4x17 Girls in Bikinis, Boys Doin' the Twist

[7.7/10] Not every Gilmore Girls episode needs to be a deep meditation on growing up or relating to your family or figuring out your life. Some of them can just be laugh fests with enough good lines and silly situations to keep things humming, and this episode is a fine example of the latter.

I think I laughed more times at this episode than in a number of prior one’s I’ve rated higher. There’s tons of great one-liners, especially put downs from Paris. Her snappy answers to stupid questions -- like when a random fellow student asks a soaked Paris whether it’s raining outside and she responds, “No, it’s a baptism. Get your tubes tied, idiot.” -- couldn’t help but make me laugh for her curt, pointed, but hilarious takes on the endless stream of frustrations around her.

This is also another episode that tries to capture the feeling of what it’s like to be in one of those “growing up” situations, akin to the far more dramatic house party episode of last season. In that, while it’s understandably stylized, Gilmore Girls does a nice job of blending the real Spring Break experience with the one you might find on MTV. Everything is a little cleaner and rowdier and safe than these things are in real life, but it works.

It also works to take the tack of Rory and Paris as a pair of wallflowers who, left to their own devices, would sit inside and watch The Power of Myth, but are, in an almost anthropological way, attempting to have the Spring Break experience. That comes replete with romantic insecurity, with Paris being anxious about why Asher didn’t invite her to his conference in Denver, and Rory trying to flirt with a random hunk who catches her eye on the beach.

There’s parts I could do without. Paris kissing Rory is kind of weird, even when the show acknowledges the weirdness of it, as it feels like a move a little too cartoony even for Paris. Similarly, I don’t know that we ever really needed to see Madelyn and Louise again, but there they were, doing pretty much the same shtick from the last time we saw them. Still, the show does well to show Rory and Paris’s awkwardness and uncomfortableness in this sort of setting, and wrings the humor from them making a go of it anyway, even if it devolves into a few clichés.

The Lorelai parts of the episode are half-good and half-bad. On the one hand, I really like the business between her and Digger about him giving her a key to the apartment. Again, there’s an appropriate level of awkwardness and fumbling when Digger gives it to Lorelai, and his little speech later about why he gave it to her and what it’s supposed to say is really sweet. (And Lorelai’s jokes about a talking key were part of why this one made me laugh so much.)

But the Luke stuff is pretty eh. Nicole has been such a non-entity this season that it’s hard to get too worked up about him finding out that she’s (probably) cheating on him. His phone call to Lorelai about being in jail is pretty damn funny, but it’s melodrama from a character who’s usually spared that sort of thing, and feels a little cheesily set up to have Luke become a free agent right when Lorelai is getting attached.

Still, overall, this is an episode that kept a smile on my face, even if none of the stories it told were especially deep or meaningful. Sometime just doing slice of life is fun, even when it ends with a suspicious (and facepalm-inducing) call between Rory and Dean.