“Your head is much too big for a veil”

EMILY: Your head is much too big for a veil. You might consider a tiara.
LORELAI: Um, a tiara?
EMILY: That’s what I wore.

A callback to Emily believing that Lorelai had a head that was too big for her body when she was a child, with Lorelai’s first sentence supposedly being, “Big head want dolly”. Apparently Lorelai’s head is still “much too big” to wear a wedding veil.

Emily suggests a tiara instead, and says that’s what she wore as a bride, perhaps indicating that she also thinks of her own head as “too big”, and may be projecting that onto Lorelai. While neither Emily nor Lorelai have enormous heads, they both would look good in a tiara, so Emily’s taste may simply be correct.

Emily does not overtly indicate that she understood or forgave Lorelai after her apology, but answering her original question is a tacit admission that their fight is over. Emily is even worse at talking about her emotions than Lorelai is, but both women are trying to connect in their own ways. Lorelai smiles at her mother’s response, as if this tiny effort was the best she was hoping for.

Final Party Scene

As we leave Lorelai and Max’s engagement party, the camera pans around so we can see what everyone is doing.

Miss Patty is dancing with Kirk; it is unclear at this point if they have only known each other for a few months, or if the show has already retconned Kirk as Miss Patty’s former student. A strange little moment takes place when Miss Patty looks up at Kirk as if she is going to say something, then seemingly thinks better of it and looks away again with a mysterious expression. You would almost think that she was about to suggest that the two of them become closer – you might remember that when Miss Patty met Kirk in Cinnamon’s Wake, she said she would date him if he had a better haircut. (And in The Break Up Part 2, Kirk had apparently been told gossip by Miss Patty between 10 pm and 6 am, which is interesting).

Rory and Dean, sitting on a bench together having resolved their argument. Rory has her head sleepily on Dean’s shoulder, and Dean kisses the top of her head.

Lane leaving for the airport with her parents, and surely extremely late by now, with a comically huge suitcase she wouldn’t actually be allowed to take on the plane in real life.

Lorelai and Max dancing together. Max smiles lovingly down at his prospective bride, but Lorelai is looking over his shoulder at Luke, who is walking towards the party.

Luke and Lorelai wave and smile at each other; Max doesn’t see this as they are doing it behind his back. Luke sits down on a bench, next to three of the little girls dressed as brides who did the tap dance in the gazebo. Coincidentally or not, Luke will have important relationships with three women in the show before Lorelai (Anna, Rachel, and Nicole).

Jackson and Sookie

Jackson tells Sookie he isn’t ready for marriage yet, but is willing to move in with Sookie. She doesn’t take him seriously – or does she cleverly pretend not to take him seriously?

We know that Sookie is basically a Relationship Jedi Master, so possibly she doesn’t want to turn down Jackson’s offer of moving in, but neither does she want to say yes, because she really does want to be Jackson’s wife, not his live-in girlfriend. Nor does she want Jackson to move in with her out of a sense of obligation, or to keep her happy.

By jokingly refusing to listen to Jackson’s offer, Sookie leaves the question of marriage up in the air, so that it can be revisited later. Her strategy pays off when she and Jackson get married in the next season.

It seems very reasonable that Jackson isn’t ready for marriage – he and Sookie have only been dating for about five months. Lorelai and Max have been dating for about two months since they got back together, and we know how that’s going to turn out, so it really does look as if they are rushing their marriage plans.

It’s interesting that just as Lorelai hits the dreaded “two month mark” in her relationship with Max, he conveniently has to go to Toronto for six weeks. If he hadn’t gone to teach summer school, would their relationship have survived much longer? Lorelai’s past behaviour suggests it wouldn’t.

University of Toronto

LANE: Just don’t let her [Lorelai] change the date [of her wedding].
RORY: Not going to happen. Max is teaching a summer course at the University of Toronto, so if you’re back by the end of the summer, it’ll be fine.

The University of Toronto is a public university in the city of Toronto, Ontario. It is one of the oldest universities in Canada, and is the highest ranked university in the country, named among the best in the world. First founded by royal charter in 1827 and controlled by the Church of England, it changed its name in 1850 after becoming a secular instiution.

The university’s summer programs take place over 3-6 weeks, which fits in with Max being away until early August (so in fact the wedding could be moved up, causing Lane to miss it). Presumably Max is teaching classes in English Literature.

Gilmore Girls was first filmed in Unionville, on the outskirts of Toronto, so this seems like a gesture towards the show’s beginnings (at one time, they considered filming the show in Toronto permanently).

The Damned

LANE: I’m trying to find that subtle blend between not too cliché sounding traditional tunes with out of left field, should be standard.
RORY: Well, the Sinatra medley was great. I’d maybe skip playing anything else by The Damned.

The Damned are an English punk rock band formed in 1976, and founded by Dave Vanian, Brian James, Captain Sensible (Raymond Burns), and Rat Scabies (Christopher Millar). They were the first UK punk band to release a single, New Rose (1976), release an album, Damned Damned Damned (1977), and tour the United States.

They were also the first punk band to break up and make a comeback – they briefly broke up after their second album, then reformed without Brian James to release a third album in 1979. The band moved towards a gothic rock sound in the 1980s, becoming one of the first gothic rock bands, and a huge influence on the goth subculture, and hardcore punk.

