HA! So awesome! So Blair, Nate and Chuck unite to follow Serena's plan: track down Gabriel and get the stolen money back without anybody -- especially Lily -- finding out it's gone. Of course, Dan goes running straight to Lily and tells her what's going on. She shifts into Ice WASP mode and tells Serena not to do anything: she's going to repay the money out of the Bass coffers, including setting up a handy $5000/month dividend for Rufus so he won't have to worry about Yale. Thereby proving Eric -- who shows up for about two seconds to warn Rufus that his mother is scary -- completely right, and completely throwing Rufus's big proposal plan into disarray.
Serena learns that Poppy's the real culprit, Gabriel's a sadsack bystander who's fallen for the Serena spell, and she and Lily majorly lock horns about going after Poppy. Lily is very insistent on not letting "adult scandals" reach their boiling point, and in so doing manages to turn into something worse even than Bart (which, it turns out, is CeCe Rhodes). She sends Serena to jail rather than letting her carry out her plan of blackmailing Poppy into giving the money back, which is just the tip of the mountain of problems this Gabriel/Poppy situation presents her relationship. And not even Jenny can explain Twilight.
How will they do this? By sending in a gloriously dizzy Georgina Sparks, who's all WWJD'd up. She balks at first, but Blair pulls some religious rhetoric worthy of the great heretics in order to get her to play along: basically that the Old Testament God is a jealous God and wants Poppy destroyed. Usually if I say that in a recap, you know it is my interpretation of events. Rarely does God actually enter the conversation. Not so this time! Blair arms Georgina with some spiritual ire and aims her at Poppy. Everything's going swimmingly until Lily has Serena arrested, in order to get her out of the situation, and Poppy escapes in the confusion with all the money, including Georgina's Jesus Camp Bible Fund.
Meanwhile, Nate awesomely tells Chuck to man up and go after Blair if that's what he wants, or stop dicking them both around. A few minutes later, Blair tells him the same thing, and then in one of the more tearjerking scenes I can think of on this show, he lies once again that it's just a game. Needless to say, Blair is devastated but quickly rebounds, while Serena clomps up and literally goes, "Chuck why did you do that." He is totally in love with her, but also a major mess, and he's afraid of hurting her, or at least not earning her. Blair tells Nate that she's no longer invested in Chuck, and they agree not to move in together, but will be attending Prom together.
End results, to a really inspired Gotye ("Heart's A Mess," every bit as evocative and iconic in its use as "URA Fever," "Kids," or even "One Week Of Danger") accompaniment: Rufus and Lily are maybe broken up but definitely not moving forward in any way, Blair and Nate are taking it slow, Chuck is truly tragic but officially declared both the only person who can do anything ever and Serena's brother, Jenny and Eric are still nonexistent, and Serena's in jail with her whole family of friends rallying to her aid with all the political, financial and scheming clout they can muster, and Georgina -- that didn't take long -- might well murder Poppy Lifton for her kidneys to get that Bible money back. Great, great episode.
week: Serena's jailtime and mentions of CeCe send Lily spinning right round baby to the '80s, where she remembers how awesome she used to be. Presumably the following will also take place: Georgina kills everybody's enemies and then comes after our guys, but is most likely vanquished by Dan, who thereby redeems himself in some way; Rufus reconsiders the upside of whoredom and Eric says something wise; Blair starts overclocking her Prom Queen campaign; and Serena gets into a knife fight in the big house and we see her stab a motherfucker to death, but later it still somehow turns out to be a coincidence.
Chuck's taxi meter is at $267 by the time they cross the bridge. "Four wise men once said, 'I get by with a little help from my friends.' But on the Upper East Side, there's the added challenge of figuring out who those friends really are..." GG's referring, of course, to Georgina, but there's a bit of business -- Chuck asking the driver for a glass for his flask whiskey and being turned down, as though Chuck would honestly be that naïve; still, his disappointed sigh is fairly hilarious -- before we see her. He chats with S and gets the newest info, which is that Gabriel skipped town -- or so we think -- with Poppy's money -- or so we think. Chuck's not surprised ("Well, his suits never did fit right"); Serena apologizes for not believing them last night. She starts to ask how it was that he confirmed the BUTTERY LIES, but whatever, he hangs up.
The song in this scene is "Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh" by the artists formerly known as Say Hi To Your Mom; it's a little too lite for this show, but they just loop the beginning measures and one line of the lyrics anyway so it's all about the riff. But dig on this, because the second verse is about a girl buying a 7" of "Randy Described Eternity," the first track on Perfect From Now On, Built To Spill's third album, which:
Where are you going to be? Where will you spend eternity?
I'm going to be perfect from now on, I'm going to be perfect starting now...
I will say I forgot it but it was only yesterday/ And it's all you had to say
So we're listening to a so-so song about a so-so song about Georgina. Anyway, she turns down Chuck's offer of a drink ("The Lord cannot enter a body sullied by alcohol"), and Chuck smarms in that incomprehensibly filthy way he loves so much ("Good, because I like to be the one doing the entering"), which correct me if I'm wrong but I think means that he plans on sodomizing Our Lord. I mean, leave it to Chuck Bass, but that's still sort of iffy. "To each their own holy water," he says, hopefully changing the subject back to his morning scotch, but definitely grossing Georgina out more than a little either way. "I got something I think I really want to do right now..." the song says over and over, and then ends on the DING of Serena getting off an elevator. Which she spends the first half of the episode doing, at every opportunity.
Serena's clomping fast through the apartment, while Lily talks about some random function requiring a harp, two cases of champagne, and no cello whatsoever. I don't know if we know what this party's even about, but I love how that's the scene business to show Lily van der Bass is a very busy lady. You could just have her saying any old thing: "Remember, we need six live swans to descend from the ceiling precisely at midnight, and those little quiche tartlets Marc Jacobs likes. Don't fuck me on this, Rudolfo. Oh, and some balloons." Lily totally interrupts Serena's harried attempt to explain her current predicament so she can fawn over Gabriel, his scary teeth, and the incredibly retarded business venture to which she and all her friends have apparently given hundreds of thousands of benjies in the last three hours without even calling a lawyer.
Serena tries to come clean, but then Lily interrupts again to give her some diamond bracelet or watch or something that was her great-grandmother's, which she pulled from the safety deposit box this morning, apparently when she was over at the bank giving some random guy a bunch of money without checking up on him. Serena demurs, but Lily's feeling expansive and wants to reward Serena for... Coming back from Spain bearing opportunities for her to squander the Bass billions, I guess.
"I was going to wait until you were 21, but I've been so proud of you lately, with Brown, and graduation coming..." Serena tries to explain that she has fucked up royally, but Lily shushes her and straps the thing on her wrist, all about how Serena is becoming a wonderful woman, and now everybody will know because of this thing on her wrist. She's like, "Now that I've guilted you so bad you're trying to invent a time machine to go back and fix fuckups, what was on your obviously guilty conscience?"
Serena's just like, "Well, this is too extravagant, but whatever. I officially cannot tell you what's really going on, because your style of parenting is as subtle as a brickbat, and the fact that you've let up on constantly screaming BAD SERENA and THE OLD SERENA IS BACK every time I open my goddamn mouth -- at least for the ten seconds I've been standing here not getting a word in edgewise -- is about as sparkly as this bracelet, so... um, nothing. See you at brunch."
Which I love, because again you have this parallel between Old Serena and Old Georgina happening, where accusing Serena of being Bad Serena six times turns her into her, and Blair's going to be lightly flicking the foundations of Georgina's whole Perfect From Now On thing throughout the episode before just giving in and pushing the damn thing over. But then, she only does that because of the similar parallel with Real Chuck and Burlesque Chuck going wrong: If Chuck can't change, for her, then obviously nobody can change, so obviously she's meant to be with Nate and Georgina is meant to be from hell.
So really it's a continuation of the whole redemption arc from the last few episodes, where senior year is making everybody freak out about whether or not it's possible to be human, much less an adult, and after that it's just a domino effect, because Serena's having the same crisis here, not only for herself -- which she knows for a fact is now awesome, which is why she has to fix it herself -- but with Gabriel too, whom she spends the first half of the episode sort of stupidly hoping he can screw her over and simultaneously still be in love with her, because what really fucked Serena up is CeCe-via-Lily teaching her that you have the be the bestest friend to everybody in the world, because when you're tall and blonde and gorgeous and rich, people just want to fuck you up.
Which is true, and true not just for tall blonde rich girls, but doesn't mean you shouldn't watch your own ass and vote for yourself, which Serena's still not quite figured out. She still has the terrible twinned girl afflictions of Being Honest Is Being Mean, connected up to the Wanting Things Is Being Selfish thing, which are lies mothers whisper to their daughters as they lay them down to sleep, and which mean getting cornered a lot by brigands and Humphries and the like. Aaron Rose was all about not wanting to be the bad guy, for example.
If you were making a list of the psychoses of American teenage girls in 2009 you'd automatically go to Blair's million because she's shiny, but the really scary ones are the ones Serena quietly still has, because they're the normal ones nobody teaches us to get rid of: don't be unliked, don't be proud, don't be smart, don't talk too loud, don't ever say no. (Nate has the same set, for the same reasons, which is why they act out in the same ways: like wounded animals. Who occasionally bone in public.) And the most fucked up thing about all of this is that Lily's children have the most well-constructed morality of anybody on this entire show, because they actually sat themselves down in the middle of going crazy and thought their way there, which is how it happens.
So Serena calls Blair, because now she's got to come up with a whole new plan to fix the whole new mess, because Lily went from being somebody she could trust back to somebody who holds the keys to Serena's ability to think objectively about herself. This of course means that Blair can launch herself like a bullet from a gun back out of the Murray Hill apartment, where she's been standing for so short a time considering Nate's offer that she hasn't even taken off her coat. Nate offers protests as she goes screaming to Serena's aid, and they stare dewily at each other, and she begs him to leave it, and then he asserts himself
in the only way you can without getting hit, which is to jump on for the ride.Rufus is with his kids, walking down the street and being just disgusting, like he's never been to New York before, telling people to have a nice day and singing fucking "Zip-A-Dee Doo-Da" on the F train, enraging people who do not speak English and even getting on Jenny's nerves. When you're a Humphrey, you're always on the F train.
Before his kids drop him off at the Ostroff Center for Terminal Annoyingness, he spills that he's going to take that hideous effing ring and give it to Lily and ask her to join him in matrimony, digging his toes into the marble floors of her apartment and ornately shrugging with his shaggy hair in his eyes and the most awful childlike belief in their future together shining out of him as brightly as a train coming right at you. They do not tell him to knock it off, but encourage him instead. First, though, he's gotta have some weird drama queen moment with Eric where he asks for Lily's hand or some shit, because once Serena gets the hell out of there, Eric will be the man of the house. Sweetie, long after you're married that will still be the case.
Serena texts Dan right then that she'll be skipping the stupid van der Humphrey brunch where all this idiocy will be going down, because she has to save the Upper East Side again, but of course Dan can't leave well enough alone, so he decides to bring her some cappuccino and get her in line. Then Rufus gives Jenny noogies, and the embarrassment spreads so far that Rufus Humphrey becomes the Cloverfield of dorkiness, dropping little arachnoid dorkinesses everywhere that go skittering off to annoy people in all directions.
Serena jumps to her feet when Blair enters, grateful as hell, but is surprised by the Archibald following along behind. Blair shrugs: "I'm just as flummoxed as you are. I got out at 53rd and made a run for it, but he's faster than he looks." Instead of telling her to go to hell and getting out of there, Nate just sort of hums, because whatever. "Don't tell me, that hick gave you scabies," Blair says, and Serena levels with her about the scam, begging her not to throw the "I Told You So" out there, because S will lose it if that happens. Blair immediately shuffles toward her in the ridiculous green/gold paper toga she's now wearing, and swears she didn't want to be right about this.
"I don't know, I don't know. I keep trying to figure out what was real and what wasn't. I... it doesn't make any sense," Serena says, because... Serena's weird. Um, it makes total sense? He spinned you right round, baby. It happens. I love it because she honestly thinks there's something else going on here. And for her part, there is: Gabriel seems convinced that he's in love with her too. I guess that magical connection was real? Not that it survived the bottom line, or a basic BS test, but it's hilarious either way. Blair nods sagely: "Feelings never do. They get you all confused. Then they drive you around for hours until they drop you right back to where you started." Nate almost has a thought, but then doesn't.
"I need to fix this," Serena vows, and Nate's all about helping because he wants in on this "help Serena" thing, but also because he is nice. She starts to tell them what is no doubt a brilliant plan with zero chance of failure, and meanwhile Chuck comes home. With Georgina in tow, looking all around for Blair excitedly. "I agreed to give you a ride," he gruffs. "That's all, meals are not included." She swears she's not looking to make a meal of B at this time: "One of the most sacred acts is the ritual of forgiveness!" G chirps, and he is just so incredibly brusque and awesome: "Why is it when you say ritual, I think human sacrifice?" She points out that she's had since this time last year to go after Blair if that's what she wanted, but then Chuck for some reason leaves her unattended in his house so that he can go explain the nonexistent reasons he brought Georgina back to the UES, which by the way he never does, because they are nonexistent.
Blair sits with Serena, very supportive, while Serena babbles and babbles on the phone telling Gabriel's voicemail this lie about how she doesn't know anything about anything, she just wanted to talk to him about a thing, which is that she is fake pregnant. Chuck enters and Blair rolls her eyes, because she knows he's going to jump on her about stealing his limo ("Hope you had an enjoyable ride back on my leather seats") but she shushes him until the phone call is over, by which time he's over it.
