DEAN: I don’t know, Rory. Maybe . . . maybe, um . . . is there a way we could be friends? … If you want to.
RORY: Oh, I want to. I really want to. But –
DEAN: Don’t ask me how I’m gonna deal with him. I have no idea.
Although Rory was initially reluctant to have coffee with Dean, and refused to eat anything, by the end of this scene they are chatting easily, and she is smiling and sharing his custard pie. When Dean asks if they can be friends, she says she really wants to, with Jess being relegated to a “But – “.
Rory was friends with Jess, which gradually damaged her relationship with Dean until they broke up (again). Now she agrees to be friends with Dean while going out with Jess – what could go wrong? Of course, Dean is very much wanting it to go wrong, in order to cause Jess the same sort of problems he believes Jess caused him.
It does feel typically unfair that just as Rory is starting to feel more relaxed and confident with Jess, Dean worms his way back into the picture. Because drama.
DEAN: Yeah. You know, um, I wanted to tell you I applied to Southern Connecticut State …
RORY: Wait a minute, you do know that Southern Connecticut State is a four-year college?
DEAN: Yeah, I read that in the brochure.
RORY: But what happened to ‘I’m going to community college’?
Southern Connecticut State University, previously mentioned. It is located in New Haven, the same city as Yale. It feels as if the show was setting up a future plot line where Rory and Dean were both at university in the same city, but nothing ever came of it. Perhaps Dean changed his mind, or perhaps Jared Padalecki’s commitments to filming Supernatural meant that this idea fell by the wayside.
Charlemagne, or Charles the Great (747-814) [pictured], King of the Franks, King of the Lombards, and the first Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne has been called the “Father of Europe” as he united most of Western Europe for the first time since the classical era of the Roman Empire, as well as uniting parts of Europe that had never been under Frankish or Roman rule. His reign spurred the Carolingian Renaissance, a period of energetic cultural and intellectual activity within the Western Church.
Rory hasn’t been a student at Stars Hollow High since she was a freshman in 2000, but apparently Mr McKellan is still using the same material on his senior students. And it’s taken Dean two years to also have him as a History teacher. How many History teachers does little old Stars Hollow High actually have?
[Jess and Rory are walking through the town square, kissing]
It’s about two months since Rory broke up with Dean, and by now she is comfortable enough to be seen kissing her boyfriend Jess in public. It feels as if the relationship between Rory and Jess is nothing but kissing, actually. Do they do anything else?
When they were friends, they read books and talked about books and went book shopping – whatever happened to that? Is it happening offscreen, or are we meant to think that now they’re in a relationship, Rory and Jess don’t bother any more?
LORELAI: What do you mean you don’t know? All you had to say was ‘Welcome to Stars Hollow,’ that’s it.
MICHEL: I know, I thought I did, and then they got angry and threw bread sticks and butter pats.
In the inn, when greeting the Hungarians, Michel says in Hungarian, A te országod tele van csúnya emberekkel. The translation in English is, “Your country is full of ugly people.”
Somehow he confused this with udvözöljük, meaning “welcome”. This doesn’t seem like a simple error or misunderstanding. He must have at least known how to say Stars Hollow!
Granted, this all happened in the last two years – before that, they only saw Rory a few times a year. Also granted, Lorelai has been fairly reluctant about most of this contact, and has often submitted to it with bad grace. However, I don’t think it’s fair for Emily to say that Lorelai hasn’t let Rory share even one piece of her grandparents’ lives. They have regular contact, and Rory is actually quite close to Richard and Emily.
Lorelai’s flair for over-dramatising her problems clearly comes from Emily.
In the early 2000s, it was free to apply to up to three colleges, but after that you had to pay a small application fee for each one. Because of this, it was common to only make three applications, and it looks as if Rory applied to three universities: Harvard, Princeton (where her paternal grandfather went), and Yale (where her maternal grandfather went). She probably didn’t want to ask Lorelai for the money for further applications, knowing that she’d be upset about it, nor did she want to go behind her mother’s back and ask her grandparents for the money.
Lorelai acts as if applying to Yale is a complete shock, even though she knows Rory had an interview there, and she herself read a brochure about it, as if she was trying to get used to the idea. Apparently she needed a lot more time for it to sink in.
Chilton would certainly not permit Rory to only apply to Harvard. It is staggering that Lorelai wouldn’t already know this – she did attend a private school, even if she never ended up applying to university. And even if she somehow didn’t know this from her school or her parents (surely Richard and Emily would have talked to her about college?), it’s something which she should have educated herself about if she wanted to help Rory get into Harvard.
It also seems very telling that Rory has never talked this over with Lorelai, but kept her college applications a secret from her mother. It seems that she was so nervous about how Lorelai would react that she never discussed it with her. Lorelai’s overreaction at dinner shows that she was right to be wary about it, but then again, Lorelai probably wouldn’t have overreacted so badly in public if Rory had talked about it with her first.
CLAUDE: I have a grandson who lives with his mother in Orlando, you know, he’s going through a very similar thing, poor boy.
EMILY: How do they like Orlando, Claude?
CLAUDE: Well, it’s all Mickey Mouse this and Mickey Mouse that, you know. They want to die.
Orlando, Florida, previously discussed. Claude refers to the fact that Walt Disney World is in the city, which apparently ruins it for Claude’s family (surely they knew this before they moved there?).
Because Claude says my grandson, rather than ours, I assume Monique is his second wife. I’m also assuming that his grandson’s mother is Claude’s daughter-in-law or former daughter-in-law, rather than his daughter, because otherwise he would say so. And I’m further assuming that Claude’s son is separated or divorced, because he doesn’t mention him as also living in Florida.
Lots of assumptions! But it’s letting us fill in quite a bit of back story for ourselves. We might also note that Claude is not spending Thanksgiving with his grandson, and never has – he says he has only seen Thanksgiving in American movies.
DOUGLAS: We have a grandson your age, he’s going through hell.
NATALIE: He’s already been turned down for early admission to Stanford, his dream.
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California, in the San Francisco Bay area, ranked among the top universities in the world. It was founded in 1885 by US Senator and former governor of California Leland Stanford and his wife Jane, in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr, and opened in 1891 as a coeducational institution.
After World War II, the university’s provost, Frederick Terman, supported faculty and graduates to build a self-sufficient local industry that would later become known as Silicon Valley. It also houses the conservative public policy think tank, the Hoover Institution, one of the most influential of its kind in the world.
85 Nobel laureates, 29 Turing Award laureates, and eight Fields Medallists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue and have created 5.4 million jobs as of 2011, roughly equivalent to the seventh largest economy in the world.
Stanford has won more College Athletics team championships than any other university, and Stanford students and alumni have won almost 300 Olympic medals.
Stanford is the alma mater of US President Herbert Hoover, 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. Its alumni include the current presidents of Yale and MIT and the provosts of Harvard and Princeton. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.
Stanford is one of the hardest universities to get into, with an acceptance rate of less than 5% – that’s tougher than both Harvard and Yale, and indeed, all the Ivy League universities. It’s perfectly believable that Douglas and Natalie’s grandson didn’t get accepted.
In real life, the deadline for early admission to Stanford is November 1, and notifications aren’t sent out until mid-December, so Douglas and Natalie’s grandson couldn’t really know he’d been turned down by Thanksgiving. (Although, if it is just before Christmas, according to the show’s actual timeline, this would make sense!).
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 