DARREN: I collect memorabilia, too. I’ve got each year’s Harvard team pennant going back to 1927 … It’s all over the walls at the rec room.
LORELAI: See, see, lots of paraphernalia.
Lorelai is crowing because Rory felt upset when she was told that having Harvard paraphernalia on her walls was a sign of being immature and desperate. Now she can see that Darren, a real Harvard graduate, has masses of Harvard memorabilia all over the walls of his recreation room. She had the real Harvard spirit all along!
Of course, Darren waited to graduate before he started collecting Harvard memorabilia – Rory has been putting it on her bedroom walls since she was a young girl. I’m not sure you can say she and Darren are exactly the same, although he is clearly a bit of a Harvard tragic as well.
LORELAI: You know, you need a mask and a horse when you do that.
Lorelai refers to masked heroes who ride a horse, such as The Lone Ranger, previously discussed, who rides a white horse named Silver.
Emily redeems herself in this episode when she orders Christopher to leave her house. She may have been pushing Lorelai to get back with Christopher by any means, but when she sees that Lorelai and Rory really don’t want Christopher there, she does her best to protect them from him (she’s good at setting boundaries when she wants to, the way she wishes Lorelai had done for her when she needed rescuing from a man).
Lorelai doesn’t often call Emily her hero, but this is a rare example when she does.
Emily debates whether to order Caesar salad or Cobb salad for lunch at Luke’s diner.
A classic Caesar salad [pictured] consists of whole leaves of romaine lettuce and croutons, dressed with lime juice, olive oil, coddled eggs, Worcestershire sauce, garlic, Dijon mustard, Parmesan cheese, and black pepper. Its creation is attributed to Caesar Cardini, an Italian immigrant who had restaurants in Mexico and the US. He is said to have invented the salad in 1924 at his restaurant Caesar’s in Tijuana, Mexico, when a busy Fourth of July left his kitchen depleted. He used what ingredients he had on hand, adding flair by tossing the salad at the table. In 1946, the salad was introduced to New York by Gilmore’s (!) Steak House, who added anchovies into the mix. Although Cardini disapproved, anchovies are now usually added. Lemon juice is also typically substituted for the lime juice.
Cobb salad is a classic American garden salad usually made from chopped salad greens, tomato, crisp bacon, fried chicken breast, hard-boiled eggs, avocado, chives, blue cheese, and red wine vinaigrette. The ingredients aren’t mixed together, but laid on the plate in neat rows. There are various stories as to how it was created, one being that it was invented in 1938 by Robert Cobb, the owner of the Brown Derby Restaurant in Hollywood, where it became a signature dish. The legend goes that Cobb hadn’t managed to eat until nearly midnight, and made the salad out of leftovers he found in the kitchen.
Coddled eggs are eggs that have been gently poached in a ramekin in a bain-marie, cooked just below boiling point. There is a risk of salmonella from eating them unless you are careful, hence Emily’s concern about ordering the Caesar salad. In the end, she orders the Cobb salad, where the eggs are hard boiled instead.
Note that Emily’s worry about the coddled eggs is basically the same conversation that Lorelai had with Sookie about mussels when they went out to dinner on their double date with Jackson and Rune. In both cases, Lorelai pleads with them to choose something else from the menu, in almost the same words.
Francie refers to the 19th century English fairy tale, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It was first recorded by the English poet and writer Robert Southey and published anonymously as “The Story of the Three Bears”, in a volume of his writings called The Doctor.
The original story was about an ugly, rude old woman who enters a house and helps herself to the bear’s porridge and their beds, with tragic results for the interloper. Published twelve years later by English writer Joseph Cundall in his Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children, the nosy person was changed to a pretty little girl.
Many names were suggested for her over the years as the story was republished, from Silver Hair to Little Golden-Locks, before the name Goldilocks was hit on in 1904, in Nursery Rhymes and Tales (English author Flora Annie Steel is credited for choosing the ultimately successful name). The little girl’s fate has differed in various retellings, but she never ends up as badly as the old woman, usually learning her lesson and vowing never to wander off into the forest again.
Rory reacts with irritation at being compared to a silly little blonde-haired character (she’s extra sensitive about blondes, because of Jess’ girlfriend). However, Francie is most likely comparing Rory to Goldilocks as if she is a naïve little girl, poking her nose into things she doesn’t understand, meddling where she doesn’t belong, and unaware of the dangers she is in. You know, the dangers of all the … hemlines? While Rory has been compared to fairy tale and children’s characters before, this is the first time it’s done to insult her.
Francie Jarvis, portrayed by Emily Bergl, turns up again early in Season 3. We first met Francie in the previous season, as the President of the Puffs, a supposedly powerful secret sorority at Chilton that Rory and Paris almost joined. It was a rather silly story line that went precisely nowhere, but we now discover it was just to set up this silly story line that goes nowhere in Season 3.
Francie is now the president of the senior class, and is using all her mighty influence … to get skirt hemlines raised an inch and a half. Apparently this requires all sorts of backdoor machinations, such as kidnapping Rory into a girl’s bathroom and making her fulfil Francie’s evil scheme! The evil scheme to get hemlines raised slightly.
