3x22 Those Are Strings, Pinocchio

[7.1/10] This was perfectly fine, though I have to admit, a little disappointing. The big issue is that the season set up a really interesting conflict between Lorelai and Emily, essentially challenging the foundation they’d built up over the last three years, and instead of firmly and committedly exploring that and meaningfully resolving it, the show basically just uses Rory going off to college as an excuse to reset the status quo.

It’s pretty convenient that the Independence Inn is closing right when the Dragonfly Inn comes on the market and also right when Lorelai has a big new expense with sending Rory off to Yale. The whole thing is too perfect, with even the necessary willing suspension of disbelief that comes with these sorts of things not really covering for the writers conspiring to recreate the sort of financial situation that mandated the Gilmore Girls going to Richard and Emily for money in the first instance.

In a vacuum, I like the position they put Rory and Lorelai in here. Lorelai is willing to sacrifice her independence on Rory’s behalf, but not on her own behalf, so if sending Rory to college means giving up on opening her own Inn, she’s willing to do it. But Rory isn’t willing to let her mom defer her dream, so she essentially redoes the original deal with Richard and Emily (with a few minor wrinkles) in order to make sure she doesn’t have to, which suits her grandparents just fine. (And their happy, slightly self-satisfied reaction is a nice touch.)

But it’s too easy of a way to set things back the way they were, and it basically allows Lorelai and Emily to elide their big fight without actually dealing with the underlying issues. It wipes away the series-changing gesture of Lorelai returning the money and the ugliness that ensued between her and her mom in favor or just putting things back to the way things were without really dealing with anything, and that’s so narratively and emotionally unsatisfying.

The things that work best in this episode are moments. Rory sitting down with Dean, offering tips and to buy him his first wedding present, are a wonderful bit of contrition and kindness from her, and puts a nice button on their sometimes bumpy but still significant relationship. Paris having her graduation attended by her nanny and her nanny’s kids whose lives she’s involved with is delightful, showing that Paris does have a rewarding family life, even if it’s not with her parents.

And the graduation itself makes for plenty of similarly nice moments, particularly for the Gilmores. Rory’s speech feel true to life, and yet touching in how she credits her grandparents for being her “twin pillars,” and her mom for giving her tons of role models, while never realizing the person Rory most wanted to grow up to be was her (a great line). The little tongue sticking out after accepting the diploma is the perfect grace note.

But not all the moments are good. For one thing, the bit with the men talking about the construction and insurance of the Chilton building is just a weird, running gag that, so far as my experience goes, has no basis in reality. Sookie’s running in and out of aisle gag is similarly broad and a hair too much. And the episode nearly spoils a really nice moment by underlining the whole “I’m not crying, you’re blubbering” shtick for too long.

They also tease the Luke/Lorelai stuff again in a cheesy way in an episode that just doesn’t need it. Sure, there’s some symmetry in having a Luke dream serve as a bookend to Lorelai’s dream from the first episode, but I’m sick of the show continuing to do this same song and dance. By the same token, Rory’s awkward one-sided phone call/kiss off with Jess seemed strange with how it was edited, and whether it’s the writing or the performance, came off like a stilted and thrown-in blowoff to what’s otherwise been one of the major throughlines of the season.

I don’t know. It’s okay for a finale, particularly one like this that serves as something of a capstone to the high school portion of the show, to be more summing up and looking back instead of telling a story, but everything here felt so weightless. The Independence Inn closing and Lorelai and Sookie losing their dream was a little cornball to begin with, but if the show had actually committed to it, even for a few episodes, it could prove an interesting obstacle for the show to explore. Instead, it’s wiped away almost as quickly as it’s introduced. Like a lot of things in this episode, the interesting complications that the show gestures toward fall by the wayside in the name of getting the characters where the series wants/needs them.

Little here is outright bad in the moment-to-moment (save for the building-assessment humor). In fact, there’s plenty of pleasant and even touching moments, at Rory’s graduation in particular. but it feels like a missed opportunity. This is the end of an era for the show, the exhaustion of its original premise and the move to new territory. Rather than using that as an opportunity to deliver the culmination of everything the series has built up to this point, the show basically delivers a heap of wish fulfillment to almost everyone, and takes back any real issues or problems that didn’t exist before.

The finale is nice, and it’s obvious to say that nice is nice sometimes, but to be frank, Gilmore Girls can do better than this, and a closing chapter as non-eventful and resetting as this one can only go down as an amiable disappointment.