Season 1, episode 21
Love, Daisies and Troubadours
Rory finds the Dean box. She is reconsidering the breakup. Luke spends a lot of time fixing stuff around the Gilmore house. A new town troubadour is in town, bizarrely playing on corners near the first town troubadour. Rory meets Clara for the first time. Rachel leaves for good. Max proposes to Lorelai.
Kirk's job: flower delivery guy.
Tropes:
- All Just a Dream: Luke fixing the porch. Apparently Rory could hear it, but no one but Lorelai could see him. But later in the day he's back fixing her roof, so he may just have been batmanning her.
- Arbitrarily Large Bank Account: Max bought a thousand yellow daisies.
- Big Eater: When he hears that Lorelai threw french fries at Taylor at a town meeting Max wonders if they were cold, but she was just full.
- Blackmail: Tristan tries to hold Rory's books hostage until she agrees to date him. It doesn't work.
- Blatant Lies:
- Rory pretends to be considering the box boy profession as a career.
- Rory pretends to be a girl scout when she goes to Dean's house and his younger sister Clara answers the door.
- Brutal Honesty: Max tells Lorelai he dated while they were apart. She retorts that she slept with Rory's dad. On her parents' balcony.
- Call-Back: Taylor is concerned that Rory has become a shoplifter. She relates it to Lane, who points out that she has shoplifted in Taylor's store before.
- Captain Obvious: Lorelai points out that she can't be promoted as she is in the top position at her workplace.
- Companion Cube: Luke leaves his toolbox at Lorelai's house for a few days, so she and Rory name it Bert and chat with it.
- Confusion Fu: Lorelai uses nonsense sentences to get Taylor to let her eat in the town meeting.
- Continuity Nod: Lane points out that Rory has shoplifted, albeit by accident.
- Godwin's Law:
- When Kirk delivers a thousand yellow daisies to the inn, he tells Michel he doesn't question the orders, he just fills them. Michel, already annoyed that his workplace is full of flowers, calls Kirk Adolf Eichmann in return.
- Paris, along with Madeline and Louise, has started calling Rory Typhoid Mary, a prolific serial killer from the nineteenth century, seeing as Rory is apparently going out with Paris's crush.
- Grammar Nazi: Rory gets a little intense about the difference between past tense and present tense.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Paris does not take Tristan's story about taking Rory to see P.J. Harvey well.
- Hypochondria: Sookie thinks she caught Michel's ennui after he told her he had it. Lorelai is reminded of the previous week, when she thought she had problem's with her prostate after Al told her about his.
- Hypocritical Humor:
- Luke tells Lorelai her house is easy to break into, then proves it by breaking into it.
- Max gives Lorelai and Rory rings with candy diamonds. Lorelai says it's sweet, but they're not eight. Then she asks Rory to trade rings because she prefers the other's flavor.
- Immediate Self-Contradiction: Rory denies hearing what Lane says, then demonstrates knowledge of what she's been saying.
- I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Rachel leaves Luke to get out of Lorelai's way. As she leaves she tells Luke not to wait to long to tell Lorelai how he feels.
- Meaningful Name: "Mary" is a versatile insult. Louise explains that Paris is referring to Typhoid Mary, not Virgin Mary.
- Mistaken for Gay: Luke briefly thinks Rachel is leaving him for a woman.
- Oblivious to Love: Max doesn't believe Lorelai doesn't pick up on the "vibe" between her and Luke, but she doesn't.
- Plot Parallel: Rory and Dean get back together the same day Max proposes to Lorelai.
- Product Placement: Lorelai had a dream that her house is made of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
- Refuge in Audacity: Luke breaks into Lorelai's house and uses the fact to argue that she needs a new lock on her back door.
- Shout-Out:
- Rory calls her mother "Margot Kidder Gilmore".
- Lorelai finds out that Jim Dunning was the Dick Tracy guy.
- Lane almost went full The Matrix on Janie.
- Rory asks Lane to swear on Blur that she hasn't seen Dean with another girl.
- Tristan wants to take Rory to a PJ Harvey concert.
- Madeline wants to be Judy Garland, claiming she was her day's Courtney Love.
- Miss Patty's ballerinas practice Swan Lake.
- Lorelai says "you've crossed over to the dark side, Luke".
- Luke and Lorelai list Lee Harvey Oswald, John Muir, the Unabomber, and Henry David Thoreau as examples of "lonely guys."
- Lorelai votes "nay" on a topic on a town meeting without knowing what they're voting on, taking Annie Oakley's stance of "Ah'm again' it!"
- Paris mixes up Skippy and Lassie in her diss of Rory.
- Lorelai asks Max if he dated "Soul Train style" while they were apart.
- Sustained Misunderstanding:
- Max dated "a little" while they were apart, but not a little person.
- Lorelai assures him she didn't expect him to join whatever's the male version of a convent, then misunderstand Max's "a monastery" as the answer to her question about how many he dated.
- Title Drop: Lorelai refers to herself and Rory as Gilmore Girls.
