IRL, Lisa Kudrow has a degree in biology. Didn’t someone say it takes a very smart person to play a ditz?
By the time Ross and Rachel hooked up (the last episode), Phoebe was already married to Paul Rudd, my beady, red-eyed boyfriend.
I think Paul Rudd is a cutie. I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers.
Yeah, but I’m sure the story arc for the last season, and the fact that Joey gets a spin-off, was all known long before the episodes were shot. In other words: Joey gets spin-off; writers match up Ross & Rachel for final episode; need a boyfriend for Phoebe; bring in Paul Rudd.
If it’s still fo the interest, here’s the evolution dialogue:
Nope, still don’t think the writers had it in minde to hook up Joey and Pheobe. For one thing, that’s just too matchy-matchy. Pheobe had hooked up with Paul Rudd the season before the last. And Joey was hooked-up with Rachel.
No where in Pheobe or Joey’s story arch for the last 3 years was a hook-up even hinted at.
That’s not the good bit. 
It’s later on in the episode:
How did Phoebe destroy Ross in that episode? It seems to me that all she did was offer a bunch of disengenuous (sp?) arguments that were designed to get under Ross’ skin, because they were on the one subject he was passionate about. When Ross points out that there is a tiny possibility Evolution isn’t true, he’s acting like an honest rationalist in the Popperian sense. Phoebe was acting like an obnoxious twit in that exchange.
I’ve never understood the hard-on people have for Ross. He’s a smart socially inept scientist of Jewish descent. What the hell’s wrong with that? Frankly I agree with Lrrr’s view of Friends. “Why doesn’t Ross, the largest Friend, simply devour the others?”
Thanks for posting the real end to the Ross-Phoebe confrontation. Now that you read it, how can you dispute what I said before: that she would have gotten herself creamed on this site and that Ross was too polite to tear her a new one?
I hated what the writers did to Ross over the course of the show. He started out as the adult, the one who had a real education, a real job, a real marriage, and a child he cared about. That apparently so overbalanced him against the others that the writers had to make him more and more of a loser idiot with each season. I stopped watching the show as a result: it was too painful.
I can. I’d have to admit that there is a teeny, tiny possibility that I’m wrong about evolution, which is all Phoebe asks for.
I wouldn’t say that he was too polite. It’s hard to get the gist of his reaction from a transcript… he kinduv seemed to be entirely stunned that Phoebe had pulled that reversal on him, (first pushing hard on the ‘just open your mind a tiny little bit’, and then, as soon as he conceded that, turning it into ‘you totally caved.’) He’s flustered and more than a little pissed at her I think, and you could use ‘humiliated’ to describe that if you want, but it’d kinduv be a stretch. (He is too nice a guy to vent his feelings at her at that point.)
And yes, it’s not like she’s being particularly creative or channeling some kind of deep wisdom that Ross wouldn’t be able to deny. She’s just using cheap reframing tricks.
But Ross says exactly that in so many words, giving, as Larry Borgia said, the exactly proper rationalist scientific response. He does not abandon his entire belief system: he reinforces it. This is something that Phoebe - and the great American viewing public - totally fails to understand. Phoebe doesn’t make a case, she just gives the popular view of science, same as the Creationists do: if there is any possibility that any fact of science is wrong, then god is the answer. (She doesn’t say god, true, but it’s the same argument.) Ross walks away rather than confront a friend, which is what most of us would do in a similar situation. He does not crawl away with his tail between his legs. Phoebe is trolling and Ross properly stops arguing with the troll.
Wasn’t there an episode where Phoebe is talking about some volunteer work that she does, and Joey challenges her claim that she “gets nothing out of it”? She says she does it for the good feeling she gets, and he replies that, then, she does get something out of it…and she is stymied.
I’m hijacking my own thread here, but [stroking]you guys are just so good at this stuff[/stroking] and we’re already on page two.
And whatever happened to Baby Ben, Ross’s kid from his first marriage? Was he ever seen or mentioned again?
He was a TV offspring–only present when needed for the plot of the episode.
Much like Ritchie on the Dick Van Dyke Show.
this colored my perception of having kids no end–I still want them to go down the hall and disappear for a few episodes…
I think that Ross didn’t know what to do with Phoebe’s illogical attack. I don’t think he caved–I think Phoebe pressed home her perceived advantage and left him speechless. What does one say to something like what Phoebe said? Where to start? I doubt that Phoebe was standing in for Creationists there-- she’s much more likely to have some New Age philosophy than fundie religion.
Several times. That’s why Ross wouldn’t move to England after he married Emily, and once Rachel accidentally taught Ben a swear word, and Ben and Joey were up for a part in a commercial. It was a father and son eating soup, but since Joey and Ben have the wrong coloring they paired Joey up with another, dark-haired boy. So, if Joey got the part, that meant Ben wouldn’t.
I don’t think they ever introduced Ben to his sister, though, although I could be wrong on that.
You may be correct in that. In fact after the “fun Aunt Rachel” episode, we never heard from or of Ben again. Nor Carol and Susan for that matter.
Well sure, but then she mocks him for admitting it.
I’m confused on what you mean by people having a “hard-on” for Ross. I would think having a “hard-on” for someone meant that one was attracted to that person, but from your context above it sounds like the opposite.
He was the born-to-lose guy from the very first episode. I mean, how real is his marriage when his wife is out there sleeping with another woman?
I always preferred Chandler. He had a “real” job. So did Monica.
But there was no reason to make Ross a moron–witness the dolls and the dress up he played etc. It was as if they had a character who was too normal and wanted to make him stand out. They added these lame eccentricities and then beat the joke to death.
To have Ross marry 3? 4? times seems a bit excessive.
I always liked Ross–it was Joey I couldn’t stand. Oh, and Rachel. Ugh.