“I wanna be around more”

CHRISTOPHER: I haven’t been enough a part of Rory’s life. So I wanna be around more, to be a pal she can depend on. I mean I’m not crazy, I know there’s already a life going on here and God knows she doesn’t need anyone besides you but … if you give me a chance …
LORELAI: I’ve always had the door to Rory open for you.

Christopher is making a massive understatement that he hasn’t been enough a part in Rory’s life – he’s barely been in her life at all, and only on his own terms.

Although Christopher agrees that Lorelai has “always had the door open” open to him, previous and future events make us doubt how much of that is really true. Lorelai is intensely jealous of anyone else developing a close relationship with Rory, and has even tried to stop her getting to know her grandparents better.

When Christopher makes a real attempt to get closer to Rory in a future season, Lorelai does everything she can to block it. It would have been even easier when Rory was a baby or a small child, and lacked the ability to see what Lorelai was up to.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday”

RORY: I’m gonna go study before the food gets here.
CHRISTOPHER: What? Tomorrow’s Saturday.

At this point we discover, surely to our astonishment, that it is now Friday evening. To recap the events of the day:

Lorelai and Luke unloaded their paint, and made plans to paint the diner on Friday. We now know that it was already Friday then, but for some reason they don’t say “next Friday”, or “in a week’s time”. Despite having a whole week to do the painting, Lorelai decides on Friday, which is not only the day she goes to business class, but Friday Night Dinner with her parents! She says this doesn’t matter, as she can “get out early” for a special occasion. That Emily would consider painting Luke’s diner a “special occasion” is highly dubious.
Lorelai and Rory went to the market to buy fruit as Lorelai felt under the weather and was worried about her nutrient intake (maybe this is how she stays healthy – she eats just enough fruits and vegetables not to get sick). Lorelai and Rory met Christopher in the street.
Christopher came to stay with them, and they ordered Chinese food for dinner while Rory did her homework.

So what the heck happened to Friday Night Dinner? Did they skip it that week? And is Lorelai even attending business class any more? And if this is Friday, March 9 then we will definitely run out of Friday nights before the end of the month.

(Also take note that Christopher is completely unaware of his daughter’s study habits or zest for academic life. He really knows nothing about Rory, and they can’t have ever had a proper conversation before).

Memorial Day

RORY: Hey, how’s Diane?
CHRISTOPHER: Uh, Diane is ancient history.
RORY: When I met her at Easter you said she could be the one.
CHRISTOPHER: The one to be gone by Memorial Day.

Memorial Day is a public holiday in the United States to remember those who have died while serving in the armed forces. It’s observed on the last Monday of May, which in 2000 was May 29. It is commemorated with military parades, and by decorating the graves of fallen soldiers with American flags. Memorial Day is considered the unofficial start of summer.

Christopher brought his girlfriend Diane to meet Rory at Easter in 2000, which would have been April 23, telling her that the relationship was serious and possibly permanent. About a month later, the relationship with Diane was over, yet he doesn’t bother telling Rory that until March 2001.

There’s been almost of year of phone calls from Christopher, yet he hasn’t thought to fill Rory in on a significant event in his life such as breaking up with a supposedly serious girlfriend he was thinking of marrying.

The writer (Daniel Palladino for this episode) is keen to drum it in that Christopher is an inattentive father, but it also means that Rory and Lorelai haven’t bothered asking him how Diane is in all that time either – even after she didn’t turn up to Christmas with him (unless Christopher kept fobbing them off with evasive answers).

“He’s never been to Stars Hollow before”

LORELAI: He’s gonna come and go as he pleases babe, you know that.
RORY: … Yeah, but he’s never been to Stars Hollow before.

We discover in this episode that Christopher has never visited Lorelai and Rory before, ever. It’s almost unbelievable that he would come to Hartford once or twice a year to see them, but never once bother to take the half hour drive to Stars Hollow. It’s a real sign that Christopher just hasn’t been interested enough in his daughter.

Christopher (David Sutcliffe)

In a mild cliffhanger ending to the episode, Rory’s father Christopher Hayden (David Sutcliffe), who has been living in California for some time, unexpectedly arrives in Stars Hollow.

We at once understand why Lorelai loved him as a teenager, but rejected him as a husband and co-parent to their daughter. Christopher is good-looking, charismatic, and rides a cool motorcycle, but is clearly unreliable and immature – it’s hard not to cringe when he yells at Lorelai to take her top off in front of their teenaged daughter.

It’s also obvious that Rory adores her father. The way she eagerly runs to him for a hug demonstrates the longing she must have felt to have a father in her life – even an unsatisfactory one like Christopher. While Lorelai knows what Christopher is like, Rory still has stars in her eyes over him: just as Lorelai must have had seventeen years ago.

Lorelai once said that Rory’s boyfriend Dean reminded her of Christopher, but now that we actually see Christopher for ourselves, there isn’t a strong resemblance. Interestingly, David Sutcliffe does look a little bit like Nathan Wetherington, the actor who played Dean in the original Pilot.

