This episode is just like a teenage boy: dirty, excitable, melodramatic, headlong, and not as complicated as it thinks it is. And, if you're a young woman in a position of authority, like a teacher or a nanny, I guess that's enough to make you have sex with it. Come to think of it, those words also describe Blair's Blueprint for War on Rachel Carr, which despite touting itself as New and Different and Amazing, really just comes down to B yelling at a bunch of people to find some dirt, finding the dirt, posting that dirt to Gossip Girl, and then lying through her teeth about steps 1 - 3.
Not that much different from any other episode, really, and made easier by the fact that Rachel Carr is apparently the stupidest person in existence. She runs around crossing boundaries and doing inappropriate shit the entire episode, which is annoying for a teacher, and then whines when people talk smack about her on the internet, which is annoying period, because the internet is not real life. That's two reasons for her murder, but it looks like she'll be around for awhile longer. In fact, the only thing that makes this episode different is that there's no Biggest Social Event of the Season -- for the first time ever, and which the omission of sucks -- and the fact that this episode is totally on crack -- which does not suck at all.
Blair makes a silly speech about destroying Rachel Carr that goes nowhere with the Plastics, then notices the total sex vibe between Rachel Carr and Dan (not to mention Serena). She tosses a crumb GG's way, and everything spirals out of control! Dan and Rachel convince Serena that they only have eyes for her, but then Serena stalks the shit out of Rachel and ends up seeing Dan playing with Rachel's unemployed hair at a coffee shop. This causes her to take a photograph and run away and give the picture immediately to Blair. Because they are so close, as best friends, that whenever Serena leaves town Blair turns into a secret cutter -- but S just forgot that she was a sociopath. Especially now that she has been expelled from Constance and has lost her shot at Yale forever.
The Doppelqueller that has replaced our beloved headmistress throws a big school board meeting because parents are in an uproar! Rufus is convinced that his child's life will never be the same, and wants Blair to be put to death! Harold Waldorf wanders around with a bulldog, dressed all gay and fighting for his daughter's right to be a bitch and tell lies! There is a big school board meeting about it! Blair gets Rachel fired, but Harold finds out it was a lie in the first place, and pouts! Because they are so close, as father and daughter, that just saying his name forces her to throw up pie on demand -- but he didn't know she was a sociopath? Maybe he just forgot too.
Meanwhile, on some other awesome show that makes no sense at all, the late Bart Bass was a member of an elite sex cabal of powerful men (real verbatim dialogue: "Turn on CNN, walk down Wall Street, go to Washington: that's who they are") that's like a cross between Eyes Wide Shut and Plato's Retreat where they put on masks and fuck prostitutes in houses that are on the market. Chuck received an invite by accident last night, and has vague recollections of fucking the "most beautiful" woman he's ever "seen" wearing a mask, but that's about it.
The reason is that she got so scared for his safety, once she noticed that he was a teenage boy and not the famous real estate magnate, that she had to roofie him and stash him in a hotel room so she could go back to Greenwich where she works as a nanny. Chuck gets obsessed with her, tracks her down, and eventually gets her disappeared, but this does not stop him from dragging Nate and Vanessa into the business. Wisely, they stay out of it and have an elite sex cabal of two, the way God intended.
So Serena runs around the entire time apologizing to everybody, because that's every episode, and Rachel's heart is like so broken and Dan's judger is like so judgey, and then he goes over to apologize to Rachel for being uninvolved in her getting fired, and she devours him like the mighty unemployed cougar of the mountains. So the lie that was true that wasn't true turns out not to be a lie, in the fullness of time, and what's so sad is that Blair doesn't even know it, and just feels like she let her dad down. I'm tired of waiting for her to go insane, but maybe this will do it.
Then, at this precise moment in time that they are boning Letourneau style, the Doppelqueller decides not to fire Rachel after all, and Serena decides for the one billionth time that she didn't actually mean to break up with Dan, so by their own actions they have turned him and Rachel into an entire episode of Tyra without their knowledge, which means that once again Dan is fucking it up for everybody, but this time it is awesome because he's not even doing anything bad, and nobody even knows that the thing that was made up at the beginning of the episode is now totally true, just because Blair Waldorf imagined it hard enough. This is why you don't fuck with Blair Waldorf: she can actually will you into being a pedophile.
