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I’ll begin by assuring you that no spoilers will be given away – but this was an emotional re-release. I don’t get attached to TV shows easily but Lord, Gilmore Girls is my holiday, tea break and exam season go-to. Lorelai, Rory and Stars Hallow got me through GCSE procrastination, which may suggest why Rory got to Yale and not me. This Gilmore Girls re-run makes this Thanksgiving week a big week.

For those not in the know, Gilmore Girls usually opens with a bucolic New England scene, the camera panning across Stars Hollow’s ‘fall leaves’ and cheery cast. Since returning from Canada, watching the opening credits has been an emotive reminder of a brilliant exchange year where North America literally becomes a beautiful hue of red, yellow and purple. However episode one of this new season opens onto black, with distant voices of the cast speaking key lines from the show (which first premiered in 2000 and then closed-up in 2007.) Next we move to a Wintery Stars Hollow scene – a fictional stereotype of a rural American village with cute trinkets decorating every corner and an over-enthusiastic community spirit (a community that would definitely still vote Democrat…).

Lorelai sits on the town promenade sipping coffee, waiting for her beloved only daughter, Rory, to arrive back from her nomadic trips around the world. The show starts like it ended; the same. The characters are all still there but have moved, with us, to today’s technology age. Gone are the Gilmore’s pagers, flip phones and huge brick computers, replaced with ‘the iPhone’ and WiFi. Luke’s ‘No Cell Phone’ sign in the Diner has also been joined with one against man buns.

Episode two opens with Spring and a hope for ‘rebirth’. This begins with a therapy scene between Emily and Lorelai where the therapist is used as a bat between the two women. Even when time ends, Emily rebukes Lorelai for cheering that it’s over, believing it’s another maneuver for a point on the “therapy scoreboard.”

I’m still left very lost by these two episodes. Some characters have left – more than the trailer lets on. However with the ones that are still included, where they are or where they might be going is completely left in suspense (or undirected?). Rory particularly drives this struggle between direction and loss; something which will hit home with many first and fourth year students (or anyone feeling at an unsettled crossroad.) A dislocation from one’s place in life, and dreams, became a running theme for the Gilmore girls themselves and their contemporaries in these Winter and Spring episodes. From this I can only predict that the final chapters will run on the theme of Summer and Autumn, and hopefully the symbolic motifs attached to these will conclude the season: happiness and thanksgiving.

If just arriving on the Gilmore train, I would recommend watching the previous seasons. This is an emotional opening to a viral TV series which even graced TIME’s Top 100 TV shows in 2007. However if you are a Gilmore Girl (or fangirl) like myself, Winter and Spring live up to the hype. Get your tissues in hand, and prepare to finally start resolving some very unresolved Gilmore issues.