Tag: Relationship Insight

Flashback 5

We see a nurse wheeling Lorelai into the delivery room to give birth, when Emily and Richard arrive. Emily is furious that Lorelai simply left for the hospital (in a taxi?), leaving a note reading: “Dear Mom and Dad, I’m in labor. See you later, Lorelai”. Richard is only annoyed that he is wearing the “wrong shoes” for the occasion, which are apparently uncomfortable.

Emily begins scolding Lorelai, even as she is being wheeled into the delivery room, for not asking them for a lift to the hospital. Lorelai receives no comfort, no support, not even a kind word from her parents as she prepares to give birth.

The contrast with Sherry is clear – Sherry is a woman in her thirties, accompanied into the delivery room by Christopher, her fiancé and the father of her baby. She also has Lorelai and Rory to give support, waiting outside. Lorelai was a sixteen-year-old girl who got herself to hospital and gave birth alone, without Christopher, and with two angry and uncomfortable parents waiting for her.

Sherry Prepares to Give Birth

SHERRY: Christopher, you’re here! I can’t believe you’re here. I didn’t think you’d make it.
CHRISTOPHER: Are you kidding? You think I’d miss this?

Sherry is being wheeled into the delivery room when Christopher rushes to join her at the last moment. Christopher says he wouldn ‘t miss this, but of course, he already did – he missed Rory’s birth. It must be difficult for Lorelai to witness Christopher showing up for his second daughter’s birth when he wasn’t there for the first. She’s certainly looking rather pouty about it.

Then again, we never see Christopher’s point of view. Did Lorelai tell him she was going into labour and needed to go to hospital, or did she just leave without telling him? Was he given the opportunity to accompany her, or did he simply not know? This is never made clear.

Christopher Arrives at the Hospital

At the eleventh hour, Christopher arrives at the hospital, after being out of town for some mysterious reason, in an area where he couldn’t get cell phone reception for some mysterious reason. Where was he, the middle of the woods? Maybe cell phone coverage was a lot more patchy in the US during the early 2000s?

It is a relief for Rory and Lorelai to see him, because otherwise it would have been them going in with Sherry to watch the birth. It seems almost superhuman of Lorelai to offer to accompany Sherry into the delivery room, when she doesn’t like Sherry, and resents her for being the reason things didn’t work out between she and Christopher.

But as Lorelai told Emily – she wasn’t going to do it for Sherry, but for Rory. Luckily, she never has to do it, but it must bring Rory comfort to know her mother was ready to be there for her is she wanted her.

Lorelai Arrives at the Hospital

When Rory phones Lorelai in distress, Lorelai is still eating dinner with Emily, as if it’s 7.30-8 pm. Impossible! It must have been around 10 pm by then. Gilmore Girls rarely seemed able to get a plausible timeline in place.

It is a two hour drive to Boston from Hartford, meaning it would be around midnight before Lorelai got there, and Rory would have been left alone for hours. The show always made it seem as if Boston was about 40 minutes away.

However ridiculously this occurs, Rory is naturally overjoyed to see her mother, who immediately takes charge of the situation, and stops Sherry from exploiting Rory. Lorelai’s protective mothering really gets a chance to shine here.

Rory Phones Lorelai in a Panic

RORY: I’m here all by myself and I’m trying very hard to be calm but I’m starting to feel nauseous, and the hospital has a smell, and there are noises, and those gowns do not stay closed and I’ve seen a lot of butts today! And –
LORELAI: Okay, sweetie, calm down.
RORY: I need you … I need you, I need you here, I need you now. I cannot do this alone. I need my Mommy, and dammit, I don’t care who knows it!

Rory has been consistently shown as needing Lorelai’s help to handle even small personal crises, but this time, surely no one can blame her for desperately calling her mother for help. She’s a young adult thrown in the deep end, and must be both hungry and exhausted by now.

Even now, she probably wouldn’t have called Lorelai, except that that she was told that she might well be accompanying Sherry, a woman she barely knows, in order to help her through the birth itself. Rory notoriously doesn’t cope well with “icky” things – even planting bulbs in the garden is gross for her – so you can imagine the trauma witnessing a birth would cause.

