What New York Used To Be

A big old hustle to track down Gossip Girl in the flesh results in a few fun twists, but ultimately this show-changing finale is as relaxing and pointless as a week after high school graduation, when you realize nothing substantial actually happened... And that you're pretty much okay with that. If the problem with last year's denouement was compression from the strike, this season's last stretch has been wobbly from inflation, with an extra three-ep pod that muddied the waters and handed us a Sunset flashback that could have been its own episode, or at least happened before Georgina showed up. It closes loops and sets up the season admirably, but makes some pretty blasé gamechanger decisions without a lot of reasoning behind them, just like last week.

So the A plot is that GG sends out a blast during the graduation ceremony that labels our kids variously "Coward" (Chuck), "Weakling" (Blair), "Class Whore" (Nate, duh), "Ultimate Insider" (Dan) and "Irrelevant" (Serena). The first two are the same secret essentially, and the Nate one is defused hilariously in about five seconds. But those last two are important, because the Dan one is actually about what a total hypocrite drama queen and user of influence he is, and the Serena one because it mobilizes her to declare war on Gossip Girl.

But what happens when you throw a war and nobody shows up for it? A big load of nothing, Miss Irrelevant. At first, the crew thinks GG is Eric's boyfriend Jonathan, but it turns out he's some kind of hacker and randomly gets her texts right now or some crap. But at Nate's grad party that night, GG proves sufficiently piqued that she drops about every bomb about everybody: Nate's prostitution, Dan and Charlie Trout's jail cell love connection, Jenny's t.A.T.u. time with Agnes, that hot/squicky backstage hookup with Rachel Carr, and everything else besides.

The way GG is used in this episode is sort of clunky, but really ambitious. First she's like this embodiment of paranoia that drives everybody against each other. Then she's like this mischievous guardian spirit that will always be there for them. And somewhere in the middle, she's the last five seconds of Fight Club, or The Manchurian Candidate, where they spend the whole episode popping back and forth across this binary opposition about how much truth could actually kill a person, or if this is all high school shit they can possibly transcend, so that when she explodes all the gossip at once it's like totally scary, and really comforting at the same time. No more secrets? The show's over. You know? Season Two is dead, long live Season Three. New secrets.

So the last of these -- Blair fucking Uncle Jack Bass at New Year's -- is info juicy enough to get Jenny the Queen's crown for year so she can "abolish the monarchy," as she says in her uniquely Humphrey adorable-yet-futile fashion. But having this info on blast before she can use it is not at all as sad as the effect it has on Blair and Chuck's nineteenth nervous breakdown: after about the hottest foreplay ever on this show, she says it, he doesn't, so she goes predictably apeshit on Serena.

At this time, Nelly Yuki is drunkenly declaring her love for Dan Humphrey (awesome), while Rufus and Lily are smoking "something she found in Chuck's room" (awesomer). I don't mean to blow your mind, but Rufus acts exactly the same high as he does sober, while Lily gets even greater. So on a nostalgia high, Rufus proposes marriage and she accepts, but the crows are already circling: PILOT INSPEKTOR -- or "Scott," and not as hot in real life as in pictures -- has transferred to NYU to stalk Dan from closer in, while the apparently missing Keith van der Woodsen has been located.

Deserted, Serena and Nate wander the streets like the wild vague beasts that they are, sipping martinis and attempting to have thoughts. Eventually they text GG that they know who she is -- even though they demonstrably do not -- and GG gets all meta on their asses, summoning the entire cast (including Eric and Plastics) to demonstrate some high-flying metaphor about how We Are All Gossip Girl As A Culture that sails over their heads, but also assure them that she's following them to their various colleges and will be voicing over them forever. Way to reboot!

So in a heartbroken state of delirium, Blair passes on her (literal!) crown to Jenny, pointing out that as a future van der Bassphrey Jenny's about to be richer than the rest of the bitches put together. Jenny and Rufus finally move in to PRADA MARFA, delighting Eric with their sole possession: a waffle iron. Please, please let Eric and Jenny become the new Blair and Serena of Constance-St. Jude's. Oh, and Nate finally joins Vanessa on that goddamn trip around the world just to shut her up. Do we know where Vanessa's going to college? Do we care? And when is her batshit sister showing up?

(Think about it: If she's at NYU that is the most fucked up scenario. Dan, Georgie, Blair, Pilot Inspektor and Vanessa is like the worst trip ever. They'll eat each other alive. Awesome. And since we were cheated out of seeing Dorota at graduation, they have to take her to NYU too, right? season is my favorite show ever!)

