The couple: Dr. Mike, awesome unconventional female doctor in nineteenth-century Colorado Springs, is getting married to mountain man, hatchet-thrower and all around stud Byron Sully. The ensuing event launches Dr. Mike into an identify crisis, Sully into a political fiasco, and the whole town into railroad-inspired fits of cosmopolitanism.

The premise: It’s a two-part episode, and because Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman episodes were already an hour long, they have space for quite a bit of wedding wackiness. Custer’s trying to hunt down the best man, the bride doesn’t want to change her name, one of the bridesmaids has an STD, and the wedding dress gets completely remade on the morning of the ceremony.

General Custer and the best man

The inevitable sequence of mishaps: To begin, Sully’s best man of choice, Cloud Dancing, doesn’t look likely to RSVP for the wedding because Custer just killed his wife and son, and he’s now wanted by the government (bummer). Dr. Mike has crazy forward-thinking ideas like not changing her name and making Sully also wear a wedding band, and he’s not really on board. In addition, the train is finally coming to Colorado Springs! When it arrives, it brings Dr. Mike’s overbearing mother, who is determined to do the whole wedding Boston-style, including a wedding dress that Dr. Mike hates. Dr. Mike’s mother rubs Sully the wrong way, and he immediately disappears into the wilderness in search of Cloud Dancing. Even though he has a bounty on his head, Cloud Dancing promises to be Sully’s best man, and they’re both immediately chased down by Custer, who takes Sully into custody. Custer abandons Sully in the mountains, leading the whole town to believe Sully ditched her, but he returns full of apology and vitriol toward Custer. Sully agrees to let Dr. Mike keep her name if he doesn’t have to wear a wedding ring.

On the morning of the wedding, Dr. Mike’s mother still insists on traditional and refuses to walk her down aisle, while Dr. Mike makes her bridesmaids re-construct her entire wedding dress so that it reflects both what her mother wants (a giant train) and what she wants (more lace, less flouncy top). It’s a good thing, too, because Sully forgoes the tux jacket for Cloud Dancing’s wedding tunic over black tuxedo pants – an unusual look. Custer shows up for the wedding, as does Cloud Dancing, and the well-meaning townspeople “accidentally” knock poor Custer unconscious. Dr. Mike’s mother walks her down the aisle at the last minute, Cloud Dancing makes a hasty getaway after the ceremony, and the whole thing comes off beautifully in the end.

All that, plus Brian feels left out because he’s too young to be a groomsman, but too old to be a ring bearer, AND a whole C plot dealing with Dr. Mike’s sister, whose evil ex-husband gave her an STD.

The clichés: Dr. Mike has to ask Dorothy about “falling off a log” because she’s never done it (which is astonishing given that she’s nearly forty at this point), bountiful restrictive etiquette rules, bride who doesn’t want that much fuss, pre-wedding spats, overbearing mother, groom says goodbye to his dead first wife by cutting off the Jedi Padawan-like memorial braid he’s been sporting for the last decade or so (okay, not really a cliché, but it should be!).

The bridesmaid dresses: Not that bad, considering the nineteenth-century possibilities.

And in the end…: Dr. Mike and Sully roll away from town on perhaps the most awesome honeymoon vehicle ever seen: a railroad car made over as a Wild West/Victorian love nest. Seriously, I am freakin’ jealous of this thing. It must have been satisfactory, because the episode ends with some surprisingly sexy undoing-the-corset shots, and a final fade-to-black on a gaslamp that’s rocking back and forth – presumably rocking to the motion of the train, but it’s clearly meant to be evocative. “Sully!” she says. “It isn’t even dark yet!” “It’s getting darker and darker,” he says, slowly pulling down the shades. Oooooh yeah.

The verdict: LOVE IT. I love the random sister with the STD, I love recasting General Custer as a wedding crasher, I love that Dr. Mike keeps her name, and I really love how hot for each other Sully and Dr. Mike are. Honestly, for all the moralizing and politically correct allegorizing the show does, it lets its protagonists get quite steamy, and it’s hard to dislike such a strange, obviously sexual pairing.

The couple: Liz Danes and TJ

The premise: Luke’s crazy sister Liz marries her fourth husband TJ in a RenFaire-themed event that serves as a backdrop for romantic developments in both Lorelai and Rory’s lives.

The inevitable sequence of mishaps: Liz rips her dress before the wedding, but this episode is really all about the wedding ceremony itself, which is not so much a sequence of mishaps as it is a sequence of incredibly awesome Renaissance Faire hilarity. A fool in motley does flips down the aisle, the music is provided by a viol de gamba and recorder-playing band of troubadours, and the minister is a guy with a guitar who sings amazingly anachronistic lyrics about childhood games. I have to print the lyrics, because it’s just that great:

“As kids we shared our toys

With all the girls and boys

Barrel of Monkeys, your Battleship sunk me,

Please recall the joys

Willow, Clue, Mousetrap

Bash, and Spyrograph

Kaleidoscope spinning, Yahtzee I’m winning

Think of how we laughed

But today we share our love

(Today we share our love)

For love is the greatest toy around

Around, around”

The clichés: Randy bridesmaids, bizarre themed event, dramatics at the reception

The bridesmaid dresses: I cannot believe more people don’t consider this as a solid bridesmaid fashion option.

