About:
Gilmore Girls S7.E02 “That’s What You Get, Folks, For Makin’ Whoopee”
Drinks Taken: 28
Cups of Coffee: 4
We’ve reached Season 7, and you know, after the agony of the final few episodes of Season 6, it’s almost a relief. Season 7 is goofy, and it’s not nearly as poignant as Sherman-Palladino-led seasons, but it’s still fun and quirky, almost a throwback to the first season of the show.
So let’s hop to! But first, a reminder of our drinking game rules:
The Gilmore Girls Drinking Game Rules
Drink once every time:
Lorelai or Rory drinks coffee.
Emily gets flustered by Lorelai’s bizarre sense of humor.
Sookie is controlling about food.
Paris is controlling about anything.
Michel snubs a customer.
Luke is crotchety.
Taylor has an absurd scheme for Stars Hollow.
The girls acquire massive amounts of food and then fail to take even one bite.
Drink twice every time:
Kirk has a new job.
You see a town troubadour.
Emily gets a new maid.
On to the episodes!
7.1 “The Long Morrow”
Both Rory and Lorelai are experiencing some morning after blues from the previous night/season: Rory is missing Logan so much she can scarcely stand it, and Lorelai doesn’t seem to be quite regretting her decision to sleep with Christopher (for the reasons I discussed last week – to create a clean break from Luke), but she certainly wants to get out of there as quickly as possible. Poor Chris wants to cook her breakfast, wants to see her again, wants to have a conversation, anything – but Lorelai just wants to split. She heads back to her house where she finds Luke, who tells her she didn’t give him a chance to talk the night before. Lorelai’s not wrong when she says “I gave you every chance.” Luke barely says anything; he’s still hardly fighting for her at all when Lorelai tells him it’s over in so many words: “It’s over.” Lorelai goes to the Dragonfly and passes on the devastating news to Sookie, who is duly devastated. Well, at first she’s disbelieving, but eventually she comes around because Lorelai is far too serious and earnest to be denied. Lorelai tells Sookie about Chris, and to Sookie’s credit she doesn’t give Lorelai a hard time about it at all, even acknowledging that Luke’s been a complete jerk. “But it doesn’t have to be over.” Lorelai tells her it does, and Sookie kills me when her eyes fill with tears (a moment of perfect acting from Melissa McCarthy). Mine do too.
Rory, meanwhile, finds a gift left by Logan in the apartment that turns out to be a tall model rocket ship. She has literally no idea what this could represent. She runs into Paris, who is now running an SAT prep course and cracking me up by how disgusted she is with a prospective student, and Paris freaks Rory out by assuming that she and Logan have broken up. Rory says that she and Logan never really discussed it (WHAT?), but says that their continued relationship “was kind of understood.” Paris is mean and hilarious and totally not wrong when she says: “Yeah. Because that worked out so well the last time.” Rory meets her mom at the Dragonfly, and Lorelai briefly tells her that she and Luke have broken up. Neither of them want to talk about their fella situation, so they try to think of anything else they can do: shopping, a movie (“You want to try not talking at a movie?” Lorelai asks, making it clear that she knows their foibles as well as we do), anything. So they land on racketball, because Michel assures them they can wear cute outfits (“I do!”). Of course “racketball” really means “sitting on the floor in cute outfits, talking about boys.” They come up with theories for Logan’s rocket ship, especially because he’s since called Rory to say he’s so relieved that she “gets it”, and Lorelai confides a little more about the Luke breakup, although definitely not mentioning the Christopher angle. Once they get home, Lorelai starts throwing away everything that reminds her of Luke, which is everything, and the story behind each item kills me because they’re all so sweet, these sad reminders of the Luke he used to be: reliable, supportive, a real partner who trusted in Lorelai and whom Lorelai could trust.
Meanwhile, Taylor’s installing a traffic light camera outside Luke’s diner. I like this plot because it calls back to “Red Light on the Wedding Night,” when the traffic light was first installed outside Luke’s, and that’s the episode in which Lorelai decides she doesn’t want to marry Max – and of course, now she knows she can’t marry Luke. That goddamn traffic light is a nuisance! Luke is typically crotchety about it, seemingly for no reason – until the town-wide camera demonstration, during which Kirk is driving Taylor’s classic baby blue T-bird (as Rory says, “Who knew?”), and he’s blinded by the camera light and drives the car straight through Luke’s. The damage is severe – like, Luke’s is screwed – and Luke just sits in stunned silence as chaos erupts around him.
