Nazis

LORELAI: Germany. Is Dad’s firm insuring Nazis now?
EMILY: Your father doesn’t know any Nazis.

The National Socialist German Worker’s Party was a far-right political party active in Germany between 1923 and 1945, notorious for their belief in an “Aryan Master Race”, and the hideous consequences of that when they came to power.

They were abolished at the end of World War II, and there are strict laws in Germany about displaying Nazi symbols and using hate speech. Despite Lorelai’s (not very funny or clever) joke, there are far more Nazis in the United States, where laws exist to protect them, than in Germany.

Dinner with Emily

The episode opens with Lorelai and Rory having Friday Night Dinner with Emily; Richard is on a business trip to Germany. It is actually the evening of the same Friday that Rory missed the Shakespeare test in the previous episode, The Deer Hunters.

Later episodes will show Emily having a direct hotline to Chilton gossip through her friendship with Bitty Charleston, the headmaster’s wife. Yet Emily never brings up the fact that both Rory and Lorelai have thrown massive fits in the headmaster’s office that very day, and Rory was even sent home from school because of her behaviour.

Maybe her friendship with Bitty is not yet as close as it will be later, or Headmaster Charleston was unusually discreet about being yelled at by two Gilmores. For whatever reason, Lorelai seems to get away with it completely, and she has a rare escape from being chastised severely by her mother.

Cinnamon’s Wake

The episode title is a play on Finnegan’s Wake, the 1939 comic avant-garde novel by Irish author James Joyce. Experimental in style, it is considered one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Upon publication, critics were baffled and hostile, but it is now thought to be Joyce’s literary masterpiece.

The title of the novel comes from a 19^th century comical Irish ballad, about a man named Finnegan who falls from a ladder and is thought to be dead, but comes back to life at his own wake. Death and resurrection is a central theme of the novel as well. No such luck for Cinnamon, however.