“The 6 am crowd”

LORELAI: Who are all these people?
RORY: It’s the 6 am crowd.
LORELAI: I officially recognise nobody in this place.

There’s a whole section of Stars Hollow society that only comes in at 6 am on Saturday, so people like Lorelai who get up later on weekends never see them. (They like standing up to talk to each other while other people are sitting down, too). Weirdly, these people never get up early on weekdays, as Lorelai does – she and Rory routinely have early breakfast at the diner on weekdays before Rory goes to school. Despite saying she doesn’t know anybody there, she soon encounters Miss Patty and Kirk.

Rory’s Dilemma

As Rory and Lorelai walk to Luke’s for early coffee and breakfast, Rory explains that they can’t walk past Doose’s Market in case Dean is working there (she can’t remember if he is, but earlier he told her their anniversary dinner had to be on Friday as he was working on Saturday night). They can’t walk past the high school in case Dean is playing football, and they can’t walk down Peach Street because that’s where Dean’s house is.

The unique configuration of Stars Hollow means that the only three routes to Luke’s Diner are now cut off from them and they have to walk through an alley to get to breakfast, as staying in and getting their own coffee and breakfast is apparently just not possible.

The real question is why they are walking at all – they have a car, and don’t they have a lot of things to buy, not to mention taking all their stuff to the recycling centre? How are they managing all that on foot?

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

This is the play that the Stars Hollow Elementary School is currently performing; Rory suggests that she and Lorelai might see it as a reward for getting all their Saturday morning chores done. It doesn’t seem as if they ever did, however.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a black comedy by American playwright Ed Albee, first staged in 1962. It is about a middle-aged couple named George and Martha who have a volatile relationship. A drunken night they spend with a young couple named Nick and Honey reveals a poignant secret in George and Martha’s marriage.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won the Tony Award for Best Play, while its Broadway stars Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill won Best Actress and Best Actor. It was successfully adapted to film in 1966 with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the lead roles.

Needless to say, it is completely inappropriate as a play for elementary school children to even watch, let alone take part in. Not only is it unusually long with complex dialogue to memorise, but the characters are utterly vicious to one another. It heavily features alcohol use/abuse, and discusses death, murder (including murder of children by their parents and vice versa), and sexual themes, including infidelity.

It seems too much even for quirky Stars Hollow, so perhaps Rory used it jokingly as a hypothetical activity. It’s definitely a joke by the writer (Amy Sherman-Palladino).

“It sleeps with the fishes”

RORY: Far, far away from the house, okay? [referring to her box of items that remind her of Dean]
LORELAI: Hey, it sleeps with the fishes.

A reference to the 1972 crime film The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and based on the best-selling 1969 novel of the same name by Mario Puzo. The story is about an Italian-American crime family in New York in the 1940s and ’50s, under their patriarch Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando). It depicts the transformation of Vito’s son Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) from an outsider in the family to mafia boss.

The Godfather was the #1 film of 1972, and is one of the highest-grossing films in cinema history. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture, while Marlon Brando received Best Actor, and Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo won Best Adapted Screenplay. It is regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, and has been highly influential on gangster films.

In the film, Luca Brasi is the loyal enforcer to Don Vito Corleone. He is murdered by a rival mobster, who sends the Corleone family Brasi’s bulletproof vest with a fish in it, a message that “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes” (ie his corpse was thrown into a body of water).

It becomes apparent through the series that The Godfather is a favourite movie of Lorelai and Rory.

Lorelai does not make good on her word, hiding Rory’s “Dean memory box” in the hall cupboard. It doesn’t seem like a particularly sneaky hiding place, and Rory finds it later in the season. Rather confusingly, prior to this the doorway in the hall led into the downstairs bathroom. Where the bathroom went is a mystery, but it still exists, as it is referred to several times later.

Three-month Anniversary

DEAN: There must be some other excuse that you could use.
RORY: Like what?
DEAN: Like it’s your three-month anniversary with your boyfriend.
RORY: It is?
DEAN: Yeah. Three months from your birthday. I mean, that’s when I gave you the bracelet and that’s when I figured this whole thing kinda started.
RORY: Wow. Three months.
DEAN: Actually, technically your birthday was on a Saturday, so really it should be Saturday, but I work Saturday and I planned out this whole big thing so I thought maybe we could do it on Friday.

There is no way that we are only three months from the night that Dean gave Rory her bracelet as a birthday present (despite what Dean says, it wasn’t her birthday, but the day after her birthday). That was in late October, so three months later would be late January. It’s now mid-March, so it’s roughly four and a half months from her birthday.

Frustratingly, it is about three months after another significant date in their relationship – the night of the Chilton Winter Formal on December 9, when Dean and Rory mutually agreed that they were boyfriend and girlfriend. It would have made a lot more sense if Dean decided that was the start of their relationship, and then we could have dated their anniversary dinner to March 9.

Dean says technically it should have held on the Saturday as Rory’s birthday was a Saturday (again, not her birthday, but her birthday party in Stars Hollow), but he has to work that night. That isn’t how anniversaries work – they are on the same date each time, not on the same day of the week. This one is just really perplexing. (It also shows that if there is any clash in their schedules, Dean expects Rory to change her schedule to suit him, rather than changing his schedule for her).

We’re probably meant to be struck by how much more invested in the relationship Dean is than Rory, as she paid no attention to the one-month and two-month anniversaries while he did. However, due to this sloppy and confusing writing, you can hardly hardly blame her for that.

Dean has arbitrarily decided what marks the start of their relationship, and has his own method of deciding what makes a month. Under these circumstances, any normal person would have been at a loss to keep up. Of course, it does show that Rory just hasn’t been paying attention to her relationship and is taking it for granted.

