The Dark Phoebe Theory That Changes Everything About Friends

The first season of "Friends" picks up roughly a decade after Phoebe's mother's death, and at this point, she appears to be very free-spirited and trying to steer clear of any negative energy. Over time, however, we discover that Phoebe is dealing with some real emotional weight from her past and remains shaken by the fact that her mom died by suicide and left her with many, many questions.

Through much effort, Phoebe does manage to clear up some of this confusion. She meets her birth mother Phoebe Abbott (Teri Garr), who had the twins with Frank (Bob Balaban) and let Lily raise them as her own, after the three were part of a romantic throuple in their youth. Phoebe also forms a close-knit relationship with her half-brother Frank Jr. (Giovanni Ribisi), even serving as a surrogate for his triplets, and she gets to confront her estranged father at last. She also learns from Ursula that their mother may have left a final note for them — although she no longer possesses it and cannot recite its message from memory.

Otherwise, Phoebe only seems to really know that her mother was a drug dealer of some kind, they lived on a barge at some point, and she had been remarried to her stepfather before he went to prison. Though Phoebe speaks well of her stepdad, he is known to have some violent tendencies (like losing his furlough privileges to attend her wedding because he stabbed someone named "Iceman" in the exercise yard). And while she never connected her stepdad to her mother's death, some fans think he might have had something to do with it based on a few key context clues.