Wench bridesmaids! Plus, troubadours!

The first dance song: “Reflecting Light” by Sam Phillips

And in the end…: Liz and TJ really make a perfect couple. TJ supports Liz’s wacky hippy tendencies, and Liz loves TJ’s doopy innocence. TJ spends the majority of the episode extolling the virtues of wearing tights, and the whole thing comes off with remarkably few hitches.

The verdict: Like Ross and Emily’s wedding on Friends, weddings on Gilmore Girls are always more of a showcase for the main characters than for the bride and groom, and from that perspective, this one does quite well. After some seriously poor decisions about drinking with strangers, Rory finally reaches a showdown between Jess and Dean that’s been brewing for years, and Lorelai’s relationship with Luke finally (finally!) gets a little bit of a kick start when they dance together at the wedding. But even though this wedding was more of a B-plot than the main event, the wackadoo RenFaire theme and genuine sweetness between the bride and the groom carry the episode. As Liz says before she walks down the aisle, “I don’t want to screw up this marriage even more than I want some pot, that’s how serious I am.” Aww.

The premise: Worf wants to get married on the Klingon home world after the Dominion War ends, but Dax convinces him to do it in Quark’s bar on DS9. Worf and Dax gear up for a traditional Klingon wedding, but the matriarch of the House of Martok opposes the marriage.

Apparently Klingon rituals require a great deal of upper body strength

The inevitable sequence of mishaps: While Worf goes on his four day long bachelor party with Sisko, Martok, Bashir, and O’Brien, House of Martok matriarch Sirella judges Dax’s worthiness as a potential wife for Worf. As Dax isn’t a Klingon, Sirella finds her completely unsuitable. The bachelor party turns out to be incredibly uncomfortable, involving six trials on the path to Kal’Hyah – deprivation, blood, pain, sacrifice, anguish and death. During Dax’s bachelorette party, Sirella shows up and demands that Dax perform a ritual. Dax refuses, she and Sirella come to blows, and then Worf insists that Dax beg Sirella’s forgiveness. Of course Dax won’t do that, and she tells a depressed Worf that she won’t participate in his traditional Klingon wedding, whereupon he calls the whole thing off. Finally, Martok convinces Worf to apologize to Dax, and Sisko convinces Dax to apologize to Sirella, so the wedding goes ahead.

Sad Worf is sad, and Sirella, undesirable mother-in-law

The clichés: Judgmental and demanding mother-in-law, obsession with details, unexpected cultural rituals, crazy bachelor party, briefly cancelled wedding, blood rituals (okay, for a Klingon it’s cliché).

The bridesmaid dresses: Klingon weddings don’t have bridesmaids, but they do have men who symbolically attack the newly married couple with clubs immediately after the ceremony. So, you know, basically the same thing.

Klingon bridesmaids

And in the end…: Happily, Sirella accepts Dax into the House of Martok and Worf is able to have the Klingon wedding of his dreams.

Awwww

The verdict: The strange thing about this episode is that while the entire wedding rests on several crucial apologies (Worf must apologize to Dax for being intolerant, Dax must apologize to Sirella for being insufficiently humble), neither of those apologies happen on screen. The big emotional payoff for each character is when someone else convinces them that apologies are in order, and then completely skips over whatever Dax actually says to Sirella to gain acceptance. Much as I enjoy the subsequent Klingon ceremony, (bride and groom ceremonially attack each other, two Klingon hearts beat as one, gods tremble, etc. etc.), I feel like the episode misses something important in skipping those apologies. Realizing you should say you’re sorry is the easy part – actually saying it is usually much harder. In any event, Worf and Jadzia Dax’s marriage goes very well until Jadzia is killed by Gul Dukat and another Trill joins the Dax symbiont. Then things get understandably awkward for a while.

The couple: Ross Geller and Emily Waltham. After Ross’s disastrous marriage to his ex-wife Susan (now out of the closet), he hopes to move forward with his life by marrying Emily.

Ross and Emily and their eerie, crypt-like ceremony site

The premise: Doomed wedding combined with classic sitcom vacation episode. Rachel suddenly realizes she can’t let Ross marry another woman, and their friends have hilarious clichéd adventures in Jolly Old England. Monica and Chandler sleep together for the first time.

