Season 3, episode 15
Face-Off
Taylor reserves several rooms at the Independence inn for a Doose family reunion. Trix is coming to visit again. Rory waits for Jess to call an entire evening. Lane's band practices psalms on electric guitar for a gig at the Kim house.
Rory goes to a hockey game where Dean plays and runs into a girl named Lindsay, not yet knowing she's Dean's new girlfriend. Jess tries to visit Rory and refuses to believe she's at the hockey game. Rory learns that Dean has a new girlfriend. Emily comes home to find Trix making out with a man in a track suit.
Tropes
- Actually Pretty Funny: Richard finds it hilarious that his mother made out with a man in a tracksuit.
- Blatant Lies:
- Taylor tries to row his way out of having accidentally admitted that he once scored a goal by having the puck ricochet off his helmet and into the goal by saying he was joking.
- Rory fakes an illness that is French and makes her limp and be unable to feed herself to get her mother out of a conversation with Taylor. Subverted since Taylor buys it and feels sorry for Rory having to run.
- Rory is offended that Jess subverts this trope when he can't be bothered to come up with some lame-o excuse why he didn't call her last night.
- Call-Back: Rory realizing she does in fact enjoy several aspects of the sporting endeavor — just not the sport itself — calls back to Application Anxiety, where she first claimed this.
- Comically Missing the Point:
- Subverted. Luke jokes that Taylor scored a hockey goal by having the puck hit his head and ricochet into the goal. Taylor replies that it still counts.
- Failing to see what's so fun about hockey, Lorelai assumes there are clowns. Rory is impressed to find that there is actually ice.
- Trix thinks Guernica was Picasso being "obsessed with the Spanish Civil War," which took place in his home country when he was in his fifties.
- Crazy Jealous Guy: Dave is a sane version, but Rory warns about it turning into Othello.
- Dissimile: Rory claims that she could enjoy certain elements of sports, such as eating massive amounts of junk food and listening to Kirk make a fool of himself. In fact, you could practically get rid of the "sports" part.
- Fee Fi Faux Pas:
- Mocked when Rory wonders why Lindsay is so awkward around her, and Lane jokes that she really put her foot in it by asking Lindsay how she was.
- Rory berates herself a little for delivering two involuntary backhanded compliments to Dean after the match.
- Hypocritical Humor: After spending a long time repeating and re-repeating his relatives' hotel room needs to her in the diner, Taylor tells Lorelai to hurry with her coffee refill as he hasn't got all day.
- Literal-Minded: Kirk's understanding of commenting the hockey game in such a way that he narrates where the puck is at all times.
- Neologism: Lane asks what Rory is doing at the hockey match, and Rory tells her she's hockeying. Lane says that that's not a word.
- Playing Sick: To get out of Taylor's need for repeated reassurance that his reservations for his relatives at the inn have in fact been registered, Rory pretends to have something French that makes her limp and be unable to feed herself.
- Product Placement: Richard muses that maybe Trix's boyfriend was wearing a Nikes with his purple tracksuit. Lorelai has a Strange Minds Think Alike moment realizing that he is referring to the slogan "Just Do It."
- Remember the New Guy?: This is the first we see of Lindsay Lister, although she supposedly went to school with Rory until about three years ago and has been living in the town and going to school with Dean, Jess, and Lane all along.
- Rhetorical Question Blunder: When Rory rhetorically asks who thinks she's a snob for going to Chilton, Lane lists a few names.
- Self-Deprecation: Lorelai points out that she beat a dead horse with Puns about Hamburgers and Hamburg when Emily had a maid from that part of Germany.
- Shout-Out:
- Taylor admits that his days as a hockey player were not the plot of Hoosiers.
- Lorelai suggests that people like feminist writer Susan Faludi were created by circumstances like having first boyfriends like Brian Hutchins, Lorelai's seventh-grade boyfriend who avoided her between convincing her to be his girlfriend and tenth-grade when he tried to sell her weed.
- Lorelai wonders if she should call Michael Moore about Jess's job situation.
- Dave runs over a mile to see Lane for half a minute at the hockey game, and Rory warns Lane about it turning into Othello.
- The Beach Boys gave lyrical advice that Lorelai quotes to Jess. Something about not leaving your best girl home at night.
- Trix has friends over to look at Picasso slides.
- Emily caught some of Love in the Afternoon the other day, as a metaphor for Trix making out with a man.
- Rory brings up the time Lindsay bought her a Mark Twain refrigerator magnet.
- Jess got tickets to a Distillers concert.
- Richard thinks the visual of Emily hiding in the bushes is like a play by Molière.
- Slap Stick: Rory thinks the entertainment value in hockey is that they slam each other into walls quite a lot.
- Smurfette Principle: Inverted, as Lane calls Young Chui "the male me," seeing as he is secretly into a Japanese girl named Karen while his parents set him up with nice Korean girls, just like she is secretly dating a white guy while her parents try to set her up with Korean future doctors.
- Stylistic Suck: Zach thinks the hymn "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" has too much Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness to be rock 'n roll.
