6x22 Partings

[7.7/10] “Partings” is a triple entendre, to the extent that’s actually a thing. It’s a parting between Luke and Lorelai, and the latter demands elopement of extinguishment from the latter and things end on, shall we say, less than favorable terms. It’s a parting between Rory and Logan, with the latter heading off to London and the latter mourning the end of something, even if it’s a transition and not a slice of finality. And it’s a parting of Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino from the show that they provided the soul of for six seasons. Due to behind the scenes disagreements, this would be the last bit they would contribute to Gilmore GIrls until the revival nearly a decade later.

So in such a heavy, momentous episode, let's start with the easy stuff. Holy cow does this episode go overboard with the troubadours . Look, I get it. If you’re the Palladinos, you have plenty of reason to think this is your swan song, so why not use that WB budget to bring in every band you’ve ever liked or admire? It’s just a “more is more” situation, so even with Taylor singing (not literally) the praises of Pat Boone, and Kirk setting up a joke about “The Beaver Bit My Thumb” that the episode pays off, it gets tiresome pretty quickly.

Despite that, this is a good episode, which, if I’m being honest, is not something I anticipated. Let’s be real here. The show had been telegraphing the break-up of Luke and Lorelai for 2/3rds of this season, on a thin basis, and I was bracing for that. If I’m frank, I was expecting the worst. This isn’t the worst, but it also doesn’t exactly salvage the rocky road the show had been marching down up until this point.

Let’s focus on the positives. The Rory-Logan storyline is really good here. For one thing, I appreciate how the show redeems Mitchum Huntzberger just a little bit. He is not a villain. He is not someone who hates Rory. He is just someone who wants the best for his son, and may be a little too doctrinaire in that effort, but who isn’t wrong about the fact that Logan is talented but shiftless, who has dopey friends like Colin and Finn who enable him in his unambitious lifestyle, and that Logan needs a push to realize his potential. The scene between him and Rory, where Rory assumes this London sabbatical is a way to keep them apart, when it’s really just Mitchum’s sincere attempt to get his son to wake up the way his father did to him, is very well done, and shows a keen understanding of both characters’ perspectives without villainizing either of them.

To top it all off, this is, perhaps, the best performance Alexis Bledel has ever given on the show. There’s been plenty of scenes on the show of Rory breaking down and resorting to tears in Gilmore GIrls thus far, but this episode easily features the most convincing of them. The moment when Logan has to say goodbye, and tells Rory not to come because if she does, he won’t be able to get on that plane, is heartbreaking, and a good portion of that comes from how convincing Bledel is in Rory’s distress at having to say goodbye to the guy she loves until Guy Fawkes Day.

There’s plenty of time for the show to blow it sometime in Season 7 or the revival, but god help me, I’m Team Logan. The pair make more sense, are more believable as a couple, than anything the affectionate but one-dimensional Dean, or the generic badboy qualities of Jess could ever muster. You buy the way that Rory wants to make Logan’s last night in town memorable, the way she doesn’t want to stand in the way of him growing up, but also how she is completely devastated to have to say goodbye to someone she has come to love deeply. “Partings” captures the sweet sorrow of that moment, those conflicted feelings, so perfectly, with a conviction and genuineness that’s not always present in the young romance storylines in this show.

And then there’s Lorelai.

And I just don’t know what to do here. Here is the problem with the Luke/Lorelai break up -- it’s a house built on sand. You have the sense of the pressure building for Lorelai, of her laboring under this unhappiness for so long that she can no longer take it. But that unhappiness is a product of Luke acting like someone who doesn’t align with the Luke Danes who so cared for Lorelai, even before he was her boyfriend, for so long. The origins of this conflict feel so false, so calibrated to reach a preordained destination rather than a natural landing spot, that even when the results feel real, the fabricated origins render the whole thing less than satisfying.

The Palladinos, however, do a damn good job at selling the consequences of all this long lost daughter stuff, even if the cause of it are ludicrous and out of character. They find the comedy in one of the show’s famous Friday night dinners, where Richard and Emily frantically try to set Christopher up with the daughter of a friend (Jan from The Office!) a la their doting over Logan and Rory last season, while Lorelai makes faces and runs interference.