Rory, through the sort of intensive research that got her into Yale in the first place, finally realizes what the rocket ship is all about: it’s a callback to the Twilight Zone episode called “The Long Morrow.” You can read about that here, but the gist is that Logan’s telling her he loves her enough to wait forty years for her. I just teared up typing that. Why don’t you guys like Logan again? Seriously! She calls him to thank him and tell him she wants to visit him in London over the summer – but before she gets a chance, he tells her he’s already bought a ticket for her to take a two-week trip over Christmas. Rory’s disappointed, but also proud: Logan’s being an adult, arriving to work early on his first day and trying to focus on his new job without any distractions.
Finally. Luke wakes the hell up and heads to Lorelai’s with a tank full of gas and a truckbed full of supplies for an elopement and honeymoon anywhere Lorelai wants to go. His speech kills me, but it’s also so late, so very, very late. Lorelai keeps trying to tell him it’s over, and he’s not hearing her, so finally she tells him she slept with Christopher. He stares at her for a beat, and then walks off without a word. GAHHH:
How many times do I have to drink?
16.
How many cups of coffee do the Gilmore girls drink?
2.
Flirtation quota
Chris sure is trying to flirt with Lorelai the morning after their tryst, but she isn’t having it. Logan and Rory just break my heart and then warm it and then break it again over the phone with each other. Those two cuties miss each other bad.
Best/most dated pop culture reference
Lorelai really, really wants to see the latest Fast & Furious movie with Rory, who reminds her that she’s tried to drag her to every single Fast & Furious movie since the beginning of time and has never been successful.
Sookie’s best dish of the episode
She seems to be cooking something delicious in the kitchen with Lorelai as they discuss Luke and Christopher, but I can’t tell what it is.
Lorelai’s craziest outfit
Her racketball outfit, naturally:
Outfit MVP
Rory’s dress is THE CUTEST. There are many layers to the cuteness that are hard to grasp in one screenshot, but take my word for it.
Kirk insanity
I can’t believe Taylor ever let Kirk behind the wheel of his classic T-bird.
Michel madness
Beyond the hilarity of his chipper delivery when the girls ask him if they can wear cute outfits to racketball (every time I laugh, thinking of his “I do!”), he and Sookie have an arm wrestling competition and Sookie destroys him, so he spends the rest of the episode wearing an Ace bandage and pouting.
Best Gilmore Gal witticism
When Logan tells Rory he can see Piccadilly Circus outside his office window, Rory: “So, you can just see elephants and clowns walking past your building all day long? That must be nice.” Such a Lorelai joke.
Random observation
David S. Rosenthal wrote “The Long Morrow,” and you can tell he’s a Gilmore Girls vet – our first episode without the Sherman-Palladinos doesn’t feel so different or scary, to be honest! As I said earlier, it feels a bit like an early GG ep, with more goofy townie action, and I’m honestly not minding that.
7.2 “That’s What You Get, Folks, For Makin’ Whoopee”
UGH. Luke, you crazy, dude. It’s reminiscent of how he acted when he found out Nicole cheated on him, and both of those incidents were preceded by his total and utter disinterest in the woman in question. Until she sleeps with someone else, that is, and then all of a sudden he’s Sugar Ray Leonard. He’s even more of a jerk when he and Lorelai later run into each other on the street: she apologizes for the awkwardness and he says the most terrible things in the shittiest tone: “Look, you’re the one who’s still hung up here. I’m telling you, I’m over it. I guess it’s just not as big a deal to me as it is to you. Yeah, so we’re not getting married. It’s okay by me. I mean you’re the one who proposed in the first place.” WHAT A DICK. At this point, I can’t believe I ever liked Luke, to be honest.
Lorelai heads to the Dragonfly for another heart to heart with Sookie, who asks once more “Did the answer have to be no?” Lorelai’s response is so good, and so heartbreaking: “No. I mean, I guess I could be married right now to someone who doesn’t want to be married to me and doesn’t know that I slept with someone two nights before we got married.” It feels like an assertion to audience members who were yelling at their TVs: “Just say yes! Marry him!” Luke only came around and proposed once he was faced with the possibility of losing Lorelai, and it shouldn’t have taken that for him to get his act together. He should have wanted to marry her for the right reasons, and these aren’t the right reasons.
Rory’s still missing Logan like mad and super bummed that their Asia trip was canceled, so Lorelai creates Asia for her! It’s a sweet, if totally racist, gesture, with kimonos and dessert sushi and kung-fu movies and tons of nutso decorations all over the house. We can tell that Lorelai’s distracting herself from her sadness with a project, and it’s cute. She and Rory are having a great time until Rory hears an answering machine message from Chris (those Chris messages cause so much trouble!), and realizes that Lorelai and Chris hooked up. As a child of divorce, I totally understand Rory’s dismay – she, Chris and Lorelai have just recently smoothed out all the bumps in their rocky relationship, and this feels like a BIG bump. (Dirty!) She yells at a sad Lorelai and then takes off for Lane’s, who’s recently returned from her honeymoon with Zack.
