“The One Where Joey Speaks French”

Friends season 10, episode 13
Original air date: February 19, 2004

When Phoebe returns from her honeymoon, everyone's glad that she's back, but no one more so than Joey. He needs her help to learn French for an audition he's going to, because he has listed on his resume that he's fluent in French, when in reality he doesn't speak a word. Phoebe agrees to help, but as they sit down to go over a few words together, Joey clearly doesn't even have a grasp of the syllables in French. Everything he's supposed to repeat comes out sounding laughably different from what Phoebe's saying: different sounds, different accents, and absolute gibberish. After trying and trying and trying, Phoebe gives up.

Monica and Chandler are preparing to show Erica, the birth mother, around New York. Chandler is initially reluctant to participate in all the touristy stuff they have planned for her, but in the end he comes home with a Statue of Liberty hat, bags of souvenirs and a goofy I Love New York T-shirt. Over the course of their visit, though, it comes out that Erica doesn't really know who the father of the baby is. It could be her steady boyfriend, who was captain of the football team and now in college, or it could be another guy she fooled around with a couple times, who's in jail for killing his father with a shovel.

Ross has to help Rachel deal with the fact that her father has had a heart attack and has been hospitalized. This means getting over his fear of her father, which seems pretty easy, since he's sleeping and on tranquilizers. Ross makes himself at home, watching TV in Mr. Green's room and putting his feet up on his bed. When Mr. Green wakes up, however, Ross is instantly ill-at-ease. When Rachel goes back to her father's house to spend the night, she begs Ross to stay with her. In fact, she begs Ross to sleep with her, but he resists, claiming that one of them has to be rational about it. Rachel is more than a little disgruntled to be refused like that, and she and Ross make a pact that they'll never sleep together again. After mulling that over for a few days, though, they each come to the conclusion that that's going to be impossible to keep, and Rachel assures Ross that with them, "it's never off the table."

Joey remains determined to get the part in the French play, and since Phoebe has given up on him, he's gotten some French tapes. When the tapes give him recorded feedback like, "Good job!" he takes it at face value and believes that he's really learning French, even though he hasn't progressed at all. He goes to his interview, confident as ever, and begins making up gibberish sounds for his reading. The director is ready to throw him out, but Phoebe arrives and has a discussion — in French — with the director. She explains that Joey is her little brother and he's retarded. She asks the director just to humor Joey, and he agrees, telling Joey that while his French was great, they've decided to go with someone else for the part.

After Monica and Erica go out for lunch on the last day of her visit, Monica reveals to Chandler that she knows who the father of the baby is: it's the football-playing college student. Chandler asks how she can be so certain, and Monica says that she learned over lunch that the stuff Erica engaged in with the shovel guy isn't the kind of thing that can make a baby. Chandler is relieved that there's no father-killing blood in his baby's lineage.