DAVE: Uh, well, you mentioned this thing last time we talked and it sounded very Blue Velvet so I figured I would come by and check it out.
Blue Velvet, 1986 neo-noir mystery thriller directed by David Lynch. Blending psychological horror with film noir, the film stars Kyle McLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, and Laura Dern, and is named after the 1951 song of the same name. The film is about a college student who returns home to visit his ill father, and makes a grisly discovery in a field. This leads him to uncover a vast criminal conspiracy, and into a relationship with a troubled lounge singer.
The film initially received a divided response from critics, with many stating that its explicit content served little artistic purpose. However, David Lynch won Best Film and Best Director at that year’s National Society of Film Critics Awards. It came to achieve cult status, and is now widely regarded as one of Lynch’s major works, and one of the greatest films of the 1980s. It has been ranked as one of the best films of all time, and one of the greatest mystery films ever made.
Dave has come to see Lane just because he missed her, a clear sign to her that he returns her feelings. Strangely, he decides to arrive at the marathon around 5 am, when the marathon is just about to end! This episode doesn’t have a confusing timeline (it’s all made very clear), it’s simply an unbelievable one.
PARIS: I think we need to work. The seventy-fifth anniversary issue of the Franklin comes out next month and I want it to be amazing.
In an earlier episode, Paris said the Franklin was almost a hundred years old. In this episode, we discover it is seventy-five years old, and was therefore founded in December 1927.
LUKE: Taylor, we have been raising money to restore that stupid bridge for eight years.
Stars Hollow has been raising money to restore the bridge since 1994. What exactly is so badly wrong with this bridge that it took so long? Would it not have been easier to simply build a new bridge?
In this episode, Stars Hollow is holding a dance marathon to raise money. Dance marathons began in the 1920s and were at their peak in the 1930s, with people vying to win the cash prize at the end, that could be for as much as a year’s salary. Today they are generally held as charity fundraisers, and only last for twelve to twenty-four hours, not the thousands of hours they went on for in times past, which sounds like absolute torture (and they were often rigged as well).
We learn that the dance marathon is an annual event, that Lorelai has been close to winning it for four years in a row, since 1998, and that the previous year she only lost at the eleventh hour. It’s possible the one in 2001 took place around the same time as Mia’s visit (she may have come back for it). The one in 2000 presumably took place after Lorelai’s date with Max.
According to the banner in the town square, this is the 50th annual dance marathon in Stars Hollow, so the first one was held in 1952. In fact, this is around the time dance marathons began to decline in popularity. Could Stars Hollow have really been thirty years behind the trends?
This is the song which plays when Rory looks at the clock at Dwight’s house, while putting the African violets back. It’s a woven basketwork clock that a china figurine pops out of when the hour strikes.
“Midnight at the Oasis” is a 1973 song written by David Nichtern. It was recorded by Maria Muldaur for her self-titled debut album, and released as a single in 1974. It peaked at #6 in the US, and was the #13 song of the year, becoming one of Muldaur’s most popular concert songs.
“Midnight at the Oasis” is about an offer of a love affair in a fantasy desert location, and is considered to be one of the most sensual songs of the 1970s, apparently inspiring numerous sexual encounters. It seems as if Dwight has more than just board games in mind now he’s moved to Stars Hollow! Perhaps he’s even set his sights on Lorelai – the gossipy Babette would have told him Lorelai was single.
The clock reads eight o’clock at this point, providing the name of the episode, “Eight O’clock at the Oasis”. I can’t see how it can be 8 am – Rory is meant to be at school in five minutes! And although they were running slightly late, Lorelai still thought they could have breakfast at Luke’s, as long as she drove Rory to school. Why do the Gilmore girls seem to have all the time in the world sometimes, and at others, time just suddenly disappears? They weren’t at Dwight’s for that long.
Lorelai seemed to meet Dwight on a Monday night, just before the auction on Tuesday. He asked if she could water his lawn, as he was leaving for a few days on an urgent last-minute business trip. As Rory was waiting for her with the pizza, Lorelai tried to put him off, saying that Dwight could show her some other time before he left on his trip. Dwight said he was leaving for his business trip at 6 am the next morning, so Lorelai reluctantly accompanied him to be shown how to use the spigot.
Even though Dwight supposedly left for his business trip on the morning of the day of the auction, Lorelai and Rory are not shown watering his lawn until about a week later – even though the business trip was only meant to be a few days. They have had Friday night dinner, and Rory is now wearing her school uniform, so they are past the weekend, and it is another Monday at the absolute earliest.
Somehow they just skipped an entire week of lawn watering and Dwight is still on his short business trip. I know I usually blame Daniel Palladino for these timeline inconsistencies and non-linear plotting, but this episode was written by Justin Tanner, a successful playwright, and a story editor on Gilmore Girls. This is the only episode he ever wrote.
