The Wife:
It’s the eve of Blair’s 18th Birthday Soiree at Chez Waldorf and she needs everything to be perfect, including her mother’s new boyfriend. Unfortunately for Blair, her mom’s new prince turns out, inconceivably, to be Wallace Shawn, a man of short stature who comes complete with a catch phrase and is altogether rather less than Blair had desired for her mother.
“I was expecting Cary Grant and I got Danny DeVito!”
Blair tries her best to keep her clam about this scenario, hoping to come of age with dignity and class like her idol, Grace Kelly, but when Cyrus starts to question the exorbitant cost for Blair’s party, she has to try incredibly hard to keep her cool, chanting:
“I am Grace Kelly. Grace Kelly is me.”
Eventually, the thought of being with a short little man who once played Vizzini is too much for Blair to bear, and she sets up a lunch date to pump him for weaknesses to exploit, in typical Blair fashion. On her date with Cyrus, she learns that when he was in Vietnam, he cheated on his wife with a Vietnamese girl he truly loved, Kim-Li. He planned to bring Kim-Li back home to America, but had to divorce his wife first. Just as he filed the papers, he learned that the love of his life, Km-Li, was killed in a raid on her village. While Blair at first seems to respond positively to this story, she later tells her mother that Cyrus is, in fact, just like her father (for being a cheater) and is thus not the kind of man Eleanor thinks he is. Eleanor doesn’t quite know what to do with the news, but chooses to confront Cyrus about it at Blair’s birthday party. When he admits to cheating, she throws him out of the party.
Cyndi Lauper! You're from Queens! GET OUT!
And then Cyndi Lauper shows up to play Blair’s party and informs Blair that Cyrus had bought out all of the tickets at her upcoming Joe’s Pub gig (that Blair and her mother had wanted to attend) so she could play Blair’s party instead. Blair, seeing that Cyrus had done something nice for her/played her just as she was playing him, runs out to tell Cyrus that she respects his game and that she would be delighted to continue having wars with him for as long as her mother wanted to have him in her life. I see there being many more Cyrus-Blair wars in the future, considering how displeased Blair is to hear the news that her mother has asked Cyrus to move in to Chez Waldorf with them.
Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, the Humphrey kids are both being severe disappointments to Daddy Rufus. I’ll start with Dan. Noah Shapiro loved the Charlie Trout story so much that he agrees to write Dan a letter of recommendation for Yale. When Dan goes to meet with him, Shapiro introduces him to an editor at New York Magazine who liked the Charlie Trout piece so much that he wants to offer Dan the chance to write an expose on Bart Bass. Knowing Chuck Bass, evidently, is enough to get you an offer to write a journalistic expose even though you have no journalistic experience whatsoever. I used to work in publishing, and I find it extremely odd that a high-powered magazine editor would take a chance on giving a cub fiction writer what could be the expose of the century. (At least, that’s how he’s painting it.) First of all, just because someone writes good fiction, doesn’t mean they’ll be a good reporter. It’s a different sensibility and a different manner of storytelling. There are indeed people who can write both ways, but I doubt Dan Humphrey, at 17, has the skills to make that transition. I don’t know why the editor wouldn’t simply, I don’t know, pay his best investigative reporter on staff to do the piece. It would probably be a lot better. But anyway, we need Dan to do it so that we can have conflict, so he agrees, despite his father’s protestations.
Dan goes to meet with Bart Bass to see if he can shadow the man a few days a week, pretending to be interested in construction. This makes Chuck Bass extremely unhappy, as Bart begins to show more interest in young Humphrey than he ever has in his own son. Chuck had previously gifted Bart with season tickets and a private box to enjoy his favorite hockey team, and is infuriated to find out that Bart has chosen to take Dan to the game instead of his own son, who bought the tickets specifically to spend time with his father and get to know him better through reliving his childhood passion of hockey. Chuck then starts a little investigation of his own to parallel Dan’s and find out just what young Humphrey’s angle is. Dan discovers that Bart’s real estate empire is based on an insurance scam he ran back in ‘87 when he committed arson on one of his own buildings in order to collect the fire insurance. Just as Dan gets this juicy tidbit, Chuck uncovers from a contact at New York Magazine that Dan is indeed trying to get close to his father to write an expose. When Dan asks Bart about the fire, he admits that someone died inside the building and Chuck races in to stop his father from saying to much to a reporter. Bart Bass offers Dan hush money to kill the story, but Dan refuses to accept the bribe. As he storms out of the Bass Der Woodsen apartment, Chuck begs him not to write the story, knowing full well that it will not only destroy Bass Industries, but also Chuck, Lily, Eric and Dan’s former paramour Serena, echoing the warning Daddy Rufus had set out earlier.
Dan decides not to write the story, but sees a chance to help Chuck Bass reconnect with his father, and so sends Bart Bass a copy of the Charlie Trout story as an apology. (I notice that all of Dan’s stories simply have dates as titles. That’s gonna get old real fast.) The story moves Bart to recognize the distance between himself and his son and he apologizes to Chuck for this transgression. He also tells his son that he never blamed him for his mother’s death, and offers to take him up on those Rangers season tickets after all. I’m so pleased that Dan has chosen to use his art for good, and I’m sure Daddy Rufus is proud of him too. Chuck and Bart needed a catalyst to mend their damaged relationship, and Dan Humphrey is that catalyst. (By the way, that framed photo of Chuck’s mom looks just like Ed Westwick. I wonder if it is actually the actor’s mother.)
