Lorelai goes to the diner for the first time since she and Luke broke up. Patty and Babette say they’re happy to see her back, and Kirk tells her she can’t have her stool back. Luke and Lorelai have an awkward conversation about the weather and Lorelai takes her coffee to go.

Lorelai’s Jeep breaks down and Gypsy says it’s unfixable. Lorelai calls Luke and asks him to help her pick out a new car. It’s still incredibly awkward because they’re trying so hard to be polite to each other. Lorelai doesn’t like any of the cars Luke suggests and Luke starts getting annoyed. Luke finds a Jeep that’s exactly like her old one and when she still doesn’t like it, they start arguing. After that, things start to flow better. Luke comes over later and says he found a 1999 Jeep Wrangler and test drove it, so if she wants to keep her old car, she should buy this one and have Gypsy switch the engines.

Sookie’s kids have chicken pox, but Jackson has never had them so Lorelai offers to let him stay at her house until the kids are better. Sookie is worried that Jackson is going to annoy Lorelai, and she’s surprised when Lorelai says she and Jackson had fun and he didn’t bother her at all. Then Jackson calls Sookie and says he broke Lorelai’s dollhouse. Sookie is really mean to him, and Jackson says he wishes she could forgive him for lying to her about his vasectomy and then getting her pregnant. Sookie says she doesn’t want to be mad and she’ll try to move on. When Lorelai gets home from car shopping, Sookie and Jackson are sitting on her porch. They tell her about the dollhouse.

Paris has gotten responses from medical schools. She’s gotten into Yale Law and Harvard Medical, and she doesn’t know how to choose. She’s also gotten into UPenn, Columbia and Stanford and she’s freaking out about the decision. Paris breaks up with Doyle because she doesn’t want to base her decision on a guy. Paris and Rory go out with Lucy and Olivia, and Paris gets drunk and starts talking about how much she misses Doyle. Doyle comes back to the apartment later and says he’s not moving out and he’s not breaking up. He says he’ll go wherever she goes.

Rory finally gets a letter from the New York Times. She didn’t get the fellowship.

Luke: Sedans aren’t afraid to get dirty!

Sookie comes over early one morning with coffee and muffin tops. She and Jackson were planning a ski trip, but their baby-sitter got sick. The coffee and muffins are a bribe. Lorelai agrees and then they both get weird when Sookie says she got the coffee from Luke’s. Sookie gets oddly emotional when she thanks Lorelai for baby-sitting. Christopher comes downstairs and he gets weird about the coffee, too.

Lucy still won’t talk to Rory, so Rory writes her a letter and leaves it on her door. Paris has made plans for the final five months of school. Rory goes to Richard’s office at Yale to ask him to set up a meeting with the dean for her and Paris. Paris gets irritated when Rory is distracted by Lucy at lunch. She goes over to Lucy’s table and yells at her for not answering Rory’s letter yet. Lucy forgives Rory and says she and Marty broke up.

Sookie and Jackson come back early because Sookie wanted a drink at lunch and Jackson wouldn’t let her get one. He also wouldn’t let her ski. Lorelai asks her what’s going on, and Jackson says Sookie is pregnant and doesn’t know it. Jackson didn’t actually get that vasectomy, but he never told Sookie and she went off the pill last month and now she’s pregnant. She gets a little upset when Jackson tells her. Lorelai tries to remind her of all the good things about babies.

Luke and Anna go to court. While they’re waiting in the hallway, Anna acts like a total bitch and says the whole thing is a waste of time because Luke will never win. Meanwhile, Christopher finds a copy of the character reference Lorelai wrote. The letter is a big success at court, but not so much at the Hayden-Gilmore house. Christopher is convinced Lorelai is still in love with Luke, so he leaves, saying he “can’t handle this.” Lorelai wakes up the next morning and Christopher still hasn’t come home. Then Luke calls and says that thanks to Lorelai’s letter, Luke is going to get shared custody.

Rory is sitting in Richard’s economics class when Richard appears to have a heart attack.

Sookie: I hope we have a girl. Oh! Or a boy!

Jackson goes to his back half acre, which he hasn’t visited for quite a while, and finds it’s turned into a field full of marijuana. He figures it was planted by a couple of guys who used to work for him. He gathers it all into garbage bags, and he and Sookie freak out trying to get rid of it.

Liz comes to the diner and tells Luke she’s pregnant but TJ has left her. Luke finds TJ in a bar and tries to fight him. TJ says he didn’t leave Liz, she told him he was going to mess up the baby’s life and threw him out. Luke tries to explain that Liz is really afraid she’s going to mess things up and is just taking it out on TJ. He takes TJ back to the diner to make up with Liz.

