Gilmore Girls: 'Fight Face' (6x02)

This week's episode wasn't as strong as last week's brilliant opener, but that's to be expected. Last week was all about revelations about the characters' emotional states, and now we get to spend a bit more time playing around in this new status quo.

I really like the fact that we still haven't gotten an easy resolution to the Lorelai/Rory feud. I think it seems a bit artificial, these two have been so close, would Lorelai really shut her out so fully, but you have to keep in mind the fact that she's very self conscious of what she's doing. She's trying to shut Rory out so much that she has no choice but to apologize. It's putting the onus of responsibility on her. So, that's why it makes sense, even though it creates behavior that seems to be unnatural or out of character. Lorelai even seems to have some problems staying 'in character' for her mission, under this constant pressure to just let Rory back in. And I think it's clear that Rory feels quite hurt by the fact that Lorelai seems to have so thoroughly rejected her. It's inexplicable.

On the episode's plot specifics. I really liked Rory's storyline, putting her in this emotionally dazed state, with no one to really connect to emotionally. She speaks to the maid and the maid gets fired. Her aggression comes out when she, for no apparent reason, gets in a fight with one of her fellow community servers. I think she's got a ton of pent up frustration and none of her usual methods for venting are there, so she lashes out there as frustration at her life builds up. It could be construed as out of character behavior, the Rory of years earlier certainly wouldn't do that, but that's the whole point of the storyline, she's changed and has to reject the life she had in order to grow, and ultimately come back to it.

And Emily's prison ettiquete speech was hilarious. I loved her giving Rory a pack of cigarettes to use as currency. It's a nice job of using a scenario for both dramatic and comic purposes.

The TJ/Luke stuff was ok, it falls into the 'wacky antics' segment of the show, and since most of the townspeople were missing, it fell on TJ to pick up the slack. I guess that's an example of where a show has elements that I don't really like, but are neccesary just because they're part of the show's package. Buffy always had to fight something, and there's always got to be some wacky small town stuff on Gilmore Girls, but in both cases, I think it takes away from the more important character stuff.

I'm not a big fan of the dog storyline, though there were some good laughs out of it, so it wasn't all bad. I like the way Luke and Lorelai are able to argue, but not have things get out of hand and hurt the overall relationship because of one petty thing.

The best two scenes this week were Rory in Luke's, very awkward and sad at the end, and the final scene with Lorelai confronting Rory on the side of the road. It's interesting that the first two episodes of this season have ended abruptly on uncertain emotional footing.

So, it's not the greatest episode, but there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on, and I really like the direction the plots are going. Hopefully next week we'll see Lane and her band, they're the only reliably strong characters outside of the Gilmores and Luke.