Friends: Every Season Finale Ranked Worst To Best

Season five's The One In Vegas was an exemplary effort from Friends' writers in making the sitcom work outside of its traditional setting.

Centred around the gang heading to Las Vegas to surprise Joey, who's been secretly working at Caesar's Palace after his movie got cancelled, Monica and Chandler are celebrating their anniversary, thwarted by Phoebe accidentally blurting that Monica had gone for lunch with Richard. This causes the couple to fight, eventually make up, and agree to get married if they roll a hard eight, which they do.

Thus, they decide to elope, but they choose not to after seeing Ross and Rachel doing the same thing. It was the sort of cliffhanger we'd come to expect from Friends by that stage, and was built to perfectly through not only Chandler and Monica's arc during the two-part finale, but also that of Ross and Rachel's.

Alone in her apartment before the flight to Vegas, Rachel strutted about naked, with Ross having a clear view from his apartment, taking the notion as a sexual invitation. This then created tension between the pair, with Ross drawing on Rachel's face with a permanent marker and Rachel counteracting this by raiding Ross' mini-bar.

The whole story of Joey finding his identical hand twin, though iconic, struggled to fit naturally with these larger stories, as did Phoebe's struggles with a lurker at the coin machines.