shallowness: Sky High's Warren Peace smiling (Warren Peace smiles!)
[personal profile] shallowness
After finishing watching Scorpion on DVD last year, I watched Gilmore Girls season 5 next.

I did my usual thing when watching a Gilmore Girls DVD boxset of rewatching the final episode of the previous season, which worked well here because the first scene of season 5 shows the last scene of season 4 from a different POV and moves on immediately.

So, we start with Rory having screwed up by sleeping with a married man/boy because Rory wants, and I easily had way more sympathy for Lindsay than Rory and Dean here and end with Rory screwing up: stealing a yacht, blowing her final because of one man’s criticism and BREAKING HER MOTHER’S HEART. I’ll always be on Lorelai’s side over Rory’s, even if we see that she failed to raise a Rory that’s strong enough to choose the right values and being guilty of so wanting Rory to have the life Lorelai couldn’t that she doesn’t always listen to her about what she wants. At one point, Lorelai admits that she’s holding back on using the mom card, when she shouldn’t, perhaps because she doesn’t have a great maternal role model. Although there was a bit of wanting Rory to turn to them over Lorelai – and I could see why Lorelai felt her parents had stabbed her in the back – Richard and Emily weren’t being entirely unreasonable in giving Rory space. By the end of the season, Lorelai and Rory’s relationship is in an even worse state than it was at the start, because they weren’t even talking.

In between, I was often exasperated with Rory and her choices. She was sometimes sympathetic, such as at the cattle market of the coming-out party Richard and Emily sprung on her. Her naivete could be both sympathetic and frustrating, and for all the times she called out chauvinism and entitlement, she didn’t own her own privilege, or quite get the point about how the glamorous Deaths and Glories abused theirs.

But she was never more sympathetic than when she stood up for Lorelai, such as with Christopher, who might have had a rough deal when Shelley left him and GIGI, (which felt convenient for plot rather than realistic,) but, as Rory said, he should have turned to other people before Lorelai. She often stood up for Lorelai against Emily and Richard too and took care of her mother when she was in a state after Luke broke up with her, but there was a lot of ‘Whatever, Princess Rory’ from me.

I quite liked Logan, for all his rich kid entitlement. He was never quite as bad as Lorelai thought him, especially after we saw his Eugene O’Neillesque crazy family, but neither did he deserve all the allowances Rory made for him. Overall, I got the sense that he had surprised himself by falling for Rory so hard and in some of what he was willing to do for her. He had warned her that he wasn’t good boyfriend material, and she lied to herself and pretended she could be casual. When she admitted as much, he committed. Having said that, I wasn’t convinced that Rory and Logan were good for each other. I didn’t make many mental Cary Agos references, although as this show is so sharply written and distinct, maybe that’s no surprise.

On the other hand, Lorelai and Luke’s relationship (I used three exclamation marks when he used the word in the very first episode, back when there had been little more than kissing) kept me hooked. The willingness from both of them to accommodate each other! And then there was some tension about how public to make it, after drawing out their separation (unnecessarily) at the start of the season with Liz and TJ’s accident and then their taking advantage of Luke’s good nature. The show sort of dropped the whole Liz moving into Stars Hollow thing in the latter half of the season, when there were many times when I thought Lorelai could/should have turned to Liz e.g. over Luke’s Dark Day/his father’s boat.

‘Written in the Stars’ was my favourite episode, where we and Lorelai realise that, admit it or not, Luke had been pining since the first moment he met her. Also, Luke took Lorelai to his ‘Luke’s’, which was run by MRS LANDINGHAM. And they were hot (this season was the most risqué in deeds as well as dialogue) and committed (‘I’m all in’). Rory noted that being with Luke made Lorelai happy, then Lorelai’s parents insisted on meeting him as her boyfriend, and although he thought he could cope, they were such snobs that they couldn’t see the wood for the trees. For all that they can be sympathetic, the Gilmores can really be wrong headed to the point of poisonous.

