken Pox” comes from Joey and Chandler, who have a series of hijinks and laughs when Joey takes a job as a processor under Chandler’s supervision. At face value, the premise is hilarious (and meaningful, in terms of their still-mending relationship), but Friends goes in the opposite direction, turning Joey into a vapid, thoughtless, asshole version of himself, lying to everyone around the office and undermining Chandler’s authority every chance he could. And the show lets him do it: Chandler never calls him out for fucking with his livelihood (ironically, the same thing that keeps a roof over Joey’s head), nor do they pay any attention to the fact that Joey’s supposed to be desperate for a job, but doesn’t approach it like an adult in any way, shape, or form – in fact, going as far to make his best friend’s job worse, damaging his professional reputation in the process.

Joey’s really kind of repulsive in this episode: he hides from his own reality by pretending that the job keeping him from homelessness is some silly game for him to play. He’s nearly 30: if he’s not making any attempts to get his shit together after undermining his own career, why am I supposed to like this character? There’s no “loveable, loyal” Joey in this episode – just a conniving, passive aggressive prick whose immaturity threatens his supposed best friend’s career.

Finally, Richard and Monica are tossed into the margins of the episode with scenes that feel cut out of another episode and thrown in here. Their scenes take place only in the bedroom, and exist only to point out that Richard loves Monica, despite her being crazy and obsessive-compulsive about things. There’s nothing wrong with it – but again, it feels tacked onto everything else, the two of them largely isolated from the rest of the group, their interactions contained to some awkwardly shot sequences in the tiny set of Monica’s bedroom. Knowing what comes next, it even feels like a bit of deliberate audience-baiting, showing us a moment where Richard concedes to Monica’s wishes, showing how flexible and relaxed he is about who she is and what she wants (which of course, changes next week).

In other words, “The One with the Chicken Pox” really is just an episode twiddling its thumbs until the finale, setting up Monica’s arc and throwing a bone to the character nobody really sees or cares about (Phoebe), and reminding us that they know how to screw up the one relationship they’ve gotten right when they really don’t feel like caring. It’s an episode that plays into the (false) preconception that filler episodes are naturally terrible: they don’t have to be. But if you forget about who your characters are and how they’d actually react to things, then it most certainly will be – and boy, is “The One with the Chicken Pox” a stinker.

Other thoughts/observations:

• The irony that Ryan works underwater and hates fish did make me smirk a bit.
• Ross’s sad “hello” makes its second appearance in the last couple episodes, which everybody knows is my least favorite character trait on the entire show.
• If Ryan’s only been underwater for eight months, wouldn’t he have shown up last season?
• When the writers are trying to make a sex joke out of Monica yelling at Chandler for “licking her muffin”, you can tell they’ve run out of jokes for the season.
• Joey: “Hey Chandler: you just gave me a place to live after I failed at life. Here, let me screw you over at work!”
• Up next: Rachel gives a speech in “The One with Barry and Mindy’s Wedding”.

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