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Ultimate Gilmore Girls Fanaticism
from the Ultimate GG Fans

Today, Keith Schooley wrote on his blog about the Gilmore Girls story, now that it’s complete:

Description doesn’t do the show justice; it was the sharp-edged wit that made it work. That and Lorelai’s character, played inimitably by Lauren Graham: having been thrust into adult responsibilities at an early age, Lorelai is emotionally the peer, or even the junior, of her own daughter. A charming veneer of clever verbal repartee covered a heart of pain and fear—primarily, the fear that she may have missed the chance for a lasting romantic relationship forever.

Unfortunately, that’s the most insightful thing he says in the entire piece.

He continues by talking about Rory’s years at Yale:

It didn’t really work; the show about a mother-daughter best-friendship struggled with trying to put its two principals on the same set at the same time. It became two parallel stories, not a single complex intertwined one.

Except that there was no struggling. And there’s nothing wrong with two independent story lines. But there is something wrong with assuming that season 4 is the same as season 3. This comment tells us much more about the person making the comment than it does about the story.

The first 3 seasons were only the first book in the Gilmore Girls epic saga. They were “The Chilton Years.” During the Chilton Years, Rory lived with her mother, followed her mother, did everything with her mother. Lorelai was, in Rory’s words, “my best friend, the dazzling woman from whom I received my name and my life’s blood.” That is the summary of the Chilton Years. But what came next was something completely different.

Rory moved away, and she began drawing away from her mother. And Lorelai had to face the fact that the little girl and best friend was becoming her own woman. This in fact is one of the key themes of the second book of the story, “The Yale Years.” It took Lorelai 4 years to adjust. And at least that’s one thing the new show runners did well.

To complain that the Palladinos failed to create a complex story? That’s either the pinnacle of sarcasm or of blindness. Because each season, each episode, they continued to make the story more complex. I know, because every time I tried to explain it to someone, the explanations got longer and longer. Amy and Dan always strove to outdo themselves, to increase the quality and depth of the story. And they succeeded.

Yeah, I’ve heard Keith’s complaint echoed by many fans. But that doesn’t make it right. It just makes it ordinary. What the complaint really comes down to is: “I have this idea of what their relationship is like. And now it’s changing, and there’s nothing I can do about it. And that ticks me off, because I can’t stand not to have control. I’m as immature as Lorelai.” (And yes, sometimes, I indeed am, too.)

Again:

But the major cause of plot gridlock in the show’s later years was the unwillingness of the show’s creators and writers, primarily Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband Daniel Palladino, to allow Lorelai to move forward in her emotional and relational development.

Except that Lorelai did move forward in her emotional and relational development. Again, this was a primary theme of Book Two: The Yale Years. She moved forward in her relationship with Rory. And she moved forward in her relationship with Luke. Not willingly, but the story put her in places where she had to move forward, or die.

For example, let’s look at her relationship with Luke. During Luke’s dark day, after he finds out she bought his boat, she asks him to please stay and yell at her. Very un-Lorelai-like. Why would she say such a thing? Why would she feel so much pressure to make Luke happy? Because he is the man she loves, in a way she’s never loved any other man. Keith may not realize this, as I didn’t realize it for a long time: But this is how a typical woman behaves when she loves someone. And even Wonder Woman is a woman.

Unfortunately, this relationship pulls her out of her comfort zone. She must learn trust. And she must learn to give up control. And when she does, she faces yet new challenges with the relationship. Leading to the end of season 6.

And unfortunately, that’s where Amy Sherman-Palladino’s vision is taken from us. We know she had a vision. We know she was going somewhere with the story. We just don’t know where. These challenges were planned into the story, not thought up on a whim.

April was of course one of these challenges, indirectly. Here again, Keith echoes the misguided comments of many fans, comments that say much more about the commenter than they could ever say about the story:

Wanting to avoid the mistakes of Moonlighting and Cheers, the writers didn’t want to lose the romantic tension by putting the principals together; they didn’t notice that the romantic tension had already dissipated because of the increasingly artificial plot devices to keep them apart.

How in God’s name can Keith know what Amy wanted when she introduced April? Unless I missed it—and that’s very unlikely—Amy never said anything of this sort. Yes, the TV commentators did compare the Luke-Lorelai story to Moonlighting and Cheers. But most of these commentators have never written even a short story, never mind a world-famous epic story, and they probably couldn’t do it to save their lives. It’s much, much more likely that Amy introduced April simply because it challenged Luke and Lorelai’s relationship. And that’s good. That’s drama. (Duh.) April was probably planned into the story, just like everything else.

Doesn’t that make April an artificial plot device. Hell, no! It would be artificial if it couldn’t have happened in the Stars Hollow universe. But could it have happened? Yes, of course it could. Even stranger things than this have happened in Stars Hollow. (Just look at Rory and Lorelai’s diet for an example.)

No one likes change, because change pushes us out of our comfort zones. Like it did to Lorelai, it feaks us out. Because when everything remains the same, we feel we have control. When things start changing around us, we feel we’ve lost control. Again, complaints about April all boil down to, “My favorite character is facing painful challenges, and I don’t like it, because I have no control over it, and I can’t stand not to have control!”

How do I know this? Because the complaint is never that Luke acted wrongly upon discovering that he had a daughter. Because he did what many of us would have done. And it forced him to grow as a person. Or the complaint is never that Lorelai reacted wrongly to Luke’s reaction. Rather, she followed the pattern she had established. And it got her into trouble. The complaint is always with April herself.

Look, April is real. She popped on the scene with no warning, like an anvil falling on your head. And sometimes life drops an anvil on your head, and there’s nothing you can do about it except to deal with it. Lorelai eventually learned to deal.

It’s about time you did, too.

-TimK