"Driving Miss Gilmore"
It’s Friday night dinner time at the elder Gilmores’, and Rory and Lorelai are having an intense discussion about (most likely) Ashlee and Jessica Simpson. Emily has a maid take their plates away, since they fight every time they have spaghetti and meatballs. Richard arrives late and is confused as to why his plate is missing; when Emily explains why, he chastises her for serving spaghetti when she knows Lorelai and Rory fight when they have it. Rory notes that they fight just as much as when they have Chinese food. Emily announces that she’s having Lasik surgery tomorrow, which is news to everyone, including Richard. The discussion turns to whether unattractive men make better doctors, and Rory wonders if everyone’s on edge because of the spaghetti. Richard and Emily tell Lorelai that they had lunch with Christopher yesterday, wanting to smooth things over after the Yale tuition fiasco. Lorelai doesn’t think it’s necessary for them to talk to Christopher, even though they argue that he’s involved in their lives now that he’s paying for Yale. They’ve also decided what to do with the money they won’t be spending on tuition - they’re giving it to Yale in Rory’s name. Rory thinks it would be strange to have a building named after her while she’s still at Yale, but Richard and Emily are too busy naming buildings to listen to her. At the hospital, Rory takes Logan for a stroll in his wheelchair and chats with his doctor about physical therapists. Logan is a little frustrated that she’s making herself his nurse, but he’s also grateful that she’s there.
At the inn, Michel yells at someone on the phone while bouncing around. He explains to Lorelai and Sookie that he’s been buying milk from an organic dairy, and he’s just learned that they’ve switched the caps of the cartons, so he’s accidentally been drinking 2% milk instead of nonfat. “Insert gasp here,” says Lorelai. Michel continues that he’s been consuming a ton more calories than normal, and the bouncing is his attempt to burn them off. He’s also not looking forward to dealing with “2%-fat-milk withdrawal.” Luke calls Lorelai, having not spoken to her in a few days, and she begs off of stopping by the diner later. She also makes up a staff meeting she has to attend, making Sookie and Michel concerned about making arrangements and changing plans. Once Lorelai gets off the phone, she tells them there’s no meeting but won’t explain why she told Luke there was one. Jackson arrives and asks Sookie to smell him. He smells like pot because he’s just discovered that the back half-acre of land he hasn’t used for a while contains a ton of pot. (He blames a couple of former employees who must have taken him literally when he told them to weed the half-acre.) The two discuss the situation (substituting the word “pickles” for “marijuana” so no one overhears them), worrying that they’ll go to jail for growing something they didn’t even know about. Jackson announces that he’ll go pull it all himself, and Sookie tells him to stop sweating and looking so nervous.
At the diner, Kirk talks to Luke about his attempts to grow a beard, which are, of course, pretty much unnoticeable. Liz arrives, back from a fair, and announces that she’s pregnant. She’s excited, but T.J. isn’t - he split when he heard the news. Liz is trying to practice her new “come-what-may philosophy,” and Luke is more upset about the situation than she is. Logan wakes up in his apartment to find Paris studying for the MCAT and Doyle watching March of the Penguins. Rory has asked them to babysit while she’s gone. Logan tries to get out of bed to use the bathroom, but Paris tells him Rory said he’s to be on complete bed rest, so she suggests getting him a bedpan instead. Logan calls Rory at the Yale Daily News to complain, and even though his doctor said he can move around if he feels strong enough, Rory doesn’t think he should. As fellow reporter Bill bugs Rory about looking at something in the Wall Street Journal, Rory calls Paris off, telling her that Logan doesn’t need quite as much babysitting as she’d planned. Rory finally looks at what Bill has been trying to show her, and it doesn’t make her happy. At the inn, Michel tries to exercise while performing his job-related duties. Emily calls Lorelai to tell her her Lasik went badly and she wants Lorelai to come see her. Richard calls next to fill in the details - Emily is temporarily blind and Richard is in South Dakota, so Lorelai has to go over and help Emily run some errands.
Pleased with themselves for pulling up all of the pot, Sookie and Jackson next try to figure out how to get rid of it all. Sookie worries that flushing it will contaminate the town’s water supply and get everyone high. She suggests baking it into brownies, though she’s not sure what they would do with the brownies after that. They decide that the first step is to get it out of the house, but first they have to wait for the sun to go down. Back at Logan’s apartment, Rory brainstorms ways to torture and kill Mitchum, who has recently given an interview with the Wall Street Journal in which he took credit for discovering her. She’s upset that a lot of people will read the interview and get the wrong idea, considering he fired her from her internship (see “Blame Booze and Melville”). Logan tries to calm her down, then distracts her by walking on his own. He thinks the article is actually a positive thing and she needs to let it go. Lorelai heads to the elder Gilmores’, where she wonders where all of the help Richard hired for her is. Emily sent them away, since they were all incompetent, and she needs Lorelai to drive her around so she can run errands. Lorelai tries to get out of this by offering to do the errands herself, but Emily isn’t game. Lorelai doesn’t want to drive the car Emily has rented and Emily doesn’t want to ride around in Lorelai’s Jeep, but, of course, Emily wins.
