Is Netflix hinting at a future Gilmore Girls plotline?

However, Netflix (who resurrected the series for four specials called Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life this year) have now tweeted an ambiguous joke that calls into question some of the assumptions we had made about the series’ ending – as well as whether it’s really an ending at all.

In case you’re not au fait with all the intricacies of a show that mostly aired a decade ago, this mocked-up image is a callback to a storyline where diner owner/ Lorelai love interest Luke Danes (Scott Patterson) discovers he has a secret daughter, who tested his DNA along with two other “candidates” for a school science project to uncover which one was her real father.

However, in this image the pictures obviously relate to Rory’s child, and seem to imply that Logan isn’t definitely the father, as most assumed – both Rory’s boring boyfriend Paul (Jack Carpenter) and an unnamed Star Wars fan in a Wookie costume who Rory slept with are also listed as potential paters.

Originally, fans had discounted possibilities other than Logan for the littlest Gilmore’s dad, noting that Paul hadn’t seen Rory in months and the Wookie incident also happened too early for when Rory revealed the pregnancy (she slept with him in the Spring episode, but didn’t tell her mother about it until Autumn, by which point she would have been more obviously pregnant).

Logan was the only person we saw Rory intimate with near the end, so it had to be him, we thought, especially considering the Christopher parallels – but perhaps we were approaching things too logically for a show that recently featured an impoverished journalist cheerily paying for transatlantic flights whenever she fancied.

Anyway, the real question here is what is meant by that Netflix tweet. Is it a harmless in-jokey gag for fans of the series, or something more? After all, if the series was supposed to have ended permanently on the long-heralded “Final Four Words,” would they have muddied the waters like this, calling into question their seemingly-neat conclusion?

Could it be that this is a little corrective to fans who discounted the pregnancy possibilities of Paul, or the child-bearing chances of Chewie? A nod that we misread the finale, and didn’t consider all the possibilities?

And if THAT’s true, does it mean that we really will be seeing more Gilmore Girls in future, perhaps dealing with this very storyline as Rory tries to discover who fathered her child out of the three men? After all, rumours have suggested that cast and crew are keen to continue the story, and suggesting an unsolved mystery in your series would be an odd move unless you were angling for more episodes.

Then again, it could just be that some poor social media writer mocked up what they thought was an innocuous and funny picture, accidentally sparking a flurry of online analysis that they never intended. If so, you know – sorry about that.

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life is streaming on Netflix now