Rory Gilmore Shocks Nation With Last Four Words: "I'm Moving to Portland"

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD FOR A FAKE VERSION OF GILMORE GIRLS THAT DOESN’T EXIST, MUCH LIKE RORY’S MORAL COMPASS

In the same voracious way I consume cheap beer and Publix cookies during finals week, Netflix has been chewing up beloved franchises and swallowing the nostalgia of terrified millennials. The most recent meal the early 2000s have served to the video streaming titan is Amy Sherman-Palladino’s Gilmore Girls. Fans have welcomed the return to Stars Hollow with open arms, excited to reconnect with the queens of quip. Everyone’s talking about one thing, though: THAT final scene with Rory and Lorelai.

“I’m moving to Portland.” Rory told her mother, shaking America to its core. WHAT!!!! Who saw THAT coming? Sweet little Rory who pretends The Fountainhead and Moby Dick are good books? Our darling Rory who missed her single mother’s graduation from college to go cheat on her boyfriend? Over the course of the 4 reboot episodes, you can actually see the poison in Rory’s soul begin to form dreadlocks in her hair before she prepares to embark for Portland.

When we catch back up with Rory, she’s returned home at 32 because she’s gone broke and is too good for any job available in the sleepy little towns of London or New York, but gets wildly upset at the prospect of living in Stars Hollow (a town without a single bicycle powered kava bar) for the rest of her life. Portland is exactly what she needs. To get there, though, Rory will need a little cash from her grandmother. Emily has always been there for Rory, but Rory has noticed an appalling lack of jade in her grandmother’s dimming aura. “I’ve never had it easy,” said Rory, who went to private school with everyone who wants to overturn Roe V. Wade and then graduated from Yale. “If you don’t give me the money to go write the Great American Novel, I’m going to grind this shitty little town under my heel.”

With the success of Netflix’s Black Mirror, we also cannot ignore the distinct possibility that Rory Gilmore is a robot created by white scientists in a lab in order to weaponize gentrification. By the end of A Year in the Life’s next season, Portland could go from 76% white to 95% with the introduction of just one cold-brew-coffee-powered Rory droid. If it is indeed revealed that Rory is an artificial intelligence, then the coldness with which she approaches human relationships would make more sense as well as her unsettling lack of self-awareness. Come to think of it, we can’t come up with a single piece of evidence that says everyone you know from college who moved to Portland is not a robot created by neoliberals to perpetuate white supremacy.