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You know what’s a better investment than a sales-rack wedding dress? Talking it over first with a licensed mental health counselor.

What’s Wrong With Episode 120: “The Perfect Dress”? The Dress is Bad and So is the Storytelling

By Megan

Here at Gilmore Women, we talk a lot about the ways in which Gilmore Girls hasn’t aged well, and if that’s what you’re looking for, you can truly take your pick from a horrible potpourri of Shit I Didn’t Remember From When This Was My Favorite Show as a Young Person. There’s the anti-fatness, the homophobia, the weird dynamic where women are almost always punished narratively for having sex, the compulsory heterosexuality, the deep devotion to the gender binary, and the occasionally very upsetting early-oughts fashion choices.

But here’s my problem was season 6: It’s not any of those things, although they persist. It’s just that this season is bad and doesn’t make sense. This episode has a few mildly enjoyable moments, but from the opening, something just feels off. As Lorelai and Rory burst into Luke’s fresh from their trip to Atlantic City for Rory’s birthday, they sound like pod-people versions of the characters we know so well:

LORELAI: Oh, my God. Look who's back.
RORY: Well, I believe it's those adorable Gilmore Girls.
LORELAI: My, how we have missed them.
RORY: I hear they're different now. A little sad.
LORELAI: A little broke.
LUKE: Don't you two believe in jet lag?
LORELAI: No way. We're still flying on the Atlantic City buzz. Hey, (they kiss) handsome. Were you bad while I was gone?
LUKE: I was. I went to bed every night at 10:15.
LORELAI: Grandpa! what am I gonna do with you?
RORY: Hey, Luke.
LUKE: Hey, Rory.
LORELAI: We, on the other hand, have not been to bed at all since we left.
RORY: We did fall over once, though.
LUKE: Did you have a good trip?
RORY: I believe it was the best belated 21st-birthday party on record.
LORELAI: What's different?
RORY: No Kalhua.
LORELAI: Oh, right. Which reminds me. (to Luke) Sorry about all the drunken late-night phone calls.
LUKE: What drunken late-night phone calls?
LORELAI: Uh, so, um, do you want to hear about all the things we can tell you about our trip?

So much to unpack here, including the possibility that Luke doesn’t know New Jersey is in the same time zone as Connecticut. But the “adorable Gilmore Girls” line just lands with a thud for me—it’s a weirdly cheery, dissonant note in a season that’s been a miserable plod for the most part, and feels self-conscious and self-referential in a way that might work for a different show, but feels wrong for this one.

There’s also something kinda creepy-codependent in the way Rory and Lorelai describe their drunken exploits in Atlantic City, including hitting on 21 men, which they presumably did… together? In the pilot episode of Gilmore Girls, a man hits on both Rory and Lorelai and it’s rightly framed as gauche and gross, but this permutation is supposed to be cool and fun? Mother-daughter dynamics are each special in their own way, but I dunno, how about some boundaries? This is giving MILF Manor, and embodies the pattern this nominally feminist show sometimes has of objectifying its leads. Also, I think it’s pretty fucked that Rory and Lorelai JUST mended their relationship and now they’re as enmeshed as they’ve ever been. It’s very cool when entire dramatic arcs are introduced on this show that should result in some character development, and then there just… isn’t any. Wow! Way to subvert expectations! Very neat!

I’m being mean, but the truth is I am kind of mad at this episode. Not only have Rory and Lorelai apparently learned nothing in their absence from each other, but Luke is yet again wasting precious screentime affirming that he isn’t gay and feeling grossed out by the existence of drag queens, while also hiding his Secret Daughter from Lorelai, which is something I don’t think Old Luke would do, but since he’s been replaced by someone who’s evidently taking cues from Andrew Tate, I guess anything goes!

RIP, Old Luke. You were grumpy but you were dignified.

Speaking of which: Every character feels slightly keyed-up and deranged in this episode, like they’re being written by AI who’s seen one (1) episode of Gilmore Girls and also learned to write by reading nothing but clickbaity headlines from 2005: 15 Times Luke Yelled at Someone for No Good Reason! 17 Times Rory Gilmore Betrayed Her Own Feminist Values (#3 Will Make You Cry)! 10 Gifs That Show Lorelai is the Ultimate Girlboss! Help!

The titular dress of this episode is Lorelai’s blush-pink wedding dress, and I’m sorry, but while the girlies love a bargain, this one is ugly! I think the dress seeming wrong is supposed to be a Harbinger of Doom re: Luke and Lorelai, but I already wanted them to break up, so I have no investment in this plotline anymore.

