AllyB

Stan and Oleg worked together to form a very elaborate trap. Stan allowed Oleg to get into Zenaida's hotel room and threaten her, pretending to be a KGB agent who was unhappy with her constantly denouncing the USSR. If things had gone easily they hoped she'd crack and tell the KGB agent that she was also KGB but she held her cover. However, she reported back to the KGB that through some sort of miscommunication, a KGB agent had been sent after her. So Rezidentura agents were called to a meeting and told to make sure they and their agents only ran operations approved of by the Rezidentura. Once Oleg had that order it was a simple deduction that the reasoning behind it was to stop KGB agents from threatening Zenaida and that she was still active for the KGB. Stan secretly taped Oleg telling him that Zenaida was KGB in the hopes of eventually being able to turn him into an FBI asset similar to what he thought he had in Nina. And in reality this was also a carrot/stick to the FBI to try and make sure they secured Nina's release. Ie, release Nina and we can secure an asset in the Rezidentura. So it was obvious to Gaad that Stan's loyalty was at least as much to Nina as it was to the FBI. And Gaad (and Aderholt) thinks Stan is a fool for trusting her as he has serious doubts about Nina's motivations and whether or not she was the 'good woman' Stan thinks she is. What could bite Stan in the ass with the Russians though is that Oleg is listening to the Mail Robot tapes and is bound to eventually hear this conversation with Stan and Aderholt from ep 3:12; Aderholt: I have a few more questions about Nina. Beeman: What is with you? Aderholt: I don’t know, Stan. There was something going on with you and Nina. That much is clear to me. Stan: What are you accusing me of? Aderholt: Did you plant the bug? Stan: No. And you are not as smart as you look. You read all those files. Let’s say the woman I shot didn’t actually die. Maybe she’s the one who beat the shit out of you and Gaad. Maybe she even killed my partner, Chris Amador. Our office is a target of The Illegals. The best, most dangerous officers the KGB has. Now they got to somebody inside, and it wasn’t me. Work on that. All said by a hallway as the mail robot was heard passing. So Oleg will likely soon know that Stan is under suspicion in the FBI because of his relationship with Nina. And that Stan actually has great instincts, which would make him extremely dangerous to Directorate S agents if he was respected on his team. Couple that with his powerlessness based on how he couldn't come through on his promise to save Nina (and possibly Oleg will find out by then that Nina is fairly safe). I can see the KGB further attempting to work Stan into an asset while he tries to work Oleg, with both thinking they have the upper hand. And perhaps once they know that Stan's feelings for Nina can still be used against him, she will be sent back? Though I could also see Nina never setting foot outside of the USSR for as long as it exists/or the rest of her life, whichever is shorter.

It's because he secretly worked with Oleg to prove Zenaida was KGB. He also worked Oleg with a view to being able to blackmail him into becoming a KGB asset. All with an ultimate plan to bring Nina back to America. From Gaad's point of view his agent secretly ran a very dangerous, potentially very compromising operation all by himself at a time when the security of their department was compromised by a KGB mole. And Stan could very easily be being used by the Russians because ultimately he is thinking with his dick. Stan is a loose cannon who has been at the root of many problems for Gaad. While he forgave him for killing Vlad, that on top of how he worked through series 3 and the discovery of the bug, means that Gaad can't trust him. So even though Stan has good instincts and outed Zenaida, Gaad feels he operates too dangerously, and has messed up loyalties so he wants him gone. But Gaad's ultimate superior, the Director Attorney General, cares more about results than process. Stan outed Zenaida, he has a chance to completely compromise Oleg Burov and turn him into a reluctant, extremely valuable asset. So he praised Stan, told him his job was safe and that he'd remove any obstacles Gaad tries to put in front of him. Further infuriating Gaad, because his whole position is so completely undermined.

That always seemed obvious to me. Journalist has long been the job of choice for smart fictional women. From Lois Lane, to Amy Amanda Allen to Elizabeth Wakefield to April O'Neill when a writer wants to say this female character is smart, modern, hard working and driven, she is written as a journalist or a wannabee journalist.

Pretty much all of the parent/child relationships we saw in GG were appalling. Christopher and both elder Haydens, Jason and Floyd, Logan and Mitchum, Marty and his crazy family backstory, Paris and her selfish, neglectful parents, Lane and Mrs Kim, Liz and Jess, even Trix not respecting Richard's choice about who he loved etc. Even Michel and his mother who initially appear to get on great turn out to just have a completely superficial relationship. The only people who seem to get on ok with their families have off screen relationships, like Dean and his parents, Max and his, etc. I never noticed it before but on this rewatch it's glaring. And super irritating as it just seems like a lazy, lazy way to make Lorelai and Rory seem fantastically close. Because it's easy for their relationship to seem wonderful when all the other parents are awful.

