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Gilmore Girls: Lorelai's First Cotillion
(S07E03) Have you noticed that the way Gilmore Girls is being shot this season seems somewhat... different? The film is less grainy... the sets are lit differently... there are more close-ups... something is odd. Yes, I'm nitpicking, but GG under the Rosenthal regime just has this feeling around it that's different from the Palladino era.You could see it with the first appearance of Richard and Emily this season, right in the cold open. Rory and Lorelai are back doing the Friday night dinners, and the dining room of the Gilmore estate seemed brighter, not as big as before. And Richard's toupee was different. If it weren't for Emily yelling at a 10-year-old finishing school protégé, the whole thing was making me think that we landed in some sort of parallel GG universe.
Don't get me wrong, the dialogue is starting to take shape in this episode. The rhythm here was a lot better than last week; there were even some very funny lines, like Rory and Lorelai discussing a deflection system if the talk at dinner about Lor and Luke breaking up gets too rough ("Bangalore!" Rory will say). "Tell them you're converting to Judaism," Lor tells her daughter. "That will throw the whole Friday night dinner thing into jeopardy." Despite that, Lorelai's negative reaction to he parents' non-reaction to the breakup is unexpected; Ma and Pa Gilmore never thought that Lor and Luke should be together in the first place, so to be surprised that they're not surprised just seems to be a little bit of a surprise, know what I mean?
Anyway, we see a lot of Michel this week. As Lorelai questions whether everything she's ever done in her life was done to piss off her mother, Michel helps set up a tea for Emily's students at the inn. Since he never got to do this sort of thing himself, he decides to go to the girls' cotillion... and forces Lorelai to go with him, as payback for when he had to take care of Paul Anka (which I could barely discern from his monologue about it... is it me, or is Yanic Truesdale using a thicker accent for Michel every year?).
For the most part, the cotillion is a distraction from this whole Luke/Lorelai mess, though we see a little of Luke after he reopens his diner. For some reason, he's decided to get a new cap (fitted, no less... I freeze-framed it and was able to figure out that he was wearing the cap of the Connecticut Defenders, a minor-league team in Norwich, CT. Paul Lukas would be proud), but that's all we know. Rory comes in, but the scene is more for her to talk to Lane about her pregnancy than any Rory-Luke stuff. It's too bad; we know that Luke's been a big influence on her life, and it's sad to see that relationship suffer because of the Lor-Luke stupidity.
Lane's more like Lane this week; scared about her pregnancy but in a positive way. She finally tells Zack, but he doesn't quite let it sink in; it was funny how he tried to not even acknowledge Lane was with child at some point, saying she was "going a little straight-edge" when she said she wasn't going to have a beer. But when it did sink in, Zack and Lane can share their fright together. "Do you know what afterbirth is?" she tells him as she shows him a book on the miracle of childbirth. "Dude, so you know how the baby's connected to you by that hose? And I'm supposed to cut that hose? No way I'm cutting that hose," says Zack in response. He calls the umbilical cord a hose... classy. At least it's not the tired old joke about the dad mistaking the tube for another protuberance in the same general area.
Meanwhile, Rory's missing Logan... a lot. She's just not connecting to him over the phone like she did back at Yale. Leave it to Paris to give her the most practical, most bluntly-put solution: IM sex. She was even BlackBerrying some naughtiness to Doyle while she was talking to Rory... classy. Of course, Rory being Rory, she tries to find the right phrases to use by reading Henry Miller books while Lane freaks out looking at childbirth books. But when she whips out her Sidekick and finally sends something, Logan doesn't write back... at least that's what Rory thought. It was kinda cute that once she found out he got her IM and responded, she was too shy to a) say anything dirty to him on the phone or b) text him anything dirty while they were on the phone... classy (I mean that this time).
The only thing I wonder is why, when Rory went to dinner with Christopher, we didn't see a scene of her berating him for taking advantage of Lorelai yet again, or Rory warning him not to hurt her mother for the umpteenth time. Maybe that was in the original draft but got cut for more cotillion scenes. At least they had Paris yell at her SAT prep employees, including Rory, whose smitten student is making doe eyes at her.
So now we come back to Lorelai... and here's where we dip back into the parallel universe. Like I mentioned before, she wonders if she just did everything in life for the sole purpose of pissing off Emily. When she notices a girl at the cotillion, one who's been defying Emily all week, sporting a pair of pink-and-black zebra-striped Chucks, that notion hits her square in the face. So when she encounters Chris when she gets home (trying to feed Paul Anka some key lime pie... classy), she tries to make like nothing happened -- "I'm not not talking to him," she told Rory earlier in the evening -- but Chris will have none of it. He tells her that she's it for him, whether it's now or when he's eighty. He loves her and wants to be with her.
Two seasons ago, that speech, pre-Luke, would have been heart-warming: "The love of Lorelai's life wants to be serious this time!" But post-Luke, it seems opportunistic and slimy. For some reason, the pairing of Lor and Chris just doesn't feel right, like it's the wrong time for it to happen, or it's too late for it to happen, now that we know what it's like to see Lor and Luke together.
So, it makes a viewer feel even worse when the episode ends with Lorelai, remembering her revelation, calls up Chris, ready to give him another shot (remember that Richard and Emily actually like Chris). What is this, like a week since the Luke thing blew up in her face? Doesn't she take any time to let the breakup breathe? Does she realize that this is a guy that took advantage at her weakest moment? Jeez alou, even George Steinbrenner acts less impulsively than this woman.
Anyway, next week we see that the Lor-Chris romance begins anew. But, because we're now in the parallel universe, I just wish it wouldn't happen at all.
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