Episode Report Card Al Lowe: A- | 1 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Luke's My Daddy
By Al Lowe | Season 6 | Episode 9 | Aired on November 14, 2005
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Rory and Emily aren't speaking. Rory sends Finn and Colin in to retrieve all her stuff, and moves in with Lane, which is where she is when she gets a call from the editor at the Stamford paper, site of Rory's now-mythical humiliation at the hands of "Herr Huntzberger." The editor is extremely nice to Rory, telling her he'd hire her if he had a job, but having none, he will be pleased to give her an excellent reference. Now, even though Rory has sent out (by her own estimation) 125,000 résumés for journalism jobs, she decides the best course of action is to start harassing the one guy who was nice to her and doesn't have work, stalking him at the office and making me cringe and writhe at how inappropriate and awful she's being. Lorelai keeps getting news of Rory -- that she's at Lane's, that she's getting calls about her references (Michel takes one at the Dragonfly) -- but hasn't seen her. In Lorelai's own storyline: the renovations are done at her house, where Luke surprises her with his grandmother's hideously ugly bedroom set, which she pretends to like. They have Sookie and Jackson over for a housewarming, in the middle of which Lorelai gets a message from Christopher. She guiltily turns off the machine mid-message when Luke walks in, touching off a fight about her dishonesty (not really) and his jealousy (totally misplaced). He sulks off to his apartment, but she goes over to finish the argument and they both agree always to be honest about everything. And then the next day a girl shows up at the diner to get a piece of Luke's hair for a science project she's doing to determine which of three dudes is her biological father; Luke doesn't mention this to Lorelai that we can see. He later goes to the science fair and learns that he is the father of this twelve-year-old girl, although she doesn't seem to care or want anything from him. Lorelai gets an urgent call from Richard about a missing Emily, whom Lorelai tracks down at the airport, where she's doing an unassisted walkthrough on a timeshare plane she's thinking of buying. She gives Lorelai the broad strokes on her blowout with Rory, and how Emily feels she lost her just the way she lost Lorelai; though Lorelai tells her nicely that none of what happened is Emily's fault (a lie, of sorts) and that Rory never should have been at Emily's in the first place, she doesn't...like, hug her mother or anything. I guess we're supposed to be satisfied that she kissed Luke a couple of times in the episode. To my absolute horror -- and in a terrible blow to reality -- Rory's stunningly unprofessional behaviour is rewarded with a job at the paper. She calls Lorelai from her car to give her all the good news -- that she's also going back to Yale, magically, now that the term is almost over, in a highly unlikely negotiation wisely kept offscreen -- and Lorelai demands that Rory move back in with her while she finds a place to live near school, and the titular Girls are finally, FINALLY reunited for real on the lawn at Lorelai's, and I did not choke up a little...shut up. So Lorelai, all a-flutter, takes off to Luke's to raid his pantry and also tell him that Rory's back, and that they can now set a date for their wedding, and though it looks like he was just about to figure out a way to tell Lorelai about the daughter he suddenly has, he doesn't actually do so. Al Lowe will tell all in the recap. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
This has got to be the craziest episode ever of this show. It was pretty good, yes, but there were just...so many words. Isn't The WB the channel I watch when I want to see long montages of scenes with the latest Liz Phair sellout song playing in the background? Where was that this week? I know, I know. The dialogue is what we love on this show, but jeez, it seemed in this episode like each actor was in a race with himself to get all the words out before the next Supernatural commercial.
Lorelai arrives home to find her front door chained. She considers this to be odd, since she did not have a chain on her door before. She calls for Luke to let her in. "Lorelai?" he answers from within the house. "Noooo," she says. "Landshark. Candygram. Here's Johnny." Luke tells her to stay there, and arrives at the door with a glass of wine to welcome her in. He's celebrating: the house is done. I would like to poor a tub of wine to celebrate, too, but Lorelai feels differently. She seems skeptical. Surely the guys will need to come back and put on socket covers and fix mouldings and pick up their tools. Luke says nope: he gave the crew a big bonus to finish up early. Lorelai finally admits that she's sad. She wanted to have a party to celebrate. "The place was covered with dust," Luke says. "You were getting woken up at 6 AM every morning [sic] from the hammering. I thought you'd be happy." Lorelai says she is, but that she's sad at the same time: "You've never been with a woman before?" Hee. Luke is flabbergasted, but says in kind of a sexy voice that he has another surprise for her upstairs in the bedroom. "Upstairs in the bedroom?" Lorelai repeats. "Whatever could it be?" Luke takes her up, telling her to close her eyes before going in the room. "I'm not scared of it anymore, Luke," she jokes, and he opens the door to reveal...the craziest, darkest, heaviest bedroom suite you can imagine. It is immediately evident that Lorelai hates it, but she puts her game face on. "Wow..." she says, in pain. "Look at all the cherubs." Luke says he wanted to surprise her with it because he remembered she said she liked it after she saw it that one time in his storage unit five years ago. She clearly has no recollection of that event, but doesn't say anything since he seems so excited. He also has some tragically ugly sailboat pictures he's planning to hang. A little secret: this is one of the hardest parts of being married. If you're lucky, your stuff fits together well and not much will have to be thrown out. But if, say, your husband is from south Jersey and he is an historian who appreciates only furniture that weighs three tons and has visible wood knots, no matter how ugly it also may be.... What I'm saying is: Lorelai, I feel your pain.