Episode Report Card Al Lowe: A- | 0 USERS: N/A YOU GRADE IT The Planetarium Story
By Al Lowe | Season 7 | Episode 8 | Aired on November 20, 2006
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Lorelai and Christopher are back in town. Lorelai is desperate to tell Rory about their marriage, and worried about how she will react. Chris, of course, blows this off, because he is clueless about human emotions other than his own. Poor Rory tries to pretend to be excited in front of Christopher, but when she and Lorelai are alone, she gets very upset. Later, they work it all out. All of these changes are hard for Lorelai, too. Logan surprises Rory again by showing up in town out of the blue to plan his new company's launch party. (He has another surprise as well -- he's moving to New York.) He's very sweet to her when she tells him about her parents; unfortunately, he's less sweet when she writes a story about the launch party. It's not exactly flattering, and he accuses her of being judgmental of wealthy people, when she herself is one of them. They have a big argument, but she realizes later that he's right, and they make up. She decides, though, to move out of Logan's apartment so that she can be self-sufficient. Luke is still looking after April and is freaked out about her going to her first boy-girl party. They get in their first fight when he won't let her attend because she is ill with a fever. Luke calls Lorelai for advice about the sick kid, and ends up taking April to the hospital for that perennial TV favorite, appendicitis. When Lorelai meets Luke at the emergency room to support him, he notices her wedding band but says nothing. It's saaaad. But, hark! Is there hope on the horizon? In April's hospital room, he sees the end of The Philadelphia Story and...well, I can't decide what it means, exactly, but I'm hopeful nonetheless. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Lorelai is back from Paris, and her first act on the home turf is to call Rory, begging into Rory's voicemail to get in touch as soon as possible. Yes: when you want to break it to your adult child that you have just married her father, after a quarter century of being jerked around by him like a yo-yo, there is no time like the present. The nervousness in Lorelai's voice is painful and, for the first forty-five minutes of this sort of goofily-named episode, it is like the old Lauren Graham and Lorelai and Rory and Gilmore Girls in general are all back and in fine form. Until...well, we'll get to that. In other news, happy Thanksgiving, American lovers of this program, and many thanks to my Canadian bosses for the holiday amnesty that gave me an extra day to write this recap. One is not at one's prime when full of turkey and JoLowe's cornbread dressing -- truly the finest in the land. If I had written this during my tryptophan haze, it would have been about three paragraphs long and gone something like: "Lorelai calls someone on the phone. Can't see screen...light fading...coconut cake...must zzzzz...Huh? Logan something! Stupid about the appendix. Rory zzzzcute..."
Christopher comes in to stop Lorelai from calling Rory yet again and sits her down on the couch, asking for an open mind. She gives him one. Walking to the corner, he narrates, "I want you to picture, on this wall...a waterfall." Lorelai's mind slams shut. When Christopher keeps going, suggesting a flatscreen TV, a Barcalounger and a Big Mouth Billy Bass to add to the CrapShack décor, Lorelai turns positively green. Finally, she realizes he's kidding. "I'm totally kidding," he admits. "Except about the flatscreen. We need a flatscreen!" Ugh, she says. She'd rather have the singing fish. A flatscreen would be too "Meet-George-Jetson-his-boy-Elroy," she says, wondering immediately if it's not, in fact, Leroy Jetson she's thinking of. Chris assures her it's Elroy, adding that while he's perfectly willing to embrace small-town Stars Hollow living, there are some things he won't be doing: "I'm not going to cobble my own shoes, churn butter, or watch a TV from 1976." Lorelai is offended: "What? This baby has a remote that has nineteen buttons on it!" Christopher asks if the house even has running water, and asks why she won't say yes to a flatscreen when she loves TV so much. ["Seriously. What is she saving the money for -- a really awesome range she'll never ever use?" -- Wing Chun] Just because she loves it, she says, doesn't mean she needs a giant one: "I love grapes, but I'm not going to sit down and eat one humongous gra...no, that would be fun."