Gilmore Girls: Lorelai's Graduation Day
February 3, 2025 5:47 PM - Season 2, Episode 21 - Subscribe

Lorelai graduates from Community College. Emily and Richard show up for the ceremony. Rory doesn't.

Still avoiding Luke's, Lorelai walks Rory over to a "Mystery Breakfast Spot" which turns out to be Sookie's house. (We discover along the way that Lane is using their pots and pans to practice her drumming for now.) Sookie of course cooks them up a feast, and Lorelai offers a suggestion of aspirin instead of jordan almonds for the wedding favors. Jackson - not a morning person - is still too half-asleep to respond.

Later, Lorelai is cramming for her business class final, the last test she has to take before graduation. Rory convinces her that she should go to the graduation ceremony, and Lorelai agrees to invite Sookie and Jackson, but not Emily and Richard, believing that it would open up old wounds about the course that her life should have taken in their eyes. Rory says nuts to that and goes to the Hartford house on her own to invite them anyway.

Lorelai runs into Luke at Doose's, but Luke's still not in a forgiving mood. She passes her final and gets margarita-drunk at home. Jess calls Rory from a pay phone without anything really to say, but it sticks with Rory. At Chilton the next day, she bolts out of nowhere and gets on a bus to New York, landing at the Port Authority with no clue where she's going.

Lorelai is shocked to see her mother setting up hours before the graduation ceremony, toting along Raul, a cameraman with a truckload of equipment. In the greenroom, some of her classmates are in the middle of breaking up, and Zach (a total asshole throughout) starts making fun of "Lady Gotbucks" out in the auditorium. Lorelai pretends that she doesn't know her. The couple invites her to go to Shakey's with them after the ceremony, but she declines because she wants to hang out with Rory and her friends and also Shakey's is only on the West Coast so that'd be kind of a trip.

Rory finds Jess reading in Washington Square Park*, and the two walk through the Warner Bros. NYC backlot doing a fairly good impression of Sullivan Street (Best I could tell, they enter the Bleecker St. 6 station, which... sure.) They get Sabrett Dogs and go into an indie record store that Lane would adore, and Rory finds her mom the perfect graduation present - a vinyl copy of the first Go-Gos album, signed by Belinda Carlisle.

Zach and company continue to make fun of Emily in the greenroom when a woman shows up looking for Lorelai with a selection of corsages, so now everybody knows that she's related to the woman with the camera crew. They accuse her of being a snob who thinks she's too good for Shakey's, and it's all very weird.

Jess escorts Rory back to Port Authority and they say the goodbyes that they didn't get to say when he left, and she gets on her bus and waits. And waits. And then it turns out to be a local. With her trapped between the window and a dude with a spit-can.

Jackson and Sookie keep an eye out for Rory in the back of the auditorium, while Richard and Emily complain about the distinctly non-prestigious commencement speaker, but when it's time to walk the stage, she locks eyes with them, and they are proud, and she is proud of herself and happy they are there, and she does the tassel thing with her mortarboard, and it's great. She even gets a picture with them before they take off (using a disposable camera that was part of a delightful gift basket that Christopher sent to Lorelai) and Richard gives her a check (for something "fun.") Jackson even finally registers the aspirin/jordan almonds thing! But no Rory.

Instead, Lorelai finds her at home, freaking out and self-flagellating over how selfish and stupid she was. She tries to ground herself and otherwise punish herself in every way that she can, and while Lorelai tries to tell her that she wouldn't have done this if she weren't into Jess, Rory isn't ready to admit that to herself yet.

Also, she left the awesome present on the bus. Womp-womp.

*Which, sure. He said that's where he's hanging out, and I went to NYU - Washington Square is small enough that if you expect someone to be there, you can plausibly find them there.

A.V. Club Review - David Sims
Woman in Revolt Review - Lindsay Pugh

Soundtrack:
"52 Girls" - The B-52s
"Dance This Mess Around" - The B-52s
"O'Oh" - Yoko Ono
"Monkey Gone to Heaven" - Pixies

Random Guest Star Watch: Seth MacFarlane as Zach, for some reason.
posted by Navelgazer (1 comment total)
 
There are things I'm willing to forgive/overlook in this episode (like ... Rory leaves Chilton and no one notices?) but I don't understand the choice to have her leave Lorelai's present on the bus. That just seems excessive in the face of everything.

I do like when we get to see Rory being impulsive and young, though. Running off to NYC with the idea you're going to magically find the boy you're crushing on there is definitely impulsive and young (I'm glad she did manage to find Jess, who was not as surprised as he should've been).

The stuff with Emily and Richard at Lorelai's graduation is sweet. And yes, they're making it all about them ... well, making it all about Lorelai is making it all about them ... but it is coming from a genuine place. They didn't get to experience this before and it shows how much their relationship has grown.

Rory's meltdown for having missed Lorelai's graduation, though, feels a bit misplace. Or at least, Rory is kind of making it all about her. I do like that Lorelai says she deserves to celebrate and she wants to do that by having dinner with her daughter. All the Gilmores can be pretty self-involved but Rory seems less upset that she missed Lorelai's graduation and more that she did something stupid for a boy.
posted by edencosmic at 6:16 AM on February 4 [1 favorite]


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