Yeah, so um, apparently March is the new February? And so I'll see you in March! Yeah, you heard right. Not exactly a high note to leave on, but the show's been off its game -- and seemingly rewriting itself every week -- since around the time Jack showed up. I'm willing to wait for it to right itself.
Watch our vloggers take on the show. Come back Monday for Jacob's full detailed recap.
Remember newspapers? Remember The Family Circus? And sometimes instead of just doing a normal shitty cartoon, they will pretend that a kid wrote it, even though the kid in question is probably now pushing 70 and embarrassed to even be associated with it? That's what this episode of Gossip Girl was like: as if somebody who had maybe seen the show a few times but wasn't incredibly bright was given a crack at it. Or maybe the Make A Wish Foundation is involved somehow. I don't know what the fuck went wrong here, but I do know I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time worrying about it. This recap comes to you from South Padre Island, on the off-season, and I've got a ton of fun shit to do that doesn't involve watching something I love being slowly bludgeoned to death. Yesterday I bought a kite with a completely awesome rainbow unicorn on it, and I will be damned if I'm gonna leave town before flying that bitch proudly.
While Serena gets dressed for school, Blair is busy doing detention duty in the Park, picking up garbage. By which I mean Blair is on her cell busily bitching to Serena about the disgrace of being given detention -- for the first time in her "16,982 hours of schooling" -- while watching Dorota do the heavy lifting. Serena cracks that just hearing the number makes her want to play hooky, and B goes back to her favorite new hobby: resenting Rachel Carr. S points out that B was asking for it because of that time that she invited Rachel to dinner at a closed restaurant. I love how suddenly everybody thinks this is a huge deal. Last year, Blair outed Serena for a nonexistent drug habit in front of a whole slew of college advisors. This year: invited to dinner as a joke. And everybody plays along like this is a huge deal. Man, I thought the Uncle Jack three-parter was disappointing, but this Rachel Carr storyline is just retardedly bad.
Serena reminds us and Blair -- as though any of us care -- that Rachel is the first teacher, adult, or human to take her seriously, and Blair gets jealous and starts accusing S of being in love with her, and Serena distractedly admits that she and Dan are not doing great. This is because they have no reason to be together, and have broken up eleven times, but B doesn't bother to point that out. S takes off to go stalk Rachel some more, and B whines to Dorota that S is "sympathetic to the enemy," so she has to "cross her off [B's] list of recruits." Issue one: S has never taken part in a Blair scheme, ever. There's no reason for her to do so, and B would never think to "recruit" her for anything at all. Harold Waldorf comes walking up with Handsome the bulldog, and they have a quick talk about what a martyr Blair is, which impresses Dorota not a whit.
At breakfast, Rachel is telling Dan Humphrey how talented he is and how great his stories are. Anyone with any sense of reality would know right at this very early point that Rachel is a pedo, because Dan's a horrible writer and nobody has any business telling him otherwise unless they're trying to tap that. But the show wavers on this point. They talk about how she feels isolated and alone, like an outsider, due to her incomplete personality, willingness to play favorites on campus, and willingness to cross every sort of social or well-intentioned boundary possible with as many young people as there are hours in the day. They joke about the subway for awhile, and then Rachel returns to her favorite subject, and Dan's: talking shit about everybody at the school or on the Upper East Side that is not them. Nothing terribly original is said, because look who's talking.
Just as Rachel is mentioning her draconian plans to get the students' minds focused back on school and off themselves, Serena -- who's got enough brain left over after thinking about herself to do okay in school -- walks up and is, justly, grossed out by the fact of them. Rachel immediately falls all over herself like many puppies, talking about how amazing Dan is, et cetera, and Serena's like, "I know, trust me." So now there are three people in this scene with grossly inflated senses of Dan's Humphrey worth. Dan leaves awkwardly, after awkwardly punching S in the arm, as though to say, "You are my girlfriend, but only by default." Rachel's still googly-eyed about Dan long after he's left, which makes S both jealous and uncomfortable, so she lies and says she needs more time with her King Lear essay. Rachel checks her purse for the fuck she was going to give, but cannot locate it anywhere.
Chuck wakes up in a hotel room and has memories of being in a wannabe-sexy, seriously stupid storyline with no hope of redemption, so he calls up Nate and Nate's like, "Girl, that's all I've ever known."
