The more answers we get, the more questions they open. I hate that and I love that at the same time.
I haven't read the books so this is pure speculation.
It seems they're going down the "ancient civilization gone extinct" road, with the sphere being some kind of "hub", numerous gates (we see a dozen of them in the first shot, then dozens more) being seen collapsing / going dark except for one at which the Nucleus fires a beam : what appears to be the Sol star goes boom. It'd be a bit weird to show the Sol system being seeminlgy destroyed as the vision is kind of a "rewind and play", maybe it's a warning to Humanity (like the speed limit inside the sphere being lowered after the grenade was used) ? The synopsis stating Holden sees past, present, and future. It's unclear if the gates closing down / going dark are a direct action of the proto-molecule or some kind of defense against a yet unnamed third-party (intergalactic war between two alien factions ?).
The reoccurence of the bird also seems to indicate that the one Miller saw on Ceres was already a protomolecule hallucination, maybe to guide him to Julie ?
To think there are three more episodes in the season... good thing it was picked up after SyFy dropped it. Maybe I should start reading the books ?
PS: the protomolecule really loves recycling humans.
[9.5/10] We’ve lived through enough revivals and late sequels to know their pitfalls now. The core of good storytelling is change; characters and their circumstances need to evolve in order to be meaningful. But revivals are, at their core, about returning home. If a movie or T.V. show is popular enough to be brought back from the dead, then fans want to be reimmersed in what they loved, not necessarily challenged with the unfamiliar. So revived shows have to face the inherent push and pull of trying to tell good stories, which necessarily means adjusting the status quo, giving their audience that warm sense of reunion and return, that mandates a certain amount of stasis.
That push and pull ended for Gilmore Girls when Edward Herrmann sadly passed away. We’ll never know what “A Year in the Life” might have looked like if Herrmann were alive and able to participate. Richard Gilmore, though limited to “Special Appearances” in the show’s original run, was always a core part of its emotional and familial makeup, and it’s impossible to know how this revival could have been different with him there.
But if there’s a silver lining to his passing, it’s that it forced Amy Sherman-Palladino and Gilmore Girls to confront change, with the kind of life-shaking loss that can throw a person into self-doubt and leave them more than a little lost. “Fall” is, in part, a tribute to Richard and to Herrmann, but it is just as much a story about how the Gilmore Girls face the sense of inexorable change that his death brought, and it’s what makes “A Year in the Life” not only a worthy revival, but a fitting end to the series.
That comes in a profound moment of catharsis when Lorelai, stymied in her efforts to imitate Wild, looks out upon the majesty of creation and has the moment of epiphany and understanding she’d been hoping for all along. She calls her mother, who’s in bed in the middle of the day, and summons a story of Richard, the story she couldn’t seem to find at his funeral, the kind of story that Emily needed to hear.
It’s a story about receiving love when you expect punishment, about the ability to recover from feeling crestfallen and lost with the held of those who care about you, and about the way that, as much distance as there was between Lorelai and Richard, he was her father, and she was her daughter, and she’ll carry his kindness with her for the rest of her days. It is a long, emotional, writerly monologue that Lauren Graham knocks out of the park, and along with Emily’s sincere, heartened “thank you,” it provides the emotional crux of “A Year in the Life.”
For Emily, it provides her with the last piece of the puzzle, the catalyst and reassurance she needs to make her peace with her husband’s death. Hers is a life that she and Richard made together, and without him there, that life no longer makes sense. Lorelai’s remembrance is a sign to Emily that she need not be the keeper of the flame, that Richard will be with the Gilmores in spirit if not in body, and it provides the comfort that lets Emily move forward from her grief.
And move forward she does! There are few scenes in the series as gratifying as watching Emily call “bullshit” on the DAR, on her stuffy cohort, and on the whole two-faced cornucopia of artifice and nonsense that she now feels inundated by (give or take a verbal beatdown of Mrs. Huntzberger). Suddenly, Emily is ready for change.
She is ready to shed her moneyed busybodies. She is ready to sell the house where she became Mrs. Gilmore, to buy their old vacation spot all by herself, to send her beau on his way with grace and good spirits, to take care of “the help” rather than have them take care of her, to mesmerize and terrify visitors to the whaling museum with graphic tales of harpoons and tendons, and to start the next chapter of her life. As the now (appropriately-sized) portrait of Richard and her sweet handed-off kiss to it, conveys, Emily is in no hurry to forget the past, but no longer unable to move without it, and finally finds some measure of happiness out of her grief.
