Category: S1Ep2: The Lorelais First Day at Chilton

The Shining

LORELAI: Well, we like our internet slow, okay? We can turn it on, walk around, do a little dance, make a sandwich. With DSL, there’s no dancing, no walking, and we’d starve. It’d be all work and no play. Have you not seen The Shining, Mom?

The Shining is a 1980 horror film directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel of the same name. The film is about an aspiring writer named Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), who accepts a job as caretaker at a spooky old hotel. Supernatural forces conspire to send his sanity into a tailspin, placing his family in danger.

At one point, Jack’s wife (Shelley Duvall) looks at what her husband has been writing on the typewriter, and finds he has just been typing All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy over and over, filling hundreds of sheets of paper in the process. (The phrase is a traditional English proverb about work-life balance).

Although initially gaining a lukewarm reception from critics, The Shining is now regarded as one of the greatest horror films ever made.

“You’re not buying us a DSL”

In the scene where Lorelai confronts Emily at the salon, we learn that Lorelai and Rory have dial-up internet access, and that Lorelai is turning down the offer of free broadband from her mother, even though that would be of genuine help to Rory’s education. To maintain her independence from Emily, Lorelai is willing to disadvantage her own daughter.

In the Pilot, when Lorelai and Rory are arguing about going to Chilton, Lorelai claims that their household has always been a democracy, with Rory getting an equal say in all decisions, until she decided to use the “mom card” and force her daughter to attend private school. Yet in this instance, Rory is never even told about the offer of free broadband so that she can put forward her views. We may wonder how many other times Rory remained unaware that a choice was being made on her behalf.

History class

Rory’s class is studying the German theologican Martin Luther (1483-1546), who was a seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation. The teacher quotes from Luther’s tract To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520), advocating a break away from the Catholic church.

Rory is able to correctly identify both the author and the year from the quote, and get her answers in before Paris can. This shows that Paris is already challenging her to do better in class.

Incidentally it demonstrates that Paris’ paranoia about Rory has actually helped to create the situation she feared – if Paris had not been so antagonistic, the shy Rory would no doubt have remained quietly in the background on her first day at a new school.

Turtle

Emily tells the internet access company that Lorelai keeps her spare key in a frog, but it’s actually a turtle. The fact that Emily makes an error was probably meant to suggest that she rarely visited Lorelai and didn’t pay much attention to the details of her life. Later on it turns out that Emily has never visited Lorelai’s house at this point, which makes you wonder how she knew about the spare key holder at all. Possibly Lorelai had mentioned it to her at some time, although it’s difficult to imagine the circumstances in which this would have occurred.

The fact that Emily gives the internet company permission to break into her daughter’s house while she is away from home speaks volumes about her high-handed attitude. It’s apt for the scene that Lorelai keeps the spare key to the house in a turtle, considering that she wants her internet to remain slow.

Mick (Sean Gunn)

The man who comes to install the DSL line at Lorelai’s house has a name tag that says Mick, but Sean Gunn will later play regular Stars Hollow character Kirk Gleason. The truth is that Kirk did not yet exist in the scriptwriter’s (Amy Sherman-Palladino’s) mind, but some fans have argued that it isn’t out of character for Kirk to have simply taken someone’s name tag and pretended he always worked for the internet company.

“It’s good that you turned him down”

Luke is pleased when Lorelai tells him she turned down the offer of a date from Ian Jack (Nick Chinlund), a divorced father she ran into at Chilton. This is the first time we see that Luke is relieved whenever Lorelai rejects someone else, and that Lorelai rather enjoys that. With Lorelai now attracting two random guys in the first two episodes, it’s clear she’s something of a man-magnet.

Bizarro

LORELAI: God, this has been one hectic, bizarro day for me.

Bizarro is a supervillain character in DC Comics who is the mirror image of superhero Superman. A Kryptonian clone from Bizarro World, Bizarro is a flawed imitation of Superman who does everything the exact opposite. For example, he has freeze vision instead of Superman’s heat vision, and in his view, bad is good. First appearing in Superboy #8 in 1958, the popular character has featured in comics, TV, film, and video games.

New Harry Potter

[Miss Patty is standing at the doorway of her dance studio. Inside, a class of girls walks around with books on their heads.]
MISS PATTY: Now, walk smooth. That’s the new Harry Potter on your heads. If they should drop, Harry will die, and there won’t be any more books.

Harry Potter is a teenage wizard in a series of fantasy books by British author J.K. Rowling (born 1965), the most successful book series in publishing history. The first in the series was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the US), published in 1997.

The “new” Harry Potter book the girls are carrying is Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, published in July 2000 – the US children’s edition is pictured. Harry Potter fans may be somewhat amused by Miss Patty’s threat.