We haven’t seen bad-boy Jess (Milo Ventimiglia) since season four, episode twenty-one, “Last Week Fights, This Week Tights.”  He asked Rory (Alexis Bledel) to run away with him, though she is a freshman at Yale, and he has a penchant for running away without her, bailing on her high school graduation the season before.  They had been dating for quite some time, especially by high school dating standards; Rory left good-boy Dean (her very first boyfriend) for Jess when she is all of sixteen.

The standard arguments for why The Gilmore Girls was an amazing series still apply.  The smart writing, so many references to popular culture, history, and current events that the DVDs come with a guide in case you miss one; the quick, witty banter made livelier by all involved; the irreparable hotness that is Lauren Graham.

Now it’s season six, episode eight, “Let Me Hear Your Balalaikas Ringing Out.”  Rory, who until recently spent her time being the solid point around which her flighty single mom Lorelai orbited, got into some trouble and chose to drop out of Yale.  She’s living with her exorbitantly rich grandparents (Kelly Bishop and Edward Herrmann) and mostly helping plan events for the DAR at her grandmother’s behest.  Her boyfriend, Logan (Matt Czuchry), is a sweater-and-collared-shirt wearing Yale senior, of even more wealth than Rory’s grandparents.  He’s arrogant in the way of privileged white young alpha men and not exactly eager to grow up as his father wishes.  He drinks to excess, jumps off of cliffs with The Life and Death Brigade (a group of Yale daredevils), and took a long time to put aside his playboy ways to commit to Rory.  Logan is television proof that money can buy almost anything except freedom from those who supplied it to you in the first place.

Rory drops off Logan after a night of drinking with friends and arrives back at her grandparents’ to find Jess waiting in the driveway.  He is as we left him, hair disheveled in an artistic way, jean jacket and messenger bag slung across his chest.  He’s been living in New York with other artistic types.  Rory fumbles through the start of the conversation until Jess hands her the novel he’s had published by a small press.  That’s why he’s back, to try to get the book into independent bookstores.  And then she’s back to her fast-talking, sure-fire self, full of encouragement and pride that high-school-drop-out Jess finally sat down and did what he always wanted to do.  Which is exactly why he wanted her to see it.

The next night, Jess and Rory head out for dinner when Logan surprises them both, home early from an out-of-town job interview.  The boys stare each other down across the table; Logan tries to use his wealth, education, and status to keep Jess surly eyed.  When Logan crosses the line, Jess leaves, Rory running out after him.  Rory tries to excuse Logan’s behavior – he’s tired from traveling, he’s been drinking, on and on.

“What the hell’s going on?” Jess asks.  “I mean with you.”

And then we get it, we know how far this has come as a series, but Rory doesn’t know what he means.  She can’t possibly explain all that’s happened recently in a way that will satisfy Jess – stealing a yacht on a dare, the court case and the community service that followed, the fight with her mom so massive that it forced her to live with her grandparents.  It’s been episodes since mother and daughter spoke; they didn’t even get to spend Rory’s twenty-first birthday together the way they had been planning for years.  This in a show that, for right or wrong, showed Lorelai and Rory not so much as mother and daughter but as best friends.

“This isn’t you,” Jess says, “going out with this jerk with a Porsche.  We made fun of guys like that.”

Rory tries again to defend Logan.

“This isn’t about him.  Screw him.  It’s about you.  What’s going on?”

She crosses her arms, looks shattered.  “I don’t know.”

The change has been so slow, over the course of two-plus seasons.  First to Yale, then with the school paper, where she meets Logan.  Resisting him, then falling for him, a couple more times around with that, then getting in trouble with him.  The tailored clothes that accompany carousing with the wealthy, especially when carousing turns into hosting DAR teas.  It’s been so long since Rory graduated from the elite prep school her grandparents paid for that we’ve all but forgotten the girl in season one who didn’t think her small-town, middle-class, public-school upbringing would help her survive her first day at Chilton Academy.

There have been other changes for other characters distracting us as well.  Most importantly, Lorelai finally couples up with diner-owner Luke (Scott Patterson).  Luke, in his perpetual plaid shirt and backward baseball cap, and coffee-fused Lorelai have been flirting since episode one; this is the relationship we’ve been waiting for, occupied with.  Logan and Rory are cute and all, but they’re absolutely nothing against Luke and Lorelai.  And now the latter are engaged.  The audience could hardly want more.

But here we remember the Rory who used to date Jess.  The Rory whose mother worked at a Connecticut inn in a quirky little town.  They didn’t have much money, but they did just fine for themselves, especially considering Lorelai was only sixteen when she had Rory and ran to Stars Hollow all those years before.  We remember the Rory who went to Chilton and this boy she met named Tristan and just how much Rory hated him and, now we realize, he was nothing more than a high school version of Logan, looks, attitude, social standing, and all.  We remember the Rory who, simply, had no idea how to navigate the world of the well-to-do.  “I just want to see…something,” she tells the headmaster of Chilton on her first day of school when he asks for a detailed agenda of her future.  And now, in this moment in the parking lot with Jess, we realize that she’s running a small part of the world that used to make her cower.

Writers Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino have taken us on a carefully crafted six-year journey to get us to this point.  The trajectory of Rory is as finely written as any novel heroine with all the nuances and then some.  Though the seventh and final season will suffer with the loss of both writers, the first six show what’s possible on television.  The series initially aired on the WB beginning in the fall of 2000, finishing out its run after the WB was subsumed into the CW in the spring of 2007.  Being off-network was its first advantage.  This allowed for a slower initial pace, a chance to build chemistry among the characters.  Shows on-network used to be afforded that with regularity (see, for example, how long Taxi takes to get in its groove), but television real estate seems to be more precious than ever, though there is more space than ever.  Characters and storylines need to be, more often than not, instantly high-rating.  The fifth, and highest rated, season of The Gilmore Girls got as far as #110 in the Nielsen ratings, though seasons two and three had the highest viewing audience (5.2 million each; the fifth season came in at 4.8 million).  The end of the show ranks as the 124^th most-watched series finale.  And yet it was still ranked in Time’s “100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME” and has enough staying power for week-nightly reruns on ABC Family.  The audience may be small compared to network shows, but it’s a loyal audience, the kind of audience who learned to match the quick-paced dialogue every time they quoted the show.

“Jess wrote a book.  He wrote a book, and you mocked him,” Rory yells at Logan when she goes back inside the restaurant.  “He’s doing something.”

“Good, fine, he’s doing something.  Everybody in the world is doing something.  More power to him.”  Logan, though always a jerk, seems even more so in the moments after Jess says to Rory what Logan should have been saying all along.

“I’m not.  I mean, what am I doing?” she says before listing all the ways her once-promising life has stagnated.  And though it’s Logan that she says this to, a boy who has shared several of his advantages to get her where she is, it’s because of Jess that she can finally get to where she should be going.