For Lorelai, it helps her realize that what she wants isn’t change -- it’s stability, but that it’ll take some changes to get there. Her story of her father serves as a reminder that even when you’re at the end of your rope, feeling like all is lost, there are people there to lift you up. Lorelai wants to preserve her connection to those people, which starts with marrying Luke.
To be frank, it’s a little odd that the two of them didn’t get married sooner, and the faux-life separation bit, clumsily exposited in prior episodes, felt a little too Season 6 and not true to who Luke and Lorelai were. And yet, it can be forgiven as an excuse to deliver a bit of that warmth that fans look forward to in a revival.
Before Lorelai’s (second) proposal comes, Luke gets his own emotional, writerly monologue, with his own earnest plea that he loves and wants Lorelai in his life no matter what. There’s always some extra force when a more emotionally reserved character like Luke expresses his affections so plainly and so sincerely. Him professing his love makes the matrimony to follow a two-sided affair, and makes “Fall” a story of two people anxious to hold onto one another and finding a way to cement their bond and assuage both their fears that something so important could slip out of their lives so suddenly, the way that Richard did.
The Gilmore Patriarch factors into Rory’s part of “Fall” too, and while a little more tacked-on, the sense of his presence in that arc generates much of its emotional force. In truth, as has been true for most of “A Year in the Life”, Rory’s storyline is the weakest part of this one. It features an ambitious but indulgent, creative but out-of-place sequence where Rory parties through New England with Logan and his buddies; it embraces the unrelatable fantasy world aspects of Rory’s life, and it’s the branch upon which the episode hangs its odds and ends.
Rory’s proposed book gives her an excuse to revisit familiar faces, and with only the barest pretense that it’s relevant to the larger project of fall. Don’t get me wrong, Dean’s reappearance is a surprisingly superb grace note for the character, that gives him a better exit, and shows more maturity and understanding from Rory than anything in the original run. And her scene with Christopher features a conversation that the show probably should have had years ago, with responses to Rory’s legitimate queries that are both comprehensible and a bit unsatisfying in the way that answers to tough questions should be. But these feels like admittedly good scenes, featuring the mandatory check-ins with major figures, that just had to go somewhere, rather than a genuinely meaningful part of the episode.
Still, in the end, they’re fodder for Rory’s book which, in addition to her asserting her independence from Logan (and discounting the tedious tease with Jess), proves to be the most redeeming thing about her arc in the revival. Make no mistake, “I’m writing a book about our lives and I’m going to call it ‘The Gilmore Girls’” is some of cheesiest, Little Women-apingest nonsense in this thing. But it accomplishes two things.
First, it allows Rory to pay tribute to her grandfather and use a piece of what he instilled in her to move through her own malaise. When she returns to the Gilmore home, sees images of their family sitting at the table, or sits at Richard’s desk and feels his inspiration in telling her story, it is a rush. That has, admittedly, more to do with the years of sentiment Gilmore Girls earned previously than anything in Rory’s done in the revival, but damnit, it works.
Second, it gives Rory the chance to be an adult with her mom for once. As petulant as her tantrum at the graveyard felt (not a phrase you write in every review), Rory makes good on her book idea in a mature way. She gives her mom a draft of the first few chapters, with the hope that seeing her enthusiasm and intentions in print will make Lorelai more at ease with the idea, and the caveat that if she doesn’t like it, Rory will throw it all away. There’s the root of good intentions there, the sense that Rory’s life with her mom is the thing she’s most passionate about, and the two of them coming together, reaffirming the trust between them, is a little easy and a little cheesy, but it too works.
Let’s be honest, it’s a little ridiculous that Rory is struggling to make a living in journalism, and so decides that she’s going to enter the lucrative world of non-fiction memoirs (though maybe it’ll be optioned for a TV show). But it completes an arc about Rory growing up and making adult choices rather than teenaged ones which, granted, is a little rich when she’s 32, but better late than never.
