The Reverend and the Rabbi

RABBI BARANS: Reverend Skinner and I share the church for services, Taylor, so if there’s gonna be a protest, it’ll be a joint decision.

Reverend Skinner and Rabbi David Barans are introduced in this episode, and we also learn that the church is shared between the (vaguely unnamed) Protestant and Jewish congregations, while the reverend and the rabbi are firm friends.

The town has apparently gone through Reverend Nicholls, and the reverend who buried Louie Danes, and Reverend Melmin (who is Seventh Day Adventist), and now here’s Reverend Archie Skinner. I’m not sure if Stars Hollow has a lot of reverends, or a high turnover of them.

Reverend Skinner is played by Jim Jansen, who had roles on numerous TV shows. He has played a reverend several times, including on Nikki, Melrose Place, and Step by Step. He previously played someone named Skinner in Just the Ten of Us.

Rabbit Barans is played by Alan Blumenfeld, who has a similarly extensive CV. He played a rabbi again in the 2017 film Pinsky. Like Jim Jansen, he has appeared in Matlock, Hangin’ With Mr Cooper, Murphy Brown, Saved by the Bell: The New Class, Diagnosis Murder, and Felicity.

Blue Crush

[Rory, soaked from the sprinklers, runs down the street and bumps into Jess]

RORY: Get out of my way.

JESS: I like the new look. It’s very Blue Crush.

Blue Crush, a 2002 sports film directed by John Stockwell, based on Susan Orlean’s 1998 article “Life’s Swell” in Outside magazine. It stars Kate Bosworth, Michelle Rodriguez, and Sanoe Lake as three friends in Hawaii who share a passion for surfing. The film was a commercial success, and received modestly positive reviews.

Blue Crush came out in August 2002, so Jess may have seen it over the summer (it feels like it could have been Shane’s choice of film?). Note this is another mention of Lauren Graham’s home state of Hawaii! The film’s soundtrack includes a song by Jamaican DJ Beenie Man (stage name of Anthony Davis) – a possible inspiration for the name Beenie Morrison?

Jess is saying that Rory is so wet she looks as if she has been surfing (and she’s wearing a blue uniform). The choice of the title is provocative – “blue” like erotica, a “blue movie”, plus the word “crush”. It sounds as if he is saying Rory looks like his “sexy crush”!

Rory Can’t Turn Off the Sprinklers

After school, Rory heads over to Dwight’s house without even taking off her suspiciously empty looking backpack. She turns on the sprinklers to water the lawn, lets herself in to water the African violets, and then goes outside again.

Unfortunately, she is unable to turn the sprinklers off again, and gets completely soaked. Luckily Stars Hollow is having several days of unseasonably warm sunny weather in late October! At least she won’t catch a chill. She quickly pages Dean, asking him to help her.

Dwight lives right across the street from Lorelai and Rory, yet this scene looks quite different from anything we’ve seen of the street before. Previously when we’ve caught glimpses of Lorelai and Rory’s neighbourhood, it seems very small town, almost semi-rural in character, with houses a fair distance apart and no front fences (there doesn’t even seem to be a fence separating Lorelai’s house from Babette’s). Suddenly it looks as if they live in white-picket suburbia with neat little lawns. It’s quite jarring.

Also, it feels off that when Rory comes out of Dwight’s house, which they live across the street from, Lorelai’s house is nowhere to be seen. This issue with the filming location might well jolt some viewers out of the illusion that Stars Hollow is a real, or even believable, place.

I rarely comment on these kinds of inconsequential technical goofs, but this is one that almost demands to be mentioned. When Dwight showed Lorelai how the sprinkler works, he said that you turn the spigot right to turn it on, and to the left to turn it off, while demonstrating. When Rory goes to water the lawn, she clearly turns it to left – but the water comes on, even though that was the way to turn it off. It’s odd that they make such a point of explaining how the spigot turns off and on, but there’s no effort to make sure the actors stick to that.

Dwight’s Wife

DORIS: [on answering machine] Dwight, hi it’s Doris. Doris, your wife, remember me? The woman who was asleep in bed when you snuck out the window like a spineless little worm!

It turns out that Dwight isn’t in fact separated or divorced from his wife, but climbed out of the window while she was asleep. As he moved to Stars Hollow and bought a house, that’s a very serious escape attempt!

This does raise more questions, such as where did Dwight get the money to buy the house without Doris noticing, how did he manage to get to Stars Hollow to go house hunting without Doris noticing, where did he live during the settlement period (unless he just murdered Beenie Morrison, of course), how did he manage to take all the board games with him when he got out the window, and how has Doris managed to find his phone number? I guess his number is listed, for the last one, which seems stupid if he’s on the run from his wife.

The formidable Doris is voiced by Alex Borstein, who played Drella in Season 1.