Lorelai Paints Luke’s Diner

On the morning after the disastrous dinner with the Haydens, Lorelai suddenly remembers that she never showed up to help Luke paint the diner on Friday night. She runs over while still in her pyjamas to apologise and explain, unnecessarily increasing Luke’s pain by letting him know that she was with Christopher.

In fact their “date” for painting the diner was so vaguely worded that I couldn’t tell when exactly they were planning to do it, and Lorelai had triple-booked herself, as she had Friday Night Dinner with her parents, and also business class, which she never seems to attend. Even if Emily let Lorelai leave early, when were she and Luke planning on doing the painting – in the middle of the night?

As their poorly-planned painting date didn’t happen, Lorelai somehow manages to sneak into the diner while Luke is asleep – the bread guy let her in, suggesting she started at dawn – and paints the entire thing in an hour or two. This would take at least two days (you can’t just start painting, walls have to be prepped), and she was doing it all alone.

Furthermore, later episodes confirm that Luke slept over the diner and would have almost certainly heard her, and that he got up extremely early so the diner could open at 6 am, meaning that there was no time for Lorelai to paint the diner before he got up (and also that he couldn’t have possibly painted the diner at night as they originally planned; he wouldn’t have got any sleep).

Christopher Leaves

When Christopher prepares to ride back to California on his bike, he makes the manipulative and irresponsible move to have Rory re-state his marriage proposal to Lorelai. This only serves to give Rory more false hope, and to place the blame for him not being in her life on Lorelai. Rory also asks him to phone more often in the future, further confirmation that the “weekly phone call” from Christopher was much less often in reality.

I’m not sure how Christopher can afford to drive home when his credit card is maxed out – the trip across America to California would take several days at least, and cost a lot in fuel, food, and accommodation. Maybe Richard and Emily gave him money, or his own parents.

This episode, and the previous one, make it abundantly clear that Christopher is a creep and a wastrel, and it’s a testament to David Sutcliffe’s acting that he also imbues him with such charm and boyish appeal. You can see that Lorelai and Christopher have great chemistry, and genuinely care for each other, but it’s not a relationship that could ever last the distance.

Lorelai and Christopher

We learn in their scene together on the balcony of Lorelai’s childhood bedroom that this is where Rory was conceived. As Rory was born in late October, it means that Lorelai and Christopher had sex outdoors in January, which seems ridiculously cold and uncomfortable. They then recreate it by having sex on the balcony again, this time at night in early March, when it is still very cold in Connecticut. I’m not sure the Californian writer, who had only visited Connecticut in the summer, really thought this one through.

From what we see of Christopher in later episodes, it seems to be one of his less endearing qualities that he is quick to make a move on Lorelai whenever they are together and she is in an emotionally vulnerable state – in this case, crying after a terrible argument with her father, and drinking tequila that he gave her. It makes you wonder if this is how they originally had sex as teenagers. Did Christopher wait until she was at a low point after a fight with her parents, then ply her with alcohol?

In any case, it’s a horrible thing for both of them to do to Rory, as they go off to be alone together just when she most needs their love and reassurance. (It’s done so that Rory can have a touching scene with Emily, but still makes Lorelai and Christopher look bad). Rory is old enough to wonder where they went, and shrewd enough to make a guess as to what they were doing, as her questions to Lorelai show. For a child who obviously secretly longs to have her father in her life, it’s cruel to give her that kind of hope that her parents might be getting back together.

Rory and Emily

While Lorelai is talking with her father, Emily at first tries to defend Straub as a good man, highly intelligent, who was one of the top lawyers in an obscure field of international law, and a great contributor to the community through his charity work. She then drops the charade, and says he’s always been a big ass. Most importantly, she lets Rory know that never, for even one second, has Rory herself ever been a disappointment to them. It’s something Rory needs to hear.

Emily then gives Rory some cold leftovers, which look like a roast potato and a couple of asparagus spears; it doesn’t seem like an adequate meal. What about the leftover roast meat? At least make her a sandwich, Emily!

Straub, Richard, and Lorelai

Christopher’s father Straub (Peter Michael Goetz) could hardly be written as more hateful. He makes it clear that he sees Rory as nothing more than a terrible mistake, entirely Lorelai’s fault, which ruined his son’s life. He even suggests that as a sixteen-year-old, Rory is just about to get pregnant herself (“dangerous age for girls”). He looks down on Lorelai, and identifies her position as executive manager of an inn as a “blue collar” job. This is ridiculous, as Lorelai is in no way performing manual labour – I suspect he still thinks of her as a maid.

It is entirely satisfying when Richard throws Straub and the mousily ineffectual Francine (Cristine Rose) out of the house (with Francine, you can see where Christopher gets his weak character from, although Straub’s bullying also provides an explanation for his overly compliant wife and son). The fight between Straub and Richard explains why Rory never has any further contact with her paternal grandparents.

Lorelai thanks her father for defending her, but instead of a sweet father-daughter moment, Richard coldly tells her that he wasn’t defending her, but “the Gilmore name”. He lets Lorelai know in no uncertain terms that she brought shame to the family by getting pregnant, and that after she ran away from home Emily was confined to her bed for a month with grief – something Lorelai did not know until this moment.

Richard lets Lorelai know that he hated Christopher for getting her pregnant, but that Christopher at least was willing to marry Lorelai and work in the insurance business to support her and Rory (Christopher would agree to anything to avoid conflict, although we can feel fairly confident he would have found a way to weasel out of it at some point).

Richard continues to blame Lorelai for not marrying Christopher, her personal feelings being irrelevant to him. This seems to be further evidence that the whole plan to reunite the Gilmores and the Haydens was something cooked up by Richard and Emily, who really want Lorelai to marry someone suitable, with Rory’s father being the best candidate in their eyes.