Footnotes to the TV series
LANE: And then I was thinking that this date could maybe happen this weekend.
RORY: Huh.
LANE: Sunday preferably.
RORY: Well –
LANE: After church.
Lane makes it sound as if the date will be the evening after church on Sunday, but as a Seventh Day Adventist she would attend church on Saturday. She must mean the date will be on the day after church – at least that’s the only way her statement makes any sense.
While Rory and Lane are talking and listening to music, Lorelai comes in to complain that she has to study for a big test on “the Walmart phenomenon” to be held on Friday (it’s a new semester at college, and her classes have changed from Tuesday and Thursday to Friday and some other day: somehow going to night school on Fridays will not clash with Friday night dinners).
Walmart is a multinational retail company which operates a chain of hypermarkets, discount department stores, and grocery stores, founded in 1962. It is the world’s largest company by revenue, and the largest employer in the world.
When looking at the “Walmart phenomenon”, a business studies class might examine the profitability of the company and the methods by which they keep prices low, but also how that could impact on the wider community. For example, foreign product sourcing could hurt the US economy, low prices might force smaller stores out of business, and low wages mean that workers often need welfare payments as well to survive, placing further pressure on the economy.
Because the pizza doesn’t arrive, a desperately hungry Lorelai fills a bag of salad leaves with ranch dressing and eats it from the bag – another sign that the Gilmore girls do in fact have vegetables in their fridge and will eat them.
EMILY: Your grandfather called last night and told me to let you know he’s bringing you back something very special from Prague.
RORY: Wow, Prague. How amazing is it that he’s going to Prague?
EMILY: It’s supposed to be lovely, very dramatic, castles everywhere.
Prague is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and is also the historic capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia. Rich in history and culture, the original settlement grew out from the 9th century Prague Castle, the largest ancient castle in the world, which is now the official residence of the President of the Czech Republic. The other main castle in the city is the 10th century Vyšehrad (“upper castle”), which contains the Basilica of St Peter and St Paul, and the Vyšehrad Cemetery, where lie the remains of many famous people from Czech history.
Emily speaks as if she has never been to Prague, but in the next season we learn that she went there with Richard in 1998.
During the conversation Rory has with her grandparents, Richard says he would have married a girl named Lucinda Lester except that he was on the fencing team, which made him enough like Errol Flynn to be attractive to Emily. In a later season, we are told the girl he almost married was named Pennilynn Lott. It is possible he almost married Lucinda and Pennilynn, but doesn’t seem likely.
Rory, Richard and Emily look at photos. Among them is one of Emily’s younger sister “Hopie”, presumably a pet name for Hope. She lives in Paris, so Rory has never met her; what she does in Paris remains a mystery. She is described as the family’s “great expatriate”, although we later find Richard mother lives in London.
Hopie is never mentioned again; even though Richard and Emily travel to Europe later, and so does Emily and Rory, nobody ever talks about visiting Hopie. The photo of Hopie shown is Kelly Bishop, who plays Emily.
When Rory and her grandparents look through a photo album, we see baby photos of Lorelai, even though in a later episode we are told she burned all her baby photos when she was a little girl.
Emily is annoyed to discover that their cook du jour, Florence, won’t be able to come to work because of the storm. At the start of the show Emily seemed to have both a cook and a maid (and couldn’t hang on to either for long), but later episodes show the maid doing the cooking as well as her other duties. For some reason this cook-maid is never referred to as a housekeeper.
During the town meeting we encounter the mayor of Stars Hollow, Harry Porter, who has been mayor for many years He was gradually phased out leaving Taylor Doose in sole charge of the town. Perhaps Harry entered a sort of semi-retirement or became a figurehead: he didn’t retire as nobody else was elected mayor and in fact the role of mayor apparently became more or less redundant.
When Tristan shows Rory the party invitation he received from Emily, we can see that Rory was born on October 8.
This isn’t possible according to the script – Rory started school late, and she would only have been at Chilton for a short time by October 8, less than two weeks at the absolute maximum. Several weeks have now gone by, where Rory has attended multiple Friday Night Dinners, learned to play golf, helped out at a wedding, got her first D, failed to turn up in time for a big test, attended a cat’s wake, discovered her mother and English Literature teacher made a date, and confessed to Dean that she is interested in him. Furthermore, October 8 was a Sunday, not a Friday, in 2000.
If you carefully follow Rory’s adventures since starting at Chilton, you can see that her birthday would actually be October 27. A birthday in late October is confirmed in future seasons.
If you are in a nit-picky mood, feel free to join me in tut-tutting that the party invitation said that Rory was born in the morning twice in the same sentence, but neglected to mention that it’s her sixteenth birthday – no way would Emily have done such a shoddy job.
One might also wonder how Emily was able to get the names and addresses of all Rory’s classmates to send them invitations – did Headmaster Charleston let her access the school database just for her granddaughter’s birthday party?
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 