Gossip Girl 3.2 and 3.3: “The Freshmen” and “The Lost Boy”

The Wife:

So far, I can easily divide this season of Gossip Girl into things I care about and things I do not care about. I am interested in all things going on at NYU, including Blair’s adjustment to not being Queen, Georgina’s meddling, Dan’s sudden popularity and the Vanessa/Scott thing that, inevitably, ties into Rufus. I do not care about Nate’s extremely isolating romance with Bree Buckley, specifically because it is so isolating. I like Joanna Garcia and I like Bree and the idea behind this plot, but Nate needs to reconnect to the rest of the group of this plot will remain just as lost as its been so far this season.

I especially do not give a shit about Serena Van Der Woodsen and her daddy issues. Her life is a series of bad decisions which could easily be fixed by simply acting like a person. Rather than going to Brown like she told Rufus and Lily she should, she hides out with her friends in Manhattan because, suddenly, she’s decided she’s not going to college. Why? Because she doesn’t know who she is or what she’s supposed to do with her life and she can’t see how leaving everything she knows is going to help her answer either of those questions. And that, my friends, is how you know Serena is too fucking dumb to go to Brown in the first place. I mean, what? I’m pretty sure that NO college freshmen has any idea who they are or what they’re life should be, and that’s precisely why we go to college for four years, away from everything we know, so we can FIGURE THAT SHIT OUT.

So because Chuck talked to Rufus about her skipping out on Brown, she decides to ruin all of his business deals? And pit Chuck against Carter? Serena, you are infantile and an idiot. You do not come between someone and their money. You can mess with their social life all you want, but you don’t ruin someone’s business. Even fucking Tyra Banks knows that shit, yo. Just be a person, Serena. Be a fucking person.

Why are we so bad at being people?

While Serena is having a difficult time operating like a human being, Blair is having a hard time fitting in at NYU, where no one gives a shit if you’re a socialite and would really rather have pizza and beer and watch pretentious films that make you feel superior than, say, getting dressed to the nines and eating sushi and sake at a soiree. Dan takes pity on her and helps integrate her into Georgina’s way-more-appropriate rooftop kegger, only to find out that he’s been Blair’s inside man for embarrassment when she calls all of Georgina’s Jesus Camp friends to the party and tries to tell everyone it’s a conversion party. I mean, that’s pretty genius, and I’m surprised that Dan was able to turn everyone so quickly from Blair’s side simply by saying, “So, who wants to stay here and drink cheap beer with me?”

I feel badly for Blair. It’s hard to fit in when you’re so different from everyone else, but it is about time she got off her Queen Bee high horse. That shit may fly in high school, but college just doesn’t care. It’s good to see her humbled, cozying up to Chuck Bass, but that, of course, doesn’t last long when she receives an invitation to Le Table Elitaire, a totally made up secret society of college socialites, asking her to bring them a photo up for auction at Sotheby’s to secure her entrance into the group. Unfortunately, Chuck needs the same photograph to smooth over a business deal. What follows is an adorable bidding war between Chuck and Blair, which is actually a battle of who loves more than whom in their relationship. Serena, acting like a person, for once, realizes that the invite was written by Georgina, just as Chuck realizes that Georgina was turning his gears as well, via an office assistant she happens to know. Humbled once again, Blair gives the photograph over to Chuck for his business deal, which ultimately doesn’t go through when he decides, instead, to sell his shares in Bass Industries and buy a hotel on his own.

Meanwhile, Vanessa has finally started to get suspicious about Scott’s lies and finds out, after we all realize that she’d make a terrible detective, that he isn’t even enrolled in NYU. She does manage to get an easy confession out of him, where he tells her that he is Rufus and Lily’s son and he’s been trying to get close to the family to meet them. Vanessa convinces him to tell everyone at the auction, but when Scott’s adoptive mother shows up, he simply can’t tell Rufus the truth, lest he break his mother’s heart. Instead, he tells them that he is Dead Andrew’s brother, maintaining the lie that Andrew was Rufus and Lily’s son, and he wanted to meet his brother’s parents. It’s all very sweet, and was probably one of the most loving things anyone in the GG universe has ever done, but Vanessa is not happy with Scott because now she is burdened with his terrible secret. And, suddenly, I don’t think I care about Vanessa anymore.

Stray thoughts:

• “The only queens at NYU are the ones with tickets to Liza at Carnegie.” — Chuck
• I love Blair’s saffron wrap top.
• Did it bother anyone else that Scott’s lies could have easily been confirmed by, oh, I dunno, looking on NYU’s website and checking course times? As well as confirming professor recommendations through ratemyprofessors.com? In a world where everyone gets gossip via text blasts, why can’t these characters use the internet?
• OH.MY.GOD. It just dawned on me that no one has received any conniving text blasts from Gossip Girl. Where did the central conceit of this show go?
• Oh, and there’s some old wounds between the Bayson family and the Buckleys . . . maybe this will solve Nate’s storyline isolation problem as Bree plans her revenge on Carter?

 

Gossip Girl 3.1: “Reversals of Fortune”

The Wife:

With 90210, Gossip Girl and The Vampire Diaries on the air (the latter of which I plan to write about by pairing the first two episodes), the CW seems to have finally settled into its groove of airing addictive, soapy teen-centric television that’s imminently watchable. This week’s season premiere of Gossip Girl wasn’t as OMFG as certain episodes in season one or two, but it was a well structured, well told 42 minutes of television.

And it has the bonus of not sucking like last year’s Hamptons-set season openers. The showrunners figured out that GG simply doesn’t work without NYC, so I’m very thankful that the majority of this episode occurred within the limits of the city that never sleeps. I mean, after all, the Humphreys aren’t even living over the bridge in Brooklyn anymore. They’ve spent the whole summer shacked up at the Bass der Woodsen home, tending to matters while Lily is away caring for her ailing mother, CeCe. (In other words, Kelly Rutherford is on maternity leave, so they’re killing CeCe for no other reason than that. I just hope she miraculously survives so that Jenny can have that stupid Cotillion Cece bought her a dress for.)

Serena, on the other hand, has allegedly been spending the summer Eat, Pray, Love-ing it at an Ashram, but we know from Eric and Jenny’s fussing over gossip magazines that Serena is up to something else entirely — she’s actually spent the summer trying to find her father. Of course, rather than normal methods of tracking someone down using various PIs (she only hired one) and other professional people finders like, say, bounty hunters, Serena is trying to force her father to notice her by partying it up across the European continent and having her photo snapped doing as many ridiculous socialite things as possible. Searching for daddy is a good quest, but I have to question Serena’s methodology here. She’s been tabloid fodder for years and that hasn’t drawn the attention of Mr. Van der Woodsen. Why would it change now? All I can hope is that this plotline somehow gets her kicked out of Brown so she can rejoin the others in the city. As I know from a classmate who “left” that school, the door to Brown doesn’t swing both ways, if you catch my drift.

We're all sorry about Privileged, JoAnna. Enjoy your consolation guest spot on Gossip Girl!

Meanwhile, Nate Archibald continued his attempts to piss off his family by turning down his political internship and touring Europe for the summer. He met up with Vanessa for those Prague peroghi, but otherwise spent the entirety of his trip fucking around with JoAnna Garcia’s Bree Buckley. It takes these two wealthy morons the entire summer to figure out that they’ve actually been sleeping with the enemy as they are the scions of two rival political families. (Shockingly, the Archibalds are Democrats. Does that seem right to anyone?) How do you spend an entire summer with someone and not learn their last name? Surely, he could have looked on the plane ticket she was using as a bookmark. Baffling.

Chuck and Blair have settled into a happy routine of keeping their romance alive by playing games with each other. They both pick a target for Chuck to seduce, and then Blair arrives just in time to humiliate the target of Chuck’s affection. These two are just a step away from attending swingers clubs together or practicing some BDSM. Actually, I’d love to see them engage in the latter. I just imagined Chuck Bass in a leather mask and ball gag, and it was really funny.

If anything is going to make "fetch" happen, it's this.

And then there’s Vanessa, who’s been paling around with Secret Brother Scott, the missing Hump der Woodsen, complaining about missing her nouveau riche friend Dan, chilling at a totally different coffee shop, wearing a lot of boho Anna Sui (hello, Target tie-in!) and, evidently, not combing her hair much. (Seriously, V, how dare you show up at a polo match with your tresses only a twist or two away from being dreads. Not cute.) She’s mad at Dan for his change in circumstance, which Dan insists is stupid, and it is, only Vanessa doesn’t see it that way because she’s embodying someone from a Jane Austen novel. This, however, is all a good opportunity for Secret Brother Scott to get closer to the Hump der Woodsens, attaching himself to Vanessa as her plus one for the aforementioned polo match and going so far as to shake his father’s hand.

The final element to this story is Carter Bayson, whom Serena apparently slept with during her European vacation, but for some reason doesn’t want to admit. So she tells her friends that Carter has been stalking her, which gets Blair to slap him with a restraining order at the polo match, only for Serena to lead Carter on a chase through the woods on a stolen stallion so they can fuck like dryads. Serena makes bad decisions. She’s very bad at being a human being. Just be a person, Serena! Tell people things! It will make your life a lot easier!

Stray thoughts:

• Okay, GG wardrobe department, you can’t feature three different rompers in one episode. JoAnna Garcia’s yellow one was passable. I’ll even give you a pass for Jenny’s polkadot one. But Serena’s brown, skin-tight romper? No. That thing is hideous. I get that this is a trend, the romper/onesie, but it needs to happen sparingly. And tastefully.
• I will be happy if I never see another maxi dress ever again, as well. NOT EVERYONE CAN WEAR A MAXI DRESS IN THE SAME SCENE!
• So, thank you thank you thank you for Blair’s incredible 30s-inspired polo outfit. That mint green dress with the square back and flutter sleeves is one of the most inspired pieces of clothing I’ve seen on television since Pushing Daisies went six feet under. The pink straw cloche was also a great touch.
• “Now take your American Girl hair and your poreless skin and get out!” — Blair
• “Well, that’s not fair. Everyone goes topless on Valentino’s yacht.” — Jenny
• “I’m not Chuck Bass without you.” — easily the sweetest thing Chuck has ever said. I melt.
• Favorite scene? Chuck and Blair doing a little restaurant-based foreplay roleplaying. So cute.

