[9.3/10] We rarely see the Gilmore Girls really struggle. It’s not that they don’t face challenges, or suffer setbacks, or have difficult moments. It’s just that Gilmore Girls is a warm, optimistic show at heart. It’s about those difficulties, certainly, but it’s also about friends and family coming together, bridging gaps, and finding ways to support one another.
The upshot is that there’s a certain degree of wish-fulfillment to the show. Rory works hard, and her hard work is rewarded with acceptance letters from every college she set her eyes on. Lorelai soars at running the Independence Inn, and so forces eventually align to allow her to realize her dream of starting an inn of her own with Sookie. Whenever there’s a pinch, big or small, Luke or Richard or Emily or someone steps in to help, and there’s nothing our heroes can’t conquer.
Until now.
That admittedly underplays the amount of conflict and setbacks on the show, but Gilmore Girls has never been as committed to showing Lorelai and Rory feeling in over their heads and without any easy options as it does in “The Incredible Shrinking Lorelais.” For each of them, the difficulties stem from not having a pillar of support, and facing a challenging problem that they have no good solution to, and eventually finding solace in the arms of someone they may or may not still harbor feelings for.
For Rory, the lack of support comes from the rest of her college roommates not-so-gently suggesting that it’s time for Lane to go home. Lane is, naturally, the best about it, taking the news without complaint and facing the next bump in the road with a can-do attitude and humility. Rory is a little more shaken about it, both because it’s only Paris’s directness that lets her know there’s a problem in the first place, making the development seem pretty sudden to her, and because it removes Rory’s immediately present connection to her days in Stars Hollow. I’ve complained a bit about how often Rory goes home, but maybe rather than a TV convenience, that can be chalked up to Rory not being fully ready to leave the nest, and Lane returning home can be read as something that forces her to more directly confront that she has to fly on her own now.
For Lorelai, the support issues come from her and Sookie (and to a lesser extent Michel) not being on the same page about the Dragonfly. While the episode opens with their first reservation (written, of course, on a gum wrapper), it crescendos with a charged confrontation between Lorelai and Sookie after the new mom misses an appointment to receive some equipment, costing the two of them more money they don’t have.
What’s so strong about the scene, and the hallmark of great writing in this vein, is that both of their positions are understandable. Lorelai is having to pick up tons of slack in the get-up-and-go phase of their inn; Sookie is supposed to be her partner, and it requires sacrifices on both their parts. Sookie is right that she didn’t anticipate being a new mom when this kicked off, that she’s never been good at this side of the business in the first place, and that she too is doing her best under difficult circumstances. There’s a realness to their complaints, frustrations, and exhaustions, and the show, rather than tidily resolving the issue, let’s it linger like the thorny problem that it is. But that leaves Lorelai feeling like she’s on her own.
That’s particularly difficult given the money troubles that are coming to a head for Lorelai right now. Her contractor hasn’t been paid for a few weeks; she’s got added shipping costs she didn’t anticipate, and with a May opening on the horizon, she’s down to considering asking for a big loan from Luke. When we got an isolated hint from Rory a few episodes back that Lorelai was scrimping, I wondered if the show was foreshadowing things to come or just paying lip service to the notion that starting a business is a difficult proposition. Here, it becomes clear that the show was setting up the unraveling that happens here.
Not that there can’t be comedy in that unraveling. The rare appearance from Gran is as hilarious as ever, and serves both the dramatic and comedic purposes of the episode. Dramatically, Gran is the one who ferrets out that Lorelai is having financial problems, embarrassing her in front of her parents (who come to her defense in their own way) and opening old wounds with Richard over a failed investment from him when he was 27. Comedically, Gran’s rapier wit is still in force, with her putdowns of Lorelai’s hair, Digger’s gift, and Emily’s...everything. That comedy is doubled down with Emily’s little smile when she sees Richard standing up to his mother, and then later giving him ammunition to strike back at her with. Nobody writes dinner table (or lunch table) scenes like the Palladinos, and this is a doozy.
Rory has a rough confrontation of her own when she goes to a professor’s office hours, ostensibly to follow up on notes, but really to get an attaboy about her latest paper. Instead, she finds out not only that her paper received a D, but that the professor has spoken with Rory’s advisor, and they agree that Rory is overloading herself and should drop the class. Rory is dumbfounded and aghast at the suggestion. It’s the sort of thing that completely shakes her worldview of herself. This is the same courseload her grandfather took. The prospect that she can’t keep up, that she’s no longer the wunderkind who can do anything, is something that rocks her to her core.