"A pregnancy ruse. Cliché, but effective. Make sure you arrange the meeting someplace where the authorities can surround him. No open spaces." Nobody meets his eyes, because they know he's going to yell about the lack of authorities, because they know he's right, because he's always right, which is a theme in this episode. He starts yelling at them about not calling the cops, and Serena explains how Lily can't find out about this suddenly, because of the bracelet or watch and all the diamonds on it and how that means she finally believes in New Serena. Chuck's like, "Oh, I am taking over now because you guys are fucking this up," and he and Nate get into a dumb little tête-à-tête about taking care of "it" where "it" equals "Blair" and "taking care" means driving to the country in the middle of the night, and whatever. Lots of exposition to get through in order for this fast-moving train to pull out of the station. Blair tells Serena straight up to let Chuck take over, and Serena's like, "He will call me back because our feelings are so real," and Dan appears out of nowhere, having overheard them talking about the stolen money.
"I just came to coerce you into family brunch," Dan explains, and Chuck slyly asks him if he saw "something" in the living room, but Georgina's I'm sure already done three weird things we'll never know about in the time they've been having this conversation, probably looking for Blair or Jesus or something room by room. "Not that it's any of your business, but Serena's fake boyfriend's investment was also fake. He made off with the money. You can go now," she snaps at the end, truly Mean Girl for a sec, and Dan kind of freaks out because of how Rufus stupidly wrote Gabriel a check for Dan's "college money." What? Yeah, that forty grand that was going to put Dan through four years at Yale is gone. Effin' shame on the F train, that is.
Serena feels all kinds of guilty because when it's Brooklyn the money stops being pretend and starts getting real, but begs him to let her fix it before he goes running to his stupid father. Which frankly, what on Earth can Rufus do, in any circumstance, besides fuck things up way worse? It's not about pride, it's about Rufus panicking like an eye-rolling broncho and giving Gabriel a piece of his mind in some Vanessa way that would somehow end up getting everyone murdered. Blair scoffs for the eighteenth time at the idea that Serena could ever formulate a plan, much less pull it off, and goes, "Unfortunately for him, the only way her plan is going to work is by some act of God!"
...So there's holy music, and Georgina comes wandering in all creepy/angelic, and says hi to everybody. And the whole room goes absolutely silent and absolutely still, like a snake just crawled in, for a beat just long enough that the thing -- everybody screaming at everybody else like their hair is on fire -- is maximally hilarious. This script makes very little sense, but it's fun, and the way it's directed makes it one of the most enjoyable episodes ever, but I've had trouble pinning down exactly why.
(The acting is really phenomenal, and it's paced really well, and the act breaks are super-exciting, and it has one of the most touching Blair/Chuck scenes ever, somehow getting water from that well once again... But it's so clearly a bridging episode, because it has to give us enough gas to not only set up the finale but also breeze past week's half-and-half mix of Gossip Girl and Untitled Spinoff [that's what I'm hearing, 25 minutes of Totally '80s Lily and 20 minutes of our kids], and somehow keep Georgina boiling that whole time. It shouldn't feel as exciting as it is. And there's only like two songs instead of the five or so that we usually get, and not a lot of literary references, so I don't know. There's not like one thing you can pin it on, it's just really well done.)
"Uh, we need to get this crazy girl out of here," says Dan, hilariously since he's not really invited either, and Serena putting one giant foot down ("Chuck, what is she doing here?") and Nate sort of wringing his hands and nattering, and Blair being hilarious ("Are you trying to have me killed, Bass? Oh my God I am going to scream if somebody doesn't get her out of here right now") and Serena actually expositing -- while getting angrier than she usually gets, which she can do with Chuck -- "So is this how you found out about that night at Butter? You bring Georgina here?" The last one just exactly as loud and strong as you would think, given what G did last time, and how little S had to do with punishing her for it. Meanwhile, the phone's ri
nging, and G picks it up with a smile, beaming to be included: "Hey, does anybody know a Gabriel?"Serena joins Gabriel downstairs at a Palace eatery, with Chuck lurking in the shadows, and tests lightly to see if he's there because A) he thinks he's been made, B) he is gripped by a clichéd fear of babies, or C) he truly absolutely wonderfully adores her. It goes from C to B really fast, and she doesn't wait for A. Her move from the tiny little hope that this is somehow a mistake, to the tiny little hope that he'll just somehow magically flip for It Girl her, to realizing sadly that her plan worked, and he's here because of the pregnancy thing, and still playing her to boot. "I thought we were being careful!" he gasps, and she looks down. "Well, I wasn't careful enough, it seems." She lets him twist for a second, and then looks him in the eye: "[Beat.] I'm not pregnant, just naïve. I can't believe I believed you." Gabriel shits.
"Don't worry," Serena says. "You're safe, for now. I wanted to give you the opportunity to fix things. To prove you're not ... who you probably are." I like this plan, actually. It's like the Serena version of a Blair plan. Blair plans are always, "I'm going to throw this cat in the swimming pool and see what people do, and then decide what to do while everybody's swimming around screaming trying to get away from the cat." And Serena's like, "This is a picture of a cat. How do you feel about that? Okay, now here's a real cat. Oh, you didn't like that? Forget the cat. Here's a picture of a dog." If he'd been like, "Serena, I accidentally stole everybody's money and gave it to Poppy" right now, she'd be sad but she'd help him fix it. She probably wouldn't even break up with him. She provides as many options as possible for everybody to get out alive, which is by far my favorite characteristic in a person.
He tries to explain how sorry he is, and she sighs. "I don't know what you are right now, except a liar and a thief. But you can change one of those by giving the money back." He feels awful, and she insists with her eyes, but he admits he can't do that. She gives Chuck the lightest, quietest nod, and he approaches. "Gabriel, why? If you were just using me, why come back? Why act like you care about me now?" Gabriel doesn't have an answer, but Chuck doesn't need one: "You're not leaving my hotel until you repay your investors. It's your choice. Either you hand over the money or we hand you over to the Feds." He whispers, with fraidycat eyes, that he can't; he would if he could, but Poppy made off with the money.
(Which twist makes me sad only because there's a good thing about Poppy -- Serena not hiding her light under a bushel -- that, even though it only ever caused trouble on this show, is now sort of invalid. Which means that Poppy was really just a lightweight Agnes, pushing Serena to do all sorts of Evil Shit like think for herself and stand up to Blair and Dan. The fire inside Poppy Lifton is a lie, which means that Serena still has not had one single person in the entire world legitimately tell her how wonderful she is. And when people do, it's always men, and when she believes them, they turn out to be lying or otherwise pieces of shit. Georgie was just trying to make her as crazy as she was, and Poppy was doing whatever the hell the script required. And by the same token, the good things about Georgina -- her capacity for change, her desire for redemption -- end up shit on as well, and every time Serena asserts herself she ends up burning everybody, and even Jenny couldn't manage to stand up to Rufus without becoming homeless in the process and eventually running back to him, and Lily's reversing her stances all over the place... So Serena's still an idiot, and any girl who opens her mouth eventually gets it shut again. It's nowhere near as ugly as the Rachel Carr stuff got, and even that turned out okay in the end, but at this point I think only Blair can pull off eventually being a human being. Somebody's got to have a voice and not go crazy in the process, but putting money on Blair Waldorf to do anything without going crazy in the process is ... really long odds.)
Dan comes running to Lily coming out of Petrossian and after a feint at not tattling, tattles. "Serena asked me not to say anything," he says, and Lily laughs. "Oh, that's my least favorite sentence. Start talking." He immediately spills about Gabriel and the con, and explains that Serena "thinks she can somehow sweet-talk him into giving everything back," but he thinks that trusting Blair and Chuck to get this done -- despite the fact that they're the only people who ever get anything done -- is a misstep. She tells him she'll take care of it, and he rudely thanks her: "I was kind of hoping you'd say that... I just want you to do what you ... people do." She hugs him despite himself, and promises to get Rufus's money back.
Serena ignores the subsequent call from Lily while Gabriel explains that Poppy is, in Chuck's parlance, a "fauxcialite": all the perks and connections, none of the class. They met at a Mercedes launch party ("the fauxcialite ball," Chuck snarks) and spent a while trying to con each other before realizing neither of them had any real wealth, at which point they joined forces to convince the UES to invest in the wifi scheme. "I had to give my investors something, so I brought on new investors to pay off the old investors and then those investors..." he says, and Chuck snarls that everybody knows that's the definition of a Ponzi scheme.
"Serena, I swear to you, in the beginning you were just a mark." Lily Bass -- or, as he says it, "Bart Bass's widow," which earns him another growl from Chuck -- was going to be the last big score. But then of course the magical connection and whatever. S is done, and asks him to cut to the chase. Long story short, Poppy got nervous that Serena was onto them ("Smart girl," Chuck notes) and offered to buy him out, but emptied the coffers and disappeared instead. "I should've just left town... But I couldn't go without seeing you again." Serena tries not to be gotten by this, while Chuck tries not to barf, and pouts intensely at Gabriel instead.
Down in the courtyard, Nate is bored. Blair begs him not to leave her with Georgina, and he asks her to come get coffee with him, and Georgina begs her to stay and talk -- "Blair, everyone else has forgiven me, I'm just waiting on you" -- and Blair notes that A) "everyone" who, exactly, besides all of them who have done no such thing and the guy she killed, is she talking about, and B) "some things" are unforgivable. I like to think that she's speaking here of blowing Dan Humphrey, which is truly unforgiveable. "God will help me find a way to earn your forgiveness," G gushes, and before B can swat that one down, Chuck exits the building, answering B's prayers. He tells them the real puppeteer is Poppy, "believe it or not," and just as Nate is choosing "not," Serena and Gabriel awkwardly come near. There is love talk, and Serena tells him to leave, because now it's just gross.
Chuck starts stressing about Gabriel leaving, but Serena is assured that she can get him back through a judicious yank on his heartstrings, and she's right. Nate, wonderfully, plays the role of Dumb Guy Who Needs The Plot Explained, so Serena obliges, telling him that Poppy has to stay put if she's going to play the victim and be just another one of Gabriel's lovelorn victims before going off to scam somebody else. I'm so sure Nate understood more than half of that anyway.
"She wants money," Chuck nods. "All we need to provide is some sap she thinks she can get it from." Blair points out that Poppy knows all of them, but Serena's staring at Georgina with an unhealthy gleam, because she doesn't know all of them: Georgie's been out of commission for a year at this point. And now she's in the spotlight, cornered, and slowly all of them take it up, staring at her like a pack of dang jackals. G protests loudly -- "Lying is also a sin, I will not perjure myself in front of the Lord!" -- and B gives her the bestest, brightest smile: "We'll see about that!" Gossip Girl almost giggles: "Looks like Georgina's losing her religion... Or has B met her match in the battle for G's soul?" Dude, we've seen Blair beat God before. No contest.
Lily's with Bass lawyer Bruce as the elevator dings for the seventh time and Serena comes home. Lily yawns and lightly apologizes that today's task -- paying all these investors back out of their pockets -- lies so far outwith his usual duties. "Bass business usually does," he says, which is awesome. Serena's kind of had it and just asks Lily straight up why she keeps calling and bothering her. Lily takes off her glasses, and things go from bad to worse. She takes Serena to the side and to task for not coming to Lily immediately. Serena can't think of a way to explain how she almost did, but
then didn't, and mostly just fumes about Dan totally betraying her trust and immediately running to mommy; she swears this is her mess and she'll fix it, trying to live up to the whole great-grandmother speech and fix the problem on her own."You will do no such thing. This goes far beyond bad taste in boyfriends," Lily says, which Serena points out is totally hypocritical considering they not only encouraged her, but were taken in by him themselves, but Lily has a valid point: "If word gets out about this, all anyone will ever think when they hear the name Serena van der Woodsen is how you helped scam your friends and family out of hundreds of thousands of dollars." And when you put it that way, Lily's right. This is a melodrama plot on a melodrama show, so it's sort of genius to have a character point that out and go, "What do we, live in a parallel universe where time and space don't matter, nobody ever goes to school, tweens get served at popular bars and Chuck Bass exists? No way are you going to solve a six-figure investment scam on your own, little lady. This isn't Swan's Crossing."
Lily says she's being naïve, pointing out that "the Madoff people" will ultimately spend a decade in court and never see a dime, and she's not going out like that. "The only plan is for me to quietly tell everyone that the deal didn't work out and pay them back myself." Which again is a good plan. Serena brings up Poppy, and of course Lily wasn't downstairs a second ago when they found out she was the actual baddie, but takes this info in stride. "She can't just get away with it," Serena says, and Lily yells. "Yes, she can. And especially if it means that your name stays out of it. This is an adult scandal. And the adult thing to do is for me to pay everyone back and for you to do absolutely nothing." All true, but way scary: "Now let it go. Am I understood?" Serena slinks off, defeated, and Lily does the whole Wonder Woman transition, moving from chilly to friendly in the time it takes her to cross back to Bruce at the table, and says she'd like to handle Rufus's investment refund "a little differently." Which I'm sure won't activate every Vanessa Abrams self-righteousness neuron in that head of his.
It's always scandal, it's always the weird Bogart "loose woman" thing; it's always the family being protected from Serena's mistakes, just like Bart and just like before. But there's a whole other thing here, which is that Serena knows she's being held accountable for this in some way, and she's got the bling digging into her wrist to remind her of that. So how come Poppy gets to go free, while Serena -- who essentially did nothing wrong, and cracked the case besides -- gets another mark on the infinite Old Serena scoreboard? You praise her for being an adult, jumping the gun from 21 to 18, and then tell her she's not allowed to fix the problem, which she's already admirably doing, in her own self-evaluation?
