“Three years of going there”

LUKE: I hate that building.

LORELAI: What, the school?

LUKE: Three years of going there, I have no good memories.

Luke attended Stars Hollow High School for three years, meaning he didn’t complete the full four years of high school available in the US. He may have dropped out of school (sixteen was the legal age for this in Connecticut at the time), or done his last year of education at a trade school. From a conversation Luke had with the school principal, the second one seems the more likely.

If Luke regrets not doing four years of high school, then it might explain why he is so insistent that Jess remains at school. There is some irony in the thought he is forcing Jess to attend the school that he himself supposedly hated, when Jess is miserable there.

Party Schools

MRS. KIM: They’re all good religious programs, and I’ve already thrown out the ones that let boys and girls sit in the cafeteria together, the party schools.

Party school, a college or university with a reputation for heavy drinking and drug use, or a general culture of licentiousness at the expense of educational credibility and integrity. It’s a term mostly used in the US, and The Princeton Review publishes a list of “party schools”. The University of Connecticut is on it.

Mrs Kim considers any college where boys and girls are permitted to sit together to eat a “party school”. In real life, Seventh Day Adventist colleges and universities often do have restrictions on contact between male and female students, but nothing so extreme as not letting them eat together, that I have heard about.

“Pack your bags”

DARREN: [on answering machine] I just wanted to let you know that I just finished going over Rory’s records here, and no shock, they’re perfect. Rory, you are tailor-made for Harvard. They’re lucky to have you. As far as I’m concerned, you should pack your bags. I’m gonna tell all this to the people in admissions and I’ll give your headmaster a call as well, so take care and we’ll talk again.

There is no way that the alumnus who interviewed a prospective student would tell them to “pack their bags” – there are many, many excellent students who aren’t accepted into Harvard, nobody can guarantee anyone a spot, unless something very corrupt is going on. This goes right up there with Headmaster Charleston telling Rory she deserves to go to Harvard, just after she’s discovered breaking into his office, no less.

However, this is a way to neatly tie up the episode and let the viewers know that Rory will almost certainly be accepted into Harvard, and all her application anxieties are at an end. Although Rory has work for the newspaper to complete, and Lorelai needs to do tasks for the inn, they elect to spend their Sunday hanging out together instead, as if aware that their time together is running short, and therefore more precious.

Jackson’s Plans for Rory’s Room

JACKSON: I have this collection of antique farming tools that my dad passed down to me.

SOOKIE: Pre-Revolutionary War. They’re kind of valuable.

JACKSON: And I’ve got no place to put them. I’ve been looking for the right space.

LORELAI: In Rory’s room?

Sookie and Jackson continue being ridiculously annoying since their marriage. Now Jackson asks Lorelai if he can store his valuable collection of antique farming tools in Rory’s room when she goes away to college, as he has nowhere to put them. Oh really? So where are they now? Because wherever they are, that’s a place he has to put them.

The idea that when a teenager goes away to college their bedroom is now “free space” is ludicrous. Rory will still need to come home, she will need somewhere to sleep, study, and put her things away for at least a few years. And even if Lorelai did decide to use Rory’s room for something else, why on earth would she want to display someone else’s old tools in it?

I think this is meant to be a sad or bittersweet moment when Lorelai realises with a pang that Rory will soon be gone, but it ends up being stupid and irritating instead.

Junior College

RORY: Or hey, you can go to college in Boston.

DEAN: I’m going to junior college.

RORY: Boston has junior colleges.

DEAN: But not dorm rooms.

In the US, a junior college is a two-year post-secondary school whose main purpose is to provide academic, vocational and professional education. The highest certificate offered by such schools is usually an Associate degree, although junior college students may continue their education at a four-year university or college, by transferring some or all of their credits earned.

Dean might be planning to attend Goodwin College, a junior college in East Hartford that used to be a school of business. They have student housing available so that Dean would be able to live on campus.

There are three junior colleges in Boston – Bay State College, Fisher College, and Labouré College of Healthcare, which provides training for nurses and is probably not for Dean. Bay State and Fisher are mostly for business and administration degrees. Both Bay State and Fisher do have halls of residence for students to stay in, so Dean isn’t correct about that.

“On the train coming home”

DEAN: So you’ll come home, do homework all weekend, then leave.