Logan is home from the hospital. He wakes up one morning and finds Paris and Doyle in his apartment. Rory had to go to the newspaper office so she got them to watch Logan. At the paper, Bill shows Rory an article in the Wall Street Journal. It’s an interview with Mitchum in which he takes credit for Rory being the editor of the Yale Daily News. Rory is livid. She calls the Journal, but they can’t do anything for her.

Emily has decided to get laser eye surgery. The surgery goes badly and Emily is temporarily blind. She needs to run errands so she asks Lorelai to drive her around in a car she’s rented with super duper tinting on the windows. She’s really annoying and by the end of the night Lorelai is ready to kill her. Emily’s last stop is at a real estate office and she makes Lorelai come inside with her. A woman shows them pictures of a house, and Emily tells Lorelai the house will be a wedding present for her and Luke. Lorelai starts crying and says she doesn’t think she’s ever getting married. She’s really depressed, so she goes to Jackson’s and Sookie’s to spend the night there.

Lorelai: There’s no one else?

Emily: I don’t remember being in labor for fourteen hours with anyone else.

Also in this episode: The town troubadour has been discovered by a tour manager. He’s going to be opening for Neil Young for a bunch of east coast dates.

Lorelai is going through all her video tapes and she finds Riding the Bus with My Sister. She tells Luke it’s the kind of movie she and Rory would watch together. She comes across the tape the next day and actually calls Rory’s cell phone number, only to find it’s been disconnected.

Emily is stuck in Helsinki and isn’t going to have time to host some DAR mixer. She calls Rory and asks her to do it. She does her bangs in some horrible sidesweep and walks around socializing with everyone. I hate DAR Rory. Logan shows up looking all depressed and he’s really standoffish when Rory introduces him to the ladies. Rory takes him into the kitchen and asks him what’s wrong. He’s not talking, he just says he’s not in the mood for a party. Rory tells him to go wait for her in the pool house and she’ll be along when the party is over. When Rory gets to the pool house, Logan is hanging out with Colin, Finn and the milkmaid Colin fell in love with in Holland.

Sookie is pissed that Jackson’s mother wants the babies to be baptized and she really doesn’t want family members staying at the house. Lorelai suggests they stay at the Dragonfly. Cousin Roon has told Jackson’s brother, Beau, that Lorelai is a nymphomaniac, so he comes in all gross and flirty. He even licks his key at her. It’s really gross.

Sookie comes to Luke with a cake topper she found and asks him when he and Lorelai are getting married. He reminds her they’re not setting a date until Lorelai and Rory are talking again. Sookie’s sick of this, so she asks Lorelai to be Martha’s godmother and Rory to be Davie’s godmother.

The day of the baptism, Rory and Lorelai each wake up and have sickeningly similar conversations with Logan and Luke, each holding up two dresses and saying, “Which one goes better with a baby?” Rory gets to Stars Hollow early and goes to hang out with Lane for a while.  Lane convinces her she and Lorelai will make up soon, and then Rory goes to the church and starts walking up to Lorelai. The reverend comes by and asks if he can talk to them. Rory starts to tell him to hold on, but Lorelai says sure and walks inside. The reverend asks them about their religious affiliations, but they have no idea what to say.

In the middle of the baptism, Lorelai suddenly starts loud-whispering to Rory, asking her how Sookie got in touch with her and why she changed her number. She actually tells the reverend to hold on and takes Rory outside and starts yelling. Rory says she just lost her phone and got a new number. Before she goes home, she offers to give Lorelai her new number. Lorelai is kind of bitchy and basically says she doesn’t want it.

Rory calls Logan on her way home and he tells her he had a talk with his father. Mitchum wants Logan to graduate this year and get his act together and start getting ready to take on the family business. Logan tells Rory to meet him at the airport because he wants to get out of town for the weekend.

Also in this episode: Lane comes home from work to find the boys have used all the tour money to buy a bunch of recording equipment.

Kirk: This is the suit they buried my dad in.

Lorelai is trying to get a permit for two extra parking spaces for the inn, but Taylor keeps rejecting her applications. Taylor is also going after Jackson for the greenhouse he recently had built because it’s too close to the edge of his property. Jackson goes crazy and decides he’s going to run against Taylor in the upcoming election for town selectman. It’s kind of a weird thing because nobody ever runs against Taylor. Lorelai and Sookie set up their campaign table at Luke’s.