Blair brings her detention slip to Rachel Carr, who is I think being completely sincere when she keeps talking about how there are things B can learn from this exercise. I think the key to this show right now is assuming that Rachel is totally legit, like, everything she says is straight up authentic. Even the whole Dan thing, she might as well be saying "I want your high school bone" the whole time. So I believe her, or else this show is suddenly stupid to an unwatchable degree. "I made friends with a family of squirrels and had lots of time to think," Blair says of her time in the park, and then stares at Rachel with a Deluxe Waldorf Are You Fuckin' Kidding Me? when Rachel replies that Thoreau "found nature inspiring as well."
B strides four feet to a table and bitches at her Plastics, who are not interested in getting into even further trouble by continuing to fuck with Rachel. She claps her hands loudly and explains: "Do you need a refresher? I say, you do." Which is... not how you get or keep "minions." Or "friends." Or "from being slapped to death." If this were honestly how B behaved, historically, she wouldn't be Queen B of anything except having every meal or drink that ever went in her mouth tainted with pee. Who wants to be queen of that? Then stupid music swells and she gives some stupid speech about how their legacy depends on not letting "Cornflower Mary" decide their fates. The score in this episode is beyond the fucking pale, by the way, between this dumbass scene and the Eyes Wide Shut crap with Chuck.
The speech is interminable, and not clever, but just like this floating idea of "it would be funny if B gave a big speech with swelling music" that doesn't fulfill the back end this show usually does of also being enjoyable in the execution of the funny idea. Then that goddamn fake Queller woman starts collecting everybody's cell phones, and of course Rachel is at the root of this evil, and Nelly Yuki actually goes, "Who could be behind such pure evil?" And there's a dreadfully long scene of them getting closer and closer and finally, there's Rachel, putting the phones into individual blue velvet bags, and the girls are back at B's side ready to do her bidding.
The thing about this show, and The O.C., was that you had the funny "guess what happened on that show last night?" thing, but also the real-life backup reality that made it not stupid. The problem with this episode, and pretty much the show since Jack showed up, is that there's no second layer: just "look at me, I'm so fucked up" without actually being interesting, or all that fucked up. Like the thing with the speech and the cell phones, and this stupid scene coming up: not realistic. It's not realistic that Hazel would be in withdrawal from not checking Gossip Girl, or phantom-texting, or saying shit like "Is a scandal still a scandal if you can't text about it?"
This is why we don't do cocaine at work: because things that seem hilarious at 3AM rarely are quite so funny by the light of day, and that's what rewrites are for. This whole episode is just a succession of four-beer "hilarious" ideas without the follow-through necessary to make them part of the story and not just gestures. And even Blair just fucking grates. It's like, the last two seasons of The L Word have been amazing because Jenny's inner insanity has finally blossomed and become part of the show. But these latest episodes, it's like that's trying to happen, but it's just stupid because the other 153 episodes have been about these people being, you know, people. Anyway, Dorota brings them a bunch of phones ("Thank you Jesus!" screams Hazel; "Thank you Blair," B corrects) wearing a disguise that consists of her usual outfit, plus sunglasses, and Nelly Yuki begs to check the Dow, and B gets up on a window seat and yells, "Nelly Yuki, get a grip! Girls, these phones are our ammo. I want you to dig deep -- and I mean deep -- into Rachel's past. We're gonna run that commie cornhusker straight out of Constance."
Nate and Vanessa are like two dachshunds that grew up together, and they crawl all over each other and trot from place to place and sniff each other all the time and laugh at private dachshund jokes. Seriously, they laugh uproariously the entire episode for no reason at all, and come off looking sort of unhinged and very, very self-conscious. I bet the script was like, "NATE and VANESSA laugh," and they were like, "I guess we're supposed to laugh, again, at this point. Should we think of a reason? Nah. Nobody else cares, and we have no vested interest in this show."
So they meet up with Chuck outside some apartment somewhere, and Vanessa -- speaking of things nobody would ever say, even her -- goes, "Talk about the filthy rich! What happened to you?" As though even an unshowered Chuck Bass would smell that bad, "natural musk" and all, but mostly: the fuck says that, honestly? There is no reality check. Anyway, he uses the number on the invitation he got yesterday to unlock the realtor box and get the key out. So this ridiculous Bohemian Grove sex club uses houses where people no longer live to stage their little games. That's sort of cool. That's the only cool thing about this entire deal: realty fraud. And that sucks, because this could be frothy fun but instead it's completely toothless and flashbacky and has a distinctly stupid National Treasure/Dan Brown kind of feeling to it instead.
