Tag: Character Insight

The Hungry Diner

After his fight with Lorelai, and Jess going back to New York, Luke has closed the diner and gone fishing – something which has never happened before. Lorelai and Rory are forced to eat breakfast at a rival business we have not heard of until now called The Hungry Diner. The diner has a dark pink colour scheme, in contrast to the blue colour scheme of Luke’s Diner.

They are immediately miserable because The Hungry Diner makes people wait in line to be served, the menus have pictures on them, the coffee is undrinkable, and the coffee cups are tiny. It turns out that it is Michel’s regular breakfast place, because they make low-fat egg white omelettes (like the one Sookie refused to make him). Michel is reading a copy of GQ magazine, previously discussed.

Even though there was a big crowd of people waiting to get into Luke’s, The Hungry Diner is still mostly empty. Nobody else seems to have gone there, so either there is yet another place to have breakfast in Stars Hollow, or they all refused to eat out until Luke returns.

Jess Leaves Town

BABETTE: Last night, not long after the accident happened, Luke walked him straight to the bus station, stuck the kid on a bus, sent him home to his mom.

MISS PATTY: I can’t believe Luke would send him off like that.

BABETTE: Well, I heard the kid wanted to go. I don’t know. All I know is that Jess is gone.

While watching the film with Lane and her parents, Rory overhears Babette and Miss Patty gossiping, and in this way learns that Jess left town the previous night, after the accident he had driving Rory’s car. Luke walked him straight to the bus station and sent him home to Liz.

We never got to see the conversation between Luke and Jess, so we have no idea why Luke did that, or in what mood he did it. Babette heard that Jess actually asked to leave, rather than Luke throwing him out. Did Luke take Lorelai’s advice and get rid of Jess, or did he regretfully give way to Jess’ request that he go home? We don’t know for sure, but town gossip hints the latter is more likely than the former.

In real life, the last bus to New York City leaves Hartford at 10.30 pm, so Jess would have left Stars Hollow around 11.10 pm, and got to Manhattan some time after 1 am. That might suggest the accident took place somewhere between 8.30 pm and 9.30 pm.

After all the town’s complaints about Jess, Babette and Miss Patty seem rather regretful that Jess has gone, saying that they don’t know what they will do for entertainment now (and Jess stole from Babette and pestered Miss Patty’s dance students, so they have personal reasons to wish him gone). It suggests that the town’s exaggerated hatred of Jess was mostly motivated by a desire to cause drama so they’d have something to focus on. Like old Louie Danes, Jess was a convenient sinkhole where they could throw all their negativity.

Lorelai keeps her face rigidly glued to the screen, trying not to betray anything by her expression, but she knows this can’t be good news for her friendship with Luke. Rory looks hurt and unhappy, and turns away from her mother, as if needing privacy for her grief (or possibly as if she is beginning to blame Lorelai for Jess’ departure). It feels as if Jess being gone will cause just as many issues for the Gilmore girls as Jess being there …

Christopher Arrives

Lorelai wakes up to find that after their phone call, Christopher drove to Stars Hollow from Boston and let himself in, falling asleep in a chair next to her. Lorelai wonders if driving interstate in the middle of the night is okay with Sherry, but Christopher deflects this by saying that “Rory comes first”. (Lorelai has no hesitation in throwing herself into the arms of another’s woman’s boyfriend).

Hm, maybe Lorelai should have asked a few more questions! She doesn’t, because she’s so relieved to have someone there to share the parenting with in an emergency, for a change. She even calls Christopher a “superhero”, just for showing up. Lorelai’s excitement over this small effort is a sad indictment of how rock bottom her expectations of Christopher are (and with justification).

In their shared relief that Rory is okay, and mutual hatred of Jess, Lorelai and Christopher easily make up their fight from “It Should’ve Been Lorelai”. Lorelai is very forgiving of Christopher – probably too forgiving.

The Contessa and the House Wench with the Talking Mice

LORELAI: And over here you have a tiny but annoying bell in case there’s something here that you need but you don’t have and you want to summon the common but lovely house wench who will promptly leave her talking mice and come to fetch the Contessa whatever she may require.

Lorelai compares Rory to The Barefoot Contessa, a 1954 drama film written and directed by Joseph F. Mankiewicz about the life and loves of a Spanish sex symbol named Maria Vargas, who is known as “the Barefoot Contessa”. Ava Gardner plays the title role as the glamorous Contessa. The film received mixed reviews, but made a big impact on popular culture.

Presumably Lorelai means that Rory, being in bed, has bare feet, yet will be waited on hand and foot like a great lady. Interestingly, the film has a major plot around infidelity and a love triangle, like that between Rory, Dean, and Jess. Like so many of these references, it ends in violence.

Lorelai compares herself to Cinderella, previously discussed. In the 1950 film, Cinderella is friends with a number of talking mice. Lorelai is saying that she is Rory’s humble servant and will get her anything she needs, just as Cinderella slaved away in the kitchen.

Lorelai behaves absolutely absurdly towards Rory. She has the most minor of injuries, and yet Lorelai acts as if she has two broken legs, at the very least. She not only gives Rory a bell to call her with, as if Rory is crippled, but actually sleeps in Rory’s room.