Oddly, Francie never acknowledges that she knows Rory and Paris well enough to have begun the process of accepting them into the Puffs – something which went very, very wrong for everyone except Rory. Possibly this helps explain Francie’s antagonistic attitude towards Rory and Paris.
Note that Francie first speaks with Rory while looking in the mirror, to indicate duplicity and double dealings – not to mention that Rory is “through the looking glass”.
LORELAI: All right . . . we’re gonna have to move … Take off in the middle of the night, leave everything behind, assume different identities. I’ll join a local community theater and I’ll drive you to soccer. It’ll work for many years until the FBI comes to get me, and by that time, you’re on your own.
Lorelai jokes that rather than tell Kirk she’s not interested in dating him she will leave town and begin a new life (this is sounding a bit like when she dumped Max by immediately fleeing Stars Hollow to hide out in another state!).
Lorelai says that she will join a local community theatre – in fact, she takes part in amateur dramatics in Stars Hollow too, and received rave reviews for taking the lead in Fiddler on the Roof. Lauren Graham began her acting career by doing two years of summer stock in Michigan, suggesting that this may be an inside joke.
By the end, Lorelai seems to have forgotten the original reason she became a fugitive, saying that the FBI will eventually track her down, as if she has committed a crime, rather than simply moved towns to avoid Kirk.
The song Miss Patty and Babette together at the wedding, while Morey plays piano. It’s a popular 1950 song by Irving Berlin, first performed by Ethel Merman and Russell Nype in the Broadway musical Call Me Madam; Merman later reprised her role for the 1953 film version, featuring the song as a duet with Donald O’Connor [pictured]. The song has been recorded several times, most successfully by Perry Como and the Fontana Sisters, who reached #5 in the charts for 1950.
The lyrics of the song give the message, You’re not sick, you’re just in love – a callback to Rory crying that she must be “sick” to have cut school to see Jess in New York. Now Lorelai has done something even more questionable, and the song is telling the Gilmore girls (and Jess?) that they’re not sick in the head, they are simply in love.
We get to see guests gathering for Sookie and Jackson’s wedding, which is being held at the Independence Inn. Everything looks pretty and romantic, with lots of colourful spring flowers everywhere. However, there’s plenty of quirky little details to provide some fun, including a sing-along around the piano.
Sookie and Jackson are going to be married under the chuppah that Luke made for Lorelai and Max’s wedding. So if you’ve been unhappy about the chuppah being relegated to a piece of garden decoration, here you go – it’s finally fulfilling its purpose. Decorated with flowers, it really does look very nice. Hopefully someone shows Luke a photo.
You might also notice that the minister performing the wedding ceremony is wearing a tee-shirt with a photo of Sookie and Jackson on it. They clearly went a little nutso with the photocopying from Jackson’s cousin. The minister isn’t either of the two ministers we’ve already seen in Stars Hollow, and is possibly from Jackson’s home town, as his family seemed to be more concerned about the religious conventions being followed (such as getting the children christened).
Some fans are disappointed that we never get to see Sookie and Jackson get married, or even walk down the aisle. However, the show is about the Gilmore girls, and everything is focused on their dramas, not that of side characters.
When Rory got her cast put on, the doctor said she would need to keep it on for two weeks, but it’s actually been three weeks since the night of the car accident when she gets the cast removed.
Lorelai takes Rory to Dr Ronald Sue, a specialist in orthopaedic medicine – who has an office in Stars Hollow, quite unbelievably. It feels like in Season 1, the writers tried to create a small town in New England that might be a little quirky, or niche, or even slightly magical, but was still a place you could convince yourself might almost exist.
Now it’s only Season 2, but already they are throwing anything into Stars Hollow that suits the plot, so this little town of less than 10 000 people has multiple takeout options which all deliver, a 24-hour pharmacy, a hospital, and an orthopaedic specialist. It feels like very lazy world-building. In this case it seems especially pointless, because there’s no reason Lorelai couldn’t have picked Rory up from school and taken her to an appointment with Dr Sue in Hartford.
Christopher invites himself to the medical appointment, announcing to everyone with self-importance that he’s “the father”, as if Rory has just been born, or like anyone cares. He’s driven from Boston to watch a minor two-minute medical procedure, and now he … drives back again? That makes perfect sense. Is it a hint he isn’t actually in Boston at this point?
Rory wears a red and black tee shirt which says STRANGE 13 to her appointment, as a nice callback to her Emily the Strange sticker.
LORELAI: Okay, look, nobody wants to say this any less than me, but I – maybe you don’t have a medical condition or a mental problem. Maybe, honey, you are falling for Jess.
In an echo of the end of “Back in the Saddle” when Dean bitterly admits that Rory likes Jess (more than him), Lorelai ends this episode having to be honest with herself and admitting that Rory must be falling for Jess.
There is no such awareness or honesty from Rory, though. She denies it, and says she loves Dean, and he will be her boyfriend forever. Jess is gone, and now all their problems are over. She refuses to talk about it any more, and only talks about her trip to New York as a “horrible, horrible day”. It’s very dishonest, especially to herself, when her day in New York with Jess was an absolutely magical experience until the bus debacle.
It will take just a little while longer for Rory to also realise that she is falling for Jess.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 