Their group has to find a parent with experience in business to act as an adviser and mentor for the business fair. Chip’s father has scheduling issues. Paris’ father is in Hong Kong for a month, but could possibly video conference – an idea Rory says no to. Madeline says her father is travelling; she doesn’t mention her stepfather, so I’m not sure if she still has one, or if she now refers to him as her dad? Her stepfather was in Japan last time he was mentioned.
Louise’s father is in court for the next six weeks on a mysterious charge. Oddly enough, when Paris’ dad was involved in some shady activity, it was a major, major scandal, she was a laughing stock at school, and her parents separated for a time. But now Louise’s father is in legal trouble, and nobody cares at all. Louise hasn’t even bothered finding out what he did!
Paris freaks out when she gets an A- on her Chemistry lab report on electrochemistry. Her parents, who were getting divorced in “Paris is Burning” after a terrible scandal her father was involved in, are back together again once Paris explained to her dad how much money a divorce would cost him. Apparently it was Mr Geller who wanted the divorce, even though he was the one causing scandal, because Mrs Geller doesn’t seem to need convincing.
The terrible scandal, which was implied to involve something sexual and illegal, is never mentioned again, and doesn’t seem to have had any consequences. Mr and Mrs Geller are now fighting with each other, and redecorating. Paris’ mother redecorated when they were first getting a divorce – maybe her husband didn’t like it, and it’s now being re-redecorated back it how it was before.
With all the fighting and redecorating, Paris hasn’t been able to focus on her studies as well as usual. This seems like a re-tread of the “Concert Interruptus” plotline, where Paris and her gang had to study at Rory’s house because of Paris’ issues with fighting parents and redecorating.
We open with the diner in disarray, because Luke’s apartment that he bought in the previous episode is still under construction. In real life, it usually takes months for the sale of a property to go through so you can begin work on it, but this is television, and Luke is already in the middle of renovations.
Jess, wearing a construction helmet, chivalrously brings Rory an umbrella to shield her from the mess. Although Luke gets cranky about Jess making fun of the situation, the umbrella saves Rory from being hit by debris just a minute or so later.
This is the first official sighting of Tom the Contractor, although it is the same actor (Biff Yeager) who played Tom who was the foreman at Rebuilding Together in Hartford where Rory did volunteer work. They have the same name and personality, and obviously look the same, so it seems perfectly possible that they are actually the same character. This is never confirmed, however.
It’s not clear how much time has passed since the previous episode, but Luke complains to Tom about the renovation taking another week, and in 2002 Easter was at the end of March, so perhaps three weeks have gone by and it’s now early April (Thursday 4th April). I won’t be able to keep blog entries in step with events in the show, or I will run out of time. Time gets very stretchy in the last few episodes of the season!
After catching Jess coming out of Rory’s bedroom, and Rory’s bracelet coincidentally turning up under her bed when she’d already looked there numerous times, Lorelai puts one and one together and draws the obvious conclusion that Jess had Rory’s bracelet and had secretly returned it.
She immediately accuses Jess of stealing Rory’s bracelet and keeping it out of jealousy towards Dean, not caring that he was upsetting Rory in the process. Lorelai doesn’t bother trying to get all the facts, because Jess didn’t deliberately steal Rory’s bracelet, but held onto it after she lost it. He didn’t know it was from Dean, and was not trying to cause trouble between Rory and her boyfriend by keeping the bracelet.
She makes the mistake of attacking Jess as if she is a teenager herself, calling him a “little jerk”, rather than behaving like a concerned parent. This mother-daughter relationship where Lorelai tries to be both a mom and a best friend often goes wrong when she tries to be a friend when she should be a mother, and vice versa.
Lorelai has a temper and tends to go off halfcocked, especially when it comes to safeguarding Rory. Jess has no hesitation in talking back to her, and this episode will leave Lorelai with deep distrust and a simmering resentment against Jess which will explode later in the season.
While Lorelai checks the car to see if the bracelet is there, we see Jess outside, staring at the bracelet with a look of unhappy disillusionment. All this time he has been cherishing it as a memento of Rory, something which has actually touched her skin. He must feel such a fool when he discovers he’s been unwittingly sighing over something Dean made for her, and probably concerned when he realises that losing it has upset Rory and caused her to worry about Dean’s reaction.
Jess is actually wearing the bracelet on his wrist, so he has made no effort to conceal that he has it, and both Rory and Lorelai have seen it without realising its significance. Jess wears several leather bracelets, so it doesn’t stand out, although he has been careful to wear Rory’s bracelet on a different wrist from the others. Talk about hiding in plain sight!
DEAN: You go look at the astronomy section, we’ll go see Lord of the Rings, and on the way home we’ll rent Autumn in New York and mock it for the rest of the afternoon.
