Friends‘s first season can be contradictory at times: for every step forward a character takes personally, they take about four or five steps back mentally. It’s particularly noticeable with the female characters: every episode with them making a personal discovery, or advancing in their professional lives, there are another two or three episodes where Rachel, Monica, and Phoebe (or some other minor female character) puts the female race back a few years.
“The One with the Evil Orthodontist” is one of these episodes… and at times, it can really be painful to watch. Rachel’s backslide with Barry is really an off-putting arc: part of what made Rachel such an interesting character in the pilot was her willingness to move away from her old life and mentality (“maybe I don’t want to be a shoe!”) , rejecting the vision of her life she’d been spoon fed since she was a child. But “The One with the Evil Orthodontist” undoes all of this in a single stroke, reuniting Barry and Rachel for a short-lived fling in his dentist’s chair.
Part of this is Barry’s thinly-written character; he’s such a reprehensible human being, it doesn’t make any sense why Rachel would find herself so attached to him. He cheats on his fiancée with Rachel, and she starts considering reconciling with him the minute she leaves his office. What the fuck, right? She left him at the aisle – but she’s willing to sleep with him again, with absolutely no concern over what her old best friend Mindy (a great guest spot, played by none other than Jennifer Grey) might think. The fact that Rachel would entertain the idea of reuniting with the man she walked away from is an odd idea – and on a plot level, is nothing but a poorly-designed distraction to keep Rachel and Ross material on the sidelines until the end of the finale.
Now, this is a problem Friends would have often in the future: jokes or entire pointless arcs thrown in for laughs, no matter how much is messed with the fabric of its characters or back story. It happens A LOT with Rachel: be it with Ross, dating Ross’s college girlfriend’s father, or the Tag arc (*shakes fists angrily at sky*). When it happens in “The One with the Evil Orthodontist”, it’s such a dissonant story to Rachel’s character, and painfully concludes with Rachel realizing that she didn’t want to be with Barry anymore.
… which puts her right back at square one, when she walked into Central Perk wearing a wet wedding dress.
At least it’s off set by a great Chandler B story, where he goes full neurotic while waiting for his date to call him back. Friends could do really fun things when playing around with gender stereotypes, and having Chandler freak out while Monica calmed him down shows the great chemistry between the characters that would inspire their pairing later on. If the show understood one character in the first season, it was Chandler, whose occasional regressions throughout the season are treated with some levity: when Chandler returns to Janice earlier in the season, it’s because of his conflicted nature, not just a contrived act for some cheap jokes (this time, at least… that will change fairly quickly).
Rachel’s story pulls down an otherwise light and enjoyable episode of Friends – as a stand alone piece of character story, it’s one of the most frustrating to watch in the entire first season, right up there with awkward Ross and “The One with Mrs. Bing”. It exists for a perfectly logical reason – getting Rachel clear of any lingering emotional strands before diving into the Rachel/Ross material to come – but it fails for so many reasons.
Other thoughts/observations:
- Joey is pretty useless in the episode, but Matt LeBlanc’s facial expressions throughout are classic.
- Mr. Peanut and Mr. Salty…. what 90’s references.
- “I’m 12, I’m not stupid.”
- I didn’t talk about it, but the resolution of Barry/Mindy/Rachel is also terrible: now that’s she played both the cheater and cheatee (having an affair with Barry while engaged to Rachel), Mindy decides she wants to be Mrs. Barry Farber anyway. Fuck is wrong with you, girl?
- Joey cooks toast and oatmeal naked… basically, anything that doesn’t splatter.
- Five letter word for heater: rdatr.
- Up next: Friends loses an “essential” member of its cast in “The One with the Fake Monica”.
The Marcel story in TOW The Fake Monica is a little puzzling, because didn’t we learn two episodes prior that Ross illegally owned Marcel? You’d think that would’ve at least been mentioned when Ross needed to take him to the zoo.
Re: Your opening paragraph. In all fairness, I think the constant character contradictions and derailments were the result of the writers struggling to balance the show’s six person ensemble cast. The Tag arc, for example, obviously had no purpose other than to give Rachel something to do for the next few episodes (ditto to her angle with Elizabeth’s father Paul). I’m not saying this in its defense, by the way, as it was both a terrible plot and single-handedly ruined what should’ve been significant character growth for Rachel, given that she’d actually become quite work savy during the prior three or four seasons.
why no more reviews??
enjoyed the review. the barry thing never made sense to me. just a note: the alternative stage name for joey was holden mcgroin.
Isn’t the gag name “Holden McGroin”?