And it gives Lorelai one more bit of closure, one more fence mended, one more beam of stability in place. But it’s not the last. A nearby old folks home is shutting down, and it will allow her to expand her inn, keep Michel, and find the balance between stasis and change that’s eluded and frustrated her thus far. Sure, it’s a little convenient that the “annex” becomes available when it does, and it’s likewise a little more cheese that it becomes fodder for Lorelai and Emily to have another “you need money” conversation, but it answers a question that Lorelai’s been asking since “A Year in the Life” started.
The question is how Lorelai can let things change, let things evolve, while still holding onto what’s important to her. You get every sense that Lorelai loves her life in Stars Hollow, that she appreciates all she has, but feels boxed in like the Dragonfly -- doing well but with nowhere to go. The annex is the last step, something that allows her to hang onto a Michel, to a triumphant return from Sookie, and to the sort of security but growth that Richard wanted for her when he left Luke the money to franchise.
“Fall” ends with a tease that the cycle of Gilmore Girls will start anew, but also with a beautiful montage, dedicated to the love and connections that sustained Emily, Lorelai, and Rory through a difficult period that began with the death of a man they all loved in different ways. There is the happy ending for Luke and Lorelai that the show’s original run had to rush toward, and never had time to breathe. There is the coda for a mother and daughter and granddaughter, swept up in music and lights and memories of what came before and hopes of what might come. There is the rush of images that sums up the soul and sentiment of the series in miniature before its (likely) final bow.
“A Year in the Life” was a year of transition for each of the Gilmore Girls. By the end of the revival, each is returned to some state of peace, some satisfaction with where they are and hope for what comes next. But before they can get there, each has to contend with uncertainty, with difficulties private and public, with the way that things can never be just as they were, a truth as certain for resurrected T.V. shows as it is for departed friends.
There is much to be mourned with Edward Hermann’s passing, and the needs of art are far subservient from the needs and the pain of those in the real world who had to lose a loved one. But in its final act, Gilmore Girls conjures his and Richard’s presence, making his absence the impetus for so much feeling adrift for Emily, Lorelai, and Rory, but also making his memory the source of strength that lets them move past that feeling, allay all those fears, and embrace, each in their own way, the need for change.
On a pure technical level, by which I mean everything that has to do with telling a story on screen, this season as a whole fails spectacularly. Bad writing, amateur directing, bland cinematography, messy editing, cheap effects, uninspired soundtrack. All the money in the world won't do a thing if you lack vision and/or basic knowledge on storytelling and filmmaking. This is my main gripe with this season and everything else stems from it.
Soulless is how I'd describe it. I simply don't feel the passion behind this project. It doesn't make me feel invested in this world or care about the people in it. It doesn't convey any kind of emotion through the screen. For contrast, in one episode of The Witcher's second season, I shed a couple of tears when Roach received a fatal wound and Geralt had to put her out of her misery. For a horse I barely knew ffs! WoT on the other hand doesn't make me feel anything at all; be it sadness, joy, anger, or anticipation. It comes off as hollow and sterile.
Acting is another issue. EF5 already suffers from bad writing and they don't have good acting chops either which makes their scenes cringy to watch. Seasoned actors/actresses do generally better but even Rosamund Pike doesn't seem fully invested in her character and every now and then gives a "wtf am I doing here" vibe.
On a semi related note, I really don't like the direction TV/streaming has been going for the past five years or so. I grew up on shows with 20-ish episodes per season which gradually got lesser over the years and here we are now stuck with bite sized shows specifically tailored and produced for binge watching/fast consumption. Don't get me wrong, it does work well for certain genres/stories, and I know WoT was released weekly but still, 8 episodes per season is nowhere near enough to properly adapt an epic fantasy story.
With all that said, I'm kinda curious to see whether or not the team will manage to fix the issues of the first season and where things will go from here story wise so I'll likely watch the second season as well.
Random tidbits:
- My favourite characters so far are Moiraine and Nynaeve followed by Lan and Thom.
- I'm a sucker for elemental magic so seeing fireballs and lightnings on screen is awesome.
- Aes Sedai, their politics and other similar conflicts in the wider world intrigue me more than EF5 youngsters.
- I already knew before watching who the dragon reborn was.
