3x13 Dear Emily and Richard

[9.3/10] Up to this point, Gilmore Girls had never used flashbacks. Characters would reminisce or grouse about the past, the Gilmore might gather round to look at old photos, or friends and foes alike would tell old stories about one another, but the audience never had a chance to see what Emily, Lorelai, and Rory’s past looked like first hand until now.

That’s largely been to the show’s benefit. As the weak acting in the flashbacks demonstrates, it’s tough to make convincing for characters who were children. While infodumps and “did I ever tell you about the time” statements can be clunky, they also mean the characters in the present have to be reckoning with the details from the past rather than the audience just seeing those details disconnected from the conflicts of the present. And it also allows for a certain degree of mystery, of emotional hardships and questions that gain a bit of strength from not being fully defined.

“Dear Richard and Emily” practically eliminates that mystery. While we don’t see young Lorelai on the doorstep of the Independence Inn, or her naming her daughter, or any gory details, the episode essentially gives us scenes of every major event that’s been alluded to by the show. We see what’s implied to be the precipitating event to Rory’s conception; we see the moment with the debutante ball dress that sparked Lorelai’s realization; we see the arguments between the Gilmores and Christopher’s parents; we see Lorelai at the hospital and headed for the delivery room, and most devastatingly, we see Richard and Emily find the note where Lorelai tells her parents that she’s running away.

But what makes those scenes work is that they’re not just about elucidating the past, they’re about informing the present. The episode isn’t subtle about creating parallels with the birth of Rory’s half-sister and the birth of Rory herself. The thrust of “Dear Richard and Emily” is experiencing two different births from two very different vantage points, and how her experience of the one in the present makes her reflect on the one in the past.

Part of that comes from the visual cleverness of the episode, with match cuts and locations flitting between present and past to visually explicate the connections between the two. But some of it comes from simple editing and storytelling, the way that putting two narratives together, on now and one long ago, inevitably makes us contrast and compare them, to see the differences between where someone started and where they are now.

Not all of it works. For one thing, the young versions of Lorelai and Chris are just completely unbelievable. It’s a near-impossible task for one actor to try to capture the spirit of another whom the audience has seen for 50+ episodes, particularly one as distinctive as Lorelai. The young actress trying to replicate Lorelai’s patter is clearly spitting on the proper dialogue, but the feels is off and it makes the scenes centered on the kids less effective, at least when they’re talking.

In the same way, the episode gets a little broad in its comedy in the present, and a little convenient in summoning the Gilmore Girls to Sherri’s bedside, and a little blunt in how it underlines its parallels. As much as I laughed every time that Sherri’s friend says Sherri “screwed up” by going into labor early, there’s a lot of “we desperately need a laugh here and it shows” moments. And as nice and amusing as they are, brief scenes with Luke going on his date, Paris locking horns with Rory, or Jess and Dean having another minor contretemp feel pretty ephemeral and stapled onto what’s an otherwise focused hour of the show.

But when the episode focuses on what, for my money, is the most complex and interesting relationship on the show -- the one between Emily and Lorelai -- it becomes an extraordinary hour. It’s striking throughout the episode how much the mother and daughter both bristle at one another but ultimately love one another, and that becomes clearest in two scenes from the present and two scenes from the past.

The two from the past both center on Emily. When the Gilmores and Chris’s parents are debating what to do, Emily is Lorelai’s fiercest defender. She parries Strobe’s efforts to sideline or blame her daughter for this, and stands up for Lorelai even as she’s clearly beside herself over the situation. But more than that, we see her utter crestfallenness at seeing Lorelai’s runaway note. It’s a scene that calls to mind Edie Falco’s performance as Carmella Soprano reacting to the news that a family member’s life is in jeopardy. The shock and devastation is so perfectly played by Kelly Bishop here, and it shows how wounded she was, how gobsmacked by this she was, in a way that no amount of recollection from Richard could match.

And the episode is ultimately about Lorelai shifting to the perspective from being the daughter to being the mother and starting to understand, sympathize, and maybe even regret what happened between her and Emily. In the present we see her gazing out at little Georgia in the nursery, seeing the nigh-literal fruits of labor, the symbol of the life she came close to having and never did, and through subtle choices of acting from Lauren Graham and writing from Amy Sherman-Palladino, connecting her quiet bits of pain in the moment to the ones her own mother must have felt at the thought of plans going down the drain and a new life starting without her.

That’s why what cinches the episode is the simple gesture of Lorelai coming over, DVD-player in hand, to help her mom watch a dozen old musicals she likes. The exchange between the two of them about what Emily does when Richard’s not around is revealing, both to show that Lorelai is wanting to know her mom better, but also to subtly indicate how much Lorelai once was Emily’s world in a certain way, and how she has, perhaps, never quite filled that gap in her life in the nearly two decades since the events that take the focus of the flashbacks.

The back-and-forth between Emily and Lorelai in those closing moments is characteristic, with Emily ready to throw her hands up and hire and expert, and Lorelai ready to dive in and improvise even if she’s not sure what she’s doing, showing the conflicting philosophies of the two women. But it also shows them coming together despite that, understanding and accepting one another a little bit, with the hope that maybe, after all this time has passed and all those echoes growing quieter, they can start to heal their relationship. I hope they do.