Tag: Character Insight

“You were a Trekkie?”

RORY: You were a Trekkie?
LUKE: I was not a Trekkie.
LORELAI: Uh uh, I do believe that denying you were a Trekkie is a violation of the Prime Directive.
RORY: Indubitably, captain.

Trekkie: a fan of the Star Trek franchise. Many serious fans dislike the term, preferring “Trekker”. Long stereotyped as hyper-obsessive supernerds, and even satirised by Star Trek itself.

Prime Directive: in Star Trek, the Prime Directive is a guiding principle that prohibits its members from interfering with the natural development of alien civilisations.

“Indubitably, captain”: Possibly the sort of thing Rory thinks that Mr Spock would say to Captain Kirk. The closest thing to it is a piece of dialogue from the 1987 series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, when Data says, “Indubitably, sir. Indubitably” to Captain Picard.

Lorelai is an arch-hypocrite to characterise Luke as a Star Trek nerd because he wore a Star Trek tee-shirt, and make fun of him: she is a huge fan of the show herself, and has made numerous references to it, including to Luke. In fact, she uses Star Trek lingo to make fun of Star Trek, something everyone, but most of all Luke, should have picked her up on.

Also note that Rory has done the same thing in regard to Lane’s erstwhile crush, Rich Bloomenfeld – she made a snarky comment about him wearing the same Star Trek tee shirt every day when he was younger. It’s essentially the same joke as this, with Luke wearing a Star Trek tee-shirt when he was younger. Like Lorelai, Rory is a hypocrite; she has made references to watching Star Trek herself.

Fun fact: the name Lorelei appears in the animated series of Star Trek (1971-present). In the 1973 episode, The Lorelei Signal, a compelling musical signal lures the Enterprise to a remote planet, where the female inhabitants drain the male crew of their life force. During the process, the men’s judgement is affected as they experience euphoric hallucinations – rather like the way men behave around the two Lorelais in Gilmore Girls! In the episode, it is up to the female crew members of the ship to take command and rescue the men, so it’s a real girl power instalment.

Slacker

JESS: Huh.
LUKE: That’s ‘Hello, nice to meet you’ in slacker.

“Slacker” is a term for someone who habitually avoids work or effort (Jess actually works at the diner before and after school every day, so can hardly be considered a literal slacker).

The phrase gained a renewed popularity following its use in the 1985 film Back to the Future, when Marty McFly and his father are referred to as slackers (and a group of teen delinquents in Back to the Future II, 1989). The 1990 comedy film Slacker, directed by Richard Linklater, about a group of twenty-something bohemians and misfits, gave it wider circulation. The 1996 comedy Clerks, directed by Kevin Smith, is regarded as the ultimate slacker cult film.

Subsequently, during the 1990s it became widely used to refer to a subculture of apathetic youth who were uninterested in political or social causes, a stereotype of Generation X. It often has connotations of an educated underachiever, or someone who is aimless in life, sometimes for philosophical or nonconformist reasons. This seems to be what Luke has in mind.

Mia Halloway (Elizabeth Franz)

In this episode, we meet Mia Halloway, the never-before-seen-or-heard-about owner of the Independence Inn, and therefore Lorelai, Sookie, and Michel’s boss. Her unannounced appearance leads to a certain amount of flustered rushing about, but Mia hasn’t come to inspect them – this is more of a social visit.

Mia is cast in the role of fairy godmother and kindly innkeeper, the woman who rescued Lorelai and Rory when they ran away from Richard and Emily’s house. It is clear that the Gilmore girls love her, and see her as a substitute mother/grandmother. They seem much closer to her than they are to Emily, their actual mother/grandmother, and feel freer in the way they express themselves and joke around. Mia conveniently faded out of the picture before Lorelai and Rory became a regular part of Emily’s life again … there would probably have been some friction otherwise.

We’re meant to see Mia as a sort of fantasy mother figure (Mama Mia!), with all the loving fun stuff, and none of the difficult painful stuff attached. The trouble is, I can’t help thinking that this is the woman who put teenaged Lorelai and her baby to live in the potting shed, when we now know they arrived in the depths of autumn, already very cold in Connecticut!

I think the issue is that the scriptwriters (including Amy Sherman-Palladino) wrote the potting shed as some quaint, adorable little wooden cottage with rosebud wallpaper and curtains at the window, and the scenery people produced … well, a pretty standard corrugated metal garden shed, not possible to put wallpaper on, and obviously utterly freezing in winter, particularly at night (and very hot in summer).

It seems more like something the wicked stepmother would have come up with for Cinderella, not the fairy godmother. Another issue is that Gilmore Girls appears to be set in a fantasy TV Connecticut where it never gets any colder than southern California.

