Gilmore Girls: Let the Games Begin
February 10, 2025 7:25 PM - Season 3, Episode 8 - Subscribe
Rory and Jess are together now, supposedly, but can't get a moment alone. Richard finagles Rory an admissions interview at Yale, and everyone turns on him for it. Luke attempts to lay down some ground-rules.
Well, there had to be an episode to follow the stellar previous one, so here we are.
It's Sunday and/or Monday following the Dance Marathon*, and the gals are walking so slow that it takes them a half-hour to get to Luke's, and Rory only has time to grab a donut and go. Rory and Jess are a little awkward around each other, and not just because Lorelai and Luke are both there. When Lorelai fills Luke in on the news, he's thrilled, since he still hopes that Rory can be a good influence on Jess. Lorelai, meanwhile, is wisely acquiescent: Rory was gonna date someone like Jess at some point, so it might as well be now.
At Friday Night Dinner**, Richard pulls Rory into the kitchen to tell her about an upcoming trip to New Haven he's taking for a Whiffenpoofs reunion, and invites her (and Lorelai, but mostly her) along with him and Emily so that Rory can have a look at Yale. WHen Rory brings this up, Lorelai is immediately on edge, seeing her father as a manipulative "puppet master" trying to get in the way of Rory's pre-ordained path to Harvard. But she agrees to come along.
Rory and Jess try to sneak a moment alone in Luke's apartment, both being painfully teenaged and awkward and trying to figure out how to get close enough to each other to make out. Then Luke walks in, assuming that much more was happening than was actually going on, and tries on the "over-protective father-of-daughter" hat, which doesn't really fit him.
After packing for a day trip to a location at most an hour away as if they're about to embark on an open-ended sea voyage, the four Gilmores hit the road for Yale.*** Richard shows off the Art Museum (where Emily explains he used top take all the women he dated) and the spot where he proposed to Emily (there used to be a bench, but there's a trash can now.) And inside one of the buildings, he shows them the admissions office, where one of his old friends works as the dean of admissions, and just to happens to have an admissions interview appointment with Rory lined up for this very minute.
Everyone loses their shit at Richard over this in different ways and for different reasons: Rory graciously takes the interview and waits until afterwards to unload on him about springing it on her when she didn't have a chance to prepare, since she would have said "yes" to the interview in any case. Emily defends him to Lorelai and then rips into him in private for handling things in the way most singularly calibgrated to alienate Lorelai. And Lorelai goes ballistic because she doesn't understand how college admissions work and that there's all upside and zero downside to Rory taking this interview and she has a plan and that plan is Harvard and if Richard gets Yale all over Rory then she'll be RIchard's kid and not Lorelai's, or something. TL;DR: Richard handled this badly, and Lorelai is nearly entirely unsympathetic in her reaction to it.
So the gals take a cab ride from New Haven to Stars Hollow and go into Luke's, where they run into Luke and Jess. Rory says she needs to go study and takes off. Jess needs to go do something or other with his car and takes off. Lorelai needs to explain to Luke that the teenagers just ran off to meet up together, which spikes Luke's anger as Lorelai just kinda laughs it off. FWIW, what those crazy kids do is meet up by Gypsy's and keep Jess from lighting a cigarette right next to a gas pump by finally making out a bit instead.
Afterwards, Rory climbs a tree to knock on Dean's window and apologize for the way she treated him in their relationship. He rightly calls her out on being unable to cope with the idea that someone out there doesn't like her, but I think it's still on the whole a nice move on her part. It never reads like a ploy to get back together or anything, just an admission that she had a foot out the door the whole time and that he didn't deserve that. I never liked Dean, but I approve of that kind of personal accountability, anyway.
The gals go to bed after a long day, but each stays up late reading literature on Yale University.
* Lorelai and Rory are still the walking dead, as if they're just coming from the Marathon, and Lorelai says something about how Rory has been up 24 hours straight. Kirk is carrying his trophy around and showing it off. And Rory & Jess haven't talked to each other since their moment on the Jess Bridge. But Rory's in her uniform, she and Jess have school, and they also talk about their sleep schedules being screwed up. Let's just call this one particularly noteworthy example of why the physics of time in Stars Hollow are worthy of serious study.
** "Fun" fact: the grisly story that Lorelai tells at dinner to scare Emily into being nicer to the help is, wildly enough, actually mostly true! It was Frank Lloyd Wright's public mistress, rather than his wife, and Lorelai lays it on a little thick, but... yeah. That happened.
*** Really Pomona College outside of L.A., which my wife got a kick out of since she went to Harvey Mudd and all the Claremont Colleges are kinda one big community.
A.V. Club Review - David Sims
Woman in Revolt Review - Lindsay Pugh
Soundtrack:
"Then She Appeared" - XTC
Random Guest Star Watch: None that I saw
Well, there had to be an episode to follow the stellar previous one, so here we are.
It's Sunday and/or Monday following the Dance Marathon*, and the gals are walking so slow that it takes them a half-hour to get to Luke's, and Rory only has time to grab a donut and go. Rory and Jess are a little awkward around each other, and not just because Lorelai and Luke are both there. When Lorelai fills Luke in on the news, he's thrilled, since he still hopes that Rory can be a good influence on Jess. Lorelai, meanwhile, is wisely acquiescent: Rory was gonna date someone like Jess at some point, so it might as well be now.
At Friday Night Dinner**, Richard pulls Rory into the kitchen to tell her about an upcoming trip to New Haven he's taking for a Whiffenpoofs reunion, and invites her (and Lorelai, but mostly her) along with him and Emily so that Rory can have a look at Yale. WHen Rory brings this up, Lorelai is immediately on edge, seeing her father as a manipulative "puppet master" trying to get in the way of Rory's pre-ordained path to Harvard. But she agrees to come along.
