Category: S1Ep15: Christopher Returns

Last Christmas

LORELAI: Yeah. I mean, I have not seen this man since last Christmas, right. We hear from him maybe once a week – maybe.

Lorelai confirms that she and Rory saw Christopher last Christmas, raising the question of where they met. Christopher has never been to Stars Hollow before, and Richard and Emily usually spend Christmas out of town.

Lorelai also confirms our suspicions that Christopher’s “weekly phone call” isn’t very regular and it’s now “maybe once a week”.

Dickens novel

SOOKIE: You – get in here and tell me the happenings at home.
LORELAI: I’m assuming you mean “did we get our toaster fixed” and no, it’s been cold Pop-Tarts for a week, it’s like a damn Dickens novel.

A reference to the classic 19th century novelist Charles Dickens, earlier discussed. Several of his novels focus on characters who suffer in Victorian-era poverty, such as Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit, and Hard Times. Indeed, to say a situation is “Dickensian” means that it is squalid, grim, and impoverished.

Pop-Tarts

SOOKIE: You – get in here and tell me the happenings at home.
LORELAI: I’m assuming you mean “did we get our toaster fixed” and no, it’s been cold Pop-Tarts for a week, it’s like a damn Dickens novel.

Pop-Tarts are convenience food pastries, introduced by the Kellogg Company in 1964. Pop-Tarts are thin, retangular pieces of pastry sealed with a sugary, flavoured filling, often with frosting (icing) on the outside.

They are already cooked, so you can eat them cold, as Lorelai and Rory have been doing, without ill-effect, but are designed to be warmed in a toaster or a microwave. Why the Gilmores haven’t been heating theirs in the microwave is a mystery. Presumably they prefer to eat them cold rather than microwaved.

Pop-Tarts are Lorelai and Rory’s go-to breakfast when they eat at home, so of course they are a nutritional nightmare – high in calories (at least 200 per Pop-Tart), low in nutrients, and loaded with sugar. Just two Pop-Tarts (a standard serve) contain all of the recommended daily sugar allowance.

Lorelai and Rory are hardly unusual though: Pop-Tarts are Kellogg’s most popular brand in the United States, and sales have continued to rise every year for more than thirty years.

’86 Suzuki

DEAN: I got an ’86 Suzuki.
CHRISTOPHER: Nice!

Suzuki is a Japanese company which makes a variety of vehicles, including motorcycles. The motorycles they released during the 1980s were smaller and lighter models, designed to appeal to the American market, but with still quite powerful engines for their size.

This is the final confirmation that Dean definitely does have a motorcycle, as Lorelai intuitively knew from the beginning, despite Dean’s protestations. It seems that the Gilmore girls really do love a man on a motorbike.

Berkeley

DEAN: So do you live in the area?
CHRISTOPHER: No, I had some time so I rode my bike out from Berkeley.

Berkeley is a city on the shores of San Francisco Bay. It’s known for being socially liberal, and famous as the location of the oldest campus of the University of California. It’s the kind of relaxed, student-y, hipster-ish place where Christopher could easily re-invent (or re-market) himself, and the rents weren’t as high in the early 2000s as they are now.

Alfalfa

LUKE: Doesn’t even resemble clever [Kirk’s heckling].
KIRK: I’m dumbing it down for you, Alfalfa.

Alfalfa was a character from the Hal Roach’s Rascals short comedy films, made from 1922 to 1944, popularly known as the Our Gang films, after the first short in the series. The stories are about a group of poor children, and their adventures around their neighbourhood. The films were notable for showing children acting naturally, and ground-beaking for showing black and white children playing together as equals.

Alfalfa, played by Carl Switzer, was one of the most popular characters from the 1935-1940 era, eventually going from sidekick to lead character. His romance with a cute spunky little girl named Darla, played by Darla Hood, was an an ongoing source of comedy in the films. Kirk may identify Luke with Alfalfa because of his obvious romantic interest in Lorelai.

