4x07 The Festival of Living Art

[6.6/10] Kind of a weird episode. It’s a Kirk-heavy and Taylor-heavy episode, which is a bit off for a show where, for the most part, things work best if the town color are garnishes to an episode instead of the main course.

To the point, there’s not much of a main course at all. There’s the titular festival (which actually looks pretty cool) to provide a throughline for the episode, but no one story dominates. You have Taylor being his usual fussy self (and him referring to the French as the USA’s “former allies” is both an interesting little time capsule tidbit and something speaks so much to who Taylor is), you have a powerplay from Rory to get Lorelai the part she wants, and you have Kirk getting a messiah complex, with none of it being really substantial or interesting enough to hold the hour.

You also have some solid but not overwhelming material with Sookie and her and Jackson’s decision to do a homebirth. The show doesn’t wring much comedy out of the testy midwife, or from Jackson’s penny-pinching brother (played by Nick Offerman!), but there’s at least some solid Lorelai-Sookie material with the former trying to seem supportive and the latter freaking out about little Davey not making his grand debut just yet.

There’s also a small but sweet story about Lane’s band still being desperate to find a guitarist, finding a David Lee Roth lookalike who owns the axe like nobody’s business, but the rest of the group feeling sheepish about it since he’s a good bit older than they are. I actually liked this storyline the best of any in this episode. Gil is pretty sweet in how he’s trying to balance his rockhard ways with his nuclear family, and Lane’s dilemma over whether to let him in the band over her bandmate’s objections portends interesting stuff.

That’s more that can be said for the rest of the episode’s main hijinks. Taylor worrying so much about “Hank from Woodbury” goes nowhere. Kirk taking his role as Jesus in The Last Supper too seriously and giving the cold shoulder to “Judas” is a one-note joke that should have been a single scene rather than a whole deal. And the broad material with Sookie and Jackson’s temporary houseguests is mostly meh.

But at least there’s a payoff to the Lorelai storyline! The entire shtick with her having flinched in the last production, fighting off her stage jitters before curtains, and then remaining stoic despite the baby beeper that signals that Davey’s about to make his grand entrance is a lovely way to close an episode that spent most of its runtime stumbling around.

Overall, this is a mostly forgettable hour of Gilmore Girls, but it’s worth it for the ending.