As for Little J, she apparently dragged her magical suitcase all the way to (I assume) the Lower East Side to live with Agnes. Agnes’ mother is involved enough with her wild child daughter’s life to phone up Rufus and inform him that she’s gone through the exact same things with Agnes but that the girls will take care of each other. The two girls head around town to meet with various business managers in order to get “their line” off the ground. Unfortunately, Jenny and Agnes don’t seem to meet eye to eye on anything at these meetings, with Jenny representing someone who has really through about the name and image of her brand and has a clear picture of what she wants to make and who she wants to sell it to, and Agnes attempting to jump in on her glory and claim Jenny’s ideas as her own. Later, Jenny starts to realize that Agnes’ unorganized lifestyle (filled with weekday hangovers) is costing her time and potential money, so she takes responsibility into her own hands and meets with a business manager behind Agnes’ back, who says he’d love to work with her alone and admits that Agnes was the problem with Jenny getting representation all along.
When Agnes gets Jenny’s contract call by mistake, all hell breaks loose. When Jenny returns to the apartment, Agnes is ready to declare war, hurrying across the street with Jenny’s dresses in hand, which she promptly shoves into a trashcan and lights on fire, despite Jenny’s protestations. Frankly, Jenny, that’s a point where you have to make a call. If a psycho bitch has your entire life’s work in her hands and is dousing it with lighter fluid and holding up a lit matchbook, you have to make a choice: do you grab the matchbook out of her hand and suffer a burn on your palm as you put out the flame, or do you cry about it and let your entire collection go up in flames? I would have chosen the burn, but Jenny instead chose the couture bonfire. Bad call, Little J. Frankly, instead of crying about it and screaming at Agnes, the best move would have probably been to punch Agnes right in the moneymaker. Hurt her as much as she hurt you, J.
So despite watching her entire collection go up in smoke, J returns home to Daddy Rufus with the parental consent forms she needs to start her business. When Rufus refuses to sign it, Jenny runs away again and meets with her business manager, who tells her that the only other way to get in business with him if her parents won’t give consent is to take them to court and sue to become emancipated. Please don’t do it, Little J! Then you’ll really be Little Jenny Orphan and you can’t be because that name belongs to someone else and I invented it! I hope Daddy Rufus will take his son’s advice and get J back by signing the papers, because it would really suck to lose our miniature fashionista.
Never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line!
Nate and Vanessa were not in this episode at all, so our final plot belongs to Serena, and I left it for last because it is my least favorite. She’s still seeing Aaron Rose the Artist who sends her all over the city via GPS to see his favorite places, unfortunately, she takes this to mean that they are exclusive, when he believes in strictly the opposite. Per Blair’s quips:
“Sure, he starts out in his blue period and it’s all great, but it’s only a matter of time until he’s all into Cubism and it’s some other girl’s eye coming out of her forehead.”
Serena gets jealous of Aaron’s other girlfriends and breaks up with him, even though he’s Cyrus’ son, which would have been a cool story thread to follow.
“You believe in long hair, peasant skirts and sandals. But you in an open relationship? I don’t think so.” – Blair
If it weren’t for Blair’s quips about this plot, I would have been totally bored because Serena without the other characters to interact with is the worst kind of ennui for me.
The Husband:
This was a great episode. Like, season 1 pre-WGA strike good. It’s fascinating, especially, that in this particular episode Little J was far more heartless than Blair. Just like last season when she usurped Blair’s position as the Queen Bee of Constance-St. Jude’s, she’s a fascinating character when she decides to ignore her soul, only to regain it right before she loses it altogether, forever. (Like Blair’s friends, who are daywalking vampires as far as I’m concerned, especially mini-Blair Hazel.) But going all Jena Malone and emancipating herself from her parents, that’s not going to get her anywhere as a designer, as by the time the case gets to court and she wins (which she won’t), her guerrilla fashion show will have become irrelevant and her clothing will no longer be cutting edge. Seriously, haven’t you seen that Drew Barrymore movie Irreconcilable Differences?
And seeing Blair go through a complete 180 within mere minutes is always very fun, as this manic-depressive rich girl – one afraid of being mistaken as “upper-middle class” – finally meets her match in stubby little Wallace Shawn. For once, it’s going to be a happy back-and-forth war, something this show has yet to do. Sure, earlier wars on the show were happy and fun for us as viewers, but, of course, the characters involved in said wars ended up anywhere but in happy places. (I like to imagine that Georgina is floating somewhere in space, trapped in the Phantom Zone.)
It’s strange, though, that Gossip Girl and Privileged, in the last week, have both dealt with secrets uncovered via budding writers trying their hand at journalism/biography, secrets of the rich and famous doing very naughty things, and then having the secret-keeping rich person offer massive amounts of money to the writer. Yeah, on Privileged it was that Laurel Limoges got pregnant with her daughter while her husband was still in Vietnam, which isn’t nearly as bad as committing arson, but both are career-destroying secrets, secrets now known by ambitious but confuzzled young persons. Is this going to be a running thing on The CW? At least on Smallville whenever Chloe would discover some terrible secret about Lex or Lionel, they would threaten to kill her, and then everything would just kind of go away by episode’s end.
Fuck, is this going to happen on Everybody Hates Chris, too? Is he going to find out something about his boss at the grocery store? I mean, he and his siblings have plenty on Mr. Omar, but I don’t think that widow-stalking Lothario gives a fuck what they have.
