3x08 Let the Games Begin

[9.5/10] After the high teen drama of the prior episode’s dance marathon this was the perfect antidote, one that both turned a focus to the family relations that are more my speed when it comes to Gilmore Girls and provided a nice, half-redeeming afterward to all the Rory/Jess/Dean mishigas.

What I loved about both prongs of this episode was that each had a complex confluence of emotions and perspectives. You see it in the part of the Yale trip where the whole Gilmore family is reminiscing in different ways. Richard and Emily are surprisingly adorable together, the former being revealed to have been something of a practiced campus lothario, and the latter being revealed to have pried her husband away from another young paramour. The story of their proposal is perfectly attuned to who the two of them are, and Emily’s recreation of Richard’s routine for looking at art was a laugh riot.

But there’s heft behind it too. You can see the twinkle in Richard’s eye when he talks to Rory about how much he enjoyed his time at his alma mater, and with it the baked-in but unspoken hope that his granddaughter might carry on his legacy. At the same time, there’s something very sweet and sad about how he thinks back on a young Lorelai taking his Yale diploma. There is such regret, such a sense of lost possibility that Richard carries with him in relation to his daughter, and it primes the audience for the emotional fireworks to come.

And what fireworks! It was predictable that Richard would somehow turn this trip into one meant to recruit Rory, but even I was taken aback when he’d already set up an interview with old pal who just so happened to be the Dean of Admissions. Just as Richard’s plot was set up by his reflections on a bench with Rory, it’s also the confirmation of Lorelai’s concerns when Rory floated the idea to her.

(By the way, it probably goes without saying at this point how great Lauren Graham is, but her incensed reaction to her father’s actions are pitch-perfect, and Edward Hermann holds up his end of the bargain just as well.)

What I love about the fallout is that everyone is true to character, everyone has emotional motivations and perspectives that feel so accurate to each person involved, and they all intersect in totally natural, understandable ways.

Richard, to his credit, is right that it’s very difficult to get into Ivy League schools and that there’s a good chance Lorelai is being naive or myopic about Rory’s chances of getting into Harvard and overly dismissive of the advantages she would have getting into Yale. It’s also understandable that, feeling like his daughter wasted her opportunities to carry on the Gilmore legacy, he would be particularly devoted to ensuring his granddaughter did not, and making sure that Lorelai didn’t stand in the way of that.

Lorelai, naturally, would be (justifiably) upset for a multitude of reasons: the way this impinges on her right to raise her daughter however she wants, the way it’s an echo of Richard’s own manipulations when she was a child, the way she’s trying to defend Rory’s agency, and the presumptuousness of Richard making these decisions for everyone else. There’s so many layers to Lorelai’s reaction and they each clash with Richard’s.

Then there’s Rory, who is likewise understandably upset, less because her grandfather misled her, but because he threw her out there without letting her prepare the way she would want to, and that he wouldn’t trust that they have the kind of relationship to where she would have done this if he’d only asked. It speaks to Rory as someone who likes to have all her bases covered and who cares about her grandparents.

And last but certainly not least, there’s Emily, who is true to form in not wanting to make a scene and trying to calm Lorelai down; who, as someone who lost her own daughter in a way, brings up that Yale would keep Rory close to come; and who, while putting up a united front in front of Lorelai and Rory, immediately tells Richard all he needs to know about how she feels about what he did in a single line. It’s a masterful set of scenes, and the script and actors’ facility with the emotions and perspective of the moment are masterful.

While not quite as intense, there’s also strong (and funny) work done with Rory and Jess getting together and all that entails. You have Rory and Jess feeling out the awkward stage of their forbidden romance now being real. It feels true-to-life, and as much as I’ve had issues with their courtship, and as annoying as the “and then you appeared” song is, there’s an epicness to their first, non-rebellious kiss.

But it harkens back to their first real kiss, and prompts Rory to apologize to Dean for the way she treated him. It’s a necessary scene to make this new relationship feel okay -- to have Rory acknowledge that what she did was wrong, regardless of how she felt, and to tell Dean that he didn’t deserve it. It’s true to the teenage sense of regret and not wanting someone you cared about to hate you, and it makes it easier to root for Rory in her love life again.

But there’s interesting things in the rest of the Rory/Jess/parental quadrangle. Rory worrying that Lorelai will be too hard on Jess, and Lorelai avering that she’ll give him an honest shot feels right for both parties. Luke reading Jess the riot act about dating Rory was hilarious in how authoritarian he’s trying to be. And Luke initially being glad to see the two of them together, and then freaking out with Lorelai when they’re sneaking around, only to have Lorelai understand and be okay with it, puts the two parents in an interesting position and gives them a new dimension on which they relate to one another.

All-in-all, it’s an outstanding episode of the series, with numerous moving parts that, nevertheless, are always in sync and deliver an amusing, complex and satisfying whole.