Season Six: The One Where Ross Gets Divorced… For the Third Time…

So after Ross and Rachel get married, Monica and Chandler decide they do not want to get married yet! When the gang gets back home to NYC, Chandler decides that he and Monica should move in together. She accepts and they begin preparing the move, however, someone is not completely on board with this, Rachel, Monica’s current roommate. Rachel finally gives in and moves in with Phoebe. Their moving in together is hectic, as is Monica and Chandler’s when first getting started. Chandler and Monica get through it, Rachel and Phoebe accidentally burn their apartment down. This forces Rachel to move in with Joey and Phoebe becomes a guest in the Bing/Gellar apartment. After everything settles out, Rachel decides to stay with Joey and Phoebe goes back to living alone.

Joey gets a starring role in a new TV series. The show is awful but as of this season he still has a job. Ross attempts to hide the fact that he and Rachel are still married for a long time because he doesn’t want to get a third divorce, but sooner or later she finds out and they get divorced after being denied an annulment. Later on, Ross begins his new job as a professor at NYU and begins dating a student, while Rachel begins dating the student’s father. Shockingly both of those relationships end.

As usual, the season finale is the BEST episode of the season. This one is especially good! Chandler plans to propose to Monica but to get her to be completely surprised he repeatedly drops hints that he is afraid of commitment and never wants to get married. Unfortunately this backfires when Richard, Monica’s ex boyfriend from season three comes back and says he’s still in love with her and wants to start a family. When Chandler finds out about this he gets home to find Joey who tells him Monica left and said for him to not call her. When Chandler gets in the apartment he finds Monica in the apartment surrounded by candles and down on one knee. He joins her on one knee and proposes. It is seriously the most adorable scene ever. Google this scene and watch it! Its incredible! So yeah, no cliffhanger, that’s how this season ends. If your disappointed you won’t be, next season’s finale is a doozy!!!

Season Five: The One That Starts in London and Ends in Vegas

We’ve reached the middle of the series. Halfway done, halfway to go. After Ross says Rachel, the wedding continues. However, even though they get married, Emily is mortified and flees out of the bathroom window at the reception. The first few episodes see Ross begging Emily to make the relationship work, but after she tells him the only way she will take him back is if he never sees Rachel again, it’s too much to ask and they break up for good. Which if you are counting, that means that Ross has now has two divorces under his belt.

I forgot to mention one MAJOR thing that happened in London before Ross says Rachel. Monica and Chandler hook up! This was completely out of the blue because the two of them had never been that close. Strangely enough they make an adorable couple and continue to date behind their friends’ backs throughout the first half of the season. Slowly everybody starts to find out, and finally they reveal it to the one that was going to be the toughest, Ross. Luckily Monica’s older brother responded happily to the news that his best friend and his sister are in love!

So lets backtrack a little bit. Shortly after the wedding, in the show’s 100th episode, Phoebe had her brother’s babies. Two girls and a boy; Leslie, Chandler, and Frank Jr. Jr., not Frank III… So anyway, after she has the babies, her life goes back to normal. She dates a cop for a while, but that doesn’t end well. Joey and Chandler have to adjust to their new roommate after Ross has to move in with them because he was kicked out of his apartment that he used to share with Emily.

The season ends with the gang going to Las Vegas to visit Joey, whom they thought was working on a movie there. He was actually working in a casino because the movie fell through. Phoebe and Joey are seen throughout the episode galavanting in the casino while Ross and Rachel attempt to find ways to embarrass one another, which results in them ending up wasted in a hotel room. Don’t worry nothing happened!! Anyway, it was Monica and Chandler’s one year anniversary and they decide to get married. Big deal! But, let’s be honest, does eloping in Vegas in television shows EVER end well? The answer for this show, and most TV shows, is no.

When Monica found her something borrowed, blue, old, and new, they head to the chapel. However, they don’t go through with the wedding. When they walk through the doors of the church to find Ross and Rachel celebrating, throwing rice and holding a bouquet of flowers. They should really pass a law in Vegas that doesn’t allow you to get married under the influence….

Season Four: The Season Where Ross Says Rachel

So we’re back! Now it’s time for the moment of truth, who did Ross pick? Shockingly, he picked Rachel. I’ll give you a second to react to that news. Where some fans, like me, were elated at this news, it was a short lived rekindling of their relationship. Ross accidentally tells Rachel that he accpets responsibility for his one night stand back when they were “on a break”. However, he feels he did nothing wrong and when he confronts her and exclaims that, they break up again. Easy come, easy go.

Let’s talk about everyone else before we get back to Ross and Rachel. Phoebe, who after a little warming up, develops a semi-decent relationship to her birth mother. The REAL Phoebe storyline this season is her pregnancy. Her half-brother comes back into town and asks her if she would carry his babies. Yeah, I can’t make this stuff up. He recently got married to Alice, who was his high school home economics teacher. Yeah… So anyway, Alice, being an older woman can no longer carry children so her and Frank Jr. decide to use invetro fretilization and have Phoebe carry the eggs. (By the way shes having TRIPLETS!) She runs into a couple of problems with the pregnancy, including the fact that babies crave meat, and she’s a vegetarian, but overall her pregnancy is a hilarious attribute to an already hysterical show!