Do you have to join a group to be totally fine with your child being gay? If Rory were gay the very worst thing she would have had to put up with from Lorelai would have been unending jokes about Rory never having an unplanned pregnancy. On the other hand I could maybe see Emily eventually joining a group like PFLAG and organising very over the top social events for the group. She and Richard would resist it for a while and probably have a knee-jerk reaction of blaming Lorelai somehow but they would eventually come around and accept Rory. But if Lane had been gay I can't see Mrs Kim ever accepting that. Lane would probably be sent to a re-education camp and then permanently off to Korea when that didn't work.

Well obviously. :) But knowing you can get away with breaking the law doesn't mean that it's ok to break the law. That's actually an even worse lesson to teach her child. "You broke the rules so I'll punish you so harshly that I'll be breaking the law to do so. It's ok though, because I'll get away with it." All Lane learns is that next time, she just needs to make sure she gets away with it too.

Lorelai was often a great parent. Not just in the fun, friendly life she lived with Rory but in how she generally trusted her daughter to know her own mind and was there for Rory to talk to through many difficult subjects many parents would not cope with. If Rory had been gay, for example, there is no doubt Lorelai would have loved her and cherished the person she was without hesitation and Rory would have been comfortable in talking to her about it. But there were still some serious flaws in how she parented, flaws that hurt Rory and Lorelai was completely blind to that. She was so busy congratulating herself on being the fantastic parent that she (felt she) never had, that she failed to look at all of her actions critically. I felt it strongly in "There's the Rub." Lorelai tells Emily that she and Rory are best friends first, mother and daughter second. That's, imo, a problematic way to parent. I know parents can be excellent parents and also be great/best friends with their children. I'm best friends with my mum but we are mum and daughter first and foremost. There are just things about a parent/child relationship that are different to a best friend relationship, especially from the parent's side of things. That means that the parent can't pitch a fit to their child or temporarily alienate them like they might with a best friend (if they were immature). And when the child is a teenager, the parent has to give more leeway than the child on an emotional level. It was fine for Lorelai and Rory to be best friends but Lorelai genuinely believed their friendship was actually more important than their mother/daughter relationship and that allowed her to sometimes behave in a very poor way as a mother.

Mrs Kim punished Lane so severely for attempting to go to a picnic with a boy that she pulled her out of school for 2 weeks, lying to the school about why. Granted Mrs Kim was angry about the subterfuge and the lying (and probably that Lane had messed up her chances with a Korean future doctor) but Mrs Kim punished Lane for her dishonesty by lying to the school. Not only extreme hypocrisy but in Mrs Kim's case she was breaking a binding agreement with the school and very possibly the law. If Mrs Kim had ever been reported for that she could have faced stiff consequences and a social worker would very possibly have been appointed to the family. It was played for laughs on the show but it was actually a total abuse of her power as a parent.

Watching the whole Max relationship I feel like when Max asked Lorelai what kind of parental responsibility he should have that the relationship was over for Lorelai. She just hadn't considered any sort of co-parenting scenario. Rory was hers, Max was hers and they'd both rub off each other nicely around her. Rory and Max having a relationship with each other outside of Lorelai was never on her agenda. Once she realised that marrying Max would include a degree of 'sharing Rory' she wanted out. If Max and Lorelai had dated until Rory started Yale they would probably have gotten married and had a fairly happy marriage. And the relationship would probably have been very good for Rory because I think Max would have helped Rory learn about consequences and empathy for others. Because he liked Rory, appreciated her drive and intelligence but he didn't treat her like she was a 'very special child' as all the Gilmores did. Full disclosure, I've had a thing for Scott Cohen since The 10th Kingdom (he was originally the only reason I watched GG which in Ireland aired in the same slot as off-season 7th Heaven so I was very, very, very wary of it at first) but Max would have provided the most stable family for Rory and would likely have matured Lorelai and helped improve her relationship with Emily and Richard. I would have loved to have seen Lorelai and Max interact more with E&R. Emily and Richard would have toned their behaviour right down around him because Max would have stopped them if they didn't. Just imagine the Dean and Richard scenes in Sadie, Sadie if Max had been present. There was no way he would have let Richard be so abusive toward a perfectly nice boy and he would have had the authoritative skills to shut Richard down.

