Category: S3Ep9: A Deepfried Korean Thanksgiving

The Five Stages of Grieving

SOOKIE: Well, you caught me at a good time, ladies. I’ve already gone through the five stages of grieving. Denial, anger . . . I don’t remember these two, but they were served on the rocks with salt! Now, I’m just happily enscotched in acceptance.

The five stages of grief are said to be denial, anger, bargaining, anger, and acceptance. The model was popularised by Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying. Despite being commonly referenced in popular culture, there is no evidence for these stages, and the model has been considered outdated and unhelpful. Kübler-Ross later stated that the stages are not linear or predictable, and she regretted writing them in a way which was misunderstood.

Sookie references the Margarita cocktail, previously discussed, which is served on the rocks with salt around the rim. In her drunkenness, she says she is “enscotched” rather than “ensconced”, as if she has been drinking Scotch whiskey as well.

Dave Kisses Lane

LANE: Really? After all this – the marathon hymns, the weak punch, the crabby Koreans, you still wanna go out on a date with me?

[Dave nods, then kisses her] DAVE: I’ve gotta go . . . but I’m gonna call you tomorrow.

Lane and Dave puts into place what I assume to be another step in their plan when Lane says she needs to run after Dave to return his Bible. Did Dave really bring a Bible with him, and purposefully leave it behind, or did Lane prepare and plant the Bible in advance?

Either way, one or the other had the genius idea of having Dave inscribe the Bible: This Bible belongs to God, but is being used by Dave Rygalski. Mrs Kim reads this, and it immediately convinces her that Dave is a solid young Christian man, and allows Lane to go after him.

This episode is the one where Dave and Lane kiss for the first time, and begin dating (Rory kissed and began dating both Dean and Jess around Thanksgiving, too, and it was when Lorelai went on her first date with Max – November, it’s dating month on Gilmore Girls!).

Lane is so excited by what happened that when she pages Rory to tell her all about it, she can only write bible kiss bible, which Rory says is a great band name.

“You can’t let Rory have even one piece of our lives”

EMILY: You can’t even let Rory have one piece of our lives, even if it’s her choice. You hate us that much.

[Lorelai doesn’t respond. Emily walks back into the house]

Emily and Richard see Rory every Friday evening for dinner, and pay for Rory to attend a private school that’s close enough to their home for Rory to visit after school if she wants to. Rory has her own bedroom at Richard and Emily’s, and they threw her a lavish party for her sixteenth birthday. They have given her generous gifts, and Rory played golf with her grandfather one weekend, while going to a debutante ball at her grandmother’s request.

Granted, this all happened in the last two years – before that, they only saw Rory a few times a year. Also granted, Lorelai has been fairly reluctant about most of this contact, and has often submitted to it with bad grace. However, I don’t think it’s fair for Emily to say that Lorelai hasn’t let Rory share even one piece of her grandparents’ lives. They have regular contact, and Rory is actually quite close to Richard and Emily.

Lorelai’s flair for over-dramatising her problems clearly comes from Emily.

Lorelai Throws a Tantrum

It’s very hard to defend Lorelai in this episode. Although she was clearly blindsided by the news about Rory applying to Yale, and it must have stung to find this out along with strangers and bare acquaintances, she behaves horribly by throwing a very public tantrum at her parents’ dinner table in front of guests – and at Thanksgiving, no less.

She’s thirty-four, but once again, behaves like a petulant teenager, and also tosses around some false accusations that Rory has somehow been brainwashed into applying to Yale. This comes across as paranoid, and is pretty insulting to her daughter – she’s eighteen, and capable of making her own decisions.

“Where else did you apply?”

LORELAI: Where else did you apply? ….

RORY: Princeton . . . um, Yale.

LORELAI: Yale?

In the early 2000s, it was free to apply to up to three colleges, but after that you had to pay a small application fee for each one. Because of this, it was common to only make three applications, and it looks as if Rory applied to three universities: Harvard, Princeton (where her paternal grandfather went), and Yale (where her maternal grandfather went). She probably didn’t want to ask Lorelai for the money for further applications, knowing that she’d be upset about it, nor did she want to go behind her mother’s back and ask her grandparents for the money.

Lorelai acts as if applying to Yale is a complete shock, even though she knows Rory had an interview there, and she herself read a brochure about it, as if she was trying to get used to the idea. Apparently she needed a lot more time for it to sink in.

“You can’t just apply to one place”

DOUGLAS: You can’t just apply to one place.

NATALIE: Chilton wouldn’t allow that.

LORELAI: Is that true?

RORY: Pretty much.

Chilton would certainly not permit Rory to only apply to Harvard. It is staggering that Lorelai wouldn’t already know this – she did attend a private school, even if she never ended up applying to university. And even if she somehow didn’t know this from her school or her parents (surely Richard and Emily would have talked to her about college?), it’s something which she should have educated herself about if she wanted to help Rory get into Harvard.

It also seems very telling that Rory has never talked this over with Lorelai, but kept her college applications a secret from her mother. It seems that she was so nervous about how Lorelai would react that she never discussed it with her. Lorelai’s overreaction at dinner shows that she was right to be wary about it, but then again, Lorelai probably wouldn’t have overreacted so badly in public if Rory had talked about it with her first.