Cheer

EMILY: You brought us used dessert?
LORELAI: It’s not used. It’s left over.
EMILY: How nice. I’ll just put it in the kitchen next to my half-empty box of Cheer.

Cheer is a brand of laundry detergent sold in the US and Canada, and made by Procter & Gamble. It has been sold since 1950.

It’s very unlikely that Emily really keeps laundry powder in the kitchen, or that she would store cake next to it. She’s just being nasty. Most people are prepared to be magnanimous and conciliatory when they get everything their own way, and are proven right in a disagreement. Not Emily.

“Never heard of blueberry shortcake”

EMILY: I’ve never heard of blueberry shortcake.
LORELAI: Yeah, it’s a Stars Hollow specialty.

Seriously, why has nobody on the show ever heard of blueberry shortcake?

Boobs

RORY: I couldn’t possibly stretch them out. Your boobs are way bigger than mine.
LORELAI: That is not true. Your boobs are totally bigger than mine!
RORY: You’re crazy!

According to websites which give celebrity bra sizes, Lauren Graham is a 34B and Alexis Bledel is a 32B. If so, they have the same cup size, so Lorelai is not “way bigger” than Rory. Likewise, Rory cannot possibly be stretching out Lorelai’s clothing when she borrows it as she is slightly smaller across the back.

Of course Rory’s real crime isn’t that she stole Lorelai’s sweater – it’s that she has “stolen” her parents. It’s telling that Lorelai claims it’s her favourite sweater, which is news to Rory. In the same way, the parents she didn’t value somehow become far more attractive when Rory has them.

Luxembourg Gardens

MICHEL: I was attacked by a band of swans in the Luxembourg Gardens when I was a boy.

Le Jardin du Luxembourg, called the Luxembourg Garden in English, is a formal garden in Paris outside the Luxembourg Palace. The garden is owned by the French Senate.

Although there is a large pool in the Garden, it doesn’t have a “band of swans”; there is a fountain which depicts Leda and the Swan instead. This calls into question Michel’s story, and the fact that he gets the name of the Garden wrong makes one wonder if he grew up in Paris at all.

Tiger Woods

EMILY: [gives Rory a hat] Here you go. Now you look just like Tiger Woods.
RORY: Wow, that’s some hat.

Eldrick “Tiger” Woods (born 1975) is a professional American golfer and among the most successful of all time. He became the World #1 in 1997, less than a year after turning professional.

I can find no instances of Tiger Woods ever wearing a woolly hat such as the one Emily gives Rory, and clearly it’s going to take much more than a hat to make Rory look anything like Woods.

“She’s a sixteen year old”

RICHARD: She’s a sixteen year old who would rather be at the mall.

Does nobody in Rory’s family know that she hasn’t turned sixteen yet?

Lorelai the First

We learn that Richard’s mother is named Lorelai, so in fact it is a family name which has been passed down to Rory by her mother, and not the Demerol-inspired feminist statement which we were told about in the last two episodes.

Richard speaks about his mother as if she is dead, but she turns up alive and well later in the season.

Tuesdays and Thursdays

Lorelai suggests that she take Rory and Lane into Hartford twice a week on the evenings she attends business class so that they can go shopping or study together. We never hear of this plan being put into action, and it doesn’t sound like something Mrs Kim would agree to.

“You’re not buying us a DSL”

In the scene where Lorelai confronts Emily at the salon, we learn that Lorelai and Rory have dial-up internet access, and that Lorelai is turning down the offer of free broadband from her mother, even though that would be of genuine help to Rory’s education. To maintain her independence from Emily, Lorelai is willing to disadvantage her own daughter.

In the Pilot, when Lorelai and Rory are arguing about going to Chilton, Lorelai claims that their household has always been a democracy, with Rory getting an equal say in all decisions, until she decided to use the “mom card” and force her daughter to attend private school. Yet in this instance, Rory is never even told about the offer of free broadband so that she can put forward her views. We may wonder how many other times Rory remained unaware that a choice was being made on her behalf.

Turtle

Emily tells the internet access company that Lorelai keeps her spare key in a frog, but it’s actually a turtle. The fact that Emily makes an error was probably meant to suggest that she rarely visited Lorelai and didn’t pay much attention to the details of her life. Later on it turns out that Emily has never visited Lorelai’s house at this point, which makes you wonder how she knew about the spare key holder at all. Possibly Lorelai had mentioned it to her at some time, although it’s difficult to imagine the circumstances in which this would have occurred.

The fact that Emily gives the internet company permission to break into her daughter’s house while she is away from home speaks volumes about her high-handed attitude. It’s apt for the scene that Lorelai keeps the spare key to the house in a turtle, considering that she wants her internet to remain slow.