LORELAI: Where’d all this come from? LUKE: Jess. Liz shipped the rest of his stuff last week. He finally unpacked.
Jess moved to Stars Hollow six months ago, and his mother Liz has only just now boxed up all his possessions and had them shipped to Luke. If Jess had any hopes that living with Luke was just an extended vacation, they have now been thoroughly dashed. The knowledge that his mother has truly kicked him out of home and he is stuck in Stars Hollow must come as devastating news. I think we can assume that the Jess we see in this episode is a deeply unhappy boy.
LORELAI: I’ve never seen so much stuff. It looks like a white trash Hearst Castle in here.
Hearst Castle, estate of media magnate William Randolph Hearst, previously discussed.
Note Lorelai’s shocking implication to Luke that his nephew is “white trash”, said while Jess is just in the other room. Lorelai has said some truly awful things about Jess, a troubled teenager who is the nephew of a close friend. This isn’t even the worst one.
LORELAI: I was just thinking, you know, all these years, no matter what my relationship status has been, whether I’ve been dating or hibernating or whatever, I think I’ve always had you in the back of my mind – you know, the prospect of us being together. But this prospect was sort of indefinitely on hold while you, you know, found yourself and, uh, got your personal life together so that you could really be there for me and especially for Rory. But you and I have been so linked in my mind that I think I have unconsciously sabotaged every decent relationship I’ve had, including the one with Max, because I was waiting for you, and I shouldn’t have been. And now that I see that, and I see you settling down with Sherry, I think I can move beyond it. CHRISTOPHER: Good, I’m really glad this is good for you Lorelai. LORELAI: It is. Chris? CHRISTOPHER: How dare you put that on me?
After seeing Christopher again, and being confronted by Emily’s beliefs that Lorelai belongs with him, Lorelai has a realisation that she has been waiting for Christopher to get his life together so that he can be with her, and with Rory. She believes that she has unconsciously sabotaged any relationship she’s ever had, because she was waiting for Christopher. Now that Christopher is with Sherry, she thinks she can get over Christopher and move past it.
When she shares this self-insight with Christopher, he is furious, saying that Lorelai is blaming every failed relationship on him (she wasn’t, but you can’t help thinking that Christopher has a lot to do with the fact Lorelai is incapable of holding down a relationship for more than a few months).
Of course, what really upsets Christopher is the realisation that he could have been with Lorelai all this time, if he’d only made more effort. Now he’s made the effort to show her he’s capable of being responsible, and instead of making Lorelai want him more, she’s ready to give him her blessing and move on. His badly-thought out plan is coming unravelled!
Lorelai really puts up with a lot of crap in this episode. She has Sherry show up unannounced and then rather creepily try to bond with Rory while telling Lorelai she won’t be involved in their lives. Then she’s unfairly abused by Emily, and by Christopher, who also embarrasses her in public in the process. She tries so hard to rise above it and do the right thing, and doesn’t get any understanding or compassion for it.
Rory has co-opted Kirk and Michel to help her with the CD drop off to Lane. While Kirk distracts Mrs Kim with idle chit-chat, it is Michel’s task to jog past, secretly slipping the CD into Lane’s bag. Unfortunately, Rory forgot to tell Michel about the revised time, so the poor man was left to jog around the square for an hour waiting for Lane to show up. He is understandably miffed.
Roping Kirk into a zany scheme is a natural choice, but it’s a surprise that Michel, who can barely be bothered doing his actual job some days, is apparently willing to help Rory and Lane out like this in his free time. Perhaps he always goes jogging on Saturday morning anyway, but even so he stuck it out for over an hour until everyone else arrived. Lord knows how Rory managed to persuade him.
I feel as if the writer, Daniel Palladino, was almost forced to choose Michel as the only person in Stars Hollow who is young and fit enough to be credibly kept jogging for an hour. It’s interesting that Rory never considers asking her boyfriend Dean to be involved. Maybe he works on Saturday morning.
If this scene does connect with the Elton John song “Rocket Man“, then Michel is in the role of the “rocket man” who is “lonely out in space on such a timeless flight”, and “burning up his fuse out here alone”. And as he feared, “I think it’s gonna be a long, long time”!!!!!
RORY: And the past couple of years she hasn’t even dated anyone unless she thought that for sure it could be a lasting relationship, and she’s got some specific goals now concerning children. LORELAI: Oh, here we go. RORY: She wants at least two, and before she met Dad she was seriously considering single parenthood.