Maui

LORELAI: [on phone] You just flew back on your jet, huh? . . . From Maui?

Maui is the second largest island of the state of Hawaii, famous for its beautiful beaches, and a very popular tourist destination.

While Lorelai actually says “Maui”, the audio doesn’t seem to quite match up. Apparently, she originally said “Bali”, an island in Indonesia which is also a popular tourist destination. “Eight O’clock at the Oasis” aired on October 22 2002 – just ten days after a bomb attack in Bali which killed 202 people and left 209 injured, on October 12 2002. Because of that, Bali was re-recorded as Maui.

A Slightly Confusing Timeline

Lorelai seemed to meet Dwight on a Monday night, just before the auction on Tuesday. He asked if she could water his lawn, as he was leaving for a few days on an urgent last-minute business trip. As Rory was waiting for her with the pizza, Lorelai tried to put him off, saying that Dwight could show her some other time before he left on his trip. Dwight said he was leaving for his business trip at 6 am the next morning, so Lorelai reluctantly accompanied him to be shown how to use the spigot.

Even though Dwight supposedly left for his business trip on the morning of the day of the auction, Lorelai and Rory are not shown watering his lawn until about a week later – even though the business trip was only meant to be a few days. They have had Friday night dinner, and Rory is now wearing her school uniform, so they are past the weekend, and it is another Monday at the absolute earliest.

Somehow they just skipped an entire week of lawn watering and Dwight is still on his short business trip. I know I usually blame Daniel Palladino for these timeline inconsistencies and non-linear plotting, but this episode was written by Justin Tanner, a successful playwright, and a story editor on Gilmore Girls. This is the only episode he ever wrote.

Peyton Sanders

While attending her mother’s charity auction, Lorelai runs into an attractive man at the bar, and takes an immediate shine to him. Although they don’t exchange names or details, Lorelai will later discover his name is Peyton Sanders. They go on a date together, but despite their initial attraction, Lorelai discovers that Peyton is a world-class bore and they have nothing in common except (apparently) both liking David Bowie.

Peyton is played by Jon Hamm. His first role was Gorgeous Man at the Bar (uncredited) on Ally McBeal, so this was a return to his origins – at least this time he got a named role, and was credited! In 2000-2001, he had a recurring role on Providence, a quirky feel-good romantic drama about a woman returning to her home town in Rhode Island and getting help from her mother’s ghost.

Jon Hamm went on to have a successful career in film and television, gaining household recognition as Don Draper, the anti-hero protagonist of Mad Men (2007-2015), a drama set in an advertising agency in the 1960s. Alexis Bledel would later have a short role on Mad Men in 2012, which is when she began dating her husband, Vincent Kartheiser, who plays Pete Campbell on the show, a man who has an affair with Alexis’ character, Beth Dawes.

The Oasis

DWIGHT: Welcome to The Oasis! That’s what I named this place, The Oasis, my oasis, a little slice of heaven right here on Earth.

An oasis is a piece of fertile land within a desert or semi-arid environment, often featuring a spring of fresh water surrounded by vegetation. Figuratively, it can refer to a quiet, peaceful place or situation separated from the noise and bustle that surrounds it. Dwight clearly sees his new home as a place of refuge from the stress of life.

Note that Dwight is wearing a shirt with cocktails on it, as if he is already relaxing into vacation mode in Stars Hollow.

Dwight’s house, The Oasis, is the Warner Bros Ranch at the studio lot. It was also the Griswold family home in the 1989 comedy film, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

Dwight

The Gilmore girls get a new neighbour in this episode, named Dwight, who moves into the house opposite them, previously occupied by a man named Beenie Morrison. Dwight is played by Jason Kravits, who had been involved with the Washington DC theatre scene, and then in a writer’s collective in New York City. From 1999 to 2001, he played the role of A.D.A. Richard Bray on medical drama The Practice.

As with so many of these characters, don’t expect to ever see or hear of Dwight again – he will disappear as mysteriously as Beenie Morrison after this episode.

Pete

RORY: I can’t believe you got into a fight with Pete.

LORELAI: Hey, you do not suddenly decide that garlic is an extra topping, not after five years, not after all we’ve been through.

The first mention of Pete as the owner/manager of the pizza store which Lorelai and Rory frequent, they have apparently been customers there since 1997, ever since Lorelai bought her own house. We met Joe delivering their pizza in “Kiss and Tell”, and Lorelai ordered a pizza from Joe in “The Break Up Part 2” – perhaps Joe is Pete’s son, and it’s a family business?

The bag Rory is carrying seems to have Bell Pizza written on it, but later the pizza store is called Antonioli’s Restaurant and Pizzeria. There is a Bell Pizza in the Los Angeles suburb of Bell, however.