It's not entirely unlike the whole Sweet Sixteen issue with Jenny, really: Jenny was the one who did the actual bad thing -- admittedly after a bunch of Serena's mistakes, which were all Rhodes Women mistakes just like the one Lily's going to make later -- but carried none of the guilt for it. So you have Lily once again telling Serena that she has no voice, but all the accountability, and once again Serena flees the scene because Lily is implacable. But not as implacable as the specter of Old Serena, or the ultimate unfairness of Georgina flitting crazily around in the light of the Lord, or Blair getting all the boys no matter how ridiculous she acts, or Lily fighting for Rufus and Dan the way she'd never think to fight for her own daughter.
Rufus needily whines that Eric's not excited enough about the hideous fucking ring and the million miles of bullshit that it encompasses, but Eric assures him that the ring is "amazing," which is not untrue, and that Rufus wanting to marry Lily is adorable. "I just want to make sure you're prepared," he says, in a duck and cover tone. Rufus protests that he's been married before, like somehow Eric's accusing him of not being able to operate a marriage license properly, and Eric explains that Lily's been married too: four times. "Ah, those guys weren't right for her," Rufus tish-toshes. That's the "I'll be back" horror-movie move of this show. You never fucking tish-tosh Eric van der Woodsen, because you always end up bleeding, because he's always right. Just do whatever the kid tells you to do, keep your back straight, and remember to smile.
"That's definitely true, but my Mom can be a little crazy, too. And I love her, I just don't want you to forget where she came from." Rufus tish-toshes once again that Lily is nothing like CeCe, which is not only untrue but also sort of sad because before Lily, CeCe was the only person on earth that actually liked Dan besides his boyfriend Nate. Rufus totally gets himself into a defensive "I was there" position, like Lily is a hip Seattle band that sold out: "Trust me, I know the family." He then compounds this with the grossest thing anybody ever said: "I'm totally up for the wild ride that is Lily Rhodes-van der Woodsen-Bass-et cetera." Instead of saying, "Compare my mother to a theme park ride again and I'll send Blair to your house while you're sleeping," Eric just welcomes him to the family, and shakes his hand, because he's got Rufus's number and knows this is the queer shit Rufus was after the whole time.
Pilot Inspektor! I forgot about him, he's gotta show up at some point in the two weeks, right? (And he's foine, too, I saw a picture. After the greasy hell that was Aaron Rose, I was shocked. Although to be fair I've seen the actor in something else, a trailer for the movie Timer with Emma Caulfield, and he looks amazing in that. So the grossness really was just Aaron Rose's grossness and not the actor's grossness, which is nice to know.) But now I'm sort of invested in seeing him make out with people, which is frustrating because Pilot Inspektor is the Aunt Sistercousin Lindsay of this show, since he's a blood relative to literally everyone in the entire cast except the Chuck/Nate/Blair thing, so how can he... Oh. That's how. Awesome.
If Pilot Inspektor hooks up with Blair -- or let's be honest, any or all three -- he really will be the Aunt Sistercousin Lindsay and we'll have to start drawing charts. Man, Season Two of The O.C. was awesome for TV Night because we actually had a chart we kept on the wall we could point to, to keep guests quiet during the entertainment: "Who's that lady?" Lindsay's mother, you can tell by the red hair, she had an affair with Caleb in the '80s but he's married to that hot lady now. "Who's Lindsay?" That adorable girl that tries so hard all the time. "Isn't that Anna?" Sort of but no, Anna's the one that talks like this. She crammed her stuffed-animal backpack full of manga and Jets To Brazil white labels and beat it back to Philadelphia. "Who's that girl you'd go straight for?" She's not really a factor until Season Four. Here's a chart of all Caleb's wives and daughters. It takes about thirty minutes to read.
Anyhow, to be nice and for no real other reason, Eric asks about the doomed proposal. "Klaus with a K did it with a blimp, C-Claus did it on top of a pyramid, although she didn't say yes to that..." Rufus shits, because he honestly hadn't thought that far ahead.
Blair rushes around trying to get Georgina into the spirit of couture and playacting, which are her two best subjects, while Georgie stares into the mirror and thinks about the Jonas Brothers. "Come on, G! Don't you miss Dior? Prada? Looking fabulous? ...I mean, for you?" Jesus loves G as she is, of course, but B offers the idea that he would love her even more with some styling, putting a cute sterling necklace around her neck. "Think of the fun you used to have! Pretending to be Sarah and Svetlana," she shouts pissily, and then even pissier: "Slipping people roofies!" And then worst of all, like it just happened yesterday, which with Blair I can believe it feels that way: "Outing them to their unsuspecting parents at dinner!" It speaks highly of both Blair and the show that outing Eric is the worst, last thing on the list, but even more so that Dan's hummer doesn't rate.
"Those things don't call to me anymore, Blair. Look, I made a choice. I let go of the Evil so I can find love and happiness with the Good." Even Georgina knows she's a cartoon of evil, I love it. That's so high school! If one time in my whole adult life I can have a frank and honest conversation about my maturing relationship with "The Evil," I will be happy. B nods about the Evil, and G flutters her lashes. "I know it sounds dull, but it's actually quite nurturing," she says, taking the necklace off: "Can't you understand?" And of course, Blair can. She grins, only mostly pretending: "More than you know!" G's reassured, and takes it too far: "I gave up my old ways when I let Jesus take the wheel." Moment over.
Blair drops the act and spits, "That is a Carrie Underwood song, not a life choice." (Which is my whole problem with that song, of course, but also Georgina's whole problem: it's not actually a metaphor, just a gross abdication of personal responsibility, viz. the iceberg digression last week.) "I'm sorry, but I can't help you if it goes against my beliefs." And the cat comes screaming into the swimming pool, Blair grinning fiercely: "But... When you look at it, Jesus drove you here. Right?" Georgie corrects her with a lame played out joke ("Actually, I believe his name was Jesus") and Blair starts screaming. "Not in the cab! In your country-western way of life! You said God would help you find a way to earn my forgiveness," she says, modulating softer again: "And here it is." So just to be clear, the UES is so frakked up that amends for her misdeeds would be: "to entrap Poppy Lifton, get the money back that she stole, and destroy her in the process?" Blair shrugs, because yeah. What's the problem?
"Exactly." She smiles and levels with Georgie: "If you cut 'revenge' out of the Bible, there's not even enough pages to make a pamphlet." So true, and awesome, but not as awesome as Georgie's nodding response: "...And they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them." Blair hands her the necklace again and asks how on earth Georgie knew her favorite passage. Who knows if she's kidding? I know the second she heard that, if she didn't know it before, it became her favorite.
The tribe of Judah ended up in exile in Babylon around 600 BCE, and started freaking out when they realized that after a long time worshiping in the Temple of Jerusalem, they didn't know how to serve God outside that. How do you properly worship in a strange country? Is God even still available? The quote is from the Book of Ezekiel, w
hich is entirely about that, written to address that: he talks -- among the trippiest prophetic poetry this side of Revelation -- about how the exile came about through their disobedience, and will be reversed once they came back to God. That age-old fundie question of how you stay in the world but not of it, essentially: how to act like Babylonians without worshiping the gods of Babylon. How to gain the trust of the fallen, fit in with UES society, without falling. How to walk this close to the edge, destroy a girl to apologize for destroying a girl, and keep yourself intact: Perfect from now on.I mean, I know it's just here because it sounds crazy and Blair Waldorfy, and funny in that Pulp Fiction way, a nice gloss on the admittedly Blair Waldorf nature of the Old Testament God vs. the tender New Georgina nature of the New Testament one. But: God vs. Society; Purity vs. the Real World. Maybe the most fundamental religious question there is, and something we talked a lot about with Battlestar, and a few weeks ago at Passover too. It's easy to stay faithful when nobody's bugging you, keep praying when the cell phones aren't ringing. But what about when you leave OMJC Camp and have to hang out with Blair Waldorf? How much do you really love God, how far can you be pushed, before it's easier to fall in line with the UES rules? Trading literal Babylon for a figurative one, trying to fit the bill anyway and make them love you again.
This isn't about Bible trivia 101, it's about Georgina, who always fascinates me. Because this game is just as dangerous, just as razor's edge, as the games she played last time. This really is a fight for her soul, Gossip Girl wasn't kidding. With New Serena, we've seen how fuzzy the edges get; think about the extremes Georgina embodies, where things really are black and white. And just like last year, I think it's more instructive to step back a little bit from the hilarity and cartoonish OTT and symbolic necessity of Georgina, and look at her for a second like she's just a girl. Just like last year, it's more instructive and more painful to acknowledge that Georgina never lies. She honestly thought she'd solved the problem, just like Serena did. It's so sad!
This is exactly why extremes don't work, and why Georgina deserves her reputation for being the scariest thing in the universe: We're not designed that way. How much of the straight and narrow was just you staying in a circumstance that didn't test you? Which is really the question: how faithful were you really, back at OMJC Camp? Did you even change at all? Was Chuck right? Was it all a lie? How far away is Old Georgina, or Old Serena, and how many compromises do you have to make to come back from the Chuck brink, if you're Blair Waldorf? If you can't adjust to the fact that we live in a bendy world, full of change and growth, and that your adult responsibility is to live in that world and watch yourself all the time, that you can't ever just commit to one thing and hope to ride it the rest of your life, then you're asking for it: Plink! God's gotta knock you down just to keep you from rotting.
Serena's none too happy calling Blair to tell her the plan's off, but her bummed-out resentment is nothing to the aghast horror that greets her. "What? No. Do you know how much work this exorcism was? It's going to take days for Dorota to reorganize my closet!" Serena says they're letting Lily take the reins, and leaving Poppy out of it, but B's got a good point: "Poppy is it? She's so evil she makes the Old Georgina look like the New Georgina!" Lily summons Serena offscreen, and Blair puts up just enough of a fight that you know she's going to acquiesce... And keep working on the plan just in case.
And in the living room, OMG there's Poppy. Drinking tea with Lily: "Poppy came by to see how we were doing after all the terrible drama this morning!" Poppy pushes her mean girl advantage: "I mean, the money part was bad, but I just felt like such an idiot. I thought he loved me... Obviously you understand that." Enjoying it. Serena gets stronger, even as Lily arches an eyebrow and meaningfully relates that Poppy's off to Miami tonight, to feel like a fool while getting a tan. Serena alerts her to nonexistent aperitif in her teeth, and sits down with her mother.
"What are you doing having tea and smiling at her? We should lock the doors and call the police!" Lily's about 99% right that they should just let her go, but S comes up with the 1% that wins: "She's not disappearing, she's going to Miami. Where she's going to do the exact same thing to new people." Lily hopes vaguely that the people in Miami will be smarter than Poppy's trickery, and Serena is horrified. Because that's horrifying. Meanwhile, Dan gets a call from I guess Bruce about Rufus's incoming dividends -- from the investment he never actually made -- rolling in in about six weeks. The ding! you're hearing is not Dan figuring out what's going on: it's just Serena getting off yet another elevator.
"Fuck this, let's destroy Poppy Lifton," she explains to Blair, who is delighted. Georgina appears from behind a sliding door wearing purple -- including a patented Blair headband, which I didn't notice until it was too late was purple snakeskin -- and gives a seriously creepy, seriously awesome speech. "Hello," she says, friendly and nervous as a Canadian socialite. "Sherilyn Phillips. My daddy's got a piece of the oil sands up in Alberta. A piece the size of Florida. I'm so excited to meet my first New York friend for tomorrow. Maybe you know her? Poppy Lifton?" Serena is impressed by this new iteration of Georgina -- the fifth, by my count, officially outnumbering all the Chucks and Charleses and Charlies, lonelier even than him -- and shakes her hand.
But -- briefly -- consider this. When Georgina came back to eat Serena, she changed her name to Sarah, which is pretty much "Serena." But when Serena and Georgina wanted to be Georgina and Serena, they were Savannah and Svetlana, which are both pretty much still "Serena." Sherilyn, in this context, is linguistically way closer to "Blair" than Serena, much less "Georgina," linguistically. Anyway, Georgina's still in Please Everybody mode, and beams yet more; Serena nods at Blair... And Blair is in love with evil.
Chuck stares at Sherilyn appraisingly; he sniffs her and she focuses on him intently, wondering how she's doing. We've seen him do this trick before; he's also the only person with as many names as she's had. He has a nose for compartmentalization. "I sense ... aspiration, yearning, striving to be accepted." Georgina nods desperately, striving to be accepted but also wanting approval for this, her dirty deed that will keep her clean. "But then there's this appealing counternote of sincerity and optimism." He could be talking about Svetlana, Sarah, OMGeorgina, all of them: "This is the story of a young girl who is enjoying her first taste of the spoils of dirty oil."
Sherilyn's proud, and if you really watch this bit, her eyebrow just sort of jerks, momentarily sneaky and excited, thrilled beyond OMGeorgina and back into the past, reveling in the artifice and the nastiness and the lie, putting on faces and taking them off again, being anybody but broken sick sad angry scary crazy Georgina, like always: "It's perfection." Blair's proud, and Nate plays dummy again so we get the skinny: still not calling the cops, especially now that Lily has essentially betrayed Serena by inviting Poppy into their home, so they're going to tape Poppy at lunch with Sherilyn and blackmail her. They know she'd stash the money if she got nicked, and besides, Serena says, "As annoyed as I am with Dan right now, it is his college tuition." I love Serena. "He screwed the pooch, but the kid's in a place."
