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In ‘Lorelai Out of Water‘, Lorelai has lied to Alex and told him she loves fishing – because she likes him. When Luke sees Lorelai reading up on fishing, he offers to help her learn. As a good friend would. However, it’s not until Luke is actually teaching Lorelai how to fish that it comes out that it’s all for a date with another guy.
At this, Luke’s face falls. Of course he was misled. However, after asking which “date number it was”, and recovering a bit, he gets back to being a good friend.
However, Luke has made a decision after this. The lawyer who was flirting with him earlier, Nicole, he asks her out to dinner. She says yes! So, has Luke pulled a Jess - has he moved on to someone other than Lorelai – no matter who – simply because he needs to move on? Or is he trying to make her jealous too?
Watch this episode of Gilmore Girls on TheWB.com here.
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296 days ago
I don’t really think Luke is “pulling a Jess” exactly but he’s clearly trying to distract himself from Lorelai. But whereas Jess was just using Shane to get back at Rory for not being with him, I always thought Luke was trying to legitimately stop waiting around for Lorelai. I mean, it didn’t really work for a variety but at least in the beginning I think he was trying to be fully involved. On a side note: I liked that Nicole was around since it gave us a chance to see that Luke could be a decent boyfriend (going to musicals that he clearly didn’t like because his date did, meeting her parents, going on cruises, etc.) so it wasn’t so weird when he was romantic with Lorelai more than a season later.
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296 days ago
Luke is not pulling a Jess. Hes waitting for Lorelai to make a decision even if its a decesion Luke don’t like. As for Jess I thought he needed to grow up and stop being a little boy who runs away when stuff gets complicated. Luke and Loreali belongs together. He felt it in his quts and she knew it too. But Jess ans Luke needs to understand that no matter how much Rory and Lorelai are together no one can tare them apart.
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296 days ago
If that means acting like Jess to make Lorelai jealous, I cannot see any basis for that in the writing. The greatness of Luke is his integrity, doing what he thinks is right, even if he sometimes acts badly when he gets his feelings hurt. From the very first episodes, speaking his mind about what he sees is corrupt or wasteful to all the things he does for Lorelai, Rory, and Jess, he has integrity.
To make him the kind of man who would use Nicole just to make Lorelai jealous is not fair to his character. As he says later, he was genuinely attracted to Nicole and knew that they were a match, that they would work in his mind and he didn’t need to really “date” to prove it. It was a gut feeling.
The show presented Luke as a man with a very sad side, until this point it seems he is a man with no-self esteem and really anti-social. He pouts all through the first two seasons when Lorelai is single — but only when she occasionally dates someone else, and we get the picture Luke has been acting this way for a while. It is well-established that Lorelai never dates anyone more than a couple of months, so he has had many opportunities to ask her out, but he does not. He just pouts. Even when she dates a young guy from business class — and he ridicules her for that — Sookie tries to build sympathy for him as if she’ll date anyone but him, even though he never asks!
What explanation there is for this behavior is hard to imagine, and choosing to date Nicole even makes it more complicated. He’s awkward, yes, but not incapable of asking a woman to date. Of course, Ryan and I have disagreed about how decent a boyfriend he is (or maybe husband), but I think Ryan is right that at this point, Luke is his most attractive and charming. He has amusing breakdowns over Jess during the relationship and it goes terribly wrong, but he cleans up very nicely and knows how to treat Nicole at least when he is romancing her.
Maybe he doesn’t want to be one of Lorelai’s many 2-month boyfriends, or just doesn’t understand her. Here she’s dating someone who fishes. He thought he wasn’t her type or he couldn’t keep up, so it’s just a breaking point for him. It proves he’s not a complete sad-case, just bemused by Lorelai.
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296 days ago
Well, unlike Jess with Shane, Luke never tried anything to make Lorelai jealous of him and Nicole’s relationship. In fact, when Lorelai does start to show a sort of jealousy when she finds out Luke has moved in with Nicole, Luke seems to be pretty oblivious. Jess and Luke are just constantly giving each other shit, which is what Jess was doing to cause Luke to even approach Nicole. Maybe he just realized he needed a woman to take his mind off of Lorelai and her pre-existing relationship. I mean, it’s not as if everyone didn’t already know that Luke and Lorelai were meant to be together and would eventually find their way to each other.
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296 days ago
I don’t know why everyone keeps saying Luke and Lorelai would of course eventually be together, and would use people like Nicole just to advance that goal, unless of course we just mean it’s bad writing that telegraphs the ending so blatantly we of course know how it’s going to turn out and assume they do, so we start trying to make up ridiculous reasons for the rest of their behavior.
As someone said on another post somewhere (mcityrk? isha? marie? help me out), if you look at the movies that Amy highlighted in the series that she considers perfect, like Casablanca and The Way We Were, the two leads did not end up together. And as was said elsewhere, she didn’t promise they would end up together when Season 5 started. And look what she did in Season 5 and 6: Amy had Luke and Lorelai break up twice, the first based on an overreaction, and the second time in a way that shows real lack of regard for each other’s feelings at best. And at worst, makes it look, as Arieanna suggests in this post, that they do these kind of things to get to each other (Luke dating Nicole to make Lorelai jealous? Lorelai sleeping with Chris while engaged to Luke just because she could do it, and then to tell Luke about it to make a point?)
