Those Are Strings, Pinocchio (20 May 2003) Rory graduates from Chilton, and the girls look forward to traveling in Europe, Yale, and opening the new inn.

22-years-old

But perhaps more concerning is the fact that Rory was seemingly only 15 years old and she was driving a car by herself — she doesn’t turn 16 until a few episodes later, “Rory’s Birthday Parties.”

Jess was his own worst enemy, and he eventually paid the price for it when, after returning in Season 4 and confessing his love for Rory, he later asked her to run away with him and she rejected him before falling into bed with a then-married Dean.

Rory tells Lorelai that things will be awkward, since Tristan is in the group and Dean will be nearby. She decides that she has to tell Dean that she and Tristan kissed (see “The Breakup, Part 2”).

While it would have been easy to not bring Tristan back at all, he does return in the ‘Spring’ episode of A Year in the Life and it stirred up as much long-lost nostalgia for us as it did for Paris and Rory.

During season 2, episode 9, “Run Away Little Boy,” a school project forced Tristan and Rory to play the title roles in a scene from Romeo and Juliet. After Tristan failed to show up for their performance, Rory learned he was leaving Chilton: his punishment for getting caught breaking into a classmate’s parent’s safe.

Doyle McMaster

One of the most memorable scenes in “Gilmore Girls” is when Paris sleeps with Jamie and then gets her rejection letter from Harvard. “I had sex, but I’m not going to Harvard!” she famously shouts to hundreds of people at a college panel.

She joins the Yale Daily News and ends up breaking up with her boyfriend Jamie for an older man, Asher Fleming, who is a professor.

Asher dies of a heart attack two weeks before Rory and Paris’s sophomore year of Yale begins. He was teaching a Shakespeare class in Oxford when he had the heart attack.