Blair explains to Nate for the eighteenth time that Poppy's not leaving town, just like in the last five scenes when this kept getting explained, but also that her needs are simple: "All she's worried about right now is party invitations and keeping a front row seat at Bryant Park." So, she's pretty much Jenny S1, then? Stealing to keep up with the Tiffanys and Penelopes? Dan calls Serena to whine about the dividend call, and Serena fully goes, "I don't know, why don't you call my mom? You seem to like to talk to her these days." Which, for Serena, is like six zingers and a burn. "It's not exactly fair of you to ask me to trust the return of my tuition to ... Blair and Chuck," he groans, once again twisting his face into this semblance of getting it. Serena swears she's taking care of it, and once again he second-guesses her, just as Sherilyn's complaining about having to "drink alcohol in this scheme," to which Blair spits in irritation, "It's the Russian Tea Room. You can drink tea," and S gets the eff off the phone with Dan. But alas, it's too late. The jig is up once again. Dan should just get Lily on speed dial.
Meanwhile, Rufus and Jenny are decorating PRADA MARFA with like shabby chic thriftstore Laura Ashley duvet covers that smell like pee and plastic classy candles, and catching varmints for the proposal dinner, and Rufus is like, "Wait, am I totally out of my depth? I just remembered I'm proposing to a woman so shallow she slept willingly in a bed with the wrinkled leathery mess that was Bart Bass, and I let her. Seems like if I was complicit in her prostitution to secure her family's future I'd be more sensitive to my doing the same thing," and Jenny's like, "Don't be silly, you love each other for what you are: emotionally retarded adulterers with track records plainly indicating that you shouldn't even be in charge of yourselves, much less five or six children."
He's like, "You're right. This is a true heroic man-type love." And something about the way his posture straightens based on facile praise from his teenage daughter, of the "this shitty proposal shows you really know her" variety, the way he suddenly stands like Clark Kent based on this frippery, cape blowing in the wind, makes me want to barf. The only nutsack Jenny should be locating is Nate's. There, I said it.
Ding! Guess what though, Serena's not getting off the elevator. I mean, somewhere she probably is, but not this one and not right now: it's Lily, coming home from ... emergency mid-embezzlement shopping therapy at Barney's. Never let it be said that I didn't admire Lily's priorities. Jenny awesomely accosts her, mugging her of the bags like a fake Mumbai bellhop and marching her upstairs to get a look at the zipper of some Marchesa dress Lily wore "last week." Which of course means "back before Kelly Rutherford became the most pregnant person ever to be pregnant."
People scoff at the absurd-yet-halfassed lengths they're going to to hide the pregnancy, but I love it so much. In this scene, Lily comes in through the door and talks to Jenny. But wait, she's totally pregnant! No problem, because Lily apparently just bought thirty-six bags' worth of shit from Barney's and will come in with them hanging all over her like that lady in Labyrinth with the hump made of teddy bears and quilts and clocks and whatever. Done. And week? Oh, she'll be carrying sixteen garbage bags full of stuff for the charity drive we'll invent, or reminiscing about Orange County in a limo with a shitload of lilies in her lap, or doing deep tank mudbath therapy as a result of jailing her daughter, or sitting behind a giant butter statue commemorating Gabriel meeting Savannah and Svetlana at Butter, or having a long talk with Chuck on that one couch with every pillow and chenille throw ever sold, piled up around her like a fort.
Everybody's still in sexy action mode as they disembark the towncar for the Russian Tea Room, but Nate stops Chuck outside. I don't have many of those weird New York things, like playing Eloise or Holden Caulfield or whatever, but I do have the weird obsession with the Russian Tea Room. I'm so not a New Yorker, like if you told me actually that's a weird name for a carpeting sample warehouse I would pretend I already know that and forge ahead with my fantasies, but for some reason it clicks into that Breakfast At Tiffany's place in my head. I just want to go to there, I don't even know where it came from. I am a rube. I am totally a Sherilyn Phillips about it. For all I know that's the joke, that of course Sherilyn would want to meet Poppy there and she'd be like, "Um okay, dork." This is why I'm constantly giving my money to con men and joining cults: it's my damnable sense of the romantic and the picturesque.
Nathaniel tells Chuck he's got it all figured out: Chuck needs to man the eff up and go after Blair or not, but it's not fair to play both Nate and Blair by ducking in only when she's got other stuff going on. And of course Nate's right -- even about how Chuck is "lying to himself" about his true feelings, I guess -- but that's not really the issue. If Chuck's in denial about his continued love of Blair, it's only as a second movement to the original thing, which is not giving in, which is itself a ghost of the very first thing, which is that he isn't worthy of her. The fact that she's not worthy of him either doesn't occur to anybody, but since none of this is the issue I think that's a healthy starting place. After all, if you had to wait until you were perfect to fall in love, there would be like five intensely boring couples populating the entire world and we'd die out in a generation. Chuck laughs until the "man up" part, and the jerky way he draws in breath, sharply, neither angry nor afraid but simply hit with something large, means something is going to happen and it's not going to be pretty.
How not pretty? Well, imagine a story that took hold of the imaginations of an entire globe of people, including me for sure, all about the natural inclination of men to devour women, and the natural inclination of women to yearn toward this, even after decades of socialization to avoid this devouring at all costs, right? How we set women up to be either virgins or whores, and how in neither case is it really about them, or what they want, and all about men and what they want to put in the women, even infants, and we still judge the women on this criterion of what they do with that incredibly limited scope of options.
Imagine if you will a story about how virginity is important for some reason, which -- since it totally isn't -- needs to be concretized by making sexual intercourse not only deadly but exquisitely painful (in fact, makes you a literal monster if you do it) and thus something to be avoided at all costs, but is also the only thing that matters, such that consummation is no longer the point of sexuality but in fact the endless forest-lying moments just before consummation: that somehow not fucking is the new fucking. Just imagine.
And imagine please that if you really looked at it, or watched the movie -- where it's made perfectly clear, and played by brilliant and skeptical homosexuals to boot -- you realized that no matter how sexy and yearny it is, these two bitches are totally disgusting and creepy-obsessed and willing to do fucking horrible things to themselves, each other, and everyone around them, just so they can stay at this nowhere point where they're not fucking, or even admitting they want to, but also all they're doing is fucking. But not physically, like, they're fucking each other's bloody brains. Maybe a very nice, very hot guy named Nate or Jacob gets in the middle of it, but doesn't really care or matter at all, because he is a werewolf or like a prostitute or whatever kind of minority.
And so but the girl wants to be annihilated, which is gross, and the boy wants to annihilate her, which is slightly less awful but still awful, but they love each other so much they can't back off, and simultaneously love each other so much they can't give in, so they just spin out in these separate desperate angry orbits of sexual inversion, getting crazier and crazier to the point where they fuck each other's uncles on NYE or, I don't know, have a spine-eating devil baby that sparkles and can read minds and is named the stupidest thing you can think of, and still 99.9% of the fanfic is about people tying up and buttfucking Jasper, for some reason.
Anyway, about that ugly, but Jenny can explain Blair and Chuck better than I can, for all my two years' experience: "Bella's so in love with him, even though he's a vampire. Maybe it's because he's a vampire, I don't know. But the thing is, his family doesn't suck the blood, so it makes her feel safer, but the problem is... Is that Edward, the more he falls in love with her the more he wants..." Lily's desperate to shut her up, as the phone's ringing, but they play it so naturally and lovingly that it's like a mother and a daughter. Even though Jenny's just fucking with her to stall for Rufus's stupid proposal plan, it still seems really genuine. And that's just beautiful, because it's Kelly Rutherford reminding you of all the good things about Lily, just when you need to remember them most. You can see her doing this exact same patient honey I love you please shut up please shut up thing with any of her kids: Serena talking about some prince or pop star taking her as his muse, or Eric same thing, or Chuck all excited about a million-year-old scotch, or Dan talking about whatever the fuck, Godard, or Rufus talking about anything whatsoever.
So it's Dan on the phone talking about whatever the fuck, Godard or Godot, asking why Rufus is getting dividends, and Lily says she took care of it so quit, and he's like, "Then what is Serena still 'taking care of' at the Russian Tea Room right now?" Because every episode's gotta have a Vanessa, I guess. I never thought I'd miss her quite this bad. Come back, Vanessa! (OW! I just got smacked by myself of the past!)
Once again, like getting off the elevator for the twentieth time today, we cut to Serena answering the phone all "WHAT?" Lily tells her to stop whatever she's doing immediately, but Serena just can't do that. "You can smile at Poppy all you want, Mom, but I'm not like that. It's not right." Lily tells her to shove "right" and "wrong" because Lily's in charge and this is not Serena's call, which I can't entirely disagree with again except for the actual morality and the fact that it's happening, and then just so Serena understands this isn't one of those "bendy world" times, tells her it's "nonnegotiable" just as Serena spots Poppy arriving, and hangs up.
Meanwhile, Rufus is lighting his stupid candles for his stupid drama event that nobody cares about, because God forbid Rufus ever just come across and say something without setting the scene, it's sort of one of the things I love best about him, and Lily makes a secretive phone call to hopefully fuck up whatever Serena's probably pulling off, while Rufus jerks open a random drawer looking for silverware and finds a random folder that just happens to contain the details of his separate $5K/mo payout for being a male prostitute of Lily. This is exactly why Bart had a vault; now we know.
"They say that numbers don't lie, and money talks..." GG says, and Sherilyn sits down with Poppy as the plan is go, and a crafty smile meets a sneaky crazy one: "But can G still speak P's language?" Commercial, and then Sherilyn's sipping Russian tea and gushing wide-eyed and asking Poppy if she's a Carrie, because she herself is a Charlotte -- I'll spare you the Jungian essay on why that's not only relevant but completely true, because I've talked about it before -- and Poppy nods uncomprehendingly, as though she's been so busy learning to be a cat burglar supermodel socialite that she managed not to see that show, and Serena watches them.
Chuck joins Blair at the bar, talking about how Poppy's arrived; B's stressing and Chuck tells her she needs a drink. "You're too late!" she says in this adorable chirpy/mordant fashion I can't really describe, and earns a laugh. "Wow... That's the first true laugh I've gotten out of you in a while," she says, plans in her eyes. He sits, and she asks to speak first, because they both know this is one of the real ones. Just like that the burlesque ends, the clothes come off, and they agree to act like grownups. It's completely smooth and practiced, natural, but still monumental. I can't explain it, but there's a sudden very true feeling that shit's going down.
It might sound like a conversation they've had before, and it's most certainly a conversation they'll have again, but there's something in their eyes. It's in the highwire tension of Blair's hesitantly defiant smile. It's most painfully in Chuck's smirk, his loving, dismissive, hungry, amused, angry, aching grin: trying to be so ironic and above it and been there that he can somehow contain it all, all the enormity that will follow. Just in the curve of his smile. We were talking two nights ago about Roseanne, how it's a different show when you go back as an adult, because you realize Becky and Jackie are the most annoying characters because they're the most honest actors: it's hard to catch an actor really informing and living their characters because the point specifically of acting is making you not notice.
It's a manipulative, repetitive relationship, this Chair: sure. And shippers want this simultaneous change and not-change I will never understand, because it's logically impossible that you get what you want -- resolution of conflict and simultaneous continuation of conflict -- which is what shipping is all about. So I can understand getting bitter or bored. What gets me personally every single time is the performances: it's not possible for them to get bored in a scene any more than it is for me to disengage from it, because they're both determinedly, even recklessly, in that moment. (You have to be reckless to play Chuck Bass, he's more dramatic just sitting there than even my drama queen ass manages to be in the middle of a crisis.) It's in the blood, or at least the scarf: there's so much hilarious wonderful bullshit in this show, it's such a farce and spectacle, that it's impossible for me to imagine trying to be honest in these performances, and they keep doing it, and watching people do it is breathtaking, both in the s
cene and outside of it. What it feels like is what it looks like, which is what it is: You're looking at a highwire act, over a circus, in the middle of a crowded city street.Pick apart the pieces of your heart and let me peer inside
Let me in, where only your thoughts have been
Let me occupy your mind
As you do mine
Blair: "Nate's waiting for me to give him an answer." Chuck assents; gives nothing. "Don't you want to know what's stopping me? I can't answer his question while I'm waiting for you to answer mine. The one I asked you forever ago: What are we, Chuck?" He gives nothing/his heart is breaking: "Blair..." She looks down, deep, trying to pierce it, to figure it out. The blunt instrument, the holy light that is Blair Waldorf, peering in. She wants to devour, to annihilate him. And he wants it. Say the word.
"Last fall you said we couldn't be together. And I believed you. But every time I try to move on, you're right there, acting like..." He cocks his head. Acting? What acting? Surviving. Managing to live.
"Acting like what?" He eyes, hurting so much. Knowing what she'll say: "Maybe you just want me to be as unhappy as you are." His face twists, sickened and afraid. He wants to annihilate her, and she wants him to annihilate her. Say the word. "I would never wish that on anyone," he says, and they nearly drop their heads in silence. "I want you to be happy," he swears; it rips across him. She sees stars.
