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The Pokemon Go phenomenon might be big, but in Stars Hollow, it’s huge. A couple of the kids from Stars Hollow High download it, and from there it spreads like wildfire. Within 24 hours, the entire town is playing it, crowed around Luke’s, Doose’s Market, and the high school — all Pokestops — or crowded into and around the gazebo, the town’s only gym that Kirk (a member of Team Instinct, who has somehow already become a Level 13 trainer) is dominating since no one else has passed Level 4 yet.
It’s utter madness, and of course, Luke hates it. Taylor, at first, doesn’t mind it, thinking it’s probably good for business (although he is a little salty that the Diner is the Pokestop, and not his Soda Shoppe next door). But Luke — he can’t stand it. All those cell phones, all those stupid names for them, he’s never despised anything more.
And it gets worse when Lorelai starts yelling out the names of rare Pokemon (with the help of Google, of course, since she struggles to even catch a Pidgey and doesn’t even know what the purple rat is called). Luke thinks the town should have cottoned onto the fact that she’s lying by now, but apparently no one wants to risk it — “what if that rare Pokemon is there?” Kirk tells him, wide-eyed and horrified at the thought of missing out on a Garawhotsit or a MooToo — and so she keeps yelling out stupid names and causing hordes of people to run in and out of the diner every half hour or so.
Luke thinks he’s on the brink of a mental breakdown, so when Kirk stalks into the Diner five days later (the hype still hasn’t died down) and shows everyone his Level 21, and tells people that he’s now accepting payment in exchange for him levelling everyone up and catching them some rare Pokemon, almost all of his customers desert the diner at once to try and get Kirk’s help. No one knows, still, how he’s levelling up so quickly, but he is. (Later, it’s revealed he’s spent £342 on lucky eggs, incense, and more of the sort. Luke almost has a heart attack when he hears this.)
And only minutes after Kirk announces his new business endeavour, Taylor is calling for an emergency town meeting where he tells everyone that as mayor, he has decided to ban Pokemon Go — it is attracting hooligans from nearby towns (who seek Kirk’s mastery and the Zapdos Lorelai had been telling people was hanging out in Stars Hollow on Twitter) and Taylor doesn’t want the town overrun by dirty youths.
There is, of course, an uproar: people aren’t going to just delete Pokemon Go, so they tell Taylor that if he wants it gone, he’ll have to somehow convince the creators to take Stars Hollow off of the map. (Which, of course, they didn’t — why would they even consider it when they were making so much money off of Kirk alone?)
Taylor’s sudden hatred of the game makes Luke warm to it (slightly) but he still gets mad when people try and play it inside the diner rather than just ordering food and eating the food. He runs a diner, after all, not a playground for children (which was what the whole town were acting like — children!).
However, just as fast as the hype had begun, it ended when Kirk had gotten stuck up a tree trying to catch one of the last 12 Pokemon he needed to complete him Pokedex, and seeing as this had been in the middle of the night (he was apparently sleeping only one night out of every two or three, which explained his rather more-than-usual erratic and odd behaviour) and he’d been so excited, he’d forgotten to put on clothes and was stuck up there naked.
Luke wondered if he’d just been having a night terror and was using Pokemon as a cover, because there had been no phone in his hand when the fire department finally got him down, covered in red marks from the bird that had attacked him when he’d accidentally crushed all its eggs).
But Luke was glad his sanity would finally be restored, now that Kirk was in hospital and no longer there to stoke the Pokemon fire. That was, of course, until the new Harry Potter app was announced…