Footnotes to the TV series
EMILY: As a child, your mother had an unusually large head.
LORELAI: The best thing about it was that she would tell me constantly. My first complete sentence was, “Big head want dolly.”
In the previous episode we learned that Paris’ mother believes her daughter’s head is unusually small, especially when she wears pink. A sure sign of a crazy mother in Gilmore Girls is that she believes her daughter’s head is the wrong size. No wonder Paris feels close to Lorelai.
EMILY: I don’t have any baby pictures of your mother.
RORY: How could you not have any baby pictures of Mom?
EMILY: Because when your mother was seven, I came downstairs and found her burning all of her baby pictures.
Emily already showed Rory a baby picture of Lorelai in the family photo album when she was staying at her grandparents’ house in Love and War and Snow, so this is a retcon.
The title is a reference to the children’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, commonly shortened to Alice in Wonderland; both book and author have been previously discussed.
Just as Alice finds herself transported to a strange world where nothing makes sense, Emily’s visit to Stars Hollow will likewise be a voyage into the unknown, the strange, and the frankly disturbing. Down the rabbit hole, indeed!
LORELAI: You lost out on $250,000 today.
RORY: What?!
Trix never said how much she was giving Rory in the trust fund, so I’m not sure where Lorelai got the figure of $250 000 from. Maybe Trix told her offscreen, or Lorelai has just added up everything Rory needs for her education and decided it must be around that amount. I guess we have to accept the figure as something Lorelai knows and we don’t.
Trix originally intended the trust fund to be something Rory could access when she was twenty-five. It isn’t clear whether Rory is still getting that arrangement, or whether Trix was so angered that she decided not to give her any trust fund at all.
She did say that she now thinks “that trust fund” was a bad idea, sounding as if she had decided against any trust fund. However, as she was angry at Emily and Lorelai, it doesn’t seem fair to punish Rory for their behaviour (she specifically says she thinks Rory is mature enough to handle the money).
Trix seems to be leaving Hartford before consulting a lawyer, which looks bad, but she’s taking a train, which might mean that when she said “into town” she meant New York, which looks good.
TRIX: Raising your voice during high tea, whoever heard of such a thing? It’s like Fergie all over again.
Trix is referring to Sarah, Duchess of York (born Sarah Ferguson in 1959), a British royal known as “Fergie” by the British press. She married Prince Andrew in 1986; after having two daughters, they separated in 1992, and divorced in 1996.
Fergie’s demeanour as a royal was always very casual, and she could be loud and exuberant socially, which people either found a breath of fresh air, or like Trix, rather vulgar. We can see from her comment that Trix has been in high society in London, although the fact that she calls the duchess by her “press name” betrays that she doesn’t really know her at all.
TRIX: My train leaves tonight and I have a little last minute packing to do.
What train? Surely Trix will need Hartford airport to fly to London, not a train? Or is she seeing her lawyers in New York before flying back to London from there?
The scenes at the tea shop were filmed at the cafeteria at Warner Bros studio, which isn’t open to the public.
LORELAI: She [Rory] was happy.
EMILY: Happy?
LORELAI: Yeah – she screamed, she did that air-lasso thing over her head.
Lorelai is referring to when people twirl an imaginary lasso over their head in celebration, like a cowboy saying, “Yee-ha!”. Sometimes incorporated into dance moves.
LORELAI: Rose tea. That’s funny. That’s not really tea, is it? It’s like rose petals in hot water. More like a bad floral arrangement.
Lorelai is clearly referring to rose petal tea, or rosebud tea, rather than rose-hip tea which is made from the fruit of the rose bush instead of its flowers. Despite her distaste for the idea, rose petal tea has many health benefits.
Paris finds out that not only does Tristan not want to date her again, even though their evening together seemed to go fairly well, but that it was Rory’s idea that he ask her out. She immediately throws a fit, accusing Rory of giving Paris her “cast offs”, so she’s obviously been quite aware of Tristan’s attraction to Rory.
Whenever Paris and Rory seemed to be becoming friends, something would happen to ruin it. Of course Rory could never do anything to hurt Paris, and would instantly forgive her whenever she hurt Rory, so the only way it could happen was for Paris to behave in a completely insane way, where she got angry over almost nothing, and would hold a grudge about it for an inordinate time.
PARIS: God, this is so weird. I can’t stop smiling.
RORY: Good, then it’s a good time to talk about our over-taxed peasants.
PARIS: Oh, let them eat cake.
Paris is referring to Marie Antoinette, the wife of King Louis XVI, and the last queen of France before the French Revolution.
“Let them eat cake” is a phrase popularly ascribed to Marie Antoinette upon being told the peasants were starving and had no bread to eat. The phrase supposedly demonstrates either an indifference to their plight, or a complete lack of understanding of it. It doesn’t fit with what we know of Marie Antoinette, who was quite concerned with the poor, and donated generously to charitable causes.
She almost certainly did not say it. It comes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782), where he mentions a “great princess” who once said it. Not only does he not name the princess, but that part of his autobiography covers the years when Marie Antoinette would have been a little girl in Austria. He may have invented the anecdote entirely.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 