- This season made me lower my expectations for the upcoming Middle Earth show but who knows, it may just turn out amazing. Fingers crossed!
Do I want a third season? Sure, this is one of my favourite book series of all time.
Would I be surprised if it all ends here? Not at all.
'Clunky' is the best word I can think of to describe this entire show. Amazing costume design, amazing special effects, amazing soundtrack and (for the most part) amazing actors. Amir Wilson killed it this season. Episodes 4 or 5 were so good I thought we were going somewhere (btw, bring back those writers who helped Thorne in those episodes, for the love of God).
But the problems are still there. Even after two whole seasons, scenes are edited poorly, Jack Thorne's writing is abysmal and the pacing is extremely inconsistent. Those are problems that were more or less understandable for the first half of season 1, but we're two thirds of the way in. What did the witches even do so far, apart from dramatically staring at walls and talking about prophecies? What was the point of showing Mary Malone wandering through Citagazze for two episodes?
A shame, considering how good all other aspects of the show are. I tried to keep an optimist mindset, and I'll be watching if a third season ever comes out, but I can now affirm that this adaptation has been mostly a disappointment.
I probably haven't watched as many, or as varied films as you would expect for someone who says they are a film lover, but I was never about quantity, instead for me it was always about quality.
Its also about the lasting impression a film makes on me, whether by completely blowing my mind, by using certain motifs like music, and scenery, or by making me feel something on a deep emotional level. Today Blue Valentine really hit me in the feels, and not the good kind either.
This film's tagline is 'A love story', and I feel this could not be further from the truth.
This film is so anti-romantic, that the most romantic moment in this film was when a decision about an impromptu hotel stay was being discussed, and hastily planned. The spontaneity by the frustrated male protagonist in a desperate attempt to rekindle a small spark that started the relationship.
Blue Valentine is told in two cross-cut linear story lines, and stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as middle-class married couple Dean and Cindy Pereira who are hopelessly trying to make a happy home for their adorable little daughter Frankie.
The story lines tell the evolution of their relationship from an awkward first meeting, and fateful chance second encounter, through to a courtship of bad decisions, and a marriage of convenience mostly to fit in with conventionality, then living in rural Pennsylvania.
While not much is known about Dean, other than he is from Florida and new to NYC, and an affable yet somewhat unfocused kind of gent. We do get a fair bit of insight in to Cindy's home life in the boroughs of New York, and the ineffectual role models for parents who share a fairly loveless existence.
I said this film is anti-romantic, and is so evident throughout the film. The sex scenes are devoid of emotion or intimacy, and is purely based on the physical needs of those involved, and the only love shown to anyone, is to their daughter who seems to be the only happy individual in this film of emotional bleakness.
Its been about 8 hours since I watched this film, and I still feel sad about it. I have put much effort into watching indie, or non-major studio films, and for the most part, while having sad, and emotional parts to them, they are often quite uplifting, and leave you with modicum of hope. Blue Valentine does neither, but this does not mean to say that it is a bad film. Quite the opposite, it is a very good film, with excellent performances, expert direction, and writing that achieves exactly what its meant to.
Do not go in to this expecting the Notebook, or I dunno, Love Actually. Expect more (500) Days of Summer without the lovelorn male protagonist, or hopeful ending.
[8.1/10] It’s like we never left. Maybe that’s an easier declaration to make when you’re watching Gilmore Girls from start to finish in one long procession, rather than having to wait a decade between the end of Season 7 and a “A Year in the Life” but there’s a remarkable sense of continuity between the show’s final bow and it’s revivified opening salvo.
The transition isn’t entirely frictionless. Ten years have passed in Stars Hollow and it shows. Everyone has a few more lines on their faces, gray in their hair, or gravel in their voice. Everyone is, in slightly (or in some cases, dramatically) different places than when we last left them. And in spots, you can see both writer/director Amy Sherman-Palladino and her actors straining to recapture the old rhythms of the series’ distinctive dialogue.
And yet, the soul of Gilmore Girls is there, in that rapidfire back and forth, in the beaucoup (and once again contemporary) cultural references, and in the blend of broad comedy and piercing character drama that were the show’s forte in its original run. “A Year in the Life” has a few re-growing pains here and there, but it is fully recognizable as the show we once knew and loved in its first, wintry outing, and after ten years off the air, that is an achievement in and of itself.
