Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino opened up about Rory's life-altering moment and chances of new episodes.
Warning: Spoiler alert! The story below contains spoilers from all four episodes of Netflix’s Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.
Gilmore Girls fans, your burning questions are about to be answered.
Netflix’s four-part revival series, A Year in the Life, ended in an unexpected, circle-of-life kind of way when a 32-year-old Rory (Alexis Bledel) revealed to her newly-wed mother, Lorelai (Lauren Graham), that she was pregnant. Following Rory’s life-changing revelation, questions abounded: Who is the father of her unborn child? Is it Logan (Matt Czuchry)? Is it Paul (Jack Carpenter), Rory’s underwhelming boyfriend?
Gilmore Girls executive producers Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino answered the revival’s biggest questions -- including the possibility of new episodes.
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1. Rory Was Supposed to Get Pregnant After College
“Mom. “Yeah?” “I’m pregnant.” Those last four words may have been a shock to the system to loyal Gilmore Girls viewers, but Amy Sherman-Palladino revealed that that was always the ending she had planned all along. In fact, Rory was supposed to be with child a decade earlier -- “at 22 years old,” she told TVLine. “I always wanted [the story] to end in a Life Repeats Itself kind of way. The daughter following in the mother’s footsteps.”
“Younger people are a little younger longer these days, so we know a lot of 32-year-olds who are still quite young, haven’t quite gotten their life paths completely decided yet,” Dan Palladino told The Hollywood Reporter. “And that felt like it felt right for Rory still and it felt right that those last four [words] and that specific ending could still work for these women."
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2. Rory May Not Keep the Baby
While Rory’s pregnancy curveball likely forces her to take stock of her life and (lack of a) career, Sherman-Palladino insinuated that the open-endedness of the ending leaves her with big decisions to make -- one of which includes the possibility of an abortion. “Rory doesn’t have to keep the baby,” she told TVLine. “There are choices here that she can make. It’s just the left turn. It’s that curveball that life throws you. I will say, weirdly, that I like it much more now.”
“But there’s something about Rory being the same age as Lorelai was when we first met Lorelai [in the pilot] that has a lot more symmetry and means a lot more,” Sherman-Palladino continued, adding, “It’s also the time to be thinking about having a baby if you’re going to be thinking about it.”
RELATED: Alexis Bledel Reacts to Shocking Rory Pregnancy Twist
3. The Father of Rory’s Baby Is a Mystery (But the Clues Are There)
We won’t find out definitively who the father of Rory’s baby is, but “a lot of clues are out there,” Palladino told E! Online. “People can make their own conclusions about who the father is; there’s not a thousand choices out there,” Sherman-Palladino told THR. It makes the most sense for the father to be Logan, whose unique relationship with Rory in the revival intentionally mirrored that of Christopher (David Sutcliffe) and Lorelai’s. “Yes,” she confirmed to TVLine, when asked about the parallels between the two romances.
Matt Czuchry also commented on the “open” ending, telling THR it was the producers’ intentions to “put that out in the universe for fans to talk about and debate.”
For the producers, it wasn’t so much about who the father was, but how the life-changing event shapes Rory. “I always feel a lot of people overlook a lot more of Rory because the focus was so much on the romance. And I didn’t want this moment to be about a boy,” Sherman-Palladino told TVLine. “The moment was about, ‘Here’s what I’m going through in my life now!’ It’s an ‘Oh, s—t’ moment about Rory. Her discussion with Lorelai is going to be about, ‘What do I do? Where do I go from here?’ It’s not going to be about, ‘I can’t believe it’s this boy that wound up….’”
RELATED: Alexis Bledel and Matt Czuchry Defend Rory and Logan's 'Surprising' Relationship Choices
4. Luke and Lorelai’s Pre-Election Wedding Date Is Significant
Luke (Scott Patterson) and Lorelai’s wedding date, Thursday, Nov. 5, happened to fall just before the presidential election -- a decision that Sherman-Palladino said was intentional. “To be totally honest with you, we did put it before the election, but [beyond that] there’s not a lot of significance there,” she told TVLine.
“These movies were written way in advance [of the election],” Sherman-Palladino further explained. “So it was weird for us to predict where we would be in November. Because if we [get it wrong] then [A Year in the Life] will feel dated by a political moment in time. I wanted it to stand on its own.”
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5. Rory’s Book Is a Potential Career Breakthrough
It seemed appropriate that Jess (Milo Ventimiglia) was the one to ultimately push Rory into taking the leap and write a book, titled Gilmore Girls, about her and her mom. “It just felt right that somebody important in her life, who Jess is, helped guide her towards… By the way, we don’t even really know how successful it’s going to be,” Sherman-Palladino told THR. “We just know that she was happy to write it and it seemed like it is pointing towards a sort of career breakthrough for her.”
As for what the first three chapters contain, Sherman-Palladino admitted she hadn’t thought that far ahead. “People have asked me, ‘What is Rory writing in the book?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know what the hell she writes in the book,’” she revealed to TVLine.
RELATED: 'Gilmore Girls' Star Scott Patterson on What's Next for Luke and Lorelai
6. There Are No Plans for More Gilmore Girls (for Now)
Though Lorelai and Emily’s stories ended on a happy note, Rory’s final moment left the door open for the possibility of more Gilmore Girls in the future. It just won’t come any time soon. “The old adage is you always want to leave them wanting more,” Sherman-Palladino, who is working on Amazon pilot The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, told TVLine. “You don’t really want someone to walk away from something you worked so hard on going, ‘Alright. I can move on.”
“We pitched this as close-ended,” she told THR. “Netflix and Warner Bros., we all went into this sort of saying that this was it. So there really haven’t been any more discussions about: Is there going to be anything else? I don’t know.”
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7. Emily Gilmore: The Spinoff?
Much of the revival had Emily (Kelly Bishop) grieving -- in her own Emily Gilmore way -- over the death of Richard, but by the end of it, she seemed at peace in Nantucket and enjoying a stress-free life. Sherman-Palladino addressed fans’ desires for a possible spinoff. “Emily in Nantucket?” she admitted to E! Online. “I don’t know, I haven’t thought of it.”
Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life is streaming on Netflix.
