Recap / The Golden Girls S 07 E 21 Home Again Rose

"Home Again Rose" is a two-part episode in the seventh season of The Golden Girls.

Blanche, Dorothy and Sophia cheer up a hospitalized Rose after she has a heart attack at a crashed class reunion.

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Tropes:

• Absurdly High-Stakes Game: According to Rose, her great-grandfather once removed a neighbor's appendix despite the neighbor in question not being sick. The reason? "Let's just say they were playing poker and the stakes got a little high."
• Bait-and-Switch Comment: After Blanche brings up a Class Reunion that she, Dorothy, and Rose can attend to pretend to be alumni there in order to blend in, Sophia eagerly imposes herself into the topical focus.
  Dorothy: Wait a minute, what about Ma?
  Sophia: Thank you, pussycat.
  Dorothy: We'll have to get her a sitter.
  [Sophia looks displeased]
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: The four no-show alumni Rose selects for them to disguise of fall into this. Blanche is to pose as "Susan Armstrong" (actually a Jerkass, but they don't know it yet), and Dorothy is to pretend to be "Cindy Lou Peoples". Then the choices become weirder: The name Rose has in mind for Sophia is "Myron Zucker", prompting Sophia to ask Dorothy to switch with her, only for Dorothy to refuse, and Rose opts to pose as "Kim Fung Toi", the Korean then-foreign exchange student.
• Class Reunion: Played with. While there IS a class reunion in this episode, the girls never attended the school where the reunion is to take place and merely disguise themselves as the no-show alumni who did attend back when they were students. It's mentioned that Rose's actual high school reunion occurred recently, but Rose didn't feel well enough to go due to her impending heart attack.
• Cringe Comedy: Dorothy finding out the identity she was using for that high school reunion belonged to a prom queen, and her barely able to contain her joy at "being queen."
  Sophia: This is sad, this is so sad.
• Dream Sequence: Rose makes the girls promise to have their heads cryogenically frozen so they can all be friends forever. After she has open heart surgery, she has a dream about herself, Blanche, and Dorothy all reduced to nothing but heads and talking on the kitchen table. Sophia is part of the deal—but as she tipped the man who froze her, she ends up with the body of a 25-year-old woman.
• Foreshadowing: Interestingly, some is set up for the next episode. When Dorothy lies about her husband having died in a tar pit, she notably says her first husband. The series would end with Dorothy officially marrying another man.
• Heel Realization: Rose's daughter Kiersten has been frosty and mean to the other hosuemates, mostly due to her crippling fear over her mother's dire condition, even refusing to let them see Rose on the belief that they aren't her real family. When she's later told that Blanche is prepared to take out a second mortgage on her long paid-off family home to take care of Rose if needed, she realizes that Dorothy, Sophia, and Blanche are indeed deserving of being called family, and lets them through to see her.
• Hero Antagonist: Kiersten serves as this, as she is every bit as sympathetic due to her extreme fear over losing her mother, but still being an obstacle to the other women being with Rose. She later realizes her error, thankfully.
• Hypocritical Humor: Rose is wary about going to a Class Reunion they don't belong to because that's lying, which is in violation of her honor code, only to change her mind and go along after Dorothy asks what her natural hair color is.
• Jerkass: Susan Armstrong, the woman Blache was impersonating at the reunion. Her known antics include abandoning her son to be raised by the father's parents and outing another classmate as gay; considering when they would have been in high school it's honestly lucky that man is still alive. Clearly, there's a reason she doesn't dare show her face around the rest of her class.
• Noodle Incident:
  • When the girls are discussing getting Sophia a sitter while they go out to the class reunion:
    Blanche: No more sitters! We're still in litigation with the last one.
    Sophia: She bit me first!
  • Several regarding the woman Blanche pretended to be at the reunion. One guy comes up and drags her for outing him as gay to the whole school. Another calls her out for abandoning their child to be raised by his parents. Seems there's a good reason why the woman was a no-show at the reunion.
• Out with a Bang: This is what happened to Blanche in Rose's dream where they are merely frozen heads on the kitchen table. According to her, she was 92 and invited over a cute tennis instructor. While she was in the tub, she asked him to sponge off her back, made her move, and her last words were "Thank you baby, glub, glub, glub..."
• Rhetorical Question Blunder: A doozy from Rose in Part 1:
  Dorothy: [after Blanche remarks that to be believable at the class reunion they plan to crash, they'll have to study the yearbook and learn such valuable information as who was the class slut] Blanche, how do you tell a slut from a yearbook?
  Rose: Oh - how do you tell a slut from a yearbook? Uh, you don't have to buy a yearbook dinner.
  Blanche: Rose...
  Rose: You can bring a yearbook home to meet your parents.
  Blanche: Rose!
  Rose: There's nothing wrong with having a yearbook on the coffee table.
  Dorothy: Rose, this isn't a riddle!
  Rose: Well, make it one! I had three good answers!
• Stealth Insult: While crashing that high school reunion, Dorothy delivers a good one to Stan (who isn't present) when she tries to get away from a guy who won't stop talking about being a tar salesman.
  Dorothy: ...I lost my first husband in a tar pit.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Blanche is happy about Janet visiting her... until Sophia brings up how strained her relationship with Janet is.
    Blanche: I've never been so happy.
    Sophia: Janet? Isn't she the daughter who hates you?
    Blanche: Well, that didn't last long, did it?
  • As the girls spend more and more time at the Class Reunion pretending to be the no-show alumni they pose as, Dorothy at one point complains that the life of the one she pretends to be is just as dull as hers and decides it's time to leave. Cue the announcer addressing the identity of the person Dorothy has been using as "prom queen" in front of everyone present.
• True Companions: Rose suffers a severe heart attack and needs quadruple bypass surgery. When her daughter expresses concern that they won't be able to pay for the rehab, Blanche immediately remarks that the Girls will help, commenting, "That's why houses have mortgages." In other words, she's willing to take out another loan on her property if it means helping Rose.
• Wham Line: The Stinger of the first part of the episode, when Dorothy, Blanche, and Sophia go to pick up Rose from the hospital:
  Nurse: "I'm sorry to have to tell you this... but Rose went into cardiac arrest. They're prepping her for surgery."