If you’ve finished watching Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, or if you’ve officially given up and just went on the internet for spoilers, you know by now what the final four words are. Or rather, the final two words — because let’s be real, saying the “final four words” is very misleading.
And since you know what the words are, you also know that they suck. They’re perhaps the worst “cliffhanger” in history, the stupidest, cruelest joke. They’re a failed attempt to be clever and bring things “full-circle” when in reality, that’s not what happens at all.
Lorelai gets pregnant at age 16 when she hasn’t even graduated high school or had a chance to go out in the world and be an adult without being a mom. Rory, on the other hand, gets pregnant at age 32. Same thing, right? Um, no, not really. In fact, Rory has had a chance at a life, a career, a real romance. Sure, she wasted it all, but she had a solid 10 years out of college to find herself. Hell, she had a chance to go to college, which Lorelai certainly never had a chance to do. So, it’s fair to say that the final ending that Amy Sherman-Palladino envisioned for years was, in fact, a failure.
So what exactly does ASP have to say for herself? Vulture talked to her to find out how exactly she can defend that ending.
“We didn’t really know what that last season was until we got into it and then we asked a lot of questions and we found out where the show ended. The show could have ended in a different place that made those last four words completely irrelevant. So we went into breaking this in a way that we were really looking at it like these three women are at a crossroads. The patriarch has died and what’s the way forward for them?”
She continued,
“Organically, the last four words fell into place on this. It’s not something we would have shoved in there if it hadn’t really led us to a good space and if we weren’t churning toward that anyhow. What’s interesting about the last four words as originally conceived is they would have been when [Rory] was 22, and while that still, I think, thematically would have worked with the whole idea of history repeating itself full freaking circle — you know, daughter follows in mother’s footsteps — to me it’s actually more interesting, it takes on more relevance, that it’s at the same age. She’s at the same age now that Lorelai was when we started the series.
“That’s just an interesting kind of dynamic. When we met Lorelai, she was 32 and that’s where she was in her life and now we’re leaving Rory at 32 with the thing on the horizon. It felt kind of cooler to us to do it now than if we had done it when we were still on the WB.”
Right, right. So tell us again how Lorelai getting pregnant in high school and Rory getting pregnant as an adult is the same thing? Yeah, that’s what we thought. Nice try, ASP, but we’re not buying it.
Feature photo courtesy of Netflix