If that’s what people are saying, or rationalizing as romantic, do we really think this kind of behavior is how two people we admire should behave, or do we think these are just two “flawed” people who use others just deserve each other? I think as Ryan and Marie say, Luke dated Nicole because he wanted to, and when given a chance, could be a good boyfriend. (And maybe Lorelai slept with Chris for the same reason, because she wanted him.). It may spoil some people’s fantasies, but it makes them less manipulative and mean as characters.
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296 days ago
hmm well i have to say i didnt really get the luke and lorelai are meant to be thing either. i loved them before they got together, all the spark and banter and tension, but as a couple it was all a bit strange – and the way they finally got together was almost an anticlimax, it happened so quickly (esp compared to rory and jess’ entire season worth of steady buildup). and those breakups were really almost absurdly childish for people who were meant to love each other. so given that, i do agree with the others that lorelai and luke seemed to genuinely be looking at other options – luke obviously had real feelings for nicole, he married her after all! and same goes for lor – she married chris, these were not fleeting romances. i am v glad they ended up together though – as much as i love ASP’s work, i dont think she had created a show which could pull off a Casablanca/the way we were type ending without upsetting its entire audience – a VERY big ask for tv shows which run for years and people invest in for so long. hence the continuing angst for all us jess/rory fans, it really seems unbelievable that they weren’t bought back together in the end. i guess rory logan fans feel the same.
anyway, i think the main thing luke and jess had in common was v poor communication skills! i think jess needed a distraction and frankly i dont blame him for finding a pash buddy while rory was tossing up about who she wanted at the expense of both boys. while luke was genuinely looking around because although he had a crush on lorelai it didnt seem to be happening naturally so onwards and upwards….
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296 days ago
@ isha
Well, maybe it’s not ASP’s writing inadequacies that reflect her inability to pull of a Casablanca, but, as you say, the expectations of the viewers. People who love that film, or The Way We Were, are not happy with the endings. That’s the point. I think they just get it and aren’t expecting TV to satisfy all of their fantasies, and are more appreciative not only for the enjoyment of the rest of the story that got them to the bittersweet or sad ending, but whatever story the writer was trying to tell. And even when the writers of those stories were not doing morality plays, people take lessons from them and try to make the happy endings in their own lives. (I know at least a few people who have said they broke up with some people because they didn’t want to date a Hubbell!)
As much as Amy and Dan always said they didn’t want morals to their stories, they did show Jess being broken and learning from his mistakes and apparently wanted him to come back, probably for more of that storyline. (I think Milo just didn’t want to go back and made this clear.) So maybe they would have given Rory-Jess fans that ending.
But I think Amy DID have it in her to finish the story with Luke and Lorelai broken up. First and foremost, the show is about the “Gilmore Girls”, Lorelai and Rory. I think that’s what the show celebrates is even when other relationships fail, when you have a good parent-child relationship, that can give you enough joy. Sure that “season of infamy” didn’t reflect well on the Palladinos writing skills, but I’d like to think they had it in them.
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295 days ago
i didnt mean that ASP’s writing skills were under par, more that the nature of the luke/lorelai breakup didnt have the ‘inevitable’ feeling about it that those great sad love stories had, that the lovers were staying apart because of some reason/deep incompatibility bigger than their love for each other – it felt to me more like everyone needed to grow up and calm down a bit, which i believe in the end they did (and i think would have continued being the case in season 8…sigh). there is great skill in writing that sympathetically and it is a credit to Amy and Dan’s writing that so many people feel that L/L belong together in spite of what appeared to be a bit of self sabotage.
i totally agree re people not expecting tv to fulfil fantasies – in my mind a bittersweet love story can be infinitely more moving that a happy ending because it echoes real life with all its madness. that said, for me personally GG was escapism in a way and although there were many subtle moral tales going on, ultimately in this case the happy ending felt more in context with the whole feeling of the show. i guess they did a mixed bag in the end – happy for luke/lor, sad for rory/jess/logan, bittersweet for rory and lor about to be separated indefinitely. i really really want that movie – am so curious about what Amy’s vision had been for the ending, i’m sure whatever she did would be done with class and genuine emotion. wow long post..time to stop!
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295 days ago
I found something interesting from 2004:
http://www.gilmoregirls.org/news/355.html
(Read the last paragraph) Apparently getting Luke and Lorelai together was in the plan which isn’t surprising since it made sense with the feel of the show (good point on that one Isha). I mean, seriously, anyone watching the show knew that was in the plan and I really give Palladino alot of credit for not letting them get together for four whole seasons. I mean, what other show does that!?
