Gilmore Girls for Foodies

Emily Gilmore returns to prime-time after a cruel summer-plus-two-episode absence to do what she does best: make her daughter Lorelai feel bad about herself and boss people around like she's the Queen of Spain. The door opens in the teaser and instead of the latest in the series of hapless maids, Emily's new domestic slave is a ten year-old girl being groomed for a cotillion. The lucky kid gets the first good laugh line of the night when she tells Lorelai that her mother said she would have a smart mouth. Zing! She then proceeds to take the drink orders and knows to ask if Lorelai would like her Martini straight up or on the rocks. Rory orders club soda, though we know she likes to tipple and indeed, in the ep's final scene her dad remarks on how she has ordered a drink with dinner. GGs would benefit from more drunken Rory scenes, but I can't complain about this installment of the ongoing story one iota. Tonight's was as perfect a Gilmore as ever aired. I have worried that without Amy and Dan, the show might end up losing its signature tone or drifting off into sharkey narrative waters. But the writers (tonight's script was credited to Everwood vet Rina Mimoun) have been ventriloquising remarkably well. Whether this is authentic or ersatz I cannot say, but I subscribe to the solipsistic theory of comedy: if I laugh, it's funny. I am laughing.

The etiquette training bits are clever not just because they give Kelly Bishop a chance to show her remarkable chops, but because they reveal character. This episode is about the possibility of Chris and Lorelai becoming a couple. In classic Gilmore fashion, this theme is not made apparent to us until the final scene, after Chris has dropped Rory off at home and Lorelai appears fresh from Emily's bash. But we realize in this moment that the high society function for moppets was Emily's way of recapturing Lorelai's youth, and that Lorelai's connection with Christopher goes back that far, to when they too were ten and victims of high WASP culture. GG likes to give us the impression that an episode is just slack, goofball fun, that nothing is at stake, and then in a flashy flourish to raise the stakes in a final scene that ends with a pregnant, questioning fade. This one duplicates that pattern of so many episodes from earlier seasons.

When she is tutoring the roomful of girls at the Dragonfly, one is reminded of the scenes in Gigi between the heroine and her Aunt Alicia, especially the one in which the clumsy girl is instructed on the proper manner of eating ortolan. Here eating food is not so much the point as the pretext for showing off one's good grooming. The counterpoint to this scene is the one in Lorelai's kitchen in which she wonders if she really would like Pop Tarts if her mother had served them to her on a silver platter. She is questioning (as with the hairstyle that looks good but which, to her dread, her mother likes) if she is the way she is merely because of her desire to be different from Emily. This is exactly the right scene for this moment: again, it crystallizes the theme of the episode, Lorelai's reluctance to see Christopher as her great love--in part because he is from her world, her past, her parents' milieu. Because being with him would please them. This is one good reason, perhaps, to reject him.

The other foodie moment comes in an exchange between Emily and Sookie. Sookie has prepared samples of food she is to serve the mini-debs at the tea at which Emily is to give them their etiquette instruction. Sookie tries to sub in pb&j for salmon in some canapés, but Emily will have none of it. If she's going to compromise with peanut butter, she might as well just toast them some Pop Tarts.

This ep also had some excellent bits with Rory and Paris tutoring SAT kids and Rory scouring Henry Miller for ideas to use in dirty texting with Logan, but those things have nothing to do with food.