Ahh, Lane. So when Rory meets up with her bestie, she’s disappointed to hear that their honeymoon was a total disaster. Pedro’s Paradise, the discount all-inclusive Zack and Lane were so excited to visit, turned out to be a crappy room in some dude’s apartment, and Zack drank the water and got a parasite, and their first night of sex (on the beach, with actual scuttling crabs and wet sand and all manner of grossness) was so terrible that Lane is legitimately convinced that this whole thing where women say they enjoy sex is just a myth created to convince virgins to take on the necessary, but unhappy, burden of furthering the species. “In a way, I’m impressed with the depth of the conspiracy. If you think about it, it says something about the potential power of women that the entire gender could collude in creating the ‘sex is sexy’ myth.” The sex was so bad that they never did it a second time! On their honeymoon! GUYS – this is why you have sex before you get married. It’s the soundest advice I can offer a young couple in love.
So that’s a bummer, right? Even more of a bummer – that one terrible sexperience? Results in Lane’s PREGNANCY. Yep – that’s what you get, folks, for makin’ whoopee. Gah, poor Lane. Poor Zack. What a depressing next chapter in their previously adorable love story.
Meanwhile, TJ’s helping Luke rebuild the diner, and this results in the weirdest thing: two out of three episodes where I actually like TJ. He keeps bugging Luke to bring Lorelai along for a double date with him and Liz (also pregnant, remember), and when Luke finally breaks down and admits that he and Lorelai have broken up, TJ responds without a word, just the world’s biggest, solidest hug. It is so cute. He then brings Luke home for a home-cooked dinner with Liz, who of course ruins the meal because girlfriend has no idea how to cook, but she says some stuff that seems to resonate with Luke: “I love Lorelai, but the two of you were never in sync. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Okay, for one thing, you never really moved in together. You wanted to, but you never did. You were in two different places. And then, when you found out you had a daughter, you never told her. That’s not normal, Luke. That’s not how people in a healthy relationship act. It’s like that space-time-continuum thing. You’re on a plane over here, and she’s on this plane over there, and you were both never here nor there at the same time.”
Luke looks thoughtful, and later when he runs into Lorelai at the grocery store, he apologizes for being such a jerk earlier. “It’s not your fault. It’s not my fault. It’s just, we’re not right together, you know? You’re you, I’m me. I just… want to stop pretending we’re something else. You don’t belong with me. You belong with someone like Christopher. And I just… let’s just stop fighting it, okay? You go back to being Lorelai Gilmore. I’ll go back to being the guy in the diner who pours your coffee.” Of course, that’s actually the CRUELEST thing he could say to Lorelai, who heads straight home to sob on the couch – fortunately, Rory then returns from Lane’s, ready to forgive Lorelai and comfort her mom, who really, really needs it.
How many times do I have to drink?
12.
How many cups of coffee do the Gilmore girls drink?
2.
Flirtation quota
Nope.
Best/most dated pop culture reference
Lorelai, still trying to keep busy, makes Rory breakfast and says: “I asked myself, ‘W.W.T.B.F.C.D.?’ And it came to me in a flash. ‘I’m gonna make waffles.'” Rory, of course, knows what’s up: “What would The Barefoot Contessa do?”
Sookie’s best dish of the episode
She teaches Lorelai how to make sushi, which Lorelai of course turns into an abomination with fried chicken and Red Hots.
Lorelai’s craziest outfit
Cultural appropriation!
Outfit MVP
Hard to get a good pic, but this sassy work dress is so flattering.
Kirk insanity
LOVE THIS SO MUCH. Now that Luke’s diner is out of commission for the time being, Kirk has opened up a temporary diner in the town square – serving Luke’s exact menu, with an identical logo. This temp diner is called Kirk’s, and this is how Kirk dresses when he works there. SO GOOD.
Michel madness
Nope.
Best Gilmore Gal witticism
I don’t know why this makes me laugh, but Lorelai keeps calling Rory her “loin fruit” – mostly to gross Rory out.
Random observation
As sad as all of this is, I’m really glad Season 7 didn’t go the route most shows would have with Luke and Lorelai: Lorelai would have accepted Luke’s proposal and not told him about Chris, and the audience would have been so nervous, knowing the other shoe would eventually drop, and several episodes later Luke would find out and there’d be a huge fight and they’d break up then. Better to get it out of the way now.
That’s it for this week! Meet me back here next Wednesday morning as we cover “Lorelai’s First Cotillion” and “‘S Wonderful, ‘S Marvelous.”
And I leave you with a question, dear FYA readers: now, that wasn’t so bad, was it? Season 7! We’re doing it together!