RORY: No, I can do my homework during the week or on the train coming home to see you, who I will spend my weekends with not doing homework. Plus, we can talk during the week on the phone constantly. Trust me, it’ll feel like I never left.

In real life, it’s a three and a half hour train trip from Boston to Hartford, requiring a change at New Haven. Then Rory would need someone (Dean?) to pick her up from the Hartford station for a thirty minute drive home to Stars Hollow. It sounds very tedious to do regularly – of course, she has to go back again every Sunday, so that’s eight hours of travel every weekend! That does give her free time to study though, I guess.

As it happens, Rory doesn’t go to Harvard in the end, and she has a car by then anyway, so this impractical plan never gets put into operation. It does sound as if she hasn’t thought about it very hard though.

[Picture shows South Station in Boston, from where Rory would need to catch a train. It’s a 15 minute bus ride from Harvard, so add a bit more time on for that].

“Do we break up?”

DEAN: What happens when you leave?

RORY: When I leave when?

DEAN: When you leave for Harvard . . . do we break up?

Rory acts as if Dean is being unreasonable to ask this question, but it doesn’t really seem so. After all, Zach and Liza broke up when they left Hartford to attend different universities. A lot of young couples break up when one or both go away to college, being realistic enough to know that long-distance relationships don’t usually work out for teenagers.

It does seem a bit premature to bring it up already – Rory hasn’t even applied to Harvard yet, let alone been accepted. It also comes out of the blue, as the pair of them were kissing, holding hands, and smiling together just seconds previously.

It feels as if Dean is either trying to ruin their last year together, or is pushing Rory for some kind of commitment. He must be feeling pessimistic about their future together, and probably rightly so, when they are headed in very different directions. I do sense a jealousy and possessiveness from Dean in regard to Rory’s education, as if it is taking her away from him.

“I didn’t mold her”

DARREN: She’s a very impressive young lady … You molded her well.

LORELAI: Oh, no, I didn’t mold her. Rory popped out that way.

Lorelai has been very careful during the meeting with Darren to portray herself as a naive and uneducated small town girl, to make it seem as if Rory has attained everything without any family help. She doesn’t let Darren know she’s from a wealthy family, and went to private school until she got pregnant. She doesn’t tell him she’s an avid reader who loves musical theatre and classic films. She most certainly doesn’t share with him that going to Harvard was her dream, and that she’s been pushing Harvard onto Rory since she was a toddler.

Everything she does at the Springsteens is designed to convince Darren that Rory has had to struggle to succeed and needs special assistance to get into Harvard; that she’s from a “non-traditional” background that will increase diversity. It’s not really honest or transparent, but she hasn’t told any actual lies (except of omission), and she really wants Rory to get into Harvard.

Harry Potter

RORY: I’ve dreamt of going to Harvard since I was a little girl.

CAROL: Yeah, a lot of four year olds dream of that. It comes right after meeting Harry Potter.

Harry Potter, the schoolboy wizard who is the protagonist of the popular Harry Potter book and film series, the novels written by English author J.K. Rowling, previously mentioned. In the films, he is played by English actor Daniel Radcliffe.

Rory was four years old in 1988-1989, and the first Harry Potter book was published in 1997, so Rory could hardly have been interested in him as a toddler anyway. Presumably Carol is thinking of her young clients in the present day.

There’s a little mistake in the writing here. Rory never actually tells Carol that she’s been dreaming of Harvard since she was four – only that she was a little girl. We know she was four because Lorelai told Max in Season 1, but somehow Carol knows about it too.

“I’m not on the conveyor belt”

CAROL: My brother and sister got stuck on that conveyor belt. I, however, escaped somewhere around the eleventh grade, thank God … Oh, hey, but no offense. I mean, that’s just me. If you like being on the conveyor belt, then good for you.

RORY: I’m not on the conveyor belt.

Rory is definitely on the conveyor belt. Lorelai has been psychologically grooming her for Harvard since she was a toddler, and enrolled her at a private prep school that is a feeder school for Harvard.

Carol says she “escaped” the conveyor belt around eleventh grade, when she was sixteen or seventeen (about the same age Lorelai got pregnant and had to leave school). It’s not clear whether Carol means that she left school around that age to start working, or if she means she refused to begin applying to colleges, and made it clear she wasn’t going to attend university.