We only learn that Mia’s surname is Halloway from the credits. Given the time of year Lorelai and Rory first arrived in Stars Hollow, the connection with Halloween is made very clear, as if Mia herself is the embodiment of supernatural forces bringing them to their correct destination.

A fun connection is that actress Elizabeth Franz was born in Akron, Ohio, the same place Richard Gilmore is sent to for work in this episode.

Jess the Prankster

POLICEWOMAN: Everyone’s accounted for Taylor. It looks like this is just an elaborate prank.
TAYLOR: But it looks so real. Where’d they get the police tape?
POLICEWOMAN: Kids have their ways.

TAYLOR: Who’d be depraved enough to pull a stupid prank like this?
POLICEWOMAN: Hard to say.
[Rory sees Jess standing across the street smirking as he watches the crowd]

The police officer reassures Taylor that the chalk outline and police tape is just a prank. Somehow, she knows that a child or teenager is responsible. To be fair, Rory also knows – Jess isn’t exactly being subtle here. The police officer seems to be remarkably blasé about someone stealing police tape from the police station. The bizarre way the police behave makes me think that they were in on the prank with Jess, either overtly or tacitly. It’s actually the only way this scene makes any sense.

Once again, one of Jess’ pranks is connected with Rory – it takes place outside the grocery store where her boyfriend works, at a time when he’s doing a shift, so that there’s a good chance of her seeing it. It seems to be a calculated move to get her attention and show off to her, as well as encroaching on her boyfriend’s territory.

In line with the autumnal colours of this episode, Jess wears a dark red tee shirt – Dean is also wearing a red sweater in a bright tone, as if Dean and Jess are the light and dark attractants for Rory (or the public and the private). Red is love and passion, but also aggression and danger, like a red rag to a bull. Both Jess and Dean wear grey sleeveless jackets over their red tops, as if in partial concealment of their feelings. There is nothing on their sleeves – yet.

Jess’s top is a vintage 1980s tee shirt with a Tasman Empire Airways Ltd logo on it – the former name of New Zealand’s flag carrier airline (since 1965, Air New Zealand Ltd). The show keeps connecting Jess with travel, journeys, and flight.

The fire truck going past is also bright red; in fact notice how many things in this scene bear the colour red. It’s a callback to when Rachel was telling Lorelai about her distress in discovering Luke’s romantic preference for Lorelai with the fire department in the background. It’s another painful love triangle situation marked with sinful scarlet, bloody red.

The poster in the background announces another Autumn Festival, nearing the anniversary of Rory and Dean’s first kiss. This suggests that the date is Tuesday 30th October, the day before Halloween. Yes, I know it looks bright and sunny, but that’s because we’re in TV Land, not the real Connecticut!

Does the big number 7 on the fire truck mean that Jess is blessed with luck in his endeavour? Or does it represent the seven days of the week, and the great wheel of time?. It might be a sign that Jess’ time has come. So much can change in just one year.

NOTE: Thank you to reader M for pointing out that the red vehicle is a fire truck or fire engine, not a bus as I incorrectly stated!

Thousand-Yard-Stare

RORY: Yikes. What kind of vibe are you giving her?
LANE: Oh, my patented Keith Richards circa 1969 ‘don’t mess with me’ vibe, with a thousand-yard Asian stare thrown in.

The thousand-yard stare is a phrase often used to describe the blank, unfocused gaze of soldiers during wartime who no longer react to the horror they’re living through. More generally, it can apply to any victim of trauma.

The phrase was popularised during World War II after Life magazine published a 1944 painting by Tom Lea, titled The Marines Call It That 2000-Yard Stare [pictured], but became especially known during the Vietnam War, when it decreased to a slimmer, punchier 1000-yard stare.

Lane dramatically compares her life being brought up in a traditional Asian-American household as akin to that of someone with PTSD on a battlefield.

Fran and the Dragonfly

FRAN: But I can’t sell you the property … I just couldn’t. You know, I have no siblings and no children and in a way, that place is really the only family I have. I’m the last Weston left, so I plan to own it forever.

It turns out that the old Dragonfly Bed and Breakfast, which Lorelai and Sookie wish to buy, is owned by Fran Weston, who runs Weston’s Bakery (the bakery with the round cakes that Rory pointed out to Dean when they met, and the same Fran that Lorelai and Rory defrauded of free cake wedding cake samples).

Lorelai and Sookie are sure that sweet old Fran will be happy to sell them The Dragonfly without driving a hard bargain, but although Fran is thrilled at the idea of them starting their own inn, she refuses to sell. She is the last of the Westons, having no siblings or children, and the Dragonfly is the closest thing she has to a family. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, because she has left the property derelict, which isn’t a great way to treat your family. Surely giving it a new lease of life would be better for the Dragonfly? Maybe Lorelai should have just paid for all that cake she ate.