I've just rewatched the first two seasons and this also how Lorelai behaves towards Rory. When Rory fell asleep after the dance Lorelai barely talked to her for weeks. When Rory asked Lorelai why they went on a road trip instead of Lorelai getting married, Lorelai refuses to talk to her and tbh, Rory had prepared herself to have a stepfather, her teacher as a stepfather, and with no warning Lorelai changes that. No matter how much Lorelai was hurting, she had to talk to Rory as much as Rory needed to. When Rory tells Emily about the termites Lorelai doesn't talk to her for a couple of days. I remembered Lorelai refusing to talk to Rory until Rory went back to Yale, which I thought was horrible of her. (You can know your adult daughter is making a huge mistake and be unhappy about it, but you don't cut her out because of it.) But I didn't remember that Lorelai had constant form for it. It's my first time watching GG as a parent and it makes my insides curdle to see how Lorelai sometimes treats Rory. There is quite a bit of emotional blackmail and withdrawal of affection when Rory displeases her alongside extreme praise when Rory is good. It raises a lot of questions about how Rory became such a people pleaser. My unpopular opinion being formed during this rewatch is that deep down Emily is kind of a sweetie. I really like her more and more with nearly every episode and I just feel so sorry for her all the time. She and Lorelai are actually extremely alike, they just grew up in different times and Emily was happier to live the life prescribed to her. She is funny, has a very sharp wit. She loves deeply but hurts so much. I think that all the Gilmores would be much happier people if Lorelai had let her parents in after she moved out. She could have laid down boundaries and controlled the relationship, in a way that she couldn't once she was indebted to them for Chilton. It would have been tough going, with lots of forward and backward steps but eventually Emily and Richard would have accepted the new status quo and slowly come to respect Lorelai as a parent and an adult. Emily would have eased up on her social rigidity as she would have had a warm relationship with her daughter and grand-daughter and Lorelai would have learned to ignore Emily when she did fall back to her sharp comments. Just like most parents and adult children. Emily and Richard never seemed bad enough to warrant the level of estrangement Lorelai subjected them to. Yes she felt like she was suffocating in the house but so do so many teenagers. Look at Lane and Mrs Kim. Lane suffered far, far more under Mrs Kim (who's behaviour crosses the line into abusive territory on occasion) but they still managed to develop the beginnings of a healthy relationship as adult mother and daughter. And both were happier for it. Lorelai is just extremely immature in a lot of ways and it does hurt the people that care for her.

I really wouldn't mind Rory living somewhere smaller. I've read a lot of articles about how it's become more and more popular for Rory's generation to choose to live in small cities/big towns. So they can have a nice affordable house, an urban lifestyle and a short commute. I'm not sure it fits with the Rory we saw in the series but she changed drastically in college and could easily change again in the last 9 years. The career path she has chosen is a dying one and she has most likely received Trix's trustfund of $250k. So she could have bought herself a house/apartment in a small urban area and devoted herself to her writing in a way that someone with crippling rent/mortgage repayments couldn't.

Well that only works if Rory now sees men who are married/in a relationship as out of bounds.

How was SHS for boys only? That's one of the few toy lines to release pretty much every female hero in addition to the males. They are a bit before my son's time but I've been buying them on ebay to augment his Playskool Heroes sets and it's just great that I can find almost every female I can think of because he thinks female superheroes are just as great as male ones and I don't want his lack of female figure to make him think otherwise. He has Spider-woman and Volcana (who is Firestar as far as he's concerned) in his Spider-man house. And Scarlet Witch, Wasp, She-Hulk, Red She-Hulk, Sif and Black Widow in his Avengers set. I already have some female X-Men and the Invisible Woman in the attic for when his superhero tastes branch out. I do custom figures so I have lots of the 2 variations of the Black Widow figures (which cost cents on ebay) and some Gwen Stacys to turn into other characters. He's already got custom Batgirl (Black Widow V1) and Supergirl (Gwen Stacy) and will be getting Batwoman (Black Widow V2) in his Easter basket. Because the DC Imaginext toys are fabulous but have only a handful of female figures to date and all but Wonder Woman are villains.

I don't know for sure. It was just the way Luke explained his family to Lorelai in Nick and Nora/Sid and Nancy when he first tells her about Jess coming and the fact that I don't really remember much being said about their mother other than 'she died when we were really young' that has given me the impression that they don't have many memories of her.

