7x12 To Whom It May Concern

[7.9/10] There’s elegance here, in the fact that the same letter that sets Luke and Lorelai on the path to becoming friends again is the same one that sends Lorelai and Chris on the path to break up.

Let’s be honest here. The Lorelai/Chris pairing is a failed experiment, both for Lorelai and the show. For Lorelai, it’s the product of wondering if it was the right time to pull the trigger on something that’s been a possibility for her whole adult life, and giving it a shot. The results were fine enough in-universe. She got married, seemed to get along with her beau, and if X-mas was any indication, had started settling in to her new family life. But there was never that spark.

That problem goes double for the show. I don’t want to constantly relitigate the failings of Chris as a character, but suffice it to say, he and Lorelai never had that connection that made their old habits seem easy to fall back into, no matter how hard the show would mash that button and try to make Chris seem like the most romantic guy to ever pitch woo.
The results were a relationship that ends up feeling perfunctory, that the show was heading toward an end point, and that like Lorelai, the powers that be decided that if they were ever going to pull the trigger on Lorelai and Christopher as a couple, it would have to be now. So we get less than a dozen episodes where they end up dating, getting married, and then start having problems and (at least seem poised to) break-up. It’s like the show realized it was running out of runway and so crammed a season a half’s worth for story material into just a handful of episodes. Even if Lauren Graham and David Sutcliffe had better on-screen chemistry, blowing through something the show’s been teasing for this long in so short a time was always going to come off a little unsatisfying and redundant.
And the show continues its now long, proud tradition of breaking up people who shouldn’t be together, but doing so in semi-unsatisfying ways. It makes sense that Chris would be upset that Lorelai kept the Luke letter from him, but his reaction to it feels weird. For one thing, him finding the letter when he’s searching for a level (in their bedroom?) is such convenient TV writing, but whatever. It’s forgivable. What’s odd is that apparently he believes he’s always going to be the runner up to Luke, and the letter just confirms it.
Now I get what the show is going for here. There’s been hints that Chris’s biggest insecurity in terms of his relationship with Lorelai is the fact that he was an absentee dad, something that felt true before he and Lorelai were ever a couple again. It explains his overzealous behavior at parents’ day, his frustration at seeing Lorelai coo over doola with Luke and then his out of nowhere desire to conceive a child with her that same night, and to some degree, his woundedness at reading what a great father figure Luke was to Rory in a way that Chris just wasn’t.
But even if that’s how Chris feels, there’s little indication that it’s how Lorelai feels, or that the situation is anything other than that she thinks Luke would make a great dad but that she loves Christopher as her partner. There’s some interesting synchronicity in the idea that when they’re with Lorelai, Chris fears Luke and Luke fears Chris, and each, at least in some ways, worries that the other is the man Lorelai has a true weakness for. But despite what we know about Luke and Lorelai, it seems like Chris is tilting at windmills here, freaking out about perfectly innocent words (or at least worrying about the “crime” when it’s the cover-up that’s more concerning.
This is a bit of a stretch, but maybe the show is getting a little meta here, with the writers having Chris internalize the sense that the fans were never going to accept him as Lorelai’s one true pairing, even if Lorelai herself seemed entirely copastetic with her new husband beyond his immediate need to have a baby and plant his flag. It’s semi-believable that Chris would read the situation otherwise, but that’s another place where the rushed nature of the storyline hurts the show, and it leaves a less-than-satisfying union on the path to a less-than-satisfying split.
But there is beauty and balance, as dramatized in the different reactions on the faces of Luke and Christopher as Lorelai’s letter is read, to the letter that breaks Chris’s heart being the one that builds Luke’s back up.
It’s hard to know how seriously to take the Luke custody storyline. The show want to set it up as a desperate attempt that Luke’s likely to lose. That’s the pitch his lawyer gave him a couple episodes ago, and the episode frames the whole effort as a longshot. Outside the courtroom, Anna has turned suddenly more pointed and vindictive (which seems like a bit of a character shift from when we first meet her, and makes her a little more of a stereotype, but you’d probably be nastier too if someone was challenging your custody rights for the child you raised as a single parent) and brings up low blows like Luke’s inability to maintain a long term romantic relationship. And during the hearing, the opposing attorney paints Luke negatively, Luke himself talks out of turn and gets shushed by the judge, and even his own lawyer has to calm him down a bit.
It’s all a little overdramatic, but the narrative point of it all is clear -- to make it seem like this is as much of a longshot as Luke’s lawyer predicted, and that by all accounts, Luke’s unlikely to ever be allowed to see April again. Then the judge reads Luke’s letter, and not only do you see how touched Luke is to hear those words, but the implication is that it’s what changes the judge’s mind, what saves Luke’s case from near-disaster.
The writers for Season 7 had a tall order. How could Luke and Lorelai ever become friends again, let alone reunite romantically? Luke seems like the type who may let bygones be bygones, and let things go back to something approaching normal, but might never, in his heart-of-hearts, forgive Lorelai for sleeping with Christopher. It’s such a blow to him, a confirmation of his worst fears, uttered when he’s offering to go elope like Lorelai wanted, that it’d be easy for their relationship to never recover from it, platonically or romantically.
But a gesture like this one can counterbalance a gesture like that one. Suddenly, to Luke, Lorelai is no longer the woman who broke his heart; she’s the woman who got him his daughter back. It’s clear what a huge thing that is in Luke’s life, how grateful he is to Lorelai for giving him this gift, and how much it makes up for in their rocky past.
And it’s only one instance in the episode where a dear friend gives a personal recommendation that helps clear up some unrelated strife. We haven’t gotten as much Paris this season. While there’s been laughs at her Dickensian study prep course, or her early aughts hip hop dance moves with Doyles, there hasn’t been as much meat to her stories this year. “To Whom It May Concern” doesn’t depart from that strongly, but it gives us Paris at her most sentimental, which is still pretty brusque and direct, but in that endearing, Paris sort of way.

