Musings, if you will.

I can normally only write when I’ve drank a lot of coffee and dipped a lot of biscuits in said coffee but the current weather is making me switch off from anything remotely warm. I’m currently on week four of being off sick from work and having had an operation twelve days ago which has resulted in an infection following that operation, I’m really struggling with the heat.

Actually, I’m really struggling with everything right now. I hadn’t driven or been in my car for three weeks and when I finally ventured behind the wheel, I discovered a bag containing a half-drunk fruit smoothie in it. Let’s just say pineapple, banana and coconut repeatedly warmed to the point of boiling in a place with a distinct lack of air absolutely stinks.

Because I’ve been poorly, I’m bored. When I realised I was going to be off sick for a long time, I splashed out on a load of original British drama box sets which were polished off within a week. Now that the weather is glorious, everyone is rejoicing and firing up the barbecues whilst I huddle in front of my fan and sob because I have a temperature from my infection and the heat is killing me.

I’ve also resorted to type and started re-watching Friends. I say “re-watching”. What I actually mean is I broke my usual comfort blanket of watching the show over and over on Comedy Central while I was watching my box sets and now I’ve gone back to the norm. During one of my many freezing cold baths lately, I read an article on Buzz Feed about Friends and what the writer described as the “catalogue of errors” presented by the show.

While I don’t necessarily agree that the show hosts a “catalogue of errors”, I do agree that there are several mistakes, mostly continuity based, which I’ve picked up on over the years. I’m not so bothered about the really basic filming errors, some of which resurface on social media every few years. These errors range from the apartment door number changing to a different actress filling in for Monica when the camera isn’t focused on her to the actress who played Joey’s agent, Estelle, also multi rolling as a midwife who delivers Ben.

The majority of these tiny errors were most likely teething problems, which arose from the show being very new and the fact that the writers, directors and producers had no idea just how popular the show would be. As a writer, I’m more interested in how the storyline itself has crumbled with too many tiny errors.  Plot holes, if you will. How can you write something and forget you wrote it? Hell, I can still quote my way through a play I wrote six years ago. 

Maybe I’m just sad. Anyway, I digress.

Firstly, let’s take a look at the age of the characters. Ross and Monica are brother and sister, therefore we know there is at least nine months age difference between them. Yet if we think about the flashback episodes, we see Ross and Chandler at college while Monica and Rachel are still at high school. Therefore, I think it’s pretty safe to say there’s at least one year between the Gellar siblings, although it’s most likely more. So, in the episode where Rachel turns thirty, why are all the Friends aged thirty (Phoebe aside) with Rachel seemingly being the youngest?

In fact, if we cast our minds back to the earlier series, Ross says he is 29 years old on three separate occasions: in series three, four and five. Ironically, his birthday changes throughout the series. When Gunther asks Rachel when her birthday is, Ross chimes in with his birthday, which is in December. But when Joey and Ross are in the hospital after Ross punches Joey, he says his birthday is in October.

Ironically, the same thing happens with Phoebe. In series three, when talking to Frank Jnr, Phoebe says that her birthday is February 16^th (I remember so specifically as this is my sister’s birthday), yet in the ninth series, Phoebe’s birthday dinner is on Halloween.

Similarly, in the episode where Monica fights for the bargain wedding dress, she says her wedding is being held on May 15^th. We know that on the morning of her wedding, Rachel discovers she is pregnant. Presumably, she is around four to five weeks at this point, perhaps a little further on maybe. It’s fair to assume that Rachel conceived in April, roughly, which would mean her due date would be approximately January. That’s all well and good until we remember that when Rachel was towards the end of her pregnancy, she and Ross were attending a hospital appointment and she says “it is 100 degrees outside”. Really? In New York in January?

Also, on that note, when Rachel and Phoebe met Dr Green for dinner and he grills Rachel about his first grandchild “not being a bastard”, she reassures him by saying she has a wedding booked for February 2^nd. So, was the phantom wedding intended for when Emma was a month old? Or was this a mystical pregnancy that lasted a year and a half?

