Recap / Gilmore Girls S 02 E 19

Season 2, episode 19

Teach Me Tonight

Lorelai complains about the town viewing The Yearling for the fourth year in a row, so Taylor says she can pick the movie this year. She and Rory seem to be making a pro/con list to eliminate choices from their list of movies when Taylor informs them that they have to pick from a pre-made list.

Luke convinces Rory to tutor Jess, not because he struggles with the subjects but because he struggles with actually being bothered to do the schoolwork. Jess and Rory go to buy ice cream on the condition that Rory can read Othello to him and they get in a car accident.

Tropes:

• Apple for Teacher: Jess uses Stage Magic to make one appear for Rory when she arrives to tutor him. It meets a No-Sell, but Rory's expression is secretly charmed once she sends him upstairs for his books.
• Bad "Bad Acting": Kirk's shortfilm subverts this. The cuts, the angles, the script, and the choreography are what makes it ridiculously bad. The acting is just regular bad.
• Bait-and-Switch: Luke accidentally drops triple the amount of cocoa in his brownie batter, but bakes them and gives them to Lorelai. When she tries one she looks like she's about to throw up, but she actually thinks it's pretty good.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Jess wants to borrow a pen from Lane so he can take the test the class is taking, but when she gives him one he immediately starts making margin notes in his Kurt Vonnegut novel.
  • Rory asks Lorelai to tell Dean she's with Lane to keep him from finding out she's with Jess, but insists it's not lying.
  • Jess arrives for tutoring without his books, and makes up excuses as to where they are, including that the cat ate them.
• Bookworm: Jess reads a lot. According to Rory it takes him five minutes to finish a book.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Jess, who loves reading, but won't take school seriously.
• Brutal Honesty: When Rory says she wants to be a foreign correspondent, Jess can't hide his surprise and is the first person close to her to actually question the goal, asking if it might be "a little too rough."
• By "No", I Mean "Yes": Jess offers to lend Rory a book on the punk movement, and Rory threatens to leave if he keeps trying to distract from tutoring. Then adds that yes, she would like to borrow it, thank you.
• Captain Obvious: Lorelai refuses to answer the phone because she knows it's Chris calling Rory, and thinks Rory should know that too given the day and the time.
• Character Shilling: Rory tells Jess about how fast Jess reads.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Lorelai passes time while in line at the grocery store by making up stories about Mark trying to steal Dean's lucrative job as a bagboy, and that Dean stole Taylor's ladder to make himself indispensable.
• Funny Background Event: While Lorelai rants about having to show The Yearling, Rory roasts a marshmallow on the stove.
• Held Back in School: Jess it at risk of having to repeat his junior year, and Luke is concerned he's going to be the "kid in the back of the room with a beard and a racing form babbling incoherently about Steely Dan" if he doesn't start taking school more seriously.
  Jess: Steely Dan?
  Luke: The group may change, the freak in the back never does.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Subverted with Kirk, who says in his soul he is Akira Kurosawa, but was getting him mixed up with Asaad Kelada.
  • The car crash is caused by Jess swerving to avoid an animal in the road.
• Hypocrite: Lorelai yells at Luke for Jess crashing Rory's car into a bench. Unfortunately, that is the first Luke hears of it, so he has other concerns than Lorelai's upset, but that doesn't stop Lorelai from following him to keep yelling.
• Insistent Terminology: Ice cream...in cones.
• Lampshade Hanging: Kirk mentions how much he enjoys his many jobs.
• Laziness Callout: Rory directly calls Jess out on his Deliberate Underperformance in school.
• Mama Bear: Lorelai gets hers on when Rory gets in a car accident, threatening to make a scene if they don't let her see her daughter now, asking the doctor to take extra x-rays, and waking Luke in the middle of the night to yell at Jess and chew Luke out for taking Jess in in the first place.
• Mismeasurement: Luke uses the excuse of accidentally adding triple the amount of cocoa to a pan of brownies in order to stop by the Gilmore house; he figures Lorelai will like them because she has "superhuman chocolate tolerance." Some Artistic License is taken with baking here, since cocoa powder isn't sweet, so unless he also added three times the amount of sugar, those brownies are incredibly bitter.