Autumn in New York is a 2000 romantic drama directed by Joan Chen, and starring Richard Gere as a middle-aged womaniser who falls in love with a sweet young woman who is terminally ill, played by Winona Ryder.
The film received negative reviews, being judged as sappy with no chemistry between the two romantic leads, although Chen’s direction did receive some praise. It was nonetheless a success at the box office. The film was released on DVD in January 2001.
Although I think Rory would mock the film roundly, it has enough parallels with her relationship with Jess to also be uncomfortable viewing for her. The main characters share a love of poetry, just as she and Jess share an interest in literature, and there are references to Rory’s favourite poets, Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
There is a major plot point in the film where the young woman takes her lover’s watch as a keepsake, telling him she will return it when he no longer notices it is gone. This is quite similar to Jess taking Rory’s bracelet, and returning it – except he will return it when Rory notices it is missing.
Dean has proposed what sounds like an exhaustingly lengthy afternoon: hours looking at books, a three hour movie at the cinema, and then a 90 minute video “for the rest of the afternoon”. Just how long is this afternoon? It’s early spring, it gets dark early!
Dean’s plan apparently comes to nothing when he notices that Rory isn’t wearing her bracelet. Instead of simply telling him the truth, that she didn’t notice it had fallen off, she tells him a silly lie about having a rash on her wrist, possibly caused by her Spanish mid-terms (!), and needing to temporarily remove the bracelet.
Even though this version of events wouldn’t stop Rory watching movies, she instead spends the afternoon searching the entire town for her bracelet. Again, it would have made more sense for her to have been honest, said that she lost the bracelet somewhere (for all she and Dean know, it fell off that very day), and needs to look for it.
It’s never said how she managed to cancel all her plans to spend the day with Dean to look for her bracelet without confessing it was lost, or raising his suspicions.
Lorelai needing her rain gutters cleaned was mentioned in “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” – she was hoping that the “Collins kid” might clean them for her. Luke remembers this, and suggests Jess could clean her gutters instead. Lorelai puts him off by saying she’s already got people lined up for the job.
Rory puts her head down sadly or sullenly when Lorelai balks at Jess coming to their house. Note that Rory is holding the ice creams hugged close to her chest, so her body heat will melt them even faster. I’m pretty sure that’s not ice cream in those cups marked “ice cream”.
RICHARD: No, what you meant was that people in the insurance industry are drones. Well I agree. They are a dull, dull lot, and I am glad to be rid of them …
TAYLOR: Oh, are you retired Richard? RICHARD: Well, uh … EMILY: Of course he’s not. Richard? Richard? RICHARD: Actually, I am.
After at least three months of unhappiness in his job, with the knowledge it was only going to get worse, Richard has unexpectedly retired, explaining his abnormally cheerful mood. Without planning to, he announces it at the Bracebridge Dinner, so that Rory’s plan of cheering up Richard and Emily doesn’t quite work out. They arrived cheerful, and wind up in a bitter row when Emily discovers that Richard has announced his retirement publicly without ever mentioning it to her.
TRISTAN: The police are letting our parents handle it, and in my case that means military school in North Carolina.
A meta comment. Chad Michael Murray, who played Tristan, left the show in order to begin filming the teen drama One Tree Hill (2003-2012), shown on the same channel as Gilmore Girls (The WB); Murray had the lead role of Lucas Scott. One Tree Hill is set in the fictional town of Tree Hill in North Carolina, and mostly filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Amy Sherman-Palladino apparently planned for Tristan to become Rory’s boyfriend in high school/college and her “Christopher”, which, because Chad Michael Murray went to another show, was a role filled by the character of Logan Huntzberger instead. In this farewell episode, you can see the faint beginnings of the tenderness between Rory and Tristan which would have blossomed into eventual love. Anyone wishing to see what would have happened if Logan had been Tristan instead must turn to fanfiction.
In real life, there is only one one military school in North Carolina, and it is Oak Ridge Military Academy, so presumably that’s where Tristan is headed. It was originally founded in 1850, and was one of the first military schools to become co-educational, in 1972. It apparently had a reputation at one time of taking troubled youth, which it is working to overcome.
If Tristan turned up to Chilton in order to say he was leaving for military school, couldn’t he also have stayed to do the scene with them? Does everyone transfer schools on a Sunday night in this universe? (Maybe because they’re boarding schools?).
With Tristan out of the picture, the love triangle between Rory, Dean, and Tristan comes to an end, to make way for a new love triangle, which becomes clear in the very next episode.
RORY: What about Brad? PARIS: Brad transferred schools.
An explanation for why we don’t see Brad again for a while – Paris terrorised him until he had to move to a different school on the day their Shakespeare project was due. How he managed to transfer schools on a weekend, I don’t know. Even if he was starting at a new school on Monday, having secretly applied to another school as soon as he met Paris, couldn’t he at least have done the scene with them on the Sunday so they didn’t fail?
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 