Footnotes to the TV series
LORELAI: The evening started well enough – that is, until we got to the car . . . a Jaguar XJ8 convertible with a 290 horsepower engine, in case you were wondering.
The Jaguar XJ is a luxury sedan marketed by Jaguar Cars from 1997 to 2003. The XJ8 was the standard or entry-level model, with leather upholstery and walnut wood trim interior. It does indeed have a 290 horsepower engine.
RORY: Blonde hair, medium height, drove a Range Rover.
A Range Rover is a 4×4 (sports utility or SUV) car produced by Land Rover. It was first launched in 1970 by British Leyland, and is now owned by Jaguar. Range Rovers only began to be officially imported there in 1987. Since 1993, US sales are under the name Land Rover North America.
In the US, there is a stereotype that Range Rovers tend to be driven by well-off suburban mothers driving them for their status value. This episode contrasts the boring PTA mothers with “cool mom” Lorelai Gilmore.
DEAN: So you’ll come home, do homework all weekend, then leave.
RORY: No, I can do my homework during the week or on the train coming home to see you, who I will spend my weekends with not doing homework. Plus, we can talk during the week on the phone constantly. Trust me, it’ll feel like I never left.
In real life, it’s a three and a half hour train trip from Boston to Hartford, requiring a change at New Haven. Then Rory would need someone (Dean?) to pick her up from the Hartford station for a thirty minute drive home to Stars Hollow. It sounds very tedious to do regularly – of course, she has to go back again every Sunday, so that’s eight hours of travel every weekend! That does give her free time to study though, I guess.
As it happens, Rory doesn’t go to Harvard in the end, and she has a car by then anyway, so this impractical plan never gets put into operation. It does sound as if she hasn’t thought about it very hard though.
[Picture shows South Station in Boston, from where Rory would need to catch a train. It’s a 15 minute bus ride from Harvard, so add a bit more time on for that].
When Lorelai talks to Christopher outside the Gilmore mansion, he’s sitting on his motorcycle. He implied that he got rid of it to buy his Volvo, but apparently he didn’t.
I thought I had finally caught Christopher out in a direct lie, but when I went back and read through the script again, he never actually says that he sold his motorcycle – it’s all jokes and evasion to make Lorelai think that he has, that he has changed. But ta da! It’s the same old crummy, irresponsible Christopher as before. He’s such a weasel with his words that you can’t pin him down.
Rory has a nightmarish bus journey back to Hartford, which begins with the bus unable to even leave the terminus, as an accident has temporarily closed the interstate. We don’t get much of an idea as to how long that took, but in such cases, the interstate is usually closed for at least an hour or two (sometimes more than a day).
Rory sends Lorelai a pager message to say that she’s been held up, and will try to get to the ceremony by seven, but might be later than that. This sounds as if the bus was delayed from starting for more than an hour. It’s annoying, but Rory can still make the graduation ceremony at this point, even if she misses the first part of it.
The problem is that she soon discovers to her dismay that the bus is making many stops on the way back to Hartford – she caught an express bus in the morning that went directly to New York, but this is a local bus service which picks up passengers and lets them off along the entire route, meaning travel time is much longer.
In real life, buses are often delayed or take longer routes, something Rory may not have known but probably should, since she catches an intercity bus every day to school. Reviews for the New York to Hartford bus service complain of lengthy delays, often taking four hours to arrive, so this is a believable situation. If Rory was delayed from starting by two hours, and the trip took four hours, she might not be getting into Hartford until somewhere between 8 and 9 pm.
Note that Rory’s backpack on the seat beside her looks remarkably flat and empty – did she throw all her school textbooks away while she was in New York???
RORY: Where you going?
JESS: Subway.
RORY: I thought we were gonna walk.
JESS: It’s fifteen blocks. Come on, I think you’ll like it.
The New York City Subway System is a rapid transit system owned by the government of New York and leased to the New York City Transit Authority. It opened in 1904, and is one of the world’s oldest public transport systems, one of the most used, and the one with the most stations, with 472 in operation. Stations are located throughout the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and The Bronx.
There is/was a concentration of record stores in the East Village, and the one that Jess takes Rory to could very well be located in this area. If they caught the subway near Washington Square, and got off at the Bleeker Street, Broadway-Lafayette Street, or Second Avenue subway station, that would take them around fifteen blocks into the East Village, saving them about 25 minutes of walking.
It’s amusing that Rory is so prepared to walk for another half hour or so – she’s already had a long walk to get to the park! You’d think she’d be glad to catch the subway.
RORY: I’ll … book the Concorde.
The Concorde, a Franco-British supersonic airliner. Its first flight was in 1969, and it began flights between New York and Paris in 1979, taking just three and a half hours to cross the Atlantic, less than half the usual time. The planes were luxurious, and travelled faster than the speed of sound, flying quicker than the Earth’s spin.
On 25 July 2000, a Concorde crashed in France, on its way to New York. Everybody on board was killed, including four people who were on the ground. It was the only fatality Concorde ever had, but it damaged its reputation. Service was suspended until November 2001 while the crash was fully investigated, and the Concorde was retired, its last flight to New York in October 2003. Rory doesn’t have much longer to book that Concorde!
RORY: My wrist hurts and I’m grumpy and I just made a total idiot of myself in there so I just wanna go home.
LORELAI: All right, well, I’ll tell Mom, I’ll drive you.
RORY: No, it’s okay. It’s still early. I can catch my regular bus and . . . you go back in.
How can it be early enough that Rory is still able to catch her regular bus home to Stars Hollow? The scene at KC’s Annex showed Rory and Lorelai in Stars Hollow, and dressed for the party. Rory has already taken her regular bus home from school – that’s how she got home in the first place! She can catch a later bus home, maybe one that leaves around 6 or 6.30 pm instead of between 4 and 4.30 pm, but she cannot possibly catch the same bus home.
EMILY: It was that car, wasn’t it? The one her boyfriend made. Richard was dead set against letting her drive that death-mobile.
Richard’s concerns about the car now seem pretty valid. Not that a different car would have stopped Jess from swerving to hit a small animal, but a new car would have had airbags and modern safety features that might have stopped Rory from getting hurt at all in a minor accident. It’s also possible Rory would have been more wary of letting Jess drive a new car. And if Lorelai had forbidden Rory from having a car at all, then obviously there would have been no way for Jess to crash it.
Lorelai wouldn’t let her parents buy Rory a new car when she started attending Chilton, which now seems a bit unfair. She allowed Dean, her seventeen-year-old boyfriend, to build her a car instead, which was actually a much bigger gift from him than a new car from her grandparents, with way more strings attached. To an extent, Emily is justified in her anger, and correct that Lorelai, however unwittingly, helped bring the situation about by the choices she made.
Note that Emily calls a dangerous car a “death-mobile”, in a similar way to Lorelai’s description of a black limo as a “Luca Brasi-mobile“.
EMILY: Lorelai, there you are. You’re late.
LORELAI: Well, you scheduled this beer bash during rush hour.
A beer bash is slang for an informal party, often organised in the context of a university or office social event. It seems to be used particularly in Commonwealth countries like Canada, and doesn’t appear to be common in the US. Emily doesn’t rise to the bait of having her corporate event described as a “bash”.
Rush hour, the name given to the time of day when traffic is heaviest, the times of day when most people are going to or from work. Unlike its name, it usually lasts more than an hour, and far from rushing, traffic is generally slow.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 