Storyline:: As a gift to Monica and Chandler, Phoebe gives them the biggest gift of all….a Ms. Pac Man video arcade game. With it comes competition, naughty initials, and…. foul language.
Characters: Monica, Chandler, and Phoebe
Review: This was definitely a funny storyline after the few disappointing stories with the Bings so far this season. It created very many laughs from beginning to the end, but more or less at the end with Phoebe’s foul outrage to the game. As we can see though, Monica definitely did not win this round of competition like she has done before. We basically know that she is being competitive because she wants to get rid of Chandler’s “naughty initials” on the scoreboard of the game. Amazingly throughout this storyline, you can see that Chandler really has no life and doesn’t care about his job since he was playing the game for 8 hours. The in-between jokes such as the reference to Monica’s favorite game, the vending machine, Phoebe pretending she was dead, were quite amusing too. Too bad we didn’t see the aftermath of Phoebe’s burst of foul language in front of Ben. I think I mostly liked this storyline because of Phoebe.
Storyline Grade: 94 (A-) -------------------------------------- Storyline:: After being able to teach two classes, Ross is surprisingly happy but becomes disappointed after not being able to make it to the later class on time.
Characters: Ross
Review: Not to say this storyline wasn’t good, it was just that it seemed like a filler for Ross’ character. I have noticed that whenever Schwimmer directs, such as this episode, he really has non-important storylines. Basically, I really didn’t get a real kick or laugh out of Ross trying to get from class to class. Ross did not annoy me that much at all but you did see Mental Geller come out as he was rushing through the doors with kids blocking the exit. I’ll say that Ross squirting the water on his face and him stopping himself on the rollerblades when going through the door, were the amusing parts for me of the storyline.
Storyline Grade: 80 (B) -------------------------------
Storyline:: Joey decides to take Rachel on a date to lift her sprits from not being able to date while she is pregnant. But after the date, Joey starts to feel feelings for Rachel that he never thought he would before.
Characters: Joey and Rachel
Review: As everyone knows, with weeks of anticipation, the friendship of Joey and Rachel’s takes a toll as they go on a pretend date not knowing what the outcome of each other’s feelings might have been. Unfortunately, only Joey creates some feelings of his own for Rachel, and not Rachel having feelings for Joey....or at least that's what we think of so far. In a way, I was surprised that the two would even consider going out on a pretend date after feeling uncomfortable it would be for the both of them to even be intimate in the previous episode. Luckily, it wasn’t all serious; there were some definite funny parts such as the whole scene where Joey pretends to pick up Joey, which to me was the highlight of the storyline. I bet the moves that Rachel tried on Joey really some how affected him in a way but he never really showed it in front of her. Maybe he was trying very hard to shrug off the feeling he was getting from her moves, so it wouldn’t look too obvious in front of Rachel. There are many ways we will all interpret Joey and Rachel’s date and how it affected just Joey. But to me as we saw, Joey did take Rachel on a pretend date to pick her up from her pregnancy but ended up knowing what Rachel was really like after knowing the Rachel who goes on dates without a mention of her being pregnant. I definitely like the anticipation of wanting to know what happens between the two. Ahh-ha and as we saw, Rachel was the one who wanted Joey's comfort.
Storyline Grade: 96 (A-) ------------------------------- Notes
-David Schwimmer did direct this episode, which might explain his filler storyline.
-How did Phoebe get that Ms. Pac Man game into the Bings’ apartment (space wise)?
-Could some people figure out Chandler’s initials on the Ms. Pac-man scoreboard by just his and Monica's interpretations?
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812s overall Grade: 90 (A)