Footnotes to the TV series
RORY: I’ll give you an eggroll.
JESS: Yes?
RORY: What did you do?
JESS: Nothing much. Just wanted to make sure whoever rented Dumbo or Bambi gets a little surprise.
One of Jess’ more icky pranks – putting (presumably) pornographic films inside the cases for children’s movies. Rory complained about young boys seeing a bit of leg, now toddlers watching porn doesn’t seem to bother her too much!
[Rory walks past the video store, which her picture is in the window. As she stares at it, Jess walks over to her.]
JESS: Nice picture.
Oh, very smooth. We already know how much you like Rory’s pictures, Jess!
Rory has been named Citizen of the Month in Stars Hollow, which is why her photo is up in the window of the video store. It shows her in her Chilton uniform against a blank background, and may be from school photo day.
Rory wonders where Taylor and Kirk got the photo from. Good question!
RICHARD: I am an annoyance to my wife and a burden to my daughter. Suddenly I realize what it feels like to be obsolete. I hope that you never have to learn what that feels like.
Richard has always been so focused on his job and career, he never thought about what would happen when he retired. And he’s rather young to retire as well, making it even harder for him. Just as Emily’s visit to Stars Hollow is soured by her discovery that Lorelai was so unhappy she preferred to live in a shed rather than at home, Richard is left with the unhappy realisation that Lorelai has only bothered to see him as a favour to Emily, to get him off her hands for one day.
RICHARD: You have never once invited me to your house Lorelai, never. And I can hardly point to an event that would prompt you to do so except my recent employment situation.
Richard has been to Lorelai’s house before, for Rory’s sixteenth birthday party, but in that case, it was Rory who invited him.
RICHARD: How tall are you?
DEAN: Why, you wanna dance?
Edward Hermann is 6 foot 5, and Jared Padalecki is 6 foot 2 (although in the show, Dean is 6 feet tall, so maybe Richard is 6 foot 3?).
RICHARD: And drive behind me. I don’t want that thing blowing up right in front of the Jag.
DEAN: No problem. Try to keep your electrical system working long enough to get there.
Jag is short for Jaguar, a luxury British vehicle company headquartered in Coventry, originally founded in 1922 as the Swallow Sidecar Company. The current name was chosen in 1945. It holds royal warrants from Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles, and has manufactured cars for the British Prime Minister.
There isn’t a good shot of Richard’s Jaguar, it’s behind Rory’s car. I have been informed by a trustworthy source that the car appears to be a Jaguar XJ6 sedan, possibly a 1974 model, based on its hood ornament, chrome bumper bar and paint colour. That’s a classic car known for its performance and superb handling.
Dean mocks it for being unreliable, probably because the 1970s XJ6 sold to the US market is notoriously difficult and expensive to restore and maintain, due to its complexity and numerous issues with the electrics. However, Richard is later shown to be very interested in old cars and has a lot of money (and a chauffeur … hey, whatever happened to Lance, anyway?), so he would be well positioned to take care of an old Jag properly.
You can see Richard is being slightly hypocritical about Rory’s car, since his own vehicle is old, and probably has more safety and reliability issues than the one that Dean has rebuilt.
DEAN: Mr. Gilmore, I understand you want Rory to be safe, but so do I. I would not give this car to her if I did not know for a fact that it was a hundred percent safe. I checked it, my father checked it, and Gypsy at Hewes Brothers checked it.
We are now introduced to a new character in Gilmore Girls – the local mechanic, Gypsy, who works at Hewes Brothers. This is slightly confusing, because in an early episode, Lorelai refers to the local garage as Musky’s, then in “Love, Daisies and Troubadours”, she says that Maven Hewes bought the garage from Jim Dunning.
Musky’s may be a completely different business, an auto body shop which does smash repairs rather than a garage. I suppose it is just possible that Maven and Musky are the two Hewes Brothers, or Musky is Maven’s nickname. In either case, we never see the Hewes Brothers, who seem to have left everything in the capable hands of their mechanic (or perhaps she bought the business from them, including the name).