"Then look down deep, into the soul I know you have, and tell me if what you feel for me is real, or if it's just a game." She breaks the rules of love. Happiness is not their strong suit, and he knows it binds them together: ruin her plan and she'll come running. But Cyrus Rose and Georgina Sparks, the defeat of Gabriel Edwards and the pursuit of Poppy Lifton, have given her new hope. Sickly hope he can't share. She looks into his eyes, like a gloved hand at the curbside: "If it's real... We'll figure it out. All of us," she says, smiling. She doesn't even know Nate's given his tacit consent: We will learn, we will stay a family. Love that costs you nothing. Love that is not earned or striven for, can he even imagine it? All the love in the world and more, a family as big as the Ritz, more love than he could ever exhaust, and the Cyrus Rose in her saying, "Not enough! Not enough!" Never enough. Never enough, to pay the debt he's owed.
If this is the conversation, if the burlesque is winding down, is it possible to be honest enough? Tears well up in her eyes. And his. "But if it's not... Then please, Chuck. Just let me go." She nods, smiling, loving him too as a friend, giving him his room. What lies beyond love that costs nothing? Love that remains, after love is gone. We will stay a family. I see signs now, all the time, that you're not dead: you're sleeping. I'll believe in anything that brings you back home to me. There's no risk here, just acceptance. Just the request for an answer. She smiles at him, lovingly, tears dropping, willing him on. Giving him strength. His sister enters and Blair acknowledges her in the nod, begging him to come out. It looks like he's losing his religion. Blair has met her match in the battle for Chuck's soul, and it has nothing to do with her.
Behind him, Serena urges her on. Enough honesty, Eric always says, enough light and you can be strong enough for anything. Enough love. Look down deep. Has she taken off enough? Is this enough? He's Eustace and she's the lion, tearing at her own skin. Once the game was words: say I love you, and I'm yours. We're past that point now. No more telling, only showing.
You don't get burned because nothing gets through
It makes it easier on you
But that much more difficult for me to make you see
After a long silence she nods once more, searching his face, and he smiles.
I'm desperate to connect
And you can't live like this
"...It's just a game." S listening, feeling awful. "I hate to lose. You're free to go." She stands, and thanks him. Defiant, hurt beyond hurting, naked and bleeding. Free.
You have lost too much love to fear, doubt and distrust
It's not enough
You just threw away the key to your heart
She's gone. He can breathe. Serena joins him, almost touching him, honestly horrified. "Chuck. Why did you just ... do that?" Honestly curious. He looks at the bar. "Because I love her. And I can't make her happy."
It's not enough.
Sherilyn sits with Poppy Lifton, as a waiter spreads caviar on a cracker so slow as to be pornographic, limitless and decadent: "New York is full of people doing such amazing things. Who knew you could bring wireless to third world countries?" Even Poppy's having trouble pretending to care about that. "Yeah. It's really more of a passion than a job. I mean, it gives so much to the children." For example, Sherilyn (and Georgina) imagine, they can "look at faraway places and read Bible stories... Oh! And they can download Kirk Cameron movies!" Poppy gets a kick out of her, nodding, and Sherilyn makes the play. Poppy's hair looks the best it's ever looked as she jumps at it: "I mean, you're such a great girl... Look, if you can get me a payment today, I'll find a way to get you in." Classic creep talk.
Sherilyn lamely squeals, "I can't wait to help the children!" She reaches for her phone and Poppy tells her there's no time for wire transfer: it'll have to be cash. Sherilyn hesitates; outside, the cops have arrived. Chuck's disappeared, so Serena goes outside to talk to them while Blair texts Sherilyn, who's handing over an envelope of cash, and having trouble handing it over. Not because she's greedy, but because the money is important. Her phone alerts her to a text, playing "Praise To The Lord," and she sees Blair's message: "Police here. All set?" All she can say to Poppy's hard-soft sell is a weak, "God intended for us to meet," and an invitation for Cosmos before she leaves town.
S meets the police outside, and they take her into custody. She's brilliant right beforehand, though: "Chuck Bass had to leave, but the woman he called you about is inside. I can take you." As they're pushing her against the car and putting cuffs on her, against her protests, Blair appears, clapping at them in that absolutely sublime way she's been doing, like they're naughty dogs. It doesn't work. Nate appears, asking for exposition, and for once Blair doesn't have an answer; Serena keeps yelling, "Blair, call Chuck! Call Chuck!" Serena's driven away in the cop car, looking back at them, worried and a little bit scared for herself, while Poppy slips out the front door and vanishes. Bitches, call Chuck!
Blair strides up angrily to OMGeorgie, whose snakeskin headband is suddenly radiant in the light of the restaurant. She smiles nervously and asks Blair what's up. This scene made me sad, sadder than the bar one frankly, because you completely understand both sides of it. So what makes Blair wonderful in the Blair context -- working out her Chuck-related aggression in a sensible way -- makes OMGeorgina incredibly sympathetic in the Georgina context. She's just sitting there wondering if it went off, and then Blair goes off.
"Your plan was a rousing success!" So, they arrested her? "If by her you mean Serena, the answer is yes." She doesn't get it; Blair assumes that's part of the joke. The game, the burlesque, the way the world lines up to hurt her, the shell game of loyalty. Find the lady: "Pretending to find Jesus to take us all down? It borders on brilliant." The money in the envelope, a rapidly panicking Georgina notes, was for new OMJC Bibles, which Blair rightly points out sounds ridiculous. "But you texted me All Set! And Poppy was asking me for a down payment, and all I had was the money my camp gave me to buy Bibles..." Blair leans down, and while it's not that cruel on paper, again Meester gives the lines just enough bite to seem really cruel. Cruel enough to send New Georgina toppling. Most of the tribe of
Judah never made it back home either. It got too hard. The deck was stacked."You expect me to believe that after all you've done?" Georgina stares up at her, afraid and sad, knowing she screwed something up, knowing she can't escape it. "Your stupid clothes and your Bible quotes don't fool anyone. You're evil. I know it, you know it. And God knows it too." The way she says it, the energy in the scene, is so vile and electric; it's like attacking Dan's integrity or Lily's parenting, Serena's selfishness or Blair's self-control: the thing they think makes them real. (Consider this: The hint of the century; the slip that brings you to your knees: failed.) Georgina's weeping, disgusted with herself and the situation, desperate for her good works to be noticed, to earn a family, sad and terrified: "But I didn't do anything wrong!" She could be Serena on her hardest day, for a moment. And Blair knows it.
"I will never forgive you for what you've done." She leans meanly over the table: "And neither will Jesus."
Funny line. It means nothing to her, or to us. It means something to Georgina. Or it means nothing to Georgina. It's funny, and it's terrible. You can pin your hopes on anything. The thinner the justification, the more desperate the motivation, the harder we hold onto it. Lose track of that iceberg and the world flips over: you don't mess with people's real shit. And Blair's just doing what she does: striking out at random, because she's just substantively lost the two people she loves in this world.
The most inconsequential things are the most important, especially on this show, but especially for those who have no hope. You know how they always take dogs to old folks' homes, to give them a reason? They stay alive for years -- minds gone, bodies gone, family gone, whether dead or inconvenienced -- just for some stupid smelly old mutt, finally loving them. Finally reminding them they were meant to love, and to be loved. Chuck needs a dog. Georgina had one.
I promise you that if this show runs ten years, Blair Waldorf will never do anything this awful in her life. And it means nothing to her. Or to us.
Rufus is still standing there with the folder in the dining room when Lily approaches, smiling lightly and hoping he's not been waiting too long. He asks about the paperwork and she blows him off, running to the lilies he brought; with hands on hips he doesn't relent. "With bags of money matching each of their investments? What's going on here, Lily?" She explains as little as possible -- everybody gets their money back -- but he asks about the separate arrangements for his forty grand. Lily is wearing the most insane necklace ever worn at this point: Wearing giant wooden balls and silver pinecones. It works. "Rufus, this really isn't a big deal," she says, but he's right: "You were planning on giving me money every month behind my back. Do you have any idea how humiliating that is?" God forbid anybody point out to a Humphrey that money isn't the most important thing on earth.
Lily swears she wasn't trying to humiliate him, with this secret fake investment on his behalf, but she's succeeded anyhow; finally she breaks down and levels, tired of the back and forth: "Do you know how hard it is for me to watch you agonize over not being able to send Dan to Yale? When I could very easily help you, if you would just let me." He whines about how great he was doing without her help, and luckily the phone rings: it's the cops, checking in. And at the station, they reach for Serena's wrist; she's relieved until they produce the bracelet: "Theft." And who called in this theft of great-grandmother's diamonds? Lily, of course.
Rufus hands Lily a glass of wine, worried, and asks what's going on, how he can help. She explains Serena's been arrested, but she's not heading down right away, because the punchline is that she called it in. Rufus is grossed out: "This coming from the same woman who wouldn't even let me put Jenny in the back of a squad car?" She tries to explain that it's different, she's not going to let Serena sit behind bars: it was about getting her away from the situation. She'll drop the charges before any kind of official arraignment, and it'll be forgotten. Much better than embarrassing the family: fourth marriage to a new money paranoid, who dies, and then the daughter steals everything. "This was the only way that I could protect her," she says, talking to herself, and he asks her what the eff she needs protecting from. "From creating a scandal? From ruining her future and everything that she's worked for? Embarrassing me?" His skin grows cold: "You just sounded exactly like your mother." She stares at him, because whoa, and begs off dinner. But that's okay, he says: dinner was a big mistake. He leaves, and she sighs, because she knows exactly what it was, and what went wrong.
Chuck comes charging up to the station as Blair and Nate exit; when she tells him they won't let her talk to him, he pulls out his phone: "We'll see about that." Nate throws a weak defense about OMG how dare you call him, and Blair sweetly grits, "Of course I did. He's her brother." Nate grins at her, almost, and she tells him he's got nothing to worry about. Wondering if Chuck actually had the conversation, he gets her to admit they talked it out and he gave up. Like that will stick.
"He gave me my answer. And you deserve yours. I don't think we should move in together." Neither does Nate; she laughs, confused, but he explains that he was acting crazy. "I'm sorry. I was... using the apartment to force our issues, and it's just, it's too big of a step. I'm sorry." She gives in -- how could you not? -- and tells him the "more suitable step" would be to ask her to Prom. They laugh, because neither of them could be less serious about their relationship if they'd never met, and Blair's phone rings, and shit gets awesome.
"Hello, Blair," says Georgina. Not OMGeorgina, not Sherilyn, but the real Georgina Sparks. Blair jerks; there's a dissatisfaction, an anger at the world, that comes through every word and movement. "I feel more like myself than ever," Georgina tells her: she's "Taking care of what you obviously couldn't." Blair shivers, nervous, and timidly suggests that Jesus wouldn't approve of whatever she's planning. Blair's always been afraid of Georgina; it's one of the reasons she played this like she did. "Well, you can tell Jesus that the bitch is back," Georgina says, putting on her giant evil bug glasses as the wonderful Gotye song "Heart's a Mess" starts up. That bassline. "Follow that car," she tells her driver, hanging up on Blair.
"Oh, no!" GG shudders, as Blair stares down at the evil that was just in her phone: "We warned you no good would come from spinning a wicked web..."
"She wants money," Chuck nods. "All we need to provide is some sap she thinks she can get it from." Blair points out that Poppy knows all of them, but Serena's staring at Georgina with an unhealthy gleam, because she doesn't know all of them: Georgie's been out of commission for a year at this point. And now she's in the spotlight, cornered, and slowly all of them take it up, staring at her like a pack of dang jackals. G protests loudly -- "Lying is also a sin, I will not perjure myself in front of the Lord!" -- and B gives her the bestest, brightest smile: "We'll see about that!" Gossip Girl almost giggles: "Looks like Georgina's losing her religion... Or has B met her match in the battle for G's soul?" Dude, we've seen Blair beat God before. No contest.
Lily's with Bass lawyer Bruce as the elevator dings for the seventh time and Serena comes home. Lily yawns and lightly apologizes that today's task -- paying all these investors back out of their pockets -- lies so far outwith his usual duties. "Bass business usually does," he says, which is awesome. Serena's kind of had it and just asks Lily straight up why she keeps calling and bothering her. Lily takes off her glasses, and things go from bad to worse. She takes Serena to the side and to task for not coming to Lily immediately. Serena can't think of a way to explain how she almost did, but then didn't, and mostly just fumes about Dan totally betraying her trust and immediately running to mommy; she swears this is her mess and she'll fix it, trying to live up to the whole great-grandmother speech and fix the problem on her own.
"You will do no such thing. This goes far beyond bad taste in boyfriends," Lily says, which Serena points out is totally hypocritical considering they not only encouraged her, but were taken in by him themselves, but Lily has a valid point: "If word gets out about this, all anyone will ever think when they hear the name Serena van der Woodsen is how you helped scam your friends and family out of hundreds of thousands of dollars." And when you put it that way, Lily's right. This is a melodrama plot on a melodrama show, so it's sort of genius to have a character point that out and go, "What do we, live in a parallel universe where time and space don't matter, nobody ever goes to school, tweens get served at popular bars and Chuck Bass exists? No way are you going to solve a six-figure investment scam on your own, little lady. This isn't Swan's Crossing."
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Lily says she's being naïve, pointing out that "the Madoff people" will ultimately spend a decade in court and never see a dime, and she's not going out like that. "The only plan is for me to quietly tell everyone that the deal didn't work out and pay them back myself." Which again is a good plan. Serena brings up Poppy, and of course Lily wasn't downstairs a second ago when they found out she was the actual baddie, but takes this info in stride. "She can't just get away with it," Serena says, and Lily yells. "Yes, she can. And especially if it means that your name stays out of it. This is an adult scandal. And the adult thing to do is for me to pay everyone back and for you to do absolutely nothing." All true, but way scary: "Now let it go. Am I understood?" Serena slinks off, defeated, and Lily does the whole Wonder Woman transition, moving from chilly to friendly in the time it takes her to cross back to Bruce at the table, and says she'd like to handle Rufus's investment refund "a little differently." Which I'm sure won't activate every Vanessa Abrams self-righteousness neuron in that head of his.
