Footnotes to the TV series
Here begins the running gag that Emily Gilmore cannot retain staff for any extended period of time. We learn that the elder Gilmores have been through at least five cooks in the past few months, that Richard cannot tell the difference between a male and female cook (getting Anton and Sophia muddled), and Emily doesn’t know their names, addressing Sarah as Mira even after being corrected.
Rory jokingly suggests that Lorelai date Al from Al’s Pancake World instead of Luke. This local restaurateur is never seen in the show, although Lorelai and Rory often order food from him, even though it’s apparently not very good. As she talks about Lorelai marrying Al, we can see Luke in the background as a hint of Lorelai’s true romantic destiny, and the episode ends with a shot of Luke framed by the diner.
In the scene where Lorelai confronts Emily at the salon, we learn that Lorelai and Rory have dial-up internet access, and that Lorelai is turning down the offer of free broadband from her mother, even though that would be of genuine help to Rory’s education. To maintain her independence from Emily, Lorelai is willing to disadvantage her own daughter.
In the Pilot, when Lorelai and Rory are arguing about going to Chilton, Lorelai claims that their household has always been a democracy, with Rory getting an equal say in all decisions, until she decided to use the “mom card” and force her daughter to attend private school. Yet in this instance, Rory is never even told about the offer of free broadband so that she can put forward her views. We may wonder how many other times Rory remained unaware that a choice was being made on her behalf.
Emily tells the internet access company that Lorelai keeps her spare key in a frog, but it’s actually a turtle. The fact that Emily makes an error was probably meant to suggest that she rarely visited Lorelai and didn’t pay much attention to the details of her life. Later on it turns out that Emily has never visited Lorelai’s house at this point, which makes you wonder how she knew about the spare key holder at all. Possibly Lorelai had mentioned it to her at some time, although it’s difficult to imagine the circumstances in which this would have occurred.
The fact that Emily gives the internet company permission to break into her daughter’s house while she is away from home speaks volumes about her high-handed attitude. It’s apt for the scene that Lorelai keeps the spare key to the house in a turtle, considering that she wants her internet to remain slow.
Luke is pleased when Lorelai tells him she turned down the offer of a date from Ian Jack (Nick Chinlund), a divorced father she ran into at Chilton. This is the first time we see that Luke is relieved whenever Lorelai rejects someone else, and that Lorelai rather enjoys that. With Lorelai now attracting two random guys in the first two episodes, it’s clear she’s something of a man-magnet.
LORELAI: My clothes were at the cleaners, and I had the fuzzy clock and it didn’t purr on time.
LUKE: It didn’t purr?
LORELAI: It’s fuzzy. It purrs.
We learn during the show that Lorelai has a penchant for novelty clocks, more than one of which make animal sounds or resemble animals. They not infrequently seem to be of poor quality and let her down, as the fuzzy purring clock did this time.
Paris (Liza Weil), Louise (Teal Redmann), and Madeline (Shelly Cole) gain access to Rory’s academic file before she even meets them. It is unclear whether something about Rory has Paris spooked, or whether she stalks every new student this way. The smooth running of their plan argues long practice, suggesting the latter, and it’s the first indication of Paris’ intense insecurity and competitiveness.
Liza Weil was originally considered for the role of Rory, and when Alexis Bledel was chosen for the part instead, the character of Paris was created for Liza.
Headmaster Charleston expresses real doubt that Rory will be able to make it at Chilton, and lets her know that she won’t be offered any special help in the dog-eat-dog, sink-or-swim academic culture at Chilton.
Throughout the show Rory is depicted as not coping very well when anyone doubts her abilities. This time she remains calm, but by deflecting the situation in a passive-aggressive way, she also refuses to engage with the headmaster, or to argue her case with him and present herself as fully competent and up to the task (which is the response he is hoping to provoke). It’s the beginning of a worrying trend in Rory’s career.
Rory insists that Lorelai go in with her to meet the headmaster – our first clear sign of Rory’s deep dependence on her mother, especially in situations where she has to meet new people. Lorelai doesn’t encourage it, and tries to send her off on her own with a wave and a smile, but when Rory begs her mother for support, Lorelai can’t say no to her. This pattern is set to continue into Rory’s adult years.
(It also makes us wonder – did Lorelai deliberately sabotage her wardrobe choices, hoping that she would look so embarrassing that Rory would not want her mother to accompany her? If so, her plan fails, and she looks like an idiot for nothing).
LORELAI: You wanted to control me.
EMILY: You were still a child.
LORELAI: I stopped being a child the minute the strip turned pink, okay?
Lorelai implies that she discovered she was pregnant using a home pregnancy testing kit, the kind where the woman urinates on a stick and waits for the test to change colour, a strip which turns pink indicates a positive test. In fact, these sort of lateral flow tests didn’t become available until 1988, and weren’t widely available until the 1990s, while Lorelai got pregnant in 1984. Previous to this, home pregnancy testing kits were more like mini chemistry labs, where you mixed urine and the solution together to see if it changed colour.
Lorelai claims that she stopped being a child the minute she became pregnant. Getting pregnant doesn’t turn a girl into an adult, so Lorelai is wrong on that count. In fact, we can see during the show that becoming a mother at an early age stunted Lorelai’s emotional development so that her maturity remained at the level of a wayward teenage girl even into her thirties. This is the other side of the conflict between Emily and Lorelai, with neither of them being completely in the right or completely wrong, and with both of them over-dramatising their situations and claiming victim status.
By the way, Lorelai was very far from being rare as a teenage mother in Hartford. By the early 1990s, one quarter of all births in the city were to a teen mother. She was definitely an unusual teenage mother though.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 