Gossip Girl 2.10: “The Magnificent Archibalds”

The Wife:

After her disastrous fight with Agnes, Little J has been making nice with Eric and squatting in the Bass der Woodsen estate while Lily and Bart are away. Unable to get a hold of his daughter for a week, Daddy Rufus is going out of his mind and is ready to call the cops until Lily calls him to tell him that J is just fine at the Bass der Woodsen’s. Rufus wants to immediately get his daughter back, but Lily cautions that she’d like to talk to J first and find out what’s going on in her head. She assures Rufus that she’ll set up a meeting between the two parties when Jenny is ready. Lily tries to convince Jenny that she should be back under her father’s roof until she’s 18 and is ready to live on her own. Jenny accepts Lily’s advice, but then Lily finds Jenny’s emancipation papers and wonders if her advice got through at all. Not knowing what to do, Lily calls Rufus to tell him about the papers and invites him to Bass der Woodsen Thanksgiving to talk to his daughter. While it’s clear that Jenny doesn’t want to see her father very much, Rufus assures her that he isn’t angry with her and that he’s willing to sign the emancipation papers and let her go if that’s what it will take to get her back in his life. No matter what documents he signs, he says, it will never make him stop loving her. Honestly, Rufus’ speech made me tear up a little bit. Jenny’s actions don’t deserve so magnanimous a gesture, but I would expect nothing less from a pure-hearted Humphrey man. Thanks for making me cry a little bit, Daddy Rufus.

This promo photo was just too nice not to share.

Nate Archibald, after being absent last week, was given a Thanksgiving story worthy of having his name in the episode title. His father, the fallen Howard Archibald, has somehow sneaked back in to the country with the aid of his wife in order to have some semblance of a normal Tgiving with his family. Nate is wary of his father’s presence, especially when The Captain invites young Nate and his mother to move to Dominica with him. Mrs. Archibald tells her son that she will only go if Nate does, which Nate agrees to. I guess since he’s been a dick to all of his friends and betrayed Vanessa, he may as well just follow in his father’s cowardly footsteps and disappear happily to the Caribbean. However, all is not so happy in the land of the Archibalds. Vanessa runs into Nate at the gallery when he shows up to return a Pixies boxed set to Rufus (cool). Immediately after this encounter, Vanessa is approached by an FBI agent who wants to talk to her about Nate. She calls Chuck and the two former friends of Nate Archibald stage a Natetervention, where they inform him that the Feds know The Captain is back in the States and that they believe he is plotting a crime far greater than embezzlement. The Feds believe that The Captain is planning to kidnap Nate and his mother and hold them for ransom in order to get money from Nate’s grandparents, and then flee back to Dominica, without his family. Chuck and Vanessa urge Nate to convince his father to turn himself in, knowing that if he does, the Feds will unfreeze the Archibald accounts and give Nate and his mother their house back. Nate returns home and grills his dad about the kidnapping and extortion plot, to which he confesses. Nate then delivers an ultimatum to The Captain: walk out the service exit and flee back to Dominica and never see his son again, or turn himself in and hope for Nate’s forgiveness. Despite Mrs. Archibald’s protestations, the Captain decides to turn himself in and the Feds restore Nate to his former way of life. Or, at the very least, to his former home.

Eric also got to have a plot in this episode after being absent for so many. (Eric is hella tight. I wish the writers would pay more attention to him.) When Bart and Lily return a day early, Bart tells Eric that his boyfriend may be seeing someone else. Eric asks Chuck how Bart would know something like that and Chuck offers to show Eric the P.I. records Bart has on every member of his new family. Chuck open’s Bart’s safe for Eric and allows him to access the records. He reads his file, and then offers Lily and Serena’s files to them, claiming not to have read them. Lily is furious that Bart has records on her children. (Hers she can understand, but the kids are just kids.) Bart rationalizes the dossiers as his way of protecting his children, but Lily cannot bear the thought of having her children’s every move followed, so she takes Eric and Serena, along with all three dossiers, and storms out of the Bass der Woodsen apartment on Tgives.

What's this about dossiers?

Serena continues dating Aaron Rose, even though she’s bothered by the lack of exclusivity, which makes her all the more delighted when Aaron cooks her dinner and tells her that he wants to be exclusive. She jokes that had she known it would be such an occasion, she would have brought champagne, to which Aaron responds that he’s glad she didn’t, because he’s been sober for several years. Serena is taken aback by this admission, saying that she too used to party a lot, but that she doesn’t drink now, just the occasional celebratory glass of champagne. Aaron says that he needs to be around people who support his sobriety, so Serena tells him that she can be that girl – the girl who doesn’t even drink a celebratory glass of champagne. Dan runs into Aaron at the grocery store and inadvertently ruins Serena’s lie by telling Aaron that her family would prefer a giftset of wines from around the world. When Aaron shows up at the party, he asks Serena about what Dan said, and Serena tells Aaron that Dan probably lied to Aaron because he isn’t over her yet. Aaron, then, becomes irrationally angry with Dan when the Humpreys show up to rescue Jenny. Both boys call one another liars, and take the situation up with Serena, who gets Dan to realize through sheer unblinking mind powers that it was she who lied to Aaron about her alcoholism. Dan fesses up to the lie and apologizes to Aaron, just before Aaron heads over to the Waldrof’s to spend Tgives with his dad. When Serena gets hold of her dossier, she heads over to the Waldorf’s herself to deliver the dossier to Aaron, telling him to read it, and then decide if he still wants to be with her.

