EMILY: You spend five seconds with a person and if they say one wrong thing, you turn on them and never give them a second chance … You are extremely judgmental, Lorelai.
Hmm … I wonder where Lorelai gets that from, Emily?
Emily is incensed that Lorelai cancelled her date to the concert with Peyton, since she had a terrible time on their dinner date, and they were obviously unsuited to each other. However, Emily doesn’t care about any of this, she cares that Lorelai rejected her friend’s son, therefore making Emily look bad by association (somehow). I feel as if Lorelai should have seen this coming … has she never met her mother before?
LORELAI: There’s no way I could stand this guy for another night. I’ll catch Bowie the next time he does a farewell tour.
David Bowie’s Heathen Tour in 2002 was not his farewell tour, or his final tour, nor was it ever planned to be so or promoted as such. His final tour was A Reality Tour in support of his Reality album, beginning in Denmark in October 2003, and brought to a sudden end in June 2004.
David Bowie suffered a heart attack on stage in Prague on June 23, and the tour was cut short after a music festival in Germany the next evening due to continued discomfort. The tour was officially cancelled after Bowie was diagnosed with an acutely blocked artery that required an angioplasty procedure (performed on 26 June). It was only after this incident that David Bowie decided his touring days were over, and he retired from live performance in 2006.
Lorelai seems to be aware that time is running out to catch David Bowie live (he was then in his mid-fifties), and perhaps also that her chances of dating a wealthy man who can pay for the tickets again is slender. However, Lorelai could have seen David Bowie at Madison Square Garden in New York City on 15 December 2003 – which really would have been his next time in New York, and his farewell tour. This makes her comment seem rather prescient.
This is the book that Rory is reading on her bed when Lorelai comes in before her date with Peyton.
Letters of Ayn Rand is a collection of letters written by the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, edited by Michael Berliner with the approval of the Rand estate. It was first published in 1995, 13 years after Rand’s death, and the paperback version that Rory is reading was published in 1997. It received generally positive reviews from Rand scholars and fans, but was judged “tedious” by The Washington Post.
Although Rory said she only liked Ayn Rand because of her novel The Fountainhead, reading her letters seems to suggest a stronger interest in Rand and her ideas than she let on.
This is the song which plays when Rory looks at the clock at Dwight’s house, while putting the African violets back. It’s a woven basketwork clock that a china figurine pops out of when the hour strikes.
“Midnight at the Oasis” is a 1973 song written by David Nichtern. It was recorded by Maria Muldaur for her self-titled debut album, and released as a single in 1974. It peaked at #6 in the US, and was the #13 song of the year, becoming one of Muldaur’s most popular concert songs.
“Midnight at the Oasis” is about an offer of a love affair in a fantasy desert location, and is considered to be one of the most sensual songs of the 1970s, apparently inspiring numerous sexual encounters. It seems as if Dwight has more than just board games in mind now he’s moved to Stars Hollow! Perhaps he’s even set his sights on Lorelai – the gossipy Babette would have told him Lorelai was single.
The clock reads eight o’clock at this point, providing the name of the episode, “Eight O’clock at the Oasis”. I can’t see how it can be 8 am – Rory is meant to be at school in five minutes! And although they were running slightly late, Lorelai still thought they could have breakfast at Luke’s, as long as she drove Rory to school. Why do the Gilmore girls seem to have all the time in the world sometimes, and at others, time just suddenly disappears? They weren’t at Dwight’s for that long.
LORELAI: Well, first, he asked me to the David Bowie concert next week.
David Bowie’s 2002 concert tour was the Heathen tour, promoting his latest album Heathen, which came out in June that year. It opened in New York City on June 11, before going back and forth through Europe and the US.
By October 11, Bowie was back in New York, with the final concert in the city being Sunday October 20 at the Beacon Theatre on Broadway [pictured]. That is the last possible date Lorelai and Peyton could have gone to his concert – and if that was the week after their first date, it suggests that this scene takes place around the second week of October.
There is no way that this tallies with the timeline within the show, way too much has happened for it only to be early October, so it’s probably best to think of it as a fictional concert date. On the rare occasions when real world events are mentioned as impinging on the action, they rarely match up exactly with the dates within the show. But I think it is safe to say it is now late October, so they only seem to be running about two weeks behind the real world.
Lorelai seemed to meet Dwight on a Monday night, just before the auction on Tuesday. He asked if she could water his lawn, as he was leaving for a few days on an urgent last-minute business trip. As Rory was waiting for her with the pizza, Lorelai tried to put him off, saying that Dwight could show her some other time before he left on his trip. Dwight said he was leaving for his business trip at 6 am the next morning, so Lorelai reluctantly accompanied him to be shown how to use the spigot.
Even though Dwight supposedly left for his business trip on the morning of the day of the auction, Lorelai and Rory are not shown watering his lawn until about a week later – even though the business trip was only meant to be a few days. They have had Friday night dinner, and Rory is now wearing her school uniform, so they are past the weekend, and it is another Monday at the absolute earliest.