 

Gossip Girl 2.25: “The Goodbye Gossip Girl”

The Wife:

This finale had its moments, but over all, I think it was rather silly and disappointing. Let me summarize the episode’s main crisis: Gossip Girl sends out a mean text during the Constance-St. Jude’s graduation ceremony calling Dan an insider, Serena irrelevant, Blair a weakling and Chuck a coward. For some reason, this hurts everyone’s feelings and Serena decides its time to declare war on Gossip Girl and find out who he/she really is. I enjoyed the mini Scooby gang scene in which the four plus Jenny try to surmise who GG might be while at their post-grad brunch at Chez Bass Der Woodsen, but their attempt at detective work in this moment was the only highlight of this plot. Serena gets a flash of brilliance and sends a tip to GG, as GG must be in the room with them. Jonathan’s phone lights up, but it turns out he’s only been hacking into GG’s server for months, overseeing the kinds of gossip she chooses to post and what she chooses to hang on to. (Like any good reporter, GG saves her juiciest information for the moment in which it will have the most impact.)

Love Blair's dress. Hate Serena's.

GG, knowing what Serena has been up to, sends out a blast filled with very juicy information about how Blair slept with Apple-cheeked Uncle Jack on New Year’s (a revelation that was totally anticlimactic; I had hoped they had done something far more scandalous than that), Vanessa slept with Chuck and a whole bunch of other crap that basically neatly sewed up all of the secrets the main cast had been keeping from each other. This makes everyone pretty angry, and disappoints little J, who had hoped to earn her place as Queen next year (and thus destroy the monarchy from the inside) by spilling that bit of gossip about Blair and Jack Bass. I realize the nature of the show is peppered with these gossip blasts from an anonymous, omniscient narrator-god type of figure, but to have so many secrets be released at once in a melee of shallowness seemed less like something Gossip Girl would do and more like something the writers needed to do to move the story into closure, as well as set up new dynamics for next season. It was a little deus ex machina (or deus ex text message?) for me, and that wasn’t the only instance of something tied up a little too neatly.

Post-party badness, Serena tries to trap Gossip Girl into meeting her, but is surprised to see everyone she knows show up instead of the mystery blogger. Once the entire assemblage arrives, they all receive a text from Gossip Girl basically saying that each and every one of them is Gossip Girl, because she’s nothing without the tipsters who send her posts. And to announce that she plans to follow them to college, but there they will all get to start with a clean slate, since she’s already blasted out all of their worst secrets. I’m not going to complain about not meeting Gossip Girl in the flesh, mostly because I don’t want to, as it would kind of ruin a major creative point of the show. But really, Gossip Girl? Did you honestly think that pointing out to these people that they are all Gossip Girl was somehow going to change them and make them earn that dear ol’ clean slate? Because it’s not. She’s not saving them at all from the labels she put on them at graduation. Dan is an insider. Serena is irrelevant. But Blair and Chuck, though . . . she might have changed them a little bit.

The Blair and Chuck bit of this episode really worked for me, actually – as did the resolution between Rufus and Lily. Serena tells Blair that Chuck had confessed his love for her, so Blair, on the advice of her mother, suggests that she take charge of her feelings and get Chuck to admit directly to her how he feels. And so she heads to Nate’s post-grad party, where the secret-spilling GG blast will take place, dressed to kill and slowly removes articles of clothing, asking Chuck if he likes them until she’s stripped down to her amazingly sexy shapewear and asking him the ultimate question, “And what do you think of me?” But even though Blair is bringing shapewear back (and really, it needs to be brought back; a good foundation garment does wonders), Chuck can’t admit he loves her and breaks her little heart when he finds out she slept with Apple-cheeked Uncle Jack. After a good cry, Blair resolves to give up on Chuck and stop chasing a guy who will never love her back, even though she remains slightly tortured by constant updates on his European whereabouts from Gossip Girl. That is, until she runs into him outside her apartment building one day, his arms full of gifts because he toured Europe to buy Blair her favorite things as an admission of love and an apology. Here, by the way, are my exact notes during this scene: “Awwwww! No, B! Accept him! Pleaaaaaaaaaaaaase???? Yay! He said it! Yay!” I think from that you can safely infer that Blair was about to turn him down, but then he finally admitted he loved her, with those chocolates from France and her favorite stockings from Germany. And I was made happy. Chuck + Blair 4evah.

Rufus and Lily, meanwhile, after some awkwardness about sitting together at graduation, suddenly realize they’re old because they have 18-year-old children about to go off to college. So Lily drops by the Brooklyn loft with some weed she found in Chuck’s room (at least I think it was weed . . .) and a six-pack. She and Rufus hang out and reminisce about the good ol’ days and, eventually, he realizes he still loves her, despite that whole thing with the investment scheme and mutual funds and whatever, and makes her a ring out of one of his old Lincoln Hawk flyers and proposes. It is, perhaps, a little more low-key, even, than a vintage ring, but perfect.

As for Jenny, without her winning piece of gossip stolen from the GG server, she assumes her chance to be Queen and end the monarchy from the inside is ruined, meaning that Penelope’s chosen replacement, a new girl who looks like a tiny Rashida Jones, will terrorize the school. But after being cast-off by Chuck, Blair tells Jenny that she wants her to be Queen and, just as Baby Rashida Jones is about to be crowned with a sparkly rock and roll headband, Blair shows up to coronate Jenny. Because she can. Why Jenny had to look like a hot tranny mess throughout this entire episode, I’ll never know. But she’s Queen now, and she officially rules no more headbands (except her sparkly one) – a rule I heartily disagree with.

This hot tranny mess is your queen now.

Nate apologizes to Vanessa, and she announces that she’ll be at NYU next year, too, making Serena the only person who won’t be in the city come this fall. (It seems that, without his Yale money, Dan will also be going to NYU, although that fact was never mentioned until this episode.) By the episode’s end, Nate announces that he’s quitting his internship at the Mayor’s office because the deputy mayor hit on him (perhaps because he told Gramps Vanderbildt about his affair with the Countess?). He invites himself along on Vanessa’s backpacking trip, as a friend, and a random dude says he’s going with her instead. But seeing right through that guise, Nate is persistent and wears Vanessa down, so they’ll spend the summer nomming peroghi together after all. But the interesting thing in this scene wasn’t any of that, it was the random dude: Secret Hump Der Woodsen Love Child Not-Dead Andrew (a.k.a. Scott), who has transferred to NYU and is lying to his parents about being in Portland, all so he can find out more about his birth parents, or so I glean from the creepy news clippings he carries around with him. I had waited for some kind of resolution with the Hump Der Woodsen Love Child, and I’m glad to have some. That’ll be a good storyline to play out for next year, as we’re unsure if Scott’s motives are purely to get to know his parents, or to wheedle some money out of them/leech off his half-brother Dan’s New Yorker fame.

I’m also glad that Georgina will be back next year, but really displeased with her integration into this episode. While the coda about her enrolling in NYU and asking specifically to be Blair’s roommate was fantastic (except that I doubt Blair will deign to live in a dormitory by any stretch of the imagination), the most deus ex machina part of this episode was Georgina’s call to Dan to simply say that his Yale money is back in the bank. Ex-Jesus Freak ex machina, apparently. I’m sure they’d like to reveal next season how Georgina got everyone’s money back, but at this point, it just seemed a little too neat. Gossip Girl often burns through storylines very quickly, creating drama and resolution that exists within no more than a three-episode arc, but they usually tie things up better than the entire “Who is Gossip Girl?” plot of this episode and Georgina’s sudden ending of Dan’s money crisis. It made the episode seem, to me at least, a little haphazard. I’ve definitely seen better work on this show, and too many good finales this season to count this one among them.

Other notes:

• Serena is a fucking tool. How does that bitch think she can get away with not wearing her cap during graduation and, instead, twisting her tassel up in her fucking hair? If the show just stranded Serena at Brown next year, I’d be perfectly happy with that because she’s such a vapid dickbag.
• Nate’s party had some good music. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs rock.
• Can Nate and Vanessa end up in Hostel III and die during their backpacking trip in Europe?
• Also, Serena’s been using Carter Bayson to hunt for her dad? Because he’s in Tahiti? Why?
• I am kind of in love with Blair’s Diane Von Furstenberg Sofia Loren dress that she wore under her graduation gown. French Connection had something with a pattern similar to the pattern on the bust two seasons ago and I always thought about buying it, but never did. Unfortunately, I’m a grad student now and can’t spend money on fabulous things anymore.

The Husband:

I definitely liked the finale far more than my wife, and while it couldn’t reach the high standard set by the s1 finale, what with the wedding and lost love and Chuck’s ultimate dismissal of Blair, I think it worked quite well. Everything it shot through too quickly was stuff I really didn’t give a shit about. Instead, it did a great job saying that, despite the fact that high school is done, it’s never really done, and that even after graduating, your problems are still going to follow you. And since everybody except for Serena is going to be in NYC (and she won’t be too far away in Rhode Island anywhoozle), those problems won’t have to travel too far. And this way, their stories can still connect with what Little J and Eric at up to at Constance-St. Jude’s, as that drama isn’t going anywhere. It’s actually a neat little restart button, and I’m okay with that.

And while I was starting to get super-sick of Blair and Chuck’s will-they-or-won’t-they, I found that not only was Blair’s strip-seduction to be the sexiest thing on this show so far, but their final embrace was remarkably emotional for me. I still think Blair has a long way to go to really get me to embrace her as an actual human being of a character after some of the shenanigans this season, but maybe NYU will humble her a bit. Because she clearly doesn’t want to go there, despite the fact that it’s a prestigious private school I’ve wanted to attend for a decade now.

