PSATs

While Lorelai is doing her homework for business school in the diner, Rory comes in, clutching her PSAT results. It’s four-thirty, but somehow Rory is already back from school, which gets out at 4.05 pm and is forty minutes away, gone home to get their mail, and walked to the diner to meet her mother, all within twenty-five minutes. But let’s ignore yet another time zone issue.

The SAT is a standardised test widely used for college admissions in the US, in use since 1926. Originally the Scholastic Aptitude Test, its name has changed several times, and by now it isn’t an acronym of anything – everyone just knows that SAT means the test to get into college.

The PSAT is the Preliminary SAT, which high school students take in early to mid-October – Rory probably took hers in the period between Presenting Lorelai Gilmore and Like Mother Like Daughter.

Taking the PSAT is said to improve your scores when taking the SAT, and furthermore, the top scorers are rewarded with scholarships, so they are considered to be very important.

Results of the PSAT are usually mailed out perhaps six to eight weeks after the taking the test, so in the real world, Rory would have already had her results by late January.

“Leave the pot, Ethel”

LORELAI: Leave the pot, Ethel.
LUKE: I’m just an enabler.

Lorelai is referencing Ethel Mertz, from the television show, I Love Lucy, previously and frequently discussed. In the show, Lucy often had coffee with her best friend Ethel, and here Lorelai implies that Luke is her best friend – as long as he has coffee to enable her caffeine addiction.

Secrets and Loans

The episode title is a reference to the 1996 British drama film Secrets & Lies, directed by Mike Leigh. The film is about an adopted woman who seeks out her birth mother, and the many secrets and lies involved in the process (indeed, one of the biggest questions in the film remains a secret, although with some tragic hints as to its answer).

Secrets & Lies received rave reviews from critics, and is regarded as one of the best British films of all time. It was showered with international awards, including Best Film at the BAFTAs and the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It was praised for bringing to light important issues surrounding adoption.

The episode doesn’t have much to do with the film’s subject matter, except that it involves secrets between mothers and daughters.