1x04 Fall

[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.