After school, Rory heads over to Dwight’s house without even taking off her suspiciously empty looking backpack. She turns on the sprinklers to water the lawn, lets herself in to water the African violets, and then goes outside again.
Unfortunately, she is unable to turn the sprinklers off again, and gets completely soaked. Luckily Stars Hollow is having several days of unseasonably warm sunny weather in late October! At least she won’t catch a chill. She quickly pages Dean, asking him to help her.
Dwight lives right across the street from Lorelai and Rory, yet this scene looks quite different from anything we’ve seen of the street before. Previously when we’ve caught glimpses of Lorelai and Rory’s neighbourhood, it seems very small town, almost semi-rural in character, with houses a fair distance apart and no front fences (there doesn’t even seem to be a fence separating Lorelai’s house from Babette’s). Suddenly it looks as if they live in white-picket suburbia with neat little lawns. It’s quite jarring.
Also, it feels off that when Rory comes out of Dwight’s house, which they live across the street from, Lorelai’s house is nowhere to be seen. This issue with the filming location might well jolt some viewers out of the illusion that Stars Hollow is a real, or even believable, place.
I rarely comment on these kinds of inconsequential technical goofs, but this is one that almost demands to be mentioned. When Dwight showed Lorelai how the sprinkler works, he said that you turn the spigot right to turn it on, and to the left to turn it off, while demonstrating. When Rory goes to water the lawn, she clearly turns it to left – but the water comes on, even though that was the way to turn it off. It’s odd that they make such a point of explaining how the spigot turns off and on, but there’s no effort to make sure the actors stick to that.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 