Tag: Timeline

Rachel

After accidentally buying and wearing Luke’s ex-girlfriend’s sweater that he donated to the charity rummage sale, Lorelai learns from Sookie and Miss Patty that Luke had a “very serious girlfriend” called Rachel about five or six years ago (around 1995-1996), who broke his heart.

When Lorelai wonders how she could not have known about this relationship, or ever heard of Rachel before, the viewer can’t help but wonder too, as Lorelai has been in Stars Hollow since 1986.

Her friends explain that she was busy moving into her new house with her eleven year old daughter at the time, and that Rachel travelled a lot. As it doesn’t take that long to move into a new house, it makes you wonder how long this “very serious” partially long-distance relationship between Luke and Rachel lasted. Not very, by the sounds of it.

It’s a pretty lame explanation for why Lorelai’s never met or heard of Rachel before now, but at least tells us how long Lorelai and Rory have been in their home.

“Weeks ago”

SOOKIE: I asked him [Jackson] if he’d like to have dinner sometime.
LORELAI: I know – weeks ago.

For the first eleven episodes, dates in Gilmore Girls can be plotted on the calendar fairly easily. From now on, time becomes more amorphous and elastic, and sometimes even self-contradicts. At this point, a lot of estimating and even guessing will be needed to form any kind of workable timeline.

When Lorelai says the events of the previous episode happened weeks ago, we have no idea if she means two weeks, three weeks, or six weeks in the past. Most likely it is two or three weeks and we are now in early to mid-February – four or more weeks and she would probably say it was a month, or more than a month.

(It’s not possible for me to align the dates on the blog exactly with the vague calendar in Gilmore Girls at this point, or I will run out of time for events to occur in).

“Two months”

When Lorelai suddenly seems far less interested in Max, Sookie points out that Lorelai and Max have been dating for two months now – which is the usual time that Lorelai begins backing out of a relationship. Lorelai and Max began dating in mid-November 2000, so it must now be the middle of January 2001.

Sookie’s comment incidentally confirms that none of Lorelai’s relationships have lasted very long, which we inferred from her statement to Max that none of her dates ever went to her house or met Rory before. Near the end of the episode we learn that Rory never even knew their names, but that Lorelai referred to them by a brief description.

Skippy the Hamster

Lorelai’s mistreatment of Rory’s childhood pet hamster is Rory’s reason to not allow her to get a dog, a nice reversal of the usual parent-child relationship.

It’s interesting that Rory says that Lorelai doesn’t need a dog as she has her, suggesting that Rory sees herself as more of a pet than a daughter. It is only when Lorelai no longer has Rory that she gets a dog – although she treats it more like her child than her pet.

It is not known when Rory might have had a pet hamster. They didn’t get their own house until Rory was eleven, suggesting it might have been after that. However, by that stage Rory should have been old enough to care for her own hamster, so that Lorelai wouldn’t need to do anything. If Rory had a hamster during the mysterious “lost years” between perhaps four and ten, we don’t know what circumstances Lorelai and Rory lived in, but whatever it was, it apparently allowed pets.

“Two weeks early”

LORELAI: Tonight’s my parents big Christmas celebration. There’s good food, these amazing apple tarts, big tree. It’s the only holiday I actually enjoy going over there for, and this year I’m uninvited.
LUKE: Why the hell would anyone celebrate Christmas two weeks early?

In fact the Christmas party is on Friday 15 December, ten days before Christmas – but that’s pretty close to two weeks.