Who is the most obscure character on Gilmore Girls?
After receiving so much wonderful fan mail in the letters pages in the last half of the semester, we decided it was time we had to give something back to the fans. So we wrote this week’s piece on a topic close to our and your hearts – The Gilmore Girls. Seeing as our fact checkers are back from holiday, we thought maybe we should even go…dare we say it…a little further into obscurity.
This week we held a serious internet poll on our MySpace and Facebook pages (anything to make this more online), asking the question, ‘who is the most obscure character on Gilmore Girls?’ All too often we focus entirely on Rory and Lorelai (and Jess…sigh) when we think about this fast-talking, clean-living, cup-of-earl grey-on-a-Sunday–night show. It’s all to easy to get blown away by the dramas and issues of these main characters at the expense of those on the periphery – Michel, Jackson, Paris, MRS. KIM – we could go on. The actual ‘girls’ of Gilmore Girls are pretty uninteresting and whiney in comparison (start writing your hate-mail, Rory lovers. We can take it. She is boring, whingy and a big fat geek). Did Rory have a funeral for her dog as awesome as Michel’s in the ‘Farewell My Pet’ episode (series seven, episode fourteen)? No. Case closed.
Our poll showed that people really, really like Gilmore Girls. We were surprised by who some of these respondents were: male black-metal loving Gilmore Girls fans are not as rare as you think. Perhaps due to this, we got some random answers: ‘The troubadour,’ and ‘the tambourine player from Brian Jonestown massacre?’ and of course ‘the extras’ (hilarious). It was Kirk who came out on top in our unofficial poll. ‘He is always serious, never smiles, and last week he was selling engagement rings he got off old ladies he befriends and keeps company…he is way out there!!’, gushed one fan, while another opined: ‘Kirk. I bet he fondles corpses…’
We looked up old Kirk on the official website (online!), and could not find his fictional last name anywhere. A random site (www.tv.com) we stumbled across later suggested his last name was ‘Gleason’ but we will leave that up to you to decide. It seems sad that Kirk is a sad no-name, but we guess it fits with the description of him on the official Gilmore Girls site, which makes his character sound like a creepy drifter. He is ‘one of Stars Hollow’s most colourful and eccentric citizens, has held jobs as a delivery man, a DSL installer, a wedding photographer, and an entrepreneur. He has worked in the grocery store, the video store and as the town mailman’. He also apparently in one episode (season 3, episode 309 for you diehards) gets a cat which he names after himself. Oh and he lives with his mother.
We couldn’t find any fan-sites dedicated to him, so perhaps he is not a sex-symbol or anything. To us, it looks like he is kind of a poorly developed walking punch line character. Perhaps this calls for some kind of ‘Kirk Power’ campaign, to move him up the Gilmore Girls’ food-chain. Think – maybe we could get a Kirk sex scene, or Kirk and Rory could get married, or Kirk’s cat Kirk could get eaten for dinner at Luke’s diner or he could start being invited to dinner with Emily and Richard – the possibilities are endless.
At the end of the day though, we just don’t care.
We wrote this week’s column kind of as a shout out to the only people who respond to our articles, and, to be honest, neither of us really care about Gilmore Girls. It was a dry week for column topics.
Having to loosely theme our column around the ‘Online Weekly’ title didn’t work this time. So, sorry. We should try harder. We are going to go and look at the page with the pictures of web sites on it now.