Now let’s hope that the show doesn’t lose its verve now that college is starting. But since the show was never defined by its high school (don’t forget, we have never seen any of them in class), I doubt it will be defined by college. These people’s lives are too big for that to happen.

 

Gossip Girl 2.24: “Valley Girls”

The Wife:

I think I’ve found the one episode of Gossip Girl I really don’t like. And believe me, I desperately wanted to like the “backdoor pilot” of the Untitled Gossip Girl Spin-Off About Young Lily Rhodes, but I didn’t. I liked what they tried to do with it, but the execution just fell utterly short. For instance, it made sense that, as Lily leaves her daughter in jail to think about her actions, she reflects on her own relationship with her mother and the night she spent in jail as a teenager. Premise = solid. In fact, the cast = totally solid, too. I like Brittany Snow. I like Andrew McCarthy. I like Cynthia Watros. I like Ryan Hansen. I love Krysten Ritter. But there was something about the writing of these characters that just didn’t work. Part of the point is that Lily as a teenager was very different than the Lily we know now, the one who ultimately fulfilled her mother’s wishes for her by marrying up, marrying someone grand (or several someones, as the case may be), but it was hard to see a connecting point between teenage Lily and adult Lily, other than that their both blonde and like men who wear leather jackets more than men in Don Johnson suits.

So as Serena sits in jail (by choice, in fact, to prove to her mother that she can make adult decisions such as serving her time, which means she’ll miss prom), Lily reminisces on her past. About how she got kicked out of boarding school (Santa Barbara’s Thacher School, which is real and thus I must give unlimited props to the attention to detail there) because she wanted to live with her dad, a music producer. But Daddy Andrew McCarthy doesn’t have time for his daughter, other than to tell the good folks at the Thacher School that she was acting out because her parents divorce was adversely affecting her, effectively getting her back in after a brief suspension. (Sidenote: I miss Lipstick Jungle.) Her mother is callous and inattentive, and her sister had the wherewithal to remove herself from that life altogether years ago, which Lily feels was a worse form of abandonment. So Lily, sensing her life kind of sucks, disobeys her parents and goes to find her sister in L.A.

No Doubt, I have a date with you July 21. Be ready. I will be.

Lily finds one of Carol’s coworkers and he agrees to let her borrow her sister’s clothing from her locker (she changes at work a lot because she’s constantly going on auditions) and escorts her to a Snowed Out show where Carol and her boyfriend/not boyfriend Shep would be in attendance. First of all, Krysten Ritter was amazing. Adorable. Funny. Perfect casting choice for the artsy, free-spirited older sister. But an even better choice was casting Veronica Mars‘ Ryan Hansen as Carol’s sort-of boyfriend. Hansen is amazing at playing self-absorbed jerkmeats, and here he was a self-absorbed jerkmeat with a bad Billy Idol pompadour. Genius. Carol wants to help Lily and be a good big sister and everything, but she can’t at the moment because she and her friends are on their way to crash a music video director’s party so they can get back the tape he took from them, which they paid him a good $500 to shoot. That music video director, by the way, is a Van Der Woodsen, channeling James Spader as Stef in Pretty in Pink. And he really likes to do coke. And he fucked Lily’s sister, which I think, if that turns out to be the Van Der Woodsen that Lily eventually marries, IS SUPER FUCKING AWKWARD. Owen and Shep pick a fight with Van Der Woodsen and his cronies, which Lily gets into to defend her sister. Van Der Woodsen calls the cops, and Carol has to bail her little sister out of jail when their mother won’t, opening up the possibilities for a string of Rhodes sisters adventures in LaLaLand.

Other than Ryan Hansen being a dick and dancing around to “The Safety Dance,” not very exciting. And even less exciting was the modern-day prom storyline. Someone might be sabotaging Blair? Well, no, not really, because it’s just Chuck making her prom dream scrapbook come true by forcing her choices to lead her to the dress she’s always dreamed about (which is fab), the date she wanted to have (Nate), the mode of transport and the glittery princess Prom Queen tiara that Nelly Yuki almost stole from her had Chuck not taken the stuffed ballots. He even gives her the key to his suite at the Plaza, because that’s how she wanted her perfect prom night to end. But instead, she ends it by breaking up with Nate. (Hooray! Because we all know she should be with Chuck, the man who made her 12-year-old prom dream come true!) Serena even makes it out of jail in time to attend the dance because her former lover/almost step brother bails her out. I mean, why? Why even bother with the prom in this episode? It was so insignificant, and wholly, completely understated. While I liked the thru-line of the big band at the prom playing “Stand and Deliver,” I have a very difficult time believing that a prom for Constance and St. Jude’s would have looked like that prom looked. We know their winter formal looks a lot more stunning than this did. This was so cheeseball in its attempt to be elegant, adult and understated that I just didn’t know what to do with it. I hate to say it, but I think the 90210 prom is going to be a lot more believable.

If Blair designed that dress when she was 12, she's a better designed than Little J ever was.

There’s nothing technically wrong with the L.A. Lily storyline. And nothing wrong with the grainy film wipes they applied to her memory (which works for me because she’s a photographer). It just fell really flat. And even though there was a lovely resolution in which Serena, sitting with Blair outside prom, acknowledges that she knows her mother had her arrested out of love and concern while Lily apologizes for her entire tenuous relationship with her own mother, there were no real risks in telling either story, nothing to lose or gain, which means . . . no drama. And that means boring. I’d like to see the spin-off succeed, though, because I’m very curious about the timeline of Lily’s life, which was something my sister-in-law brought up last night. The music they chose last night put us pretty solidly in 1986, and we’re assuming that Lily was 16 or 17 then. And Serena was born in 1991 if she just turned 18 this year, so Lily was bearing Van Der Woodsen children by the time she was 20/21. Now, that’s perfectly plausible and all . . . but does that really give her enough time in L.A. to cultivate a career as a rock photographer and follow Lincoln Hawk and Nine Inch Nails around? I had assumed her wild years lasted much longer than this, at least until her mid-20s. If anything, I need to spin-off to help me flesh that out.

The Husband:

I do feel a definite disconnect between the present Lily and the 1980s Lily, and I definitely have a hard time believing that whatever Cynthia Watros was doing would ever lead to some of the horrific displays of behavior and evil that modern-day Celia is capable of (I point you toward the Debutante Ball episode from s1), but I also think I liked the backdoor pilot far more than my wife did. It shows a good deal of promise, and while they might be getting their years a little iffy as far as much is concerned, I think it could be a pretty wildly fun program. They just need to bridge the years a little bit better, because otherwise it’s barely even a spin-off so much as an entirely new show. (Like how Mork & Mindy is technically a spin-off of Happy Days. Say what?)

Or maybe it’s just because I really like 80s Los Angeles movies, like Less Than Zero and, as the title would suggest is an influence, Valley Girl. The city still feels dangerous and open in these narratives, not like the plastic, cultureless meh I lived in for five years.

And yes, I love Krysten Ritter too, but I’ve loved her for a few years now. And she is definitely one of the main reasons I thought Confessions of a Shopaholic was such a blindingly underrated film. (Yeah yeah, I am in fact male – don’t let my endorsement of that movie fool you.)

But other than Blair and Nate breaking up, nothing really vital happened to anybody in modern day GG land. Save that for next week.

 

Gossip Girl 2.22: “Southern Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”

The Wife:

And so Poppy and Gabriel’s Serena-ruining scheme deepens. Serena is not pleased that her new beau works so much, as she’s grown up a socialite so she actually has no idea what work is. Blair suggests that they spy on him to see what he’s up to, but Serena doesn’t think it’s a good idea. Naturally, Blair does it anyway and catches him in Poppy’s embrace. When Serena confronts him with this information, he tells her that he’s only pretending to be with Poppy because she invested a grip of money in his company and he’ll lose all of his other investors if he loses her. For some reason, Serena is okay with this. Naturally, Blair isn’t, so she calls Chuck to help her hunt down and expose Gabriel once and for all. Blair and Chuck work on getting Poppy and Gabriel to the co-op party Serena’s mom is hosting and, when the love-triangle meets, Poppy forces Gabriel to choose between his investors and the girl he loves. He chooses Serena, and she instantly is so thrilled that he has done so that she helps him hustle her mother and her mother’s friends for investments in his internet company that wants to bring wireless access to Africa. Seriously, he’s this close to sounding like a Nigerian prince who needs them to wire money to his account so he can access his father’s trust fund and then he’ll repay their investment threefold, but, for some reason, this whole “bringing wireless Internet to Africa” thing sounds like a great idea to the rich and bored and Lily decides to invest. Rufus, too, after finding out that the gallery may not sell for what he thought it would (nor would his back up plan of selling the Lincoln Hawk catalog reach quite the sum he could have gotten last year when he was touring) decides to pony up for Gabriel’s investment, despite the smarmy tobacco heir’s protestations that Rufus should instead put his money in mutual funds and the like. (You see, Gabriel only wants to steal money from people who won’t be hurt by it, like the very, very idle rich, rather than the upper upper middle class represented by Rufus Humphrey. He’s a con man with a conscience.) But Rufus is insistent, and so Gabriel agrees to let him invest.