Somehow they just skipped an entire week of lawn watering and Dwight is still on his short business trip. I know I usually blame Daniel Palladino for these timeline inconsistencies and non-linear plotting, but this episode was written by Justin Tanner, a successful playwright, and a story editor on Gilmore Girls. This is the only episode he ever wrote.
NATALIE: There she is, the Cobra … This woman gets her way or she squeezes ’til you comply.
Emily’s friend is Natalie Swope, played by Judy Geeson. You may remember her as one of the ladies from Emily’s tea party on the patio in “Presenting Lorelai Gilmore”. Emily introduces Natalie and Lorelai as if they are strangers, even though Natalie asked after Lorelai and seemed to remember her quite well in the previous season, despite not seeing Lorelai since she was a teenager (although, as Lorelai and Rory attended Emily’s Christmas party each year, this doesn’t seem plausible).
Natalie refers to Emily as “the Cobra”, because she squeezes people (puts pressure on them) until she gets what she wants from them. There are various snakes called cobra, but only those in the genus Naja from Asia are true cobras. They are notable for being able to rear up off the ground and flatten their necks to appear larger. They don’t attack prey by squeezing them, however – that’s pythons and boa constrictors. Cobras have highly venomous fangs instead, and all species are capable of delivering a fatal bite to a human.
Lorelai sometimes seems selfish and unreasonable in the way that she instinctively refuses her mother’s requests, but Emily’s reputation as domineering and manipulative, determined to get her own way at no matter what cost to the other party (the auctioneer is actually ill in this episode, but Emily has forced him to turn up and work) provides a good reason for that. She has no wish to be one of the Cobra’s many victims, and what seems like a reasonable request may well turn out to be something more sinister.
LORELAI: Uh, well, I guess, I could water your lawn, Dwight – sure.
DWIGHT: Boy, that is something. If I would have asked somebody back where I used to live to water my lawn, I would’ve gotten a much more HBO kind of answer.
Home Box Office (HBO), a pay television channel, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery (Gilmore Girls was on the Warner Bros. TV channel, the WB). First launched in 1972, it was the first pay TV network in the US, and the first in the world to begin transmitting via satellite.
HBO, as a channel available to subscribers, was able to broadcast programs without having to edit them to remove adult or objectionable material, and its sister channel Cinemax even broadcast softcore pornography until 2018. Dwight is saying that he would have received a much more adult-oriented answer in his previous neighbourhood (presumably in a city) if he asked someone to water his lawn for a few days.
Lorelai has always been shown to be pretty good at shutting down anyone who asks her to do anything for them she doesn’t want to, yet somehow, she is unable to resist Dwight’s plea. I guess she doesn’t want to get on the bad side of a new neighbour, or she doesn’t want him to think Stars Hollow isn’t a nice place, when he seems so excited to have moved there. Possibly her fight with Pete, which she later learned she’d been unreasonable about, has taken up all her energy. Or Dwight just has some mystical power over her. Maybe the same mind control that he used to get Beenie Morrison’s house!
DWIGHT: You know, I just got this beautiful lawn put in, really amazing shade of green, and the guy who put it in for me, he told me that I have to keep each blade of grass very moist for the first few days while the roots take, but I have to go on a business trip for a few days. Huh, last minute, and believe me, I tried to get out of it but my boss said, ‘Dwight, get off your keister and go make us some money’, so I gotta go.
Keister, slang for the anus or the buttocks. Its origin is uncertain. In the 19th century, it was criminal slang for a burglar’s tool box, then later, criminal slang for a strongbox or safe, while “tripe and keister” meant a conman’s display case on a tripod. It probably comes from kiste, a German and Yiddish word for a box or case.
It seems Dwight not only moved in without Lorelai and Rory noticing anything, he also got a new lawn laid down without them noticing!
I am not sure what business Dwight works for that he could commute to it from Stars Hollow. He could work in Hartford and drive in every day, but he’s really presented as more of a big city person, with a New York vibe. By the way, people really take a lot of business trips in the Gilmore Girls universe!
LORELAI: Oh, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Beenie Morrison’s old place.
Although Beenie Morrison was never seen or mentioned before, he used to live in the house directly opposite Lorelai and Rory. Oddly enough, they never noticed Beenie talking about selling, putting the house up for sale, erecting a FOR SALE sign, saying goodbye, or moving out. This has led many fans to the theory that Dwight simply murdered Beenie and moved into his house! Although this doesn’t explain why they didn’t also notice Dwight moving in, and why they never heard anything, when Stars Hollow is so gossipy. It’s strange how very, very oblivious the Gilmore girls have been to the house across from them until their attention is drawn to it.
Even Lorelai seems to suspect something isn’t right with this scenario. When Dwight says it’s “great” to be in his new house, Lorelai says, “Only if Beenie Morrison didn’t want to live in it any more”, as if she wonders whether Beenie was forced out in some way. Dwight says he paid Beenie a good price – even overpaid. That might suggest that rather than Beenie putting his house up for sale, Dwight picked it out on a visit to Stars Hollow, and made Beenie Morrison an offer he couldn’t refuse.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 