Hi Fi Parasol

Let’s play Pretend for a moment.

Close your eyes and imagine that you are a professor of one of the most academically respected and culturally popular sciences: Paleontology. More specifically, dinosaur paleontology. You spend your days hypothesizing the dietary preferences of tyrannosaurs, the hunting tactics of family dromaeosauridae, the many potential uses of a dimetrodon’s spinal sail. What’s more, you impart what you’ve learned to students eager to carry on the work of exploring the history of life on Earth, hoping to one day discern our very origins. Imagine how ridiculously cool this would be.

Now imagine you spend all your free time with five losers: A struggling actor, a struggling chef, an aimless rich girl, a corporate drone, and a drug-addled masseuse who’s one lost client away from eating spoiled ramen out of trash cans in Chinatown. But whatever; they’re your friends, right? You’ve been with them for years, and true friends don’t judge each other’s lifestyle choices. Right?

Except when they do.

And thus we have the biggest problem with Friends (1994-2004): It’s essentially a show about a dynamic and intelligent man who chooses to surround himself with a crowd of idiots who mock him incessantly.

This would be fine, of course, if it were the show’s conceit. Lots of great shows involve straight men who make us laugh by reacting to the goofballs that populate his town, workplace, home, or Korean War-era US Army field hospital. Consider Jim from The Office, Will from Will and Grace, or Benson from Benson. (Yes, I know many of you don’t remember Benson. Yes, I know you only know Robert Guillaume as the magical baboon from The Lion King. Yes, I am a little sad now.)

But Ross wasn’t the straight man. It was never his job to react with heavy-lidded sarcasm to Joey’s dimwitted, never-ending poontang-and-corned-beef safari, or Phoebe’s gape-jawed journeys into New Age dipshittery. The task of calling Chandler out on his limited ability to use humor to distract us from looking too deeply into his lifeless, hollow eyes never fell to Ross, nor did the task of letting us all know that Monica’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies were more cause for alarm than humor.

No, Ross had only two jobs:

(1) Get mocked mercilessly for his own search for true love, his unending devotion to the life of the mind, and his ability to attract a diverse array of women, and

(2) Enable Rachel’s perpetual construction of an endless, House-of-Leaves-like spiral staircase into shrieking, bat-winged insanity.

The problem is that there was never a compelling reason offered for Ross to continue to let his life and intellect fester away in such a social toilet as his circle of friends. Okay, so Monica was his sister and Chandler was his best friend since college. But what could Joey possibly have to offer that couldn’t be gotten from the occasional Carl’s-Jr.-and-Spike-TV weekend bender? And what benefit was there for any scientist to spend such substantial amounts of time with Phoebe, who spent an entire episode claiming to be a creationist merely to mock his life’s work?

And after dating such a broad array of intelligent, gorgeous, emotionally mature women, why would Ross ever want to date such an addle-brained, self-centered twit as Rachel? She was like a Disney Princess without the hilarious sidekicks and headstrong drive for success (or musical talent). She made Carrie Bradshaw look like Evita Peron (again, minus the music). I can only imagine the trials their poor daughter will face: Fascinated by science, but compelled to wear spike heels in the lab; brilliantly academic, yet barely able to spell her own name when men are in the room; attracted to stable, rewarding relationships, but occasionally overcome with the urge to dig her fingernails into her own eye sockets and laugh maniacally through the blood and vitreous humour streaming down her face. Thank god Joey was cancelled or she might have shown up to destroy us all.

Yet, sadly, that same cancellation leaves us with no further insight into the Gellerverse, and subsequently no ability to find meaning in Ross’s bizarre choices. But here’s my theory: At some point early in his career, perhaps while excavating a strangely well-preserved Protoarchaeopteryx, Ross unearthed something terrible and mind-shattering — some eldritch horror that ruled the universe during Earth’s infancy, imprisoned in rock by ancient shamans who sacrificed their own sanity in order to destroy the thing. Looking into his reflection in the cold, stoic forever of the beast’s all-seeing god-eyes — which ran the length and breadth of time itself — Ross went mad, and retreated to a world where his every day was a walking punishment. His friends secretly hated him. Multiple marriages failed. And he could never shake his obsession with a vapid Cosmo devotee, who, like the dinosaurs he studied, had a brain the size of a walnut.

Thus, I bid goodbye to Ross-That-Was, the eternal scholar whose days were no doubt filled with endless study and discovery; who was never mocked by his friends for getting busy with hot 19-year-olds; and who no doubt would have ultimately found love with a stable, sane partner who knew the difference between “your” and “you’re.”

Good night, sweet prince. I raise a glass of chicken fat in your honor.