Meanwhile, Serena starts to turn to Blair’s suspicions when Gabriel tells her that they met at Butter, which was closed on the night he claimed because Blair had purchased their bartender for the Ruin Nelly Yuki’s Future scheme, and even more so when he claims he doesn’t remember Georgina’s flaming red hair. This whole time, Nate has been trying to secure Blair’s affections by purchasing them a swank apartment in Murray Hill so they could live together between Columbia and NYU, and, feeling that the time she spends with Chuck is a threat to their relationship, tries to bar Chuck from even speaking to Blair. But Blair cannot resist the need to help Serena by taking a limo ride with Bass up to the Jesus Camp Georgina Sparks has been hiding out in somewhere in Connecticut, and so she ditches Nate when he needs/wants/strangely tries to possess her most. But as Chuck heads into Jesus Camp alone, Blair realizes that he didn’t need her to come along at all, and he was just playing her in his war against Nate, and so she steals his limo and heads back to her boyfriend and her apartment, saddened by Nate’s admission that he only asked her to move in because of Chuck. Chuck gets the confirmation he needs that Gabriel is lying from Georgina and brings her back to the city to testify. That might not matter, at all, though, because by the time Serena shows up to confront Gabriel about his lies, he has already taken Rufus’s money and fled his hotel room, with Poppy popping in at just the right time to make herself look more innocent by also wondering where Gabriel has run off to with her half a million dollars.

I love that the Jesus Camp shirts read OMJC, as in, Oh My Jesus Christ.

I honestly don’t give a shit about Serena and her feelings and inability to read or understand people, but I feel so badly for Rufus to be caught up in this situation. Dude is just trying to send both his kids to college and maybe, just maybe, buy an antique ring for the love of his life. I really love that Dan and Jenny went ahead and bought Rufus the ring he wanted to give to Lily, because that’s probably one of the kindest, most selfless things anyone has ever done for anyone else on this show. The Humphrey clan really doesn’t need to lose everything in an investment scheme, so here’s hoping Gabriel’s conscience gets the best of him and he returns Rufus’ money or Rufus finds out in time to void that big ol’ check. I really don’t need Rufus to hang himself with that chunky orange cable knit scarf he was sporting. That would be très sad.

The Husband:

Really, Blair? You can’t deal with the 10.3 miles between New York University and Columbia? That you have such a pathetic concept of what one would be willing to do for the person they love that he would choose, instead, to buy an apartment halfway between the two universities? I lived 90 miles away from my wife when we were both in college and only engaged at the time, and that seemed to work out pretty well. But 10.3 miles? Nooooooooooo…too much time in traffic! And the subway is soooo grooooooooooooss…

Blargh. I’m fine with the rich mentality on this show, but that’s just ridiculous.

 

Gossip Girl 2.19: “The Grandfather”

The Wife:

For a Vanessa-and-Nate-centric episode, I actually didn’t mind “The Grandfather” that much. What began as Vanessa’s earnest attempt to reunite Nate with the family that abandoned him when The Captain got pinched for big time embezzlement became a slow, sad realization that the uppity Brooklyn artist will probably never, ever be beside future Governor Nathaniel Archibald, no matter how much cousin Laurie thinks she’ll fit right in beside the reigning Vanderbilt grandson. And when Nate ultimately chooses to accept an internship in the Mayor’s office instead of backpacking through Eastern Europe on Peroghi Tour ’09 with V, she sees just how hard it is to turn down family ties. Even though she fears that Nate is letting his grandfather make decisions about his life for him, I’m fairly certain that Nate’s well-thought speech about doing things to realize your potential is proof enough that taking the mayoral internship was the right choice. After all, Vanessa doesn’t go to school and, as far as I recall, isn’t heading anywhere in the fall. I’m sure they could find dozens of other opportunities to do that Peroghi Tour, maybe right before or right after his internship? It’s fun to be free spirited and all, but I think Nate’s choosing to take some steps toward a future he previously didn’t have and even if he decides later not to go into politics, an internship at the Mayor’s office won’t hurt.

I will greatly enjoy this opportunity to get doughnuts and coffee for the mayor and his staff, sir.

Meanwhile, Blair is spiraling out of control, fucking Carter Bayson and rubbing it in Chuck’s face, as well as outwardly seeking to commit social suicide by acting like a total bitch and doing scads of other things Blair Waldorf would never do, like stealing sunglasses from Bendel’s. Serena and Chuck grow worried about her and try to out the corrupting influence of Carter by bribing him with a flight to Dubai and, failing that, blackmailing him with some sordid activities he and Serena were privy to in San Torini. When that doesn’t work, they question Dorota to find out where Blair has gone and catch their friend still clinging to the possibility of a future, degrading herself by begging the Dean of Sarah Lawrence to let her attend in the fall. Feeling her life is ruined, Blair attends a party at Nate’s grandfather’s house and continues to air the dirty laundry of every socialite she encounters. Chuck drags her away and she offers herself to him, “to prove that nothing matters,” but he refuses because this girl is not the girl he loves. She later confides in ex-boyfriend Nate on the balcony, and he reminds her that she can’t fight against who she is. She is Blair Waldorf, and to not be Blair Waldorf is to deny herself. He takes his own advice to heart in choosing that internship over Vanessa’s backpacking trip.

Finally, there’s a throwaway plot in which Lily finds out that Rufus slept with her art dealer and they foolishly ask each other for lists of their former lovers. Lily agonizes over giving Rufus her entire list, and follows her daughter’s advice to make Rufus give his list first so she can gauge if her numbers are in the same ballpark. When she sees that his list only has 13 women on it, she hands him only the first page of hers. He later finds the second half of the list and the two have a fight over eggrolls about honesty and expectations and disappointment. Later, Rufus brings Lily a list of the things that make him happy, and he tells her that the only list he needs is the same one from her.

Although Vanessa and Nate hadn’t technically broken up, she disappears before the end of the party, so Nate decides to escort the ego-sore Blair home. Chuck confesses to Serena that he feels like he’s losing Blair, and she reminds him just to comfort her and make her feel safe because, more than anything, she’s scared about no longer having a plan for her life. So he heads to Chez Waldorf, and feels betrayed and angry when he spies Nate’s official Vanderbilt blazer on the couch as Blair, upstairs, begs her ex-boyfriend to stay the night. And that, my friends, is why this episode was not a bad Nate-episode. If he’s back with Blair causing a rift between her and Chuck, that gives him a purpose, which totally makes up for his lack of personality. This is an excellent chess-like move, and I am so, so excited for the Chuck-Nate rivalry to begin. Whatever happened to bros before hos, Nate?

Also, there were some fibbity-fab-fab pieces of clothing in this episode:

• Blair’s black and white skin-tight nightie? Super hawwt.
• Blair’s navy and white asymmetrical striped sheath? Amazing. Even more amazing? That pearl-adorned nautical-inspired necklace she’s wearing at the Vanderbilt party.
• Vanessa’s Vanderbilt party dress.
• And, finally, I kind of love Lily’s reading glasses. Like, a lot.

Oh, goody! This Herve Leger is only $1,590 at Bloomingdales! Now I'll just go live in a box for a month because that's my entire teaching salary for a month.

The Husband:

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve always enjoyed Blair’s storyline when she is finally struggling against a world that has finally turned on her, because it tends to make her a more sympathetic figure who, as we learn, actually is worthy of our pity. But now we have a different put-upon Blair, one who has nothing to lose and is willing to bring everyone else down with her, this time not out of anger but simply through the fact that she is almost on a self-pity autopilot, and has sunk so far that not even the most rudimentary emotions can be found within her. It’s oddly terrifying, but it’s also monumentally enjoyable. She’s like Doomsday in the Superman canon, designed for only one purpose — absolute destruction.

I also thought it was a strange but interesting choice to have Dan and Serena get to a point where they have fought so much about stupid shit (i.e. Dan sleeping with his teacher) that it’s starting to dawn on them that they are just being ridiculous. So when she slapped him across the face, and then giggled at the sheer concept of said slap, it was a scene I don’t think I’ve ever seen in any film or TV show, which in turn led me to, as usual, proclaim in my head that Josh Schwartz shows are always a little savvier than they appear. It’s a throwaway scene, technically, but in my mind it made up for much of s2’s Dan-versus-Serena boredom.

 

Gossip Girl 2.18: “The Age of Dissonance”

The Wife:

I’ve missed Gossip Girl. Dearly. This episode, though it was really quite silly overall, did remind me not-so-subtly precisely why it’s one of the smarter shows on television. Scribe Jessica Queller definitely layered the comparisons between Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence and the world of the Upper East Side quite thickly, and didn’t let us forget for a second that these modern-day socialites were living the same lives as the characters in the book . . . or that movie with Daniel Day-Lewis . . . or, for that matter, the characters they themselves are playing in the senior class play version of Wharton’s novel. GG is filled up modern versions of Wharton’s melodramas, and I appreciate how the show navigates that territory, and does so much more skillfully than, say, The Duchess, which I’ve been told is allegedly an allegory for modern-day socialites, but is hardly allegorical at all. There is nothing about that particular film that truly connects to the modern world, not even in the costuming. (I’m sorry, Michael O’Connell, but I do not think you deserve that Oscar.) But Gossip Girl continually harks back to an earlier time. Even with Blackberries and Burbury and Cartier, I am always, always reminded of the world of Pope or Austen or, yes, Wharton. Queller just spelled that connection out with this episode, and for every silly thing that occurred during this hour of television, I hope that, at the very least, it inspires hundreds of teenage girls to pick up a copy of Wharton’s novel.

I do not understand why only the senior class puts on a play – and why there are no actual drama kids at Constance, forcing people who don’t give a damn to tread the boards for school credit – but put on a play they do! And it has fabulous modern-yet-antiquated costumes, like Serena’s feathered Marchesa gown and Blair’s amazing, amazing, amazing black backless number for her role as the ruined Countess Olyenska, as well as some pretty stellar sets, thoughtful lighting design and, naturally, a Broadway wunderkind director that Serena, with her strange insistence on dating artists that she’s too dumb to understand, develops a huge crush on. And just to make sure absolutely everyone has something to do, Vanessa has decided to make a documentary about the play.