It's always scandal, it's always the weird Bogart "loose woman" thing; it's always the family being protected from Serena's mistakes, just like Bart and just like before. But there's a whole other thing here, which is that Serena knows she's being held accountable for this in some way, and she's got the bling digging into her wrist to remind her of that. So how come Poppy gets to go free, while Serena -- who essentially did nothing wrong, and cracked the case besides -- gets another mark on the infinite Old Serena scoreboard? You praise her for being an adult, jumping the gun from 21 to 18, and then tell her she's not allowed to fix the problem, which she's already admirably doing, in her own self-evaluation?
It's not entirely unlike the whole Sweet Sixteen issue with Jenny, really: Jenny was the one who did the actual bad thing -- admittedly after a bunch of Serena's mistakes, which were all Rhodes Women mistakes just like the one Lily's going to make later -- but carried none of the guilt for it. So you have Lily once again telling Serena that she has no voice, but all the accountability, and once again Serena flees the scene because Lily is implacable. But not as implacable as the specter of Old Serena, or the ultimate unfairness of Georgina flitting crazily around in the light of the Lord, or Blair getting all the boys no matter how ridiculous she acts, or Lily fighting for Rufus and Dan the way she'd never think to fight for her own daughter.
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Rufus needily whines that Eric's not excited enough about the hideous fucking ring and the million miles of bullshit that it encompasses, but Eric assures him that the ring is "amazing," which is not untrue, and that Rufus wanting to marry Lily is adorable. "I just want to make sure you're prepared," he says, in a duck and cover tone. Rufus protests that he's been married before, like somehow Eric's accusing him of not being able to operate a marriage license properly, and Eric explains that Lily's been married too: four times. "Ah, those guys weren't right for her," Rufus tish-toshes. That's the "I'll be back" horror-movie move of this show. You never fucking tish-tosh Eric van der Woodsen, because you always end up bleeding, because he's always right. Just do whatever the kid tells you to do, keep your back straight, and remember to smile.
"That's definitely true, but my Mom can be a little crazy, too. And I love her, I just don't want you to forget where she came from." Rufus tish-toshes once again that Lily is nothing like CeCe, which is not only untrue but also sort of sad because before Lily, CeCe was the only person on earth that actually liked Dan besides his boyfriend Nate. Rufus totally gets himself into a defensive "I was there" position, like Lily is a hip Seattle band that sold out: "Trust me, I know the family." He then compounds this with the grossest thing anybody ever said: "I'm totally up for the wild ride that is Lily Rhodes-van der Woodsen-Bass-et cetera." Instead of saying, "Compare my mother to a theme park ride again and I'll send Blair to your house while you're sleeping," Eric just welcomes him to the family, and shakes his hand, because he's got Rufus's number and knows this is the queer shit Rufus was after the whole time.
Pilot Inspektor! I forgot about him, he's gotta show up at some point in the two weeks, right? (And he's foine, too, I saw a picture. After the greasy hell that was Aaron Rose, I was shocked. Although to be fair I've seen the actor in something else, a trailer for the movie Timer with Emma Caulfield, and he looks amazing in that. So the grossness really was just Aaron Rose's grossness and not the actor's grossness, which is nice to know.) But now I'm sort of invested in seeing him make out with people, which is frustrating because Pilot Inspektor is the Aunt Sistercousin Lindsay of this show, since he's a blood relative to literally everyone in the entire cast except the Chuck/Nate/Blair thing, so how can he... Oh. That's how. Awesome.
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If Pilot Inspektor hooks up with Blair -- or let's be honest, any or all three -- he really will be the Aunt Sistercousin Lindsay and we'll have to start drawing charts. Man, Season Two of The O.C. was awesome for TV Night because we actually had a chart we kept on the wall we could point to, to keep guests quiet during the entertainment: "Who's that lady?" Lindsay's mother, you can tell by the red hair, she had an affair with Caleb in the '80s but he's married to that hot lady now. "Who's Lindsay?" That adorable girl that tries so hard all the time. "Isn't that Anna?" Sort of but no, Anna's the one that talks like this. She crammed her stuffed-animal backpack full of manga and Jets To Brazil white labels and beat it back to Philadelphia. "Who's that girl you'd go straight for?" She's not really a factor until Season Four. Here's a chart of all Caleb's wives and daughters. It takes about thirty minutes to read.
Anyhow, to be nice and for no real other reason, Eric asks about the doomed proposal. "Klaus with a K did it with a blimp, C-Claus did it on top of a pyramid, although she didn't say yes to that..." Rufus shits, because he honestly hadn't thought that far ahead.
Blair rushes around trying to get Georgina into the spirit of couture and playacting, which are her two best subjects, while Georgie stares into the mirror and thinks about the Jonas Brothers. "Come on, G! Don't you miss Dior? Prada? Looking fabulous? ...I mean, for you?" Jesus loves G as she is, of course, but B offers the idea that he would love her even more with some styling, putting a cute sterling necklace around her neck. "Think of the fun you used to have! Pretending to be Sarah and Svetlana," she shouts pissily, and then even pissier: "Slipping people roofies!" And then worst of all, like it just happened yesterday, which with Blair I can believe it feels that way: "Outing them to their unsuspecting parents at dinner!" It speaks highly of both Blair and the show that outing Eric is the worst, last thing on the list, but even more so that Dan's hummer doesn't rate.
"Those things don't call to me anymore, Blair. Look, I made a choice. I let go of the Evil so I can find love and happiness with the Good." Even Georgina knows she's a cartoon of evil, I love it. That's so high school! If one time in my whole adult life I can have a frank and honest conversation about my maturing relationship with "The Evil," I will be happy. B nods about the Evil, and G flutters her lashes. "I know it sounds dull, but it's actually quite nurturing," she says, taking the necklace off: "Can't you understand?" And of course, Blair can. She grins, only mostly pretending: "More than you know!" G's reassured, and takes it too far: "I gave up my old ways when I let Jesus take the wheel." Moment over.
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Blair drops the act and spits, "That is a Carrie Underwood song, not a life choice." (Which is my whole problem with that song, of course, but also Georgina's whole problem: it's not actually a metaphor, just a gross abdication of personal responsibility, viz. the iceberg digression last week.) "I'm sorry, but I can't help you if it goes against my beliefs." And the cat comes screaming into the swimming pool, Blair grinning fiercely: "But... When you look at it, Jesus drove you here. Right?" Georgie corrects her with a lame played out joke ("Actually, I believe his name was Jesus") and Blair starts screaming. "Not in the cab! In your country-western way of life! You said God would help you find a way to earn my forgiveness," she says, modulating softer again: "And here it is." So just to be clear, the UES is so frakked up that amends for her misdeeds would be: "to entrap Poppy Lifton, get the money back that she stole, and destroy her in the process?" Blair shrugs, because yeah. What's the problem?
"Exactly." She smiles and levels with Georgie: "If you cut 'revenge' out of the Bible, there's not even enough pages to make a pamphlet." So true, and awesome, but not as awesome as Georgie's nodding response: "...And they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them." Blair hands her the necklace again and asks how on earth Georgie knew her favorite passage. Who knows if she's kidding? I know the second she heard that, if she didn't know it before, it became her favorite.
The tribe of Judah ended up in exile in Babylon around 600 BCE, and started freaking out when they realized that after a long time worshiping in the Temple of Jerusalem, they didn't know how to serve God outside that. How do you properly worship in a strange country? Is God even still available? The quote is from the Book of Ezekiel, which is entirely about that, written to address that: he talks -- among the trippiest prophetic poetry this side of Revelation -- about how the exile came about through their disobedience, and will be reversed once they came back to God. That age-old fundie question of how you stay in the world but not of it, essentially: how to act like Babylonians without worshiping the gods of Babylon. How to gain the trust of the fallen, fit in with UES society, without falling. How to walk this close to the edge, destroy a girl to apologize for destroying a girl, and keep yourself intact: Perfect from now on.
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I mean, I know it's just here because it sounds crazy and Blair Waldorfy, and funny in that Pulp Fiction way, a nice gloss on the admittedly Blair Waldorf nature of the Old Testament God vs. the tender New Georgina nature of the New Testament one. But: God vs. Society; Purity vs. the Real World. Maybe the most fundamental religious question there is, and something we talked a lot about with Battlestar, and a few weeks ago at Passover too. It's easy to stay faithful when nobody's bugging you, keep praying when the cell phones aren't ringing. But what about when you leave OMJC Camp and have to hang out with Blair Waldorf? How much do you really love God, how far can you be pushed, before it's easier to fall in line with the UES rules? Trading literal Babylon for a figurative one, trying to fit the bill anyway and make them love you again.
This isn't about Bible trivia 101, it's about Georgina, who always fascinates me. Because this game is just as dangerous, just as razor's edge, as the games she played last time. This really is a fight for her soul, Gossip Girl wasn't kidding. With New Serena, we've seen how fuzzy the edges get; think about the extremes Georgina embodies, where things really are black and white. And just like last year, I think it's more instructive to step back a little bit from the hilarity and cartoonish OTT and symbolic necessity of Georgina, and look at her for a second like she's just a girl. Just like last year, it's more instructive and more painful to acknowledge that Georgina never lies. She honestly thought she'd solved the problem, just like Serena did. It's so sad!
This is exactly why extremes don't work, and why Georgina deserves her reputation for being the scariest thing in the universe: We're not designed that way. How much of the straight and narrow was just you staying in a circumstance that didn't test you? Which is really the question: how faithful were you really, back at OMJC Camp? Did you even change at all? Was Chuck right? Was it all a lie? How far away is Old Georgina, or Old Serena, and how many compromises do you have to make to come back from the Chuck brink, if you're Blair Waldorf? If you can't adjust to the fact that we live in a bendy world, full of change and growth, and that your adult responsibility is to live in that world and watch yourself all the time, that you can't ever just commit to one thing and hope to ride it the rest of your life, then you're asking for it: Plink! God's gotta knock you down just to keep you from rotting.
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Serena's none too happy calling Blair to tell her the plan's off, but her bummed-out resentment is nothing to the aghast horror that greets her. "What? No. Do you know how much work this exorcism was? It's going to take days for Dorota to reorganize my closet!" Serena says they're letting Lily take the reins, and leaving Poppy out of it, but B's got a good point: "Poppy is it? She's so evil she makes the Old Georgina look like the New Georgina!" Lily summons Serena offscreen, and Blair puts up just enough of a fight that you know she's going to acquiesce... And keep working on the plan just in case.
And in the living room, OMG there's Poppy. Drinking tea with Lily: "Poppy came by to see how we were doing after all the terrible drama this morning!" Poppy pushes her mean girl advantage: "I mean, the money part was bad, but I just felt like such an idiot. I thought he loved me... Obviously you understand that." Enjoying it. Serena gets stronger, even as Lily arches an eyebrow and meaningfully relates that Poppy's off to Miami tonight, to feel like a fool while getting a tan. Serena alerts her to nonexistent aperitif in her teeth, and sits down with her mother.
"What are you doing having tea and smiling at her? We should lock the doors and call the police!" Lily's about 99% right that they should just let her go, but S comes up with the 1% that wins: "She's not disappearing, she's going to Miami. Where she's going to do the exact same thing to new people." Lily hopes vaguely that the people in Miami will be smarter than Poppy's trickery, and Serena is horrified. Because that's horrifying. Meanwhile, Dan gets a call from I guess Bruce about Rufus's incoming dividends -- from the investment he never actually made -- rolling in in about six weeks. The ding! you're hearing is not Dan figuring out what's going on: it's just Serena getting off yet another elevator.
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"Fuck this, let's destroy Poppy Lifton," she explains to Blair, who is delighted. Georgina appears from behind a sliding door wearing purple -- including a patented Blair headband, which I didn't notice until it was too late was purple snakeskin -- and gives a seriously creepy, seriously awesome speech. "Hello," she says, friendly and nervous as a Canadian socialite. "Sherilyn Phillips. My daddy's got a piece of the oil sands up in Alberta. A piece the size of Florida. I'm so excited to meet my first New York friend for tomorrow. Maybe you know her? Poppy Lifton?" Serena is impressed by this new iteration of Georgina -- the fifth, by my count, officially outnumbering all the Chucks and Charleses and Charlies, lonelier even than him -- and shakes her hand.
But -- briefly -- consider this. When Georgina came back to eat Serena, she changed her name to Sarah, which is pretty much "Serena." But when Serena and Georgina wanted to be Georgina and Serena, they were Savannah and Svetlana, which are both pretty much still "Serena." Sherilyn, in this context, is linguistically way closer to "Blair" than Serena, much less "Georgina," linguistically. Anyway, Georgina's still in Please Everybody mode, and beams yet more; Serena nods at Blair... And Blair is in love with evil.
Chuck stares at Sherilyn appraisingly; he sniffs her and she focuses on him intently, wondering how she's doing. We've seen him do this trick before; he's also the only person with as many names as she's had. He has a nose for compartmentalization. "I sense ... aspiration, yearning, striving to be accepted." Georgina nods desperately, striving to be accepted but also wanting approval for this, her dirty deed that will keep her clean. "But then there's this appealing counternote of sincerity and optimism." He could be talking about Svetlana, Sarah, OMGeorgina, all of them: "This is the story of a young girl who is enjoying her first taste of the spoils of dirty oil."
