ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

Why Gilmore Girls Made It Impossible To Be Team Logan

Photo: CW Network/Everett Collection.
Of all the debates that Gilmore Girls fans are engaged in, few are as heatedly discussed as that of Rory's boyfriends. Team Jess, Team Dean, or Team Logan: The lines have been drawn, much to series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino's chagrin. But while each of Rory's adolescent amours has his own pluses and minuses, devoted members of Team Logan might find themselves in a bit of an awkward spot after viewing the series' highly anticipated revival. (If you have yet to binge your way through the reboot, consider yourself warned: spoilers ahead.) In the original Gilmore Girls, Herr Huntzberger was many things: a trust-fund kid bristling under the thumb of his father, member of the Life and Death Brigade who prided himself on taking Rory out of her comfort zone, and a perpetrator of copious grand gestures delivered with a sideways smile. A decade later, in Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, he is all of these things again — with one important addendum. He's now also an unrepentant cheater. And thus, Team Logan scores a bittersweet victory in the reboot, which finds a 32-year-old Rory once again involved with a now well-suited, London-dwelling Logan. But the two are also both in relationships with other people: Rory with the eminently forgettable Paul and Logan with his supposed fiancée, Odette, the French heiress. "It did surprise me," Alexis Bledel admitted to ET Online about the Logan-affair storyline. "And I think it's a little uncomfortable for [Rory], even though she's kind of putting on a brave face that she's fine with it. I think she's actually not that emotionally connected to it. I think she's kind of just going through the motions at this point when we pick up with them." When we bid adieu to college-aged Rory, she was heading off to begin her career by covering the campaign of an upstart young senator named Barack Obama. Now, adult Rory has one well-received New Yorker article, but her coveted meeting at Condé Nast keeps getting postponed and she finds the conceit of an article she's writing on spec to be so boring that she falls asleep while interviewing one of its potential subjects. It's a long way from her eager-beaver days at the head of the Yale Daily News. In that vein, being back with college boyfriend Logan may even be a subconscious attempt to get back some of that hopeful ambition. Clearly, Rory learned nothing from her first go-around with a married man way back when she cheated with Dean and broke up his marriage. Sorry not sorry, Dean-lovers of America; our heroine did not take a lesson away from that heartbreak. The fact that she does not, however, tell Lorelai right away about the affair with Logan indicates that she at least partially believes her behavior might not be the most admirable. Open relationships are great and a totally healthy choice for some people, but it didn't work for Rory and Logan during their first days together back at Yale, so why would it work for them now? Rory ultimately intuits this for herself and calls things off when Logan suggests she stay at a hotel during her next visit, “like a geisha,” as she describes it, because the French fiancée has moved in with him at long last. “I realized I can’t call you anymore. Because she’s there,” Rory explains to Logan when she finally decides to end things between them. “So that’s it, we’re breaking up. Except we can’t break up because we’re nothing.” It's good to know Rory draws the line somewhere, even if it takes her an awfully long time. Logan, on the other hand, knew they were going nowhere from the get-go. He didn't particularly seem to care, in most part because he didn't have to. He could happily have his forbidden cake and eat it, too — he could eat it, in fact, at a swanky London restaurant owned by his family if he so desired. Because Logan is the kind of guy that would take Rory to a restaurant where he knows they are likely to run into his father, even though he also knows said father is a well-established thorn in Rory's side. He is the kind of guy who responds to Rory's declaration of their pseudo-relationship ending not with acceptance, but rather with one last, Beatles-inspired Life and Death Brigade extravaganza, followed by a seemingly altruistic (but ultimately selfish) attempt to peer-pressure her into using his family’s house in Maine to write. Gotta keep that side piece safely on the side, you know.

More from TV

R29 Original Series

AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT