By Robert Scucci
| Published
Confession time. Being a married man, I’ve watched the entire run of Gilmore Girls more times than I’ll ever care to admit because it’s my wife’s favorite comfort show to watch while she’s falling asleep. Since I have a projector in my bedroom that takes up the entire wall and I’m a total night owl, I’ve had a lot of time to think about one plot point involving Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) that has bothered me for years … one that I’ve not heard anybody else talking about at length.
During the four-episode, 2016 Netflix reboot, Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life, Rory’s mother, Lorelai (Lauren Graham), finally marries her on-again-off-again diner-owning love interest, Luke Danes (Scott Patterson). Upon the reboot’s conclusion, Rory confesses to Lorelai that she’s pregnant, but we’re never told who the father is, which complicates matters.
On its face, these two separate moments are unrelated, but when you consider Rory’s inability to get over her past relationships, and the timeline in which she has run-ins with all of her previous romantic suitors during the reboot, she may very well actually be carrying the child of her cousin, Jess Mariano (Milo Ventimiglia).
Wait, What?
Let’s quickly unpack the relationships in question so I don’t come off as a total buffoon.
Throughout Gilmore Girls’ seven-season run, Rory Gilmore had three significant relationships.
First, there’s Dean Forester (Jared Padalecki), the boy next store who works at the local shops owned by town Selectman, Taylor Doose (Michael Winters).
This romance comes to an end when Rory becomes smitten with Jess Mariano, Luke Dane’s troubled nephew who moves to Stars Hollow to live under his supervision because he’s too much for his mother, Liz (Kathleen Wilhoite), to handle.
After Jess leaves Stars Hollow, only to return as a recurring character in Season 4 with a couple of guest spots in Season 6, Rory becomes entangled with the Huntzberger family when she starts dating Logan Huntzberger (Matt Czuchry). This relationship carries on through the end of the series, until Rory decides to part ways with Logan to “keep her options open.”
Meanwhile, throughout all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls, Lorelai and Luke are an item, and then they’re not, and then they are again, and so on …
But there’s one thing about Rory Gilmore that we need to make crystal clear at this point in my psychotic unpacking of a teen drama that saw its series finale in 2007. Rory Gilmore, in her effort to keep her options open, has a tendency to revisit her previous love interests with dubious intent, which will be revisited in the 2016 Gilmore Girls reboot.
A Year In The Life
In Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, Rory is secretly having international meetups with a now-engaged Logan, who moved to London. If you know anything about the original run, Rory doesn’t have any qualms about getting together with somebody who’s already spoken for, as she had a hand in ruining Dean’s marriage during a misguided Season 4 soiree, long after they broke up and Dean moved on (he didn’t move on). While it may seem like I’m bringing this incident up to drag Rory through the mud, you’re half correct … but we need to establish a pattern of behavior here to really drive this cousin theory home.
With that in mind, we also need to consider the fact that during Gilmore Girls’ original run, when Rory and Logan’s relationship was in a state of turmoil that eventually got smoothed over, she paid a visit to Jesse with romantic intent, which she decided to back away from at the last minute. The important takeaway, however, is that they’ve both always had feelings for each other, and they never fully went away.
Later in the reboot, Rory has a reunion with Jesse, who encourages her to write a book about growing up in Stars Hollow, which she ultimately sets out to do upon the short run’s conclusion. Knowing that Rory has a tendency to move onto a new partner without ever getting closure on her feelings from past relationships, there’s no way to know whether Rory and Jess shared a moment off-screen toward the end of “Summer.”
Similarly, we know that Rory has one last weekend getaway with Logan during the final “Fall” installment. Meanwhile, Lorelai and Luke finally make it official after decades of uncertainty, ending the reboot with the wedding they always wanted and deserved right before Rory announces that she’s pregnant and the credits roll.
A Question Left Unanswered
Listen, maybe I’m looking too far into this light-hearted comedy drama that women of a certain age all adore for reasons I’ll never understand. But one thing I know for certain is that I’ve watched so much Gilmore Girls that I need to get this off of my chest.
While the most likely scenario is that Rory Gilmore is carrying Logan Huntzberger’s child, the truth of the matter is that we don’t know for certain that he’s the father – especially when you scrutinize the timeline.
If Rory actually had an unforgettable evening with Jess Mariano at the tail end of “Summer,” and she broke the news to a newly wed Lorelai during the fall season, the timeline suggests that Jess may actually be the father, and that Rory will soon be the mother of Luke’s step-grandchild, Lorelai’s grandchild, and Luke’s great-nephew/niece, because Jess is now her cousin through marriage.
In the grand scheme of things, none of this really matters because it’s just a wild theory that will never be validated unless the lingering rumors of another Gilmore Girls reboot materialize into something more than a one-off collaboration with Walmart. But if you’re out on the road, feeling lonely and so cold, all you have to do is run this theory by your wife if you want to sleep on the floor for the foreseeable future.
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