Chuck explains, over gaywad flashbacks that illustrate the stupid story he's telling, that he got an envelope yesterday that led him to this building where it was all flabby rich powerful white guys and naked chicks in masks hanging out on divahhhhns (which V nails as the Chuck Bass version of Narnia, for which she gets many points now only to have them deducted later) and once inside and past the velvet curtains there was some chick -- "the most beautiful woman I've ever seen" -- who climbed on top of him and then nothing happened, and it was awesome, and he got roofied and woke up in a hotel. "In a cruel twist of fate," Chuck says out loud, "I don't even remember her name." He says he's hoping a visit to the place will ring a bell, and then Nate and Vanessa laugh and laugh and laugh.
"Between milking cows in Des Moines and teaching low income kids to read and write, Ms. Carr is clean as a whistle," says Iz. Blair insults Hazel's hair even though it looks totally cute, because there is no script supervision here, because the producers are all off at the shore or something, and B tells them the truth is letting her down, so they need to abandon it. They stare at her uncomprehendingly, and she goes, "Make something up, idiots," and leaves. "With friends like these, who needs friends? Stupid," she bitches to herself. What was it that brought her down the first time, during the pregnancy scare? Wasn't it like some tiny faux pas and being mean to Jenny? Now she's literally asking to get shanked, and saying shit nobody would ever say. I don't get it. I don't get how this episode happened. To use my "I" statements: I feel sad, and confused, and a little scared, because this episode sucks sweaty trucker balls, and I own that.
Dan and Rachel bump into each other in the hallway, and it's gross, but again completely unrealistic gestures towards an actual conversation that might happen, where he's crushy-crushy and she's grody-grody, and Blair says six or seven unforgivably stupid, bitching things to the Plastics before sending GG a text that says "Lonely Boy and Ms. Carr? Mary Kay Letourneau alert!" and then grinning to herself evilly: "XOXO..." Ugh. Look, I am not in the business of defending things I love. If you don't like something, more power to you, because I'm going to be over here enjoying myself. I believe that the quality of art is heavily dependent on the viewer, which is why blowing off TV categorically is stupid and shortsighted and embarrassing. And this show, when it's rocking, is the greatest story ever devised.
But were I to be drawn into a conversation about the merits of this show, and should my little lecture about how women's narratives and children's narratives are historically undervalued in our culture go unheeded, my greatest fear is now that this episode would enter the field of play, and I hate it for being future ammo against my sense of self more than anything. As much as this is like some dullard Gossip Girl fan's idea of what an episode of this show might be like, it is also -- and this is painful to realize -- a non-fan's idea of what this show is like: bombastic music, people scheming to themselves like they're on Passions, ridiculous momentary situations and conversations that don't pass simple BS tests, everybody a cartoon, every joke telegraphed and underlined and not that funny to begin with. For like the fourth week running: Too much soap, not enough opera.
Everybody high-fives Dan Humphrey in the courtyard for finally doing something admirable, and Jenny brings over the GG post written on her hand, and Dan makes fun of her old homeless makeup habits so that it's like the show winking at us and pretending to be our friend, and he gets all defensive about how he's not sleeping with Rachel yet, and then Serena comes up and gives him a chance to explain himself, and they figure out that the only person on the Upper East Side that's not in love with her -- because if both S and Lonelyboy think she's great, and they're the center of the universe, then it must be so -- is Blair Waldorf. Dan makes like he's about to murderize B in Rachel's honor and throws a self-righteous hissy fit about how this time, "she's gone way too far."
What are Vanessa and Nate doing? What do you think? Giggling inanely for no reason at the piano in the house where Chuck met the most beautiful woman he still hasn't seen. I keep wanting to bitch about how he said that even though she was wearing a mask, but I can see defending that line in a better episode, with some kind of high-flying metaphor about masks and burlesque and the girl inside the thing inside the mask or whatever, so fuck it. Once we see her -- bearing a fucking candle like this is the moors of Scotland and not a huge apartment in Manhattan -- we will see that she's pretty, in the way that girls in L.A. are pretty on their way to being hard. Then he finds a picture of her sitting on the piano with a kid in her arms, and it takes Nate's brilliant steel-trap mind to point out that, since this house is for sale, they could call the realtor.