The inevitable sequence of mishaps: The wedding ceremony location gets torn down, squabbles ensue and Emily wants to cancel the wedding. After some discussion, Emily agrees to hold the wedding in the partially destroyed building anyway, which makes the whole thing look like a funeral service held during the Blitz, but to each her own. Emily’s parents try to get Ross’s parents to pay for home renovations by calling them wedding expenses, and Ross has to broker a contract between them. Meanwhile! Rachel realizes that she loves Ross and hops on a plane to try to catch him before the wedding begins. She arrives in time, but decides to let the wedding go forward without saying anything. Everything looks like it’ll work out until they get to the vows, where instead of Emily’s name, Ross says “I, Ross, take thee Rachel.” The minister asks whether he should continue, and – cliffhanger!

The clichés: We actually get double the clichés thanks to the potent wedding/vacation special combo. Sequence of wedding vendor catastrophes (changed menu, missing cellist), acceptance of alternate wedding plan, fighting amongst the in-laws, groomsmen hooks up with bridesmaid, things go awry at the last possible moment. Absurd tourism, homesickness, wacky guest stars, mockery of foreign customs, vacation hook-up.

The special guests: Richard Branson as a street vendor! Hugh Laurie as the annoyed guy on Rachel’s flight! Plus, a completely awesome Jennifer Saunders as Emily’s mother.

The first dance song: Alas, it never got that far.

The bridesmaid dresses: Things could be much worse.

And in the end….: Obviously, this marriage was not to be. Although Ross and Emily are technically married at the end, the marriage is swiftly annulled and Ross’s divorce count rises.

The verdict: While the wedding itself may not have ended well, this episode is probably most important for being the inciting force behind Chandler and Monica’s relationship, which later leads to one of the other major Friends weddings. Even if you didn’t know that Ross and Emily’s marriage would be doomed, the basic set-up of this episode (another typical two-parter) should have been enough to tip you off. The focus is clearly not on the wedding or the couple – stitching the wedding episode together with a vacation episode is already enough of a distraction from what should have been the main event. By the time you see Chandler and Monica sleep together, it’s clear that this wedding is going to be a sideshow for other relationships (Ross and Rachel, Chandler and Monica) rather than an end in itself.

The couple: Rebecca Donaldson, co-anchor of Wake Up, San Francisco, and Jesse Katsopolis, rock singer and Elvis fanatic, go for the full on formal affair in an old church in San Francisco, followed up by a reception at Danny Tanner’s townhouse.

The premise: Becky’s father informs motorcycle-loving Uncle Jesse that his days as a wild rock star are now over, and as a last hurrah, Jesse forces Uncle Joey to take him sky diving the morning before the wedding. Meanwhile, DJ and Stephanie film a “The Making of a Wedding” tape as a gift for the bride and groom, and Michelle is grossed out by the ring bearer until she sees him in his tiny tux.

Jesse goes sky diving, falls into tomato country

The inevitable sequence of mishaps: Frankly, if you want to go sky diving the morning before your wedding, you should probably leave more than three hours ahead of time. Jesse is already running late when his parachute gets stuck in a tree in “tomato country,” where he is arrested for trying to steal a tomato truck, and then Becky decides to drive up to “tomato country” to bail him out. As a resident of the Bay Area, I have yet to encounter this magical, tomato-loving place, but when I find it, I’ll let you know. So Becky hops in her dad’s car completely decked out in her wedding dress and enormous dangly headgear and manages to get Jesse sprung from Tomato Country County Jail, only to discover her dad’s car has been towed. They then hitch a ride with a convenient traveling gospel choir, who cheerfully follow them into a church to provide backup for Uncle Jesse’s serenade.

Becky is not pleased to discover that Jesse is going to make her wear that crazy thing for even longer, thanks to his tardiness.

The clichés: Over-protective father of the bride, cold feet, crippling lateness, bride doing unusual things in her wedding dress (running into a jail, driving a school bus), unnecessarily demonstrative kiss, cake smashing.

The first dance song: “Jail House Rock,” sung by Uncle Jesse while he was also dancing. That man was talented.

The bridesmaid dresses: FEAST YOUR EYES

Oh yes.

And in the end…: Success! Jesse and Becky hop on the motorcycle and drive off into the distance, hopefully not too far because it’s hard to fit much luggage on a motorcycle.

The verdict: This is pretty standard fare for a TV wedding, beginning with the cheerfully nonthreatening comedy of errors, and going right down to the classic two-parter episode format. Without a doubt, though, my favorite thing about this whole episode is Becky’s role in the craziness. She’s definitely angry at Jesse for being stupid enough to go sky diving three hours before the ceremony, but not only does she barely even freak out, she insists on driving up to the jail herself. Even better, when they catch a ride back to the city with the gospel choir, she starts to give the driver directions, and then just hops into the drivers’ seat herself. It’s an unusual and pleasant image of a TV bride – she’s disappointed and upset, but she’s not so attached to the magical preciousness of the day that she’s above marching into a jail cell to bail out her fiancee. Not too shabby, Full House.