Packaged as The Little Rascals, the shorts were syndicated to television in the 1950s, shown on cable in the 1980s, and from 2001-2003 were on the American Movie Classics network. During the 1980s, The Little Rascals became an animated television show that was part of the Saturday morning cartoon line-up with Julie McWhirter voicing Alfalfa.

In 1994, a feature film of The Little Rascals was released, directed by Penelope Spheeris, and with Bug Hall in the role of Alfalfa Switzer. The movie has a heavy focus on Alfalfa’s romance with Darla (Brittany Ashton Holmes).

Zero and Zero

LUKE: Don’t you have anything better to do with your Saturdays?
KIRK: What can I say, I’m addicted to comedy. [to Rory and Christopher] Half an hour they been playing and it’s tied zero – zero. [louder] Hey, if you ever take this show on the road I got a name for you, Zero and Zero. Dean Zero and Luke Zero – get it?

Kirk seems to playing with the concept of double acts in comedy often being billed by their surnames, such as Abbot and Costello, or Laurel and Hardy [pictured]. Kirk is saying both Dean and Luke are a double act of “zeros”, and therefore a pair of losers.

Softball

Rory asks her dad to accompany her to a local softball game that Dean is playing in. Luke is a player on the opposing side, meaning that Stars Hollow has at least two softball teams! This episode provides another inside-joke by alluding to Scott Patterson’s professional baseball career – he was a baseball pitcher in real life, and also the pitcher at the softball game in this episode.

Softball is a variant of baseball, played with a larger bat on a smaller field. It was invented in Chicago in 1887, giving it a connection with Dean’s home town. It’s a popular sport for amateurs as it can be adapted to almost any skill level, and the rules can be changed to suit the circumstances (in Stars Hollow, the rules are almost Wonderland-level – they stop when they get tired, and the first team to get even one run wins). The softball season usually begins in February, so this game is relatively early in the season.

Pitcher: During the baseball scene Luke is the “pitcher”, meaning he is is the one pitching balls to the opposing team’s batter.

On-deck circle: When the softball scene opens, Dean is standing in the “on-deck circle”, the area where a player stands when they are next up to bat.

Strikeout: The batter ahead of Dean “strikes out” by failing to hit the ball three times in a row. Luke notes that he is the second member of Dean’s team to do so.

Fielders: The players on the non-batting team who aren’t pitching spread out in order to catch the ball, thus potentially catching the batter “out”. When it is Dean’s turn to bat, he suggests that Luke sends his “boys a little further into the field”. He means that he is planning to hit the ball a long way, so that the fielders on Luke’s team had better get further out onto the field.

Whiffing: Luke suggests that the only reason his fielders would need to get further out is so they can get a better view of Dean “whiffing”. In baseball and softball, whiffing means to swing at the ball without hitting it – in other words, to strike out.

The softball scenes were filmed at the Hartunian Baseball Field in the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area in Encino, Los Angeles. You can see some very un-Stars Hollow-like homes overlooking the field, which are in Encino Village.

“I wanna be around more”

CHRISTOPHER: I haven’t been enough a part of Rory’s life. So I wanna be around more, to be a pal she can depend on. I mean I’m not crazy, I know there’s already a life going on here and God knows she doesn’t need anyone besides you but … if you give me a chance …
LORELAI: I’ve always had the door to Rory open for you.

Christopher is making a massive understatement that he hasn’t been enough a part in Rory’s life – he’s barely been in her life at all, and only on his own terms.

Although Christopher agrees that Lorelai has “always had the door open” open to him, previous and future events make us doubt how much of that is really true. Lorelai is intensely jealous of anyone else developing a close relationship with Rory, and has even tried to stop her getting to know her grandparents better.

When Christopher makes a real attempt to get closer to Rory in a future season, Lorelai does everything she can to block it. It would have been even easier when Rory was a baby or a small child, and lacked the ability to see what Lorelai was up to.