Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Podcast #94 - S4 Wrap Up

Hello! Welcome to Return to Stars Hollow - a spoiler-free, retrospective podcast about Gilmore Girls! This is the podcast for Season 4 - Wrap Up.


You can direct download the episode here: S4End Podcast
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The next podcast will post on Thursday, December 1, 2016 for our first Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life podcast.

6 comments:

  1. I think you need to add a category to the wrap up- the number of jobs Kirk has had!

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    1. Did he ever get paid for debuting his movie, attending meetings at the Inn...also serving as a maid in full outfit there uninvited or his performance finale piece at Miss Patty's? That would also be a factor considering that he filed tax forms v. volunteering. I cannot imagine Lorelei paying him for cleaning the room the former Ms St. James rented that one time to binge watch her favorite show in.

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  2. Wow this was a tough season for me to watch, yet it was the end evolution of Rory as a woman. Now in college...setting for Rory, she stumbles to find her identity outside of Stars Hollow and Chilton. Yale is new and she craves her old traditional routines. Her saving grace in this season is Paris who brings back the safety of Chilton but the craziness of competition in the ivies. I just finished binge watching to prepare for the Netflix revival of GG. Just finished season 5, but I new season 4 was special due to the first episode and last. Both show Rory evolving into a round character which is literary. I don't hate her due to the adulterous affair. I do have a hard time relating to her and slowly realize that she is an overachiever who is sheltered and lost. She stumbles without Lorelei going to bat for her and all her grandparents' money cannot save her from her fear of being away from home for the first time. She then looks to Deen as her protector...knight in armor. But he is married and yet he has moved on but not quite. He wants to go back to the familiar too. Both young adults had stellar home lives in Stars Hollow. It's only natural for them to want to cling to each other for support when things do not go their way which seems selfish considering Lindsey as the victim who did nothing wrong. Unfortunately I saw the human side of Rory...no longer a child and no longer someone who needs protecting. In season 5 she learns from her mistakes and how to navigate through Yale with more acquired wisdom.

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  3. I'm assuming we can comment on here about the revival? I know you said you're going to do a podcast of just you, and then a podcast for feedback, but I just finished watching the revival, and would love to get my thoughts in while it's fresh on my mind. Delete the comment if you need to!

    So SPOILERS BELOW!

    Overall impression - I found the experience of watching the revival to be very similar to the experience of watching the show. I loved the character driven stuff and the zany humor. There was some really great heart and beauty, particularly around the core female relationships. Kelly Bishop still gives great face. But certain crucial plot lines were poorly developed, and emotional resonance just expected rather than earned. For example, I thought for a moment they were going to actually make some meat out of what it was really like being raised as a child by a teenage Lorelai, or have Rory really confront Christopher and her own issues after his emotional abandonment, but ... no. They just casually mention that Lorelai left her in a (bucket?), reminding us that, yeah, Lorelai probably has really valid reasons she doesn't want her adult daughter working out her issues in print, but then ... is that a funny anecdote? It's never touched on again. I spent too much time filling in the blanks with my own theories.

    Into the details, right off the bat, I'm going to admit it - I am a Logan shipper. Yep, there, I said it. I love him, and I am very interested to see if this close rewatch I am doing with all of ya'll changes my opinion of that. So I was very glad to see Logan as the central character, and I am choosing to not believe that it was just because he is the least busy actor. I found his plot arc, of being with Rory but also having this fiancee to be very believable to him and to her. If disappointing of course. So when it comes to all things Logan and Rory, I was totally on board. He is the relationship I would be going back to if I were a confused Rory.

    But with all other things Rory I was ... confused about how to feel. It felt reminiscent of my confusion with Rory's plot line in season 4 actually where I just wasn't sure if Rory was a really great student or not. Rory's got a meeting with Conde Nast, so she's awesome and well known. She's got a book deal with a great feminist icon, so she's clearly accomplished. But then she doesn't seem to actually have much of a resume really. She thinks she's too good for the lifestyle website (guess Jane Pratt didn't want to pay for xojane.com?), but can't come up with anything creative for the interview? No past accomplishments other than the mysterious Atlantic. Did she seriously have no ideas at all? She's given up her apartment and is "homeless", but she's flying transatlantic flights at the drop of a hat? She once again felt very successful and very unsuccessful simultaneously. Then the Stars Hollow Gazette. Okay. I could get behind Rory just deciding to stay on at the Gazette. That actually makes perfect sense for her character. She's a shy introvert who loves her mom and her town SO MUCH. I would completely believe that she wants to move back and run the paper. But then they directly say it's a volunteer gig, so now that just makes no sense at all. It makes you have to believe that she's leaning on some bequest from Richard. Which I also think would be consistent with her character. But they don't want to say that because rich people in Gilmore world are evil as one commenter has said here before.