Dean and Rory are supposed to hang out, but he calls and says Lindsay has the car and he can’t get there. Rory drives to Stars Hollow to hang out at his house. It’s nice to see his sister, Clara, again, but Dean’s mom is kind of bitchy and disapproving. She makes Dean leave the door open while he and Rory are in his room and oh man do I not miss hanging out with my high school boyfriends in their rooms at their parents’ houses. The next time they get together, they make out in Rory’s car, which is problematic for Dean since he’s about ten feet tall. Rory asks Dean to go to Jackson’s rally with her, but he yells at her for even suggesting such a thing because he doesn’t want to flaunt the relationship all over town and rub Lindsay’s nose in it.

Lorelai asks Lane’s band to play at a rally for Jackson, and now I’m quite sure the writers of this show have never known anyone in a band. The voting starts, and Lane’s band is just then given a tape of the song Jackson wants them to play. They’ve never heard it before, but they’re going to go on and play it in like five minutes. Kirk has been polling, and he says everyone in town plans to vote for Jackson. Lorelai is happy, but then she looks through the window in the diner and sees Taylor sitting by himself in the dark in his soda shoppe. She thinks it’s sad.

Jackson gets on stage and says he has no idea why he’s running for selectman. He already has a job and not a lot of time and he doesn’t want to be selectman. The crowd just loves him more for being an honest man and of course he wins. Only ten people vote for Taylor, most of them because Lorelai asked them to.

After the rally, Zack brings a couple of tramps back to the apartment. Lane hasn’t told Zack she likes him because she’s worried it will break up the band, but she just can’t stand to see him with these girls so she tells him she likes him and then goes to her room. Zack goes outside to think about things.

Dean comes up to Rory at the rally and apologizes for yelling the other night. He says he worked things out with his car and talked to his mom so things are going to be better. Rory asks if Dean would have left Lindsay if she hadn’t found her letter. Dean kind of does that weird grin of his and says yes, of course he would have left her.

Rory: You do not harass the voters. This is not Florida.

Lorelai: Kirk, sit down.

Kirk: Can’t. These aren’t my pants.

Also in this episode, Asher has left Paris a printing press and she puts it in the common room.

Lane’s band is looking for a new guitarist and it’s not going well because everyone who shows up sucks. A guy named Gil comes to audition and he’s totally awesome, but Zack and Brian aren’t sure about him because he’s old. Lane goes to tell him he’s not in the band, but he seems so disappointed that she tells him he’s in.

Sookie and Jackson have decided to have the baby at home and they give Lorelai a baby pager so she can be there for the birth. Jackson’s brother Beau is in town for the baby’s arrival, but the baby is late and Beau gets annoyed that he has to keep changing his flight home. Sookie and Jackson have hired a midwife who is really scary and intimidating. She doesn’t like Lorelai because she thinks she’s anti-midwife.

The Festival of Living Pictures is coming to Stars Hollow and everyone is excited. Kirk is so happy to be assigned as Christ, but he takes it a little too seriously and acts like the troubadour is his mortal enemy because he’s going to be Judas. Lorelai is upset when she’s not the Renoir girl, but Taylor says it’s because she flinched last time. He wants Rory to be in one of the paintings, and she says she’ll only do it if Lorelai can be Renoir girl.

Half of the table for the Last Supper is missing and Taylor gets discouraged and wants to cancel the festival. Kirk, dressed as Jesus to help get him into character, starts preaching and convinces everyone to go ahead with the festival.

Sookie comes over to Lorelai’s at one in the morning. She’s totally freaking out because the baby is so late. Lorelai calms her down by showing her a box full of stuff from the night Rory was born.

Lorelai manages not to flinch during the festival, but her baby pager goes off while she’s on stage. She keeps it together until the curtain closes, and then she runs off to Sookie’s.

Nicole comes to the diner and tells Luke she wants to postpone the divorce and date for a while.

Miss Patty: Have a cigarette.

Taylor: I don’t smoke.

Miss Patty: Could you start?

Other notes: The Festival of Living Pictures is based on The Pageant of the Masters. Here are some pictures of the Gilmore Girls’ version of it. It seems like a really cool thing to see:

The girls are back from their European trip. Rory has a week before school starts, and she and Lorelai have every minute planned. The first day back is for handing out presents from Europe, so they put all the gifts in their backpacks and hit the streets. They pass Luke yelling at Taylor for putting in a window between his soda shoppe and the diner, and it reminds them they didn’t get him anything. Lorelai gets some jam from Jackson and makes a label to go on the jar so it looks like it came from France or something. Luke knows it’s fake, but he’s a good sport about it.