And so she ends up in the (platonic, for now) arms of Dean, spilling out her anxieties and crying on his shoulder. It’s the biggest setback we’ve ever seen for Rory, the first time (other than a brief bump in the road at Chilton) that suggests she may have hit a wall, found something she’s truly not capable of. It’s a hard reckoning to confront, and the sort of event rooted in the real life difficulty of discovering one’s own limitations that gives it a force beyond the drama of the breakdown.
Lorelai breaks down too, though hers comes in the arms of Luke. It’s a typically great scene for Lauren Graham, who conveys how wounded and stressed she is by all of this, for trying so hard to achieve her dream and still feel like she’s coming up short. It’s one of the few times in her life when she feels alone, like she doesn’t have the partner or helping hands to lift her up when she needs. It’s affecting and powerful as a reflection of the hard moment she’s going through.
And that moment is made harder for both Lorelai and Rory given the brilliant conceit of the episode -- that the two Gilmore Girls are constantly playing phone tag with one another. It adds to the hurried and haried pace of the episode, with quick cuts between scenes to convey the flurry of activity and the ways that these missed connections end up lost in the tumult. If there is one source of solace for the Gilmore Girls in this world, it’s one another, and this episode leaves each in desperate emotional straights without the one person there who usually gives them the support they need. It’s a daring choice, and it pays real dividends here.
So does ending the episode on such an uncertain note. Like Richard’s unemployment from last season, these are the sorts of issues that cannot be resolved, in either practical or emotional terms, in a single episode. They linger, and take time and help to get past. The fact that Gilmore Girls, which is so used to tying its stories off at the end of the hour, instead leaves our heroes in a place of uncertainty and distress, is a bold change of pace. Faced with challenges, separated from those closest to them and one another, Lorelai and Rory suffer. That isn’t fun, but it is real, and makes for the most compelling episode of the season thus far.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2017-11-09T23:19:23Z
[9.3/10] We rarely see the Gilmore Girls really struggle. It’s not that they don’t face challenges, or suffer setbacks, or have difficult moments. It’s just that Gilmore Girls is a warm, optimistic show at heart. It’s about those difficulties, certainly, but it’s also about friends and family coming together, bridging gaps, and finding ways to support one another.
The upshot is that there’s a certain degree of wish-fulfillment to the show. Rory works hard, and her hard work is rewarded with acceptance letters from every college she set her eyes on. Lorelai soars at running the Independence Inn, and so forces eventually align to allow her to realize her dream of starting an inn of her own with Sookie. Whenever there’s a pinch, big or small, Luke or Richard or Emily or someone steps in to help, and there’s nothing our heroes can’t conquer.
Until now.
That admittedly underplays the amount of conflict and setbacks on the show, but Gilmore Girls has never been as committed to showing Lorelai and Rory feeling in over their heads and without any easy options as it does in “The Incredible Shrinking Lorelais.” For each of them, the difficulties stem from not having a pillar of support, and facing a challenging problem that they have no good solution to, and eventually finding solace in the arms of someone they may or may not still harbor feelings for.
For Rory, the lack of support comes from the rest of her college roommates not-so-gently suggesting that it’s time for Lane to go home. Lane is, naturally, the best about it, taking the news without complaint and facing the next bump in the road with a can-do attitude and humility. Rory is a little more shaken about it, both because it’s only Paris’s directness that lets her know there’s a problem in the first place, making the development seem pretty sudden to her, and because it removes Rory’s immediately present connection to her days in Stars Hollow. I’ve complained a bit about how often Rory goes home, but maybe rather than a TV convenience, that can be chalked up to Rory not being fully ready to leave the nest, and Lane returning home can be read as something that forces her to more directly confront that she has to fly on her own now.
For Lorelai, the support issues come from her and Sookie (and to a lesser extent Michel) not being on the same page about the Dragonfly. While the episode opens with their first reservation (written, of course, on a gum wrapper), it crescendos with a charged confrontation between Lorelai and Sookie after the new mom misses an appointment to receive some equipment, costing the two of them more money they don’t have.
