LORELAI: But if you’re gonna be in the area Thursday night, you can come with us to the dinner.
CHRISTOPHER: But it’s Sookie’s rehearsal dinner.
LORELAI: Oh, she would love it. She’s cooking for a thousand. It’ll be fun.
Sookie and Jackson’s wedding rehearsal dinner is on Thursday, and Lorelai invites Christopher to it, since he already offered to take Lorelai and Rory out to dinner that night. The Gilmore girls are strangely un-curious about how and why Christopher is suddenly so available for outings with them, and neither bothers to ask where Sherry is, or why she isn’t coming too.
Note we get another day of the week reference to keep us on track. The wedding rehearsal is Thursday, the elections are Friday, the wedding is on Sunday. Got it?
When Rory got her cast put on, the doctor said she would need to keep it on for two weeks, but it’s actually been three weeks since the night of the car accident when she gets the cast removed.
Lorelai takes Rory to Dr Ronald Sue, a specialist in orthopaedic medicine – who has an office in Stars Hollow, quite unbelievably. It feels like in Season 1, the writers tried to create a small town in New England that might be a little quirky, or niche, or even slightly magical, but was still a place you could convince yourself might almost exist.
Now it’s only Season 2, but already they are throwing anything into Stars Hollow that suits the plot, so this little town of less than 10 000 people has multiple takeout options which all deliver, a 24-hour pharmacy, a hospital, and an orthopaedic specialist. It feels like very lazy world-building. In this case it seems especially pointless, because there’s no reason Lorelai couldn’t have picked Rory up from school and taken her to an appointment with Dr Sue in Hartford.
Christopher invites himself to the medical appointment, announcing to everyone with self-importance that he’s “the father”, as if Rory has just been born, or like anyone cares. He’s driven from Boston to watch a minor two-minute medical procedure, and now he … drives back again? That makes perfect sense. Is it a hint he isn’t actually in Boston at this point?
Rory wears a red and black tee shirt which says STRANGE 13 to her appointment, as a nice callback to her Emily the Strange sticker.
PARIS: Because people think you’re nice. You’re quiet, you say excuse me, you look like little birds help you get dressed in the morning. People don’t fear you.
A reference to Cinderella, previously discussed. In the 1950s film, Cinderella makes friends with birds and mice to cheer her lonely existence, and the birds are shown helping her get dressed, and even make a ballgown for her, with the help of the mice.
Six months ago, Rory was a friendless loser who couldn’t even get anyone to eat lunch with her, and Chilton was actually disturbed by how unpopular she was. Suddenly, everyone likes her so much that she can help Paris win the election just by existing. What happened?
LORELAI: Oh, hey Mom, uh, Sookie wanted to know if you and Dad would like to come to her wedding … Yeah, it’s gonna be great. Small, low key, but fun. She’s catering it herself so the food’ll be fantastic, and you’d get to see me and Rory walk down the aisle in two of the least obnoxious bridesmaid dresses ever created.
EMILY: Well, that sounds very nice. When is it?
LORELAI: A week from Sunday.
Unlike so many episodes of Gilmore Girls, which exist in a sort of timeless vaccuum or even have a self-contradictory timeline, “I Can’t Get Started” has a very clear timeline, with Sookie and Jackson’s wedding on a Sunday, one week and two days from the first scene. There are several reminders of how time is passing, to keep us on track with the wedding schedule.
We were told in a previous episode that that the wedding is planned for the 14th of May, although in real life, the 14th May in 2002 was a Wednesday, not a Sunday.
MICHEL: Well, I must say this has been especially challenging for me. I mean, when you are talking about a wedding with up to forty people all living within a five mile radius, how can one person be expected to keep track of all of that?
According to Michel, forty people are coming to Sookie and Jackson’s wedding, all of them living within five miles from Stars Hollow. That doesn’t sound right, because Jackson is shown to have a large family, and whenever they come to Stars Hollow, they need accommodation – something which wouldn’t be necessary if they’d only driven five miles. For that matter, why did Rune move to Stars Hollow if his home town was five miles away?
The moment arrives, and it is Lorelai’s turn to graduate, after three years of studying business at community college. As her name is read out, we discover for the first time that her middle name is Victoria (oddly enough, the last time we saw the name in the show, it was on a gay bar – The Queen Victoria!).