Serena runs off to Fiji with Carter to find Keith, while Blair stays close to home, unaware that Georgina Sparks -- who got all the money back, and is probably keeping Poppy Lifton in a pit somewhere -- is going to be her roommate! And even better: on a random morning a week after graduation, Chuck surprises Blair outside her building bearing her favorite gifts from around the world and tells her he loves her, again and again and again and again. XOXO.

Gossip Girl shows this flipbook of old people from like the '80s who maybe went to Constance/St. Jude's, including JFK, Jr., and talks about how "like everything on the Upper East Side, high school graduation is done a little differently," like for example maybe you're on the cover of the New York Post with a misspelled headline ("DIAMONDS ARENT A GIRLS WORST FRIEND" or some shit) because your mom had you arrested so there wouldn't be a scandal, or something. Also, Eric saw the news of Serena's arrest -- first scooped by Gossip Girl, of course -- as far afield as the pages of Pravda. Because Eric van der Woodsen reads the society pages in a Russian newspaper, of course, and of course they would care about that stupid storyline. As you can see, by the Rouge Tomate-goers staring at Serena's face, then the front page, then her face, then the front page, face, page, face, page, do you get it, and they're gaping horribly.

Blair's awesomely into it, though, like, of course Serena has discovered an entirely new kind of fame based on being arrested. Blair's wrong, though. The Perfectly Serena part of this is that when her crimes finally hit the newsstands it was for something retarded like Aggravated Not Stealing A Bracelet rather than Second Degree Sex Tape Threesome Lack Of Murder. That's the Serena part: that only for her dumbest-ass crimes would she be famous, to the point where nobody can really even figure out why she was in jail.

I hate this episode in a myriad of ways, but one of the bestest is how it finally made the jump to a place at least adjacent to the "heightened reality" we've been promised for the last two years, where S is constantly inspiring perfumes and couture lines and like the purchase of toucans... But the script is so uniformly bad that you think maybe the bright but rural nine-year-old girl who wrote it doesn't actually understand that it's unrealistic; there's a very Danielle Steele aspect to the glamour this week. Oh, I get it actually, because this is the problem I have with this particular writer every time: the Entourage offense to causality, wherein most things that happen make no sense and only exist to set up either A) a joke that's not even that funny, B) an Awesome Situation that's not that awesome, or C) season. It's the laziest possible way to write, and that's offensive. Also, so is Nelly Yuki's shitty acting.

Blair points out that GG has always "plagued" Serena more than anybody, starting in ninth grade, when the whole thing started, and points out that since GG doesn't do college, this is Serena's last day under that French-tipped thumb. Serena tells B to get her mind off the whole mugshot thing, and Blair starts asking about how exactly Chuck talked about his great love for her. Her eyes are bright. "B, I don't know why you're acting like this is new information. You know how Chuck feels about you!" Blair explains that he has yet to tell her officially, and thus she can't trust him not to pull some kind of fast one on her. Then Blair decides it's time to go, so they go out of the restaurant and Blair poses for the paparazzi adorably before jumping into the car.

At the graduation ceremony for a school which she does not attend, Vanessa obsessively film-documents William Granderbilt, who discusses nothing with Nate for awhile before doing everything he can to ignore Vanessa's morbidly deranged grin as he goes past. "It's like getting a smile from the President," she tells Nate, who laughs nervously because he's never quite sure, and has no way of knowing that this time, that statement actually doesn't mean anything whatsoever. It's like what now? And this was indicated onscreen in what way? So their mouths open and close and sounds come out for awhile, and he tells Vanessa that they broke up -- "turns out we just had to go through something to be sure" is the fucking effortlessly beautiful prose that he lays down at this time, an awkwardly written sentence made even more difficult by the uncertain way Crawford approaches the line -- and then he apologizes to Vanessa for getting irritated that time she tried to ruin his relationship with his recently estranged family and shame him out of creating any semblance of a future for himself.

Vanessa thanks Nate for shaming her into taking the SATs, for they have made a difference in her path and she will now be attending NYU. If you don't remember, Vanessa was too good for college until Nate told her to take the SATs, so she put down her videocamera just long enough to apparently get a good enough score that they were willing to overlook how she: doesn't attend and will never graduate high school, has no visible means of support beyond an endangered job selling coffee at a Williamsburg art gallery where nobody ever goes, dresses like a crunk dancer without the clown makeup, and effectively seems to live without a permanent residence of any kind. If I were the admissions dean for NYU, she would have to get at least two million SATs, and I would also make her sign a thing about not cat burglaring the other students in the dorm, or stealing their valuables.