Speaking of Rachel’s pregnancy, when she’s in hospital after giving birth and Monica spies the engagement ring allegedly given to her by Joey, alarm bells should’ve rang for Monica as this is the same bloody ring that Ross used to propose to Emily. Perhaps she just didn’t recognise it, although she grew particularly attached to this specific ring and put Emily off wearing it by informing her that it was inside a duck’s colon for days. Or maybe their grandmother had several expensive looking engagement rings knocking around, despite the fact that when she moved to America, she had just the one ring and “the clothes on her back”, implying that she was very poor. Ah well. Maybe Monica is just forgetful.

Let’s move back to Ross for a second. In the first series, the guys make quite a big deal out of the fact that Ross has only slept with one woman: Carol. Yet, if we fast forward to the Thanksgiving episode featuring Brad Pitt, we discover that he in fact slept with an elderly librarian when he was in college. As he met Carol in college, we can only assume that either he was dishonest in the first series (possible – he seemed embarrassed when people found out about Mrs Altman so maybe he lied to avoid losing face) or he cheated on Carol, the woman he was with for eight years, married and had a child with.

If it’s the latter, it takes a whole new glance at Ross as a person. Sleeping with the girl from the copy place was meant to be a one-off thing that was so out of character for Ross but if he repeatedly cheats on every significant partner he’s had, sorry but it makes him a wanker. The alternative is that the writers forgot about the earlier confession that he had only slept with Carol and therefore, it falls into the ever-increasing category of “continuity errors”.

Still on the “Rossatron”, it’s crazy how throughout the series, he maintains that he has an allergy to shellfish, yet he has no objectons to gobbling down those crab cakes when the shit hits the fan.

Moving swiftly forwards to Rachel and Chandler. How many times did those guys meet “for the first time”? We know they met at the Geller’s during Thanksgiving on two consecutive years but we also see them meet at a college party where they end up kissing, yet apparently are totally unaware of each other. Let’s not forget that they meet again “for the first time” in the first episode where Rachel runs out on her wedding. It’s possible that as time has passed, she wouldn’t know who Chandler was (maybe) but then to back up this third meeting by saying in her potential maid of honour speech that she met Chandler for the first time when he was a “twenty-five-year-old”. 

No. No, you didn’t.

Speaking of Rachel, her surname repeatedly changes how it’s spelled throughout the series. We see her name listed as Rachel Green in the credits to the show, which is corroborated when Rachel has Rachel Green written on the top of Emma’s first birthday cake. However, it’s spelled as Greene on her office door at Bloomingdales and also on her invitation to Ross’ wedding.

Let’s move on to Ross and Monica’s parents: Jack and Judy Geller. In the episode where Jack gives Monica his Porsche, we hear that there were suspicions that Judy couldn’t conceive. The doctors then referred to Ross, who was conceived unexpectedly, as a “medical marvel”. This is also mentioned in another episode where Ross explains that doctors thought “she was baron”. Yet when Chandler and Monica meet Jack and Judy for lunch following their engagement and Jack talks about how he proposed to Judy, he explains that he’d gotten Judy pregnant and he still wasn’t sure how it happened. Okay. So far, so good. But then Judy says “your dog used my diaphragm as a squeeze toy”.

Hang on a minute. If medical practitioners believed she had no hope of getting pregnant, why did she use contraception? Without going into too much detail, I’m aware that certain methods of contraception also act as something else e.g. the contraceptive pill can help with periods etc. But a diaphragm is a complicated little bugger that you have to put in and out of yourself each time you want to have sex. Which would imply that, as the diaphragm was Judy’s preferred method of protection, she perhaps hadn’t been told she wasn’t able to conceive. Which means the whole “medical marvel” gag was total bullshit.

Bearing the Gellers in mind, remember little Ben Geller? Sorry, Ben Geller-Willitt-Bunch, to be exact. He didn’t turn up to his own father’s wedding, yet was present at both his mother’s and his aunt and uncle’s. Now, I have my own theory on this. Ross’ wedding was in London, therefore a long way to travel for a young child. He would’ve needed accompanying and presumably the person to do that would be his parent and maybe it was just a bit awkward for either Carol or Susan to come along to Ross’ wedding, not to mention costly. So why couldn’t Ross be responsible for him? Or, failing that, his own grandparents?

