Recap / Gilmore Girls S 02 E 07

Season 2, episode 7

Like Mother, Like Daughter

Chilton's guidance counselor thinks Rory isn't social enough and the principal thinks Lorelai doesn't participate in enough activities. Their solutions consist of joining a clique (which turns out to be a secret sorority) and the Booster club, which ends with Lorelai hosting an event at the inn. It's a fashion show. Lorelai signs Emily up to model, which unbeknownst to her gets her automatically signed up for the mother/daughter team.

Maid of the week: an unnamed black woman.

Provides examples of:

• Artistic License – Geography:
  • Luke and Lorelai have a small fight about whether the quickest way back to Hartford is the highway that goes along the west coast from the Canadian border to the Mexican border (I-5), or the one that goes through Nevada (I-11).
    • Additionally, no one thought it odd that two interstate highways six numbers apart would both land you in Hartford, Connecticut, but that's Stars Hollow for you.
  • Luke also suggests driving by Deerfield to get from Stars Hollow to Hartford, but the closest Deerfield is in Massachusetts. Hartford is at least in the same state as Stars Hollow.
• Bad "Bad Acting": Averted with Rory getting "woken up" by the Puffs. It's good bad acting.
• Bookworm: Rory takes four non-school books with her to school, all in different genres.
• Call-Back: Lorelai has named Luke’s toolbox Bert.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • Rory thinks the reason Paris is so upset about her sitting with the Puffs is that she thinks they're The Mafia.
  • The women from the Booster club think Michel is an actor playing a rude Frenchman instead of a real rude Frenchman.
• Continuity Nod: Rory tells the guidance counselor that the only time she has been late to school was in her sophomore year when she hit a deer.
• Eating Lunch Alone: What sets Rory's plot in motion. The school doesn't like it. Unusual for the trope, the episode is about Rory's attempts at socializing Gone Horribly Wrong, and at the end, she is allowed to go back to reading at lunch and nobody says anything else about it.
• Embarrassing Nickname: Inverted, as Lem is less embarrassing than Lemon. Lem, for her part, thinks Lorelai is a weird name and that Rory is an improvement.
• Funny Background Event: Paris walking by and realizing Rory is sitting with the Puffs.
• Godwin's Law: Rory inverts this trope by insisting that the Puffs are not the Cosa Nostra.
• Hypocrite: Lorelai tells Luke not to date anyone from the Booster club, or anyone who has anything to do with Chilton, because she likes to keep her Chilton life separate from her Stars Hollow life. She's the one who arranged the Booster event at the inn, as well as being engaged to a Chilton teacher last year.
• Like Mother, Like Daughter: The title is the trope name. It refers to how both Lorelais avoid socializing with Chilton people, feeling they're too snobby.
• Quitting to Get Married: A member of the Booster club no longer works at Sachs, and shows off her wedding ring to prove it.
• Product Placement: One of the members of the Booster club used to work at Sachs.
• Rule of Three: Michel only made three people cry.
• Shout-Out:
  • Lorelai can honestly deny hiding a Bay City Rollers CD under her car seat, because it was a Barry Manilow CD.
  • Lorelai and Rory mock each other for listening to Spice Girls, Duran Duran, Dido, Olivia Newton-John, and "The Macarena."
  • Rory feels like she's living with Zsa Zsa Gabor.
  • For Rory, a biography of Edna St Vincent Millay and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner are bus books, an essay collection by Gore Vidal is her lunch book, and a book of short stories by Eudora Welty is in case she finishes one of the other books.
  • Rory supposes she should put on a The Matrix coat now that she's considered a loner.
  • Rory claims there's a draft at her usual table, not quite "we're not in Kansas anymore" but still bad.
  • Rory liked Coming Home.
  • Sandra Day O'Connor was a powerful Puff.
  • Lorelai wonders if she will get to see Kate Moss eat something.
  • Rory claims that if Lorelai is a model she can date Leonardo DiCaprio.
  • Ivy claims that the sorority is just a fiction, like Snow White and Rose Red or Mariah Carey's crackup. Ivy mocks her song "Survivor."
  • Francine compares Paris to Rain Man.
    Francine: Smart? Like, if I drop a box of matches she can tell me how many?
  • The fashion show plays "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper while the women go on the catwalk.
  • Rory reads Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir while waiting for her "kidnappers."
  • Paris angrily declares that until she does a Freaky Friday with Rory in a Disney movie she won't have Rory's self-confidence.
  • Rory quips that the Puff oath was written by Anne Sexton.
  • Francie tells Rory to "sing out, Louise!" in reference to the books of the same name about Broadway.
  • Rory refers to the Puffs as the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
  • Lorelai has a hard time getting mad at Rory for thinking she's The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
• Smart People Know Latin: Rory is taking Latin.
• Stealth Insult: The carpenter who builds the catwalk is told Lorelai admired his work in Pisa.
• Take That!:
  • Rory thinks the modelling outfit made Lorelai look like Nancy Reagan, a comment Lorelai finds the opposite of nice.
  • Emily points out that Lorelai seems to be fitting in nicely in the world she ran away from.
• Teen Pregnancy: Lorelai's is referenced as a reason she doesn't chaperone school dances.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Downplayed. Lorelai's conviction about Rory's individualism waivers just a bit when Kirk commends her for eating lunch alone, a thing he did with his duffel bag when in school.
• Wakeup Makeup: Literally! After Lorelai told Rory that the Puffs are going to "kidnap" her during the night she suggests her daughter to put on makeup to look pretty. Paris, who is among the other kidnapped girls comments on Rory's "Wakeup Makeup" with "Nothing in my life is fair!"

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