Luke tracks T.J. down at a bar and prepares to punch him, but T.J. isn’t cooperative. He reveals that he didn’t leave Liz - she threw him out because she thinks T.J. can’t raise a child. Luke tells him she was actually talking about herself. He tells T.J. that the trick to relationships is to figure out what your partner really means even when she doesn’t say it. He promises to make everything okay. Lorelai has trouble driving Emily’s rented SUV and gets frustrated over Emily not telling her where they’re going. Emily starts talking about Christopher, who she wants to set up with someone. Lorelai shoots down all of her suggestions and tells her that Christopher can find a girlfriend on his own. At the Yale Daily News, Rory calls Kimberly, the reporter who wrote about Mitchum, and tells her that what Mitchum said about her in his interview wasn’t true. She then has to admit that it actually is true, but gives a misleading impression. The Wall Street Journal won’t print a correction or retraction, so Rory is out of luck. Liz meets with a group of single moms at the diner but finds that there’s a reason they’re all single - all they do is complain. Luke tries to give her a pep talk and convince her that she’ll be a great mother. He adds that T.J. will be a great father if she lets him. T.J. appears and Luke sends Liz off with him.
Emily directs Lorelai to a real-estate office in Hartford, where Emily has a conversation with an agent about a huge house. Lorelai demands to know what’s going on, and Emily says she’ll tell her after Lorelai has given her honest opinion about the house. Lorelai says it’s fine but she doesn’t think it’s Emily’s style. That’s because it’s not for Emily - it’s for Luke and Lorelai. Emily says that Lorelai’s house is too small for her and Luke, and they’ll need a bigger place if they have children. She adds that though the house isn’t in Stars Hollow, it’s close enough, and she might be able to slip Taylor some money to change the property lines so she can have a Stars Hollow address. Lorelai realizes that when Emily and Richard were looking at houses in Stars Hollow, they were looking for a house for her, not themselves. She starts crying and tells her mother that the wedding isn’t going to happen. Sookie and Jackson sneak through the town square with the pot, trying to stay out of sight. They run into the troubadour, who tells them that he’s gotten a spot opening for Neil Young on tour. Sookie wonders if they could just give all the pot to the troubadour to give to Neil Young. They then run into Reverend Skinner and Rabbi Moranz, trying to stay calm in the face of clergy. Later that evening, Lorelai goes to Sookie and Jackson’s house and asks to hang out for a while.
MEMORABLE QUOTES: “You know you wouldn’t treat Nicole Kidman like this…. Nicole Kidman. Red hair, tall…. Okay, then, Julia Roberts. You wouldn’t treat Julia Roberts like this…. Red hair, tall…. Okay, then, Scarlett Johansson…. What are you, a shut-in?” - Michel
Liz: “Hey, let me tell you my big, exciting news!”
Liz: “My philosophy. It’s about accepting what comes your way, whatever it is. If a bus is heading right at you, let it come. If a piece of space junk comes hurtling down at you, let it come.”
“The windows are bulletproof. They kept saying that as if it’s a selling point. I told them I was not paying extra for bulletproof windows. I haven’t been strafed in years.” - Emily re: her car
T.J.: “This is complicated.”
Emily: “Lorene, this is my daughter, Lorelai. She has headaches, and that tends to make her babble.”
Written by Daniel Palladino and Amy Sherman-Palladino; directed by Jamie Babbitt
Luke: “Uh-oh.”
Liz: “It’s not an uh-oh. It’s good, unless you don’t like babies, in which case it’s not so good.”
Luke: “You’re pregnant?!”
Liz: “Oh, it was supposed to be a surprise. Who told you?”
Luke: “You just did.”
Liz: “Wow, I blew my own surprise.”
Luke: “Or you step out of the way.”
Liz: “You know, that’s probably better, and when I said what I said now, it felt wrong.”
Luke: “That’s because people are. Sometimes they just don’t say what they mean.”
T.J.: “Yeah, I hate that. It’s hard enough following them when they’re talking about what they’re talking about.”
Lorene: “Oh, I’m sorry. Can I get you some aspirin?”
Lorelai: “Oh, no, thanks. I’m okay. I’ve had the headache for 38 years.”