Of course, there were wobbles: Lorelai’s choices to lie to Luke about her interactions with Chris, particularly after his father died – the grandfather Rory barely knew – because her relationship with Chris is so complicated and even a habit. But they were both thinking of weddings until EMILY. (The ‘not like this’ proposal at the end of the season fit in with this, not to mention that they officially started their relationship at a wedding.) But Emily deserved Lorelai’s (and Rory’s) white-cold rage for inviting Chris (even though she knew he was weak) to try to ruin things between Lorelai and Luke. Even though I was amused by her referring to Gigi as ‘it’. I know Emily was instrumental in getting Lorelai and Luke over the hump, mainly because Lorelai cut her out of her life for what she’d done and even that wasn’t successful at patching up the mother-daughter relationship, Luke and Lorelai have communication problems if all the town knew about the house and she didn’t… It was convenient that Dean’s prophecy came true, because up til then, there had been no thought of Lorelai giving up the inn she’d built up, although it was plausible that she’d consider it now that Rory was mostly leaving the nest and she was able to consider her future with fewer responsibilities.

But Lorelai faced up to a lot of her mistakes (the magazine article!) and swerved away from being That Girl who took advantage of Luke’s chivalry. It almost goes without saying, but it should be said that Lauren Graham was superb, leading a strong cast who know what they’re doing, in a show that relies on timing, delivering witty lines fast as well as having dramatic chops. For instance, we saw some great drunk acting after the three younger girls drank Miss Patty’s punch.

Rory was particularly devastated as Emily and Richard argued themselves into a separation, which meant the girls meeting him for drinks in the poolhouse and then going to dinner in the main house, turf wars, awkwardness and heartbreak. But as Lorelai told her daughter, it was Richard and Emily’s marriage to repair or dissolve. Emily did have my sympathy when she broke down in tears after the date she’d pushed herself into going on (after the estrangement she’d pushed them into). I didn’t find Richard’s response to learning about Emily’s date romantic as much as dismayingly caveman-like, as he rear-ended her car when he saw her just talking to the other man. But it led to the rapprochement they both wanted.

Worth noting in passing, that I was judy about Sookie making a huge decision unilaterally for Jackson (and their family) instead of discussing it with him.

I know that Lane and Mrs Kim work best as contrasts to the Gilmores on the show, which they do in the finale, coming together as the Gilmore girls fall apart. And only because they lost Adam Brody’s Dave to The OC (which dates the show), but the Lane/Zack warmed my heart. Lane realised she had feelings for cute, but slightly sleazy-around-girls, bandmate Zach in the second episode, and the beginnings and development of their relationship offered contrast to Rory/Dean trying to rekindle their relationship, after they wrecked a marriage (that, yes, Dean and Lindsay were too young for). Lane/Zack just felt like a perfectly reasonable relationship for a 19 to 20 year old to be in and was really sweet.

And while I was amused by Paris/Doyle (as BtVS exists in the Gilmore Girls verse, based on the Spike and Dru reference, it’s surprising nobody’s gone up to him and said, ‘Hey, you look like Jonathan’). Paris’s level of crazy was high, starting with the death of her much older boyfriend just before term. Her grief was genuine, but it was crazy. Granted, her therapist clearly had no boundaries.

Also crazy, but delightfully so, Stars Hollow e.g. debating Lorelai/Luke at a town meeting, preparing to take sides if the couple broke up, which they briefly did. Jackson got so annoyed by Taylor that he impulsively stood against him as the town’s head honcho and won. Then there was the need for someone to play a historical woman of questionable morals for one of their re-enactments. After that, there was the hilariously dire audio-visual presentation of Stars Hollows history at the museum. Sookie was made crazy by her second pregnancy, affecting Lorelai as co-owners of the Dragonfly Inn, and, for one thing, she ought to have known Lorelai would never hire Kirk, who normally punctuates every episode in his own special way. He was at the heart of a very Stars Hollow moment where he, very sincerely, duetted to ‘Do You Love Me?’ along with a child in the elementary school’s rehearsal of Fiddler on the Roof. It was absurd but poignant, especially as the temporarily separated Luke and Lorelai bore witness to it. And then, towards the end of the series, recklessly homeless Kirk turned out to be the rich buyer competing with Luke for his dream house. And the mysterious/absurd elders! The show is at its best when it blends the absurd humour with genuine drama, although if I’m honest, it didn’t consistently manage this in this season, but the finale was a good pay-off for all the season’s development. When the town busker turned up to sing a fitting song in the final episode, I realised we hadn’t seen him ALL SEASON!

The show was inconsistent about reminding us when in the year it was – there were some points when I frowned at the characters for wearing clothes that were more suited for Californian weather at that season than New England e.g. Rory’s strapless gown at the Death and Glories’ carryings-on. It was also rather shocking, but welcome, that there was a commentary on one episode that tried to cram in even the pilot, from Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, because there’s never been a commentary on these DVDs before.

[Edited on 25/7/22 to add some things and tidy others up.]

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