Footnotes to the TV series
LUKE: What the hell was that?
LORELAI: That was episode one of Rory and Jess: The Early Years.
Compare to Lorelai saying a potential situation with her father was like Who’s The Boss, the later years.
This is Rory and Jess’ first encounter since Dean dumped Rory at the dance marathon. They are both too shy to say more than a few words to each other in front of Lorelai and Luke, which feels true to life.
LORELAI: Hey, unh, Luke, uh, we need a couple of donuts, and, uh, some of those extra legs Heather Mills is sending over to Croatia.
Heather Mills (born 1968), English former model, businesswoman, and activist. She came to public attention in 1993 when her left leg had to be amputated below the knee after a motorcycle accident. However, she continued to model while wearing a prosthetic limb.
Mills set up a trust which sent prosthetic limbs to people (mostly children) who had lost limbs stepping on landmines. Because she went through several prosthetic legs while her stump healed, she also had the idea of delivering discarded prosthetic limbs to amputees in Croatia, the first ones arriving in 1994. They weren’t really “extra legs”, and they weren’t always legs either.
She married rock star Paul McCartney in 2000. They divorced acrimoniously in 2008.
LORELAI: Because I’m the leader of the clan, the provider of the household, the alpha male, and the one whose feet just fell asleep so there’s absolutely no chance of movement.
In biology, a dominant high-ranking member of an animal social group is known as an alpha. Alpha male is used as a pseudoscientific slang term for a dominant male. It is has been sharply criticised by scientists as incorrect, and by others for perpetuating damaging stereotypes about masculinity. It has been in use since the early 1990s.
RORY: I never realized Luke’s was a hundred miles away.
LORELAI: We’re lucky it wasn’t snowing. It would’ve been The Donner Party all over again, but with slightly better hair.
The Donner Party, sometimes called The Donner-Reed Party (!!!!!), was a group of American pioneers who migrated to California from the Midwest in a wagon train. Delayed by a multitude of mishaps, they spent the winter of 1846–1847 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Some of the migrants resorted to cannibalism to survive, eating the bodies of those who had succumbed to starvation, sickness, and extreme cold.
Rescuers from California attempted to reach the migrants, but the first relief party did not arrive until the middle of February 1847, almost four months after the wagon train became trapped. Of the 87 members of the party, 48 survived the ordeal. Historians have described the episode as one of the most fascinating tragedies in California history and in the entire record of American westward migration.
This is the second reference the show makes to cannibalism during extreme survival in snowy mountains.
RORY: I feel jet-lagged.
LORELAI: You’ve been up twenty-four hours straight.
Um, no. The dance marathon began at 6 am on Saturday and finished at 6 am Sunday (earlier actually, as Kirk won some time before 6). It’s now Monday morning, so where did Sunday go? Everyone acts as if the marathon just finished an hour or so ago, but an entire day is missing from the timeline here. Maybe the whole town went into a collective coma after the marathon and they all lost a day.
The episode title goes back to the ancient Olympic Games, which were opened with the announcement “Let the games begin!”, first said in 776 BC. In this episode, the “games” refer to “mind games”.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 