Despite the amusing farce of it all, there’s a great sequence of Lorelai receiving counseling from the Melora Hardin character in the character’s car. It is, like most things with Amy Sherman-Palladino’s pen, a scene that manages to thread the needle between well-observed tidbits of human interaction, amusing dialogue, and earned sentiment. For all the problems in this season, the show progresses on an honest reflection from Lorelai on where her love life has left her emotionally, and laudable advice from the impromptu psychologist that Lorelai needs to express what she wants and accept the results whether she gets it or not.

The catch is that I don’t imagine the psychologist would give her approval to a plan of telling one’s fiancée “either we elope right now, or we’re through.” And hey, I get that too. The story the show is trying to tell is one where Lorelai has tried so hard to be good for so long that, when the dam breaks, the pressure that’s built up results in destruction, not just a release valve. It’s unreasonable to demand someone, even your fiancée, drop everything they’re doing and run off to get married (presumably the Melora Hardin character meant they should have a serious conversation about what Lorelai wants and what’s been bothering her), but it kind of makes sense for a character who has been holding so much back and let’s it all spill out once she gets de facto permission to let this out.

But the whole thing is premised on a house of cards. Lorelai is upset because Luke is acting in a way that “the real Luke” (for lack of a better term) would never act, and the show tries to justify his change in behavior with an out-of-nowhere, soap opera-esque development that seems to contrived to break the show’s uber-couple up. The nuts and bolts of the Lorelai scenes are strong here, with good moment-to-moment writing, but you can’t help but pull back and say, “Wait. This whole situation smells funny, and you can do well with the effects, but the causes are still suspect, which renders the whole enterprise a bit hollow.”

Oh yeah, and she sleeps with Chris.

Don’t get me started. Again, I want to take a charitable view toward this show, to try to understand what the Palladinos were going for. The problem is that Chris, as executed, just never occupied the space the show conceived of for him. He never feels like the baseline for Lorelai, or this guy that she has a longstanding shorthand with. He feels like a forced alternative to the other men in her life, without that rapport to justify it.

And yeah, the show bends over backwards to show Chris getting his life together, to try to lay the groundwork for why things might be different this time and Lorelai could see the best in him. But it’s so telegraphed and so constructed.You see the seams of where Gilmore Girls is positioning Chris from the moment the Lorelai-Rory rift ends. It makes that closing reveal feel like an inevitablity, a sop to television drama, more than an unfortunate but organic development.

The episode begins and ends with Lorelai’s dead eyes. At the beginning, it’s a reflection of the truth about her strained and damaged relationship with Luke that she’s not ready to confront. At the end, it’s about the way she’s burned her bridges with her fiancée. That’s she’s done the one thing, (short of, I don’t know, insulting April or something) that Luke would find unforgivable (along with that picture and details of the two of them at Lane’s wedding, which surely Luke wouldn’t be particularly fond of.)

There’s sad poetry in how Lorelai opens the episode enmeshed in one doomed relationship (practically by fiat) and closes it ensconced in a different sort of inescapable mistake. But that mistake is the product of forces that seem to come from a TV show needing to extend its most significant romantic storyline by a season or two, not of the natural choices of the characters, and however good the conversation between Lorelai and Melora Hardin is, however powerful the conversation between Luke and Lorelai, however painful that moment between Lorelai and Christopher is, they can’t make up for the fact that it’s all predicated on nonsense, designed to cause more televised drama than to do justice to how these characters have related and interacted with one another.

So Gilmore Girls ends and begins again. This closes off the Palladino regime, at least for the ten years until they would return to the fold to revive their creation. It ends Luke and Lorelai. It ends Rory and Logan. It marks a clear dividing line between here and what comes next. And it’s interesting, and full of too many troubadours, and features the best Bledel performance this side of latter-day prestige television turns.

But it also features an ending, or at least a breaking point, to the show’s foundational romantic relationship, that cannot be easily walked back, that felt preordained for thin reasons, and that works in the moment but fails in the grander scheme of things. The Palladinos go out with a bang, one that threatens to rend in twain the core relationships they themselves established, and found so hard to find convincing reasons to dissolve. Season 6 has been the hardest season of Gilmore GIrls to watch, not just because it’s sad, not just because it features those ballyhooed partings, but because the most significant split of all is one that culminates in real feelings, but moves along through the will of creators who need their happy ending to be delayed, rather than characters with meaningful conflicts or comprehensible events.

The Palladinos would fail the Boy Scout test. However good their individual moments may be here, they leave this show worse than when they found it.