Ah, but then there’s Chuck, who got a doctor to diagnose him with stage fright so he could get out of the play, leaving him to chase around Nikki Stevens from The L Word throughout the whole episode, only to find out that she’s been playing him the whole time. Oh, you thought she was dead? So did Chuck, but he was wrong. Carter Bayson got involved somehow and gave Elle money to get out of the country, leaving Chuck in the dust and losing his trail to finding the Eyes Wide Shut-y gentlemen’s club that his father was once a part of. That’s his entire plot, and that was really odd for two reasons: 1.) It’s really odd to come back to that plot after several weeks off and 2). It’s also really odd to insert that plot into an episode that otherwise would have used the school play entirely as a locus of action. I mean, you can’t have Gossip Girl without Chuck Bass, of course, but exploring the EWS thread in this episode was really jarring and actually the one sloppy part of an otherwise tightly written episode.

She may not be going to Yale anymore, but at least she looks fabulous.

As dress rehearsal for the play begins, Nelly Yuki finds out that she received early acceptance to Yale, which sends Blair into a tizzy as, like Highlander, there can be only one Constance student at Yale in the fall and she already solved her problem with acceptance before the break. She tracks down the headmistress and demands to know why Nelly got an “early” from Yale, and HMQ explains that Yale rescinded Blair’s admission thanks to a tip from an anonymous caller regarding faculty “hazing.” An unsubstantiated claim from a random tipster will, it seems, keep you out of college. Losing Yale helps Blair finally understand the plight of the Countess, and she goes on an accusational tirade, upbraiding Nelly Yuki for calling in the tip, which Nelly vehemently denies. Everyone then receives a GG blast about Lord Marcus and his secret affair with his mummy, much to Blair’s dismay. She then takes her venom toward Vanessa, claiming that V was the only person who hates her enough to divulge that secret, but Vanessa denies the blame as well, because, really, she’s just not that petty when it comes down to it, even though she has been tempted to do so in the past.

Serena, with that crush on her director and all, gets Vanessa’s help in acquiring a private rehearsal session after realizing how much Vanessa and Julian have in common. She suggests that Vanessa play her Cyrano and tell her what to say so she sounds smart enough to impress Julian. Nate, however, is already jealous enough of Julian after hearing his girlfriend talk on and on about Bergman films and so on at dinner that he is pretty sure she’s planning to leave him for Julian when he walks in on her end of the Cyrano call. So, being lame like Nate is, he runs away, rather than confronting Vanessa, like a person of interest might do. The rest of the Cyrano date was actually pretty clever, though. Vanessa, although she sometimes sounds like she’s literally just quoting the backs of film theory books, actually seems to know her shit, and I errrrrpreciate when people know things about things. The tactic seems to work really well for Serena, until she receives a confidence-crushing GG text blast explaining that she only got into Yale because she’s got an important name, not because she earned it.

I mean, really, when you're able to wear a Marchesa in a school play, people probably do only like you for your money.

As for Dan, he’s still got the hots for Miss Carr and is trying to pursue his relationship with her on the DL by using costume wench Jenny as his courier. Rachel sends him a note with a key to her apartment for some post-dress rehearsal lovin’, but then Daddy Rufus shows up and finds the note and ruins everything by storming over to Rachel’s house and giving her the key. Here’s Gossip Girl’s color commentary on that scenario; I found it highly enjoyable because there’s a whole lot going on in these two brief sentences:

“Poor Miss Iowa, caught playing Mrs. Robinson. Looks like teacher just got schooled.”

Later that night, Daddy Rufus gives Dan a talking to about seeing Rachel, and Dan insists he’s 18 and can do whatever the fuck he wants. (When did Dan turn 18? And even if it isn’t statutory rape anymore, it is still an inappropriate relationship with a student for which Rachel should be fired!) So what’s his next move? To meet Rachel in the costume closet and kiss her wrist a la The Age of Innocence and then fuck her. This is definitely something Gossip Girl got right about fooling around in a high school theatre: the costume closet is definitely one of the best places to do so. It was at my high school, anyway.

Serena accuses Blair of sending the malicious text, but Blair insists she didn’t do it and turns her suspicions to Dan, who, by the way, is her co-star in the play. They have it out onstage, muttering between their lines to one another as they’re supposed to be falling in love. This is why you don’t require people to do a play, because they do shit like that. The stage is a really bad place to air your dirty laundry, kids. You do that in the wings. But apparently, no one got that memo because this trend starts to spread like wildfire throughout the student actor population after Julian chides Nate for not understanding his character (whose reputation was ruined because his family went bankrupt). Nate forgets a line, gets flustered and starts screaming about how is totally does understand his character, more, in fact, than Julian ever will because he’s lived it. Everyone else starts to follow suit, turning on each other and yelling about various things, officially ruining the play in front of critic Christopher Isherwood. Surprisingly, Isherwood loved the juxtaposition of the formalist first act with the deconstructed second act in which the actors and their teenage angst melded with the characters. I appreciate his reading, I really do, but let’s get this straight: Nate ruined the play. That’s actually what happened.

Julian outs himself to Serena, surprised that she was unaware he was “teh ghey,” and Nate and Vanessa get into a strange fight about liking different things, in which she compares him to a little kid who claims he doesn’t like tomatoes without ever having tried them. Weirdest. Metaphor. Ever. Later, they make up and she brings over snacks to watch sports and finds him, teary-eyed, watching The Age of Innocence. Aww, compromise and understanding! Dan, meanwhile, realizes that the only person who could have sent those GG blasts was Rachel. He calls her out on this, but she is unrepentant, so Dan heads out to tell Blair the truth, as well as bestow upon her the information that he and Rachel just fucked in the costume closet. He also informs Serena about Rachel’s misdeeds and admits to his father that seeing Rachel was a mistake, which is a good realization to come to considering she decides to skip town and head back to Iowa. That’s all for the best, really, because NOBODY LIKED HER.

And after all of this, Chuck, losing Elle, decides he’s ready to come back to the girl who loves him, only she’s busy drowning her sorrows at a bar with Carter Bayson. I look forward to the Chuck vs. Carter contest for Blair’s heart.

 

Gossip Girl 2.17: “Carnal Knowledge”

The Wife:

Everything about Miss Carr generally makes me roll my eyes and scoff, so imagine how happy I was to hear that she was fired . . . and then how suddenly unhappy I was to hear that Headmistress Queller decided to rehire her for fear of a wrongful termination lawsuit. Miss Carr is actually a pretty terrible teacher. She may be bright, as far as empty literary references and intelligent-sounding commentary about the writing process the showrunners can shove into her mouth are concerned, but she’s pretty fucking dumb about professional conduct for a teacher. The school has a pretty fair case to fire her simply for fraternizing with the students without authorization because, by meeting Dan and Serena for coffee and breakfast to discuss their work outside school grounds, she’s setting herself up to be slandered. That’s just not appropriate conduct for a teacher. If she were their moderator for an after school activity, like, say, a newspaper or a literary magazine, neither of which Constance-St. Jude’s seems to have, and she needed to meet with her students off school grounds, permission slips would need to be signed. Why wouldn’t she just meet Dan in the school courtyard or library or have a meeting in her classroom to discuss his work? This isn’t college where you can treat your students like the adults that they are and meet with them outside of school and be their friend as much as their teacher. This is high school. They’re minors. Rules have to be followed. And clearly, Rachel Carr, with her extra-campus meetings and insistence on letting only Dan and Serena call her Rachel, doesn’t understand a damn thing about decorum. Rufus Humphrey seems to be the only person in the GG universe who understands the impropriety of Miss Carr even meeting innocently with students outside of school grounds. I’m pretty sure that a picture proving that she was meeting with students off-campus is enough to at least have her transferred to another school, or a brief suspension from the classroom. Whatever. I guess it doesn’t really matter, because as soon as people find out that she actually has slept with Dan, she’ll be gone. Sadly, I’ll have to put up with her idiocy and Laura Beckinridge’s dead, cold eyes until then.

My hatred of that character aside, Blair’s takedown plot was actually pretty awesome. Miss Carr had already stupidly given Blair so much to work with, that even working on a contraband cell phone couldn’t stop Blair from spreading the rumor that Miss Carr was having an inappropriate relationship with a student. After hearing about the rumor, Miss Carr finds out (from Dan, no less) to put the squeeze on Nelly Yuki, who gives up Blair as the GG tipster.

You've crossed me for the last time, Nelly Yuki.

Blair’s punishment for this crime? Expulsion, which is far worse than her detention with the Preservation Society. (Of the two times I had detention, I vastly preferred helping out with the school’s can drive to sitting in a room doing homework for a half hour. How, exactly, is being given 30 minutes to do your homework quietly or read a book any kind of punishment?) Her expulsion, of course, means her much-contested Yale admission will be immediately revoked. Blair’s father comes to his daughter’s aid and asks her point blank why she would spread a rumor like that, to which Blair replies that she wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t true. (I agree on that vague statement that, indeed, Miss Carr’s relationship with Dan is inappropriate.) He drags his lawyers to a parent’s board meeting with the school to discuss the nature of the Gossip Girl website and its pernicious rumormongering, as well as the nature of Miss Carr’s relationship with her students. And it is here, after Serena’s strange inferiority complex led her to snap a photo of Miss Carr with Dan, that Blair bursts in with evidence of the claim she made, displaying the picture of Dan caressing Miss Carr’s face for the entire school board to see. This action gets Miss Carr fired, and Blair readmitted to Constance. Hooray! Problems solved! Until Blair’s father overhears her admit that she had initially lied, and just got lucky that her lie turned out to be true.

Nothing hurts Blair more than not being the apple of daddy’s eye, and she tries to apologize to him by appealing to his Yalie pride. He responds that Yale doesn’t matter to him at all. “What matters to me is not what college you go to, but what kind of person you grow up to be,” he says, admitting his disappointment with the lying, deceitful side of his perfect little girl.

