Inexplicable Gilmore Girls Review: Drama and Longing in Season Four

PENNILYN LOTT!

Warning: Spoilers follow for episodes 7 through 13 for season four of Gilmore Girls.

Because I’m binging this show, and trying to split up my writing into chunks based on three to seven episodes, I neglected to mention two prominent side characters in my last entry – Jason and Lane. One relationship I wish would get more time, and one less, and if you’ve been reading my past entries, you can probably guess the distribution I’m craving.

Jason seems like a dolt. He’s rich, but seems kind of sleazy, and his basic appeal to Lorelai seems to be 1) it’ll annoy her parents and 2) he can talk as fast as she can. The first aspect is especially annoying to me. I don’t think Emily and Richard are particularly warm, and clearly, Emily’s henpecking is probably responsible for a lot of Lorelai’s issues. However, Lorelai is quick to sabotage inroads her parents belatedly make, whether it’s insisting on paying back Rory’s Chilton tuition, grinding her teeth through every social opportunity, or dating Jason.

So, Jason. The relationship starts when Lorelai is drunk (essentially) and pissed off at Emily. Jason is kind of weird, with his various apneas, and I imagine things will go south once Lorelai is forced to introduce him as her boyfriend. At that point, the “fun” of the forbidden goes away, and what are you left with? A rich, fast-talking insurance salesman, which is pretty much the opposite of Lorelai’s type. (And, plus – I still know Luke is lurking out there as a dating option. Damn my foreknowledge of this show! But, it’s not like this is a giant secret, as the show clearly keeps foreshadowing his continued love for Lorelai.)

In contrast, Lane getting kicked out of her home and momentarily living with Rory is incredibly interesting. They don’t really delve too deeply into her new, awkward situations, unfortunately, but having seen some future episodes, at least it is a plotline that is continued throughout season four, as opposed to being dropped with little explanation.

It’s also unique and somewhat realistic, because I feel like in most shows, the Lane-Mrs. Kim drama would be wrapped up by the end of the episode. Instead, Mrs. Kim essentially tells Lane to go screw when she finds out how much her daughter has been hiding from her. There isn’t a “make nice” moment, so in a way, we’re getting a reenactment of the Emily-Lorelai feud.

Fun moment – The Gilmores, as a family, attending the Yale-Harvard football game, and Lorelai ribbing Emily about Pennilyn Lott. Not so fun moment – the ensuing drama and FEELINGS as Emily discovers that Richard still meets with Pennilyn Lott. Definitely fun moment – Repeatedly typing Pennilyn Lott. Pennilyn Lott! What a name, Pennilyn Lott, is.

By the way, speaking of tangled love and family webs, Jess comes back. We finally get the blow-off between him and Rory, presumably because that whole spin-off thing didn’t work. I mean, uh, not the spin-off, the completely legitimate reasons for him to be out in California with his biological father.

Anyway, Jess is still horrible, but he confesses his love to Rory. He then immediately leaves town. Yay? Annoyingly, I imagine this means Jess will pop up in at least one more episode. He’s the god damn Chekov’s gun of this show. Until Rory tells him to go screw, a la Mrs. Kim, I won’t believe that he’s gone for good.

Other odds and ends: It was distressing that Sookie turned out to be a flake when it comes to inn issues. Nicole and Luke is very meh. Lulu and Kirk is the new hotness. (Did you know that Kirk has a girlfriend?) Gil is played by Sebastian Bach, and not the 10 other hair metal band members I initially thought of, and he’s pretty fly. Paris is still baller, even though she (or possibly because?) crushed Jamie with a single phone call. Andddd, my next entry will be Friday or Saturday, depending on when I manage to write more about the ole Gilmore Girls.

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Inexplicable TV Review – Voyager’s answer to everything? A time machine did it!

Warning: Spoilers follow for the last few seasons and ending of Star Trek: Voyager.

Ultimately, I liked my trip through the seven seasons and 172 episodes (!) of Star Trek: Voyager, although things do start to get awfffulllyyy creaky toward the end because of a strong emphasis on time travel as a quick fix. I couldn’t tell if the show simply got cancelled abruptly, and they needed to wrap things up with a two-part episode, or if the writing simply faltered a bit in the final season.