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    1. In general I feel like adult Rory probably has lots of emotional issues that she should be dealing with. Raised by a single mom, and that mom was Lorelai, as the show took pains to remind us, her fractured family, her abandonment by her father, a hyperacheiving adolescence that, predictably, stagnates into an uninspiring young adulthood - there's a lot to mine here. But it just goes nowhere. We're left to assume - I think - that Rory's book about her mom is going to be the sweet touching Gilmore Girls that we all love. Her conversation with her dad is NOT about her trying to mine details for the book or to work on her own issues but only to help herself start thinking about whether or not to cut Logan out of her daughter's (you know it's a daughter) life ... that was an emotional gut punch realization for me that did not go down well due to directing. The reveal that Rory was pregnant was treated with the clanging of a cliffhanger - which was inappropriate for this context. I would have preferred to see a slow fade away, so that I could process first the announcement (not unexpected of course), and then the oh my god, she's considering not even telling Logan, isn't she, and then on down the rabbit hole from there. But instead of being given that time to think I was thrust immediately into the credits where they were FINALLY playing the song, and I wanted to focus on that ... so it was just jarring.

      That was probably really rambling, sorry.

      I liked the Lorelai/Wild thing a lot. I think Wild is a book and a concept that speaks to a lot of women - it spoke to me - and I got a giggle out of the all the "Wild" doers and the bored park rangers. I thought that was smart. The whole time I kept expecting Lorelai to actually do the PCT, and I don't know why I kept expecting that. I appreciated seeing Lorelai deal with her mortality at this time. Lorelai's behavior after the funeral was heartbreaking and so true for me. My family has experienced a lot of grief this past year, and it made that scene realistic to me in a way that it wouldn't have been before. People who are grieving do and say a lot of strange things, and the passing of a parent or a loved one that you have a complicated relationship with remains complicated even after death. Watching Lorelai and Emily move through that, and come back full circle with the money issue for the inn, but without all the antagonism was really moving.

      As to Emily's arc ... I am MOST interested in her - as I frequently was throughout the whole series. I cannot wait to hear what you girls make of her transformation. I was torn between feeling like her complete personality overhaul was perhaps a little disrespectful to her and Richard's relationship, to feeling that in a way it had always been leading up to this - I particularly look at the scenes with her, Richard and Trix in a new light now.

      Finally some observations on the way the revival treated women in general. Paris Gellar, strongest character on the show, completely flips her wig over Tristan? Who wasn't even Chad Michael Murray? Impossible and embarrassing. There is no other reason for that to be there other than to put Paris in her place. And just in case we didn't get the point, let's make sure we all understand that Paris's intense career focus has obviously made her unfit to be a wife and a good mother - by her own admission the nanny is better than her. Naomi Shropshire, described by Rory as a feminist icon, is a messy, lunatic drunk. Mild slut shaming over Rory's one-night-stand, followed by directly calling the kinds of women who sleep with men in Wookie costumes losers - both by Rory and then in a follow up with the lifestyle blogger. Not quite in the same vein, but let's not forget the catty body shaming at the pool by Rory and Lorelai - who have literally never been to a pool before in their lives. (Ok Rory once in Florida.) The entire scene basically only existed so they could reveal themselves as bitches.

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    2. OMG guys crackpot theory alert.

      Rory's baby is not Logans, but it's Paris's. Well Paris's surrogacy sperm. Think about how contemplative Rory looked after that night with Logan. She looked like she was making a huge decision. She looked downright grim. Could she be looking like that just from cutting out Logan? Couldn't be -she'd already decided to break up with him. It's Chekhov's fertility clinic guys - once you've shown the sperm gun you must fire it.

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