Meanwhile, Dan goes off to apologize to Miss Carr . . . or something . . . about the way this whole situation went down, and they end up majorly boning to some scary-sounding music, just as Lily and Rufus get the news that, fearing a wrongful termination suit on dodgy evidence, Miss Carr will resume her teaching duties on Monday. Oops! I wager that the newfound sexual component to their relationship will finally get Miss Carr off my fucking TV set. Sweet statutory, I hate that character.

I do think this episode gave us something interesting to think about, though, in the discussion of the GG website during the parent’s board meeting. It is harmless, yes, and well within their rights of freedom of speech for teenagers to gossip on the internet, but free speech is always called into question when someone’s character is defamed. This happens numerous times where celebrities and other public figures of that sort get angry about things said of them in the media, but there is legal precedent in New York Times v. Sullivan that states that a public figure has to prove that the statement was said with actual malice, and that the publisher/author of the statement knew it at the time to be false and printed it solely with the intent to harm. It is usually very hard to prove that in a defamation case. On the GG scale, it’s very easy to prove that a statement is libelous. (Dear GG writers: please learn the difference between libel and slander. Everyone kept calling this slander, but it was published on the internet, thus written, thus making it libel. Slander is spoken. Libel is written. It’s really easy.) Blair even admits that she made the claim without knowing it to be true, and certainly did so with the intent to harm the affected parties. Indeed, the Waldorf family should have feared a libel suit, but Miss Carr has definitely erased any chances of filing that claim now that she’s schtooping Dan Humphrey.

Here's my paper. Appropriately, it's about hot dogs.

As for Chuck Bass, he apparently had the best night of his life, but can’t remember it, and spends the entire episode trying to find out what happened the night before, with Nate and Vanessa in tow, for no apparent reason other than that someone felt they should make an appearance in this episode. He finds the house he went to after receiving a mysterious invitation, and gets a realtor to show him around and give him the name of the seller, whom he calls when he recognizes one of the women in the photographs on the piano. The woman, Elle, turns out to be the seller’s nanny, who moonlights as some kind of billionaire prostitute. Elle tracks Chuck down and tells him that she sent the invitation to him in error. She had taken over another girl’s client list and sent the invite before realizing that Bart Bass had passed. So, to keep Chuck from finding out what his father had been involved in, she drugged him and checked him into a hotel, hoping he wouldn’t remember anything he saw. Later, Chuck finds out that Elle has gone missing (goodbye, The L Word‘s Nikki Stevens!) and discovers a whole bunch of old invitations to these secret billionaire sex clubs stored in Bart Bass’ vault. I’m hoping that Bart Bass was actually involved in a secret hunting club where every now and again he would get together with sexy prostitutes and kill them in myriad fantasy ways, like, say, eating their legs while they’re still alive or lying naked in a tub while one is suspended above him so he can bathe in her blood. Just like Hostel, but with more sex.

The Husband:

Aside from some of my wife’s feelings about student-teacher relationships – I had breakfast/coffee with a teacher every once in a while in high school, and don’t see as much of a problem with it as she does – I also have to protest about Carr being a bad teacher. We haven’t seen any of her actual educational style (this is GG, and we have yet to actually see a class in progress yet over the show’s two seasons), but from what we’ve gathered I appreciate a more down-to-earth and relatable teacher such as this. My wife and I had pretty different high school experiences, despite both of our schools being in the same diocese, so I guess I really have to chalk it up to what kind of teachers we liked. I also don’t give a crap that Carr gave up doing Teach For America to come work at Constance-St. Jude’s. Knowing this show, something horrible may have happened to Ms. Carr there, and since this is GG I’m just going to assume the worst. I can only judge a person based on what’s given to me, just as a viewer is only truly supposed to apply the logic given to them by a particular show or movie in critiquing said show or movie. (i.e. Prison Break established itself in the first episode as existing in a universe of crazy coincidences, so stop complaining when things just happen to work out in certain ways to the characters.)

Really, though, the episode was pretty scattershot, especially Chuck Bass’ story, but I happened to love Blair’s plot. I think I just love it when she gets her comeuppance in any way or form, and having her father finally understand who the true conniving Blair really is goes down as a great GG moment.

(“Comeuppance.” That’s a word that I loved to use, but it is forever tainted to me now. When I worked at my college newspaper as A&E Editor and critic, a copy editor made a red mark next to that word and then wrote “huh?” This, along with this person’s confusion re: “compliment” vs. “complement” soured me on copy editors forever. ‘Tis the plight of a scorned writer. Still, try typing out the word. It’s surprisingly fun.)

So what’s Blair’s next bit of revenge going to be? Surely Nelly Yuki’s squealing will not go unpunished. Or is losing daddy’s love enough to alter Blair’s brain so that she realizes that vengeance is a vicious circle?

Good times. Orgies and statutory rape and Shakespeare. My kind of show.

 

Gossip Girl 2.16: “You’ve Got Yale!”

The Wife:

It’s hard for me to take any plot that culminates in attending the opera seriously after watching Repo! The Genetic Opera this weekend, a cult film I tried really hard to like but couldn’t thanks to a completely unskilled, overwrought score and a clunky and artless libretto. (The different between Repo! and other cult movies is that at least things like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Shock Treatment have good music and well-rendered lyrics. They might make little to no sense, but the musical aspects of them are accomplished.) The opera made marginally more sense as a place for this episode’s drama to culminate, but I still wonder exactly what business some of the characters had being there in the first place. Like, the revelation that some of these characters were even interested in opera came the fuck out of nowhere. Vanessa likes Wagner’s Ring Cycle? Who knew? Who would even know because liking Wagner is so avant garde?! And Eric knows everything there is to know about Mozart’s Magic Flute? Talking wildly about crescendos and high Fs and movements within arias with the wild passion of my friend who’s really into Brahms? Did they lump Eric with a sudden love of the opera simply because he’s Gossip Girl‘s lone gay? I can’t imagine any other reason why they would imbue him with such a weird character trait. I get that it’s important for Lily and Serena and Blair to go to the opera. They’re society people. They don’t give a shit about the music. They just go because it’s a social event. (And certain operas still have lengthy scene changes that allow for socializing between acts, as was originally intended back in the days before electricity when it was necessary to light all the gas lamps in the theatre in order to perform said scene change.) But it’s just so odd for me to have some of these characters suddenly be interested in something they’ve never previously had any interest in, all for the sake of an attempt to create a hyperbolic, operatic plot line filled with deceit, betrayal and, in proper opera fashion, sexual assault.

By the way, the entire Gossip Girl “opera” is about getting into Yale and gaining control of Bass Industries. I liked the Bass Industries plotline. I did not so much like the Yale plotline.

It’s Yale acceptance day and Blair’s father and his lover have flown in from France to feed her a Yale-themed breakfast on the day that they just know she’ll get her letter. They even spring for a Yale sweater for Dorota and give Blair a purse bulldog named Handsome Dan to tote around to show off her Yale pride. (My sister-in-law pointed out that a bulldog is not really a purse-sized dog. Blair pointed out that she will not call the dog Dan, settling instead for Handsome, which I thought was pretty funny.) This is all a bad idea, of course, to count one’s acceptance chickens before they’re hatched and it turns out that Blair doesn’t even get in to Yale at all, despite constantly having her minions refresh the page as if to make the news of waitlisting go away. Dan Humphrey, of course, is the one student from St. Jude’s to get in. (Nate, it seems, has gotten his money back and now no longer cares about going to college at all. Chuck, on the other hand, has bigger fish to fry in the form of apple-cheeked Uncle Jack. He is so over Skull & Bones at this point.) The only Constance student to get in? It Girl Serena Van Der Woodsen, who decides to lie to Blair about her acceptance, claiming to also be waitlisted, making Blair think that it was Nelly Yuki who got in instead. Serena does this a lot, this whole lying for no apparent reason thing, and she should probably stop. It would be better for everybody. Especially because in trying to protect Blair’s feelings, she also has to lie to Dan, causing them to have yet another petty relationship drama about not going to school together in the fall.

Blair talks to Headmistress Queller, who tells her that because she has the next spot on the waitlist, she will definitely get in as long as she keeps up her perfect transcript should the person accepted turn their offer down. Furious, Blair starts plotting against Nelly Yuki. (“Witch hunts are my Valium, Serena.”) Things only get worse when the new English teacher, Miss Carr, who is fresh-faced but no-nonsense about teaching, awards Blair with a B. For Blair, this is devastating. She can’t keep her top of the waitlist spot with a B in English. First of all, who the hell is this Miss Carr who spends two years doing Teach for America and then transfers to a nice, shiny private school on the Upper East Side? Clearly, she doesn’t have the integrity to teach where education actually matters, so I will not trust this character’s advice on anything for the duration of her tenure on the show. (Especially hackneyed advice such as “You should go to the right school for you.”) Second of all, Blair is being 90210 dumb about this whole transcript thing. One B during your second semester will not ruin your GPA. Especially when the snow’s still on the ground. There are plenty of other chances to keep getting As, therefore completely eradicating that B. Instead of thinking like an actual human being, Blair freaks out and demands an audience with Miss Carr, instructing her that Constance has a free pass policy for second semester seniors, where all grades are bumped up to what they should be simply so that Constance can preserve its reputation of sending its graduates to the “best” universities. When Miss Carr tells Blair that this is not a policy she feels comfortable adhering to, Blair cries out for war. Not wanting to cause any more drama, Serena tells Blair that she turned her offer of acceptance down. Dan gets all upset about this, and even Blair thinks that it’s pretty dumb of Serena to turn down Yale just to make Blair feel better/save Miss Carr from ultimate humiliation.

Miss Carr, I think you've misunderstood. I *am* B. I do not *get* Bs.