Flashback 3

In this flashback, Lorelai’s pregnancy has become known to her parents, and Emily and Richard meet with Christopher’s parents, Straub and Francine to discuss it. Straub and Francine are both angry and upset – Francine cries and says she feels sick, while Straub says that everything has been ruined.

The Haydens can only see Lorelai and the baby as a problem to be got rid of. Straub suggests an abortion, and Francine that Lorelai be “sent away” – meaning to a home for unwed mothers, where her baby will taken away and adopted out. Francine’s ideas for handling teen pregnancy are very much outdated, as her plan sounds like something from the 1960s. By the early 1980s, such homes had been closed down and replaced with teen parenthood centres, for young parents to get help.

Richard then tells them his plan – Lorelai and Christopher will get married, they will live with he and Emily, and Christopher will be given a job at the same insurance company Richard works for.

Lorelai and Christopher are listening to the discussion from the stairs, like children – they aren’t invited to be part of it or make any contributions. Lorelai is angry at being left out of the decision-making process, but Christopher passively accepts Richard’s plan, saying that it doesn’t sound too bad, and they will need their parents’ help. Neither of them acknowledge the fact that Richard is essentially forcing them to get married.

While Lorelai still feels independent and rebellious, even though she is now pregnant with an unplanned baby, Christopher is ready to cave in to Richard. Lorelai demands to know what happened to their plan of backpacking around Europe after graduation, and she must already know that Christopher’s adventurous talk was just that – all talk. If Lorelai wants to forge an independent life for herself and her baby, she will have to do it alone.

A quick note that Christine Rose, who appears in this scene as Francine Hayden, went on to play Milo Ventigmiglia’s character’s mother in the TV show, Heroes.

Sherry at the Hospital

SHERRY: I’m lying in a bed. God knows what’s gonna happen … And she goes back to work. I would love to go back to work, but I can’t because I have to stay here … She’s not here. None of my friends are here. Christopher isn’t here. No one is here. No one but you. Thank God you’re here, Rory. I don’t think that I could do this by myself because this wasn’t supposed to happen until next week. I wrote it down. I wrote it down. I wrote it down!

Sherry is frightened and worried at being left alone to give birth, and seizes on Rory as the one person who can help, in the most inappropriate way possible. Rory is barely eighteen and still at school, with minimal practical skills of any sort, having travelled alone by public transport in midwinter at night for more than four hours! Yet somehow she is now the designated assistant to Sherry.

For someone who was so gung-ho to have kids, Sherry’s suddenly got very cold feet on the idea, and says she would prefer to be at work. (Yes, at night. Everyone works at night, apparently).

Nicole Arrives For Her Date with Luke

Lorelai is at Luke’s diner to get a coffee before she drives to Hartford to have dinner with her mother. Luke isn’t there when she gets in, and when he does appear, he’s clean-shaven and dressed up – even wearing clothes that Lorelai picked out for him.

Then Nicole arrives, and Lorelai realises Luke is going on a date. Even though she’s dating Alex, she doesn’t seem pleased by this discovery, and rather childishly “tells on” Nicole for using a cell phone in the diner, when Luke doesn’t allow it. Busy career women get a bit of a bashing in this episode.

Flashback 2

The second flashback shows teenaged Lorelai preparing for her debutante ball. She is about three or four months pregnant, so it is perhaps April or May, and can no longer do up the zip on her debutante dress, which she was fitted for three months previously.

Lorelai hasn’t told her parents about her condition, and earlier told Rory that she still hadn’t told them on her sixteenth birthday, which is around April. This seems to be the moment leading up to Emily finding out about the pregnancy, although at first she blames the dressmaker for sending Lorelai a dress that is too small.

We know that Lorelai never got to go to debutante ball because she got pregnant, and this scene shows how it happened. Rory got to fulfil her mother’s role by making her debut, even wearing the same dress to her ball. The dresses don’t look the same – Lorelai’s has butterfly sleeves and Rory’s is sleeveless – but perhaps the dress was altered for Rory.

If Rory was born in October, she was most likely conceived in mid-to-late January, even though Lorelai and Christopher are shown kissing in December. It can perhaps be assumed that they continued having sex for a few weeks before conceiving Rory.