Gilmore Girls: Nick & Nora / Sid & Nancy
January 28, 2025 5:23 PM - Season 2, Episode 5 - Subscribe
Rory starts writing for the school newspaper. Max Medina gives an interview. And the world's most adorable punk-ass comes to town to stay with his Uncle Luke.
It's the first day of the school year and Rory is anxious to get there already, but first Lorelai has to navigate around the counter at the diner to swipe some donuts before Taylor's boy scout troop can get to them. Luke himself is having a heated phone call with his wayward sister Liz, the upshot of which is that she can't handle her kid and is sending him to Luke to do something with him.
Luke, of course, is in no way qualified to be a parent to a troubled teenager, but has that Dunning-Kreuger confidence that everything will be fine as long as he blows up an inflatable raft for a second bed.
At Chilton, Rory approaches a still-chilly Paris about maybe trying to co-exist, since they'll be working together on The Franklin (Chilton's school newspaper) all year. Paris agrees and tells her to be at the first meeting at 4:00. Of course, when Rory gets there, she learns that the meetings start at 3:15, and that the only assignment left is a piece on the repaving of the parking lot.*
From the moment he lumbers off the bus, Luke's nephew Jess doesn't miss a single opportunity to be the most obnoxious little shit that he can be. He barely responds to anyone talking to him, and when he does, it's to smack back at folks trying to help him out. He smokes in Luke's apartment, steals money from Taylor's charity jar and a garden gnome out of Babette's yard, and spends every waking second posturing about as hard as he can. Lorelai and Sookie throw him a welcome party at the Gilmore house, and when he meets Rory (the one person he acts civilly towards in this whole episode, though he does steal her copy of Howl), he tries to immediately bail. (Wonderfully, Rory informs him that in Stars Hollow on a Tuesday night, there's nowhere to bail to.)
So he swipes a beer from Lorelai's fridge and heads out to the porch, where Lorelai catches him, takes said beer, and tries to have a friendly conversation with a kid who is looking for every new an innovative way he can find to be unfriendly. So she heads bak inside rather than throttle him, only to get tag-teamed by Luke, who doesn't want her getting involved. It's real ugly (and it's one of those times where I feel like Lorelai is entirely, or almost entirely, in the right.)
Rory writes an apparent magnum opus on the re-paving issue, and the teacher tells Paris to give her something more to work with for the next issue, so Paris assigns her an interview with the previous year's "Most Popular Teacher" as voted by a landslide of Chilton students: Max Medina. Which is straight-up evil, but Rory once again rolls with it, sitting down with Max for a real interview and turning off the tape recorder for a moment so that they can tell each other how sad they are that things didn't work out between him and Lorelai. I'm not generally a Max fan, but this is a good, and necessary, scene.
Luke confronts Jess about the thefts and stuff, and they fight about it, until Luke finally just pushes him off of a bridge and into a pond, which might not win a gold star for parenting but feels right in the moment to be sure. Luke goes to Lorelai to apologize and admit that he has no idea what he's doing.
Back in their now-shared apartment, Luke reads Jess the riot act and lays down the law, and Jess is like "Cool, see ya later then, I'm going out." But, again, there's nowhere to go in Stars Hollow at night, so he finds Rory in thew town square and gives her back her book, with notes scrawled in the margins for her. She's the only one seeing this side of him, and honestly might be the only person who ever does, but she's seeing it hard.
Y'all, I'm so excited that Jess is in the mix now.
*For all that Rory gets labeled as a "priss," it seems like Lorelai instilled her with a strong "snitches get stitches" ethic at some point. We obviously see it here, as Rory rolls with the punches and takes her beef up with Paris herself rather than involve the teacher or faculty advisor or whoever, but I feel like this is actually pretty consistent throughout what I've seen of the show.
A.V. Club Review - David Sims
Woman in Revolt Review - Lindsay Pugh
Soundtrack:
"This is Hell" - Elvis Costello
"Girl from Mars" - Ash
Random Guest Star Watch: None that I saw, anyway.
It's the first day of the school year and Rory is anxious to get there already, but first Lorelai has to navigate around the counter at the diner to swipe some donuts before Taylor's boy scout troop can get to them. Luke himself is having a heated phone call with his wayward sister Liz, the upshot of which is that she can't handle her kid and is sending him to Luke to do something with him.
Luke, of course, is in no way qualified to be a parent to a troubled teenager, but has that Dunning-Kreuger confidence that everything will be fine as long as he blows up an inflatable raft for a second bed.