Rory and Jess try to sneak a moment alone in Luke's apartment, both being painfully teenaged and awkward and trying to figure out how to get close enough to each other to make out. Then Luke walks in, assuming that much more was happening than was actually going on, and tries on the "over-protective father-of-daughter" hat, which doesn't really fit him.
After packing for a day trip to a location at most an hour away as if they're about to embark on an open-ended sea voyage, the four Gilmores hit the road for Yale.*** Richard shows off the Art Museum (where Emily explains he used top take all the women he dated) and the spot where he proposed to Emily (there used to be a bench, but there's a trash can now.) And inside one of the buildings, he shows them the admissions office, where one of his old friends works as the dean of admissions, and just to happens to have an admissions interview appointment with Rory lined up for this very minute.
Everyone loses their shit at Richard over this in different ways and for different reasons: Rory graciously takes the interview and waits until afterwards to unload on him about springing it on her when she didn't have a chance to prepare, since she would have said "yes" to the interview in any case. Emily defends him to Lorelai and then rips into him in private for handling things in the way most singularly calibgrated to alienate Lorelai. And Lorelai goes ballistic because she doesn't understand how college admissions work and that there's all upside and zero downside to Rory taking this interview and she has a plan and that plan is Harvard and if Richard gets Yale all over Rory then she'll be RIchard's kid and not Lorelai's, or something. TL;DR: Richard handled this badly, and Lorelai is nearly entirely unsympathetic in her reaction to it.
So the gals take a cab ride from New Haven to Stars Hollow and go into Luke's, where they run into Luke and Jess. Rory says she needs to go study and takes off. Jess needs to go do something or other with his car and takes off. Lorelai needs to explain to Luke that the teenagers just ran off to meet up together, which spikes Luke's anger as Lorelai just kinda laughs it off. FWIW, what those crazy kids do is meet up by Gypsy's and keep Jess from lighting a cigarette right next to a gas pump by finally making out a bit instead.
Afterwards, Rory climbs a tree to knock on Dean's window and apologize for the way she treated him in their relationship. He rightly calls her out on being unable to cope with the idea that someone out there doesn't like her, but I think it's still on the whole a nice move on her part. It never reads like a ploy to get back together or anything, just an admission that she had a foot out the door the whole time and that he didn't deserve that. I never liked Dean, but I approve of that kind of personal accountability, anyway.
The gals go to bed after a long day, but each stays up late reading literature on Yale University.
* Lorelai and Rory are still the walking dead, as if they're just coming from the Marathon, and Lorelai says something about how Rory has been up 24 hours straight. Kirk is carrying his trophy around and showing it off. And Rory & Jess haven't talked to each other since their moment on the Jess Bridge. But Rory's in her uniform, she and Jess have school, and they also talk about their sleep schedules being screwed up. Let's just call this one particularly noteworthy example of why the physics of time in Stars Hollow are worthy of serious study.
** "Fun" fact: the grisly story that Lorelai tells at dinner to scare Emily into being nicer to the help is, wildly enough, actually mostly true! It was Frank Lloyd Wright's public mistress, rather than his wife, and Lorelai lays it on a little thick, but... yeah. That happened.
*** Really Pomona College outside of L.A., which my wife got a kick out of since she went to Harvey Mudd and all the Claremont Colleges are kinda one big community.
A.V. Club Review - David Sims
Woman in Revolt Review - Lindsay Pugh
Soundtrack:
"Then She Appeared" - XTC
Random Guest Star Watch: None that I saw
Yeah, I can't find a good YouTube clip of it, but the Rory-Dean-Jess triangle just reminds me of Wet Hot American Summer, when we've been following the lovable Coop (Michael Showalter) as he pursues Katie (Marguerite Moreau), who's involved with unrepentant dickhead Andy (Paul Rudd), and at the end, she rejects him with an amazing monologue about how Coop is wonderful and dependable and all sorts of things that she'll probably be looking for when she's older, but Andy's super hot and she's sixteen and so that's where her head is at: "Sex. Specifically with Andy and not with you."
I'm also just seeing the kinda throughline between shows of that era of the "Hot guy, maybe not the best boyfriend material" going from Jordan Catalano (My So-Called Life) to Daniel Desario (Freaks & Geeks) to Jess Mariano here and it's like, damn, just always gotta go to the Italian-American well for that trope, huh? Makes me thankful that at least Spike was a super-English Billy-Idol-wannabe instead.
posted by Navelgazer at 10:15 AM on February 11 [1 favorite]
I'm also just seeing the kinda throughline between shows of that era of the "Hot guy, maybe not the best boyfriend material" going from Jordan Catalano (My So-Called Life) to Daniel Desario (Freaks & Geeks) to Jess Mariano here and it's like, damn, just always gotta go to the Italian-American well for that trope, huh? Makes me thankful that at least Spike was a super-English Billy-Idol-wannabe instead.
posted by Navelgazer at 10:15 AM on February 11 [1 favorite]
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I also like that Rory wasn't mad about the meeting but that her grandfather didn't prepare her for it. She knew it was important and should have been ready! Lorelai's outsized reaction, though, is pretty typical Lorelai, but I did like Emily's dig about "she could live at home!"
Rory and Jess are fun together and I actually like that this relationship is much more sexually-charged than what she had with Dean. That makes sense and despite all the books and stuff, really, this relationship is based on that they find each other hot.
And yeah, not really on Dean's side because he handled it all badly but I like that Rory admits she did too.
posted by edencosmic at 7:12 AM on February 11 [1 favorite]