Sherilyn's proud, and if you really watch this bit, her eyebrow just sort of jerks, momentarily sneaky and excited, thrilled beyond OMGeorgina and back into the past, reveling in the artifice and the nastiness and the lie, putting on faces and taking them off again, being anybody but broken sick sad angry scary crazy Georgina, like always: "It's perfection." Blair's proud, and Nate plays dummy again so we get the skinny: still not calling the cops, especially now that Lily has essentially betrayed Serena by inviting Poppy into their home, so they're going to tape Poppy at lunch with Sherilyn and blackmail her. They know she'd stash the money if she got nicked, and besides, Serena says, "As annoyed as I am with Dan right now, it is his college tuition." I love Serena. "He screwed the pooch, but the kid's in a place."
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Blair explains to Nate for the eighteenth time that Poppy's not leaving town, just like in the last five scenes when this kept getting explained, but also that her needs are simple: "All she's worried about right now is party invitations and keeping a front row seat at Bryant Park." So, she's pretty much Jenny S1, then? Stealing to keep up with the Tiffanys and Penelopes? Dan calls Serena to whine about the dividend call, and Serena fully goes, "I don't know, why don't you call my mom? You seem to like to talk to her these days." Which, for Serena, is like six zingers and a burn. "It's not exactly fair of you to ask me to trust the return of my tuition to ... Blair and Chuck," he groans, once again twisting his face into this semblance of getting it. Serena swears she's taking care of it, and once again he second-guesses her, just as Sherilyn's complaining about having to "drink alcohol in this scheme," to which Blair spits in irritation, "It's the Russian Tea Room. You can drink tea," and S gets the eff off the phone with Dan. But alas, it's too late. The jig is up once again. Dan should just get Lily on speed dial.
Meanwhile, Rufus and Jenny are decorating PRADA MARFA with like shabby chic thriftstore Laura Ashley duvet covers that smell like pee and plastic classy candles, and catching varmints for the proposal dinner, and Rufus is like, "Wait, am I totally out of my depth? I just remembered I'm proposing to a woman so shallow she slept willingly in a bed with the wrinkled leathery mess that was Bart Bass, and I let her. Seems like if I was complicit in her prostitution to secure her family's future I'd be more sensitive to my doing the same thing," and Jenny's like, "Don't be silly, you love each other for what you are: emotionally retarded adulterers with track records plainly indicating that you shouldn't even be in charge of yourselves, much less five or six children."
He's like, "You're right. This is a true heroic man-type love." And something about the way his posture straightens based on facile praise from his teenage daughter, of the "this shitty proposal shows you really know her" variety, the way he suddenly stands like Clark Kent based on this frippery, cape blowing in the wind, makes me want to barf. The only nutsack Jenny should be locating is Nate's. There, I said it.
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Ding! Guess what though, Serena's not getting off the elevator. I mean, somewhere she probably is, but not this one and not right now: it's Lily, coming home from ... emergency mid-embezzlement shopping therapy at Barney's. Never let it be said that I didn't admire Lily's priorities. Jenny awesomely accosts her, mugging her of the bags like a fake Mumbai bellhop and marching her upstairs to get a look at the zipper of some Marchesa dress Lily wore "last week." Which of course means "back before Kelly Rutherford became the most pregnant person ever to be pregnant."
People scoff at the absurd-yet-halfassed lengths they're going to to hide the pregnancy, but I love it so much. In this scene, Lily comes in through the door and talks to Jenny. But wait, she's totally pregnant! No problem, because Lily apparently just bought thirty-six bags' worth of shit from Barney's and will come in with them hanging all over her like that lady in Labyrinth with the hump made of teddy bears and quilts and clocks and whatever. Done. And week? Oh, she'll be carrying sixteen garbage bags full of stuff for the charity drive we'll invent, or reminiscing about Orange County in a limo with a shitload of lilies in her lap, or doing deep tank mudbath therapy as a result of jailing her daughter, or sitting behind a giant butter statue commemorating Gabriel meeting Savannah and Svetlana at Butter, or having a long talk with Chuck on that one couch with every pillow and chenille throw ever sold, piled up around her like a fort.
Everybody's still in sexy action mode as they disembark the towncar for the Russian Tea Room, but Nate stops Chuck outside. I don't have many of those weird New York things, like playing Eloise or Holden Caulfield or whatever, but I do have the weird obsession with the Russian Tea Room. I'm so not a New Yorker, like if you told me actually that's a weird name for a carpeting sample warehouse I would pretend I already know that and forge ahead with my fantasies, but for some reason it clicks into that Breakfast At Tiffany's place in my head. I just want to go to there, I don't even know where it came from. I am a rube. I am totally a Sherilyn Phillips about it. For all I know that's the joke, that of course Sherilyn would want to meet Poppy there and she'd be like, "Um okay, dork." This is why I'm constantly giving my money to con men and joining cults: it's my damnable sense of the romantic and the picturesque.
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Nathaniel tells Chuck he's got it all figured out: Chuck needs to man the eff up and go after Blair or not, but it's not fair to play both Nate and Blair by ducking in only when she's got other stuff going on. And of course Nate's right -- even about how Chuck is "lying to himself" about his true feelings, I guess -- but that's not really the issue. If Chuck's in denial about his continued love of Blair, it's only as a second movement to the original thing, which is not giving in, which is itself a ghost of the very first thing, which is that he isn't worthy of her. The fact that she's not worthy of him either doesn't occur to anybody, but since none of this is the issue I think that's a healthy starting place. After all, if you had to wait until you were perfect to fall in love, there would be like five intensely boring couples populating the entire world and we'd die out in a generation. Chuck laughs until the "man up" part, and the jerky way he draws in breath, sharply, neither angry nor afraid but simply hit with something large, means something is going to happen and it's not going to be pretty.
How not pretty? Well, imagine a story that took hold of the imaginations of an entire globe of people, including me for sure, all about the natural inclination of men to devour women, and the natural inclination of women to yearn toward this, even after decades of socialization to avoid this devouring at all costs, right? How we set women up to be either virgins or whores, and how in neither case is it really about them, or what they want, and all about men and what they want to put in the women, even infants, and we still judge the women on this criterion of what they do with that incredibly limited scope of options.
Imagine if you will a story about how virginity is important for some reason, which -- since it totally isn't -- needs to be concretized by making sexual intercourse not only deadly but exquisitely painful (in fact, makes you a literal monster if you do it) and thus something to be avoided at all costs, but is also the only thing that matters, such that consummation is no longer the point of sexuality but in fact the endless forest-lying moments just before consummation: that somehow not fucking is the new fucking. Just imagine.
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And imagine please that if you really looked at it, or watched the movie -- where it's made perfectly clear, and played by brilliant and skeptical homosexuals to boot -- you realized that no matter how sexy and yearny it is, these two bitches are totally disgusting and creepy-obsessed and willing to do fucking horrible things to themselves, each other, and everyone around them, just so they can stay at this nowhere point where they're not fucking, or even admitting they want to, but also all they're doing is fucking. But not physically, like, they're fucking each other's bloody brains. Maybe a very nice, very hot guy named Nate or Jacob gets in the middle of it, but doesn't really care or matter at all, because he is a werewolf or like a prostitute or whatever kind of minority.
And so but the girl wants to be annihilated, which is gross, and the boy wants to annihilate her, which is slightly less awful but still awful, but they love each other so much they can't back off, and simultaneously love each other so much they can't give in, so they just spin out in these separate desperate angry orbits of sexual inversion, getting crazier and crazier to the point where they fuck each other's uncles on NYE or, I don't know, have a spine-eating devil baby that sparkles and can read minds and is named the stupidest thing you can think of, and still 99.9% of the fanfic is about people tying up and buttfucking Jasper, for some reason.
Anyway, about that ugly, but Jenny can explain Blair and Chuck better than I can, for all my two years' experience: "Bella's so in love with him, even though he's a vampire. Maybe it's because he's a vampire, I don't know. But the thing is, his family doesn't suck the blood, so it makes her feel safer, but the problem is... Is that Edward, the more he falls in love with her the more he wants..." Lily's desperate to shut her up, as the phone's ringing, but they play it so naturally and lovingly that it's like a mother and a daughter. Even though Jenny's just fucking with her to stall for Rufus's stupid proposal plan, it still seems really genuine. And that's just beautiful, because it's Kelly Rutherford reminding you of all the good things about Lily, just when you need to remember them most. You can see her doing this exact same patient honey I love you please shut up please shut up thing with any of her kids: Serena talking about some prince or pop star taking her as his muse, or Eric same thing, or Chuck all excited about a million-year-old scotch, or Dan talking about whatever the fuck, Godard, or Rufus talking about anything whatsoever.
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So it's Dan on the phone talking about whatever the fuck, Godard or Godot, asking why Rufus is getting dividends, and Lily says she took care of it so quit, and he's like, "Then what is Serena still 'taking care of' at the Russian Tea Room right now?" Because every episode's gotta have a Vanessa, I guess. I never thought I'd miss her quite this bad. Come back, Vanessa! (OW! I just got smacked by myself of the past!)
Once again, like getting off the elevator for the twentieth time today, we cut to Serena answering the phone all "WHAT?" Lily tells her to stop whatever she's doing immediately, but Serena just can't do that. "You can smile at Poppy all you want, Mom, but I'm not like that. It's not right." Lily tells her to shove "right" and "wrong" because Lily's in charge and this is not Serena's call, which I can't entirely disagree with again except for the actual morality and the fact that it's happening, and then just so Serena understands this isn't one of those "bendy world" times, tells her it's "nonnegotiable" just as Serena spots Poppy arriving, and hangs up.
Meanwhile, Rufus is lighting his stupid candles for his stupid drama event that nobody cares about, because God forbid Rufus ever just come across and say something without setting the scene, it's sort of one of the things I love best about him, and Lily makes a secretive phone call to hopefully fuck up whatever Serena's probably pulling off, while Rufus jerks open a random drawer looking for silverware and finds a random folder that just happens to contain the details of his separate $5K/mo payout for being a male prostitute of Lily. This is exactly why Bart had a vault; now we know.
"They say that numbers don't lie, and money talks..." GG says, and Sherilyn sits down with Poppy as the plan is go, and a crafty smile meets a sneaky crazy one: "But can G still speak P's language?" Commercial, and then Sherilyn's sipping Russian tea and gushing wide-eyed and asking Poppy if she's a Carrie, because she herself is a Charlotte -- I'll spare you the Jungian essay on why that's not only relevant but completely true, because I've talked about it before -- and Poppy nods uncomprehendingly, as though she's been so busy learning to be a cat burglar supermodel socialite that she managed not to see that show, and Serena watches them.
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Chuck joins Blair at the bar, talking about how Poppy's arrived; B's stressing and Chuck tells her she needs a drink. "You're too late!" she says in this adorable chirpy/mordant fashion I can't really describe, and earns a laugh. "Wow... That's the first true laugh I've gotten out of you in a while," she says, plans in her eyes. He sits, and she asks to speak first, because they both know this is one of the real ones. Just like that the burlesque ends, the clothes come off, and they agree to act like grownups. It's completely smooth and practiced, natural, but still monumental. I can't explain it, but there's a sudden very true feeling that shit's going down.
It might sound like a conversation they've had before, and it's most certainly a conversation they'll have again, but there's something in their eyes. It's in the highwire tension of Blair's hesitantly defiant smile. It's most painfully in Chuck's smirk, his loving, dismissive, hungry, amused, angry, aching grin: trying to be so ironic and above it and been there that he can somehow contain it all, all the enormity that will follow. Just in the curve of his smile. We were talking two nights ago about Roseanne, how it's a different show when you go back as an adult, because you realize Becky and Jackie are the most annoying characters because they're the most honest actors: it's hard to catch an actor really informing and living their characters because the point specifically of acting is making you not notice.
It's a manipulative, repetitive relationship, this Chair: sure. And shippers want this simultaneous change and not-change I will never understand, because it's logically impossible that you get what you want -- resolution of conflict and simultaneous continuation of conflict -- which is what shipping is all about. So I can understand getting bitter or bored. What gets me personally every single time is the performances: it's not possible for them to get bored in a scene any more than it is for me to disengage from it, because they're both determinedly, even recklessly, in that moment. (You have to be reckless to play Chuck Bass, he's more dramatic just sitting there than even my drama queen ass manages to be in the middle of a crisis.) It's in the blood, or at least the scarf: there's so much hilarious wonderful bullshit in this show, it's such a farce and spectacle, that it's impossible for me to imagine trying to be honest in these performances, and they keep doing it, and watching people do it is breathtaking, both in the scene and outside of it. What it feels like is what it looks like, which is what it is: You're looking at a highwire act, over a circus, in the middle of a crowded city street.
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Pick apart the pieces of your heart and let me peer inside
Let me in, where only your thoughts have been
Let me occupy your mind
As you do mine
Blair: "Nate's waiting for me to give him an answer." Chuck assents; gives nothing. "Don't you want to know what's stopping me? I can't answer his question while I'm waiting for you to answer mine. The one I asked you forever ago: What are we, Chuck?" He gives nothing/his heart is breaking: "Blair..." She looks down, deep, trying to pierce it, to figure it out. The blunt instrument, the holy light that is Blair Waldorf, peering in. She wants to devour, to annihilate him. And he wants it. Say the word.
