KIRK: One day it occurred to me, cows never wrinkle … So I decided to do a little research. I studied cows, I studied humans, and finally I discovered the secret – the secret of the cows. Hay, it’s hay – cows eat hay. And after some experimentation and a great deal of research, I developed what I believe to be the next great skin care product to sweep the nation.
LORELAI: [reads the label] Hay There.
KIRK: A complete line of creams, balms, toning lotions, and cleansing liquids.
This is the first (?) of Kirk’s attempts to start a business, in this case, selling his own line of beauty products (in huge bottles!). It fails almost immediately when the products he creates turn out to be dangerous.
RORY: Hm, not quite sure. Last time I saw her, she was beating the will to live out of our nation’s representatives.
JAMIE: She is a hammer, isn’t she?
RORY: Actually, she’s the entire toolbox.
In this episode we meet Jamie, who becomes Paris’ boyfriend. Paris thinks of herself as unappealing to the opposite sex, and her crush on former classmate Tristan was not reciprocated. But it is Jamie who pursues Paris, and on paper at least, he looks like her dream man. Attractive, intelligent, ambitious, and sharing her passion for aggressive debating techniques, Jamie isn’t scared off by Paris’ strength and outspokenness – in fact, that’s what draws him to her.
Paris is so unused to anyone being interested to her that she gets asked on her first date by Jamie (a victory dinner after their debate together) and accepts before realising what’s happened when Rory explains it to her. Paris predictably has a meltdown before the date, just like the one she had before her date with Tristan, and becomes so insecure that she makes Rory hide in the closet just in case a glimpse of Rory will make Jamie change his mind. Rory points out that Jamie has already seen her, and isn’t interested, but Paris is in no mood for logic.
Even though Paris only asks Rory to step into the closet for a moment while Jamie is there to pick Paris up, Rory gets in with a flashlight and a book, as if she’s planning to spend the whole evening there!
Jamie is at Princeton, meaning that the Young Leaders program is for college students as well as high school students (something which probably wouldn’t happen in real life). He is presumably two or three years older than Paris, because if he was one year older, he wouldn’t have started at Princeton yet.
Jamie is played by Brandon Barash, in his first television role. He has gone on to have roles in The West Wing, 24, NCIS, Bones, General Hospital, and Days of Our Lives.
TAYLOR: This is gonna be a very exciting day. I’m really gonna go all out for this. I even think you’ll be impressed.
LORELAI: Really, even me?
TAYLOR: Yes-sir-ee, Mini-Me, I did not put the word madness in the title for nothing.
Taylor references comedy spy film Austin Powers in Goldmember, a sequel to Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, previously mentioned. Goldmember had just come out in July 2002, so would be very fresh in their minds (presumably Taylor saw it that summer, which reveals a slightly unexpected side to Taylor).
In the film, spy Austin Powers’ nemesis is Dr Evil, who has a clone of himself at 1/8th size, who he names Mini-Me, played by Verne Troyer. Dr Evil declares Mini-Me his favourite son. Oddly, Taylor seems to be designating himself as Dr Evil??? And Lorelai as his … clone? What? Does Taylor understand how references work? Maybe it’s just as an example of madness at work?
The plot of the film involves more than one example of surprise paternity, which is interesting, given that there is a popular fan theory that Taylor is secretly Kirk’s biological father. He does employ him at Doose’s Market, the video store (which he also seems to own), and has him photograph key events around town. This might explain Kirk’s multiple jobs – they are all, or mostly, given to him by Taylor, who owns a large proportion of Stars Hollow.
Season 3 begins with one of the most teasing, and notorious cold opens in the show. Lorelai is shown being woken up by a barrage of alarm clocks, wandering downstairs in a pretty pink nightgown, to find that Luke is making her breakfast, and trying to force her to drink decaf coffee.
At first the viewer might think that Lorelai and Luke somehow got together during the offscreen summer break, or that at least their friendship has got back on track and blossomed to the point that Luke is now cooking her breakfast in her kitchen, and offering to pick up household supplies for her.
But then Luke starts talking to Lorelai’s belly, because she’s pregnant! And she and Luke are having twins, no less. We know she can’t possibly be that far into a pregnancy after only a few weeks, and sure enough, not long afterwards she wakes up in the middle of the night with a start.
Lorelai immediately phones Rory to discuss her dream, and Rory gives the most obvious explanation: Lorelai wants to be with Luke and have his babies. But as Rory goes on to say, the dream is linked to Lorelai being upset about Sherry being pregnant with Christopher’s child, and Lorelai being lonely for Luke’s company (and missing his food!). The dream puts all these things together, and suggests a way to resolve all this tension – have Luke’s babies!
The (joke?) names Luke and Lorelai have for their unborn twins in the dream is darkly amusing. First, they were Sid and Nancy, a reference to the year-ago episode when Luke and Lorelai got into another terrible fight. Lorelai’s subconscious may be saying, “You got into a bad fight with Luke before and you worked it out, so you can do it again this time”.
Even darker, Lorelai says in the dream that the twins are named after child murderers Leopold and Loeb. Could this be an unconscious wish for Sherry’s baby to not exist, as if Lorelai’s pregnancy could cancel it out? Leopold and Loeb were the names of the Rottweilers owned by the parents of Lorelai’s repellant date chosen by her mother, Chase Bradford from Hartford. Just as Sid and Nancy link the twins to Luke, Leopold and Loeb seem to link them with Christopher, as if Lorelai’s unconscious has made her pregnant to both men at once.
