“Chandler’s Ultimate Sacrifice: The Box Episode That Shocked *Friends* Fans!”

Long before Chandler is remanded to contrition in a crate, we willfully boarded the sympathy train for his pursuit of Joey’s actress girlfriend Kathy (played by Paget Brewster, who deserves to be better remembered in the guest star gallery for warmly navigating such a pivotal hitch in the rarely-challenged Joey-Chandler bond).

But this Thanksgiving episode caps that arc with a necessary reorientation on Joey and the depths of his broken heart—the pieces of which were not cracked by his one-time romance with Kathy, so much as obliterated by his longtime companion Chandler. It’s not some grenade of gay praxis to suggest that Joey’s fraternal love for Chandler powers him through this whole series: Joey consistently shows the value he places on Chandler’s opinion and support, and “Chandler in a Box” does a heavy lift in imploring audiences to remember that the boys’ relationship is a cornerstone of the series—they are THE friends of Friends!—and unlike their mostly comedic clash when Joey moved out in season 2, their schism here in season 4 threatens their whole emotional tether (not unlike Ross and Rachel’s dispute in “Morning After”).

So, although Joey’s way of reconciliation may be insipidly stupid, for he and Chandler to almost split and ultimately find peace is among the series’ more tragic machinations, this episode deserves recognition for getting them back where they belonged without sacrificing the gravity of what drove them apart.

An excellent case of the sum being greater than its parts, Monica and Chandler’s big day doesn’t exactly work on its individual levels—ignore Joey trying to get out of shooting his war movie, Rachel trying to stall Monica when Chandler goes missing, and the entire train wreck of “Part 1” that renders Chandler’s drag-queen father a cruel constant punchline (one of the show’s least defensible comedy relics, but you knew that already).

But it’s all about those final few minutes, an endlessly gratifying consecration of the great Friends romantic experiment that is Monica and Chandler—the seven-season slow burn that never stopped feeling like both an unexpected surprise and the constant rock the show needed. Rachel’s game-changing pregnancy reveal and Joey’s earnest officiating added color to the nuptials, but the special aura around this episode came from how it made good on seven years of audience loyalty by sneaking us onto the altar to clue us in on those whispers and revelations of the inner circle that so often humanize the grandiosity of a performative ceremony like this. Essentially, seven seasons led us to all but forgetting about the people in the pews or the very marriage itself—the circumstances around the affair sired an intimacy shared only by you, the wedding party, and a dozen million more viewers at home.