Another hilarious couple of episodes this season involve Monica and Rachel losing their apartment to Chandler and Joey! The boys are stoked because they finally have the great apartment. The girls? Not so much. Monica tries her hardest but she just can’t make the “boy apartment” feel like home. Rachel on the other hand is SICK of the neighbor out her window whom greets her every morning in song, sing it Lola, “MORNING’S HERE, THE MORNING’S HERE!!!” Anyway, later on while the boys are out, Rachel and Monica switch the apartments left and kiss for one minute so the guys would let them keep their place…

So lets go back to what everyone really cares about, Ross and Rachel. Ross begins dating a British woman named Emily. She’s awful. But thats my opinion. Everyone else really seems to like her, especially Ross. He proposes to her after dating her for like 2 months and long story short they set up their wedding in England at the end of the season. Rachel, who develops feelings for Ross again decides she’s not going to the wedding. Just Kidding! She actually decides at the last minute to bombarde the wedding and tell Ross how she feels about him. Pregnant Phoebe tried to stop her but she couldn’t.

When Rachel got to London, when she saw Ross and Emily kissing, she decided to just congratulate him instead of declaring her love. So the wedding goes on as planned. The minister marrying them turns to Ross and says the following:

Minister:”Repeat after me, I Ross,”

Ross: “I Ross,”

Minister: “Take the Emily…”

Ross: “Take the Rachel…”

GASP!! Yeah, so Ross just said Rachel…

*END OF SEASON FOUR*

Season Three… WE WERE ON A BREAK!

So this season is EXTREMELY pivotal for the series. The series really hit its stride at this point and ratings sky rocketed when comparing this season opener to last season’s already impressive opening episode. As always I’ll start with our favorite duo. The third season starts out with Ross and Rachel dating. Though Ross and Rachel have an off-and-on relationship throughout the series, we get to see them truly “dating” during the last season and the beginning of this one. After that, they never really go back to a “boyfriend/girlfriend” relationship until WAY down the line. But anyway, we see Rachel finally quit her job at the coffee shop and pursue a career in the fashion industry. She begins to work at Bloomingdale’s where she meets Mark, an attractive man who works with her in her department. Ross gets extremely jealous of him and after multiple fights regarding the issue, Rachel calls for a “break”. Ross, coping with the pain, ends up getting drunk and having a one-night stand with a girl from his copy place.

Clearly, after all of that, Rachel and Ross’s break turned into a break-up. They got back together the episode after Ross’s one-night stand but once Rachel learned about the act, she was disgusted and told him they were done. Yeah, so it got AWKWARD to say the least. Eventually things got less weird and their friendships with one another resume back to normal. Well until this season’s finale, but we’ll get there.

So what’s going on with everyone else? Monica begins a relationship with Pete Becker, a millionaire who developed a crush on her while she was waitressing/cooking at a diner. At first, she only sees him as a friend, but eventually, the two begin to date. However, Pete confides in her that he wants to become the Ultimate Fighting Champion. After seeing him get beat up badly in two matches, she tells him he has to stop fighting or their relationship was over. He kept fighting, she ended it. Chandler broke up with Janice after Joey saw her kissing her ex-husband. Joey continued to get small acting roles and we see huim go through multiple casual and comical relationships. Phoebe, who hadn’t had a family member on the show except her twin sister, met her brother Frank Jr. last season and sees him a few times throughout this season. She also goes to the beach and meets a woman who turns out to be her real mother in the season finale! The parents she knew adopted her!

Speaking of the season finale, Phoebe meets her birth mom and Ross brings a new girl to the party. This is awkward for Rachel, that is until someone lets it slip to Ross that she’s developing feelings for him again. Now Ross is in a similiar predicament that he was two seasons ago, who will he choose? The girl he’s dating or Rachel? Hmmm I wonder…

 

Woo Hoo! Season 2!

So since I gave you all the down low on Season One last week, I figured I’d keep the ball rolling and do the other seasons and just analyze them along the way. First things first, we last left Rachel in the airport awaiting Ross’s return to tell him she feels the same way he feels about her. Make that FELT about her. He’s getting off the plain with Julie, (by the way we hate Julie). Julie and Ross went to grad school together for paleontology and hit in off on their trip to China. Ross and her date for a while, but then later on in the season he figures out that Rachel is into him, via a drunk message she left him on another date claiming that she was “over him”. He replied, “When were you under me?”

Let’s pause for a second. I absolutely LOVE the writers of this show. We started out with two people who most fans wanted to get together after they shared their first kiss 3 episodes into the series. However, the writers cleverly manipulated the the characters, throwing obstacles such as Rachel’s ex husband, Italian guys, Julie, a cat, lists, and so many other things in the way of them getting together so when they finally do in “The One With the Prom Video”, it literally makes your heart jump out of your chest. See Lola’s Blog for details on the “Prom Video” episode.

So for Ross and Rachel, the rest of the season is them dating. Of course the two of them dating and they’re “firsts” as a couple are hilarious so if I haven’t convinced you already to check out the show, it’s awesome! As for everyone else, they aren’t just sitting back and watching the two “lobsters” fall in love. They had their own stuff to deal with. Monica began dating Richard, played by Tom Selleck, a friend of her parents who was 21 years older than her. They had an extremely serious relationship, however in the season finale, they decided to part ways because she wanted kids and he was done with that chapter of his life. Joey and Chandler’s friendship, or bromance, grew tremendously in this season. Joey got a job as Dr. Drake Ramoray on the popular soap Days of Our Lives, but after a fight with the writers of the soap, his character fell down an elevator shaft, because that happens all of the time in hospitals. Chandler starts falling for a girl he met online and when he finally decides to meet her at Central Perk, it turns out it’s Janice, and they get back together. Who’s left? Oh yeah, Phoebe. Phoebe doesn’t have such a prominent role in this season, but she does meet her half-brother Frank Jr. which will set her up for BIG things in the future, literally.

Well that’s about it for season two. This season was critically acclaimed as one of the best seasons of TV, ever. It ranks #31 on TV Guide’s Greatest Seasons of All Time list. It was overall the perfect set up for the rest of the series. It expanded all of the characters in depth and opened up a plethora of story lines, which were all picked up for the show’s remaining 8 seasons.