Second Look: Friends Season 5, Episode 16 – “The One with the Cop”

After “The One Where Everybody Finds Out”, it’s not surprising to see Friends use a few episodes as a valve of releasing tension before it heads into season five‘s third act, which will mostly turn their focus to Joey and Rachel (with a side of Phoebe) until the Vegas-set finale. So it’s not unsurprising that “The One with the Cop”, like “The One with the Girl Who Hits Joey” before it, feels a little bit slight when it comes to both character and plot – and despite that, is a perfectly passable episode that relies on incredibly simple Joey and Ross plotlines to fill most of its running time, stumbling only in its third story, where Phoebe begins her accidental romantic pursuit of Gary the cop.

As its iconic sofa-moving scene so loudly declares, “The One with the Cop” is an episode about unexpected, incongruent pivots: Joey’s sudden penchant for dreaming about dating Monica, Phoebe pivoting from her typically anti-state personality to consider dating a cop – and of course, Ross’s aforementioned, and very literal, attempts to pivot his new couch up the back stairway of his new apartment. It’s not a particularly elegant metaphor, or one that is really considered as more than anything but a goofy, loud visual gag Friends can fill some running time with – and yet, it serves as a perfectly capable visualization of Joey’s attempts to wrap his head around his apparent attraction to Monica, while Phoebe contorts herself into a strange, unfamiliar shape… so she can presumably do the same things underneath a young Michael Rapaport at some point in the near future (who I will admit, I’ve never really enjoyed in anything – though credit where credit is due, though: his Tribe Called Quest documentary he directed is solid).

What does work is Joey’s plot; though it relies mostly on a single plot device – Joey getting really awkward around Monica, until he finally bursts out his intimate non-sexual dream about her. But it accomplishes two important goals: it further establishes Monica and Chandler’s relationship as a part of the show’s fabric, allowing them to just exist after a dozen-plus episodes squarely focused on the emotions swirling around their forming relationship. Instead, “The One with the Cop” follows its predecessor in observing how their relationship affects the rest of the group: after Ross’s career path-redefining freakout in “The One Where Everybody Finds Out”, this episode takes a much lighter approach in watching Joey squirm a little bit, as he tries to wrap his mind around the fact that maybe, just maybe, he’s becoming open to the idea of having a relationship with meaning and purpose, now that it is surrounding him every day in his own home (he realizes this, and then immediately has a threesome, putting a hilarious cap on Joey’s potential for growth in the course of one episode).

It’s actually a rather touching little bit of narrative for Joey: it unfortunately manifests in him either being awkward or trying to convince Rachel that they should be dating, but the genesis and ultimate execution of the idea is a solid one, an unexpectedly tangible example of Ross’s pivots manifesting themselves in a meaningful way within Friends‘ overarching season five plot. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Phoebe, who finds a cop badge and immediately begins badgering people doing things she doesn’t like (putting a cigarette out on a tree, for example), impersonating a cop until she does it to Officer Gary (using his own badge, no less).

Phoebe and Gary, from its strange inception in this episode, to its eventual demise in a few episodes time, has always been one of my least favorite romantic subplots of Friends – and it does itself no favors on rewatch. There’s just not a lot of effort put into their particular meet-cute, which stems from Gary dusting Phoebe’s fingerprints off his badge, then tracking her down by looking up her information in the police database – which, when you type out the words, is a pretty fucking creepy thing for someone to do! Regardless, Phoebe and Gary really only share two brief exchanges of dialogue across the entire episode, so it’s impossible to really pin down why the two are even attracted to each other – that is, beyond Phoebe’s earlier inclinations towards dating dudes with badges in “The One Where Ross Moves In”, thus establishing a rather unsavory little pattern of the Friends rebel/hippie who gets oddly horny for cops.

Thankfully, their plot is mostly background fodder in this episode; most of the attention is given to Ross’s couch and Joey’s soft, malleable brain, which allows “The One with the Cop” to safely exist as a thoroughly forgettable, perfectly workable midseason episode, the kind every comedy with more than 20 episodes a season finds themselves doing at some point in time. At filling space, “The One with the Cop” is perfectly, inoffensively effective, a light half hour that does exactly what it needs to do by not screwing with season five’s goodwill before the season enters its critical third act run.

Grade: C+

Other thoughts/observations:

• Monica sitting in Chandler’s lap will always look weird, I’m sorry.
  
• the running gag about cops and donut jokes is decent – at least when delivered by non-Gary characters.
  
• Ross is on a creepy one in this episode, first detailing that he counted having sex with Rachel (298 times to be exact – pretty good for barely over a year of dating). Then later, while alone, we see him trying out his ‘come hither’ move on his new couch… which is just unsettlingly gross.
  
• Fun Jane Pauley fact: she’s married to the creator of Doonesbury.
  
• There’s a joke about Monica and Chandler using a tape measure in the bedroom that is… just odd?
  
• Aloma Wright (Laverne from Scrubs) makes a cameo over the closing credits, as a furniture salesman Ross tries to return his couch (now in two pieces) to.
  
• “Closeness, schmoseness… there was three of us, for crying out loud!”
  
• Joey trying to hide his floor pizza from Gary is great physical comedy.
  
• Extended thoughts: the Jane Pauley bit is a good deleted bit, but the two actual scenes deleted from the episode (Phoebe announcing she’s not “going back to that hellhole” and Ross’s couch being trampled by tenants hearing a fire drill Rachel accidentally pulled) don’t really add much but running time.
  
• Up next: Rachel interviews for a job in “The One with Rachel’s Inadvertent Kiss”.