2x21 Lorelai's Graduation Day

[8.3/10] Oh Rory. When that bus pulled into Port Authority (or a set meagerly resembling Port Authority) and she stepped out to go hunt down Jess, I literally said “Seriously? Fuuuuuuuck you, Rory.” Clearly one of my most mature moments.

But you know what, at the end of the day, I really like the way Rory’s story is framed here. Make no mistake about it -- she screws up big time. Even setting aside how terrible it is that she’s cutting school to drive hours away just to flirt with some guy who’s not her boyfriend, there’s the fact that, intentionally or not, she misses her mother’s graduation, when Rory was the only person Lorelai really wanted to be there.

And yet, “Graduation Day” frames it as Rory feeling something overtake her, something she doesn’t necessarily want and may not be able to control. That’s what teenage love can feel like -- this overpowering force that can screw up your life but that you cannot always fight. It makes you do stupid things, even hurtful things, and then turn around and feel bad for what you’ve done.

That’s what makes this work -- that for once Rory is not in denial, she’s just in a state of contrition. She knows what she did was wrong, and she’s trying to say she got it out of her system, but Lorelai of all people knows better. She knows that what Rory’s feeling cannot be bottled up or contained. As much as Rory still wants to be the good girl, to be the decent young woman we know she can be, there’s also those teenage hormones that mess with your brain chemistry and leave you scrambling and doing things that don’t feel like you.

As I’ve said before, it’s hard to watch Rory do things that will no doubt be hurtful to the people she loves, but I like the way this episode casts that as an irresistable force that she doesn’t want and yet cannot quell.

The other side of the coin is that Lorelai’s story starts broad, but becomes one of the most uplifting in the show. The notion that she doesn’t want Richard and Emily to be invited to her Business School graduation because it’d just be a reminder of how she failed them is a sad one. That, however, just makes it all the more heartening and humorous when Rory gives her little presentation to her grandparents about why they should and how both parties would regret it if they don’t.

The graduation itself goes a little broad. Having Seth Macfarlane play half of a feuding couple who knocks on Lorelai for being “rich” is pretty silly and doesn’t really land. (Maybe he can find Alex Borstein’s harpist in the land of Gilmore Girls’s forgotten one-off characters.) Emily going all out with the photographer and lighting is trademark overdoing it, and it’s amusing enough. And Jackson remembering about the jordan almonds days later is a nice brick joke. But for the most part, it’s all airy comic relief.

But then there’s that moment where Lorelai, feeling put upon by her parents’ meddling, takes the stage. She stands up there, looks out into the audience, and meets her parents’ gaze. Time freezes for a second, and Richard and Emily beam and even get a little misty, and Lorelai looks proud and heartened, and for just a moment at least, everything has been rectified. There’s so much bad blood, so many hurt feelings, among those three individuals, and yet her, they love one another, even if their distance makes it hard to express in anything other than reassuring looks and being there when they should be there.

Rory gets a little slack for not being there this time or all the times she has been, and while it’s a bit overdone, that’s part of what makes her final conversation with Lorelai ring true. As she says, this isn’t her, this is some other sort of teenager slowyl emerging from the dependable young woman who’s been Lorelai’s best friend for 16 (17 years?). But in small but significant ways, things are changing for both of the Gilmore Girls, and “Graduation Day” gains strengths from locking on to those changes and wringing the emotion out of them.