An episode of The Flash entitled “Flashpoint” follows a superhero travelling to the past in an attempt to revive his mother.  By doing so, The Flash rewrites history and attains the life he had always envisioned.  He soon discerns that his actions do not come without ramifications as his new utopian world soon begins to combust, forcing him to reverse his path and scrape his way back to reality.  However, the life to which he returns does not mirror the one he once had.  The Flash essentially establishes three separate timelines: the flawed original, the self-destructive fantasy, and the altered reality.  Now, he can never return to his first life as he has sent it into oblivion. The same is true for the creator of the beloved television program Gilmore Girls, Amy Sherman-Palladino, who attempted to time travel to the past when she revived the show in the four-film series Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.  Because she left the original show before its conclusion, she viewed the reunion as her opportunity to rewrite the story’s ending.  As a result, three different timelines emerged: the show’s actual ending, Sherman-Palladino’s desired ending, and the revival’s re-creation of her vision.  Sherman-Palladino believed her revival would remedy the original show’s unfit conclusion, an idea that only further damaged the story and its characters.

Sherman-Palladino left Gilmore Girls in April 2006, a time when MySpace prevailed and Pluto was a planet.  There were no IPhones or African-American presidents.  Over the past decade, however, our society has undergone substantial changes, and so have we, the exception being Sherman-Palladino.  The moment she departed the show, she clicked pause and left her vision of the story in 2006.  A decade later, she found her way back to that outdated, no longer relevant remote control and hit “play”.  The revival picked up where Sherman-Palladino left off, a place that now existed solely in her imagination.  As a result, she implemented the concluding message she had envisioned in 2006 into the 2016 reunion series, essentially neglecting the elapsed time.  By ending with a single, pregnant Rory, Sherman-Palladino aimed to represent the circle of life through mirroring Lorelai’s past.  This pattern was an overarching theme throug