6x13 Friday Night's Alright for Fighting

[8.2/10] The received wisdom for couples says “don’t let one fight become every fight.” Which is to say that when some disagreement comes up, don’t let it become on opportunity to raise and relitigate every single argument you’ve ever had just because your dander is up.

And yet, Gilmore Girls needed to get back to normal. While I slagged the show a bit for bending over backward to preserve the status quo at the end of Season 3, the truth is that those Friday night dinner are an integral part of the series and one of its best assets, and so it’d be a shame to let those go by the wayside, the same way it would be now. But as I’ve said so many times, the show has to earn that.

So often, the show’s answer to those big disagreements is just to move on, to show the characters separately upset with one another or reacting to the other’s actions, but rarely actually hashing everything out with one another. That ends here.

And Amy Sherman-Palladino and director Kenny Ortega find the perfect way to happen. Too much has happened among the Gilmores over the last half season or so to actually be able to do every facet of this argument justice. Instead, Sherman-Palladino and Ortega make the brilliant choice to break the show’s format, and the results speak for themselves.

Instead of the typically conventional TV camera work of the series, Ortega breaks out the steadicam and darts around the table in one long shot to convey the way accusations, defenses, and hurt feelings are flying around the Gilmore dining room like snowballs in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Instead of the standard WB editing choices, editor Raúl Dávalos stitches these scenes together, creating not a simple A-to-B progression throughout the night, but capturing the waxing and waning tempers, the way the object of dispute and censure shifts and changes throughout the evening, and even the comedy of how tempers flare one moment and the next, everyone’s politely complementing the sorbet.

It’s a masterclass in the benefits of breaking out your fancy stuff for a special occasion. For her part, Sherman-Palladino writes the scene beautifully. Rather than making anyone the scapegoat or anyone the martyr, the interplay among the various Gilmores reveals how each of them has screwed up and also borne the brunt of others’ thoughtlessness; each has their own reasons for why they did what they did and each has their blindspots and inability to understand someone else’s perspective and motivations; each has hurt and been hurt by the people sitting around that table. It is the culmination of so much bad blood, so many toes stepped on, that needed to be processed and digested and gotten out of everyone’s system before the show could get back to normal (whatever that means for this lot).

In short, it needed to happen for Gilmore Girls to earn its status quo again. In truth, that masterful sequence is itself a sort of magic trick, one that rubs our face (and our funny bones) in enough of the rougher parts of The Big Gilmore Fight without us having to see each painful step. But it gets the major issues out in the open: Rory’s spoiled myopia about the kindness her grandparents’ showed her; Emily’s own smothering manner and ability to make poor decisions when she’s emotional; Richard flipping his allegiances on the Yale sabbatical issue and then pretending its Lorelai’s fault for not giving him the full picture. And of course, it ends with Lorelai and Emily arguing over Lorelai getting pregnant at sixteen, the original sin of Gilmore Girls, from which all other disagreements and bad feelings flow.

It’s the only way to get back to business as usual, and for once, its Lorelai who wants to preserve things, who, no matter what has happened between the four people accusing and defending each other before and after some passion fruit sorbet, has come to believe there’s a reason to keep this group together. And maybe, just maybe, she even regrets how things ended up with her parents when that rift first began. Gilmore Girls, for lack of a better term, goes there. It is the most raw, explosive, and technically ambitious sequence in the series so far, and its commitment to exorcising those demons so that the return of Friday night dinners is warranted, not just demanded by fiat or narrative convenience, is as laudable as it is impressive.

Oh yeah, and that’s only the last ten minutes of the episode. The other 75% of “Friday Night” hit several notes. The most (continually) disappointing is that Luke is now de facto excluding Lorelai from his “getting to know you” sessions with April. This is where the show’s fuzzy timeline gets dicey. It’s perfectly fair for Luke not to want to overwhelm this young woman who’s having a big change in her life all of a sudden, and hope that she can get acclimated to him before he starts introducing prospective stepmothers and stepsisters and flighty new aunts. But if it’s another two months before anything happens on that front, it again feels like an out of character Luke who’s not aware of, let alone concerned with, his fiancee’s feelings.

The other side of the coin is that at some point, Lorelai has to express that this is making her unhappy. I won’t pretend that that’s not difficult. It’s commendable how Lorelai wants to give Luke the time and space to process something as significant as realizing that you have a child. But eventually, if this is all making her as miserable and despondent as her expressions seem to suggest, she and Luke need to have an earnest, understanding talk about it the way they normally do. Otherwise it’s letting a problem that’s not going to go away simply get worse.

The other major, intersecting plot thread involve Paris turning into a dictator at the Yale Daily News, Logan trying to get back into Rory’s good graces, and those two efforts unexpectedly colliding. The dictatorial lengths that Paris goes to as editor are admittedly a bit cartoony, but Paris has always been a very outsized character, and so while the show goes big and broad here, it doesn’t necessarily feel out of step with the tenor of the corner of the world that Paris occupies and seems to conjure wherever she goes.

At the same time, it’s nice to see Rory jump in, take charge, and save the day, even if the show seems to be setting her up to end up usurping Paris (reluctantly, no doubt, with Paris naturally taking it hard and being upset with her recently-disclaimed best friend). And having Logan make good with Rory, not by showering her with gifts or taking her to a fancy dinner, but by showing himself to be a talented newspaperman, who helps her get the Daily News to the finish line and even uses his charm, his last name, and a little skullduggery to gain some leeway from the printer. That too earns a reunion and reset of where things used to be.

There’s a theme there, one that connects the seemingly disparate newspaper and Friday night dinner portions of the show. At times, things start flying fast and furious. It begins to seem like chaos, like nothing in the world could put things back together. But at some point, possibly the point of exhaustion, when you’ve done all you can and let all your feelings out and come to whatever equilibrium you need to even if it’s not perfect, you walk away drained but where you need to be, and maybe even gain back a little piece of what you lost.