The One with All the Resolutions
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"The One With All The Resolutions" is the 11th episode of season 5 of Friends.
[edit] Plot
It's New Year's Eve at Monica's apartment. Monica and Chandler want to kiss at midnight, but can't because no one knows about their relationship, so Joey gets all the gang to kiss. (Ross kisses Phoebe and Joey kisses Rachel, due to the history between Ross and Rachel.) After the party (and the commercial break), the six sit around developing New Year's resolutions. Ross decides to do something new every day; Chandler, after being bet $50 by Ross, vows not to make fun of his friends; Rachel decides to gossip less; Phoebe wants to pilot a commercial jet; and Joey picks learning to play guitar. Phoebe immediately volunteers to teach him.
Phoebe's guitar lessons prove traumatic, as she has no formal training and invented her own system. Furthermore, she refuses to allow Joey to actually touch a guitar. Joey quickly loses patience with her and seeks out a "real" teacher, only to have second thoughts and beg her forgiveness the next day. She lets him use her guitar, which he promptly drops.
Rachel does well with her promise not to gossip, but her resolve is tested when she accidentally intercepts a phone call between Monica and Chandler, who are planning their next tryst. She begs Joey to let her talk to him about it, but he refuses: "I am tired of being the guy who knows all the secrets and can't tell anyone!" After some careful double-talk, however, they both discover that they know the same secret ("Chandler and Monica?!"), only to be walked in on by Phoebe. The two immediately exit for a walk in the rain, leading Phoebe to conclude: "I bet they're doing it."
Ross gets a date with a girl named Elizabeth Hornswoggle, which he uses to taunt Chandler, who cannot make fun of it. The next day he acquires leather pants, again pushing Chandler to distraction. These two elements collide, however, when he begins to overheat on his date with Elizabeth, leading him to flee into her bathroom, where, after removing his pants for some thermal relief, he finds himself unable to re-don them. A surreptitious cell phone call to Joey leads only to further problems, when Joey's two solutions—talcum powder and hand lotion—combine into a paste, and the date ends prematurely with Ross emerging from Elizabeth's bathroom with whitish rind on his legs and his pants bundled in front of his privates. Ross's son Ben, however, has taken the leather pants to mean his father is a cowboy, and Ross lopes off into the sunset to kiss him goodnight.
Chandler's resolution not to make fun of anyone ends with an outburst over the ending credits, in which he hands over the $50 and then cuts loose on Ross and Phoebe with some well-chosen ridicule ("Tom Jones called! He said he wants his pants back!"). Finally, Monica's resolution turns out to be to take more photographs of herself and her friends, and she wanders in and out of the episode, camera in hand.
[edit] Trivia
- Monica's original resolution was to be less obsessed with being neat and clean. The resolution is broken almost immediately, when Rachel dumps a handful of crumbs onto the living room floor. This scene was deleted when the episode aired, but is in the DVD version.
- There is a drawing of a coffee cup on the Magna Doodle.
| Preceded by "The One With the Inappropriate Sister" |
List of Friends episodes | Followed by "The One With Chandler's Work Laugh" |
