Season 6, episode 6
Welcome To The Dollhouse
To launch his old street names idea, Taylor has Andrew and Kirk dress up in their reenactment uniforms and act confused about the streets in town. Richard and Emily begin to realize that they should make sure Rory and Logan don't have sex before marriage. Emily sends Lorelai a bunch of old stuff. Richard finally caves and asks Lorelai to help him deal with Rory.
Maid of the week: Consuela.
Tropes
- Alternate Identity Amnesia: Michel thinks the reason packages of odd things keep getting delivered to the inn in Lorelai's name is a sign she has an alternate personality who has a shopping addiction.
- Diagnosed by the Audience: In-Universe. Emily doesn't know why Rory sleeps so much nowadays, but figures it's some "young woman's melancholia".
- Brick Joke: Luke's Zen policy regarding Taylor, mentioned early in the episode, falls apart later when Taylor changes the street name and Luke has to update his address with all his contacts.
- Call-Back: Rory tells Logan she loves him, and assures him that she doesn't want him to feel the way she felt the first time Dean told her that he loved her.
- Captain Obvious: Taylor acts like he doesn't recognize Kirk and Andrew in their reenactment renamed tropecostumes, so Gypsy tries telling him that they're Kirk and Andrew.
- Central Theme: Some type of handbag.
- Comically Missing the Point:
- What does it mean when your boyfriend gives you a ridiculously expensive purse?
- Taylor can't understand why Lorelai would have a problem with her inn being on Sores and Boils Alley.
- Emily can't understand why a teenaged Lorelai would need a drawer full of tootsie rolls. When the girl is thirty-seven, Richard suggests it might have been to hide something under them.
- Deadly Scratch: Taylor regales Lorelai with the history of Sores and Boils Alley, informing her that sores and boils were a huge health issue back in the day.
- Department of Redundancy Department: Discussed and deconstructed. Kirk explains that there used to be several streets named Constabulary Road in Stars Hollow, with dire consequences. Mail was misdelivered, soldiers lost their way, old people got disoriented. There was rioting, chaos, death, everyone hated it.
- Good News, Bad News: Lorelai is sick of depressing newspapers, so considers starting her own which only reports good news, such as "No Civil War in Canada" and a feature called "Puppies: how cute are they?"
- Immediate Self-Contradiction: Taylor claims to want to increase tourism revenue, but refuses to make the only inn in town marketable.
- Malaproper: Sookie discusses exploiting this trope by renaming their street "Bunions", which sounds like a portmanteau of "buns" and "onions" if you don't think too hard.
- Meaningful Rename: Third street gets renamed Sores and Boils Alley. Kirk suggests a re-rename that he thinks is Native American for either "you fish on your side of the river, I fish on my side, no one fishes in the middle" or "buffalo".
- Metaphorgotten: Lorelai claims she is afraid of sticking her head out to tell Emily to stop sending her stuff, because Emily will blow her head off and then she'll have no head. She figures Emily will carpet bomb her with actual carpets.
- No, You: Michel calls Sookie silly. Sookie retorts that no, Michel is silly.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Lorelai is so mad she is beyond coffee.
- Passive Aggressive Combat: Lorelai swears her mother is a tenth degree black belt in this, and that's why she won't fall for the bait and talk to her about sending her stuff.
- Product Placement: Birkin bags.
- Regal Ringlets: Rory has them now that she lives in the upper class.
- Revenge Before Reason: The other theme of the episode.
- Riddle for the Ages: What did teenage Lorelai hide under those tootsie rolls?
- Running Joke:
- Luke's new Zen thing.
- The urn Emily sent to Luke's and kids playing on it.
- Shout-Out
- Rory doesn't care whether she misses Katie Couric as she doesn't watch her.
- Rory thinks Logan brought her the head of Alfredo Garcia.
- Richard doesn't want to miss Charlie Rose.
- Michel asks if Lorelai saw Joan Rivers or Suzanne Somers holding the figurine she's seen before.
- Richard mentions that it's usually at the point in John le Carré novels where they go snooping that things start to go wrong.
- Kirk knows the saying "cross the Don in the morning, sleep with the fishes in the afternoon".
- Lorelai stands up like Norma Rae to protest the street name change.
- Lorelai compares Taylor's street name change to Molly Ringwald giving her pants to Anthony Michael Hall in Sixteen Candles and Anthony showing it to other guys for one dollar each.
- Logan suggests Rory let down her hair so he can climb in her window.
- Time Travel: Kirk and Andrew pretend to be from 1779.
- You Keep Using That Word: Kirk plays a cobbler, but doesn't seem to know what a cobbler is. Lorelai hangs a lampshade on it. Keep in mind that this is a character he's played yearly for most of his adult life.
