Gilmore Girls’ Thanksgiving Episode Highlights A Harsh Reality About Lorelai

While Gilmore Girls was sometimes guilty of glamorizing the flawed relationship between Lorelai and Rory, the show’s Thanksgiving episode highlighted what happened when Lorelai’s approach to parenting broke down. The entire cast of Gilmore Girls was interesting on their own merits, but there was a reason the show’s creators chose the title. The series was about the thorny, complex relationships between three generations of women in the Gilmore family, first and foremost. This was why Logan left Gilmore Girls before the series finale, as this gave the show’s last episode a chance to focus on Lorelai and Rory’s relationship with each other.

Similarly, numerous Lorelai love interests seemingly faded away without explanation over the years, from Digger to Alex Lesman, and this was usually due to Rory taking precedence in her life. As proven by the Gilmore Girls revival A Year in the Life, Rory and Lorelai had a very different relationship to that of Lorelai and her mother, Emily. Emily was a classic disciplinarian who still told her daughter how to behave well into adulthood, resulting in Lorelai’s rebellious streak. In contrast, Lorelai saw herself as Rory’s peer and equal. This seemingly superior dynamic resulted in problems of its own on occasion.

Lorelai’s Issues With Rory’s Yale Application Prove Her Biggest Gilmore Girls Problem

Lorelai’s Rejection Of Her Parents Impacted Rory’s Future

In season 3, episode 9, “A Deep-Fried Korean Thanksgiving,” the Gilmore family’s Thanksgiving dinner proves that Lorelai’s parenting can be fairly flawed. When Lorelai blows up at Rory for failing to inform her that she was applying to Yale as well as Harvard, she proves that she sometimes puts Rory’s interests aside to focus on feuding with her parents. Lorelai might not have realized how unrealistic and counterproductive it would have been for Rory to apply to Harvard and nowhere else, but her anger over Rory’s interest in Yale is explicitly rooted in her family’s approval of the college.

Lorelai fails to focus on what would be best for Rory, instead angrily berating her parents for pushing what she views as their agenda. In the process, Gilmore Girls’ heroine Lorelai proved that her own baggage around her past decisions haunted her attempts to steer Rory in the right direction. The sensible choice for Rory would be to apply to every college that she was interested in attending, considering how selective Harvard admissions are. Moreover, Rory still needed to decide for herself which college even appealed to her. Her mother was only concerned about what Rory said as a child.

Lorelai’s Problems With Her Parents Shape Rory’s Gilmore Girls Story

Rory Was Often Caught In The Crossfire Of Intergenerational Squabbles

Lorelai insisted that Rory only ever wanted to go to Harvard, but this ignored the reality that Rory didn’t know much about higher education as a child and her horizons had broadened over the years. Not only that, but applying to safety schools was simply common sense even if she was only interested in Harvard. Rory’s A Year in the Life story proved that she never really knew what she wanted, and Lorelai using her as a pawn when fighting with her parents is partially to blame. This unhelpful dynamic helped shape the Gilmore Girls heroine’s sense of self.

Cast

Lauren Graham , Scott Patterson , Sean Gunn , Keiko Agena , Matt Czuchry , Alexis Bledel , Yanic Truesdale , Kelly Bishop , Melissa McCarthy , Edward Herrmann , Liza Weil , Jared Padalecki , Milo Ventimiglia

Release Date

October 5, 2000

Seasons

7