• Mood Whiplash: Between Rory and Jess's Friendship Moment and the rest of the episode, which deals with the fallout of the car accident.
• My Beloved Smother: Lorelai opts to sleep in a chair in Rory's room when she has a hairline fracture in her wrist.
• Noodle Incident: We never do find out where Jess is hiding 500 baseballs. Or his thoughts on how Coldplay could be considered an alternative band.
• Offscreen Crash: Jess and Rory's car accident.
• Papa Wolf: After the car accident, Chris says he needs a picture of Jess so he doesn't accidentally rip the head off the wrong kid.
  • Luke claps back against Lorelai's rant after the accident, telling her he's sorry, but at least she knows where Rory is and she's okay and that he needs to find Jess to make sure he's okay, as no one has seen him since the accident. Lorelai inelegantly tells him to "go to hell," and he returns the sentiment.
• Parental Hypocrisy: Lorelai's reaction to Jess and Rory's accident comes off as this when a throwaway line from a season one episode reminds the audience that Christopher crashed his Porsche driving deliberately recklessly two hours after he got it for his 16th birthday, and she was in the passenger seat "having a blast."
• Parenthetical Swearing: Lorelai says goodbye to Jess, and Jess patronizingly responds "ma'am."
• Pick a Card: When Rory tries to help him with studying, Jess starts doing magic tricks to distract her.
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • Rory wants Jess to concentrate on homework, but he says he's too busy prying into her personal life.
  • Later, he tells Rory he will help her in her dream to be an overseas correspondent by having her stand in the middle of the road while he drives towards her screaming in a foreign language. Rory points out he'd need to learn a foreign language first.
• Shout-Out:
  • The episode title is a reference to the song "Teach Me Tonight, made famous by Frank Sinatra.
  • An episode-length one to The Yearling.
  • The Wizard of Oz, The Sting, Rocky, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Arthur (1981), and Sophie's Choice are all considered as alternatives to The Yearling.
  • The Singing Detective, too, despite not being a movie.
  • As is Cabin Boy.
  • And Desperately Seeking Susan to avoid a topic.
  • Rory suggests fake movie "My Mother's Two" and Lorelai asks if she means the one with Angie Dickinson.
  • Jess makes margin notes in Slaughterhouse-Five.
  • Fletch and Urban Cowboy right before they learn that there's a list to puck from.
  • Lorelai figures out how Snow Dogs was made.
  • The freak in the back of the classroom mumbles incoherently about Steely Dan, Luke asserts.
  • Luke knocks on the door of the Gilmore house, and Lorelai exclaims it must be "Pauline Kael back from the dead." She greets him with "Pauline!" much to his confusion.
  • Kirk is proud to rent out Jennifer Lopez flicks.
  • But not Akira Kurosawa and Seven Samurai.
  • He was thinking of Asaad Kelada and Facts of Life.
  • Kirk's shorts are inspired less by Babe and more by Babe 2.
  • Lorelai claims she is not What Happened to Baby Jane? yet.
  • Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk is Jess's Genius Book Club book this week.
  • Instead of notes about Shakespeare, Jess writes down the words to "Guns of Brixton" by The Clash.
  • Jess tried to explain to Rory how Coldplay could be considered an alternative band.
  • Rory agrees to get ice cream if she can read Othello in the car.
  • Rory doesn't buy Jess's Kurt Cobain-y thing.
  • Jess calls Rory Courtney Love in response.
  • Jess tells Rory "As you wish".
  • Lorelai threatens to do a reenactment of Shirley MacLaine's character's meltdown in Terms of Endearment.
  • Lorelai calls the doctor treating Rory's arm George Clooney.
  • Rory has CDs of Stan Freberg, Ash and Sinéad O'Connor for her "sick bed".
  • Lorelai calls Rory "my little Marianne Faithfull".
  • Kirk's shortfilm has him dance to "White Lines (Don't Do This)" by Melle Mel.
    • Lulu is definitely channeling Chloe O'Brian in her performance.
• Show Within a Show: Kirk's short film.
• Stage Magic:
  • Jess uses this to give Rory an apple, a joke about her tutoring him.
  • Then he asks her to pick a card. She takes the deck and throws it on the floor, prompting him to say that she made the trick harder.
• Sticky Fingers: Jess has stolen all 500 of Stars Hollow High's baseballs.
• Take a Third Option: When Jess presents her with a card trick, Rory picks all the cards and throws them on the floor.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Pretty much Rory and Jess's entire conversation in the car is about Rory's belief that Jess could do more with his life than what he is currently doing. He is skeptical.

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