Gimore Girls: Season 3, Episode 17 : A Tale of Poes and Fire
The Edgar Allan Poe Society comes to Stars Hollow and stays at Lorelai's Inn. Lorelai makes a few jokes to the guests, “I can assure you there are no human body parts buried in the floor of your room,” and the Society hosts a reading in the Town Hall. At the reading, two Poe impersonators show up expecting to read ‘The Raven’, which almost causes a physical altercation, but simply results in two back-to-back readings of the poem. The main bit of this scene is the characters complaining about how long the poem is, asking each other how many “nevermore”-s they have left to go, and even once saying, “Poor Poe suffered so much, and now we suffer with him.” As the town hall comes to a close, the Poe impersonators try to out-Poe-fact each other, before one gives up and walks away. A character who has a running bit for changing jobs prints T-shirts that say “faux poes foes”.
This TV show’s humor lives off of ‘high-brow’ references to history, literature, and pop culture, so a few of the monologues in this episode have references to Poe’s work, mainly “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado”. Due to the unfortunate fact that I am not a millennial, and was watching this show pretty far after it came out (as well as being a kid when I watched it), I missed a lot of these pop-culture references. Poe scorns this model of dropping references in writing in "How to write a Blackwood article”; I wonder how he would feel about his becoming of someone to reference.
Upon a rewatch of this episode, there is less of a Poe focus than I remember, with the main plot details of this episode being Lorelai’s Inn catching on fire and Rory becoming jealous of her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. However, it was still enjoyable to watch.
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