GILMORE GIRLS

THE COMPLETE FOURTH SEASON

REVIEWED BY CHARITY BISHOP

Our rating: 3 out of 5

Because of: adultery, implied sensuality

Rated:

The long awaited change from high school to college has arrived in Rory Gilmore's life, and with it, audiences were given the excitement of watching her fit into Yale, while juggling her dinner responsibilities with her grandparents, playing phone tag with her mom, and spending a year of her life without a boyfriend. The result is a charming, funny return to the eccentric town of Stars Hollow, where nothing is as peaceful as it seems.

Returning home after four months spent backpacking through Europe, there's nothing more that Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and her daughter Rory (Alexis Bledel) want than to settle in for a week of recovery time before packing up all of Rory's stuff and carting her off to Yale University. The town has not changed much since they have been gone. Rory's best friend Lane (Keiko Agena) is still hiding her favorite CD's under her floorboards, the local diner is overflowing with activity, and Lorelai's parents, Richard and Emily (Edward Herrmann, Kelly Bishop) continue to try and micromanage her life. Then it hits them... they forgot to buy Luke (Scott Patterson) a gift. Out of all the people in town that play an important role in their lives, he is the most important. He serves them coffee every single morning, with a complaint to go with it. But that is the least of their problems when Rory realizes she wrote down orientation wrong. She doesn't have a week; she has two days in which to pack her stuff, say a temporary goodbye to everyone in town, and decide what classes she wants to take.

Yale is chaos, and her roommates aren't much better. There's the perky athlete who is always up before five in the morning, the slightly deranged girl who cannot carry off a suitable conversation to save her life, and... Paris (Liza Weil). Apparently, torturing her friends at prep school wasn't enough, because she's back for seconds, this time with a personal life trainer in tow, but no amount of gluing macaroni onto cardboard can tone down her personality. In the meantime, Lorelai is planning to open a local inn with her friend Sookie (Melissa McCarthy), who is heavily pregnant with her first child. In the midst of all the planning and financial expenses, Lorelai finds time to date her father's business partner (Chris Eigeman) but never quite gets around to telling her parents, and Rory once again becomes friends with Dean (Jared Padalecki).

The change in pace of this season is quite remarkable, because it never loses the charm of the small town where nothing more terrible than missing Easter eggs transpires, but it also allows us to continue with the lives of the Gilmore girls. They don't hang out quite as often, but that doesn't really do much damage since there's so much going on in their lives. One thing all fans love is the dialogue that runs around in circles and ends up in a pun, and there's no shortage of it this season. All your favorite characters and a few new ones are back. Paris is just as obnoxious as ever, only this time she's started dating a man three times her age (Michael York). Luke starts thinking differently about Loreali, leading to their very first kiss, and Rory is surprisingly single through the entire season, the occasional bad date notwithstanding. Even Lane owns up to her mother just who she really is, and winds up moving out of the house to pursue a temporary career.

For the most part, the season is clean. There's occasional bad language and innuendo. Loreali's favorite phrase is "dirty," and she uses it whenever she can. The biggest disappointment was how much casual drinking the college girls get involved with. Rory doesn't drink excessively, but does chug alcohol now and again with friends on spring break, and to celebrate the end of her first year at college. Conversation revolves around Paris having an affair with a womanizing professor. Lorelai spends several nights at Jason's house. In "Girls Gone Wild," things get pretty heated on spring break. Inspired by friends' commenting on how much more attention they get from guys when they lip lock, Paris grabs Rory and plants a kiss on her lips. Lorelai doesn't even look up when Rory later tells her about it. In the second to last episode, a bachelor party heads to a strip bar, where a lot of scantily-clad women waltz around offering out lap dances. Rory makes the mistake of sleeping with a married man in the season finale, which results in a violent, tearful fight with her mother over her having become "the other woman." Rory finds a naked boy asleep in the hall after a party, and offers him her robe.

Even though the morals leave something to be desired, and the occasional liberal cracks at conservative values and politicians test the patience, Gilmore Girls has something that few other shows possess: heart. For every off the cuff joke, there's a meaningful moment to make up for it, or something just plain funny, like Luke and Lorelai breaking into the church to sabotage the bells, whose hourly tolls have just about driven the townspeople insane. The pastor catches them at it, and with a grand flourish, says, "Thank God... carry on," and vanishes. Just another day in the quirky world of Stars Hollow.