(Christopher looks astoundingly clean and refreshed for someone who has just ridden his motorcycle for 3000 miles; the bike is very clean as well).

“Do you have feelings for this man?”

EMILY: Why do you treat me like I don’t have a clue in the world as to what is going on in your life? Now I’m asking you, as a favour, if you have any respect for me at all as your mother, just tell me. Do you have feelings for this man [Luke]?
LORELAI: I don’t know. Maybe I do. I haven’t given it much thought. Maybe I do.
EMILY: Thank you. I’m glad you were finally honest with me. Now we can discuss what on earth you could possibly be thinking.

Although Sookie has been trying to persuade Lorelai that she likes Luke as more than a friend, it is Emily who finally forces Lorelai to openly admit she might have feelings for him. There is some poignancy that she chooses to open up to her mother before her best friend – and possibly that’s because she knows Emily will slap her down for it, rather than be given encouragement as Sookie would. On some level Lorelai doesn’t want to be pushed toward Luke, she wants to be pushed away, and Emily obliges.

Valium

RORY: Can we go for a weekend [to stay with Richard and Emily]?
LORELAI: We’ll see how much Valium Auntie Sookie can lend Mommy, okay?

A possible confirmation that it was Valium that Sookie gave Lorelai when she hurt her back on the night of Rory’s dance.

It also confirms that Lorelai and Rory aren’t a “democracy”, as she told her daughter in the first episode. Here Rory wants to spend a weekend with her grandparents in Martha’s Vineyard, and they never go because Lorelai doesn’t want to. Rory could have gone by herself, but Lorelai doesn’t facilitate or encourage that either. Rory probably could have forced Lorelai, but if she did that she wouldn’t have been Rory (and she and Lorelai would never have had the close bond they valued so highly).

Rory and Donna Reed Night

It isn’t obvious what Rory hoped to achieve by holding a Donna Reed Night with Dean, or what she thought she had proved by doing so. If she wanted to confront him with the reality of being an ideal 1950s housewife to show him how unrealistic it is, she is only partially successful.

Dean clearly adores the idea of her cooking for him while dressed in high heels and pearls, and even likes the rather terrible food she has prepared from packets and cans. Rory receives reassurance from Dean that he doesn’t really want her to be Donna Reed, but when she says she would do it all again, he is very quick to show interest in the idea. If anything, she may have awoken a desire in him he didn’t know he had.

If Rory planned to seduce Dean with cuteness to resolve their argument, she succeeded – but at what cost? And why? Was she simply scared of losing Dean, and made a grand gesture to win him back? If so, it’s sad, but probably not unrealistic for a teenager, that a single disagreement over an old TV show could make her so frightened and desperate.

There seems to be an element of wanting to demonstrate to Dean that she can have opinions and an identity that differ from Lorelai. Her choice of teenage rebellion is a bit strange, but she seems to have decided that she will set herself apart from from her mother by being far more willing to change herself and her ideas to please her boyfriend. Little wonder the uncompromising Lorelai thinks a blow to the head might have been involved.

Flower Girl of Bordeaux

This instrumental piece by Mexican band leader and composer Juan García Esquivel, often known by his surname only, is the “interesting music” which is playing when Dean first arrives at Babette’s and finds Rory in costume. It is from the CD that Rory got from Lane’s “miscellaneous” section, and which she described as “the weird one”.

Esquivel is considered to be the king of late 1950s-early 1960s quirky instrumental pop, or lounge music – Rory’s choice of his music shows that while she has tried to be faithful to period, she is doing so with her own idiosyncratic style, and subverting conventional expectations.

Esquivel’s music was released on a series of CDs in the 1990s; Flower Girl of Bordeaux is from the 1995 compilation album Music From a Sparkling Planet.

Notice how this is a slight callback to the “kick ass” Bordeaux wine drunk earlier in the episode; perhaps an allusion to how intoxicating Rory appears to Dean.

Paul and Linda McCartney

LORELAI: You know, this is only like the second night we’ve ever spent apart. Doesn’t that make you sad?
RORY: Yeah, but I’ll get over it.
LORELAI: Uh-huh. Well, Paul and Linda McCartney only spent eleven nights apart their entire relationship. Did you know that?

Paul McCartney is an English musician and singer-songwriter who gained fame as the bass guitarist and singer for the rock band The Beatles. He married his first wife, American photographer Linda Eastman in 1969, and they remained together until the end of her life. Paul and Linda McCartney were a famously close couple, who shared interests in nature, vegetarianism, and animal rights.

In 1993, Paul told People magazine that the eleven days he spent in gaol in Tokyo in 1980 after being found in possession of marijuana was the only time that he and Linda spent apart. This was often quoted in obituaries for Linda, who died of breast cancer in 1998 at the age of 56, which is probably where Lorelai recalls this information from.

It is a bit worrying that Lorelai compares her relationship with Rory to that of a married couple: it might be desirable for a husband and wife to never be separated, but not a mother and daughter. This might be because Lorelai and Rory were partly based on a real life married couple: Amy Sherman Palladino and Daniel Palladino.