So she's like, "That's cool how one time you made me forget to suck just long enough to take the SATs and so now I guess I'll just take this education they're handing me," and then gets this pathetic face and she's like, "Of course, it's the summer so before NYU, I have to go backpacking all alone through Europe" and staring at his face, I guess hoping he'll still bankroll that shit now that Blair dumped him. And of course Nate has no idea what she's talking about, or what a Europe is, so he just invites her to a party after the ceremony, which causes Dan to appear like rubbing a lamp going, "Party? What party?" with these desperate beaver teeth.

Dude, if you have to ask, first of all, and also, that's dumb because Dan doesn't like parties, doesn't like these particular people, and is in fact going to have a conversation about that very thing with his guitar-strumming douchenozzle of a father in about ten minutes. What, did he think Nate was going to have a graduation party with... people from another school? Poor people? I just can't... It keeps echoing in my head. Party? What party? Nate's like fine, you're invited. He caresses Dan's arm briefly, and peaces. Then V randomly goes, "Today's the first day of the rest of your life!" and they read the program and something there, also stupid, makes them laugh.

Jenny, looking good but particularly insane, is once again giving Eric some speech about how since the seniors are graduating, the "dictatorship" is going to be over and that year there will be "peace in the kingdom." Penelope of course appears and asks if she's interested in running for Queen year. Jenny assures them that with Blair gone the monarchy will come to an end, and they scoff because she hasn't been this dumb in a long time. "What would high school be without hierarchy?" Nelly Yuki asks, and Jenny doesn't even blink: "Bearable? A nice place to spend time?"

The Plastics aren't feeling up to having this basic conversation with Jenny for the millionth pointless time, but then Blair appears and issues some lame coordinated-headbands proclamation, and yells at Penelope about her scarf, and tells them she chooses the Queen, not them. She shoves past everybody, and Eric hilariously bows as she goes by, and then because the halls of Constance are a curious random nexus of all times and places, Nelly Yuki mentions this girl that just transferred in, Emma, who then appears. You may remember gross little Emma from when Blair had to babysit her that time and talk her out of losing her virginity. I didn't recognize her at first, beyond a vague sense that her Oh God face and whiskey voice were excruciatingly familiar.

Nelly Yuki and Isabel explain that the "coronation" will be happening at midnight at Nate's party, and the prize will go to whoever produces the "biggest

piece of untold Constance gossip." Emma snivels out some weird unlikely speech like so: "See you at midnight? Unless you want to concede right now... Oh and year, if you don't want to take the subway to school, you're more than welcome to sleep at my house. It's on Park." Which is the same dumb thing, because I'm so sure she would just offer for Jenny to essentially come live with her during the week just to prove some nebulous Mean Girl point.

She takes off to be unbearable somewhere else, and Eric is all, "Here we go again," but Little J has her Invincible Billie Jean face on again as she marches right into another iteration of the "monarchy ends tonight" speech, this time because "the cycle of abuse must be broken." It's a good thing Momsen's such a good actor, because this storyline -- fighting the institution from inside the institution and being swallowed and corrupted by it -- is fun, but damaged by the hamfisted Telling Not Showing disease of this episode.

Serena, who's just lovely in her emerald commencement gown, randomly appears at Dan's side, where he's staring at the ceremony program. His name was left off the list of graduates, so they're bringing out some insert. He literally says, "I'm waiting to approve a special insert for the program," right, but then in a second when it's wrong, he just laughs and lets it slide. Which I'm tempted to think is Dan's famously mordant sense of humor, but it really just seems like dumb writing. "At least you're special!" Serena burbles, because of course she would think having a special insert just for you in every single program is even cooler than just having your name in the program to begin with. Then this totally cute guy with a staring problem brings out the insert card: "We apologize for the inadvertent omission of Daniel Humphrey from the graduation program. He is indeed graduating. Congratulations, Don." And I guess Dan "approves" this incorrect thing, because the kid runs off...

Into a high-concept tracking shot that fails in execution, as Blair randomly tags along behind him on a zig-zaggingly random path through the courtyard so she can have her scene with Chuck. She tries to tell him she broke up with Nate, he stares at her and stands weirdly for a bit, and she fumbles, then runs away while he smarms at her. Then the Headmaster and Queller tell everybody to line up -- "Girls on one side, boys on the other, like we practiced," as though that's really complicated" -- and B offers a lame "good luck up there" in lieu of actual words. And considering nobody's going to walk across the stage at any point, that's just dumb too.