When we return to our heroines, each is somewhere familiar but different. Rory has become the globetrotting reporter she always dreamed of being, but also seems rootless and still, somehow, a little naive. Lorelai is still lives in the same place, and is still running the Dragonfly Inn, but now she’s practically (but not technically) married to Luke, and wondering whether she’s hanging too tightly onto the past and to her way of doing things. And Emily is still in the Gilmore family home, but Richard, after two previous medical scares, is now no longer with her. She is a widow who’s managed to keep the same made for at least four months and even deigns to wear jeans.
That’s the beauty of “Winter.” Everyone is both themselves and a little not themselves. The episode leans strongly on the Lorelai-Emily relationship that was always the most complicated and strongest part of the show. Lorelai is the successful, quirky, and smart-mouthed coffee inhaler we know and love, but she’s also self-reflective, stuck on preserving things as they were, and wondering if she (or Luke) wanted something different that was lost in the shuffle. And Emily is lost herself, having been a wife for fifty years to a man who made up half of her life, now finding herself a widow who doesn’t seem like herself without Richard there to balance things out.
In their midst is Rory, who has a smaller part of this episode. Her portion is mostly teases or suggestions for ideas that will presumably play out over the rest of this season/mini-series/revival/whatever. She’s bouncing around and couch-surfing rather than keeping her place in Brooklyn. She’s constantly forgetting her universally forgettable boyfriend Paul, who is more of a running joke than an actual character (which makes it easier to stomach the objectively terrible way everyone treats him). She’s hooking up with Logan (working for his dad’s company in London?) on the side. And she’s co-writing a memoir for an eccentric magnate with a reputation for being difficult, a side of her new collaborator that will no doubt rear its ugly head once the honeymoon period wears off. None of these things really progress in “Winter” but it’s enough to gesture toward meatier things to come and bounce Rory off the usual suspects.
Speaking of the usual suspects, “Winter” brings back much of the town color that was a constant in Gilmore Girls. Kirk is up to his usual tricks with his ill-fated “Ooober” rideshare business, in a bit that brings the usual goofy laughs from his antics and gets him face-to-face with Emily with expectedly humorous results. Taylor is up to his standard town revitalization projects, but gets a nice moment where he rants at Luke’s customers for using his diner like an office and the two jousters find common ground. And Gypsy gets in on the act with some amusing and choice words about Lorelai’s car.
The episode also takes care to check in on a number of other familiar faces who’ve lost none of their charm and are in expected, if a little sad places themselves. Michel is out and married, and his barbs are as cutting and funny as ever. Lane and Zack are still married, and Hep Alien is still rocking out when the group can manage it, with Zack looking like the paunchy, former cool dude now verging on middle age that he is, Brian still crashing in their extra bedroom, and Lane still knowing her way around a drumstick.
By the same token, Paris is getting divorced from Doyle, which is a little sad considering the sweet note the pair went out on in the regular series, but she’s her usual hilarious and pointed self here, and there’s something heartening about how committed she is to helping Lorelai out with her surrogacy needs since Paris considers her a second mother. Her razor sharp putdowns and acerbic wit are still on display, and it’s nice to see Paris succeeding and again, seem so recognizable as the same character we left in Season 7.
But the meat of the episode lies, as it often did for Gilmore Girls, in the Emily-Lorelai relationship. The strongest part of “Winter” comes in the flashback to Richard’s funeral where everyone ends up a little raw and a little drunk and a little more on-edge and emotionally vulnerable when coping with that monumental loss. It affords the audience a chance to mourn Richard (and Edward Hermann) ourselves, to see the brief but charming return of Jason “Digger” Stiles, and to witness the eternal yin and yang of the complex mother-daughter relationship brought to the fore once more by the death of the Gilmore patriarch.
It stems from Lorelai’s inability to come up with a good story to tell about her father, when put on the spot by Emily to offer a fond remembrance. At a time when everyone’s already sensitive, it opens up old wounds. It causes Emily to offer the old recriminations: that Lorelai hates her family, that she doesn’t care about their legacy, that she only cares about what she wants and steamrolls over anyone else’s wishes. And Lorelai, in a tender place herself at the moment, responds with pain, and pushes back, but starts to wonder if there’s a kernel of truth to what her mom is suggesting.