On TV Tropes, there is a concept called A Wizard Did It, which originates from The Simpsons as all great concepts do. On Voyager, this could be modified into A Time Machine Did It, as this is the main plot rescue device for too many episodes in the last couple of seasons, including the two-part series finale.

Because the plot device is used so much, it unfortunately hurts the show – it makes Voyager being stranded in the Delta Quadrant feel more like an artificial plot contrivance. The show finally ends with Janeway from 26 years in the future using a time machine to travel back, to help the crew through a Borg transwarp hub wormhole thing.  

It’s frustrating because it’s a plot they could have done without relying on time travel yet again. Just have the crew stumble across that big ole Borg ship, and realize they can use it to travel back to Earth. Future Janeway makes a heroic sacrifice to allow the crew to achieve the trip, but they could have figured out a way around it, or have one of Voyager’s actual crewmembers do it. Because we know it’s Future Janeway, who will be “killed” anyway with a timeline change, her sacrifice means less.

The time traveling is so extensive in the final two seasons that we’re exposed to actual things like the Temporal Prime Directive, and a squad of time traveling Starfleet officers who don’t allow deviation from the timeline. The latter is especially confusing, as is the Future Janeway’s ability to somewhat easily steal a time travel device. It’s implied that time traveling is somewhat regular in the future of the show, and as a viewer, it just seemed odd to me that something REALLY catastrophic hadn’t happened as a result.

Outside of the emphasis on time travel, the biggest flaw with the final six episodes or so is a hasty romance plot between Seven of Nine and Chakotay. There isn’t a ton of setup for it, and Future Janeway reveals that the two get married. Since the previous seasons mostly teased at Chakotay-Janeway and Doctor-Seven of Nine flings, it feels weird that they pivot strongly away from both.

Anyway, some other random odds and ends:

- My Voyager Character Power Rankings: The Doctor, Seven, Naomi Wildman, gap, Janeway, Tuvok, Torres, Paris, Harry Kim, gap, Chakotay, gap, Neelix, huge gap, Troi and Reginald Barclay. While Seven has more “high” moments than The Doctor, I have to give him a smidge more credit for being the most compelling character of the course of the entire series.

- Naomi Wildman just kills it pretty much every scene she’s in. She adds good levity to the show, and helps humanize Seven of Nine in a great way, whereas much of the other “humor” of Voyager falls flat. I usually find the Cute Kid characters insufferable, but she’s a rare exception to the rule. She’s so great that her mother, Samantha Wildman, basically gets demoted to extra.

- Neelix gets offloaded a couple episodes before the finale, which I was fine with. I never really warmed up to his character, although thankfully, his more comedic aspects are downplayed once Kes gets jettisoned off the ship. He was more interesting once he was portrayed as a competent ambassador for the ship.

- Reginald Barclay guest “stars” in a couple episodes, as a Starfleet officer obsessively trying to make contact with Voyager. He was in Next Generation and basically serves as a stand-in for sci-fi crazed fans, and he’s highly annoying.

The pandering feels worse because he’s accompanied briefly in most episodes by Deanna Troi. You can really see the seams on these episodes. “Well, we can only get Marina Sirtis to agree to a couple scenes, but the guy who plays Barclay, he just wants to know when he’ll get his check.”

- I’m now done with Voyager, and I’m currently making my way through Next Generation. I had thought I had seen all of the episodes, but Netflix tells me that I actually, bizarrely watched the first two seasons and the last season, leaving a ton of the middle episodes untouched. Whoops.

From there, my buddy and Trek superfan Bob recommended that I go in the order of Deep Space Nine, the old Star Trek movies, Enterprise, then the new Star Trek movies. I’m also still catching up on Gilmore Girls with Karen, and I need to watch Luke Cage at some point too, but there is something oddly easy about watching Trek vs. “new” content. They had a sort of relaxed cadence that makes them perfect for background watching, as I’m writing or doing other things.

Want to support Steve’s blogging? Then purchase something via the Amazon clickthru link for Your Parents Basement, Steve’s other project! To read all of Steve’s past Inexplicable Movie Reviews, click here! For Inexplicable TV Reviews, click here! For Inexplicable Video Game Reviews, click here! And for Inexplicable Book Reviews, go here!

On grey and grey morality, and (the excellent) Fallout 4

Okay, the world of Fallout 4 is full of murky decisions. But on the bright side, you get a dog!

Note: Tons of ending ers for Fallout 4 follow.

