Before the surprise ending, that bit where Monica fell over ("I think I cracked a rib") was causing me some concern. I noticed that later Rachel just pretended to fall over, but the implications did not occur to me.
If Rachel really is pregnant, my money is on Ross as the father. I don't think prime-time TV could do anything else.
I guess Rachel thought it would be safer to use Monica's bathroom for a test than the one she shares with Joey, but she seemed surprisingly ignorant about the resulting shortage of tissues, etc.
Primetime TV does this sort of thing all the time. Rachel has a very active social life. Case in point: Roz Doyle of Frasier had a baby by a young college student with whom she had a fling. No mention of him since the baby was born, and not a lot beforehand.
Rachel could have used all the tissues and just forgot about it after she found out she was pregnant.
The one thing that didn't occur to me until after the episode though was that it most likely couldn't have been Monica's baby and the writers were trying to tell us that early on. She fell over when running out of her bedroom. If she knew she was pregnant, she most likely would have flipped out if she fell because it was a pretty hard fall too (I think I cracked a rib, but its ok...its my wedding day hehe)
Michele
"We are all role models whether we choose to be or not"
On 5/18/01 11:36 AM, Maureen Goldman wrote something sort of like this:
I think it's a little different character-wise, though. Roz has been painted since the beginning as being very mature & fairly loose. Her words about birth control when she tells Frasier she thinks she's pregnant: "Ninety-nine percent effective! I can't beat those odds!" I mean, don't get me wrong, I LOVE Roz, and Frasier is my favorite show, but her character's attitude made the situation much more believable than would, I think, a Rachel-fling-man pregnancy. Rachel's always had this sort of strange innocence that Roz's character has never had. So I don't think that the issue is so much "would they do it in prime-time," because clearly they did (in a hilarious series of episodes which culminated in Niles' drunken proposal to Daphne to make her an "honest woman"), but would they do that to Rachel's character? I don't know. I can't really picture it and what it would do to her relationship with everybody, especially Ross, but that obviously doesn't mean anything.....
I don't know. I guess we'll see. :-)
~~~~~ allie ~~~~~ http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~amurray/ ~~~~~ "I'm right, or I'm not Smart." -- Maxwell Smart, _Get Smart_ ~~~~~
Can't say that I see the same innocence in Rachel that you do, but neither has she ever been labelled the series slut, like Roz in "Frasier" and Blanche in "The Golden Girls" since they're all pretty much even that way.
More important, though: Both Aniston and Arquette have indicated that they expect to have kids, with Arquette apparently being in more of a hurry... according to the press, anyway. If an actress is not pregnant and her character is given an on-screen pregnancy, then how do they handle the situation when she actually does get pregnant?
It'll be interesting to learn the back story with regard to that aspect of last night's plot. The wedding itself has certainly taken second place to pregnancy spculation.
There are several examples of TV females being pregnant without anyone knowing... there was Claire Huxtable in the Cosby show (covered up by pieces of the set, grocery bags) and Elaine on Seinfeld (untucked shirts and handbags held in front of the belly. In later months, if they are still filming, they just get head and chest shots.
Yes, that's apparently what they expected to do with Daphne on "Frasier" when Leeves was pregnant. Turned out that she carried big, so they had to write her weight gain into the show. ("Oooh, I don't know why it is, I just can't stop eating.") As with many women, Leeves' face became somewhat swollen as well, and she put on weight pretty much everywhere. A 9lb. daughter, IIRC..
And I'll never forget when Scully returned from being abducted by aliens [after Anderson gave birth]. As she lay unconscious on the hospital examination table she had the typical figure of a well-nourished new mom - extra poundage plus enlarged breasts unaffected by gravity. Mulder certainly didn't return like that... as far as we know.
Some actresses can get away with it fairly well, others can't. Another I didn't know about was Gates McFadden on Star Trek:TNG. She said that Dr. Crusher wore increasingly longer lab coats and stood behind tings, but I've looked at episodes made during that time and I see no difference at all. Probably helped that she's also a dancer\choreographer. With Friends, both Aniston and Cox seem awfully small-boned... and boney. I don't think they could hide anything.
HOWEVER, on Entertainment Tonight this evening Aniston's representative said that she's not pregnant.
On 5/19/01 1:05 AM, Maureen Goldman wrote something sort of like this:
Well, for the purposes of the show, she also wore a "fat suit," like the one Courtney Cox wears to play her younger, larger self. In the first couple episodes of the season, in which she didn't wear it but wore larger clothes instead, she actually didn't look as though she gained that much weight. Some, for sure, but she wore it nicely. Regardless, she certainly LOST it quickly. Niles: "Nonsense! You're as svelte as you ever were!"
As far as I'm concerned, I think it was frankly amazing how well they hid her pregnancy for the first episodes of the second season. I'm pretty sure that someone who hadn't known never would have guessed. Of course, that it wasn't out of character for her to constantly wear trenchcoats helped a lot....
~~~~~ allie ~~~~~ http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~amurray/ ~~~~~ "All right, check out this bad boy. 12 megabytes of ram. 500 megabyte hard drive. Built-in spreadsheet capabilities and a modem that transmits at over 28,000 b.p.s.!" -- Chandler on Friends, circa 1994 ~~~~~
I didn't realize that Leeves wore a fat suit at any time since to me she just looked pregnant. It was somewhat disconcerting to me since some episodes appeared to have been shot out of order; some weeks she seemed noticeably less far along than the previous week. Jane Seymour was astonishing in the way she returned to her usual figure so quickly - after having twins, no less.
(I expect that it's too late to start postnatal exercises now that my youngest is married.)