With Rory having made good on her idea last episode to write Lucy a letter of apology, and with her still feeling bad after not receiving a response, Paris gets annoyed that this sinking friendship is getting in the way of her “Project Finishline” and springs into action. She bolts over to Lucy in the lunchroom, tells her in blunt but sweet terms what a great friend Rory is and how lucky she is to have her, and then instructs the two of them to get over it, which, after a nice little heart-to-heart they do. It’s a nice little plot thread in the episode, one that both wraps up the odd Rory/Lucy/Marty story, but also puts a nice button on one of the show’s most enduring friendships.
The only true stinker in this episode is the reveal that Sookie is pregnant, because Jackson didn’t get his vasectomy, which is all kinds of messed up. Don’t get me wrong, as I said when it happened, Sookie ordering her husband to get a vasectomy without any discussion, let alone his consent, is horrible. But just as horrible is letting your partner labor (no pun intended) under the impression that you’re firing blanks when you’re actually firing live rounds. The show tries to brush it off with the fig leaf that Jackson though Sookie was staying on the pill indefinitely, and that if he’d known she’d stopped taking it he would have said something, but still. Apparently Jackson and Sookie are just horrible to one another when it comes to matters of conception, and it makes it hard to buy into the broad comedy the show goes for with this storyline.

Still, we do get one great, touching moment out of the deal. When Sookie is freaking out (understandably) about her husband lying to her and getting her pregnant, and worrying about what’s to come, her best friend talks her through it, and reminds her of all the joys of children: the first smiles, the tender moments, the bliss of seeing this tiny little life slowly but surely become a person. It’s just what Sookie needs, and it’s a heartening moment between two friends.

At the end of the day, that’s what Lorelai’s letter is for her and Luke. Despite Christopher’s protestations to the contrary, it doesn’t read like a love letter; it reads like a genuine testament to Luke’s decency as a father and a person in Rory’s life. It is a tribute wholly apart from Luke and Lorelai’s romantic history, which didn’t really begin until Rory was an already an adult, but to how he was as a male role model in a young girl’s life, something in which Chris is right to feel outclassed. If Luke and Lorelai were ever going to have hope to get back together, the show was likely going to need to dispatch Christopher, which the letter seems a pretty lousy way to accomplish. But before that, the show would need to make Luke and Lorelai friends again, and if anything could do that, this letter could and, with any luck, did.