Inside, Rufus and Lily are feeling all weird because they planned all along to sit together. So now it's Rufus and Lily, Jenny and Eric with Jonathan, sitting at graduation and feeling horrible and weird about it. Then Cyrus and Eleanor show up and Cyrus is all ebullient like always, talking about how they're just fucking around dating when they could be getting married, because mortality is always on Cyrus's mind. Rufus and Lily laugh politely and act weird about it, and Rufus gives some mealymouthed Rufus response about the journey or whatever, and Lily shuts him right up about that because she's in no mood. Finally Eric tells everybody politely to STFU, and the Shiny Toy Guns' "Season Of Love" starts playing. It's tonally perfect, all war drums and processional-sounding; it's even nicer when you know it will reprise at the end of the episode, when the actual growing-up happens.

Doppelqueller starts giving some speech about "bright new beginnings" while Blair whines to Serena about how she chickened out from telling Chuck that she's in love with him. Serena, for whom of course every conversation about this is the first one, because she has the attention span of a fruitfly, is supportive. She has her graduation tassel braided into her hair, sans mortarboard, which is awesome on all levels. Blair mans up as a result of her encouragement, and goes, "So what if I'm not going to Yale? You were recently incarcerated, and I'm afraid to talk to Chuck because he might hurt me again. This is our moment. Nobody can take that from us!" So of course -- as DQ is like, "I urge you to go out into the world and show them who you have become" -- everybody's phones go off, because God forbid Blair Waldorf get one second off.

Not so fast. You're not graduating until I give you my diplomas. Mine are labels, and labels stick. Nate Archibald: Class Whore. Dan Humphrey: the Ultimate Insider. Chuck Bass: Coward. Blair Waldorf: Weakling. And as for Serena van der Woodsen? After today, you are officially Irrelevant.

Isabel and Penelope gawp and freak out, and when the admins tell the class of 2009 to stand up, they are incapable of doing so, because this is so amazing what has happened. Little do they know that these labels are actually pretty meaningless at this point, and also: wasn't that the marketing campaign way back in the fall? Those labels sound really familiar. Serena will be damned, though, and says GG is going down.

It sucks because nearly every single moment of this episode is horrifyingly flawed, but the story is so awesomely solid. Even if the labels don't make sense at this point, they're all being herded by them into positions where they have to look at their entire lives to this point -- taking both seasons into account -- and make the decision to get over it, together and singly.

So: the fact that Dan is this huge hypocrite remora who touts his Outsider narrative while taking more advantage of the class of his betters than any of them, is more interesting for being exposed than it is for being true. And then, this also parallels his real irrelevance in the Constance world as signified in the program, and also the way that Vanessa does the exact same thing, and how they both benefit. Jenny too, actually: she's more inside/outsidey than any of them, but I feel like she does it with dignity.

And you've got Blair's personal narrative, which is always going to be about strength and control, and vetting that control on her own body and her compatriots, and is ultimately pretty pointless because it completely misses the point that she's awesome. So she thinks that this has to do with Chuck, but honestly it scores on the deepest level, because without her strength she is literally nothing. And what transcends this particular dichotomy she's having such trouble with is the idea that sometimes strength is about chilling out and not letting fear control you -- which has been the ultimate endpoint of the burlesque the entire time -- that the appearance of strength is usually an indication of its opposite, which is the thing Serena's been trying to teach her forever.

Nate is literally the class whore, right. But he's also been the only person this entire year to actually bear the marks of classism on his flesh: his father's conspicuous consumption, his mother's pride, being caught in the middle of this intergenerational bullshit that has nothing to do with him. He's maintained in the middle of all this by doing whatever's necessary: homelessness, prostitution. DUMBO even. The razor edge balance between being part of his family without becoming Tripp, which is to say the bounce he does between being Vanessa's boyfriend who rises above the Vanderbilts and being Blair's boyfriend who revels in it. Dan and Rufus talk a good game, and Jenny really gets in there and fights, but only Nate has actually, at any point, paid the price for the straight-up fact that some people have lots of money and some people don't, and your best bet is to be super nice and conduct yourself with decorum -- never complain, never explain -- no matter which way your fortunes are going. And I mean there's an argument to be made that possibly he figured this out onstage during The Age Of Innocence, because of the role that he was playing and the fact that nothing he was screaming about had much to do with anything that was actually going on.