Dan Humphrey comes galumphing down the hallway doing a fair impression of masculinity, then ruins it by striding purposefully into the Ladies', where B is applying the most wonderful lip gloss to ever gloss a lip. She makes a fucking stupid joke about how he's a girl, and tells him to fuck off and stop bothering her about Doomed Rachel, and he gives some speech about how amazing she is, and Blair delivers an excellent line: "Oh! That is so sweet! Maybe you should write a short story about it and have 'Rachel' give you notes! Naked!" She shoves past him, and his butchness drains away and he turns back into Awkward Lad. Even when she's wrong, she's right.
S stalks Rachel to a coffee cart and gives her the essay, unchanged, even though Rachel's got massive bitchface for no reason, and Rachel gives her this "I totally understand you" speech about how Dan is justified in thinking that he's more talented than God, but Serena has every reason in the world to be insecure about her gifts, because Lily never bought her blank books when she was a kid, just Chanel purses. S agrees, which hurts to see even when it's not Dan' absurd and hateful judgments on her and her lifestyle that she's agreeing with. "Yeah, I'm a vapid twit, you got me there! You and Dan, I tell you what. I would probably think I was pretty great if you guys weren't around to help me remember to hate myself."
So all the people are whispering and gossiping about Rachel and her complete lack of professional boundaries, and S explains about the Dan rumor, dumbly mentioning Gossip Girl: "I've been on Gossip Girl plenty of times, and for the worst things. Some of them were true, some of them weren't. But eventually, everyone forgets. The best thing to do with these things is just nothing at all." Of course, she only mentions Gossip Girl because Rachel and her complete lack of professional boundaries have fooled S into thinking that they are girlfriends, and then once Rachel jumps up her ass about it, S realizes she has no exit strategy, and heads off at a full-tilt canter with little to no farewell. Making it totally obvious that B is to blame, of course.
So who should come walking up but Dan, wanting to talk in private about Rachel and her complete lack of professional boundaries, and who is happier to run off to a private location with Dan to talk about the rumors of them going to private locations than Rachel and her complete lack of professional boundaries.
Back at the property, it's a very long scene indeed that resolves down to: the family selling the house has moved to Greenwich, the most beautiful girl in the world in the photo is their nanny, and then Chuck bribes the real estate agent to leave him alone with their contact info long enough to call the family and get the nanny's name, which is Elle, and things are mysterious and whatever.
Blair heads into Doppelqueller's office with her usual bouncy hair, but her vibe goes flaccid when she sees Rachel standing there. What has happened is that Dan Humphrey went running to Rachel after B left him standing in the bathroom holding his lack of dick, and then the whole thing was confirmed by Nelly Yuki, who comes in looking shamefaced and reminding us that the Plastics did tell B to leave it alone. And then Blair is expelled from Constance Billard.
Of course, she immediately takes to her bed -- "Yale will revoke my acceptance as soon as they receive word. This is my darkest hour..." -- and Harold points out that if B started the rumor, there's a legitimate case for "slander," by which he -- and everyone else on this show -- means "libel." She admits she sent a tip to GG, but points out that all the girls do it, and swears that all she wrote was the truth. Which is also pretty much true, and another problem with this episode, because the whole thing about how once again B is drawn over the line into too far, but she should have actually gone too far in order for this story to make sense, and they keep telling us she did, but all I saw was a blind item-style question mark: "Lonelyboy and Rachel? Yuck!" Which, and I hate to agree with Rufus about anything, is valid. Rachel has been acting wildly inappropriate since she showed up. Harold promises to fight for Blair's right to return to Constance, and B gets worried that she has gone too far.
"So you ratted on Blair? You Templeton!" says Vanessa. Which is fine, although weird that it's following on the Narnia thing, and then fucking Dan Humphrey ruins her whole thing by calling this out as a "Charlotte's Web-sult," which is not only fucking unnecessary because we're not retarded, but also an offensive coinage in its own right. Dan justifies himself as best he can, which is hard considering he just got his girlfriend's best friend expelled and basically taken away her chance to attend Yale, for no real reason except to prove something to Rachel, which is also gross. Rufus comes in asking them about it, and Rufus is all "my son is the object of a slander!" And somebody brings a package for Vanessa Abrams, which we know because the guy goes, "Package for Vanessa Abrams!" and there's a mask in there and a card identical to the one Chuck got, so she runs off, and then Rufus is like, "Are you fucking that teacher?" And Dan goes, "My tea is getting cold," by which he means, "I wish."
