That’s right, it’s Tuesday. (Thinking about doing something similar with Veronica Mars, btw; anybody in?) This week’s episode is "Fight Face." Sez the WB:
Rory (Alexis Bledel) begins serving her 300 hours of community service and finds that life on a road crew is not pretty. Lorelai and Luke try to decide whether they will fix up Lorelai’s house or buy the Twickham house. Luke’s sister Liz (guest star Kathleen Wilhoite) begs him to hire her husband T.J. (guest star Michael DeLuise) as a contractor. When Rory pays Luke a surprise visit at the diner to find out how Lorelai is, he feels obligated to tell her that he and Lorelai are engaged. Afterwards, Luke confronts Lorelai about her estrangement from Rory. Feeling lonely, Lorelai adopts a dog at the Stars Hollow pet fair. Finally, during a chance meeting, Lorelai and Rory have an angry confrontation about their mutual hurt feelings.
Kelly Bishop and Edward Herrmann also star. Daniel Palladino wrote and directed the episode.
Adopts a dog: maybe it’ll be a George.
Also, I forgot to mention last week that I was very excited they played one of my favorite songs from the summer, Graham Coxon’s "Freakin’ Out," during the felon party. And this week, I plan not to take three days to weigh in.
I’ll be along eventually, but I suspect I will always be the Late One. Tuesday is still poker night for me, so GG is part of the record-and-watch-later category.
C.
I suppose that’s acceptable since I hear Lauren Graham is a hellaciously good poker player.
That feeds nicely into my rich fantasy life.
Thank you.
Where is Lane?!
A lot to like in tonight’s ep, some nice moments between Luke & Lorelai, but I found all the frantic kind of hard to take. Yes, we get that Lorelai is thrown off-balance and that she’s blustering her way through unhappiness and grasping at distractions, but the writing seemed slightly off to me. A few too many bits sacrificing her character integrity and smarts and her connections to the people around her, in the service of wacky hijinks, I thought. …But maybe it’s true to the character that she’d be exactly like this, and it’s just difficult to watch her go through such a low time.
And possibly I’m just cranky because I couldn’t get past TJ pointlessly destroying the entire wall of Lorelai’s house and then BEING INVITED BACK TO WORK ON IT SOME MORE.
Anyway. Overall an okay ep, though not all that substantial and I missed all the secondary characters — oh, except I forgot about the opening scene with Sookie! That was a great scene!
In retrospect, for some reason the thing that’s standing out the most for me is the look on Rory’s face as she contemplates the DAR application. They’re slathering it on pretty thick, but I’m interested to see where they’re going with her being torn between being all rebellious, feeling completely lost and alone, and getting herded into the world of stifling respectability.
I haven’t had a chance to view tonight’s ep, yet, and so will weigh in tomorrow when I get a chance, but this one was written by Daniel Pallidino, otherwise known as the character assassin — he write Live and Let Diorama and a couple of others which really screwed with character consistency. I almost dread his eps, and I’m glad to read here that there are some great qualities to look forward to this time.
Hey Karen — right on, across the board. Christopher sees much to worry about in Lorelai’s freneticness, because he’s afraid there are parallels between her asking Luke to marry her and buying the dog. I’m not sure I’m all that worried about her and Luke yet, but I do hope they don’t make us go through another mini-arc like the crazy one last season where they are apart/might stay apart/etc.
I wonder if Daniel Palladino also wrote the Emily and Richard dog episode. Hmmm…
I’d never heard him called the character assassin, but it makes perfect sense. (Hey, Toni, good to see you!) He should only be allowed to write with his wife strapped to his pen, or something like that.
I actually find myself feeling more sympathetic for Rory, who has so clearly landed in a place she didn’t mean to. That said, I want to see her take action about it, not just give the Rory face for two or three episodes. I did like the roadside shouting match at the end though; if Rory and Lorelai are going to be estranged it would be tough to believe if there weren’t fireworks.
Luke’s hair change was less obvious in this one, I thought.
Where is Lane?!
“That’s what she said.” And I thought only guys use this line. 🙂
Yeah, I noticed that frenetic pacing as well, and I wasn’t sure if it was purposefully done to coincide with Lorelai’s own state of mind, or if it was just a flaw in the writing.
However, I was keen on (and a little unsettled by) the elephant in the room of the entire episode; no one wanted to talk about the current rift between Lorelai and Rory, and this made for some very interesting tension throughout the episode. It informed everyone’s actions throughout, even though they didn’t want to acknowledge what was really going on.
Btw, did anyone happen to catch Family Guy on Sunday (or maybe it was American Dad), where they poked a little fun at GG? Very funny and disturbing, which is probably what Seth MacFarlane was going for.
I’d like to believe we won’t go through another “will they/won’t they” arc with L&L, but more of a “watch them struggle and change as they learn to share their lives together.” These are two people who’ve carved out very independent lives for a long time, so there’s plenty of tension and challenge inherent in the situation even without more stupid breakups.
Didn’t Lane go on tour with her mother’s help managing the band? Which was such a great twist. I want her back too. Rory seems too depressed and demoralized to make an effort to be in touch with her friends right now, though it would be nice to see someone come through for her anyway. So far, the only one who’s been aware of her loneliness and making an effort to raise her spirits is Logan.
(Hey, Toni, small web! I just met up with Tamar on her way east… it’s old-school journallers’ week around here!)
You guys know each other? And I know both of you? The world is so gobstoppingly small. I love it.
I hope you’re right, Karen, because I don’t want to see unnatural contortions of their relationship — natural contortionism only please.