Meanwhile, I cannot abide this episode’s “jokes” about how unsafe New Haven is and how awful Paris and Rory’s off-campus apartment is. Between her offensive comments about how to tell when you’re hearing gunshots (and let me tell you, when you live in a neighborhood where you hear gunshots with any regularity, it is really not very ambiguous) and the “doo wop group” stuff, I can only presume that Paris has become yet another White Lady Who Has Watched Too Much True Crime. I had hoped for more from our Noam Chomsky-worshipping Paris Eustace Geller than an overactive NextDoor dot com account, but the way she’s characterized in this episode reminds me of the people in my HOA who complain about renters and seem affronted by the existence of homelessness and occasional property crime in a major metropolitan area! Again, help!

There is some occasional fun in this episode: It’s directed by the wonderful Jamie Babbit, and for once I genuinely love Lane’s B-plot, which involves Mrs. Kim’s secret booze stash and a brief detente between mother and daughter. I wish we’d gotten more of this and less of Zack and unplanned pregnancies, but… a win is a win?

Rory, too, seems more like herself in this episode. Behold this very reasonable thing she says to Lorelai in defense of her crappy housing:

LORELAI: Let's call Daddy. Make him pay for an apartment with one lock.
RORY: No. Look, this is the way it's supposed to be. I am in college. Don't you see? I'm supposed to live in a crappy apartment. I'm supposed to eat ramen noodles and mac and cheese for months. I've been living in a pool house with maids and fresh-cut flowers and mints on my pillow every night.
LORELAI: You gotta love my mother sometimes.

Finally, some acknowledgment that living rent-free with her grandparents was a weird, bad choice!

Rory also sets some boundaries with Logan, who in this episode alone stalks her at the coffee cart, tries to poke her (???) in the newsroom, and shows up at her home unannounced after she’s made it clear she doesn’t want to see him, only to give her severely mixed signals about how he didn’t mean to break up with her, but he kind of did, but now he’s lonely and so maybe he didn’t, anyway, maybe he loves her, here’s some cold coffee you didn’t ask for and no one would want!

Rory also goes to therapy, and in a monologue that is jarringly played for comedy, for once admits her anger at Logan and acknowledges her own increasingly impulsive decisions:

RORY: I mean how fair is that? He's gone, and then he shows up out of the blue. "You can't live here. This place is a dump. And, by the way, I love you." "I love you"?! Is he serious?!
DR. SHAPIRO: I don't know.
RORY: Nothing for weeks, and then he just decides that he loves me. So, what happens now? I get another Birkin bag? And how long until he doesn't love me again, huh? I stole a boat with him! I never stole a boat with Dean!
DR. SHAPIRO: Who's Dean?
RORY: My married ex-boyfriend who I lost my virginity to!

Unfortunately, while Rory agrees to more therapy with Dr. Shapiro, we will never see any of her appointments onscreen, and she will ultimately get back together with Logan, which I think means Dr. Shapiro is bad at his job.

This is a shame, because most of the characters on this show could benefit from therapy, and it would be interesting to see them talk things out with a licensed professional. Luke, especially, seems like he would be less of an asshole if he could process his frustrations with a clinician rather than taking them out on his current or former girlfriends. But because we’re solidly in the doldrums of season 6, we will have no such luck. Instead of therapy, Luke is about to embark on a very Men’s Rights storyline. Help.

5 Other Things Wrong With This Episode

It’s funny that Luke claims to hate Macaulay Culkin, because he is like a boy Alexis Bledel.
Luke and Kirk wander the town in search of wi-fi so Luke can check out his Secret Daughter’s website. Does Luke not have internet access at home? Is he trying to cover his tracks? This is probably just a plot hole, but if not, the implications are sinister.
I hate the way Anna Nardini is characterized, even moreso because she’s played by Sherilynn Fenn, the iconic actor behind Twin Peaks’ Audrey Horne. We’re supposed to see her boundary-setting with Luke as somehow rude and possessive, but I don’t know, after hearing how much Luke hates children and probably women, I really can’t blame her. By the end of the season, she will be fully vilified for these kinds of boundaries, and while I think season 7 resolves the April storyline as well as it can, it does so by building on the narrative that this single mom who runs a fun shop and seems like a parallel-universe Lorelai is somehow a singularly bad person motivated only by the desire to make Luke feel sad. What a goddamn waste of Sherilynn Fenn.
Logan’s “joke” about crack and baking soda is exactly the kind of behavior I would expect from a rich person who has presumably done a lot of cocaine (let’s be real, Colin and Finn make more sense through this lens) and has no awareness of the overlap between mass incarceration and the war on drugs. It’s true to his character and truly a good reason to DUMP HIM, RORY. GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN
It makes me sad that Rory and Lorelai spent any money at a Trump casino.

Gilmore Women is a weekly newsletter from journalists Maggie Mertens and Megan Burbank examining everything that’s wrong with Gilmore Girls. All of our weekly episode issues are free, but paid subscribers get special BONUS newsletters, on everything from the politics of Stars Hollow, how Dawson’s Creek and GG compared, and the show’s strange relationship to Judaism.

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