S meets Rachel in the park with coffee, and tries to explain to Rachel that vengefully going after Blair's entire future for something as stupid as digital graffiti is stupid and vile, and which like any time a teacher gets up their own asshole about the internet or things people say on the internet, is more about her own drama and her own ignorance than anything else. Hey, who doesn't enjoy being a victim? (Worthwhile people.) Rachel whines and goes on and on about how evil and awful Gossip Girl is, because she's dumb enough to think that the internet is real, and S finally shows a little teeth when she reminds Rachel she's not there to defend the fucking website, she's there to ask Rachel not to bitch out for no real reason and screw her friend over. Rachel then... Leaves, with a petulant little "I do hope we can still be friends." Um, no. And PS? We're not friends. You are a teacher and I am a student, you lonely fucking pathetic idiot.
S calls Blair and tells her she couldn't help; B is wearing an insane dress with giant puffy sleeves, and wanders away from the phone in the middle of the conversation to order Dorota around: "Give Handsome to a homeless man. Make sure he has kind eyes." Blair stares into space looking totally insane, and S stalks Rachel some more: her datebook was hidden by Serena's giant purse, so now she knows that the date she's running off to is Le Petit Oeuf, 5 PM. Meaning that before the big hearing to discuss her fucking a student, she is going to meet that student across town for dinner. A grown woman and a teenage boy, just having some secret dinner, that's all. Rachel Carr is too goddamn stupid to live.
Lily and Rufus head into Constance laughing about how many canceled restaurant reservations it takes to get a parents' meeting together on a Saturday, and they run into Harold, and Rufus gets all fucking righteous in his face about how his son was "slandered," and Lily shoves him out of the way with an embarrassed flush, which is how she is electing to spend the entirety of the rest of her life: apologizing for Rufus.
Chuck calls Nathaniel, who is standing around with roses of course, and they talk about how Chuck is still obsessed with Elle, but also lies for some reason about fucking a double-jointed chiropractor, and Nate's like, "Talk to you later!" without ever asking WTF he was calling about, because the truth is that there is no reason for him to call Nate except to transition into this scene and have Chuck be doing something in that empty house in the dark near a mirror so that Elle can appear out of nowhere holding a taper candle like her hobby is commuting into the city each night and haunting houses where she used to live. Why.
Rachel thanks Dan with dinner for ratting out Blair for the thing she did that doesn't matter at all. Then she starts crying and whatever, and tells Dan she would never sleep with him... Unless he went to a different school. INAPPROPRIATE! She tells him to call her in five years. INAPPROPRIATE. He wipes the tears from her face, and S comes stalking them around the corner and sees him like stroking her hair and shit, and takes a photo, and of course the second she turns around Rachel's like, "Dinner yes, offering to fuck you yes, but a hug? INAPPROPRIATE. Learn some boundaries, Humphrey." So he apologizes and she runs away, and Dan is a tool some more. "Spotted: Lonelyboy, going from teacher's pet to persona non grata in the pitter-patter of a heartbeat." Even GG doesn't give a fuck this week. Think about your life, about your job: how far would it fly if you decided to take a vacation, but still showed up at work for some reason? "What are you doing here, Jones?" Absolutely fucking nothing, sir. This is my vacation. "Then why are you here, Jones?" To piss Jacob off, sir.
"That invitation wasn't for you. You were never supposed to be at that party. What do you remember?" Chuck's like, "Almost fucking you," but that's not what she's talking about, she explains, but is so into being mysterious that she just refuses to fucking say what she's actually saying. This is so embarrassing. "I wasn't at that party to meet you. I was there for another man. Your father." This show is as dead to me as Chuck's father is to him. "I know that... now. I took over a girl's client list. I sent the invitation without realizing. When you told me your name was Chuck, I realized that I had the wrong Mr. Bass. I had to get you out of there, I had to make sure that you didn't remember anything that you saw." Chuck's like, "You roofied me to... Put me in a hotel and go back to Connecticut? WTF is the point of this storyline?" And she's like, "What matters is that I left you at that hotel to keep you safe... Turn on CNN. Walk down Wall Street, go to Washington. That's who they are. And if they find out that I let an outsider in... Lose the card. The stamp on your arm will fade. And stop asking questions. Stop looking!" Chuck mentions Eyes Wide Shut, which is grounds to move that our whole relationship with this show be stricken from the record, because what are you, new? If you're ripping off a storyline from a movie, the one rule is that you don't say the movie. Also: don't rip off stuff at all. Be better. Write better.