And yeah, Lane’s out there rocking the Christians, but I really miss her presence on the show (please let her have gotten over greasy hair Zach while they were on the road together)… It’d be interesting to see how she’d fit into the current separation.
OH OH OH and none of us has mentioned one of Emily’s most evil moments yet — the firing of the maid. I couldn’t believe Rory didn’t follow up on that, when it was clear why she’d been fired.
Karen! Hello! So good to “see” you here! And Tamar told me she’d just seen you and had such a good time. Gwenda, I know — really small world.
I agree with Karen, we’ll probably see some struggles between Luke and Lorelai as they try to mesh their lives together, and I expect some work-related issues to crop up, too. Remember, so far, there really hasn’t been any more mention of Mike Armstrong and his offer to consult / buy the Dragonfly, etc. I wish we knew that the frenetic pace of Lorelai in this ep was a way of showing her internal state of mind, but there are several eps that Daniel has written and when you look at them, Lorelai seems to be played almost manic by Lorelai, and I get the uncomfortable sense that it’s because, as an actress, Lauren is stretching to still connect with the character. The “bits” over the dog while L/L were in the kitchen seemed farfetched, even for Lorelai. It’s not ringing completely true.
(Gwenda — I’m cracking up with you saying that he shouldn’t be allowed to write without Amy tied to his pen. I wonder if we can make that a mandate?)
I am so hoping that Amy is going to have Rory grow a backbone through this process. Rory’s watching of the abuse / firing of the maid — especially when she knows her mother made ends meet by being one for years — is one of the lowest moments for that character, for me. Where is the kid who stood up to Paris? who stood up to her grandparents when they hurt her mom via hurting Luke? Where is the kid who didn’t listen to what people said about her when she was content to stay outside the popular crowd at Chilton and do her own thing? I know for “story” purposes, they’re having her go through all of this as a result of what Papa Huntzburger said, and I really hope that the ultimate point is going to be “what the hell does it matter, what one man says?” Because anything less, they might as well have killed her off and replaced her with zombie-Rory.
I believe they’ve made a point of having a different maid in every episode because Emily fires them so often, and the minute she walked in on Esperanza and Rory I thought “she’s so fired”… and yet I still wasn’t sure the new maid was her replacement because I was confused by Rory’s non-reaction. That was just ridiculously wrong — another moment that was played for comedy and shouldn’t have been, because having her just sit there was a devastating choice for Rory’s character.
Gwenda asking about Lane got me thinking. (It’s two days after the show; is it too late to keep posting comments here? Ah well.) The first two shows of the season haven’t given us the usual roster of friends so far; what we have been seeing is a lot of family interactions. Heavy on the Gilmore generations, of course, and the bit with Luke’s sister Liz and TJ.
So it looks like we’ll be seeing some major emphasis on family dynamics this season, and it occurs to me: as L&L figure out how to have a life together, this marriage might be the thing that finally helps Lorelai break some old patterns in her relationship to her parents. She’s been changing things here and there for the past few years, but in essence they haven’t come that far from where they started. What we’re seeing in these first couple of episodes is that Lorelai reacts to family troubles by cutting them out of her life, while Luke reacts by getting mad and expressing it while still managing to keep them in his life (to the extent of being a pushover).
I don’t think it’s as neat as “she needs to learn to be more like him, and he needs to learn to be more like her”. But I do think that Lorelai is in a pattern that isn’t working well for anyone, and there’s nothing like reshaping your own immediate family to change the patterns in your wider family… Also, you know the marriage will be a huge deal to Emily and Richard, and might just be the thing that forces them to see Lorelai as a grown woman instead of their bratty daughter. They’re not going to be happy about Luke, but if they decide to make room for him it’s going to change them. God, I’d love to see Emily learn to appreciate Luke. Ever since that moment when she sized him up at Rory’s birthday party, I’ve had some hope that she can judge character pretty well when she wants to.
It’s weird, coming to this from where I am, in that I just started watching the show in reruns a couple of months ago. I’m somewhere in the middle of… season three, maybe? The most recent episode was where Paris had that breakdown over not getting in to Harvard, and Rory got accepted everywhere. But I’m watching the new episodes too, so I’ve got, like, some but not all of the character-development backstory.
But from as much as I’ve seen, I’m about ready to start the betting pool on whether or not Luke and Lorelai actually get married. Luke’s got a better shot than anyone else did–making the decision to stay in Lorelai’s house rather than move was a great sign of that–but Lorelai… see, I love Lorelai, but I love her in that way where it’s clear to me that she’s deeply flawed and pretty much totally unaware of her own blind spots and shortcomings.
Like, for instance, buying a dog when she and Luke are at this particular point in their relationship. Not just that she bought it without consulting him, but that she didn’t seem to even think she should have. Because, you know, she’s just gone and bought a dog for the -both- of them. And it feels a little bit like Max all over again, when it was two weeks before the wedding and she wouldn’t give him keys to the house and he couldn’t make her understand why that bothered him. For Lorelai, the world is the All About Lorelai show, and I can have a lot of sympathy for that (see earlier statement re: I love her) because it was something she had to do to get by, but it’s not a really good adult coping strategy.
Also, Rory’s behavior makes perfect sense to me, maybe because I witnessed a lot of the “your whole life you’ve been the smartest kid around and now you’re starting to realize that there are a lot of people a lot smarter than you, and just being really studious is not, in fact, enough to get by” breakdowns in college. They’re kind of standard. And all of her flailing, out-of-character, kind of affectless drifting, it all makes sense to me. Even the maid thing, which was appalling. Our Rory would have said something, but this Rory isn’t sure what’s going on anymore.