1x01 Winter

[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.

Oh my goodness the feels for this episode, from the very outset the play over of all the voices of the original series quoting all those wonderful nostalgic moments was just wonderful then when the screen opened on Stars Hollow and Lorelai sitting on the bandstand with her coffee it was just so perfect, like coming home after a long time away, just how Rory must have felt.

I loved so many moments, I loved seeing Luke for the first time and his ongoing adoration for his two girls and how he is still caring for them. The first time we see Paul Anka, the scene with Lane and Rory in Doosey's. The moving moving scenes at Richard's funeral. OMG, the first time we saw Logan I danced for joy. Paris' voice coming through the door of that fertility clinic then her entrance it was just perfect.

I had a few tiny little niggles, firstly Lorelai annoyed me at her father's funeral. To have gotten that drunk seemed a tiny bit direspectful and she should have been trying to stay more focused in order to help Emily, I understand Emily's anger this time around and I was disappointed in Lorelai. The other one driving me nuts was Rory and her relationship with Logan, so she turned down his marriage proposal at the end of the original series but now they are still essentially seeing each other on the side. This seems wrong to Logan who still seems to absolutely adore her. I was a little annoyed about that I have to say.

All in all I loved it but wow I cannot wait for the next episode.