Vanessa shows up at Nate's house wearing the mask, because far from her being in physical danger like you might have hoped, this was a little joke at Chuck's response. And what do we do about jokes? Oh, how we laugh.
"Turns out I can still apply to Oberlin," B says darkly, and S sits all sad with a secret in her phone. B, of course, assumes that S is feeling shitty because of Blair's expulsion, and S finally blurts out that she was right about Dan and Rachel. "Seriously? I must've picked up on something!" But then she's sad again, because they need proof. But then she's happy again, because S's sad face says they have proof. But then S doesn't feel like that would be a good move, but then B tells her that confirming the details with him would just "give him another opportunity to lie" to Serena, which -- since in this episode S is as cartoonishly stupid and gullible as B is cartoonishly stupid and bitchy -- convinces her to turn it over. "How awful!" B says, sparing a moment's sympathy about it, and then going right back to scheming: "But this is the smoking gun I've been waiting for." Serena gives a half-hearted protest, but B is off. "We have to get to that meeting. Dorota! Go get my dog back!" S texts Lonelyboy to meet her at Constance, with the angriest ASAP you ever saw in text form.
Harold explains that it's ridiculous for the school to think it can control what children write on a public site that has nothing to do with school, and then Rufus offers his professional, incorrect legal opinion that what B posted was slander, and a school board lesbian yells about seeking an injunction against Gossip Girl and shutting her down, which makes Lily laugh because that's dumb as hell and a million copies will grow back in its place, and Rufus is all, "This isn't some note on the bathroom wall, Lil! It's on the internet!" Which is exactly what you would expect Rufus to say, because he's old and clueless and looking for attention, but doesn't change the fact that the internet actually is just a very large bathroom wall, and anybody who cares about this shit or goes after their employees based on it has bigger problems than their basic inability to understand how the world works. Lily points out that Yale is a sort of steep price to pay, and Rufus goes, "What about Dan's future? How long is this gonna follow him?"
Um, what? Dan's life is going to somehow suffer because of a rumor in high school that he boned a hot young teacher? What does Rufus think Dan's future holds? The only job I can think of where that would be weird is like, old folk's home orderly. Or if he became a teacher, it might be weird for you to look at his permanent record and see that he crossed that line, but Rufus assuming this whole rape stigma on Dan's behalf is beyond offensive. B comes running in, and Rachel looks like she's been stabbed, and then B shows them the picture of Dan almost hugging Rachel, and obnoxiously goes, "I believe it's called exculpatory evidence? I love Damages." Good show, and I believe that she likes it, but whatever. Outside, Serena's like, "Fuck you! Almost hugging!" and Dan says, "Nothing happened," and S says, "Dammit. Like the one fuckin' time I actually show some backbone, and I was wrong. Guess I learned my lesson."
The doors open, and Lily comforts Rufus for a second before ... wandering away out of the scene, and Rufus yells at Dan about how they will talk later, and then Rachel comes out crying and fired, and then B comes out beaming: "I'm back in! I saved myself! And Gossip Girl!" Dan yells, "You used this photo of Rachel and me to back up a rumor that is nothing more than a vengeful lie!" And Blair goes: "So?" Serena gives her the ixnay, but B's on a high: "You say 'lie,' I say 'eerily prophetic.'" Harold throws a hissy about that, and stomps off, and B looks stricken, and then Dan grills S about why on Earth -- after the million not-so-subtle nonverbal and explicitly stated clues to how fucking over they are about to be -- she would think that anything was going on. S doesn't really have an answer, because that's how intuition works, and Dan's like, "What makes you so disgusting?" She explains that she is just looking for reasons to dump his lame ass at this point, literally, and then they break up for the one hundred and eleven thousandth time.