Later events will seriously call into question this supposed strong desire Sherry has to have children.
LUKE: You don’t seem your chipper self. LORELAI: I brought some sparklers. I’ll light them later and do some kicks.
Sparklers are small hand-held fireworks that give off bright coloured flames and sparks. They are especially popular with children, and are responsible for 16% of firework injuries in the US, and 57% of firework injuries in children.
Lorelai saying she’ll be doing some kicks while she holds sparklers sounds like a reference to The Rockettes, a precision dance company founded in 1925, and since 1932, based at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. They are famous for their high kicks, and especially known for both their Christmas show, and annual performance at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Luke immediately picks up on Lorelai’s low mood, and tries to cheer up by offering to play bagel hockey with her. He might act grumpy, but Luke doesn’t like seeing Lorelai unhappy, and his response is to try to return her to her normal chirpy disposition.
EMILY: Christopher gets his life together with that woman. LORELAI: So, that’s good. EMILY: It should’ve been you!
Emily is extremely upset when Rory doesn’t come to Friday Night Dinner because she’s having a night out with Sherry. She immediately fears that Sherry will “take Rory away” from them, and is terrified that Christopher and Sherry will obtain weekend custody of Rory. She’s slightly on the old side to be a tug-of-love child at seventeen, and I’m pretty sure you have to pay child support to get even part-time custody of your child, which Christopher has never done.
Emily says she is heartbroken, because she always pictured Lorelai and Christopher being together, so that Rory could finally have two parents. Christopher was never ready to commit and was no kind of provider, but now it looks as if he was capable of settling down and working at a steady job, he just needed to find the right woman.
Completely and cruelly unfairly, Emily now blames Christopher’s general uselessness on Lorelai, saying that if she’d really tried, she could have influenced him to become a better man. Really? At the age of only sixteen, frightened, pregnant, and alone, she should have been responsible for Christopher’s life as well? Lorelai had a baby to care for and support, she didn’t need to take care of Christopher as well (and Rory would have suffered horribly if she did).
Emily is no better than Straub, laying all the responsibility for Christopher’s failure at Lorelai’s feet. It’s a horrible thing to say to her daughter.
Lorelai does admit that she has feelings for Christopher and isn’t happy about Sherry either, but she is trying to focus on doing what’s right, and being happy for Christopher. This unselfishness is roundly condemned by Emily, who goes upstairs to cry on her bed. (Later we find out she did eventually come down to dinner, but sulked all the way through it).
The episode’s title comes from Emily’s outburst to Lorelai, that, “It should’ve been you!”. Note that Emily’s outfit is mostly sad black, with touches of angry red. Lorelai is in grey, trying to remain neutral.
LORELAI: [The Volvo’s] also excellent for cranking Metallica.
RICHARD: Cranking Metallica? … If that’s some sort of drug reference, it isn’t funny.
Lorelai says that Christopher’s Volvo is excellent for “cranking” Metallica, meaning “listening to Metallica loudly on the stereo”. The car really does have a great stereo system, but Lorelai is teasing Christopher, because Metallica is her favourite band, not Christopher’s.
RICHARD: Uh, what does [Sherry] do? Does she work? CHRISTOPHER: Uh, she’s the East Coast sales rep for L’Oreal Cosmetics.
L’Oreal is a French beauty product company headquartered in Clichy, France, with a registered office in Paris. It is the largest cosmetics company in the world. It was founded in 1919 by chemist Eugène Schueller.
The US headquarters of L’Oreal are in New York City, but they certainly employ sales reps in Boston. Christopher says Sherry is the sales rep for the East Coast, as if they have only one! I’m pretty sure Sherry is only a sales rep for L’Oreal. Christopher loves to talk everything about himself up.
This does bring into question whether this business trip is really for Christopher, or was it for Sherry’s work? It seems like it’s actually her job that would involve travel, not his. Bearing in mind his comment about eating at White Castle (which is in New York), it could be that they were in New York for Sherry’s business, then decided to spend the weekend in Connecticut to see Rory. In which case, they could be staying as close as Woodbury, making their travel time to Stars Hollow even more achievable.
EMILY: So how long have you been with this woman? CHRISTOPHER: Eight months.
Christopher has supposedly been going out with Sherry since July 2001. Something he didn’t bother sharing with Lorelai and Rory until nearly three months later – and only then because they contacted him. Without Lorelai calling him, would Christopher have remained in contact with them at all, or disappeared to Boston to lead a new life with Sherry?
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 