At Chez Waldorf, Blair struggles to meld her family’s traditions for her favorite holiday with Cyrus’. Blair likes a homecooked meal prepared by her father with his signature pie that she always helps him bake, while Cyrus’ family prefers a restaurant Thanksgiving, which is the most unholy of things in Blair’s book. When Cyrus eats a slice of Blair’s holiday pie, she confronts her mother about this man ruining her holiday (Inconceivable!), and Eleanor suggests that its time for Blair to welcome some new traditions and stop thinking the worst of people. After all, it may be a restaurant Tgives, but it’s a restaurant Tgives at Blair’s favorite place, which Cyrus booked just for her: Ramsay Tavern. (As far as I know, it’s not real, but I think its meant to invoke any number of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants.) Blair insists that this is beside the point. Dorota then tells her that Cyrus proposed to Eleanor and that they were planning on telling everyone at Tgives dinner. Upon showing her the ring, Blair grabs Dorota and storms out, choosing to drag her housekeeper around Central Park rather than participate in a new tradition that she feels is a farce. Blair forces Dorota to ignore calls from Eleanor (Dorota’s ring tone for her boss, by the way, is Britney Spears’ “Slave 4 U”), and Dorota suggests that perhaps she and Blair could participate in some of their traditions, like feeding the ducks. Eventually, Eleanor gets Serena to send a text to Blair to get her location, and Eleanor takes off in a cab to find her daughter. As she rescues Blair from the cold streets of New York, she finds Jenny, too, with whom Blair was having a talk about the importance of family and how much Daddy Rufus cares for Little J. Eleanor gives Jenny her shawl and a ride out to Brooklyn, insisting that she should be home with her family. When Blair arrives at Chez Waldorf, she finds her holiday surprise was not her mother’s engagement, but the presence of her father, who shows up to participate in his daughter’s favorite tradition and brings her his special pie. Blair does, however, spoil the reveal of the engagement, but no one seems to mind and the Rose-Waldorf’s enjoy a peaceful Tgiving dinner together as a family.

One big happy, slightly dysfunctional family.

When Dan and Rufus return home, they find Jenny waiting for them, tearing up her emancipation papers with a face free of black eyeliner and tears in her eyes. Soon after, Lily and Eric show up for a second Humphrey Family Tgives, fresh from their second pitiful diner Thanksgiving in which Eric admits that he read Lily’s file and asks her why she didn’t tell him that she was in a sanitarium when she was 19. Vanessa shows up shortly after and makes up with Little J in the spirit of the holiday . . . until she steals a letter from Nate from Jenny’s mail pile. Aaron returns to Serena’s to tell her that he didn’t want to read her file, but instead wants to know all about her straight from her mouth. They proceed to gab the holiday away as Nate and Chuck ride around town drinking Scotch in Chuck’s limo, just as the pilgrim’s intended. In another limo across town, Bart Bass calls his PI to ask him to look into why Lily did spend time in the Ostroff Center back when she was 19. (I suspect it might have something to do with an abortion.)

A much better Tgives episode than last season’s with a lot of plots coming to an end and a lot of new ones starting. I accept this as good start to the next half of the season. Also, I’m all about Serena and Blair’s Tgives outfits. That backless green dress? To die for.

The Husband:

I am so glad that GG decided not to take Little J’s proposed emancipation from her parents and run with it for the entire rest of the season, not only because it just would have sucked up the show’s energy each time it reared its ugly head, but because it actually really worried me that J was so far gone that she would even consider it. Rufus is a great dad no matter how you swing it, and I hate to see him suffer simply because his 15-year-old daughter played naïve dumbass for a few weeks. It would have broken my heart, honestly. This new rekindling of their relationship is far more interesting psychologically, anyway, because truth be told, 15-year-olds don’t know shit.

But we do know about making mashed potatoes!

Yes, that’s right; I felt major empathy and sadness for a couple characters on a CW “chick show.” I’m deeply invested in these folks, warts and all. Deal with it.

I was disappointed that there was no November sweeps death as rumored – yes, I know I don’t do spoilers, but it was hard to avoid Michael Ausiello’s article in the pages of Entertainment Weekly – because there’s no episode next week and the week after that is December, but I’m also appreciative that they’re letting the stories breath organically and not just forcing a death just for the sake of ratings.

Still, I spent much of the second half of the story thinking up who was going to die and how. One really far-fetched one involved Mrs. Archibald killing Vanessa to show Nate what it feels like to lose a lover.

I also – and I mean this absolutely seriously – thought about something very absurd during the final minutes. When it was obvious nobody was going to die, I thought up the ways that they could still, absurdly, kill a character just for shiggles in the final minutes at Chez Humphrey. As Rufus – one of the rumored potential characters that may die – walked around his kitchen, I imagined – once again, with absolute seriousness – the 1980s Domino’s Pizza Noid crashing in through the window on a rope, tying said rope around Rufus’ neck until he died from suffocation, and then running out the front door screaming.

There is something seriously wrong with me.

OH MY GOD! Rufus Humphrey! I'm your biggest fan!

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