Chuck-Charlie-Charles, I mean, his whole point is not being involved in any of this. Glorying in irrelevance. But I do like "Coward," because so much of his story this year, separate from the Blair stuff, has been about literally playing out Hamlet, with the rapey uncle and dead Dad and absolute misery he was so successfully putting off until Bart died and he inherited the kingdom. The parts without Blair are, I think, the more interesting parts because he's involved in two completely unrelated personal stories: the love thing, which involves both Blair and his relationship with Lily and his family, and the grownup thing, wherein he's never acted like a realistic teenager, but once the world actually demanded that he stop being a teenager, he jumped in the deepest darkest teenager hole he could think of to get away from it. His decision was -- and is -- to make no decision at all, which is the most cowardly move you can ever make.

And then there's Serena, who is sort of a plot tool in these last few episodes as she keeps making attempts at "s

chemes" that never make sense but involve a lot of resolved faces and whipping her phone out. And I'm fascinated by the attack on S in this episode, because it really does reverse and radicalize her entire reason for existing. The paper-thin justification for her It Girl status, the Fitzgeraldness of her, the way she floats above everything and can't make a rational decision to touch the ground ever, is very realistic. But it's also very temporary, because eventually you have to justify your seed. You can only be a Page Six girl for so long, and if she's not this scandalous ingénue and actually will be joining the adult world, or God forbid the workforce, at some point: what is she? Who is she? Having your picture taken isn't a personality.

But the reason this had to be a war between Serena van der Woodsen and Gossip Girl seems really clear: they create each other. Every episode starts with one question: Who is Serena van der Woodsen? Where's she been? And everybody's college stuff -- Dan, Nate, Blair -- has sort of twined itself around this central conceit of the show, and the books, wherein Serena gets everything for no reason. But Serena, being awesome and an actual person, can't go on that way forever, because the story wouldn't make any sense, past the hothouse weirdness of post-boarding school Constance Billard. Gossip Girl's been saying for four years that Serena's existence is contingent on being the It Girl, and suddenly she's saying that's not true after all, and that graduation means she no longer has a place at all. Which is exactly what she's been wanting since the show started, which is why it sucks.

S viscerally resents being pulled into anything real at all -- even the concept of cleaning up after Jenny's party sent her screaming across the Atlantic -- because her basically abstract nature is a conscious choice. Come down into concrete matter, people die, people leave, you get judged and found wanting. Stay up in the clouds, you're never accountable for anything. But being reminded that everybody who isn't Serena van der Woodsen actually has to live down there, and will eventually move on? Way harsh.

So at Nate's post-party, Serena lectures everybody about how graduation is ruined and Gossip Girl must be destroyed, but really it's that GG has given her a new reason to exist and be looked at. If she can't be the It Girl, she can be the girl who took down Gossip Girl, and at least then she can figure out her new move. Nelly Yuki shivers about the idea of going after GG, and Penelope points out that this is Serena's vendetta, in which nobody else has a stake. Iz takes that point to the level, hilariously mentioning the way that GG never mentioned Penelope at all; Penelope snatches the food out of Nelly Yuki's hands in a desperate and sort of adorable show of pique.

Serena runs to the Non-Judgmental Breakfast Club, hoping to get backup for this. Of course Blair and Chuck are invested in striking back rather than looking at what GG's telling them, while Nate realizes he needs to clear all of this with Granderbilt. Not because he's ashamed really, but I think more because he honestly does want to cover all his bases and make sure everybody -- even the Vanderbilts -- are okay. Blair and Chuck run in opposite directions, naturally, to flounce and freak and attempt to figure out what's going on. The most fun thing about this middle section is watching the people controlled by Gossip Girl -- Blair, Serena, Nate, even Chuck -- run around like chickens freaking out, while the people who never bought into GG (which is like everybody but them) just kind of watch in amazement.

The interdependence between the surveillance culture and the people it surveys, right, the way that we watch celebrities and simultaneously decry the privacy they're being denied by the Shadowy Other. I mean, it's on the nose by the end, We Are All Gossip Girl, is a very bullshitty and literal way of making the point, but I think it's made much more elegantly at this party. "Stop looking at me! Don't stop looking at me!" I don't think it's a coincidence that the more we scream about civil liberties and HIPPA and identity theft, the more we're desperate for reality TV and celebrity gossip and our YouTube hits. They're parallel because they're the same thing, what nourishes destroys, what makes you awesome makes you suck, all that; on the other hand, this episode is an absolute truth bomb because of what S makes GG do. At the apex of those two parallel lines, the infinity where those lines meet, is real disclosure. The only answer to the pushmi-pullyu we have with our secrets, our desire to be known and our fear of being known, is taking a hard hot look at those secrets, and deciding we don't need them anymore.