Why? Is she worried Rory will die in the night without her there, or does she think Rory needs help to go to the toilet with a cast on her wrist? It’s a callback to the years mother and daughter spent sharing a bed, their boundaries completely merged.

It’s almost as if Lorelai thinks she can justify her over-the-top demonisation of Jess by acting as if he has done terrible injury to Rory. She is also trying to make up for her failure to “protect” Rory from Jess by overcompensating now, when it is too late.

Lorelai’s instinct is always to smother Rory when she feels their relationship is threatened; whether this is good for Rory or not is never questioned. Her fussing over a barely injured Rory seems like confirmation that Jess was right – Rory is not cut out for the tough life of a foreign correspondent.

(Note that Rory has a Powerpuff Girls glass next to the bed, a callback to when Lorelai said they were going to buy some. Although they didn’t buy them that day, it’s confirmed they did eventually make the purchase).

Jess and Luke on the Bridge

[Jess is sitting on the bridge as Luke walks up to him]

JESS: I made sure she was okay.

LUKE: I know you did.

The bridge becomes a place of refuge for Jess, who might be a “little punk” to Lorelai, but is also a frightened and worried boy. Luke once pushed Jess off the bridge in a fit of frustration, now he comes to bring Jess his own brand of silent comfort.

Note that Luke and Jess are once again dressed alike, both in khaki jackets, and their seating postures mirror each other, so that each sits with their face turned away from the other. Emotions are difficult for these two to handle, let alone discuss. We never get to hear their conversation, as if they need privacy even from the audience.

Lorelai Yells at Luke

LUKE: What about Jess – is he hurt?

LORELAI: No, Luke – Jess did the hurting. That little punk nephew of yours almost killed my kid tonight.

Lorelai confronts Luke about the accident Jess had in Rory’s car. It’s normal for Lorelai to be unreasonable and a bit childish when she’s angry (those Gilmore tantrums), but this time she really goes over the top. She’s had months of seething resentment towards Jess, and by extension, towards Luke, that has been bubbling away, and now it finally boils over in one explosive scene.

From beginning to end, Lorelai’s anger towards Luke is unfair and completely one-sided. She never even considers that Luke might be worried when he hears Jess has been in a car accident – immediately exaggerating by saying that Jess “almost killed” Rory, when all she had was a minor hairline fracture. Lorelai is obviously thinking of how things could been so much worse, but painting Jess as some sort of deranged killer is over the top.

Lorelai makes sure to tell Luke that Rory is “having X-rays and tests”, even though she’s only having them because Lorelai demanded them, and they’re completely unnecessary. She puts all the blame on Luke for taking Jess in, saying that his obligation wasn’t to his family, but to her and Rory and all of Stars Hollow.

Lorelai thinks Gilmores are the centre of the universe, but this is outrageous even for her, that Luke should have abandoned his own nephew in order to put Lorelai and Rory first. (It’s definitely a sign that Lorelai wants to be #1 in Luke’s heart, but she’s too angry to even see the implications of what she said).

This is the worst fight Lorelai and Luke have had so far, and it’s the culmination of their argument in “Nick and Nora, Sid and Nancy”. Their disagreements about Jess, and Lorelai’s mistrust of him, could only ever be papered over. When the crunch came, all of Lorelai’s true feelings came out, and they are extremely hurtful to Luke.

At the end, when Lorelai is left alone and finally lets her tears out as she watches Rory’s wrecked car get towed, her first instinct is to reach for her phone and call Christopher. Much of Lorelai’s exaggerated fear about Rory is based on the fact that Lorelai was in the car when Christopher crashed his Porsche as a teenager. Now she sees it from a parents’ point of view, and realises how terrifying it is to hear your child call you from hospital.

To a certain extent, Jess is paying for Christopher’s sins, and even more unfairly, Lorelai goes running to Christopher when Rory ends up in the same situation Lorelai did as a teenager.

Jess

RORY: Jess made sure that he called the ambulance and that I was okay before he even talked to the police and – .

This lets the viewer know why Jess isn’t with Rory at the hospital. He phoned for an ambulance and made sure Rory was safe before he had to talk to the police about his role in the accident, since he was the driver at the time. After that, he could have joined Rory at the hospital, but is probably (rightly) scared of how Lorelai is going to react to the news.

Minor Hairline Fracture

DOCTOR: She sustained a minor hairline fracture to her wrist.

LORELAI: So she broke her wrist? ….

DOCTOR: It’s a tiny fracture, absolutely nothing serious. I’m gonna put a cast on it. She’ll wear it for a couple weeks, that’s it.

There is essentially no difference between a fracture and a break – a hairline crack and having a bone shattered into pieces are both referred to as a fracture. The terms are interchangeable. Fractures usually take 6 to 8 weeks to heal, a hairline fracture may be on the shorter side of that, but only two weeks in a cast doesn’t seem plausible. However, it’s not long until the end of the season, which probably has a lot to do with the doctor’s treatment plan!

Lorelai insists that the doctor do some more X-rays, which he agrees to, but hairlines fractures don’t typically show up on X-rays, so it’s a waste of everybody’s time. It’s just to give Lorelai a chance to keep Rory busy while she goes off to do some yelling. Most parents wouldn’t leave their injured kid at a hospital in the middle of the night like that, but this is TV, not reality! Unfortunately for the plot, it makes Lorelai look incredibly selfish. I mean, more so than usual.