Season 7, episode 6
Go, Bulldogs!
Sookie gets a gift basket of vegetables from a vegetable guy who isn't Jackson. Luke meets April's swimming teacher. Lorelai and Christopher go to parents' weekend at Yale. So do Emily and Richard.
Sookie feels guilty about accepting the vegetables. Christopher takes all the senior staffers at Yale Daily News to a restaurant. Luke goes out with coach Bennet. She turns out to be a little psycho.
Tropes
- Absurd Phobia: Chris and Lorelai are afraid of a capella.
- Bilingual Bonus: Lorelai listens to a French language tape. She later goes to a French restaurant where the waiter asks, in French, whether she prefers to speak French or English, but she doesn't understand a word.
- Blatant Lies: Lorelai learns the French accent instead of the French language, and plans on telling the French that she was born in Marseille and adopted by Americans, but never forgot the accent of her mother country.
- Call-Back: In season four Rory had an awkward date with a guy who wanted to sit next to her at the restaurant. This episode Luke tries to date April's swim coach Susan Bennet, who demands that Luke sit next to her at the restaurant.
- Captain Obvious:
- Kirk observes that whenever he's on a date with Lulu, she's there.
- As coach Bennet says, Luke really should know how to swim, not just in case he takes April somewhere with water, but his hobby is fishing.
- A grandparent is a kind of parent, as Emily argues when she runs into Lorelai on parents' day.
- Compliment Backfire:
- Kirk is genuinely impressed with how little people care about Luke.
- Sookie is disappointed that her staff thinks the ratatoille she made with a new vegetable guy's vegetables is her best one yet.
- Fee Fi Faux Pas: Chris invites all of Rory's Yale newspaper coworkers for dinner at a restaurant. Rory and Lorelai both feel weird about it, since it was supposed to be a family thing.
- Hollywood Board Games: Lane knows that she sucks at chess, so she harasses April with seven-letter rare words until the latter agrees to play Boggle, which is the game Lane was told they were going to play. Understandable, since April has been roasting Lane's every chess move up until now.
- If You Ever Do Anything to Hurt Her...: Despite not being related to or even friends with Lulu, Luke promises to break every bone in Kirk's body if he ever says an unkind word to her.
- Malaproper: Lorelai claims to have thought café au lait was in fact café olé, which according to her means "coffee, all right!" in Spanish.
- Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Susan tries to be this to Luke, but you can only be nuts at Luke if he has known you for several years.
- Metaphorgotten: Chris asks his daughter if she literally couldn't give two figs about them getting to her. Rory replies that one and a half fig is her cap.
- Mistaken For Couple: Subverted. Lorelai thinks a Yale father assumes she and Chris are married, but he actually thought Emily and Christopher were married. It's probably rarer for kids to have their mother's last name in his circles.
- Product Placement:
- Deli.
- Subverted with Chez Zinjustin's, which is mentioned over and over but seems to be fictional.
- Pun: Lorelai wants her and Chris to go by the pseudonyms Zinf and Del. Zinfandel is a Californian wine grape.
- Shout-Out
- Yale allegedly plants kids reading Leo Tolstoy under trees.
- Lorelai thinks her dog is more of a Reed or an Oberlin than an Ivy League dog.
- Kirk watches Antiques Roadshow.
- Lorelai wants her and Chris to be Laverne & Shirley on their name tags. When he rejects this proposal, she suggests Anthony and Cleopatra, F.Scott and Zelda, and Zinf and Del.
- Chris thinks Lorelai lives in Pleasantville.
- Superman wears his "name tag" in the middle of his chest.
- Lorelai calls Emily Riddler when she claims that a grandparent is a kind of parent, just like a grand piano is a kind of piano.
- A lecturer claims Albert Einstein was pretty smart.
- Coach Bennet wants Marlene Dietrich to play her in a movie.
- Lorelai says Chris doesn't have to be superdad, he can just be Clark Kent dad.
- Bon Jovi's Living on a Prayer doesn't sound as great in a capella, at least not the group Lorelai and Chris pass on their way back from the restaurant.
- Smart People Play Chess: April insists on playing chess with Lane. When told a fianchetto will lose her the match, Lane says she doesn't care and does it anyway.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaiciousness: Lane has been pracitising seven-letter words in anticipation of Boggle with April. She invites her to discuss zynurgy instead of playing chess.
- Sustained Misunderstanding: Lorelai refuses to explain to her parents why her nametag says "Zinf", so lets them think it's a Herbew word that's part of a Yale tradition.
- Title Drop: The girl who hands out nametags on Yale's parents' day shouts this at everyone instead of "bye".
- Voicemail Confusion: Subverted. Lorelai calls Emily and she answers the phone, and Lorelai treats her like an answering machine.