Gypsy is left as an intentional cypher in the show. We never discover her surname, or find out if Gypsy is her real name or a nickname. We learn nothing of her backstory or why she came to town. We don’t find out her ethnic heritage, or her sexual orientation.
All we need to know is that she’s a sarcastic, straight-talking mechanic who is extremely good at her job and highly respected for it. Nobody ever questions her skills, and it is said that if Gypsy can’t fix a vehicle, then nobody can.
DEAN: Your car.
RORY: No!
DEAN: Finished it yesterday.
The car that Dean rebuilds and gives to Rory is a pale blue 1961 Dodge Lancer sedan. A rebuilt Dodge Lancer would cost around $10 000 today, so it’s a significant gift, quite apart from all the work he’s put into it.
We now discover that even though they broke up on the night he told Rory he was giving her a car, Dean has continued to work on it. It seems that Rory and Lorelai have been kept informed about his progress, because they seem excited, but not surprised about it, and Lorelai seems to have already given permission for it to go ahead.
Richard’s unease with Dean giving Rory the car is probably not only the safety issue (and no car from 1961 is going to be as safe as a modern one), but because it is inappropriate as a gift from a teenage boyfriend that Rory has only been seeing for about a year (and was broken up with for three months). He may have handled it badly, but Richard has a point.
The day with Richard now becomes an unmitigated disaster, and it’s all thanks to Dean. He just shows up with the car, rather than call ahead and make sure that it’s alright. He also ignores the fact that when he arrives, Richard’s car is out the front, so he knows that they have a guest, and can probably guess who it is. Does Dean actually deliver the car that night on purpose, as a way to show Richard that he isn’t a useless waste of space, and to rub it in how special he is to Rory and Lorelai?
It’s a real slap in the face to Richard and Emily, who wanted to buy Rory a new car, but were not given permission to do so by Lorelai. It must hurt Richard that she instead gave permission for an unsafe old car, built by a teenage boy, and this no doubt informs a lot of his behaviour.
LORELAI: Dad, she wants to go to Harvard.
RICHARD: Well yes, because she thinks you want her to go to Harvard.
Richard hits it right on the head – where did Rory’s obsession with going to Harvard come from, except from Lorelai? Lorelai bought Rory a Harvard sweater when she was only four: not the usual clothing a toddler asks for on their own.
Richard is also correct that she’s too young to have set her heart on one specific college to attend. There are other good options available, and as Gilmores traditionally go to Yale, he would be able to help Rory get in as a legacy student. He does know more about the Ivy League system than Lorelai, who, despite being determined to have her daughter fulfil her dream of going to Harvard, has seemingly done little to educate herself about the process of being accepted there.
Harvard and Yale are traditional rivals, and it can’t have escaped Richard’s attention that Lorelai has rebelled against him by choosing his own alma mater’s main competition as her preferred university. He is tactful enough not to say that to her, though.
Richard is actually giving Lorelai good advice here. He probably shouldn’t have brought it up while he’s a guest, but at least he makes sure he doesn’t do it in front of Rory.
RICHARD: Lorelai, you cannot order all of that food. You’re teaching your daughter wastefulness and gluttony.
LORELAI: Um Dad, we do this all the time. We order way too much and then we eat like a third of it and live off the leftovers for a week and a half. It’s a finely honed system.
More evidence that Lorelai and Rory don’t really eat that much. They order a huge amount of food, but then only eat 30% of it. The leftovers take them another ten days to get through, suggesting they’re only picking at them. That doesn’t sound like people with big appetites.
They’re also not worried about food poisoning – you’re meant to eat leftovers within two days (four at the absolute most), not ten! How they never get sick is a miracle. Unless constant vomiting and diarrhoea is their secret to staying slim.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 