Luke's mother died when he and Liz were very young, so I'm presuming it was when they were too young to have nay real memory of her. Their father was always working and Luke worked with him which is why Luke has so much love for him. Liz on the other hand was left to her own devices, so her story of her parents would probably be that after her mother died her father had no time for her as he was always at work or camping/fishing.

Well it almost certainly was something like that because it's extremely difficult for non-residents to get married in France. One partner has to live there temporarily and be signed up with utility providers to get legally married and even then there is an insane amount of paperwork with regards to non-French official documentation, like birth certificates which both of them would have need to have the longform official copies of. There is just no possible way for Lorelai and Chris to have ever been married. Something I found really glaring about GG is that other than Lorelai and Rory almost everyone who is shown with a parent has a tough relationship with them. There are very few exceptions, Richard gets on with Trix (but she is vile to his wife, which is actually crappy parenting), Lindsey and her mother seem to have a normal relationship, presumably Dean and his parents get on fine, Sookie must have loved her mother for the risotto to have special meaning and Luke honoured his dad though their relationship seemed maybe like it lacked real understanding between them. The thing is though that in the real world they would be the norm and all the awful parents like Mitchum, Straub, Floyd Stiles, etc and the overbearing ones like Emily and Richard, Mrs Kim and the Gellers are far less common. Even Marty had crazy family drama. It comes across as bad writing that so many characters had to have awful parent/child relationships in order for Lorelai and Rory to be special.

I was talking about this with my husband last night and he pointed out that Rory was a dream come true to Emily and Richard. As a natural people pleaser she went along with almost everything they wanted and it really must have appeared from their perspective like Lorelai was the problem with their relationship not them. They treated Rory in a similar way to how they treated Lorelai and got very different results. They didn't look past that to see that Rory was desperate for connection with her estranged grandparents and was willing to go along with them so often because of this. They also didn't see that as grandparents they were a part time presence in her life and Rory had respect and freedom from her mother in her daily life, so going along with their wishes every so often was a small sacrifice or even possible to enjoy because it was an occasional thing, not all of her life. To them Lorelai was needlessly obstreperous and Rory's easy compliance proved it. When Rory came to live with them and they kept up the same shtick it backfired because suddenly there was no other outlet for Rory or Lorelai to provide a buffer.

In The Deer Hunters Lorelai knows that it's possible she pushed Rory down the Harvard path. She knows that they have been pursuing that dream from before Rory could have understood it. It doesn't mean she was pushing Rory against her will, just that it was something that came up, Rory expressed an interest in and Lorelai ran with it. It's not a bad thing, most parents do it to some extent, my husband and I both adore superheroes and Star Wars so as soon as our son showed an interest we were so happy to introduce them to him and it's very likely that his love of them has been influenced by ours. That doesn't make us bad parents, just humans. For Lorelai, as a formerly wealthy teenager, working as a chambermaid and raising a child alone, she must at times have experienced regret about the life she could have been leading. Especially hearing occasionally about former friends traveling Europe and attending Princeton/Yale/etc. She would have wanted that and more for Rory. And as well as that it would be human, after all the crap the likes of Straub talked about her, for a part of her to want to prove how great a parent she is by her daughter going to a better school than either of her grandfathers. She wasn't purposefully pushing Rory for her own glory, she just had a fantasy at a low point in her life and Rory was in to it before she could truly understand it, so they both ran with it. But it was never really a decision Rory made for herself. So she ended up needing to take time out to decide what she herself really, really wanted.

It was exactly because of their lack of relationship with the senior Gilmores that Rory was unprepared for dealing with their wealth when the trappings of it were constantly offered it to her. And while Lorelai would have happily carried on estranged from her parents the fact remains that up until Gigi's birth Rory was the only descendant of two very wealthy families (four if you count her surviving great-grandparents separately). There was always a very, very strong likelihood that Rory would eventually come into an awful lot of money but Lorelai never prepared Rory for that. I guess from Lorelai's point of view, she was so much happier since she turned her back on it, it never occurred to her that a super happy child like Rory might be tempted by it. And ultimately Rory chose her own path to happiness over even vaster wealth. So Lorelai laid a good foundation in Rory, like I said she was a great mother overall, but she didn't really prepare Rory for the temptations of that wealth and the society that the Sr Gilmore's lived in, so at some point Rory was always going to be tempted to either do what she did in season 6 or something similar.

