1x09 Rory's Dance

[9.4/10] At times, Gilmore Girls has to remind you that it’s a CW show. That’s what Mrs. Bloom (a Gilmore Girls veteran) warned me when we pressed play on “Rory’s Dance.” Rest assured, the episode has one stretch in particular of truly lame and overwrought teen melodrama during the titular soiree. Paris has her latest cliché fit of jealousy and frustration with Rory, her disposable minions are suitably impressed with Rory’s date, and Dean and Tristan have a confrontation that’s so rote, Dean actually calls his foe “Dristan,” a nickname that conjures memories of Stan’s antagonist referring to him as “Darsh” in the classic “Asspen” episode of South Park.

But aside from that easily ignored Dawson’s Creek-aping pablum, “Rory’s Dance” is one of the peaks of the show so far. Even the material with Rory and Dean is fairly endearing when they’re not at the actual dance. Rory’s nervousness about raising the “boyfriend” question with her beau (sorry, “gentleman caller”) and reasons for being concerned about even going to the Chilton Formal are relatable and have their share of humor, like the best Rory subplots of the show’s early going.

Still, the real highlights of the episode come from the interactions between Emily and Lorelai and to (slightly) lesser extent, the interactions between Lorelai and Rory. Each of these interactions has a start and a nice counterpoint, that drives home the complexity of the relationship between these three women.

That starts in the episode’s opening, when Emily insists that Rory go to the dance over her granddaughter’s objections, and Lorelai stands up for Rory in the debate. Lorelai defends Rory’s right to make her own decisions and tries to stymie Emily’s attempts to pressure her. And yet, when Lorelai and Rory are in the car together, Lorelai applies her own (gentler) form of pressure, trying to vindicate Rory’s wishes but making sure they’re coming from a place of preference and not one of fear. The two moments work extremely well together, showing how Lorelai is apt to stand up to her mother, particularly to defend her daughter, but absorbs at least some of what Emily is saying and turns around to impart her own version of it Rory.

Even better is the heaven and hell of the interactions between Lorelai and Emily while Rory’s at the dance. For one thing, the two of them seeing Rory off is just a great moment. Everything from the bib and the taco over Rory’s dress (and Emily’s ensuing horror), to Emily’s insistence that Dean show up to the door to greet Rory (and again, her incensed reaction when he doesn’t catch on), is sweet and funny.

But things take a turn for the even sweeter once Emily and Lorelai are alone. There is the prospect of the two of them mending fences with Rory herself as the catalyst. We see Emily at her most maternal here, insisting on looking after Lorelai after she’s suffered a back spasm and trying to take care of her daughter. Little bits like the scene of mushed banana on toast (and again, Emily’s reaction to trying her own creation) or Lorelai telling her mom than she sounds like Barbara Stanwyck are those small but funny moments of bonding between the two.

Things really come to a head though, over Rory. When Lorelai confesses that she made, rather than bought, Rory’s dress, Emily tells her that she did a great job, with both the dress and Rory. It’s the highest compliment Lorelai can receive from her mother -- a subtle affirmation that for however much Emily looks at Lorelai’s life as being full of wrong decisions, she looks at the person and project that Lorelai described to Max as “her world” and approves. It’s not overdone, just a quiet comment while watching a movie that is full of meaning.

And by the same token, when falling asleep and being tucked in by Emily, Lorelai says “thank you mommy.” The magnitude of that word is palpable. To call Emily and Lorelai’s relationship strained is an understatement, but the power of that word, to take them both back to a childhood when bananas were first smeared on toast, works as an affirmation that there’s still a connection between them as mother and daughter. With that comes the hope that maybe they’re starting to come together and feel like family once again.

Then, those hopes are immediately dashed in an absolutely harrowing sequence. Emily wakes up at 5:30 in the morning and realizes that Rory isn’t there, waking up Lorelai to deliver the news. That means, of course, that Rory has been out all night with a boy, a prospect which raises once more all the bad blood and hurt feelings and recriminations about Lorelai’s own youth which Emily and Lorelai had just seemed to be getting over.

Suddenly, Emily is bringing up the magnitude of Lorelai’s own mistakes as a teenager. She expresses her own hurt feelings at being denigrated as a mother despite trying to give Lorelai every advantage she could. She offers the ultimate hurtful assessment of Lorelai -- that she ruined her life. Lorelai is proud of that life, and to hear her mother knock it is almost as bad as Emily’s compliments of her job of raising Rory were gratifying.

For her part, Lorelai is balancing her frantic concern for the health and well-being of her daughter with the hurt and anger inherent in her argument with her mother. Lauren Graham is fantastic at playing all layers of those conflicted and overwhelming feelings, and if she didn’t get an Emmy nod for this performance alone, it’s an absolute shame. She brings up her old grievances as well -- about how her childhood and adolescence were suffocating, about how Emily doesn’t respect the choices she’s made and the way she lives her life.

But “Rory’s Dance” has one last point and counterpoint to make. The point on which Lorelai is the most vehement in arguing against Emily is that her daughter is a good kid, that she is not like Lorelai was when she’s a teenager; she is decent and trustworthy and responsible. It’s the statements about Lorelai’s choices that cause her to throw her mother out of the house, but it’s her concerns about Rory (a part of the argument Rory overhears), that kindles the flame.

Then, right after the defense, Lorelai turns around and (understandably) berates her daughter for worrying her. Lorelai’s clearly projecting some of her own insecurities about her actions being baked into Rory’s DNA somewhere -- again denying Emily’s pronouncements to her face but then vindicating them in her own way -- and Rory’s defense that Lorelai knows she and Dean didn’t do anything scans as how a mother and daughter would argue at this fraught moment. That mistake from Rory sets off this firestorm that threatens to torch daughter, mother, and grandmother all at once.

That is Gilmore Girls at its best, playing the spaces of the relationships between three generations of women. It finds the beauty, the comfort in them, in how Lorelai mediates Emily’s ideas with regard to Rory, with how Rory serves as a way for Lorelai and Emily to mend fences, how. But it also finds the fraught nature of those connections, how fears of history repeating itself can raise the dander of Emily and Lorelai, shattering the tenuous peace they’d just established and shaking the foundations of trust between Lorelai and Rory.

That’s what’s so odd about “Rory’s Dance.” In an episode that, if the title is any indication, is devoted to the most trite execution of teenage dance anxiety and adolescent romance, Gilmore Girls delivers its most emotionally complex, structurally and thematically sound, and in turn heartening and harrowing hour of television yet.