Lorelai and Sookie try to tactfully ask what happens to the property when Fran dies, but she doesn’t take any of their hints, and acts as if she is immortal, so that they reach a frustrating impasse. I feel as if Lorelai and Sookie should have at least made an offer and put it in writing – the temptation of cash might have eventually changed Fran’s mind.

“Chickie run down at the salt flats”

LUKE: Go. Stay out of trouble.
JESS: Guess that means calling off the chickie run down at the salt flats.

Jess references the 1955 drama film, Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray and starring James Dean, previously discussed. It was a groundbreaking attempt to portray the moral decay of American youth and inter-generational conflict, focused on a Los Angeles teenager named Jim Stark. Released less than a month after James Dean’s death in a car accident, and the only film where he received top billing, it is now regarded as a cultural landmark.

At one point, Jim takes on Buzz, the leader of the local gang, in a “chickie run”, where two people drive headlong towards each other, or towards some object of doom – the first one to swerve away to save themselves is the “chickie” (chicken, coward). In the film, the chickie run is headed straight for some seacliffs, so that there is a serious risk of one or both ending up mortally injured, and indeed, it ends tragically for the gang leader, whose jacket becomes entangled with the door when he tries to jump out and save himself.

A chickie run at the salt flats is a reference to the 1984 dance movie Footloose, set in salty flat Utah and previously discussed. In a homage to Rebel Without a Cause, the film’s hero Ren takes part in a chickie run on tractors against a rival. Like Buzz, he suffers a technical glitch when his shoelace gets stuck in the vehicle’s pedals. Unlike Buzz, this causes him to win the chickie run and emerge triumphant.

It’s interesting that Jess references Footloose, one of Lorelai’s favourite films. It’s another reminder how much these two characters have in common.

Van Gogh

EMILY: The [painter] from Italy had some sort of breakdown.
RORY: Oh my God.
LORELAI: Hey, it didn’t hurt van Gogh, the guy should thank me.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Dutch post-impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in the history of western art. In only a decade, he created more than two thousand oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life, his work becoming brighter, bolder, and more dramatic as his style developed.

Van Gogh suffered from psychotic episodes and delusions, and neglected his physical health, drinking heavily and not eating properly. His friendship with the painter Paul Gauguin ended with a confrontation during which van Gogh partially severed his own ear in a fit of rage. He spent time in psychiatric hospitals, but after being discharged, his depression continued. He is believed to have shot himself in the chest with a revolver, dying two days later.

Van Gogh was commercially unsuccessful during his lifetime, but attained widespread success over the ensuing decades, and today his works are among the world’s most expensive paintings to have ever sold. His legacy is honoured by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Although van Gogh suffered lifelong mental health issues, it is thought he may have had an acute breakdown when he severed his ear, as he had no memory of the event. It certainly did hurt him – he ultimately killed himself. But Lorelai probably means it didn’t do his career any harm, as the mental illness and suicide have only given him an aura of tortured, misunderstood genius in the public imagination. [picture shows a Van Gogh self-portrait].

It’s clear the Italian painter’s Lorelai-caused breakdown also hurt him – a year later, he was apparently homeless or destitute, found rummaging through Emily and Richard’s recyclables. It was typical of Emily not to check that he was okay, or offer him help – after all, it was her daughter that supposedly drove him to madness! Hopefully he was just working on an art installation and looking for materials, or something.

“Maybe someday I’ll stumble into a Disney movie”

RORY: This is the headmaster’s office. How did she get the keys? I’m sure he didn’t give them to her.
PARIS: Stop it. We are making very important social contacts here.
RORY: Hey, I’m not looking for social contacts. I have friends. I’m fine.
PARIS: Well, how nice it must be to be you. Maybe someday I’ll stumble into a Disney movie and suddenly be transported into your body, and after living there awhile, I’ll finally realise the beauty of myself. But until that moment, I’m going to go in there and I’m going to become a Puff. Now get out of my way.

During the show, Paris several times refers to Rory being like a Disney princess – something which has surely helped fuel all that Rory/Paris fanfiction! Rory is also referred to as another Disney character a few times – Bambi.

It is at this point that Rory, who seems to be joining the Puffs almost by default, good-naturedly but without being particularly interested (like playing golf or making her debut), has her first serious doubts about what she’s let herself in for. She knows the Puffs are doing something wrong, but is unable to stand up for herself against Paris and the other girls.

Rory doesn’t have many options to escape at this point. She’s half an hour from home, in the middle of the night, in her pyjamas, with no transport, and no money for a payphone. There was no Plan B in case things went wrong. Rory seems to be hoping Paris, who at least lives in Hartford, will be equally horrified and take charge of the situation. Unfortunately, Paris is determined to be Puffed.