In fact, Ben’s role in the series deteriorated massively. In the earlier series, he was at Ross’ apartment – and even Monica’s apartment – all the time. Ross had him overnight and even begged Carol and Susan to let him have Ben for longer than just one night. Yet towards the end of the series, we hardly see him at all and we never once see Ben meeting his younger sister, Emma.

Right. Monica and Chandler. When Monica puts the Thanksgiving turkey on her head and dances for Chandler, he laughs and unexpectedly tells her that he loves her. It’s clear that this is the first time, as Monica is astonished and says “you said you love me. I can’t believe it”. Yet later on when Phoebe has rumbled their budding relationship, Chandler declares his love for Monica by saying “I’m in love with Monica. That’s right. I love her. I. LOVE. HER”. 

Yet Monica, overhearing this conversation from where she’d hid in the bathroom, is astonished once again that Chandler has said he loves her. 

I’m willing to let this one slide though, as it’s clear that the turkey time was obviously blurted out unexpectedly and the time with Phoebe, he obviously intended to say it.

Moving on to Joey: did anybody notice that the amount of his sisters kept changing? He tells Chandler that his mother “gave birth to six kids”, yet in another episode he says he has seven sisters, which would mean there are actually eight of them. I guess it’s possible that two of the kids were adopted, which means Mrs Tribbani did only give birth to six kids, but it seems a little farfetched and unlikely.

It also annoyed me that when Phoebe announced her engagement, Joey proposes a toast but doesn’t know the name of her fiancé. Which would be all well and good – well, no, it would be completely crap if your best mate didn’t know your fiancé’s name – except Joey was the one who introduced them to each other! Admittedly, Joey didn’t actually know Mike as it was a total long shot that there was someone named Mike in close proximity to him when he shouted out “Mike?” in the coffee house but evidently, he did know his name. He’d even been on holiday with Joey, for goodness sake.

This one isn’t so much a continuity error but more of a complaint. Personally, it felt that the writers grew tired of thinking of interesting storylines and character development for Joey towards the end of the show, as his character went from “dim but sweet” to “bordering on serious learning difficulties”. Come off it. A fully-grown man who, when presented with very basic French read out in one word sentences, repeats gobbledegook back? It was cringeworthy.

And in series nine, he explains that he can’t use air quotations correctly, which is weird because he uses them throughout the series. Example: when Rachel is grilling him over Monica and Chandler’s new secret relationship, he says “Monica and Chandler are making love” and uses air quotations accurately. At times, it felt as though the writers were so focused on Ross and Rachel towards the end that Joey’s character was so dumbed down that it became unfunny and insulting towards the character.

On this note, I felt that the writers lacked inspiration with Phoebe too. She went from being a ditsy hippie who cleansed people’s auras and gave a huge sum of money to a homeless lady (not to mention being a surrogate for her brother) to being downright insulting and nasty. “Really? Chandler?” and “Don’t even get me started on Chandler” springs to mind. If one of my best friends was so unnecessarily rude about my husband – who also happens to be one of their best friends – I’d cut her out.

In line with this, can we just talk about Phoebe’s dismissive attitude when Rachel confesses that she kissed another girl when she was in college? Phoebe is so convinced that it just “isn’t like” Rachel, which is odd considering Phoebe watched Rachel kiss Monica for a whole minute in a bid to win back their apartment.

Finally, the biggest curveball of them all – Erica unexpectedly giving birth to twins. It’s ludicrous, outrageous perhaps, that a woman would be carrying twins without realising it, unless of course she’s opted out of having any ultrasounds. But we know that Erica did have an ultrasound that Monica and Chandler gazed at proudly. Come on. You’re telling me that a medical expert who performs ultrasounds day in, day out, didn’t pick up on two babies on that scan? Particularly because they were clearly aware that Erica was carrying twins, as Erica explains that a midwife told her that “both heartbeats are really strong”.

The only possible explanation is that her initial ultrasound was very early on when perhaps the second baby couldn’t be detected and that, as she’d decided to give the baby up for adoption, she chose not to have any more scans? Possible but very unlikely.

Regardless, I will still continue to watch Friends and love it for all of eternity. It’s quite literally the best comfort blanket a girl can have.