Rory’s CD Plan

Rory has co-opted Kirk and Michel to help her with the CD drop off to Lane. While Kirk distracts Mrs Kim with idle chit-chat, it is Michel’s task to jog past, secretly slipping the CD into Lane’s bag. Unfortunately, Rory forgot to tell Michel about the revised time, so the poor man was left to jog around the square for an hour waiting for Lane to show up. He is understandably miffed.

Roping Kirk into a zany scheme is a natural choice, but it’s a surprise that Michel, who can barely be bothered doing his actual job some days, is apparently willing to help Rory and Lane out like this in his free time. Perhaps he always goes jogging on Saturday morning anyway, but even so he stuck it out for over an hour until everyone else arrived. Lord knows how Rory managed to persuade him.

I feel as if the writer, Daniel Palladino, was almost forced to choose Michel as the only person in Stars Hollow who is young and fit enough to be credibly kept jogging for an hour. It’s interesting that Rory never considers asking her boyfriend Dean to be involved. Maybe he works on Saturday morning.

If this scene does connect with the Elton John song “Rocket Man“, then Michel is in the role of the “rocket man” who is “lonely out in space on such a timeless flight”, and “burning up his fuse out here alone”. And as he feared, “I think it’s gonna be a long, long time”!!!!!

Sparklers, Kicks

LUKE: You don’t seem your chipper self.
LORELAI: I brought some sparklers. I’ll light them later and do some kicks.

Sparklers are small hand-held fireworks that give off bright coloured flames and sparks. They are especially popular with children, and are responsible for 16% of firework injuries in the US, and 57% of firework injuries in children.

Lorelai saying she’ll be doing some kicks while she holds sparklers sounds like a reference to The Rockettes, a precision dance company founded in 1925, and since 1932, based at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. They are famous for their high kicks, and especially known for both their Christmas show, and annual performance at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Luke immediately picks up on Lorelai’s low mood, and tries to cheer up by offering to play bagel hockey with her. He might act grumpy, but Luke doesn’t like seeing Lorelai unhappy, and his response is to try to return her to her normal chirpy disposition.

“It should’ve been you!”

EMILY: Christopher gets his life together with that woman.
LORELAI: So, that’s good.
EMILY: It should’ve been you!

Emily is extremely upset when Rory doesn’t come to Friday Night Dinner because she’s having a night out with Sherry. She immediately fears that Sherry will “take Rory away” from them, and is terrified that Christopher and Sherry will obtain weekend custody of Rory. She’s slightly on the old side to be a tug-of-love child at seventeen, and I’m pretty sure you have to pay child support to get even part-time custody of your child, which Christopher has never done.

Emily says she is heartbroken, because she always pictured Lorelai and Christopher being together, so that Rory could finally have two parents. Christopher was never ready to commit and was no kind of provider, but now it looks as if he was capable of settling down and working at a steady job, he just needed to find the right woman.

Completely and cruelly unfairly, Emily now blames Christopher’s general uselessness on Lorelai, saying that if she’d really tried, she could have influenced him to become a better man. Really? At the age of only sixteen, frightened, pregnant, and alone, she should have been responsible for Christopher’s life as well? Lorelai had a baby to care for and support, she didn’t need to take care of Christopher as well (and Rory would have suffered horribly if she did).

Emily is no better than Straub, laying all the responsibility for Christopher’s failure at Lorelai’s feet. It’s a horrible thing to say to her daughter.

Lorelai does admit that she has feelings for Christopher and isn’t happy about Sherry either, but she is trying to focus on doing what’s right, and being happy for Christopher. This unselfishness is roundly condemned by Emily, who goes upstairs to cry on her bed. (Later we find out she did eventually come down to dinner, but sulked all the way through it).

The episode’s title comes from Emily’s outburst to Lorelai, that, “It should’ve been you!”. Note that Emily’s outfit is mostly sad black, with touches of angry red. Lorelai is in grey, trying to remain neutral.

“Cranking Metallica”

LORELAI: [The Volvo’s] also excellent for cranking Metallica.

RICHARD: Cranking Metallica? … If that’s some sort of drug reference, it isn’t funny.

Lorelai says that Christopher’s Volvo is excellent for “cranking” Metallica, meaning “listening to Metallica loudly on the stereo”. The car really does have a great stereo system, but Lorelai is teasing Christopher, because Metallica is her favourite band, not Christopher’s.

Eight Months

EMILY: So how long have you been with this woman?
CHRISTOPHER: Eight months.

Christopher has supposedly been going out with Sherry since July 2001. Something he didn’t bother sharing with Lorelai and Rory until nearly three months later – and only then because they contacted him. Without Lorelai calling him, would Christopher have remained in contact with them at all, or disappeared to Boston to lead a new life with Sherry?