And so when we see them in the present day, each is still reeling from this big absence in their life and what it means, and each takes the other to heart just a little. Lorelai asks Luke if he ever wanted them to have kids, and at the same time, seems to be having a hard time responding with prospect of change and the reminders of mortality that come when a parent dies. And Emily is reading de-cluttering books and doesn’t know who’s traipsing through her home and doesn’t seem like herself.
But in the end they both admit that they’re not 100% fine, and that they won’t be fine for a while, and each puts a hold on uprooting and redoing their lives while they’re still processing this loss. It is, true to the best of Gilmore Girls, a story that has sympathy for both sides of the generational divide. It earns those moments when Emily says “alright” with a tone that says “I’m unbelievably touched” and Lorelai is rapturous herself that her mother takes her advice to see a therapist. The Emily-Lorelai relationship is always being torn down and rebuilt again, true to the way that real life complicated relationships never fully settle but instead rise and fall, and depend on the genuine care between people to persist, flourish, and even warm the heart when things are going right.
Gilmore Girls, even at its nadir, was a show that knew how to explore the harsh and ugly parts of relationships but also how to warm your heart on the climb back from there. That the spirit of that two steps forward, one step back approach to the show’s characters and their relationships survives is just one of the way in which “A Year in the Life” feels like the real deal.
It’s hard to recapture the magic after ten years. Some of the lines are a little too meta and cutesy. Some of the gags run a little broad and don’t fully land. Some of the beats the episode hits are ones we’ve seen before (albeit given renewed strength in the shadow of Richard’s death). But Gilmore Girls still feels like Gilmore Girls, with its silly back-and-forths, its collection of colorful characters, and its commitment to plumbing the depths over a relationship that will never be “fixed” but always seems on the path to getting better.
[7.4/10] Some series finales are epic climaxes, that pay off long-running feud or solve longstanding mysteries. Some are challenging exits that leave things painfully open-ended or uncertain. Some are greatest hits albums that just revisit the show’s high points and favorite bits.
And others, like Gilmore Girls’, are part victory lap, part pat on the back, and part quilt.
That makes “Bon Voyage” a good, not great finale. It’s full of perfectly pleasant, even outstanding moments, but they don’t really amount to a whole so much as they are deposited one after another into a mosaic that doesn’t really go anywhere. Nominally, we are building to Rory’s exeunt to the next great adventure while she spends her last three days in Stars Hollow before jetting off to cover the Obama campaign (replete with a “only in a finale” visit from her hero, Christiane Amanpourr). But in reality, we’re just checking in with everyone and nodding to every major relationship on the show before it’s time shut things down.
That means we also get one last heaping helping of town color, which much of the valuable real estate in the finale being taken up by the usual local yahoos putting their heads together in order to give Rory an impromptu send off to show how much they care. Taylor gets rebuked. The likes of Kirk and Miss Patty and Babbette all get up to their usual antics. And we get a perfectly pleasant pan of the lot of them cheering as the show’s eponymous duo arrive at their surprise party.
None of it’s bad exactly, but it tends to go on and on in an episode where every major interaction feels like it just barely has time to breathe. I could certainly have used more time to explore Lorelai’s feelings about her daughter leaving, and less time with Babbette talking about her weather-predicting ankles.
Still, the dribs and drabs of character and relationship grace notes are each well done. I’m glad the show took time to tie a bow on Rory and Lane, with each remarking on how far they’ve come and how much the friendship has meant to them. Their connection took something of a backseat once Rory left for college and their lives started to proceed more and more on different tracks, so it’s nice to have some final reminder of how much that relationship meant to the show over its run.
There’s also a number of great little moments involving Richard and Emily. There’s no real conflicts left to resolve between Rory and her grandparents, so we get a bit of warmth instead. Emily’s “It is a privilege to be your grandmother” is said with such conviction and feeling that it carries the day, and the sad realization that this will likely be their last Friday dinner as a quartet for some time.
There’s more to the elder Gilmores’ interactions with Lorelai though. Richard getting a little sentimental, almost-but-not-quite admitting his regret for how they’ve reacted to her life choices, and telling her that it takes a “remarkable person” like her to warrant this sort of treatment is a sweet moment that shows the growing respect Richard’s developed for his daughter over the course of the series.
