A Year In The Life’s Biggest Mistake Was Using Gilmore Girls’ Original Ending

The 2016 Gilmore Girls revival series, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, ended with the final four words revealing Rory is pregnant, an ending that had been planned during the original run of the show but no longer worked. Having originally ran from 2000-2007, A Year in the Life picked up almost a decade later, catching up with the titular Gilmores: Lorelai, Rory, and Emily (who the revival makes clear very much belongs in that title).

The revival finds each of the Gilmores in very different places. Lorelai is mostly settled with Luke, perhaps ready to start a new family. Emily is trying to move on after Richard’s passing. And Rory is still trying to make it in journalism, though the warning of Mitchum Huntzberger that she doesn’t have it is looking more and more like the gospel truth. It’s Rory’s journey that leads Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life to its fateful ending and those hotly anticipated last words: “Mom?” “Yeah?” “I’m pregnant.”

It’s a startling (if not completely unexpected), emotional, and complicated ending. Sherman-Palladino had maintained even before the show’s initial ending that she knew the final four words of Gilmore Girls. So while she always planned to end it with Rory pregnant, the way that plays out in A Year in the Life is very different to how it might’ve been back in 2007. Sherman-Palladino left Gilmore Girls before season 7, so never got to do her ending then. Picking back up with the revival, while some things had to be different, Rory’s arc feels a lot like what had been planned before, which serves to set up that big reveal, but also means that her character feels as though she’s been in a sense of stasis: viewers are watching a Rory aged 32 acting in a way initially designed to suit a Rory who was 10 years younger. A lot of the character’s behaviour has been called into question, but it’s even harder to justify her actions at this point.

It’s unclear just how well the ending for Gilmore Girls would have worked back in 2007. There’s no denying that season 7 as a whole suffered because of Sherman-Palladino’s exit, but the finale wrapped up a lot of aspects rather well, especially for Rory. She got to meet her her, Christiane Amanpour, and then set out to become her by going on the campaign trail with Barrack Obama. Whether or not Rory was going to make it as a journalist wasn’t the point; what mattered is that her ending felt hopeful, ambitious, and open-ended. For a show that had focused a lot on her love life, to see it end with her putting her career first felt like the right choice. Rory being pregnant then would have been similarly full-circle – even more so, given her closer proximity in age to how old Lorelai was when she fell pregnant – but there was no guarantee it would’ve worked even then, though it could at least have laid the groundwork for it much better.

In the Gilmore Girls revival, it’s clear that Rory’s attempts at a career in journalism aren’t going to pan out, but she does find another path in writing the story of her and her mom. It’s possible that alone might have been a satisfying enough ending to A Year in the Life, but it then tags on the pregnancy twist at the very end. There’s little hint throughout either the original or revived series that Rory wants to be a mother, and the message is not only are things coming full circle, but that Rory has always been fated to repeat what happened with Lorelai, only it’ll be easier for her, and while there’s obviously nothing wrong with wanting kids and its viable to have both, the ending feels a little more tragic for Rory, rather than being the happy ending Gilmore Girls needed to have given its status as a supreme comfort blanket show.

The idea of Rory’s pregnancy also fits in uneasily with Gilmore Girls‘ greatest failure: Lane Kim. Like Rory, Lane was full of ambition to be a rock star and tour the world – and then she has an unplanned pregnancy, gives birth, and her husband gets to live out that dream instead. Paris is shown to be able to have it all, just, but largely because she is an irrepressible force of nature. Otherwise, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life‘s ending is the show once again seemingly needing to make its ambitious women into mothers, and rather than the optimistic ending the show did have, it feels a little sadder for it.

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