‘Gilmore Girls’ Unpopular Opinion: The Season 7 Ending Was Better Than What Amy Sherman-Palladino Originally Planned
Amy Sherman-Palladino got her redemption when she penned Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. The famed showrunner didn’t get to write the Gilmore Girls finale the way she intended when a contract dispute led to her departure before the show’s final season. While she wrote her original, planned ending for the Netflix revival, fans’ feelings about the last story arc are mixed. While sentiment about season 7 of Gilmore Girls is also mixed, we would dare to argue that the season 7 story arc that aired back in 2007 was a better ending to Rory Gilmore and Lorelai Gilmore’s story.
Amy Sherman-Palladino always planned for Rory to learn that she was pregnant in the show’s final moments
In the final moments of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, Rory Gilmore revealed to her mother that she was pregnant. The screen went black before fans learned anything else, including the father’s identity. The father’s identity might feel like a cliffhanger, but it’s really not. Most fans can figure out, with relative ease, that Logan Huntzberger likely fathered Rory’s baby.
It’s even more obvious that Logan is most likely the father when you consider that Sherman-Palladino always intended to end the show with the final four words of the revival, regardless of when she got to pen it. If Sherman-Palladino had stayed on for season 7 of Gilmore Girls, she would have ended Rory’s collegiate career with the big pregnancy reveal. She wanted Rory and Lorelai’s stories to remain deeply woven together, and an unintended pregnancy was certainly one way to reach that goal.
The actual season 7 ‘Gilmore Girls’ finale found Rory turning down Logan Huntzberger’s proposal and going on the campaign trail
Sherman-Palladino never got to see her storyline play out in the final season of Gilmore Girls. A contract dispute led her to walk away from the show, leaving season 7 in the hands of David S. Rosenthal. Rosenthal had a completely different vision for the final season. He and a team of writers developed Logan Huntzberger’s character, turning him from a frat boy into a man on a mission to differentiate himself from his overbearing father. They deepened his bond with Rory. Rory’s romance wasn’t the only relationship getting attention, though. Season 7 pushed Lorelai into the arms of Christopher Hayden.
The final moments of the series found Logan proposing to Rory on the eve of her graduation from Yale. She turned down the proposal, opting to take a job reporting from the campaign trail instead. The Gilmore Girls finale didn’t exactly button up Luke and Lorelai’s relationship, but the show implied everything would turn out just fine. At the very least, Christopher was out of the picture.
Despite never personally seeing it, Sherman-Palladino didn’t care for the final season. In a 2016 interview with TV Line, she said, “any writer who was so emotionally connected to something and then pulled out of it is going to find it very hard to go back into that world and not feel like you either want to slit your own wrist and die slowly in a swimming pool, or be angry or be jealous.” While the show’s creator didn’t like what was done to her pet project, we argue that the actual season 7 finale was better in many ways than what Sherman-Palladino planned.
The season 7 finale of ‘Gilmore Girls’ was better than the revival’s finale
While Sherman-Palladino got to complete the story of Rory and Lorelai exactly as she wanted, we can’t help but think the revival’s ending felt a bit contrived. Rory’s unintended pregnancy as a 30-something felt incredibly out of character. In fact, the entire path to get Rory from point A to point B felt a bit forced.
The final moments didn’t even really serve the intended purpose. If Sherman-Palladino hoped to bring the story “full circle,” a pregnancy at 30-ish is markedly different from Lorelai’s experience of having a child before finishing high school. The final four words felt like a bit of a betrayal to the complex character that was Rory. It was too one-dimensional.
Rosenthal’s vision wasn’t perfect either, but it did lend itself better to Rory’s overall persona. Rory often spoke about her dream of being a reporter. Rosenthal sent her on her way to do just that. She picked a career over love, and while not every fan was happy to see it, it felt exactly like something Rory would do. It also allowed fans to imagine where Rory’s career would take her after the campaign reporting job, stumbles included. It would seem that Sherman-Palladino’s ending left Rory on exactly one path.
While we think the season 7 ending was better than the ending of the revival, we aren’t saying that Sherman-Palladino’s vision couldn’t have worked if things had been different. Her planned finale would have worked better if it had been written in 2007 when Rory was fresh out of college. That would have made her journey much closer to her mother’s own foray into adulthood. Forcing that storyline onto a much older Rory simply feels like a mistake. At the very least, there were other ways to reconnect Rory with her fans. An alternate ending still would have left the door open for more revival seasons, too.