Moment Of Truth is apparently coming back this summer, which is a conversation I absolutely adore, because it's so indicative of this moment we're talking about. That's the evil game show where the people have to tell the truth no matter what, and the questions get nastier and grosser, and truer and truer. And on one level it's interesting because culturally we respond to this in two very unpleasant ways: first by being all What About The Children and fake-outraged, and then also by being totally guilty and fascinated and porny about it. To me, though, it's like the most beautiful unicorn thing in the world. Think about it: going on TV, and being asked if you're strong enough to stay exactly who you are, no matter what they throw at you. It's not about ethics or morals or value judgments, it's about what is actual and true and what we wish were and were not true. That's a wind tunnel and a hurricane and you're supposed to sit still in it, no matter what, and just be honest. Just be completely naked.

No matter how bad it gets, every single terrible scary thing you've ever done, maybe they ask you about it, and whether or not it's true or a lie, the entire viewing audience is going to know the answer. Even if you don't answer at all, we'll know. And there is something BDSM about that, I guess, and something really nasty about watching it. But God, the thought of being on that stage and laying down every fake propaganda thing, every lie I've ever told, to or about myself, or in lieu of bigger scarier things? The actual act of watching that show is like watching somebody go through ten years of therapy in ten minutes. I feel like I would literally start to glow. The entire point of becoming a human being is entering and maintaining a state where you are strong enough to do without the lies altogether.

And so I've always said that the brilliance of this show is in the way it collects and categorizes the feedback of reality vs. the surveillance. Any dramatic narrative is us hearing Gossip Girl talking about what's going on with the characters. The reason this show rocks is that they can hear it, too. She's part of it, a character in it, a voice in their lives, and everyone's an agent of her. Every random person on a street corner is simultaneously watching and being watched. And as a complete story, these two seasons have come full circle in this episode, because that tension is forced to a crisis. When I heard about this episode, like, "Serena goes after GG," it made me very nervous, because then what? But the way it plays out is so awesome, because it ties into the whole idea of graduation: The clean slate, the entirely new buffet being spread out before you of ways to completely fuck up. The opportunity to turn around and look at the life and the persona you've created in this very particular, very synthetic environment, and decide what to keep and what to burn.

If I were to give a commencement speech, it would be thirty-seven boring years long obviously, but it would come down to this: High school is the very last time in your entire life that you aren't completely free to decide who and what makes your life up. You're never going to be in another situation of having to sit to your ex-boyfriend at 10 AM in Chemistry class. If somebody calls your phone and you don't want to

talk to them? Don't. It's honestly very simple. We whine and cry about the ways our intimacies are mediated by technology, but seriously, it goes both ways. And all GG is doing here is squeezing a blister that absolutely must be squozen: None of this ever meant anything at all, beyond the person that you forged out of it. The part of your life where you're forced to figure out how to deal with other people has officially ended, and the final grade is just the rest of your life. There's not a permanent record, there's not a hall of evidence, there's not a grand divine book of demerits: there's just you. You're the only evidence.

Not that there aren't echoes, especially in the areas of our blindness. Rufus surprises Lily somewhere in a house somewhere and they have a brief conversation about their current grievances. He's pissed because she told the Waldorf-Roses that he's a romantic disappointment, and she's pissed because he is a romantic disappointment. She says... Basically everything I just said, which is that they've examined and pored over each other in a new way every week for the last twenty-five episodes (and twenty years!), their histories and their relationships and their differences and their samenesses, and he's still afraid, and she's still scary, and either you drop the bullshit and commit or you wait for everybody to be perfect. He's a romantic, she's a realist. And the thing about romantics is that they honestly don't think anybody but them really knows about love.

You get these boys who think love defines them, that the state of love is not only sustainable but the point, and maybe for them it is, and anybody who feels differently is not only heartless and clueless, but is also attacking their worldview simply by disagreeing. Because if we don't all agree that love is the most important thing, maybe it's not, and the world falls apart. And then you have Lily, who as a Rhodes woman knows precisely where to prioritize that fluttery love feeling, and has her own complicated relationship with it, but has told herself over and over that, rationally, you can't afford to overestimate that feeling. That this idealized irrational silly retard love is the shadow on the wall of the cave, and the real thing is gritty and scary. That truly wanting love is about the dumbest thing you could ever do, because real love is not that romantic: it rips you open and burns you alive, and it takes you apart and puts you back together, better. (Which try telling that to a Rufus, and you'll see a grown man cry, because he just wants the easy part.) But it's dangerous in either case, because the whole point of that feeling actually is letting it burn all the way through you.