Sookie is getting very pregnant, but Jackson doesn’t want to know the sex of the baby. He’s even had buttons made so that nobody tells him. Rory takes a button, but Lorelai wants to know. Sookie takes her outside to the shed, where she’s keeping all the baby stuff. Everything is blue.

Walking down the street, Rory passes Kirk putting up posters with her picture on them. Apparently, Taylor has proclaimed her the “ice cream queen” as part of his campaign to get people excited about the imminent opening of his soda shoppe. He’s deeply offended when she says she can’t do it and tries to guilt her.

Rory opens the mail and freaks out when she realizes she wrote down the wrong date for Yale. She’s starting school in two days. She has a ton of things to do to get ready, so Lorelai, who is super happy she’s not required at Friday night dinner, offers to take care of it while Rory is at the grandparents’ house. Emily is annoyed that Lorelai isn’t there, so she manipulates Rory into staying all night to watch hours of videos of ballroom dancing competitions. Rory calls Lorelai and asks her to come rescue her. Lorelai and Emily start arguing, but then Lorelai’s jet lag catches up to her and she starts laughing uncontrollably. She ends up sticking around, and Emily falls asleep in her chair.

Luke is being weird about his cruise with Nicole and won’t talk about it at all. He finally tells Lorelai he and Nicole got swept up in the romance of it all and got married, but now they’re getting a divorce.

Luke, about his marriage: We tried to ignore it for a while, you know, went snorkeling.

Luke has new menus. Nicole said there wasn’t very much for her to eat, so he added some salads and got rid of some sandwiches nobody ever ordered. Lorelai, Rory and Lane give him trouble about it.

There’s a speech writing contest at Chilton and the winner will get to read his or her speech on C-SPAN. Rory doesn’t really feel like entering, but after Paris baits her a little, she decides she wants to crush her. Nerdy Brad is back. He’s been in a Broadway production of “Into the Woods” and now he’s returned with even more self-confidence than before. Paris still manages to scare him. Headmaster Charleston can’t decide if he likes Paris’ or Rory’s speech better, so he tells them it’s a tie and makes them merge their speeches together.

Sookie is making terrible food at the inn and getting complaints from guests. She thinks everyone is just crazy, but Lorelai tastes the food and says it really is bad. Sookie and Lorelai realize she must be pregnant. When Sookie tells Jackson, he immediately gets out the calculator and starts freaking out about preparing for the baby.

Rory and Paris decide to work on their speech over the phone, but then Paris shows up at Rory’s house. They work on their speech for about two minutes, and then suddenly Paris says she and Jamie had sex. She apologizes for letting Francie mess things up and then asks what Rory thinks about the sex thing. Lorelai comes home and overhears the conversation. When she hears Rory say she’s never had sex, she gets a really sickening smile on her face and actually says to herself, “I’ve got the good kid.” Fuck off, Lorelai.

Lorelai runs into Max at a drugstore in Hartford. He’s been teaching in California, but he’s back now. He and Lorelai actually have a nice conversation. She sees him at Chilton later when she goes to watch Rory’s speech. She tries to apologize for the way she treated him before, but Max says he’s fine, he’s over it. Then they kiss later in the coatroom. That kind of came out of nowhere.

Paris is late getting to Chilton for the speech, and when she finally does show up, her hair is a mess and she seems to be wearing pajamas. She walks like a zombie up to the podium when it’s time to go on, and doesn’t say anything while Rory does both parts of the speech for a minute. Then she suddenly starts ranting about Chilton and how she thought it was going to be so good for her. She pulls a small envelope out of her pocket and says it’s her rejection from Harvard. She goes crazy, talking about how she had sex so now she’s not allowed to go to Harvard. Rory starts to pull her off the stage and Paris tells the audience that Rory’s a virgin so Harvard probably loves her. Rory gets Paris to a quiet place and lets her cry on her shoulder.

When Lorelai and Rory get home, they find acceptances from Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

Paris: Why’d you use this font?

Rory: Because I was on the crack.

Paris: Pack your chastity belt, Gilmore. You’re going to Harvard.

Other notes:

• The promos for this episode were the most ridiculous display of misdirection I’ve ever seen. They showed Lorelai listening outside Rory’s door when she and Paris were talking about sex. The voice over said, “A mother will be crushed,” and the dialog was edited to have Rory say, “It was just time.”
• The actor who played Brad, Adam Wylie, actually debuted on Broadway in a production of “Into the Woods” in May 2002.