And you know, it's not that they're the Ryan and Marissa so much as -- stay with me -- the anti-Seth and Summer. Who, memorably, were "together even when they weren't together"; fuckin' Dan and Serena are broken up even when they're together. I can't even keep track of whether or not they're together, and it's my fucking job. I don't buy it, I don't like it, I refuse to acknowledge it. Which means no matter how many times Dan gets dewy and goes, "Wow, it's really over, isn't it?" -- which he does every fucking third episode, if she's not the one that gets to say it -- I don't believe it. They are a cat in a box that is neither alive nor dead, but partaking horrifically of qualities of both.
Rufus puts down his goddamn coffee when Dan comes home and, having taken his Paxil, is like, "Lily told me about you and Serena. Are you okay?" WHAT? Like Serena and Lily ran home to compare notes on the Humphreys and Serena was like, "We broke up," and instead of going "What? You were back together?" Lily went, "I gotta call Rufus and tell him." Dan explains that he is okay about the breakup, because he's no more invested in that relationship than Serena -- or us -- but really wants to know what happened with Rachel in the meeting. Rufus explains that, sex or not, Rachel was meeting a hot young student (whom she didn't even teach) off-campus, after hours. And that this is gross.
Dan throws a huge fit, realizing that Rufus voted to fire her, and then stomps around and puts a jacket over the ladies' rollneck cardigan he clearly borrowed from his father, and -- as he's leaving the house -- bitches, "I should be punished! Not her!" Rufus... Watches him leave. Where the eff does he think he's going? Meanwhile, Serena brings the datebook back to Rachel and dumbly explains that she took the photo because she was jealous because she loves Rachel, and Rachel repays her with yet more bitchface and telling Serena to go fuck herself. Because any of this is her fault.
Blair says goodbye to Handsome, because in the fucking stupidest contrived retarded line yet, Harold goes, "How was I to know when I asked your mother if we could get you a bulldog that she assumed we meant a stuffed animal?" How were you -- or any of us, really -- to know the difference between a goddamn living creature and a stuffed animal? Oh, I don't know, maybe the fact that never in a fucking million years would anyone call his ex-wife FROM FRANCE to ask if he could buy his daughter a STUFFED TOY. Somebody got paid thousands of fucking dollars for this crap. Think about that. Thousands of dollars into somebody's bank account, unearned, for pulling this shit on our beloved show. It makes me want to join the Hell's Angels, honestly.
Harold floats the idea that there is something very, very fucked up about Blair -- as though this is a recent development -- and B's like, "What? But I won. I'm back at Constance and I got into Yale. Everything's perfect again!" Harold's like, "I saw a different side of you last night, and I'm disappointed." WORD. This episode, we saw the side of Blair that is stupid, makes up stupid plans, and can't do a goddamn thing to help her fate. And yes, I am disappointed. But where does Harold get off thinking B has suddenly turned evil? She's always been evil. No wonder she's so obsessed with him, if he honestly doesn't know this most basic shit about her.
"Yale was on the line. I have to go there, like you. It's our plan!" Sad, Harold explains that it's not the college you go to, but the kind of person you are. Um, you mean awesome? She's turning out TOO AWESOME for you? Blair asks if she can take them to the airport, with a Dorota picnic and all, and he's like, "No, I'm too disappointed in you for that. You better go throw up everything you've ever eaten in an orgy of self-hatred. Well, I'm off!"
Chuck goes through that vault wearing another weirdly piped/oddly alluring barbershop tenor jacket, and he finds a stack of those invite cards about a yard thick that he just never noticed before. His phone rings, and it's Alan Philips, the dad of the family in Greenwich, looking for his nanny. Because she has been vanished! Because she told secrets while holding a candle! Turn on CNN! Go to Washington! Stop looking! If we can forget what Blair did on New Years', we can forget Elle, right?
Dan -- fresh off Rachel getting fired for seeing him outside of school -- heads over to Rachel's apartment for some more boundary-transgressing idiocy. I wish he'd run into Serena in the hallway and this all could have been avoided. "What are you doing here?" I sort of love Rachel more than I ever even thought about loving you. "Shit, me too." Let's go buy her some cookies. "Yeah! Cookies!" He gets about one second into the apology, and Rachel Carr grabs him by his teenage lapels and crushes him to her face and then drags him backwards into her unrealistically gigantic apartment to act like the giant pedo she has always secretly been.