At any rate, dreaming of being pregnant with twins suggests a conflict between Lorelai’s conscious and unconscious, and that she has two separate but related sources of stress in her life: the failure of her relationship with Christopher to get off the ground because of Sherry’s pregnancy, and the failure of her friendship with Luke. The twins may symbolise that on an unconscious level Lorelai is attracted to both Christopher and Luke, and at this point, deep down wants both of them.
And one final thing: dreaming about being pregnant is also due to the stress of not having Rory there, her “baby”. The dream overcompensates by giving her two babies to replace Rory. Lorelai is missing Rory even more than she misses either Christopher or Luke.
At the end of the episode, Sookie and Jackson’s wedding is about to begin, as we hear the strains of their wedding song, “I Can’t Get Started”, previously discussed.
The episode nears it conclusion with a shot of Rory and Lorelai, locked in their own secret relationship difficulties, neither sharing them with the other, as they have to focus on the wedding. Rory has secretly kissed another boy while on a date with her boyfriend, and still looks shellshocked by her own action. Lorelai is heartbroken over being dumped by another woman’s boyfriend, who is going back to be a father to their unborn child – something he could never muster the energy for when it came to Lorelai’s daughter.
The song “I Can’t Get Started” is written from the perspective of someone who is successful in every possible outward way, yet they don’t have a hope of beginning the relationship that they want. In the same way, Lorelai is a successful mother, homeowner, community participant, and businesswoman; Rory is a successful student, journalist, debater, and now Vice-President elect at a prestigious private school. However, success in romance is eluding them. It’s the complete opposite to the end of Season 1, which concluded with both Lorelai and Rory infatuated with their respective partners, and bubbling over with happiness and excitement.
CHRISTOPHER: Sherry’s pregnant … She just found out and she called me as soon as she found out, and that was her calling to tell me that she found out.
Christopher comes to see Lorelai who is standing on the bridge, waiting for him (another mention of bridges as significant emotional spaces). He tells her that Sherry has called him on his cell phone to tell him she has just discovered she is pregnant – I presume she used a home pregnancy testing kit, as it’s a Sunday.
Oddly enough, Lorelai says, “Women all over the world will line up to see that tiny little woman fat”. Sherry isn’t a tiny little woman, she’s only a few inches shorter than Lorelai, and Lorelai is slim as well. It makes Sherry sound like a stick-thin five foot tall waif, which she isn’t. Not to mention the bizarre thinking that equates being pregnant with being “fat”.
Apparently all the terrible problems Christopher and Sherry were having were not enough to stop them from having (unprotected?) sex. It does beg the question, did Sherry even know they were supposedly having problems and Christopher was thinking of moving out? Maybe all she did was go away on business for a month or so, and Christopher used that as an opportunity to weasel his way back in to Lorelai’s life, telling her some story about how he and Sherry were practically broken up.
As a huge slap in the face to Lorelai, Christopher is going back to Sherry because she’s having a baby. Christopher was never around while Rory was growing up, and he’s apparently never forgiven himself (zero evidence of that, but whatever). He can’t make that mistake again, so it’s back to his girlfriend that he doesn’t love, so he can be a father to their child. (This is actually a terrible basis for a relationship).
It doesn’t make any sense, because he could still be a good father to his second child without going back to Sherry (and I bet while telling her nothing of what he’s been up to with Lorelai in the interim). For that matter, he could have been a good father to Rory while not being with Lorelai all this time.
Notice that when Rory questions why her dad has a work phone call on a Sunday, he responds, “Hey, I have a lot of responsibility now”. Little did he know how true those words would turn out to be!
After her father leaves to answer a phone call, Rory suddenly sees Jess, and discovers he has moved back to Stars Hollow. Only a complete idiot would fail to realise it was to see Rory again, and Rory isn’t an idiot. She kisses Jess, warning him not to tell anyone what happened, then runs back to her boyfriend Dean with a cheery, “Welcome home!”.
Yep, falling in love with a Gilmore girl isn’t any picnic. Just ask Dean.
The kiss with Jess in this season finale is a counterpart to the kiss Rory had with Dean in the finale of Season 1 as they reunited after breaking up. The first kiss had Dean looming over Rory and grabbing her almost roughly, as if taking possession of her (Jared Padalecki’s height partly explains this). The kiss with Jess, another reunion, is far more gentle and intimate, much more romantic. It feels more like Rory giving herself to Jess, rather than allowing herself to be taken.
Alexis Bledel and Milo Ventimiglia were a real life couple during the filming of the show, which is one reason why it appears far more convincing. They are almost too comfortable together for a first kiss.
At the wedding, Lorelai lets her parents know that she and Christopher are back together – even though Christopher still hasn’t broken up with his girlfriend, Sherry! A teensy detail that nobody even bothers asking about or suggests might need a little more thought (or at least waiting for Sherry to get back from her business trip).
While Emily and Richard are quietly pleased about the news, Rory is by no means automatically thrilled about getting Daddy Dearest back in her life. In fact, she is justifiably suspicious of his motives, saying that both she and Lorelai have been waiting for this for a long time, and they cannot take another disappointment from the ever-disappointing Christopher.
Amusingly, she warns Christopher, “We take disappointment extremely hard. I mean it. Property damage is often involved”. In the next season, Rory and Lorelai will resort to property damage due to their romantic disappointments. It’s also a foreshadowing of Rory’s even more spectacular disappointment and property issues later on in the story.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 