“Far away from us”

EMILY: Your father would have put [Christopher] in the insurance business and you’d be living a lovely life right now.
LORELAI: He didn’t want to be in the insurance business and I am living a lovely life right now.
EMILY: That’s right, far away from us.

Stars Hollow is only half an hour from Hartford, is on a bus route to the city, Lorelai visits it at least twice a week to attend college, and Rory will be going to school just five minutes from their house. Nevertheless, Emily still sees it as being “far away” from them. That gives the viewer some idea of the control Emily would like to have over her daughter and granddaughter, and is a hint of one of the reasons for the conflict between Lorelai and her mother.

“We never fight”

SOOKIE: It was a fight. Mothers and daughters fight.
LORELAI: No, we don’t fight. We never fight.

During the course of the show, Lorelai and Rory had their fair share of fights and arguments, during which the normally meek Rory could be shockingly rude and hurtful to her mother. If Lorelai is to be believed, they never had a single fight until Rory was a few weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday, which would mean that they lived in harmony until Rory began gaining some independence for herself. It’s telling that Rory forming an identity for herself apart from Lorelai is the beginning of their various quarrels.

Of course, Lorelai may be just conveniently forgetting all the fights they had before this one.

Demerol

DEAN: Lorelai. I like that.
RORY: It’s my mother’s name too. She named me after herself. She was lying in the hospital thinking about how men name boys after themselves all the time, you know, so why couldn’t women? She says her feminism just kind of took over. Though personally I think a lot of Demerol also went into that decision.

Demerol is a brand name for Pethedine, a synthetic opioid medication and the most common narcotic pain relief given in US hospitals during childbirth.

Lorelai’s choosing to give her daughter her own name is another suggestion that she hoped Rory would be a “do-over” version of herself.

Rosemary’s Baby

RORY (after being startled by Dean): God! You’re like Ruth Gordon just standing there with a tannis root. Make a noise.
DEAN: Rosemary’s Baby.
RORY: Yeah.
DEAN: Well, that’s a great movie. You’ve got good taste.

Rosemary’s Baby is a 1968 horror film directed by Roman Polanski, based on the 1967 best-seller of the same name by Ira Levin. In the film, a young housewife named Rosemary (played by Mia Farrow) discovers that a cult has tricked her into bearing a demonic child. Ruth Gordon (1896-1985) plays Rosemary’s elderly neighbour Minnie Castavet, who is a leader in the cult; Gordon won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.

Minnie gives Rosemary a pendant necklace filled with tannis root (a fictional herb), which the cult apparently deploys as an all-round demonic treatment. As Minnie hovers around handing Rosemary tannis root in food and drink as well, it is hard to know which exact moment in the film Rory has in mind – or if she is so startled that she doesn’t quite know herself what she is saying.

Rosemary’s Baby was the #8 film of 1968, was acclaimed by critics, and is regarded as a classic movie. Dean is right that Rory has good taste. Fans of Dean Forester (Jared Padalecki) can enjoy this time during Season 1 when Dean quickly picked up on old film references and seemed to be an intellectual equal for Rory. It won’t last.

Dean Forester (Jared Padalecki)

Dean Forester (Jared Padalecki) appears in the first episode of Gilmore Girls, and is immediately set up to be Rory’s boyfriend with a meet cute that involves books and a movie reference. Dean was written to be the perfect first boyfriend for a teenage girl, which seems to mean he has almost no life or personality apart from being in love with Rory, and an obsessive jealous streak. I guess those are things that inexperienced teenage girls might find endearing. However, it didn’t take long for cracks to begin showing in the perfect Dean facade, so perhaps even the writers got bored with this conceit.

Jared Padalecki was not the first choice to play Dean: in the original Pilot episode, he was played by Nathan Wetherington, who gave him a slightly more bashful, skater-boy feel. Interestingly, in a later episode Lorelai says that Dean reminds her of Christopher, Rory’s father, and while Padalecki doesn’t really resemble David Sutcliffe, Wetherington looks much more like him.

Nathan Wetherington was considered for the role of Anakin Skywalker in the Stars Wars prequels, but took himself out of the running when he learned he had the role of Dean on Gilmore Girls, and also missed out on playing Seth on teen drama series The OC, so he’s had some unlucky breaks.

Bridge

Lorelai and Emily

When Lorelai visits her parents, she makes conversation by asking about her mother’s bridge club. Contract bridge is a complicated card game played by two teams of two against each other, a variant of the older card game whist. The most common form in the United States is duplicate bridge, and it’s a card game which is more commonly played among older people. It is a game of skill involving strategy and tactics, which seems in line with Emily’s character: in fact she is just about to outplay her own daughter.

Zsa Zsa Gabor

SOOKIE: Where’s your paté?
LORELAI: At Zsa Zsa Gabor’s house.

Zsa Zsa Gabor (1917-2016) was a Hungarian-American film and television actress and socialite, known for her extravagant Hollywood lifestyle. During the show, Lorelai and Rory would routinely label any behaviour they considered overly fancy or pretentious as being like Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Mrs. Kim (Emily Kuroda)

MRS. KIM: So, how was school? None of the girls get pregnant, drop out?

A none-too-subtle dig at Rory, whose own mother did exactly that. It’s clear that Mrs. Kim is uncomfortable and a bit nervous about Lane being best friends with Rory, the daughter of a young single mother. The fact that she allows Lane to maintain the friendship anyway speaks volumes about how much she loves Lane, and doesn’t want her to be friendless and alone. It’s our first clue that she’s not as strict as she might appear at first.

Although Lane Kim is based on the Palladinos’ friend Helen Pai, and her childhood experiences of growing up in a Seventh Day Adventist Korean-American family, Helen’s mother is described as a mild, sweet lady. Mrs Kim isn’t based on her – she’s an entirely fictional character.

Hayride

Lane’s parents arrange for her to attend a local hayride with a Korean-American teenage boy as her date. A hayride is a North American traditional activity where (as the name suggests) people travel in a wagon filled with hay for fun. They are a form of celebrating the harvest season, and may involve other activities associated with the fall.

Rory does not attend the teen hayride, not seeing anything about it she would enjoy (from what we see, the hayride does look pretty lame and boring, as it just goes around the main square in town, rather than through fields). However, in later episodes we learn that Taylor will not allow Rory to skip any town entertainments or functions, not even accepting illness as an excuse.

At this point, Taylor wasn’t a character in the show, although his name is mentioned later in this episode. It is possible that originally Rory was intended to be considerably more detached from the events of the town than she ended up being.

Rory missing the hayride does point to a disdain for teenage activities that seems in keeping with her character – perhaps because they would have meant having a life separate from her mother. This might be why Rory never seems to be popular with her peers, although adored by adults.

Drella (Alex Borstein)

Drella is the harpist at the Independence Inn for the first few episodes of the show. She is named after Andy Warhol, oddly enough – he was given the nickname Drella by his friends. The nickname is a combination of Dracula and Cinderella, and perhaps that is meant to be a comment on Drella the harpist: she will go for your throat like Dracula, but sees herself as a poor put-upon servant like Cinderella. There will be many more references to Warhol and his circle during the run of the show.