What’s so strong about the scene, and the hallmark of great writing in this vein, is that both of their positions are understandable. Lorelai is having to pick up tons of slack in the get-up-and-go phase of their inn; Sookie is supposed to be her partner, and it requires sacrifices on both their parts. Sookie is right that she didn’t anticipate being a new mom when this kicked off, that she’s never been good at this side of the business in the first place, and that she too is doing her best under difficult circumstances. There’s a realness to their complaints, frustrations, and exhaustions, and the show, rather than tidily resolving the issue, let’s it linger like the thorny problem that it is. But that leaves Lorelai feeling like she’s on her own.
That’s particularly difficult given the money troubles that are coming to a head for Lorelai right now. Her contractor hasn’t been paid for a few weeks; she’s got added shipping costs she didn’t anticipate, and with a May opening on the horizon, she’s down to considering asking for a big loan from Luke. When we got an isolated hint from Rory a few episodes back that Lorelai was scrimping, I wondered if the show was foreshadowing things to come or just paying lip service to the notion that starting a business is a difficult proposition. Here, it becomes clear that the show was setting up the unraveling that happens here.
Not that there can’t be comedy in that unraveling. The rare appearance from Gran is as hilarious as ever, and serves both the dramatic and comedic purposes of the episode. Dramatically, Gran is the one who ferrets out that Lorelai is having financial problems, embarrassing her in front of her parents (who come to her defense in their own way) and opening old wounds with Richard over a failed investment from him when he was 27. Comedically, Gran’s rapier wit is still in force, with her putdowns of Lorelai’s hair, Digger’s gift, and Emily’s...everything. That comedy is doubled down with Emily’s little smile when she sees Richard standing up to his mother, and then later giving him ammunition to strike back at her with. Nobody writes dinner table (or lunch table) scenes like the Palladinos, and this is a doozy.
Rory has a rough confrontation of her own when she goes to a professor’s office hours, ostensibly to follow up on notes, but really to get an attaboy about her latest paper. Instead, she finds out not only that her paper received a D, but that the professor has spoken with Rory’s advisor, and they agree that Rory is overloading herself and should drop the class. Rory is dumbfounded and aghast at the suggestion. It’s the sort of thing that completely shakes her worldview of herself. This is the same courseload her grandfather took. The prospect that she can’t keep up, that she’s no longer the wunderkind who can do anything, is something that rocks her to her core.
And so she ends up in the (platonic, for now) arms of Dean, spilling out her anxieties and crying on his shoulder. It’s the biggest setback we’ve ever seen for Rory, the first time (other than a brief bump in the road at Chilton) that suggests she may have hit a wall, found something she’s truly not capable of. It’s a hard reckoning to confront, and the sort of event rooted in the real life difficulty of discovering one’s own limitations that gives it a force beyond the drama of the breakdown.
Lorelai breaks down too, though hers comes in the arms of Luke. It’s a typically great scene for Lauren Graham, who conveys how wounded and stressed she is by all of this, for trying so hard to achieve her dream and still feel like she’s coming up short. It’s one of the few times in her life when she feels alone, like she doesn’t have the partner or helping hands to lift her up when she needs. It’s affecting and powerful as a reflection of the hard moment she’s going through.
And that moment is made harder for both Lorelai and Rory given the brilliant conceit of the episode -- that the two Gilmore Girls are constantly playing phone tag with one another. It adds to the hurried and haried pace of the episode, with quick cuts between scenes to convey the flurry of activity and the ways that these missed connections end up lost in the tumult. If there is one source of solace for the Gilmore Girls in this world, it’s one another, and this episode leaves each in desperate emotional straights without the one person there who usually gives them the support they need. It’s a daring choice, and it pays real dividends here.
So does ending the episode on such an uncertain note. Like Richard’s unemployment from last season, these are the sorts of issues that cannot be resolved, in either practical or emotional terms, in a single episode. They linger, and take time and help to get past. The fact that Gilmore Girls, which is so used to tying its stories off at the end of the hour, instead leaves our heroes in a place of uncertainty and distress, is a bold change of pace. Faced with challenges, separated from those closest to them and one another, Lorelai and Rory suffer. That isn’t fun, but it is real, and makes for the most compelling episode of the season thus far.