However, Blair’s ultimate humiliation plan still goes through, thanks to Iz and Penelope stirring up mischief. And what’s this ultimate humiliation plan? Why, invite Miss Carr to dinner and the opera as a sign of good faith! But tell her that the curtain rises at 8 p.m. instead of 7 and send her to a restaurant that’s closed! Ooooooooh, burn! I would be a bit put out that I’d wasted a few hours of an evening that I’d otherwise hadn’t had any plans for to stand in the cold and then not be let in to the Met, but other than the inconvenience of the thing, this was probably the lamest diabolical scheme ever conceived in the GG universe. I mean, really? Really, Blair? Really? That’s like 90210 lame. I thought you were above that. Of course, there is a complication to the plan. Just before curtain, Blair gets a call from Headmistress Queller saying that Miss Carr had spoken to her about Blair’s B and both women were willing to overlook this grade in order for Blair to keep her top-of-the-waitlist spot. When Blair receives this news, she heads to stop Miss Carr from continuing her evening of inconvenience. She accepts Blair’s apology and admission of craziness, but then turns around and calls HMQ, who calls Blair into her office on a Saturday to lands Blair with detention for Mission Opera Inconvenience, which puts her back on Yale’s waitlist. This, of course, means war. Or, as Gossip Girl herself cleverly put it: “Gon’ B startin’ somethin’.”

While I look forward to seeing Blair on the warpath in the coming episodes, I do have a question: in what fucking world does it matter to a college if you get detention after you’ve been accepted? It should matter if you get a D. It shouldn’t matter if you get detention. Plenty of straight-A students get detention. And that doesn’t keep them out of Harvard, Yale or Stanford, before or after a decision has been rendered. In fact, I’m pretty sure detentions don’t show up on your transcripts, but I could be wrong about that. My sister-in-law thinks that this might be a special rule because Constance and St. Jude’s have a unique relationship with Yalies, which is the best reason I can find for why detention should matter at all in this case.

As for Chuck Bass, he seeks Lily’s help to get back his rightful control of Bass Industries. Lily offers to help him, taking a break from all the crazy hot sex she’s having with Rufus, by leveraging her sizable stake in the company against the lesser shares held by other board members. For her help, though, she asks that Chuck move back in, adding yet another person who can be uncomfortable with the Hump Der Woodsen Humpfest. Getting Chuck’s company back proves to be a little harder than she had initially hoped, as Jack stumbles into a board meeting, late, with coke still on his nostrils. She warns him to be more concerned about the morality clause as she offers him a hankie. He then calls her the equivalent of a whore and storms off. Despite Jack’s obviously reprehensible behavior, Lily still warns Chuck to stay away from the kind of reputation-ruining pranks that Jack pulled on him. Chuck’s pranks are actually more impressive, I think, some of which include getting Jack caught with transgendered hookers, having him placed on Megan’s List as a sex offender, loading his gym bag with cocaine and actually attempting purchasing anthrax with Jack’s credit card.

Chuck, if you want my help, you're going to have to stop purchasing anthrax. That just looks bad for Bass Industries as a whole.

Lily takes Rufus to the opera that night to make their society debut, which angers Chuck, as his father was not a month dead. (Suddenly, Chuck Bass is seeming a lot like Hamlet . . .) Rufus, of course, knows nothing about opera, which kind of makes me question his rockstar status. It’s certainly not a requirement to be classically trained as a rock musician, but, frankly, I think we all know that the greats at least have an appreciation for classical music. (Trent Reznor, for example, is classically trained and you can tell when you listen to his arrangements.) I find it hard to believe that someone who loves music as much as Rufus Humphrey doesn’t even know the Magic Flute, which, as Lily points out, is mostly for children. Lily meets with one of Bart’s lawyers at the opera, and she realizes that a solution for Chuck may be easier than either of them had thought. She leaves Rufus to talk opera for a few minutes and informs Chuck that before Bart’s untimely death, Bart had planned to legally adopt Serena and Eric and Lily had planned to legally adopt Chuck, thus making them one big happy Bass Der Woodsen family. If Lily and Chuck sign the papers, she will become his legal guardian, making Bass Industries fall under her care, and any decisions about Chuck’s future with the company also her decision pending board approval. They sign the papers immediately and Lily becomes Chuck’s guardian, which infuriates apple-cheeked Uncle Jack, who was also at the opera, for no apparent reason. (Which is the same reason Chuck was there, I guess.) When Lily leaves her seats to go to the powder room, Jack follows her and locks the door behind her. He confronts her about her actions and decides that since she has taken the company from him, he will take something from her. As he starts to assault her, Chuck realizes that Lily is missing and that the door to the ladies room is locked. He and Rufus come back and break down the door, saving Lily from being raped by coked-up Uncle Jack. That rape was definitely one of the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever seen on Gossip Girl, but fitting for an episode revolving around the opera. In gratitude for saving her, a sign that Chuck Bass really is turning over a new leaf . . . he did try to rape two different girls in the very first episode, remember? . . Lily plans to turn control of Bass Industries over to Chuck on his 18th birthday, so long as he remains a part of her family. I’m pleased by this development, especially because I now get to call that entire family the Bass Der Hump Der Woodsens.

Also in this episode, Nate and Vanessa had a totally stupid rich boy-poor girl plot that would have been straight out of an opera had it actually amounted to anything at all. He buys her opera tickets in a gesture of kindness, noting her Wagner CDs, but secretly, she has purchased them as well, wanting to be a part of the high-class world Nate resides in. In an attempt to let Vanessa feel good about buying the tickets herself, Nate just puts his tickets in his pocket and never speaks of it . . . until Dan ruins the gig by acting all surprised that they’re sitting in the balcony for the performance. Gallantly, Nate sits in the balcony with Vanessa next to a woman with a cough, until they can’t take it anymore and move to Nate’s box to make out. Why did this plot even exist? There was no confrontation, no payoff, no anything. Worst. Opera. Ever. Almost as boring and pointless as the Nate and Vanessa plot was Dan and Serena’s half-assed confrontation about what it means for their relationship to not be going to school together in the fall, as Dan for some reason takes it as a personal affront that Serena turned down Yale. You know what, Dan? You didn’t even want to go to Yale until this year, and neither did Serena. So, why don’t you both wait and see what other schools you get into and then make a decision? If you don’t go to the same school, it’s not a big deal. If you guys really love each other and want to be together you’ll make it work. Fuck. Just fucking handle it.

I’m really not okay with so many people in the GG universe being so dumb. I count on this how to not be as dumb as 90210, but this episode kind of was. Save for the Chuck Bass plot. That shit was pretty awesome and actually like an opera.

The Husband:

Man, are my wife and I on different wavelengths this week? I really dug this episode. I seem to do that a great deal with episodes on a variety of shows that pretty much just shove every character into one location and see how tense it can get. I honestly don’t care much about why they are at said place as much as I care about what kinds of secrets and betrayals the writers can cook up. That’s why I dug s1’s nearly incoherently silly but awesome episode “The Handmaiden’s Tale,” where everyone converged on the Masquerade Ball, with or without invitation, and wreaked havoc in oh so many ways (e.g. Nate kissing Jenny, thinking it’s Blair, etc. etc. etc.). That’s why I dig episodes that step outside of a show’s comfort zone and give us emotional clusterfucks (such as beach house/log cabin episodes of such shows as Frasier, What About Brian and Brothers & Sisters). It makes up its own rules, like it or not.

Sure, Serena is lying for no reason and making dumb impulsive decisions, but when has Serena been any different? She and Dan clearly have issues when they are apart from one another, so I can understand their hesitancy to go to different schools, even if, yes, they can technically handle it if they just fucking grew up. But see, that’s why I like Serena and Dan. They make ridiculous decisions and have ridiculous fights, but they do it together. What do the Strokes say? “Alone we stand, together we fall apart”? Exactly.

But yes, Dan, what happened to Dartmouth? Are we just ignoring that? Probably, because I even forgot about it, mistaking his interest in being the usher for the Dartmouth representative in s1 as actually being about Yale. I accept this ignoring of items past, simply because I’m selfish and am giving the writers the benefit of the doubt.

This is basically my roundabout way of saying that perhaps I lower my bullshit meter in episodes such as these, where the location itself has enough character and attitude to make up for some logic deficiencies. Is this a problem? As a television critic, perhaps. But as an avid GG viewer looking for my next fix, I feel it comes with the territory. Because even if I was very surprised to see Lily take such an interest in Chuck’s future between the last few episodes and this one, I loved their joint usurpation of the one apple-cheeked Uncle Jack Bass and didn’t mind that it seemed somewhat out-of-character for her. But don’t call her a bitch, Uncle Jack, or you’re gonna get figuratively ass-raped by her.

Clearly, I’ve lost my mind this morning. Too much coffee. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

 

Gossip Girl 2.15: “Gone with the Will”

The Wife:

Gossip Girl wasted no time in paying off the tease they gave us last week about some unscrupulous activities that Blair was involved in on New Year’s – that unscrupulous activity was hooking up in some capacity with apple-cheeked Uncle Jack. (I am not the only one who wishes to bite the cheeks right off his face.) After successfully turning Opium Zombie Chuck Bass/Drunken Suicidal Robert Pattinson Hair Chuck Bass back into Sneering Everyday Chuck Bass, Blair takes extra precautions not to let Chuck find out what went down between herself and his uncle, inserting herself into every facet of Chuck’s life. She attends the reading of Bart Bass’ will, along with Nate Archibald, who basically had two scenes in this episode and contributed nothing. (Why couldn’t he have died in a freak gasoline fight accident or something? Why?) The only person who cannot attend said reading is Lily Bass Der Woodsen, who is still off in Boston with Rufus Humphrey, looking for the child she gave up.