The scary thing about loving Rufus -- and these are the only men I involve myself with, so take this with a grain of salt -- is that he lives so far into the future of possibility, of the perfection, he can see it so clearly, that you're afraid to move because disappointment hurts him so much more than other people. It's a betrayal, not a rerouting, if things don't go according to plan. And the scary thing about loving Lily is that she can close up faster than a motherfucker, because all it is is rerouting. She doesn't require perfection, but if things warp enough off the x-axis that it starts to suck, she can cut that cord faster and more brutally than the eye can follow.

(And, I think, the secret key here is that you can replace "Rufus" with "Blair" in the above paragraphs, and "Lily" with "Chuck," and it answers pretty much every question you, or they, could ever have about why it's so fucking hard. It's supposed to be, that's how you know you're alive.)

So to me, the definition of a relationship is in holding onto this particular livewire and letting it be both things at once: perfect and difficult at the same time. That's dynamic. Do it right and you keep changing yourselves and each other, forever and ever, and nobody gets cold and nobody gets hard and nobody gets settled, because the challenge is always there and it's always asking you to synthesize and transcend, to take a disagreement and work it out so that you can hit another plateau and another disagreement, until ... You are both superheroes, and then you fight crime. Which as a day-to-day war against stability isn't very romantic (or comforting) but you kind of asked for it by falling in love with Lily and/or with goddamn Rufus Humphrey.

Nate looks amazing! William Granderbilt agrees, as usual, and has a sort of disinterestedly prurient interest in Nate's talk about the Hamptons and the older woman ("Welcome to Washington!" he says, which actually makes less sense the more you think about it, like most of the dialogue), and then eventually kind of shocked by the actual prostitution that came about. I can't believe Nate left out the incest part. I mean, I know it didn't really involve him, but it was the most WTF thing about that whole deal, and would be just as damaging in the long run, due to being part of a cougar prostitution harem of boys. Chuck walks up looking for Blair, and Nate finally tells him that they broke up. Which you would think Chuck would have picked up on, when B was opening and closing her mouth like a codfish, but I don't really get these people this week. And if he didn't know that, what is he looking for her for? Maybe the GG thing.

So Vanessa's standing around the party with Dan, talking predictably about how shitty it is and how they should go get doughnuts at whatever cruddy place, and Serena -- this is brutal, this scene, but very funny -- comes up screeching about OMFGG and all this, and the terrible labels and the humanity of it all, and what will we do, and the sky is falling, and they just sort of... Make fun of her for caring, which as an adult watching the show is pretty satisfying if you don't consider the source. Vanessa literally walks away rolling her eyes in the middle of Serena's meltdown. It might be my favorite moment in the whole episode, because neither Dan or Serena notices her disappearing act, and all three of these things are beautifully in character.

Dan tries to talk her down, and explain about how high school is stupid, but he... I am sympathetic to them both, because they're both right, but he's more right, but for the wrong reasons. If he didn't tell himself every day for four years that GG was just stupid and for stupidheads, he would have killed himself. And yes, GG is stupid and GG is for stupidheads, and S needs to chill the eff out, but that's not where he's speaking from. Which is why he goes too far in the other direction, and says some hurtful things that are almost out of character but in a better-written episode would feel less out of character. He says they all need to move on, away from the backbiting and conniving BS, and she's like, "Sure, but these things are actually true and they were actually said. That's not a game." And he tries to get her to think outside that box and consider the fact that she's still taking part in an optional economy and that, as Serena vdDub, she can hold onto those relationships without necessarily hooking them up with the GG phenomenon.

At least, I think that's what he's trying to say, but her points are valid enough that she backs him into a corner and he ends up saying that their high school relationships essentially mean nothing, and he'll never talk to her again. It's either brilliant or really stupid writing, I can't decide. Because you can see the battle of the logic that gets him there, but I mean, I'm always surprised when Dan does stuff this stupid. It's not like Serena van der Woodsen is terribly complex.

