The One Where Underdog Gets Away. This is the first Thanksgiving episode in the series, and definitely one of the funniest because everything goes horribly wrong. The turkey burns because they get locked out of the apartment, Rachel tries to make it to her family skiing trip but misses her flight, Joey’s family won’t have him over because of the VD posters all over the city, and Chandler is still boycotting all the pilgrim holidays.
A life lesson that can be taken from this episode is: never give up. I mean it! No matter what challenges you might face in reaching your goals, never give up. This attitude can be displayed through Rachel in this episode. Her family always goes on a skiing trip to Vail, but since she is pursuing the whole independent thing, her father refuses to pay for her plane ticket. So she decides she will try really hard to make enough money to be able to go. She desperately tries to make a hundred dollars very quickly by waitressing, even though everyone knows that this is an impossible task, especially for Rachel since she is honestly a terrible waitress. But this doesn’t deter her in reaching her goal, until her work day is over and she has tried to do everything in her power to make the hundred bucks. Luckily she has some amazing friends who all pitch in some money to make sure she has enough to buy the plane ticket. In the end she isn’t able to catch the flight because they all get locked out of the apartment anyway, but this is still a good example of how you should never give up. You wouldn’t expect a character like Rachel to demonstrate this attitude, but that just goes to show that truly no one should ever give up!
The Squinting Observer 