"Last fall you said we couldn't be together. And I believed you. But every time I try to move on, you're right there, acting like..." He cocks his head. Acting? What acting? Surviving. Managing to live.
"Acting like what?" He eyes, hurting so much. Knowing what she'll say: "Maybe you just want me to be as unhappy as you are." His face twists, sickened and afraid. He wants to annihilate her, and she wants him to annihilate her. Say the word. "I would never wish that on anyone," he says, and they nearly drop their heads in silence. "I want you to be happy," he swears; it rips across him. She sees stars.
"Then look down deep, into the soul I know you have, and tell me if what you feel for me is real, or if it's just a game." She breaks the rules of love. Happiness is not their strong suit, and he knows it binds them together: ruin her plan and she'll come running. But Cyrus Rose and Georgina Sparks, the defeat of Gabriel Edwards and the pursuit of Poppy Lifton, have given her new hope. Sickly hope he can't share. She looks into his eyes, like a gloved hand at the curbside: "If it's real... We'll figure it out. All of us," she says, smiling. She doesn't even know Nate's given his tacit consent: We will learn, we will stay a family. Love that costs you nothing. Love that is not earned or striven for, can he even imagine it? All the love in the world and more, a family as big as the Ritz, more love than he could ever exhaust, and the Cyrus Rose in her saying, "Not enough! Not enough!" Never enough. Never enough, to pay the debt he's owed.
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If this is the conversation, if the burlesque is winding down, is it possible to be honest enough? Tears well up in her eyes. And his. "But if it's not... Then please, Chuck. Just let me go." She nods, smiling, loving him too as a friend, giving him his room. What lies beyond love that costs nothing? Love that remains, after love is gone. We will stay a family. I see signs now, all the time, that you're not dead: you're sleeping. I'll believe in anything that brings you back home to me. There's no risk here, just acceptance. Just the request for an answer. She smiles at him, lovingly, tears dropping, willing him on. Giving him strength. His sister enters and Blair acknowledges her in the nod, begging him to come out. It looks like he's losing his religion. Blair has met her match in the battle for Chuck's soul, and it has nothing to do with her.
Behind him, Serena urges her on. Enough honesty, Eric always says, enough light and you can be strong enough for anything. Enough love. Look down deep. Has she taken off enough? Is this enough? He's Eustace and she's the lion, tearing at her own skin. Once the game was words: say I love you, and I'm yours. We're past that point now. No more telling, only showing.
You don't get burned because nothing gets through
It makes it easier on you
But that much more difficult for me to make you see
After a long silence she nods once more, searching his face, and he smiles.
I'm desperate to connect
And you can't live like this
"...It's just a game." S listening, feeling awful. "I hate to lose. You're free to go." She stands, and thanks him. Defiant, hurt beyond hurting, naked and bleeding. Free.
You have lost too much love to fear, doubt and distrust
It's not enough
You just threw away the key to your heart
She's gone. He can breathe. Serena joins him, almost touching him, honestly horrified. "Chuck. Why did you just ... do that?" Honestly curious. He looks at the bar. "Because I love her. And I can't make her happy."
It's not enough.
Sherilyn sits with Poppy Lifton, as a waiter spreads caviar on a cracker so slow as to be pornographic, limitless and decadent: "New York is full of people doing such amazing things. Who knew you could bring wireless to third world countries?" Even Poppy's having trouble pretending to care about that. "Yeah. It's really more of a passion than a job. I mean, it gives so much to the children." For example, Sherilyn (and Georgina) imagine, they can "look at faraway places and read Bible stories... Oh! And they can download Kirk Cameron movies!" Poppy gets a kick out of her, nodding, and Sherilyn makes the play. Poppy's hair looks the best it's ever looked as she jumps at it: "I mean, you're such a great girl... Look, if you can get me a payment today, I'll find a way to get you in." Classic creep talk.
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Sherilyn lamely squeals, "I can't wait to help the children!" She reaches for her phone and Poppy tells her there's no time for wire transfer: it'll have to be cash. Sherilyn hesitates; outside, the cops have arrived. Chuck's disappeared, so Serena goes outside to talk to them while Blair texts Sherilyn, who's handing over an envelope of cash, and having trouble handing it over. Not because she's greedy, but because the money is important. Her phone alerts her to a text, playing "Praise To The Lord," and she sees Blair's message: "Police here. All set?" All she can say to Poppy's hard-soft sell is a weak, "God intended for us to meet," and an invitation for Cosmos before she leaves town.
S meets the police outside, and they take her into custody. She's brilliant right beforehand, though: "Chuck Bass had to leave, but the woman he called you about is inside. I can take you." As they're pushing her against the car and putting cuffs on her, against her protests, Blair appears, clapping at them in that absolutely sublime way she's been doing, like they're naughty dogs. It doesn't work. Nate appears, asking for exposition, and for once Blair doesn't have an answer; Serena keeps yelling, "Blair, call Chuck! Call Chuck!" Serena's driven away in the cop car, looking back at them, worried and a little bit scared for herself, while Poppy slips out the front door and vanishes. Bitches, call Chuck!
Blair strides up angrily to OMGeorgie, whose snakeskin headband is suddenly radiant in the light of the restaurant. She smiles nervously and asks Blair what's up. This scene made me sad, sadder than the bar one frankly, because you completely understand both sides of it. So what makes Blair wonderful in the Blair context -- working out her Chuck-related aggression in a sensible way -- makes OMGeorgina incredibly sympathetic in the Georgina context. She's just sitting there wondering if it went off, and then Blair goes off.
"Your plan was a rousing success!" So, they arrested her? "If by her you mean Serena, the answer is yes." She doesn't get it; Blair assumes that's part of the joke. The game, the burlesque, the way the world lines up to hurt her, the shell game of loyalty. Find the lady: "Pretending to find Jesus to take us all down? It borders on brilliant." The money in the envelope, a rapidly panicking Georgina notes, was for new OMJC Bibles, which Blair rightly points out sounds ridiculous. "But you texted me All Set! And Poppy was asking me for a down payment, and all I had was the money my camp gave me to buy Bibles..." Blair leans down, and while it's not that cruel on paper, again Meester gives the lines just enough bite to seem really cruel. Cruel enough to send New Georgina toppling. Most of the tribe of Judah never made it back home either. It got too hard. The deck was stacked.
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"You expect me to believe that after all you've done?" Georgina stares up at her, afraid and sad, knowing she screwed something up, knowing she can't escape it. "Your stupid clothes and your Bible quotes don't fool anyone. You're evil. I know it, you know it. And God knows it too." The way she says it, the energy in the scene, is so vile and electric; it's like attacking Dan's integrity or Lily's parenting, Serena's selfishness or Blair's self-control: the thing they think makes them real. (Consider this: The hint of the century; the slip that brings you to your knees: failed.) Georgina's weeping, disgusted with herself and the situation, desperate for her good works to be noticed, to earn a family, sad and terrified: "But I didn't do anything wrong!" She could be Serena on her hardest day, for a moment. And Blair knows it.
"I will never forgive you for what you've done." She leans meanly over the table: "And neither will Jesus."
Funny line. It means nothing to her, or to us. It means something to Georgina. Or it means nothing to Georgina. It's funny, and it's terrible. You can pin your hopes on anything. The thinner the justification, the more desperate the motivation, the harder we hold onto it. Lose track of that iceberg and the world flips over: you don't mess with people's real shit. And Blair's just doing what she does: striking out at random, because she's just substantively lost the two people she loves in this world.
The most inconsequential things are the most important, especially on this show, but especially for those who have no hope. You know how they always take dogs to old folks' homes, to give them a reason? They stay alive for years -- minds gone, bodies gone, family gone, whether dead or inconvenienced -- just for some stupid smelly old mutt, finally loving them. Finally reminding them they were meant to love, and to be loved. Chuck needs a dog. Georgina had one.
I promise you that if this show runs ten years, Blair Waldorf will never do anything this awful in her life. And it means nothing to her. Or to us.
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Rufus is still standing there with the folder in the dining room when Lily approaches, smiling lightly and hoping he's not been waiting too long. He asks about the paperwork and she blows him off, running to the lilies he brought; with hands on hips he doesn't relent. "With bags of money matching each of their investments? What's going on here, Lily?" She explains as little as possible -- everybody gets their money back -- but he asks about the separate arrangements for his forty grand. Lily is wearing the most insane necklace ever worn at this point: Wearing giant wooden balls and silver pinecones. It works. "Rufus, this really isn't a big deal," she says, but he's right: "You were planning on giving me money every month behind my back. Do you have any idea how humiliating that is?" God forbid anybody point out to a Humphrey that money isn't the most important thing on earth.
Lily swears she wasn't trying to humiliate him, with this secret fake investment on his behalf, but she's succeeded anyhow; finally she breaks down and levels, tired of the back and forth: "Do you know how hard it is for me to watch you agonize over not being able to send Dan to Yale? When I could very easily help you, if you would just let me." He whines about how great he was doing without her help, and luckily the phone rings: it's the cops, checking in. And at the station, they reach for Serena's wrist; she's relieved until they produce the bracelet: "Theft." And who called in this theft of great-grandmother's diamonds? Lily, of course.
Rufus hands Lily a glass of wine, worried, and asks what's going on, how he can help. She explains Serena's been arrested, but she's not heading down right away, because the punchline is that she called it in. Rufus is grossed out: "This coming from the same woman who wouldn't even let me put Jenny in the back of a squad car?" She tries to explain that it's different, she's not going to let Serena sit behind bars: it was about getting her away from the situation. She'll drop the charges before any kind of official arraignment, and it'll be forgotten. Much better than embarrassing the family: fourth marriage to a new money paranoid, who dies, and then the daughter steals everything. "This was the only way that I could protect her," she says, talking to herself, and he asks her what the eff she needs protecting from. "From creating a scandal? From ruining her future and everything that she's worked for? Embarrassing me?" His skin grows cold: "You just sounded exactly like your mother." She stares at him, because whoa, and begs off dinner. But that's okay, he says: dinner was a big mistake. He leaves, and she sighs, because she knows exactly what it was, and what went wrong.
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Chuck comes charging up to the station as Blair and Nate exit; when she tells him they won't let her talk to him, he pulls out his phone: "We'll see about that." Nate throws a weak defense about OMG how dare you call him, and Blair sweetly grits, "Of course I did. He's her brother." Nate grins at her, almost, and she tells him he's got nothing to worry about. Wondering if Chuck actually had the conversation, he gets her to admit they talked it out and he gave up. Like that will stick.
"He gave me my answer. And you deserve yours. I don't think we should move in together." Neither does Nate; she laughs, confused, but he explains that he was acting crazy. "I'm sorry. I was... using the apartment to force our issues, and it's just, it's too big of a step. I'm sorry." She gives in -- how could you not? -- and tells him the "more suitable step" would be to ask her to Prom. They laugh, because neither of them could be less serious about their relationship if they'd never met, and Blair's phone rings, and shit gets awesome.
"Hello, Blair," says Georgina. Not OMGeorgina, not Sherilyn, but the real Georgina Sparks. Blair jerks; there's a dissatisfaction, an anger at the world, that comes through every word and movement. "I feel more like myself than ever," Georgina tells her: she's "Taking care of what you obviously couldn't." Blair shivers, nervous, and timidly suggests that Jesus wouldn't approve of whatever she's planning. Blair's always been afraid of Georgina; it's one of the reasons she played this like she did. "Well, you can tell Jesus that the bitch is back," Georgina says, putting on her giant evil bug glasses as the wonderful Gotye song "Heart's a Mess" starts up. That bassline. "Follow that car," she tells her driver, hanging up on Blair.
"Oh, no!" GG shudders, as Blair stares down at the evil that was just in her phone: "We warned you no good would come from spinning a wicked web..."
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Lily drinks wine at her now-empty table, as the song begins to play in earnest, begging someone, anyone, everyone, to just be loved, to lay down the armor and give in, rest there: "You just end up all tangled in your own lies..."
Your heart's a mess
Rufus comes home, all alone, defeated. (You won't admit to it...) The kids are at the table playing cards, looking up at him excitedly, asking questions. He has no answers. (I'm desperate to connect...) He slides the ugly ring across the table to them, asking them to return it. (You can't live like this...) They stare as he slumps across the floor, and the camera pushes in on their shocked faces. It's a real moment, this: the way the song plays across the little tiny scenes, the camera pushing in at them, catching them in a moment.
Blair, Chuck and Nate stand at three different elevations on the police station steps as the camera swoops in at all of them, GG speaking over it all: "And the more you twist, the tighter the trap..." Chuck calls his PI ("I need you to dig up what dirt you can on the officers of the 55th Precinct..."), Nate calls in a personal favor with the department, Blair scares the shit out of two cops on the steps, explaining that the bracelet's been in the family for generations.
Your heart's a mess/ You won't admit to it
It makes no sense
But I'm desperate to connect
And you can't live like this
And inside the station, as GG laughs ("Until you're trapped in a prison of your own making. Smile for the camera, S!"), Serena stands for her mugshots: unbearably moody, with the camera lighting her up like a Page Six girl, against a black background. For a moment it's a Hernandez comic book, black walls and a spotlight, with beautiful tired Serena in the middle, flash bulbs in the dark, name on her chest, trying to be a grownup, caught in a web of coincidence and inconvenience, lit up by sparks in the darkness that fade too quickly, stuck between Perfect From Now On and the chains of reputation: between kindness and petty vengeance. Just like everybody else.
week: I don't really care about anything, because I'm finally getting the Dick I've been craving for so long.
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