The Hobbit, the Sofa, and the Digger Stiles
Lorelai buys Rory stuff to have an excuse to visit her at Yale. It's shopping week where everyone gets to try out classes, Rory trying over fifty. Lorelai and Sookie meet to discuss inn business, and Sookie mentions that she already got them a catering job. Emily buys Rory expensive furniture for her dorm, unasked. Jason Stiles contacts Richard to offer to start a business with him instead. The theme for the episode is themed parties.
Tropes
- Babies Make Everything Better: Jackson appears to be of this opinion.
- Bait-and-Switch: One of the adults asks Lorelai if she remembered to bring swords, because some of the kids are asking for swords. Lorelai says that she forgot the swords.woman: Thank God.
- Big Eater: Sookie doesn't expect children to be this, so for a children's birthday party she makes a single dish of jalapeño-flavored macaroni and cheese.Sookie: They're small, how much can they eat?
- Blatant Lies: Rory's "the teacher wants us to be there early" fib only worked once, in first grade, but she's tried it every year and she tries it on her first day of college classes.
- Boring, but Practical: Sookie is bored with the menu at the birthday party, so goes with something Awesome, but Impractical instead.
- Brick Joke: Lorelai forgot to bring swords to the children's birthday party, which is appreciated by the mother of the birthday boy. One of the fathers brought swords, though.
- Captain Obvious: Marty observes that he's on the floor and naked when Rory wakes him by poking him with a stick.
- Child Hater: Sookie seems to be outright afraid of children when around them, apparently taking most of her experience with them from movies like Home Alone. The rest of the time she finds them boring.
- Cloudcuckoo Lander: Tana deduces from the fact that she didn't see anyone carry the new furniture in that it must have been there when she got there. She isn't sure about the fireplace, though.
- Comically Missing the Point:
- Jackson and Sookie think a baby monitor is a walkie-talkie. He goes to the baby room and starts talking into it, and Sookie tries to reply through the unit in the kitchen, failing to realize that baby monitors are one-way.
- Tana wonders if the fireplace in the common room was put in there by Emily earlier that day.
- Sookie thought Lorelai was joking when she suggested getting popcorn balls for the children's birthday party. She expected to serve gourmet food.
- Continuity Nod: Lorelai mentions Rory's unofficial goal to read every book in the university library.
- Continuity Snarl: Within the same episode, Jason tells Richard he would like to go one day without being called Digger as part of his motivation for leaving his dad's firm. Later, when Lorelai identifies him by said nickname, Richard tells her no one has called him Digger in years.
- Dramatically Missing the Point:
- Emily thinks Rory is missing the point of establishing your dominance by furnishing the common room.
- Rory thinks Emily is missing the point of a common room, it being the room she and her roommates have in common.
- Lorelai thinks Rory is missing the point of Emily's actions, which according to Lorelai is to establish her dominance over Rory.
- Sookie misses the point of the whole birthday party.
- Sookie doesn't understand why a child's face would scrunch up when she screams at it, at first.
- Embarrassing Nickname:
- Jason doesn't really like being called Digger.
- The "D.A.R. darlings" try to give Rory one, trying out various combinations of parts of her real name.
- Marty doesn't want to be known as "the naked guy", prompting Rory to suggest "the never-naked guy".
- Godwin's Law: Lorelai claims that some people shouldn't be parents, like her own parents, Osama bin Laden's parents, and Hitler's parents.
- Guilt Complex:
- Lorelai appeals to Rory's to spare her the pain of Emily appealing to it.
- Paris accuses Rory of having a wealthy family to guilt her into opening their door to the party.
- Jaywalking Will Ruin Your Life: Lane once wore a bracelet to school. Parents were called. Prayer groups were arranged.
- Malaproper: Paris insists that going to a party is passive, while opening your door so people can party in your common room is active.
- Meaningful Name: Jason "Digger" Stiles's style is to "dig" for treasure, "treasure" being whatever he really wants.
- Metaphorgotten: Lorelai assures a distressed Sookie that children are nothing like duvet covers, who notoriously like whoever they go home with, just like golden retrievers.
- Naked People Are Funny: Marty wakes up naked in the hall as Rory walks by. His main concern is not how he got naked, but that lots of people have probably seen him and will nickname him Naked Guy.
- Person as Verb: "To lorelai" means to sample fast-food.
- Plot Parallel: Sookie and Lorelai arrange a party for children. It was Sookie's idea, but Sookie ends up hating it and thinking kids have a real unsophisticated taste in food. At the same time, Paris wants to participate in the college party being thrown, and ends up hating it and finding all the other college students boring to the point of being frustrating. Lorelai and Rory reluctantly agreed to their respective friend's party plans.
- Product Placement: Emily wears Chanel no. 5, which lets Lorelai smell that she was in Rory's room.
- School Uniforms are the New Black: Tana wants to borrow Rory's Chilton uniform for the party. It's not a costume party.
- Self-Deprecation: Lorelai comments that her taste in food is not that different from an eight-year-old's.
- Shout-Out:
- The title references The Hobbit, though they watch The Lord of the Rings as The Hobbit hasn't been filmatized yet.
- Rory reads Atonement while waiting for the rest of her class to arrive.
- Emily's furtinure guy recommends Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.
- Rory is busy being Heidi's grandfather.
- Paris is a Stephen King novel.
- The birthday party Lorelai and Sookie cater is Lord of the Rings-themed.
- Lorelai references The Love Boat, but the kids don't get it and start arguing about whether her name is Julie or Lorelai.
- Louise's boyfriend is freaked about The Simpsons going off the air.
- According to the DAR darlings, celebrating Christmas in Hawaii is too creative for Walt Disney.
- Paris refers to Rory's grandma-sent obligation friends as "the Gabor sisters".
- Paris figures Tana will be in the John Nash group.
- Sookie expects kids who don't like you to tie you to a chair, beat you with a bat, and set your house on fire.
- Sookie realizes she's Mommie Dearest.
- Sookie hates it when Jackson's niece sings Mariah Carey songs.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: Invoked. Sookie insists that she has never borrowed the neighbor's kid to watch for the evening. Lorelai replies that that's good, because that's called kidnapping.
- Take That!:
- Lorelai claims not even the editor of the Stars Hollow Gazette subscribes to the Stars Hollow Gazette.
- There is grumbling about how much freshmen and Russian economics suck.
- Paris thinks people her age are airheads.
- Take That Me:
- Lorelai claims her own taste in food is not very different from that of an eight-year-old.
- Sookie berates herself for being bad with kids.Sookie: I'm Mommie dearest!
- Sure, Let's Go with That: During the sleepover at Rory's dorm, Lorelai finds a kiosk near the library on the campus map where Rory can buy coffee. The next morning, two girls come by with coffee, and Rory guesses they got it at the kiosk by the library, which leads the girls to assume she found it before them. Rory decides to go with that.
- Themed Party:
- Paris figures the first Yale party of the year will go from "celebrating the first week of classes" to "hey, walking works, let's drink" quite fast. Paris wants their room to be Deep Conversation themed during the party.
- Lorelai and Sookie cater a J. R. R. Tolkien-themed birthday party.
- Western Zodiac: The "DAR darlings" suggest basing Rory's nickname on her birth sign. Rory refrains from telling them what it is, though everything indicates it's Libra.
- Writers Cannot Do Math: Writers should do math, because by making Jason thirty-seven when Lorelai is thirty-five, people will start to wonder why they were at summer camp together before Lorelai was sixteen.