One of Emily’s many former maids is suing her for wrongful termination. Lorelai is asked to give a deposition, and Emily is angry when she gets the transcript and finds out Lorelai made her sound like some kind of tyrant.

Lorelai and Sookie take a course in running an inn. They run into a couple guys at the coffee and cookie table. One of them, Joe, is an old friend of Sookie’s. They went to culinary school together. While they reminisce about old times, Lorelai chats with Joe’s friend, Alex. Joe comes to the inn the next day to ask Sookie out. He’s liked her for ten years. Sookie freaks out, wondering if she accidentally flirted with him. Lorelai assures her that she didn’t. Sookie is nervous about telling Joe she’s married because she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings, but he takes the news well. Sookie still feels guilty because she thinks she led Joe on, so she goes home and makes Jackson all his favorite foods for dinner. Jackson is convinced Sookie cheated on him. Later, Alex calls Lorelai and asks her out.

Francie sends Rory a note telling her she wants to talk. Ugh, I hate Francie. They meet in a parking garage somewhere and Francie says she wants to call a truce. The next day, she gives Paris a manila envelope she says she found in her locker. Inside are pictures of Francie and Rory shaking hands. Francie claims Rory came to her and said Paris was too distracted by her boyfriend to be a good student council president.

Paris totally freaks out on Rory during a fencing class and says she can’t believe she ever considered Rory her best friend. To her credit, Paris knows she’s being manipulated and isn’t too concerned with that. What upsets her is that she specifically asked Rory not to tell anyone about Jamie. She doesn’t know Francie overheard a conversation about him and that Rory never told anyone. That night, Rory tells Lorelai she can’t believe Paris thought they were best friends. At lunch the next day, Paris, Madeline and Louise make a point of not sitting with Rory.

Paris: Don’t make that face at me.

Rory: What face? I’m wearing a mask.

Paris: The “I’m Rory, don’t you want to pet me” face.

Emily comes to the inn because she hasn’t seen or heard from Lorelai since the trip to Yale. She wants Lorelai and Rory to come to Thanksgiving dinner and she absolutely will not take no for an answer. This means the girls will have four Thanksgivings to go to. They talk about it and decide Luke’s is the only one they can skip, but he looks really disappointed when they tell him. They don’t want to hurt his feelings, so Lorelai pretends she just called someone and found out they can make it after all. Luke looks happy.

Jess kisses Rory in front of the market and Rory tells him she doesn’t want to flaunt their relationship. Lorelai goes to the market and runs into Dean. He tries to avoid her, but she tells him she still likes him and doesn’t want things to be awkward between them just because he and Rory broke up.

Thanksgiving #1 – The Kim House

Dave Rygalski is at the Kims’ Thanksgiving, masquerading as a Christian guitar player. It’s all part of their plan to make Mrs. Kim fall in love with him so that when Lane says she wants to date him, Mrs. Kim will approve. The girls take some tofurkey, planning to discretely put it into their napkins, but Mrs. Kim never takes her eyes off them so they have to actually eat it.

Thanksgiving #2 – Sookie and Jackson

Sookie agreed to let Jackson cook the turkey, and now she’s horrified that he’s going to deep fry it. She’s well on her way to being drunk when the Girls get there.

Thanksgiving #3 – Luke’s Diner

The girls sit with Luke and Jess, and Luke is embarrassed when Jess mentions that he wanted to wait for them before they started eating. Per Rory’s request to tone down the public displays of affection, Jess kisses Rory on the cheek when she comes in. Babette and Lorelai tell her that was a totally lame kiss.

Thanksgiving #4 - The Gilmore House

Emily and Richard have a couple from France joining them for Thanksgiving. Lorelai scandalizes her parents when she recites some lyrics from Lady Marmalade to them. Luckily, the guests have heard the song and think it’s funny. At the dinner table, the other guests start asking Rory what schools she’s applied to. Apparently, Lorelai thought she was just applying to Harvard, because when Rory mentions Yale, Lorelai goes crazy. She makes a scene and blames the whole thing on her parents.

Also in this episode: Jess runs into Dean while he’s taking out the trash. Dean’s looking for a fight, but Jess isn’t interested. Kirk has gotten a cat who hates him. Lane sneaks outside after Dave leaves. He meets her in the yard and Lane gets her first kiss.

Rory, about Kirk: He’s always been a cat person, he just never had a cat.