A popular fan theory is that because Richard named Lorelai after his beloved mother, her middle name of Victoria was chosen by Emily, and was perhaps the name she wishes that Lorelai had. It does seem like Emily to choose a name from royalty.
Richard and Emily look at Lorelai graduating with such pride, and I think feeling glad that they have been included in this important event. They could have been snobbish about her graduating from a community college, or even embarrassed that she doesn’t graduate until her thirties. They could have done the bare minimum; shown up, sat at the back, and given a quick congratulations before going home.
Instead they hire a professional filmmaker to record the ceremony, order dozens of corsages so Lorelai can choose whichever one she likes best, and watch Lorelai graduate with expressions of love and pride. They know how hard she has worked, and the struggles she has been through to graduate, so being there for her big moment is very important.
The writer (Daniel Palladino) has left poor Rory stuck on a bus and unable to get there, but it was so that Lorelai could share this touching moment with Richard and Emily – she gets to graduate as a daughter, not a mother, the way she would have if she’d been sent to Vassar when she was a teenager.
It’s slightly unbelievable Richard and Emily are not more concerned about Rory’s absence from the ceremony, but perhaps they don’t want do anything to ruin Lorelai’s special evening.
Rory has a nightmarish bus journey back to Hartford, which begins with the bus unable to even leave the terminus, as an accident has temporarily closed the interstate. We don’t get much of an idea as to how long that took, but in such cases, the interstate is usually closed for at least an hour or two (sometimes more than a day).
Rory sends Lorelai a pager message to say that she’s been held up, and will try to get to the ceremony by seven, but might be later than that. This sounds as if the bus was delayed from starting for more than an hour. It’s annoying, but Rory can still make the graduation ceremony at this point, even if she misses the first part of it.
The problem is that she soon discovers to her dismay that the bus is making many stops on the way back to Hartford – she caught an express bus in the morning that went directly to New York, but this is a local bus service which picks up passengers and lets them off along the entire route, meaning travel time is much longer.
In real life, buses are often delayed or take longer routes, something Rory may not have known but probably should, since she catches an intercity bus every day to school. Reviews for the New York to Hartford bus service complain of lengthy delays, often taking four hours to arrive, so this is a believable situation. If Rory was delayed from starting by two hours, and the trip took four hours, she might not be getting into Hartford until somewhere between 8 and 9 pm.
Note that Rory’s backpack on the seat beside her looks remarkably flat and empty – did she throw all her school textbooks away while she was in New York???
LORELAI: Yeah, I never leave home without all the essentials: mirror, makeup, picture of Shaun Cassidy.
Shaun Cassidy (born 1958), singer, actor, writer, and producer. He is the son of Oscar-winning actress Shirley Jones and Tony Award-winning actor Jack Cassidy, the half-brother of David Cassidy from The Partridge Family, and the brother of actor Patrick Cassidy.
While still in high school, he signed a record contract and forged a career as a teen pop idol. His biggest hit was “Da Doo Ron Ron”, which went to #1 in 1977. At the same time, he starred in The Hardy Boys Mysteries on television, and had a role on General Hospital.
During the 1980s and 1990s he concentrated on stage acting, performing on Broadway and in the West End. He wrote his first television pilot in 1995 while appearing in Blood Brothers on Broadway alongside David Cassidy, and has gone on to have a successful career as a screenwriter and TV producer.
Lorelai implies she had a crush on Shaun Cassidy when she was a little girl, although also, a bit oddly, that her make-up routine dates to the same period, when she would have been aged 8 to 12. This actually makes more sense for someone Amy Sherman-Palladino’s age, as she would have been around 14 at the end of Cassidy’s pop star career.
JESS: It’s fifteen blocks. Come on, I think you’ll like it.
The New York City Subway System is a rapid transit system owned by the government of New York and leased to the New York City Transit Authority. It opened in 1904, and is one of the world’s oldest public transport systems, one of the most used, and the one with the most stations, with 472 in operation. Stations are located throughout the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and The Bronx.
There is/was a concentration of record stores in the East Village, and the one that Jess takes Rory to could very well be located in this area. If they caught the subway near Washington Square, and got off at the Bleeker Street, Broadway-Lafayette Street, or Second Avenue subway station, that would take them around fifteen blocks into the East Village, saving them about 25 minutes of walking.
It’s amusing that Rory is so prepared to walk for another half hour or so – she’s already had a long walk to get to the park! You’d think she’d be glad to catch the subway.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 