On a different note, EVERY other show finds some contrived reason to break up the show’s power couple for the sake of keeping viewers pissy and watching which unfortunately Gilmore Girls did as well. I personally think it would have been more in line with the show’s feel to just let Lorelai and Luke stay together after the Season 4 finale and watched them realistically deal with what happens after you find your “happily ever after” instead of adding in some random kid as a plot device to break them up. Or at least they should have made the break up more realistic because both of the characters (especially Lorelai) had more than enough emotional baggage to warrant a realistic break.
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295 days ago
@ Isha
Well I think they did set it up that way, if you go back to the first five seasons. They just never followed through. The idea that a woman like Lorelai who gave up her career to raise a child and whose future is on the rise, courted to go around the world, would want to settled down forever and start popping out babies in a small town while the most important person in the world to her is traveling around the world as a foreign correspondent is hard to take. The more logical arc for this AMAZING woman is to finally be the world-traveler that she was destined to be, doing what she does best, and able to meet up with her daughter in exciting places around the world (As if Stars Hollow is all there is? Come on.) And if a guy she’s fallen for wants to be “buried in that diner” as Sookie said — there’s yours setup for the incompatibility. Once the Durham Group storyline got dropped and Rory’s foreign correspondent future was substantively thrown out, there went the essentials … hey, maybe it was the Palladinos’ writing skills after all!
Of course, as Lauren said in one of her last interviews about the film, the problem with the idea is people really don’t go back after bad breakups (two of them). And I know if my fiance slept with someone she can’t seem to get over while we were engaged, I don’t think most people could ever get over that.
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295 days ago
Thanks for that article ryan, v interesting. i agree with you that keeping them together and exploring the relationship more fully or, if they had to break up, making it for a real reason would have maybe been a more original and rewarding storyline through the later seasons, but who knows? maybe it would have taken away from the central rory/lor r/ship, but i think it could have been done well anyway.
@josh, you’re right, that set up with the durham group definitely had a scarily real feeling to it, also with dean/rory foreshadowing a similar incompatibility. wonder why that one got kind of sidestepped – it would have been a more believable and heartwrenching reason to break up, and even if not permanent, it would have been rewarding to see them overcome the obstacle (in reality, if there was deep love there, someone would compromise, probably luke in this case because lor as you say really can do more and deserves better than a limited life). i couldnt agree more that very few people would be able to move past what lor did – on a smaller scale i found it similarly startling that rory forgave logan so readily for his ‘cheating’ – actually sleeping with someone else is serious stuff.
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295 days ago
@Ryan, I do think you have to put what she said in context:
She told a national press junket she didn’t believe in the break-up-to-make-up stuff on other TV series, and was also not promising that Luke and Lorelai would end up together:
From the wires (this one from the Deseret Morning News, Feb 2005):
“While the producer promises that the Luke-and-Lorelai relationship won’t devolve into a break-up-to-make-up cycle , that doesn’t mean there won’t be challenges. Like in Tuesday’s 100th episode of the series (7 p.m., Ch. 30), when Christopher, the father of Lorelai’s daughter, gets between the two. And Sherman-Palladino isn’t promising that the new relationship will last forever.
“Luke and Lorelai could split up over many reasons that wouldn’t be Christopher,” she said. “Luke and Lorelai are very independent people who have built very, very separate lives. Part of the interesting thing about getting them together was not just that they would make a handsome couple, which they do, but it’s the fact that you’ve got this woman who’s done it all her whole life by herself. . . . You’ve got a man who’s done the same thing. And both of them have their lives the way they like it.
“When you’ve got two people who try to mesh those two lives, that conflict is going to come.”
* * * *
And when she said she had planned it and definitely anticipated a love-connection, she also said she thought she could get “a season of stories” out of it. This is what she told Time Magazine (Feb 2005):
We had this Luke-and-Lorelai thing in our back pocket; it was just a matter of when we wanted to do it. We were like, “Do we just take them to a kiss?” But I was like, “That’s bulls—. We can’t have them kiss and say it was a mistake.” The fear was we’d put them together and all of a sudden it’s “You’re pretty,” “No, you’re pretty,” and there’s no conflict anymore. But I thought if you just keep Luke and Lorelai [like] Luke and Lorelai, there will still be conflict. Once I saw a season of stories I said, “What are we waiting for?”
* * * *
So is it a surprise she barely got a year of a happy relationship out of the two of them?
And when she promised there would be reasons other than Christopher to break up the relationship, you have to wonder if she had April in mind then, but as you say, Ryan, it should have been a lot more of what she promised — about Luke and Lorelai’s baggage.
As for the no break-up-to-make-up cycle, well, she broke them up, got them together, broke them up… so what can we really take out of what she said?
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293 days ago
Thanks, Ryan and Josh, these quotes are very interesting.
I remember reading at the time, when I was there and the show was running, that Season 4 was under much criticism for the show not working without Rory and Lorelai living together, and that the Luke-Lorelai romance gave them a burst of high scoring with audiences.
Taking these quotes all together, one does wonder if Amy Palladino did not want to have several breakups and a believable reunion and future for the characters and did it for a season of stories, and had some bittersweet idea about the girls staying together always despite breakups with men as her overall story idea.
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