“How the Apothecary Table Became *Friends*’ Most Iconic Decor Disaster!”

“The One With the Apothecary Table” (Season 6, Episode 11)

A distaste for consumerism (and one markedly different from her PBS ire) aroused this dutiful bout of refreshing character service for Phoebe at the midpoint of season 6. As five previous seasons showed, it’s much easier to do wrong by Phoebe than to do right by her, but her dance of morals over Pottery Barn felt true to both her cause and her comedy without relying on lazy jokes about psychics or vegetarianism.

(Plus, the episode’s twist is also classic Phoebe, a brilliant exerciser of karmic loopholes.) Elsewhere, “Apothecary Table” also delights with its sly upending of the social status quo we grew accustomed to when Joey’s former albatross Janine (Elle Macpherson) shocks everyone by expressing her distaste for our well-oiled product: Monica and Chandler.There’s nothing more or less in “The Routine” than good-natured innocuousness—three tight subplots following Joey’s quest for a kiss, the Gellers’ quest for attention, and everyone else’s quest for Christmas presents.

The highlight, of course, is Ross and Monica’s dance routine itself, one of the more brilliant utilizations of Friends’ specialty for presenting curiously curated fragments of characters’ pasts to add to the mythos of who we’re spending time with in the present. Ross and Monica’s shared love of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve feels as instantly lived-in as their football rivalry, but rather than leaning into the antagonism of their relationship as so many episodes often (and not for lack of reason) do, “The Routine” celebrates the underlying kookiness of their brother-sister dynamic, letting them shine with a certain rare ebullience for the Schwimmer and Cox partnership.

On a show that can often skew toward the unrealistic, this is an episode all about facing reality (despite Ross’ C-plot about babysitting a dummy of Ben—one of his more inane story lines). On the eve of Chandler moving in with Monica, he and Joey and she and Rachel must contend with the reality of saying goodbye to their eras of living together; the episode’s tentative dance around the latent sadness of what should be a happy move secretly delivers a gut-punch when you realize that you, too, didn’t expect this departure to be nearly as sad as it is.

What works particularly well is the hyperfocus on Monica and Rachel, the polar opposite cohabitants they’ve always been, now accidentally spurred by Phoebe to pull on the loose threads around each other’s edges. In doing so, they let off some of the steam they’ve been housing over the fundamental change in their lives—a clever way to get to a bittersweet realization that cements “The Last Night” as one of Friends’ more universal episodes in its exploration of the ways we mask sadness by lashing out at the very people we’re saddest to be losing.