Better yet, Emily is insistent upon Lorelai building a spa or a tennis court or some other addition to her inn for reasons that are initially mystifying. But then her scheme becomes clear -- she’s worried that with Rory gone, Lorelai will give up the family’s Friday night dinners, and she wants to create some leverage to ensure they continue.
Instead, Lorelai gives Emily all she could hope for -- the implicit assurance that Lorelai will continue to visit her parents on a weekly basis, without any financial blackmail necessary. It’s my favorite part of the episode, not just because it provides a lovely grace note to the eternally complicated but ultimately loving relationship between this mother and daughter, but because it’s the most understated in a finale that (naturally and forgivably) wears its heart on its sleeve.
The same can’t really be said for the Luke/Lorelai business here, which lays the “maybe Luke and I are done forever, he just never shows me how he really feels” shtick on thicker than thieves. It’s the plainest sort of a television show protesting too much to where you just know they’re going to pull the trigger on putting the uber-couple back together, and all the supposed indications and declarations to the contrary feel like grandstanding.
Still, once again, the moments where they stop pretending this isn’t going to happen and instead build to it happening are well done. Luke organizing the town to throw the party early, getting this collection of knuckleheads in gear in time, and even stitching together a makeshift party tent himself overnight at the last minute is the sort of “go the extra mile” stuff Luke always does. To be frank, it’s why Lorelai’s protests to the contrary and Rory’s statements that he always acts a little slowly feel pretty inaccurate.
It’s heartening enough though. Luke telling Lorelai that he just wanted to see her happy, and their kiss that’s accented with a crane shot, leans hard into the cheese. And the predictability of the reunion takes away some of its impact. Still, you have to give Rosenthal, Kirshner, and the rest of the writing staff credit. They spent the time to set up Luke and Lorelai getting back together, and laid plenty of groundwork, rather than slapping together a make-up at the last minute to send the crowd home happy. (Hell, they even use a light touch with chekov’s necklace, which I didn’t expect.) It’s not perfect, but it’s sound, which is my generally feeling about this episode as a whole.
That just leaves Lorelai and Rory, and the story of a mother realizing this is really goodbye and not wanting to face it quite yet. It’s a storyline that I wish had more time, maybe even its own episode, to breathe. As it is, Lauren Graham finds one last opportunity to soar with her performance. Rory feels a little hurt that her mom isn’t more broken up about her departure, only to find that when she asks Lorelai what the deal is, Lorelai admits that she’s focused on details and planning right now, because she’s not ready to deal with the emotional difficulty of confronting Rory leaving until it’s actually happened. And Graham’s face is perfect, with the right combination of “I love you” and “I’m putting up a good front, but I’m barely holding it together.”
The last couple of scenes lay it on a little thick, but such is the provenance of a series finale. Rory telling her mom “you’ve already given me everything I need” is the sort of on-the-nose dialogue that normally makes me wince, but in a final episode, you can get away with a little sap. Likewise, there’s something a bit too neat about the show ending with the two exchanging their usual banter at Luke’s, while replicating the same shot from the pilot, but I can hardly fault a show for getting a little sentimental with its bookends in its final frame.
Let’s face it; finales are hard. You have to find some way to sum up the entire run of your shown without it feeling contrived or too easy. Gilmore Girls doesn’t always escape that trap in its last outing. It’s a collection of feel-good moments that work when you’re watching them but don’t really crystalize into something cohesive or stronger-by-association when the credits roll.
Still, what it lacks in advancing the characters or delivering any grand bit of meaning beyond what we already know, it makes up for in its utter amiability. That was always this show’s strength. Even when its storylines started to sag, or its characters made inexplicable choices, or everything came too easily to its heroes, it was a world you always enjoyed spending time in. Whether it was Stars Hollow or Hartford or some other Norman Rockwell-esque locale, Gilmore Girls showed its viewers someplace where the people were always witty, the bon mots and references were thrown about fast and furiously, and the bitterness was there, but sweetness always followed. “Bon Voyage” gives the fans one last dose of that sweetness, and while there’s not much substance to it, it’s still worth that final, sentimental bite.