I thought the whole thing was a very over the top story line at the time but I've just started a rewatch of the show and I'm starting to realise it was an inevitable progression Rory needed to go through. While I generally think Lorelai was a good parent I'm starting to see two major failings in how she brought up Rory. One was that she really did shape Rory's ambitions too much. For example when she first meets Max she told him about how Rory has wanted to go to Harvard since she was a toddler. And with all due respect to Lorelai the only way Rory would have had that ambition at that age was if Lorelai was pushing it. I have a toddler and he's smart for a 3 year old but his only long-term ambition in life is to ask Santa for Star Wars toys next Christmas. Lorelai described buying toddler Rory a Harvard sweater and it being a focus of their ambition for years. So obviously Lorelai was feeling a degree of regret at how her life was at that point and determined for Rory to have the things she had given up, but focused on Harvard as the superior rival to Yale, where she would have been pressured to go to. Unlike Emily and Richard, she got Rory onside with that ambition, in part through her friendly parenting but also in big part because Rory is naturally a people pleaser. Rory didn't ever genuinely want to go to Harvard that much, as evidenced by the fact that she didn't. But I don't think she really knew if Yale was what she wanted either and she really needed that time away to work out what were her own ambitions as opposed to the ambitions that other people had for her. The other mistake that Lorelai made was to not really prepare Rory for the reality of living a middle class life while having masses of wealth available to her if she really wanted it. In Kill Me Now, Lorelai laments to Sookie that she didn't think she'd raised the type of kid who'd want to live like her family. But no matter how down to earth and happy a kid is in a chilled out, comfortable life. If they have a wealthy family who wants to share their riches (and who in fact don't know how to express their love other than sharing those riches) any teenager is going to want to sample that. Especially when they are just being offered them at the same time as being newly surrounded every day by classmates with the same privileges. If Lorelai had found a way to lay down boundaries with her parents that had allowed them to be a bigger part of Rory's life as a child it might not have been as big a problem. But Rory was suddenly flung into a new school environment full of wealthy children while being offered the love and wealth of her wider family. That's too much for any teenager to resist.

I loved Jason too and agree he was Lorelai's best match on the show. Yes she and Christopher have fantastic physical chemistry but Jason and Lorelai seemed really easily happy together and I always felt they would have had a mostly very happy future as a couple.

Why did they call their house a crap shack? It seemed pretty nice to me. Presumably it was in a bad state when they bought it, but it looked like quite an old house and was preserved from the outside in a way that means it would have to have been well taken care of rather than totally falling apart. The flowers (presumably wisteria) growing over the porch would have had to be close to a decade old to be flowering as they were so it would have been a relatively cared for house up to the time they bought it. So other than being horribly decorated and unmodernised on the inside it would have been fine. Certainly a step up from a potting shed.

Yeah you're right. I was remembering that backwards.

Mia was in contact with the older Gilmores though. She had a deal with Emily to send her updates and photographs of Rory. Something that was kind to Emily but a serious breach of Lorelai's trust. The idea that they lived in a potting shed was ridiculous, especially when Lorelai worked at an inn. It would have made so much more sense for there to have been some sort of staff quarters in the attic and for the Gilmores to have lived there. It would have still given them the background of poverty and struggle for Rory's childhood but it wouldn't have been a set up that made it seem like poor Dickensian characters had it good it comparison.

Why do we think Arya wanted to save Gus' job? Personally I think that he seemed like a pretty awful tutor and Arya had him wrapped around her little finger. If Gus was replaced there are good odds the new tutor would actually have expected her do some work instead of dancing in class and riding carts around the lot. She might even have to pass her own exams or fail them and take time out of work which wouldn't be good for her rehire prospects as what show/film will hire an actor who can't be relied upon. I know nothing about the world of onset tutors but I imagine it's a job that takes talent and hard work to do well as, in all fairness to Arya, she had a genuine point about being exhausted from her job and adding schoolwork on top of it is a lot for a 12 year old. A child and even the teens on set would need a chance to blow off steam after work and getting them to learn anything in that scenario would be difficult. But Gus just wanted them to like him and did a crap job of laying down any boundaries for the kids who's education he was responsible for. He was an appalling teacher who would have been eaten alive in a school setting. But of course his main interest was 'working in television' which was how he described himself to Mickey upon meeting her. He didn't actually care too much about the kids, just his own opportunities to sell his script and be a writer.