“He and I never met”

CHRISTOPHER: Well, [Max] and I never met. I didn’t even know he existed until late in the game. Hell, I didn’t even know you were engaged until you called me from your bachelorette party. And I wasn’t invited to the wedding – or did my invitation get lost in the mail?
LORELAI: Well, you’ve moved a lot this past year.

Lorelai and Max’s relationship moved extremely quickly and they had a significant break from it. When they got back together, they got engaged almost immediately. In fact, Lorelai only seems to call Christopher from her bachelorette party in hopes of getting talked out of it (in which case, mission accomplished).

It is interesting she never told Christopher though, considering that she was going right through her address book to tell distant relatives and the man who did her shower that she and Max were back together. Maybe she didn’t want to get talked out of it that soon. I suspect if she had sent him an invitation, it would have gone to the wrong address, and he would’ve been a no-show (again).

Christopher is getting awfully huffy about this neglect, but by the time Lorelai phones him to say she is getting married, we find out later he is already with Sherry – something which he hid from Lorelai. It looks very much as if Lorelai’s news pushed him into committing Sherry faster than he otherwise would have.

“Was Sherry with you?”

LORELAI: When I invited you to Rory’s debate, was Sherry with you?
CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, of course. She’s been with me the whole trip. Why?
LORELAI: It’s just that you gave me no indication that she was with you.

Lorelai is quite reasonably suspicious of Christopher’s motives and behaviour. He came into their lives six months ago, only telling them he had a girlfriend just before he left. Once again, he has weaselled his way into their lives without mentioning that Sherry was going to be with him.

Would Lorelai have invited him to Rory’s debate if she knew Sherry was coming too? Probably not. Christopher would no doubt say that justifies his lies of omission, so he can see Rory – although he only seems to want to see her so he can impress Sherry with what a great father he is.

Wednesday Nights

SHERRY: And he told me about how he wasn’t really a presence in her life for years and how he’d like to make up for all that time that he wasted.
LORELAI: Well, he’s been doing really well lately.
SHERRY: I know. He is obsessive about his call dates to her. I mean, it doesn’t matter where we are or what we’re doing, he’s gotta call Rory Wednesday nights at seven o’clock. I like that about him.

We learn here that Christopher has been phoning Rory every Wednesday at 7 pm since the debutante ball, after years of neglect. It seems a bit suspicious he only became so conscientious when he got with Sherry, as if he’s mainly doing it to impress his girlfriend.

It’s not clear when the Wednesday night phone calls initially started. After Christopher visited them in March 2001, Rory asked for him to phone more often. That could have been when the Wednesday calls were implemented, but if so, there was a big break during the summer, as Christopher moved to Boston then without ever letting Lorelai and Rory know, and they only resumed contact in September 2001.

“I paraphrased Proust”

RORY: Well, having company is about making sacrifices.

LORELAI: Martha Stewart?

RORY: I paraphrased Proust.

Martha Stewart, previously discussed.

Rory refers to Marcel Proust, previously discussed, the author of In Search of Lost Time, a novel in seven volumes.

I’m not sure which part of Proust Rory is paraphrasing from. There are so many times that the author reflects on sacrifices made for other people, and for the benefit of society that it is difficult to choose. However, this sentence from The Guermantes Way, Vol 3 of the novel, stood out for me as possibly reflecting Rory’s feelings:

The same familiar spirit represented to Mme. de Guermantes the social duties of duchesses, of the foremost among them, that was, who like herself were multi-millionaires, the sacrifice to boring tea, dinner and evening parties of hours in which she might have read interesting books, as unpleasant necessities like rain, which Mme. de Guermantes accepted, letting play on them her biting humour, but without seeking in any way to justify her acceptance of them.

Rory also submits to social duties she finds boring, in a way Lorelai doesn’t, but like Mme. de Guermantes, she would probably prefer to be reading “interesting books”, and uses her sense of humour as a coping mechanism to get through them.

That does sound a lot like Rory’s attitude, and if so, suggests she thinks of entertaining her father and his girlfriend as a boring necessity. A big change from the previous season, when she was so thrilled to see Christopher in Stars Hollow. Is it just Sherry making the difference, or is some of the gilt coming off Christopher already?

If this is the source, it means Rory has read at least the first three volumes of In Search of Lost Time.

“Sherry, this is Rory”

CHRISTOPHER: This is Sherry. Sherry, this is Rory.
SHERRY: Oh, finally, finally, finally. I am so beyond thrilled, I can’t tell you. All he does is talk about you. I couldn’t wait to meet this amazing person.

Confirmation that Rory didn’t visit Christopher and Sherry in Boston during her Christmas break, despite being invited.

Goodness knows what Christopher has to say about Rory. He hardly knows her!