Episode Report Card Al Lowe: B | 57 USERS: C+ YOU GRADE IT All Dressed In...Blush?
By Al Lowe | Season 6 | Episode 11 | Aired on 2006.01.10
Rory and Lorelai move on to talk about the wedding planning, and Rory is as shocked as Luke was to learn that everything is taken care of. Rory says that's great, but Lorelai is now looking back with skepticism. She says that she felt like all these things falling into place were signs, but is now worried that it was too easy. "Planning a wedding isn't easy," she says, "because marriage isn't easy." While the second part of that is true, I have to side with Rory when she responds, "How do you know? You've never been married." But Lorelai says that's exactly it -- she didn't marry Max because she freaked out that it was going to be too hard. Now she's worried that she hasn't freaked out at all about Luke, so something must be wrong. But wait, didn't she freak out about Luke? Isn't she pretty much freaking out 24/7? I'd like to recap the INSANE blabbering she does about being like that woman in The Twilight Zone who is being chased by a woman on a horse who ends up being the woman's older self coming to warn her of the future but...well, hell, I just did it. Even Rory is exasperated. "Okay, King George, take a breath, eat a fry, and listen to me." Rory says that the dress is right, the date is right, and everything is going to be fine. "Remember the snow?" she says. "The snow never lies. Be happy. This is all good." Lorelai sighs and thanks her: "I'm going to miss you when you're murdered and stuffed into the dumpster by the doo-wop group." Rory asks about her own dress, which Lorelai has already bought, and Lorelai answers: "Two words. 'Hoop skirt.'" Hee. Rory says that sounds great, especially in a lovely shade of tangerine, and offers her mother a fry to go with her evilness.
Somewhere...else, Luke knocks on the front door of a house. "Hello, stranger," says the woman who answers the door, and we see that it is none other than Sherilyn Fenn who is playing Anna Nardini, Luke's long-forgotten lover and mother to the Secret Child, pawn of the worst plot device ever forced upon this show. ["That girl gets around; she was also Jess's kind-of stepmother. And didn't that character have some super-smart kid too? Your spin-off failed, Palladinos; quit trying to shoehorn all that stuff in over here." -- Wing Chun] Luke and Anna exchange hellos, and Anna invites him in to her creatively-decorated house ["also reminiscent of her last appearance on the show, hello" -- Wing Chun] which is doubles as a store or warehouse or something for all the stuff she sells. "Clothes, pillows, candles, fabrics," she lists. "It's one of those 'everything' kind of boutiques that used to send you into a 'what do people need with all this crap?' kind of rant." Luke says, "Oh, yeah," kind of shamefacedly, and they have more awkward conversation. I get the Sherilyn Fenn choice and I see that all this wacky junk in her house makes her, like, the pre-Lorelai. If they flog us with this for the rest of the season -- some kind of "Luke was in love with her but that was before he knew what he wanted so now he is in love with Lorelai who is just like her and isn't it too bad that he didn't figure it out soon enough with Anna so they could have been a family together way back then," I will throw my laptop in the trash.