At the will reading, Chuck is told that he will receive his full inheritance, to be put into a trust until he turns 18, at which time the money is entirely his to do as he pleases. He is also handed a letter, written by Bart Bass before his death. Chuck, satisfied with the influx of cash, doesn’t give a damn about the letter and doesn’t want to read it, fearing it will only recapitulate the string of terrible disappointments he has been to his father, including wearing “so much purple.” Blair, however, encourages Chuck to read the letter, which goes on to glow about Chuck’s potential as a businessman, further explaining that, upon Bart’s death, Chuck Bass should receive the controlling 51% share in Bass Industries – the only thing apple-cheeked Uncle Jack wanted from his brother at all. Chuck proclaims that he doesn’t want any stake in Bass Industries whatsoever and willingly gives up his share to Jack. (For those who give a shit about the business world of GG, Lily received a 20% share in the company, with the remaining 29% being divvied up amongst members of the board.)

Running a company isn't all free booze and hookers, nephew mine.

Feeling that Chuck deserves to become the kind of man she knows he can be, Blair encourages Chuck to accept the majority share in Bass Industries. For all his harsh words to his son prior to his death, that cold dead bastard Bart Bass seemed to really believe in Chuck’s business acumen, and Blair believes in it, too. Newly confident, Chuck returns to Uncle Jack and tells him that he wants to take over Bass Industries, fully accepting the responsibilities of his inheritance. I love Uncle Jack, so much, because the exchange between the two younger Bass men in this scene opened with Jack cracking a joke about his relationship with his nephew:

“Well, you noticed that the Thai waitress I was gonna take home the other night had a penis, so . . .”

But all joking aside, Jack is none-too-pleased when Chuck Bass demands that he take over Bass Industries, fulfilling the role his father wanted for him. Immediately, Jack hatches an evil scheme to ruin his nephew. He calls Blair and tells her that he wants to throw a surprise party for Chuck, which Blair opts to help coordinate, even if Chuck’s new responsibilities as head of a company keep him from missing the romantic dinner in that she got all dressed up for in a really cute black and silver cocktail dress. Of course, those “new responsibilities” are actually Uncle Jack baiting Chuck to once again become Opium Zombie Chuck with the promise of good times, drugs and loose women.

Meanwhile, Dan is still avoiding Serena, while Jenny can’t keep the hell away from Eric. Jenny has been spending all of her free time becoming New York’s Most Annoying Fag Hag by constantly being the third wheel on Eric and Jonathan’s dates. This annoys Eric. It should, because it annoys me. Serena tries to assure Dan that their parents are not getting back together, which she assumes is the thing keeping him from being with her, spouting out something about a text message from her mom and a joke about French president Sarkozy not being a good kisser, which Dan remarks is one more thing to be disappointed with. What the fuck, Gossip Girl? That’s a really weird line. Why the fuck does Dan care about politics in France? Is this going to be a new interest of his? Like how being a writer suddenly became a character trait? The Gossip Girl universe has never been concerned with real people unless they are fashion designers or entertainers, so to go out of one’s way to write a line about a foreign politico is really odd.

Anyway, overhearing one of these conversations makes Penelope think that Dan may be cheating on Serena. She puts out a hit on Gossip Girl about him, asking people to dig up information. So far, the worst thing they find is that Dan brown bags his lunch and eats tuna salad sandwiches. (I’m sorry, does Daddy Rufus not have a panini press at home? Jesus, Brooklyn really is the fucking sticks.) That is, until Nelly Yuki spies on a very revealing conversation with Vanessa, during which she manages to steal Dan’s phone as Dan reveals to Vanessa (in a candy shop!) that his father and Lily had a child together. Relying only on information from the last Gossip Girl blast, the icky scary mini tween mean girls (who, despite their addictions to fashion and gossip, actually do, like children, hang out in a candy shop) show up to blast Dan for cheating on Serena and to remind Vanessa that she’s dating up by dating Nate Archibald. Thanks, characters that really frighten me. I think Vanessa already knew that. Later, Serena goes to visit Vanessa, hoping to find out the secret Dan has been keeping from her, but Vanessa will not betray Dan’s confidence.

The next day, at Chuck’s celebratory brunch, Penelope and the mean girls prepare to release the information bomb they found on Dan’s phone: Serena and Dan share a sibling. They ask Blair for her okay to release the information, but she is too distracted by Chuck’s absence to bother with trite high school crap, giving Penelope the okay regardless of the caliber of information. When Jack arrives without Chuck, Blair suspects that something might be wrong. Jack assures her that Chuck is hard at work in his office upstairs, and asks Blair to take a couple of the Bass Industries board members up to meet him. Like the dutiful wife Chuck scorns her for pretending to be, she leads them right into the horrific scene of Chuck cavorting with two scantily clad women and snorting lines off his father’s stately desk, making a truly bad impression on the members of the board, one so scandalous it would make any board demand the resignation of the affected party.

Jenny, stop trying to be part of my relationship. In no way do Jonathan and I want to have sex with you.

Downstairs, Jenny and Eric have it out over her fag haggy clinginess and he calls her irritating and conceited, both of which are, in fact, true statements. But then they and the entire party receive the text blast from Gossip Girl, dropping the bomb about the secret Hump Der Woodsen child on the unwitting Serena, Jenny and Eric. The Hump Der Woodsen children exit the party ASAP to cope with this new information. Jenny realizes that it only makes sense for them to share a sibling as all four of them fight like siblings (you know, with the ones that aren’t actually their siblings), but Serena can’t really deal with this information at all. When Dan confirms the truth of the situation, she gives her best (worst?) Garbo and goes off to be alone for a while.

After the party is over and the coke has worn off, Chuck goes to apple-cheeked Uncle Jack and demands to know why he wasn’t told he would be meeting board members. Jack admits to his evil plan to get Chuck so wasted and lie to him so that Jack, Chuck’s legal guardian, would gain the majority share in the company by pointing out the loophole: a morality clause that determined care of the company would go to Chuck’s legal guardian should he act, in any way, unbecoming of the chairman and CEO of a major real estate company. This was a pretty good evil plan, as far as evil plans that don’t involve death go. I thought the threat of nephew-cide was imminent, but apparently Uncle Jack is more of the type to keep his hands clean, yet filled with hookers. (Not that I’d want Chuck to die. I love Chuck and would never want any harm to come to him. I just thought they were going to go the really high drama route of foiled murder attempts.) Realizing the ass he’s been made of and how poorly he treated Blair when she had been nothing but kind and helpful to him, Chuck comes to Chez Waldorf to apologize, a bouquet of ranunculae in hand. But Blair refuses to accept his apology or his flowers, telling him that she can’t stand the emotional abuse anymore as tears well up in her giant brown eyes. To add insult to injury, she throws the flowers at his feet as the elevator doors close on him. I’m terribly sad that Blair and Chuck appear to be falling apart again, but that only sets us up for an arc where we’ll likely see suave Chuck try to win back the only girl who will ever actually love him.

As all of this drama goes down on the Upper East Side, Rufus and Lily wait around in a hotel in Boston for any word on their son. They were able to find the agency that placed him with adoptive parents, but as it was a closed adoption, there is no way for them to meet their son, unless, the adoption agent tells them – sympathizing, perhaps, for the fact that Rufus didn’t even know he had another child until recently – that they might have a chance at seeing their son if they get in touch with the adoptive parents directly. The adoptive parents call and demand that Rufus and Lily never contact them again, denying them a chance to see their son. Then Rufus and Lily reminisce and she admits that she wants to give up trying because every moment she spends in a hotel with Rufus is another moment that she cannot deny the fact that she’s in love with him. Naturally, Rufus takes this as a cue to have sex with her, and they reminisce some more about what I’m pretty sure is the time he impregnated her, after a concert Lincoln Hawk played in Paris.

They then receive a call from the adoptive father, who asks to meet with them privately, under his wife’s radar. When they meet the man, he tells them that he hadn’t wanted to meet with them because their son, Andrew, died last year in a freak sailing accident. All Lily wants to know is that the brief life her son had with his adoptive parents was a happy one, and the adoptive father assures her that it was. Satisfied with the knowledge that they will never meet their son (although, technically, Lily has met Andrew . . . you know . . . on his birthday . . .), Rufus and Lily return home to the Humphrey loft. Lily bemoans the fact that the dead Hump Der Woodsen son means that she and Rufus were, perhaps, never meant to be a family, only to walk in and find the other Hump Der Woodsen children, hanging out in the kitchen eating PB&J after having made up for all of their recent fights, Eric and Jenny mutually apologizing for being bitchy to one another and Dan and Serena deciding to stay together, citing various literary precedents as well as the movie Clueless, in which Cher hooks up with her ex-stepbrother Josh. Indeed, Clueless is, like, totally cultural capitol.

But not to be outdone by the oddly problematic romance of two people who share a sibling, back in Boston, the adoptive mother joins her husband at the table and asks if Lily and Rufus are gone for good. Her husband assures her that they will never call again, to which she states that she’s glad she doesn’t have to face the threat of losing another child. The missing Hump Der Woodsen is very much alive, it seems, and very likely not named Andrew. I hope that, if he should somehow get wind that his birth parents wanted to meet him and he takes a bus down to New York, The Missing Hump Der Woodsen turns out to be way cooler than 90210‘s Secret Brother Sean. That guy was a dick. And not an actual Secret Brother.

The Husband:

A very expository but not very emotionally involving episode, this week’s GG nonetheless hit hard with all of its dangling story threads, putting a remarkable amount of effort into making even the most ridiculous plot twist seem perfectly natural (i.e. the adoptive parents using a newspaper clipping about the drowning of their one son and making it seem as if it was actually about the missing Hump Der Woodsen). Even Uncle Jack’s story has already rocketed through what would take other shows as least six episodes to handle while at the same time making him a more interesting character in a mere two episodes than Nate Archibald has been in two seasons.

I loved the “hidden” morality clause, loved the hookers-and-opium set-up and was very happy that Rufus and Lily hooked up in a manner not so melodramatic but more in tune with their actual loving relationship. How refreshing.

But was I on bated breath about how any of the characters really felt? Not really, and that’s a weird feeling to have. Even when everyone seems to have given up on caring about Dan, I still really relate to him, but I will admit that he’s becoming less interesting this season in comparison to s1.