The talk at the high school is on a Thursday at 4 pm, so it’s an after-school event (it’s amazing how many important events schools hold out of hours and on weekends in the Gilmore Girls universe). Luke tries to cancel over the phone, and Lorelai tells him that the careers talk is being held the next day, so we know that it’s Wednesday at this point.
We then cut to Rory and Lane walking down the street together, so school is over for the day. Rory is in her school uniform, and Lane is wearing tan trousers and a denim jacket over a striped red sweater. They go into Stars Hollow Beauty Supply to buy the bleach and purple dye for Lane’s hair, and are served by Shane, wearing a brown lace-up blouse with a pattern of roses on it.
We then cut to Lorelai and Luke; Lorelai is helping Luke get dressed up for the careers talk at the school, so we know it is now Thursday, and presumably some time around 3.30 pm. Jess is already home from school, and he has Shane stashed in the closet, so whatever time she starts work at the beauty store, it hasn’t begun yet.
We then cut to Rory preparing to bleach Lane’s hair (for some reason they are doing it at Lane’s house, where she fears her mother coming home and finding them, instead of doing it at Rory’s house). Rory has changed out of her uniform into jeans and an orange sweater, and Lane is now wearing blue jeans and a striped green sweater.
Rory and Lane must have bought the hair dye from Shane on Wednesday afternoon, because it’s now Thursday afternoon, they are wearing different clothes, and Shane isn’t at work yet.
When Lane panics about her purple hair, she sends Rory back to the beauty store to buy black dye. Rory is wearing a denim jacket over her orange sweater, and Shane is now at work, out of the closet, and wearing a different brown blouse – this one does up with a drawstring and has a wide scoop neckline.
Then we see Stars Hollow after the talk at the school, so it’s presumably some time after 5 pm. Rory and Lane are now wearing different outfits – Rory is in blue jeans and a denim jacket, with a turquoise tee shirt, and Lane is wearing a dark red V-neck sweater with blue jeans. But let us assume that they changed their clothes because they smelled of bleach and dye or something, and also assume that Rory keeps a change of clothing at Lane’s house or brought one with her, because there’s been no time for her to go home and get changed.
Then Jess and Shane walk past them – Shane is still wearing the brown blouse from work, now with a brown jacket over it. So Shane was at Jess’ place around 3.30 pm, where she hid in his closet. She then went to work at the beauty store, selling Rory the black hair dye. Then by around 5 pm, she’s finished at the store, having put in a full hour’s work for the day.
I guess this sort of makes sense – if it’s an after-school job, she might only work there from 4-5.30 pm, but who is working at the store the rest of the time, and why couldn’t they work that extra 90 minutes per day? Another possibility is that Shane has already left school, works full-time at the beauty store, and simply sneaked out of work to see Jess, closing the store for half an hour or so.
This timeline almost fits, except for the fact there’s simply not enough time for all these events to take place. Rory doesn’t get out of school until 4.05 pm, and has a 40 minute bus ride home, yet somehow she is bleaching Lane’s hair around 3.30 pm, and has already had time to change out of her uniform. And Lane gets her hair bleached, dyed, then dyed again, all in the space of, at most, two hours (rather than days). But these quibbles are pretty much par for the course on Gilmore Girls, and nothing out of the ordinary for its usual wacky timeline.
So there you have it, this is how Shane managed to be hidden in the closet, and at work to sell Rory the black hair dye. It requires an awful lot of suspension of belief, and the usual rubber-band timeline, but the viewer can just manage to comprehend it. Of course, it wouldn’t be possible in the real world, but by Gilmore Girls standards, it’s almost coherent. Almost.
Lane was given permission by Sophie to use the music store to practice drumming two evenings a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays at 6 pm (evenings when she knew her mother would be out doing church activities). Lane is now really pushing that generous offer by finding a band that needs a drummer and letting them use Sophie’s music store as a free rehearsal space! It sounds like a pretty awful way to repay Sophie, but maybe Lane already fixed this up with Sophie offscreen. I hope so.
You may be wondering whether this episode starts on a Wednesday evening – it can’t be Friday, because Lorelai and Rory are having dinner at the diner, instead of heading off to Hartford for Friday Night Dinner with Richard and Emily. It appears to be a Saturday, oddly enough, so perhaps Lane also got Sophie to agree to a third evening of band practice per week. How Sophie would have agreed to all these changes to the orginal agreement, I don’t know.
This scene shows how happy Lane is to finally be in a band and playing music, she is absolutely radiating joy as she bounces into the diner and starts eating Rory’s dinner. Lane isn’t making any effort to keep her activities a secret, and even though Stars Hollow is super gossipy, she doesn’t seem worried about Mrs Kim finding out. Maybe that’s how confident she feels now she’s actually living her dream.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 