1x06 Rory's Birthday Parties

[8.1/10] This was a treat for Mrs. Bloom this weekend, and an unexpected treat for me. As I mentioned when I wrote up “Forgiveness and Stuff,” the show’s first X-mas episode, I have a hard time rating this show because I’m only loosely acquainted with it, so it’s hard for me to tell whether a good episode is a creative peak or just business as usual. But that kind of works for this episode, one centered around notions of whether family members really know one another or not.

What really makes the episode work is how it filters that message through three women that make up different generations of the same family, and how they are each, in their own way, trying to bridge that gap. “Rory’s Birthday Parties” featuring each of the three (or is it only supposed to be two?) Gilmore Girls stepping into one another’s worlds and feeling uncomfortable or bristling at the unfamiliar, but trying to make the effort in the name of connecting with one another.

To that end, what I really like about this episode is that there aren’t really any good guys or bad guys in the episode. It would be easy to paint Emily, Rory’s Grandmother, as the villain here, and yet while the episode is offered more through to lens of Lorelai’s (and to a lesser extent Rory’s) perspective, it gives Emily layers and understandable motivations to her actions.

Sure, Emily throws a teenager a fancy party for her birthday that is much more to Emily’s tastes than to Rory’s. She invites the students from the prep school that Rory hates, not to mention her own society friends, and is mortified when Rory has an outburst instead of playing the part of the dutiful hostess. She’s unbelievably cold to both Rory and Lorelai when the former apologizes and asks her to come to her other birthday party, and the latter tries to explain why Rory blanched and what the invite means to her. Emily is certainly treated as a foil, if not as an outright villain.

But it also shows the most important thing -- that she’s trying. The most interesting piece of baked in subtext to “Birthday Parties” is that both Emily and Lorelai are stuck in their own perspectives, but are straining to see one another’s in the name of keeping the peace, and that Rory is the only one who seems to see them both with clearer eyes. As much as the episodes casts Emily as oblivious or unperceptive to the real needs and wants of her daughter and granddaughter, it shows her making the effort, one that is tentative and unsteady, but well-meaning nonetheless.

There is the pudding -- “hospital food” being served because Emily knows Rory and Lorelai like it, albeit served in crystal bowls. There is the fateful trip to the department store to pick Rory out a gift, where Emily is not only making a real effort to get her granddaughter a present she’ll actually like, but listening to Lorelai’s advice on the subject. And after the minor blow-up between Emily and Lorelai and the protestations that they already have plans, Emily does show up to her granddaughter’s other birthday party, which also happens to be the first time she ever sets foot in Lorelai’s home.

It’s a big deal, and the setting also reveals two noteworthy layers to Emily. The first is that as much as Emily and Lorelai are not on the same page and have never seen eye-to-eye Emily can still read her daughter to some degree. She picks up on not only how Lorelai has feelings for Luke and vice versa, but how delighted Lorelai is that Emily reached that conclusions. At the same time, it shows Emily realizing that in their estrangement, she missed major parts of her daughter’s life, and it’s subtly acted, but clear that as proud and certain in her moral and social standing as Emily is, she has regrets, regrets that lead her to make the attempt to bridge that divide, however rocky those early attempts may be.

The marginal stuff in the middle of those generation-bridging attempts are hit or miss. Rory’s eye-rolling encounters with Tristan, and the love quadrangle bookended by Paris, don’t add much to the proceedings. On the other hand, Richard Gilmore is a super source of comedy, from his restrained glee at “mixing it up” by not wearing a tie to reading a Cosmo equivalent and discovering that he is an autumn.

That’s the other superb thing about this episode -- it’s very funny. It may just be recency bias, but there’s a sense of Parks and Recreation style humor, amusing reflections on quirky towns and funny quips, albeit delivered with more of a motor-mouth patter. And even the interstitial parts that don’t work as well for me -- like Rory’s starry-eyed interactions with Dean, do a nice job at feeding back into the main theme of the episode.

When Lorelai catches a glimpse of her daughter holding hands with some floppy-haired local, she realizes that as much as she rightfully charges against Emily for not knowing or understanding her granddaughter, there’s parts of Rory’s life that she’s not privy to either. In short, for all their closeness, Rory can still surprise her mother.

It’s a well-acted moment by Lauren Graham, who really shines here. Much of the comedy rests on her shoulders, with her having to carry the lion’s share of the patter. She does particularly good work at communicating the way Lorelai feels ill-at-ease in her parents’ home, versus how comfortable she feels in her own. “Parties” casts the two places as practically existing in two different worlds, and Lorelai’s demeanor in them sells them as well as the production design does.

In the elder Gilmores’ home, she’s confronted by an old acquaintance who only knows her as the scandal girl and who asks rude questions. It’s a site of old wounds and reminder of the ways in which she doesn’t fit in. There’s an interesting contrast between Lorelai laying in her daughter’s bed at her own home, warmly recounting the well-worn story of the day Rory was born, and laying in her own former bed at Richard and Emily’s, ruefully thinking back of when she told her parents that she was pregnant. There is a clear sense of where Lorelai feels she belongs in contrast to where she always felt like a poor fit.

And yet, even when she’s at home, in her element, surrounded by friends, there’s a natural anxiety that comes from her parents’ arrival. It is a collision of those two worlds, one that is not without its impact, but one where mothers and daughters are trying to cushion that as much as possible in the name of making progress as a family, and most importantly, of getting to know one another again.

As a Gilmore Girls neophyte, it’s hard to know how successful that mission will be, or whether the show will move away from such rich material for more Dawson’s Creek-style teen romance. But for “Rory’s Birthday Parties,” the show devotes itself to two women, recalling where they were, reflecting on where they are, and trying to find a better place that they could be with one another.