Season 1, Episode 4
The Deer Hunters
(Original air date: 10/26/00)Rory gets a D on a test and beats herself up for it. Lorelai attends a parent/teacher-meeting and meets Max Medina for the first time. Sookie is desperately searching for a reason why a critic would call her magic risotto "okay".
Rory studies hard for a test on Shakespeare and oversleeps on the day of it. When driving to school in a panic (and while getting dressed) she stops at a crossroads and a deer runs into her car. At school no one believes her even though there are antler marks on the side of her mother's truck. She doesn't get to take the test and loses it, yelling at everyone for stuff they have annoyed her with. Lorelai throws a similar fit when she tries to convince the headmaster to let Rory take the test.
Rory's study method: Active recall, with Lorelai playing the quizmaster.
Tropes
- Bad to the Last Drop: The coffee at the parent-teacher conference is so bad that Lorelai exclaims "Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the camel!" after taking a sip of it. She later implores Max to never make coffee again.Lorelai: It just keeps getting worse.
Max: Well, you know not drinking it is always an option.
Lorelai: Not in my world. - Big "NO!": Rory when she realizes she has overslept. Downplayed though.
- Bookworm: Rory gets to display her reading skills here, and lugs several book bags around.Lorelai: Behold, in theatres now: the thing that reads a lot.
- Brick Joke: Lorelai tells Sookie about the last parent/teacher meeting she attended, where they allegedly voted on whether to allow the kids to wear scrunchies on school grounds. Later she is at another parent/teacher meeting, and a woman whispers to her friend: "that's the one who voted for the scrunchies".
- Comfort Food: When Rory is studying at Luke's and gets so stressed she throws a pencil, Luke brings her a slice of pie. When Rory wonders what would have happened if she threw a pen, Luke says he would have brought her trout.Luke: I don't make the rules, I just carry them out.
- Companion Cube: Lorelai mocks Rory's worry about not being taken seriously at Chilton because of un-serious legal pads by assigning negative moods to other writing equipment.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Louise got an A on a test.
- Foreshadowing: Max makes really bad coffee. No wonder Lorelai wasn't interested.
- Friend to All Living Things: Rory is worried about the deer that ran into her jeep then ran away.
- Godwin's Law: Lorelai calls Headmaster Charleston "Il Duce" for being strict about people being on time.
- Hypocritical Humor:
- After Rory gets a D on a paper, Paris (A) tells Madeline (B) and Louise (A), so Rory hears it, that not everyone can be smart since someone has to answer the phone. Madeline says she doesn't understand what Paris is talking about. Paris tells her in a gloating tone that Rory does.
- Rory stubbornly denies being stubborn.
- Lorelai thinks Michel does this when he says that Headmaster Charleston has a funny accent.
- Individuality Is Illegal: Rory considers Chilton this, not without justification. Shown when insists on yellow legal pads because the purple ones won't be seen as serious enough.
- Late for School: Rory oversleeps for an important test, is shocked at realizing she's late when she wakes up, and an important part of the episode is about her hurrying to the school but failing to arrive on time.
- Malaproper:
- "Do you want to belabor the conversation?" is Rory's version of the combo "do you want to belabor the point?" plus "do you really want to continue this conversation?".
- The veterinary says Cinnamon was 260 in human years. She means cat years, unless she is saying that the cat was born in 1740.
- Non Sequitur: Rory tells Dean that she doesn't have a second – but she has gum.
- The Nose Knows: Whether your dish is too salty, even if you're cooking several rooms away, at least if you're Sookie.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Rory "going ballistic" in class makes Lorelai rethink the whole Chilton and Harvard thing in a way a crush on Dean never could.
- Jackson knows something's up with Sookie when she says nothing about the vegetables he brought her, even though they were the wrong ones.
- Product Placement: Snickers, the chocolate-covered death.
- Pun: Lorelai backs into a globe.Lorelai: What in the world?
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Headmaster Charleston. Max Medina.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Lorelai gives Hanlin one. He isn't impressed.
- Rule of Three:
- Rory needs three highlighters because one dries up, one gets lost, you have one left.
- Rory runs back onto the bus to get more of her bags three times.
- Subverted when Lorelai claims it took Rory three months to learn to ride a bike, but Rory corrects her that it was four.
- Sookie force-feeds Lorelai taste-samples of three risottos.
- Running Gag: Several times, Rory has to correct other people that the deer hit the car instead of the other way around, but most don't seem to believe her.
- Shout-Out:
- There is a big test on Shakespeare.
- Rory still gets called Mary at school.
- Drella can't play Black Sabbath, Steely Dan, Boston, or Queen on her harp, though Mozart is fine.
- Max wants his students to read Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Ben Johnson and John Webster.
- Lorelai wears a The B-52s-shirt.
- Rory used to love Saved by the Bell.
- Paris quotes the Shakespeare's Sonnet 116.
- The Comedy of Errors, Richard III, the Sonnets.
- Pat Benatar is also off limits, but if she can play harp Lorelai will take her.
- Lorelai had a Flashdance phase when she was young.
- Take That!: Lorelai tells a golf fan who finds her weird that finding tests interesting is no weirder than liking golf.
- When Rory admits she didn't tell Lorelai about the "D" she received in English because it was too humiliating for her, Lorelai reminds Rory of the time she admitted she liked Saved by the Bell; "What could be more humiliating than that?"
- Too Much Information: Lorelai tells an embarrassing story about Rory needing diapers when she was four but only having a Harvard t-shirt.
- Writers Cannot Do Math:
- For Cinnamon to be 260 cat years, she would have to be 37 years old. For comparison, Lorelai is 32.
- Rory isn't actually 16 yet, meaning she's not old enough to have her driver's license and be driving the Jeep on her own.
- Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Subverted. Sookie gets a glowing review on her food except her risotto, which was okay. She takes it personally.
