The trouble with Gilmores

Okay, it's happened, so let's talk "Gilmore Girls" season finale, after the jump for the benefit of the tape-delayed.

Well, they did it. Amy and Dan blew up the show on the way out the door. They may not see it that way, but they just did something even dumber and more character-ruining than Rory losing her virginity to a married man. As the British guy in the same timeslot on that other network might say, Whoopeee!

Look, given where the story has gone for the last half-season, I can buy Lorelai angrily storming out on Luke and having comfort sex with Christopher. Given all the crap Amy and Dan did to her/made her do, this is exactly what she would do. What pisses me off is how much they had to contrive to push their main character into a position where she would turn her baby daddy into her fuck buddy.

I liked April as a character, but as a plot device, she ranks down there with Rosalind Shays going down the elevator shaft, "The X-Files" movie and, yes, Arthur Fonzarelli jumping over the damn shark for show-ruining ability. The Lorelai Gilmore we've known for the previous five-plus seasons would have never put up with Luke's keep-your-distance bullshit, just as the Luke Danes we knew over the same span would have told the woman of his dreams the truth in the first place. (He might have then gotten all knuckle-draggingly protective of April, but Lorelai would have slapped him back into line PDQ.)

So we suffered through a half-season of our hero and heroine being uncommunicative, out-of-character dumbasses, and for what? To drag out a wedding that the show has been leading towards ever since the end of the pilot? To pretend like the show needs long dramatic story arcs, even they almost always suck? To recreate all those warm and fuzzy feelings America has about the words "We were on a break!"? To spare Lauren Graham and/or Scott Patterson the awkwardness of having to, you know, act like they love someone they can't stand? (If you believe the rumors, that is. If they really get along, then this is even more ridiculous.) To branch off into some bizarre new direction where Lorelai winds up with Christopher, even though Amy and Dan have spent so much time in previous seasons pointing out exactly why they would never work as a couple long-term? Someone, please explain it to me like I'm a five-year-old, because it makes no sense to me -- not unless Amy's hats are all laced with some kind of hallucinogen that's absorbed through the scalp.

I'm not especially wild about what's going on with Lorelai the younger, but at least it didn't make me want to throw a brick at the TV. (Really, that's just an excuse so I can finally go out and buy that plasma screen I've been eyeing.) As I wrote a few weeks back after one of Rory's passive-agressive snits, Amy and Dan found a way to make Logan seem sympathetic: by making Rory the hateable half of this couple. Hey, Rory? Logan does not want to go into the newspaper business. He could not have made this any clearer over and over and over again. I know you want your manchild jerkhole boyfriend to grow up, but falling into lockstep with the family destiny isn't the only way to do that. How about suggesting he blow off his mean old daddy and seek his own future, even if that means giving up mean old daddy's fortune? If having to pay his own way in the world is too harsh a transition, maybe you could get your goofball daddy to give him a hand-out (just as soon as he's done ruining your mom's relationship, of course).

Really, the only part of the finale I enjoyed was the troubador subplot. I have to confess that the only people I recognized were Mr. Rosso, Chloe O'Brien and Kim and Thurston from Sonic Youth (and who I have to assume is their daughter on bass), but the image of all these alt-rock musicians invading Stars Hollow (and Taylor's increasingly flummoxed reaction to them) was hilarious, and the songs worked well as a Greek chorus for the idiot plots going on around them. (Anyone who wants to take a stab at identifying all the musicians -- preferably with some kind of physical description so I can keep track -- I'll owe you a cookie.)

The troubador story is the kind of thing this show has always done best. Like I said before, the drawn-out weepy arcs rarely worked (or, at least, it's been so long since we've had a good one that it's been buried under memories of Rory the homewrecker, Rory the drop-out, April the cousin Oliver, etc., etc.). This show's money has always been the smaller stuff, Lorelai bantering with whoever's in the frame, Emily's attempts to seem human, Sebastian Bach joining Hep Alien, etc. I've joked in the past that there have been seasons where it seemed like the writing staff had a pool going to see who could write the most plotless episode, but you know what? The episodes where nothing happens are infinitely preferable to the sturm und drang we've had to deal with for the last season-plus -- and that we'll have to deal with in the fall when crazy David Rosenthal has to clean up this mess Amy and Dan left behind.

End rant. What say you?