Episode Report Card Al Lowe: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Lost And Found
By Al Lowe | Season 7 | Episode 18 | Aired on 04.16.2007
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Stars Hollow is in an uproar over Taylor's typically-Taylor Spring Fling celebration, while Rory flips out over her first newspaper interview. Also flipping: Paris, due to Logan's presence in her apartment. He has moved there, rather than stay in the fancy, dad-funded place. April, looking very pretty, is visiting Luke on vacation, chatting 900 wpm. She gives him a bracelet and talks about it with such speed that I actually move forward in time. I know we've been on hiatus for a while, but there's no need to cram all the sentences from those missing episodes into this one. While she nervously waits to hear the results of her interview, Rory brings Logan home for the festival, and they all act like he's never been to Stars Hollow or met her mom or anything; she shows him around like they've just met. He's been on this show for what? Three seasons? Come ON. She takes him into Luke's Diner, where they run into Zach, who mentions the babies -- Kwan and Steve. Awesome. Not quite as awesome: Lorelai is worried that Rory and Logan are back together after his descent from success. She is extra-worried when she hears his goofball ideas about the future. When Rory is offered the job for which she interviewed and immediately goes into a Gilmorian tizzy worrying about whether to accept it or wait for her dream fellowship, Logan suggests that she go for the dream, upsetting Lorelai, who wants more stability for her kid. Logan assures her that he's not a gambler, that he is aware of the mistakes he's made, and that he wants to work hard. In any case, Rory decides on her own that she really wants to go for the fellowship. Speaking of (in)stability: At a town meeting to discuss the Spring Fling, Lorelai runs into Luke. They have a...friendly, polite, succinct, bland chat. Not bland: Taylor, as he tries to conceal the disaster of his Fling. He's put the entire Fling budget into the hay bale maze that has taken over the entire town. Look, it's stupid and it involves Kirk in a Minotaur suit. Just go with it. Within the maze, Lorelai runs into Luke. They joke about the bracelet he's wearing. Suddenly, Lorelai feels like she needs to apologize to him for everything that has happened. He graciously accepts, and he apologizes to her as well and tells her that he's learned a lot and that she was right to want to help April. They smile at each other. Hey, are y'all getting Mark McGrath during your commercials, like I am? Dudes. His teeth. What is happening there? Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Lorelai arrives at the Inn to find Sookie and Michel engaged in one of their little tiffs. Michel has apparently created a desktop publishing masterpiece of a printed schedule and is offended that Sookie would place it in the backs of the guest baskets she's assembling. "I am a man of refined and renowned aesthetics," he bitches. "Fabien Baron once publicly admired the way I decorated my locker at Crunch." My God, it took me 65 rewinds to figure out what he was saying. Fabien BARON. Not Fabian Barnes. CRUNCH. Not Crotch. Though, truth be known, I can imagine Fabian Barnes complimenting Michel on the decoration of his crotch. What? Oh, come on.
The exchange degenerates into a slapfight soon after Michel tries to inappropriately call touché -- you'd think a speaker of the French language would know the definition of the word -- and when Lorelai arrives, just before real violence breaks out, she notes that "Mr. Crankypants is in his usual Spring Fling funk." Michel immediately denies any funkiness. "Oh, I wasn't talking about you," Lorelai jokes. "I was talking about Mr. Crankypants." She compliments him on his beautiful schedule, reading off the usual Fling events. She's alarmed, however, when she sees that bird-watching has been added to the list. "There was a void," Michel insists. "There was nothing scheduled on Saturday evening; it looked ridiculous; I wrote in bird-watching." Lorelai says that's great and all, but that since they didn't schedule any bird-watching, it might create a problem if someone, say, wants to go bird-watching. "Oh, please," Michel snarks. "Who wants to watch birds? Why on Earth would you want to watch a bird?" Touché, for real. ["My father challenges you to a duel." -- Miss Alli] Lorelai says that what they should have put on the schedule was the stupid hay-bale maze that Taylor hoodwinked all of them into approving at the town meeting. "What is wrong with people? Walking in hay?" Michel drones. "Don't people have lives? Don't they have televisions and elliptical machines? And what kind of weirdo wants to walk around in a maze of hay?" Lorelai: "Taylor Doose, and no one else."
Lorelai and Sookie describe how, at the meeting, Taylor gave an impassioned speech, while clutching hay, weeping. "It was very disconcerting, and yet oddly moving," Lorelai says, but she adds that this support was short-lived when after the vote people saw that he wasn't actually crying -- he just had hay fever. In any case, Michel has become bored by this charming tale and rolls his eyes again, sighing out a queenly "whatever." Sookie breaks it to him that people stopped saying "whatever" like two years ago. (Everybody except me.) "Whatever," Michel says again and then, nearly killing me with pure brilliance, adds that he's "Audi 5000." That single Michel moment was enough to make up for the fact that the entire 466 words I just wrote above? Described 90 seconds of television. Damn this show and all its words.