I’m not sure which song by The Damned Lane might have chosen to play for the engagement party, but it could have been their first single, New Rose, which is a love song, and went to #81 on the UK charts. Lane may also have heard the 1993 cover version by Guns N’ Roses.

Boca Burger

MICHEL: Go back to the cooking room.
SOOKIE: Not until you eat these and tell me what you think!
MICHEL: Sookie! I only eat fifteen hundred calories a day. If I eat that, I cannot have my Boca Burger later.

Boca Burger is a vegetarian burger patty made from soy protein and wheat gluten, first manufactured in 1979. Boca Burger products have been owned by Kraft Foods since 2000.

We learn here that Michel eats only 1500 calories a day. One Boca Burger has around 70 calories, while macaroon has over 400 calories and a chocolate praline cookie over 300. Clearly if Michel eats both cookies, as Sookie wants him to, he’s going to have to give up more than a Boca Burger – he will have eaten around half of his daily calorie intake on just two cookies!

Maybe he’s including the bread and salad to accompany the patty, although even that would only be around 400 calories. Or maybe he is calculating the calories of just one bite from each cookie, since he would only need a taste of each to decide which one he prefers.

1500 calories a day is about the lowest amount of food recommended for a man, and it probably wouldn’t be recommended long term, especially for someone who’s already a healthy weight. Even men on calorie restriction diets usually eat around 1800 calories a day, and still lose weight doing so. We never actually see Michel lose much weight on his strict diet, so maybe he’s having a few cheat days.

Lorelai seems to eat as much as she wants while remaining slim, while poor old Michel apparently starves himself just to maintain a normal weight.

A Connecticut Yankee

RORY: Hey, Henry?
LANE: Called him.
RORY: And?
LANE: He likes me. He’s perfect. I’ll never see him again. You’ll read about it in my novel, A Connecticut Yankee in Busan.

Lane is parodying the title of the 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain. The novel is a satirical fantasy about a 19^th century American engineer who is mysteriously transported to 6^th century Britain in the time of the legendary King Arthur. It may be a novel that Lane and Rory once read for English class at Stars Hollow High.

At least Lane and Henry have finally spoken to each other, and everything went well – just as Lane is about to be shipped off to Korea for several weeks.

Speed Racer

RORY: You’re hungry.
LORELAI: No, I’m not.
RORY: Well, you didn’t eat any of your dinner.
LORELAI: Yeah, well, by the time I could get my jaw off the ground, Speed Racer had taken my plate.

Speed Racer (in Japanese, Mach Go Go Go!) is a Japanese animated media franchise based on a manga about car racing, which began showing on TV in 1967, and was one of the first Japanese cartoons to be localised in English for US television.

The eponymous Speed Racer is a young racing car driver with a deep love of family, and a dizzying array of gadgets to help him defeat the bad guys. It has a goofy over-the-top style and cornball dubbing which almost defined Japanese anime for an entire generation.

The original series was shown in reruns on MTV in 1993, when Rory was nine, and she and Lorelai may have watched it together. There was an American-made The New Adventures of Speed Racer the same year, but it was short-lived, and I feel Rory and Lorelai would have considered it greatly inferior to the 1960s original.

“If you don’t tell them in two weeks”

LORELAI: I will tell them when I’m ready to tell them. You have to accept that because I’m the mother and you’re the daughter, and in some cultures, that means you have to do what I say.
RORY: If you don’t tell them in two weeks, I will.

For years, Lorelai has been running she and Rory’s lives by making all the decisions for both of them (in fact, she’s been shown to be quite controlling, like Emily). Now Rory is a few months off seventeen, she is starting to make her own opinions heard, especially when it comes to her grandparents. These are the first rumblings of what will eventually be a major rift between mother and daughter.

Rory says she will wait two weeks before telling Richard and Emily, meaning she’s quite happy for them to miss Max and Lorelai’s engagement party. Maybe she’s in no hurry for them to meet Dean again.

Henry and Lane

Henry tells Rory that he tried to call Lane once, and Mrs Kim answered, frightening him so much that he never phoned again. This doesn’t quite tally with what Lane told Rory: that Henry rang once and got the answering machine, leaving a message that she listened to again and again before eventually breaking the machine. Perhaps Henry only counts the call where someone answered the phone (which Lane doesn’t know about since her mother took the call).

It is now nearly three months since Henry and Lane first met at Madeline’s party. That’s a long time for Henry to remain interested without doing anything, and he’s taken ages to talk to Rory about the situation. Perhaps he is as unused to dealings with the opposite sex as Lane – certainly they both seem to have made a bit of a mess of this situation.

Rory hasn’t been a real help either; she lives in the same town as Lane and goes to school with Henry, so couldn’t she at least have passed notes and letters between the two of them, or driven Lane into Hartford to see Henry? (Maybe even organised a Trigonometry tutoring class that Lane and Henry could have both joined!)

To be fair, Rory didn’t rely on Lane to fix her relationship problems with Dean, but Rory has a bit more experience with boys, much more freedom, and a generally far easier life than Lane.