At Chilton, Rory approaches a still-chilly Paris about maybe trying to co-exist, since they'll be working together on The Franklin (Chilton's school newspaper) all year. Paris agrees and tells her to be at the first meeting at 4:00. Of course, when Rory gets there, she learns that the meetings start at 3:15, and that the only assignment left is a piece on the repaving of the parking lot.*
From the moment he lumbers off the bus, Luke's nephew Jess doesn't miss a single opportunity to be the most obnoxious little shit that he can be. He barely responds to anyone talking to him, and when he does, it's to smack back at folks trying to help him out. He smokes in Luke's apartment, steals money from Taylor's charity jar and a garden gnome out of Babette's yard, and spends every waking second posturing about as hard as he can. Lorelai and Sookie throw him a welcome party at the Gilmore house, and when he meets Rory (the one person he acts civilly towards in this whole episode, though he does steal her copy of Howl), he tries to immediately bail. (Wonderfully, Rory informs him that in Stars Hollow on a Tuesday night, there's nowhere to bail to.)
So he swipes a beer from Lorelai's fridge and heads out to the porch, where Lorelai catches him, takes said beer, and tries to have a friendly conversation with a kid who is looking for every new an innovative way he can find to be unfriendly. So she heads bak inside rather than throttle him, only to get tag-teamed by Luke, who doesn't want her getting involved. It's real ugly (and it's one of those times where I feel like Lorelai is entirely, or almost entirely, in the right.)
Rory writes an apparent magnum opus on the re-paving issue, and the teacher tells Paris to give her something more to work with for the next issue, so Paris assigns her an interview with the previous year's "Most Popular Teacher" as voted by a landslide of Chilton students: Max Medina. Which is straight-up evil, but Rory once again rolls with it, sitting down with Max for a real interview and turning off the tape recorder for a moment so that they can tell each other how sad they are that things didn't work out between him and Lorelai. I'm not generally a Max fan, but this is a good, and necessary, scene.
Luke confronts Jess about the thefts and stuff, and they fight about it, until Luke finally just pushes him off of a bridge and into a pond, which might not win a gold star for parenting but feels right in the moment to be sure. Luke goes to Lorelai to apologize and admit that he has no idea what he's doing.
Back in their now-shared apartment, Luke reads Jess the riot act and lays down the law, and Jess is like "Cool, see ya later then, I'm going out." But, again, there's nowhere to go in Stars Hollow at night, so he finds Rory in thew town square and gives her back her book, with notes scrawled in the margins for her. She's the only one seeing this side of him, and honestly might be the only person who ever does, but she's seeing it hard.
Y'all, I'm so excited that Jess is in the mix now.
*For all that Rory gets labeled as a "priss," it seems like Lorelai instilled her with a strong "snitches get stitches" ethic at some point. We obviously see it here, as Rory rolls with the punches and takes her beef up with Paris herself rather than involve the teacher or faculty advisor or whoever, but I feel like this is actually pretty consistent throughout what I've seen of the show.
A.V. Club Review - David Sims
Woman in Revolt Review - Lindsay Pugh
Soundtrack:
"This is Hell" - Elvis Costello
"Girl from Mars" - Ash
Random Guest Star Watch: None that I saw, anyway.
Man, I forgot how much was packed into some of those episodes!
posted by wenestvedt at 4:25 PM on January 29 [1 favorite]
posted by wenestvedt at 4:25 PM on January 29 [1 favorite]
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Jess calls them like he sees them. He sees right through Lorelai's attraction to Luke.
Milo Ventimiglia is great and he brings way more to Jess than is really there and that's why everyone loves Jess. They don't love Jess. They love Milo Ventimiglia. (I've heard mixed things about how he treated Alexis Bledel when they were together but I'm of the mind that they were in their 20s and sometimes thing don't work out.)
Jess definitely comes out of the gate angry and antagonistic, which is absolutely fair. His mom just dumped him in this small town and he only has an inflatable mattress as a bed.
I am not the biggest Jess fan but he definitely brings a lot of great, dangerous energy to Stars Hollow and Stars Hollow needs that. The town needs a boy in a leather jacket who steals gnomes and other bits of mischief. Also, yeah, Rory finally has chemistry with someone. She doesn't really have it with Dean and she 100% didn't have it with Tristan.
I like that Rory & Max have their conversation because I do feel like how all of that affected Rory was very much ignored (possibly by Lorelai but I hope they had some kind of conversation about it).
I miss season 1 Paris but we'll get some more good Paris moments soon.
Jess gave Rory her book back but wasn't it in his pocket when he got pushed in the lake? How was it the same when he gave it back to her?
(I find Jess to be pretty tiresome overall, honestly, but he's very much what this show needed.)
posted by edencosmic at 6:41 PM on January 28 [1 favorite]