6x12 Just Like Gwen and Gavin

[6.7/10] Who is this Luke? I expressed some sympathy for the idea that Luke might want to hold off on his big news because he didn’t want to put a damper on Lorelai’s reunion with Rory or Lorelai’s satisfaction with everything going so swimmingly with the wedding preparations.

But two months? Two frickin’ months? It’s hard to grok the passage of time when you’re watching these episodes on a daily rather than weekly basis, but holy cow. I had assumed maybe a couple of weeks had passed. Surely in two months, Luke could have found a quiet moment to explain the situation to his fiancee.

That he didn’t, that he not only waited that long to tell her, but then just writes him off as him being “confused” and “overwhelmed” by the whole thing is such a thin excuse. And you know what? Sometimes people have thin excuses for bad behavior. It happens, and it could be true to life. But it doesn’t feel like Luke. When have we known him to hide anything? When have we known him to be anything but overly concerned with Lorelai’s happiness. When have we known him to be anything but direct, particularly with people he’s close to.

This isn’t Luke, and maybe the idea is that having a long lost daughter is such uncharted territory that it brings out an heretofore unknown side of him, but you have to earn that, and this doesn’t feel like the show’s earned so drastic a departure. It feels like the show needed some place dramatic to take Luke and Lorelai after they’d basically hit Happily Ever After, and so came up with this soap opera nonsense and out of character behavior to justify it. The Luke we know doesn’t keep important things from the people he cares about for two months; he doesn’t try to back out of a promise made to his daughter; and he certainly doesn’t postpone marrying the love of his life, the one he said “yes” to in an instant,” especially when he can imagine the effect it would have on her.

That is, somehow, the worst part of this. So help me god, Gilmore Girls almost crawls out of this debacle there for a moment. Lorelai is understandably devastated at revelation that Luke kept a prospective stepdaughter from her for so long, but Rory gives her mom a reassuring speech about Gwen and Gavin (which, uh, didn’t turn out so well in real life), Luke apologizes profusely, and you get the sense that this could be one of those Gilmore Girls situation where something dramatic happens, but everybody just scoots along like it didn’t and we go back to the status quo. Would it be good? No. But would it be passable and in keeping with other major events that the show proceeded to gloss over? Absolutely.

Instead, Lorelai offers to postpone the wedding and Luke takes her up on it, and you can tell this thing is headed for disaster because the show wants it to and not because it’s a true reflection of the characters and their personalities or perspectives. I’m not so committed to Luke and Lorelai that I can’t stand to see them broken up -- hell, I thought their break-up in Season 5 was well-motivated and hit on some serious issues. But that’s because Lorelai’s issues with Chris felt like a reflection of what we already knew about her history and behavior, and the same went for Emily’s meddling. Mysterious offspring and secret-keeping and putting off anything involving his life with Lorelai feel completely divorced from the Luke Danes we knew, and the show’s done little-to-nothing to earn that sort of transformation.

That aside, this was a solid episode. (“Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”) Paris as the Yale Daily News taskmaster is a bit over the top, as a lot of Paris comedy bits tend to be, but there were plenty of laughs too. Kirk running the winter carnival while Taylor snoops around to evaluate things “Huck Finn”-style is dumb but inoffensive. And I actually really liked the scene where Anna told Luke off, and said that if he wants to be a parent, he has to commit to it and can’t break promises to April on a whim. It’s intriguing and endearing to see Anna seem so generally welcoming and good-natured about this weird situation, but then springing into defense mode as soon as her daughter’s happiness or well-being is any way threatened.

But then there’s crappy Zach, who continues to be a dolt and a jerk, this time to Lane’s hunky uncle whom he mistakes for a suitor. The fact that Mrs. Kim “will not stand in [his] way” is disappointing, as he continues to have a risible personality that should lead Mrs. Kim to keep him on the sidelines, regardless of her efforts to accept her daughter’s rock and roll lifestyle.

And hey, I’m also a little bit back on Team Logan once again. His onslaught of flowers and gifts and wayward coffee carts feels, as Lorelai told her father earlier in the season, like a totally misaimed way to bribe Rory. But the fact that he finds the right way -- coming to Lorelai and making an earnest plea, bearing her barbs, and expressing a shared hatred for Mitchum -- culminates in Lorelai’s letter (a fun device) and the door opening on Rory-Logan just a crack. It’s a little broad at first, but proves a nice way to suggest reunion is in the cards for the couple and move Logan slightly back into our good graces.

Overall, the nuts and bolts of this episode aren’t so bad. It’s just that the major storyline of the episode, and this stretch of the season, is founded on a version of Luke who feels like he hails from the Red Room on Sherilyn Fenn’s last major show, not from Stars Hollow.