One of the better-developed tropes on the ole TV Tropes is that of grey and gray morality, and it’s now interesting to me to see how more and more game developers are using it in their games. It’s been on my mind recently because, like seemingly everyone else with a current generation console, I’ve been making my way through the Commonwealth of Fallout 4 since the game’s release in November.

If you’re not aware of the game, but still reading this entry for some reason, a quick description – Fallout 4 is an open-world first-person shooter with RPG elements. It’s set in Boston after (essentially) worldwide nuclear war that was primarily instigated by the U.S. and China. In the Fallout universe, there are energy shortages that lead to war, with some timeline differences starting around 1945. The Fallout wiki had an exhaustive articles on the divergences and games’ timelines.

The main conflict in Fallout 4 is between different factions working together or against one another for control of the greater Boston area – The Institute, the Brotherhood of Steel, the Railroad and the Minutemen.

- The Institute are technological boogeymen who believe in the superiority of technology. They essentially try to control society from the shadows, with a secret base under CIT, the game’s stand-in for MIT. As an added bonus, your personal history as the sole survivor from an underground bomb shelter intertwines with the group. The game starts with you, your wife and your sweet baby boy being put into cryogenic freeze. Later, Institute scientists take the baby and shoot your wife when she tries to stop them. The game’s events are put into motion when your son – now a grown old man – frees you from the cryogenic prison.

- The Brotherhood of Steel is a militaristic group that believes strong in recovering an reusing pre-Atomic War technology. They’re the closest thing to an established “government” power in the game. They were one of the prime allies in Fallout 3, although far less militaristic. Backstory and in-game dialogue suggests that the leader of the Brotherhood from that game passed away or died, which led rise to a more authoritarian, younger leader. (His daughter, a prominent character who survives in most of the endings, is nowhere to be seen, and neither is the Lone Wanderer from Fallout 3.)

- The Railroad is the main antagonist group against the Institute. The Institute has developed synthetic human clones / lifeforms to do most of their above-ground bidding, but, they’ve become so advanced that they have consciousness and free-will to an extent. The Institute refuses to acknowledge this, but the Railroad is committed to freeing as many synths as they can. (Synths aren’t received especially well by the general public, which also means that the Brotherhood and some of the Minutemen are against them as well.)

- The Minutemen are the closest thing the game has to a “good” option. As you’d expect from the name, they’re a motley crew of Bostonians who have banded together to fight off Super Mutants and other baddies. However, as the game starts, their numbers have dwindled to about a dozen people, and you have to build them up from square one.

Regardless of what you think of the four groups, there isn’t a clear cut answer as to which one is “right,” like a lot of games, and each of their plotlines makes you do something squeamish to get the ending. To win as the Minutemen, you have to wipe out the Institute. To win as the Institute, you have to wipe out the Brotherhood and the Railroad. To win as the Brotherhood, you have to kill the Institute and Railroad. While you can play the sides against one another for a while, you eventually have to make a choice and pick one.

As a result, there is also an added layer to the experience if you replay the game from the perspective of the other side. Remember that soldier you mowed down when allying with the Railroad? Well, when you’re with the Brotherhood, you find out they have a fully-fleshed out history and backstory, and hey, he’s not such a bad guy. Fallout 4 has tons of “named” characters, and you’re faced with this dilemma when venturing through any of the four main plotlines.

For the record – In my “best” save, I went with the Railroad. The Brotherhood and Institute were completely untenable to me to keep around, and the Minutemen ending path hadn’t presented itself to me. (It tends to be a “default” ending if you screw things up too badly with the other groups to proceed.)

And, oh, the game itself? Fallout 4 is pretty rad. I enjoy when my limited knowledge of Boston comes in handy and I recognize something, and it’s mindless fun to just poke around all of the nooks and crannies of the map. I’m one (glitched) trophy away from a platinum, but unlike a lot of past Bethesda games, I haven’t had a single game-ruining bug or massive save issues. If you have a PS4 or Xbox One, it’s pretty much an immediate “Must Play!” if you’re a serious gamer.

The DLC for the game starts coming out this month, with a pack with some rowe-buts coming out in roughly a week. From there, another DLC is going to be about Bar Harbor, Maine! And probably three or four more places, since Fallout 3 ended up with about five DLC. This is the first game I actually shelled out the cash for a season pass, so I am excite.