Episode Report Card M. Giant: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Mailer than Thou
By M. Giant | Season 5 | Episode 6 | Aired on 10.25.2004
Doyle is passing out beats at the newspaper office. Paris gets the coveted (by her) Religion beat, so she can make a big production out of pretending not to have wanted it. Rory gets her Features and Glenn gets Crime, which earns a "Hm" from him. It's just an excuse for him to name-drop Maureen Dowd, and has no relevance to anything else. The meeting breaks up, and Rory snags Doyle to pitch him a bunch of boring feature story ideas. Suddenly Doyle, looking over Rory's shoulder (or, more accurately, around it, since Danny Strong comes up to about the level of Rory's larynx), says, "Oh, no. He's back." It's that douche Logan, mashing his lips onto some girl's face as he swans into the office. Oh, no, indeed. Doyle runs up to plant his own lips on Logan's ass. There's some talk about Logan's family, particularly his father, and Logan sits down at what he calls "my" desk, which has apparently been sitting there unoccupied right in front of Rory's face this whole time without ever having aroused her curiosity as to who sits there. Yeah, she'll make a great reporter. Doyle confesses to Logan that he's given out all the beats, looking as if the news will earn him a beating, as it were, but Logan's apparently just there to do what he does in other scenes on this show, i.e., take up space and irritate everyone. "Rory, nice to see you," he smarms, propping his foot up on his desk.
That prompts Doyle immediately to scamper across the three feet of empty space that makes up television's invisible conversational sound barrier and hiss to Rory, "You know Logan? How do you know Logan?" Rory assures Doyle that she and Logan are not friends, which of course means that she's going be screwing over Dean because of him by the end of this season. Doyle expositions that Logan sank his dad's sailboat off of Fiji and spent a few months partying on the island until his dad sent a plane down to fetch him. I think the reference to sailing to Fiji is the closest thing to a mention that Lane's ex-boyfriend is ever going to going to get again. Doyle further expositions that Logan's dad is one Mitchum Huntzberger, the fake famous newspaper magnate. So I guess Logan works at the Yale Daily News so that he can one day take over his father's twelve fake newspapers. And why Doyle feels the need to kiss Logan's ass. I'd try harder to figure it out if I cared. Rory reminds Doyle that they were talking about which of her lame stories she should run with, and Doyle dismissively tells her to go with her gut. Rory's bleeding-edge story topic? Illegal music downloading on campus. Sounds to me like the biggest story of 1998. Logan, meanwhile, has produced a snap-brim fedora with a big card reading PRESS stuck in the brim and raps out a little '30s screwball newspaper comedy dialogue into his phone before typing and grinning madly at Doyle. I'm sure that gets funnier every time someone does it at a college newspaper. ["I never worked at a college newspaper, so it was funny to me." -- Wing Chun] Rory can't suppress a small smile. Why does she encourage these bozos?