6x20 Super Cool Party People

[6.3/10] Ugh, I don’t know what to do with this episode. There are some really good parts of it, but also some that are not just bad, but which actively start to break the show a little bit for me, or at least make me uncontrollably furrow my brow.
Let’s go with the three choices, the three reactions, that don’t seem to make any sense.

The first is the fact that Luke has kept April from Lorelai for 3-4 months because he’s worried April would like Lorelai better than him. I mean, what the hell?

What kills me is that, in a weird way, it makes sense. I can totally buy Luke being insecure, and saying to Lorelai, “You have a great relationship with your daughter. You had a great relationship with her when she was twelve. You’re a great maternal figure. And not only have I never really been a parent before, let alone to a preteen girl, but I’m the guy who disliked kids so much that April’s mom hid her from me for twelve years. I want her to get to know me before she sees someone who’s effortlessly better at relating to her than I am.”

But he would, you know, tell her that and not hide his anxiety from someone he’s consistently earnest and straightforward with, and he certainly wouldn’t make up excuses and be such a withholding jerk about it. They take a semi-understandable feeling from Luke and twist into these choices that make no sense and don’t conform to anything we already know about him. Worrying that Lorelai will be the favorite is a perfectly reasonable concern from Luke, but it’s frickin’ bonkers as a reason to keep his newfound daughter away from his fiancee for ages and ages.

Weird reaction number two is the way that Anna is really upset that Luke didn’t sleep in the same room as a bunch of thirteen-year-old girls. Now again, it’s not crazy if you frame it as “you had my daughter being looked after by someone I’ve never met,” but it still seems really odd. It’s not like Lorelai is any kind of threat or danger. She is Luke’s fiancée. And again, maybe sleepovers were different for girls, but it seems pretty reasonable for Luke to go to bed while his soon-to-be spouse is still staying up with the girls for a little while. It feels like a “next time, I’d just like to meet her first” thing than a blow-up, especially when he was right downstairs if there was some kind of issue. Again, it’s the sort of concern that’s mildly plausible, but not in the way that the episode executes it.

Weird reaction number three is the way that Anna doesn’t want Lorelai around April because she’s worried that Luke/Lorelai is a transient relationship, and so she doesn’t want April to get attached to Lorelai in case things don’t work out between Luke and Lorelai. That’s all well and good except that Luke and Lorelai are engaged! How in the world is that not good enough for her?

Now I suppose, if we’re just dipping into the world of Gilmore Girls, Lorelai did already have one engagement go south, and Luke went so far as to elope and have things quickly dissolve. But in real life, drawing a line in the sand that your kid can’t hang out with her dad’s fiancée because you’re not sure it’s going to last is effing insane. The show tries to put a fig leaf over it by having Anna play the “I know this sounds a little crazy, and maybe I’m misguided, but I’m a single mom, and I have to do what I think’s best for my daughter” card, but it just makes her seem totally unreasonable.

Each of these things by themselves would be a lot to swallow, but throw them all together, and you have implausibility stacked on implausibility as the basis for the major source of conflict in this season. That is, again, deeply deeply unsatisfying, particularly when it’s being used as a wedge to drive the people in the show’s major romantic relationship apart. I cannot express how disappointing this is, how lazy it feels, and how untrue to the spirit of the show and the characters it is to use what can only generously be called tenuous logic to fuel the major issues of Season 6.

What stinks is that apart from that (almost show-breaking) stuff, this is actually a pretty good episode. If it weren’t preceded by months of duplicitousness and baffling enforced separation, a story about Luke not wanting Lorelai to get involved, and then calling her desperate for her to save the day is pretty perfect for Gilmore Girls. Lorelai is the ideal person to swoop in and save the birthday party Luke’s throwing for April, and the way that she and April bond, that she saves Luke’s bacon, and turns a likely dud into a rousing success, replete with Luke’s approval and gratefulness, is just what the doctor ordered. It’s just a shame that it turns into a unbelievable spat and more fodder for that wedge afterward.

Oh yeah, and Rory’s in this episode too! I like her remorse after Logan’s accident in Costa Rica. For as much as I disliked her coldness and intentional hurtfulness two episodes ago, it’s almost worth it to have that boomerang back at her when she feels guilty at the realization that that could have been her last interaction with Logan. There’s nothing like a near-death experience to put things into perspective.

On top of that, there’s a pair of great moments for the young women on the show. For one thing, Paris using her determination to get around the “doctors only talk to family” policy and get the details on Logan’s condition to relay to Logan is wonderful. Paris is much more enjoyable when she’s using her bulldog-like abilities to help Rory rather than attack her. And Rory matches her friend’s steeliness when she angrily demands Mitchum Huntzberger come see his injured son and manages to get through to him, something that shows she really does have the determination and killer instinct that Mitchum said she lacked.

Overall, there’s a lot of good meat and potatoes material in this episode, there’s just some baffling macro-level choices that nearly tear the whole damn thing down.