Norman Mailer, I'm Pregnant
Sookie is mad that Norman Mailer only drinks ice tea. Dean and Rory each work whenever the other has time. Financial adviser Ann advises the Dragonfly managers to drop lunches, which tics Sookie off. Rory tries to do a story about illegal downloading of music when she runs into a woman in a gorilla mask. Sherry has fled to Paris. Chris has trouble getting his toddler to sleep. Lorelai has trouble telling Luke that she is helping Chris with that. Sookie realizes she is pregnant again.
Maid of the week: A blonde woman who doesn't understand Lorelai's pop-culture references.
Tropes
- Anxiety Dreams: Paris dreams that Rory tries to take the beat she wants. It's the religion beat, which Rory has no interest in.
- Bait-and-Switch:
- Rory gets tired of arguing with Paris about whether she wants the religion beat, so pretends she misunderstood, then reiterates that she doesn't want the religion beat.
- Rory tells Dean he'll get to read her article on their date, but reveals she's kidding: she intends to read it to him.
- Berate and Switch: Doyle yells at Paris for harassing several religious leaders and stealing their shoes. He's really proud of her.
- Calling the Old Man Out: Precautionary calling the old man out. Rory tells Christopher to stop calling Lorelai because he's gonna mess up her love life again as always.
- Child Hater: Chris can't call Sherry's friends to help him with the baby because they hate children.
- Comically Missing the Point:
- Lorelai warms her socks in her oven and finds them not warm enough for her satisfaction, which makes her wonder if her oven is broke. Luke asks, what about her dryer? She replies that no, her dryer is fine.
- Luke, trying to fix it, conks his head on Lorelai's oven and Lorelai thinks it's a bit.
- Compliment Backfire:
- Glenn's article about The Anarchist Cookbook gets picked up by The New York Times. He is not happy about it, but rather annoyed that professional editors keep calling him.
- Invoked by Norman Mailer, who says he is not a fan of compliments.
- Continuity Nod:
- Lorelai mentions the time Rory hit a deer.
- Rory mentions that she took Latin in high school.
- Dark Humor: Michel tells guests about a nearby place where people have died painful, but very picturesque, deaths.
- Feminine Women Can Cook: This show's near-permanent aversion of this trope makes Paris's dream that Rory bribed Doyle with veal parmesan that she cooked herself particularly implausible.
- Foreshadowing: Rory complains about spending the summer in Europe instead of taking her journalism dream seriously like everyone else on the paper.
- Hates Being Touched: Glenn isn't a fan of backpats.
- Hypocritical Humor:
- Doyle hates privileged white guys. Rory points out that he is a privileged white guy.
- A woman stumbles into a ladies' room, takes off her gorilla mask, realizes Rory is there, says "oops", and walks out declaring, in Latin, that she is prepared for everything.
- Sookie invokes this by telling her iced tea-only guest that she is going to read his book without paying for it.
- Insistent Terminology: Lorelai points out that Kirk is a giant hot-dog, but Kirk says that according to the costume tag he's a giant wiener.
- Irony: Rory finds that record sales are up despite illegal downloading of music being a thing.
- Missing Mom: Sherry bailed on Chris and Gigi and got a job and moved to Paris.
- Pregnancy Makes You Crazy: Though she isn't serving food that tastes like raw sewage this time, Sookie figures out that she's pregnant by reflecting on how emotional she has been lately.
- Pretentious Latin Motto: "In omnia paratus!" for the Life and Death Brigade.
- Professional Butt-Kisser: Doyle to Logan.
- Running Gag:
- For Lorelai, Luke's "bit" where he keeps banging his head on the oven.
- Norman Mailer sitting at tables at the Dragonfly only ordering ice tea. It drives Sookie nuts.
- Shout-Out
- The title mentions Norman Mailer.
- Lorelai tries to use The Mothman Prophecies as her excuse not to change the porch light.
- When that fails, she claims there's a sequel where Richard Gere gets an ugly disease from changing a dirty porch light.
- Lorelai's excuse to not lock her house when she leaves it is a quote from Field of Dreams: "If you build it, they will come".
- Paris doesn't want her and Rory to end up like Abby and Anne van Buren over the religion beat.
- Doyle finds Glenn's nonchalance over being picked up by the New York Times to be like Being There.
- Rory has Bambi voice when something's wrong.
- Norman Mailer gets interviewed at the Dragonfly.
- Gore Vidal has to be kept on the other side of the room from Norman Mailer.
- Maybe Gabriel García Márquez will run interference.
- Billy Joel impressed Sookie with his appetite.
- Sookie confuses Norman Mailer with Arthur Miller. That's the one who was married to Marilyn Monroe.
- The music downloader mentions Joy Division and Nick Cave, downloads every Chicago album while he talks, and says he wants everything "from ABBA to Zappa".
- Chris's apartment looks like Axl Rose trashed it.
- Lorelai calls Gigi "Rapunzel" because Chris turned her crib around so the tall fence is facing outward.
- Lorelai's Wonder Woman Halloween costume was spot-on according to Chris.
- In a hypothetical world were she bailed on Rory, Lorelai is a groupie for The Bangles.
- Paris got Jesse Jackson's barber's phone number.
- In The Twits, the animals glued Mr. and Mrs. Twit's furniture to the ceiling, just like Lorelai suggests they do here.
- Threat Backfire: Rory isn't threatening enough to convincingly threaten to stalk Logan.
- Title Drop: Sookie tells Norman Mailer that she is pregnant. Yes, really.
