While I still enjoy Gilmore Girls storylines we could have lived without. This became a more pronounced problem as the series continued, peaking with its 2016 Netflix revival.

Many of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life’s worst episodes scarcely even felt like a shadow of the original series, and the main reason for this was a lack of compelling storytelling. There were plenty of scenes where the main characters stood and sat around exchanging quick-fire comedic dialogue like they had in the original show, but there was no narrative drive underpinning these exchanges. Rory dated a forgettable love interest and cheated on him with Logan, but didn’t display any guilt, uncertainty, or even righteous rebelliousness in the process.

Gilmore Girls Season 7 Ruined Lane’s Entire Character Arc

Lane’s Unhappy Honeymoon and Unplanned Pregnancy Were Shockingly Downbeat

Similarly, Luke and Lorelai considered having children, but the pair never seemed to take this life-altering decision too seriously and Luke barely appeared to react to Lorelai’s decision to leave Stars Follow and hike the Pacific Crest Trail. This infamously difficult multi-month hike could have profoundly altered Lorelei’s entire personality, but Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life dropped this plot before it went anywhere and the sum total impact of the story was a nice phone call between Lorelai and Emily.

Lane’s fate seemed just as bleak and unnecessary the second time around.

While it is easy to mock Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life for its many pointless diversions and its lack of narrative urgency, it is worth noting that this issue dates back to the show’s original run. Re-watching Gilmore Girls proved to me that Lane’s character arc was ruined long before her pregnancy, and it was slowly eroded by this same lack of narrative drive or purpose. Make no mistake, Lane’s fate seemed just as bleak and unnecessary the second time around. What it no longer seemed, was unexpected.

The girl who spent her adolescence vying for independence and trying to escape her mother’s clutches instead turning into a carbon copy of her mother was inexplicably bleak, but it wasn’t an unexpected surprise. Instead, re-watching the series made me realize that this twist was just as heavily foreshadowed as Rory and Dean’s Gilmore Girls affair a few seasons earlier. Lane’s character arc was derailed not when she went on her honeymoon, but rather as soon as she started dating Zack years earlier.

Lane's Character Problems Started Long Before Her Pregnancy

Lane’s Relationship With Zack Made Her More Like Her Mother

Throughout the first few seasons of Gilmore Girls, Lane is constantly at war with her conservative, traditional mother. Ms. Kim is not only comically stern, but also utterly humorless. Her severe demeanor makes Taylor Doose seem as rebellious as Jess, and this clashes hilariously with Lane’s desire to be a free-spirited rockstar. Lane obsessively collects rock CDs while her mother lectures incessantly on the perils of secular music. It makes for a perfect contrast with Lorelai and Rory, whose relationship is sometimes more akin to two sisters with a large age gap than a mother and daughter.

However, long before the unwatchable Gilmore Girls episode where Lane discovers she is pregnant and abandons her life plans, she gradually started to act more and more like her mother once she began living with her bandmates. Living with the band turned Lane into a housemother, resulting in her reflecting the stern attitudes she resented hearing from her mother back at her bandmates. This was clearly intended to be funny, as Gilmore Girls underlined the similarities between Lane and Ms. Kim and she remained blissfully ignorant of them, but the jokes got old fast.

Lane’s Original Love Interest Avoided Zack’s Biggest Flaw

Dave Rygalski Didn’t Share Zack’s Immaturity

Before Lane began dating the woefully immature Zack, she had a brief, far better relationship with Adam Brody’s Dave Rygalski. Sadly, Brody’s commitments to The O.C. meant that this charismatic musician was written out of the series and replaced by Todd Lowe’s Zack. A talented actor who shone as Terry Bellefleur in True Blood, Lowe couldn’t make the insufferable Zack any less unlikable despite his irable efforts. Lowe made Zack a comically inept, well-meaning love interest, but the show’s writing amplified his immaturity until Lane was effectively a replacement mother for him.

Zack’s petulant avoidance of responsibility meant Lane took on the lion’s share of the housework while also working more hours.

Turning Lane into a scold meant that her rebellious edge was sanded down and her plans for rock superstardom took a backseat as she focused on making rent. This could have been a sweet story if Zack and Lane had both tried their hardest to balance their artistry with the demands of working-class life, but Zack’s petulant avoidance of responsibility meant Lane took on the lion’s share of the housework while also working more hours.

Gilmore Girls Never Redeemed Lane’s Grim Season 7 Fate

Lane and Zach’s Future Still Seemed Unhappy In A Year in the Life

Much like Rory’s A Year in the Life story made her more arrogant and conceited than her original series incarnation, this endless drudgery inevitably made Lane more bitter and unpleasant. A character who started out complaining about the system and the establishment as she planned to break free from its constrictions ended up complaining about the dishes, and this was before her and Zack’s inexplicably bleak honeymoon storyline. Lane’s story reached its nadir with season 7, episode 2, “That’s What You Get For Makin’ Whoopee, Folks.”

Gilmore Girls and A Year in the Life both seem convinced that Lane becoming just as close-minded and bitter as her mother is inherently hilarious.

Here, Lane discovers she is pregnant after her first experience of sex, a painful, unpleasant encounter that the show inexplicably plays for laughs. Although A Year in the Life’s brief Lane and Zach cameo attempts to turn their family life into a cutesy sitcom, there is no avoiding the fact that humdrum small-town life is a million miles from the rock stardom Lane dreamed of during her teens.

Lane’s fate is a profound betrayal of her younger self and, to make matters worse, Gilmore Girls and A Year in the Life both seem convinced that Lane becoming just as close-minded and bitter as her mother is inherently hilarious. It is hard to see why this plot would be funny, but the fan base’s reaction to the storyline is telling. Roundly viewed as one of the show’s worst missteps, this unpopular Gilmore Girls character arc proves that the show's problems started a lot earlier than many viewers might anticipate.