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Back in 2009, over the course of eight months, I watched all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls for the first time.

(When I say that, there’s always someone who thinks I’m talking about Golden Girls, but I’m not; this is an entirely unrelated show. Follow my link above for more info.)

I started occasionally rewatching episodes in 2010, while entering submissions into the SH database. What with one thing and another, it took me until now to finish; last night, I rewatched the last two episodes of the series.

It’s still a wonderful show. Frequently laugh-out-loud funny; frequently utterly charming; not-infrequently cry-out-loud sad. Delightful and quirky and extremely sympathetic characters, sweet romances, vast herds of pop-culture references (which you can just ignore if you don’t get), and the fastest talking since His Girl Friday.

It has flaws. There are episodes I don’t like much; there are characters I don’t like much; there are storylines that feel forced and/or unnecessary and/or out-of-character to me; there are at least three cases where I can’t understand what a main character sees in their romantic interest.

But overall, I think I would have to rate it as my favorite TV series.

And even after twice through the whole series, I still fairly often sing along with the theme song all the way through the opening credits.

I don’t have any particularly deep insights about the series, and any big-picture thoughts (especially about the way they presented gay jokes and cross-dressing jokes, and the ways that changed over the course of the series) will have to wait for some future time. I also still plan at some future time to put together a list of particularly funny quotes, but that too is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Mostly this entry is just to mark the end of my rewatching. This past week has been kind of difficult and weirdly overemotional for me; partly due to not enough sleep, partly due to being a little sick, partly I have no idea why. So watching these last few episodes has been nicely cathartic. I did a lot of laughing and crying in these last two in particular.

I also wanted to note, for my own later ease of reference (y’all may want to skip or skim the next several paragraphs), the stop-and-go nature of my rewatching:

Seven months after I finished watching the series for the first time, I picked it up again. Got through season 1 in about three months, but then set it aside.

Started rewatching season 2 about five months later, in March of 2011, but still intermittently; took me over six months to get through that season. By this point I was taking pretty detailed notes on each episode, including transcribing dialogue I particularly liked, and bookmarking the Luke/Lorelai scenes so I could go rewatch them whenever I wanted. (Happy sigh.)

Season 3 took me another 6+ months, but seasons 4 and 5 took me only two or three months apiece—I apparently went from watching about one episode a week to two or three a week. Somewhere in there I think was when I discovered that there’s a fan site that contains a transcript of every episode (albeit a not very well edited one), which made it a whole lot easier for me to take notes without having to painstakingly transcribe scenes.

I started rewatching season 6 in October of 2012, having gone through the previous four seasons of the show in a year and a half, but then I stopped entering submissions into the SH database, so there was no longer a convenient excuse to watch it regularly. I came back for a couple more episodes in mid-January—and then, halfway through season 6, I set it aside for seven months.

I was watching movies, and wasn’t entering submissions, and I guess I felt I’d gotten past the show’s peak, and somehow just didn’t continue. But in August, the night before what would’ve been my mother’s birthday, I needed something fun and comfortable, so I came back to it.

And since then, I’ve watched an episode or two almost every night.

And now I’m done. Not sure what I’ll watch next. More movies, most likely, and continuing to rewatch Alias with Kam, and continuing a couple of shows I started watching intermittently, and maybe picking up a new show or two that people have been recommending.

Or, y’know, maybe I’ll get back to reading and/or writing. We’ll see.