Tag: Oh Really?

“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.

“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].

Lane Meets Dave Rygalski

DAVE: Excuse me, Lane?

LANE: That’s me.

DAVE: Okay, great, I’m Dave Rygalski.

LANE: Right, hi. You’re a guitarist.

In this scene, Lane meets Dave Rygalski, who answered her ad because he has a band that needs a drummer. He almost immediately becomes her love interest.

The character of Dave is based on the real life Dave Rygalski, the husband of Helen Pai, producer on Gilmore Girls, who the character of Lane is based on. The real Dave Rygalski has been a writer for Jay Leno and David Letterman, and also plays guitar, just like his fictional namesake. He has been in a few bands, and played some of the music for Lane’s band on Gilmore Girls.

On the show, Dave Rygalski is played by Adam Brody. At this stage, Brody had played Barry Williams in the TV film, Growing Up Brady, and been Greg Brady in an episode of The Amanda Show. Like several other actors on Gilmore Girls, he’d also been in Judging Amy, another show about mothers and daughters set in Connecticut – he played a guy called Barry Gilmore!

There has already been a character named Rygalski on Gilmore Girls – a bank manager in Hartford where Lorelai tried to get a loan was Mr Rygalski. Quite possibly this is Dave’s father.

It seems a bit unlikely that Lane is available to meet Dave on a Saturday night – as a Seventh Day Adventist, she has church on Saturday, and when Lane asked her mother for permission to go out on a Saturday night after church, Mrs Kim told her that after church she should be thinking about what she learned in church. However, perhaps has mother has softened slightly, or Lane is allowed out to see Rory.

Town Meeting

After having lunch in Westport with the Springsteens, Lorelai and Rory attend a town meeting in Stars Hollow – we know it’s the evening of the same day, because they are wearing the same clothes, and Lane asks how lunch went.

Town meetings were always held on a Thursday (it seemed to be the second Thursday of the month). Now they are going to one on a Saturday – not the day of the week that anyone would pick for a meeting, either, because people often go out on weekends, or even go away. It’s a bit disappointing, because they seemed to be slowly building a nice little world in Gilmore Girls that was reasonably consistent, and now they’re holding a meeting on a Saturday because it suits the plot, and for no other reason.

I would like to believe this is a special meeting that Taylor has called for the soda shop issue (cunningly arranged for a weekend so hardly anyone can attend), except that when Lorelai and Rory arrive late, the meeting has just finished going through their routine banking business.

“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.

“She’s okay with anything I do”

CAROL: So, tell me something, Harvard hair – how bad do you wanna please your parents?

RORY: My mom, and really bad, but it’s not hard to please my mom. She’s okay with anything I do. As long as I’m happy, she’s good.

Not really true – there’s plenty of times Lorelai hasn’t been okay with what Rory wants to do. She didn’t permit Rory to give up Chilton after she met Dean, she was furious when Rory told Emily about their financial problems, and she doesn’t approve of Rory’s attraction to Jess. In the future, Rory will discover that when it comes to her university education, Lorelai will not be “okay” with all of Rory’s decisions, and that Rory just being “happy” is not enough to satisfy her.

More accurately, Lorelai and Rory have plenty of fights and disagreements, some more serious than others, but they always find a way to resolve things, eventually.

Note that Rory repudiates Christopher as her father here – she is quick to say she only has one parent, her mother. She is seriously angry with him for what he did to Lorelai, and to her, and it is a rift which is never really healed. Rory will never go back to being the young girl who yearns for her father and gets excited at the thought of him making one of his all too rare visits.

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.