The core four sit on the stairs and have a long conversation trying to narrow down exactly who GG is: she basically only talks about Constance/St. Jude's, she probably knows them personally, she started in ninth grade so is probably their contemporary, et cetera. Nate is particularly amazing in this scene, because he keeps repeating everything everybody says like he just thought of it. Chuck's like, "I assume she's our age," and this giant lightbulb goes off over Nate's head and he literally says, "So you're saying Gossip Girl's a senior, like us?" Thanks, Nate. So Serena points out that their entire graduating class is there at the grad party -- even Uninvited Dan -- so fuck it. Chuck goes through Facebook on his phone, and they discount them one by one. Blair pshaws "Rebecca Sherman" because she doesn't pay attention; that crazy-face girl that did the Prom ballot and skulks around Queller all the time is apparently named Fiona, and she's out too.

They look at Nelly Yuki, who's eating like a crazy person, and name all the reasons she might be the one. And since Jenny's not there to explain it -- because Jenny knows how cringing she actually is -- they actually stick with Nelly Yuki for awhile, before Serena reveals that apparently she hangs out with Nelly Yuki like constantly, and has seen her get and be mindblown by GG blasts plenty of times. Which, um, we all have.

Serena gets that resolved mouth again and sends GG a tip, and she's like, "Chuck, get the room quiet." He says, "I'm way ahead of you," even though he's ... not, and then starts some fake speech just long enough for the culprit's phone to ring. And it is Jonathan! No! The music has fifteen dark orgasms and Chuck and Serena cross in front of each other in a phenomenal way that gives the appearance of lots of movement, and everybody stares at everybody else for a million years, but there's the proof: "Now I know who you are," right there on the phone. It's unbelievably dramatic, but also: A) GG will never be unmasked because that's stupid, and B) the episode is half over. So the music and the drama and the way everybody shits their pants for like the third time this week, it's sort of insulting.

Guess what? Jonathan isn't Gossip Girl. I know, I am just as shocked as you. So he explains that he "hacked into her server over Spring Break," because he was bored, and Eric notes that they now have access to every tipster email. Jenny flips through the tips with abandon, and Eric blushes when she points out that he obviously dyes his hair, which is cute enough -- as is watching Serena, Jenny and Jonathan giggling about it -- that the fact that he's never tried to hide it and has actually mentioned it before and has gone from blonde to brunette multiple times and thus is not ashamed of it, we'll let that slide. Serena takes Jonathan off for more of her Byzantine plotting that never goes anywhere, and Jenny and Eric have a very literal conversation in which Jenny uncovers something truly scandalous that would make her Queen if she used it, but will she, because would that destroy her soul, but would it be worth it, because she could then abolish the monarchy forever. The whole royalty Queen B motif, I like it at around a six, seven if they're wearing costumes, but man, Jenny is taking that shit to eleven.

Look, Rufus Humphrey morosely strumming his guitar. Look, Dan Humphrey wearing that one vest.

There's a short conversation wherein Rufus explains to Dan that he needs to go to the graduation party because he actually does have friends and they are all there, and he's being his usual vapidly insulting self by trying to retroactively define himself as no friend to them, there's the embarrassing employment of an Obi-Wan metaphor to describe their relationship -- when really it's been more like Jar-Jar Binks in a leather choker and wrist cuff trying to give Anakin dating advice but ending up instead accidentally giving his vote to create an army of clones and thus adding just the heat to the Trade Wars necessary to put a plan into action that will destroy all the Jedi for twenty years and launch us into a time of galactic darkness not even Yoda could have foreseen.

Dan leaves to go slaughter some baby Jedi, and Rufus thinks about Lily and manfully whips out his little girl phone but Lily magically appears right then with that beer Vanessa likes, that will get two grown adults smashed with only three beers each. Oh, and some pot she stole from Chuck. Rufus is like, "Bet it's good!" They are sort of awesome sometimes.

Blair is dressing in the most astoundingly hot outfit when Eleanor comes in. You know that normally I don't like visible lace, but she looks amazing. It's like something Serena would wear to Christmas, but with a classy Blair touch. "Are you dressing for someone?" Eleanor asks, setting up the intensely literal and visual counterpoint to the whole burlesque thing that started last year, and Blair is amazing. "Yes. Someone I hope is finally ready to love me the way Cyrus loves you."

I really like the self-conscious way the Cyrus/Eleanor relationship has been quietly becoming the gold standard, ever since Blair's Yale-related Nate bender. Seder and Graduation, both times they provided a counterpoint to Lily/Rufus running around like kids, and then with the whole "we are not socialites" speech a while back it really brought Eleanor's wisdom into sharp relief. She's the only woman in the Upper East Side that's ever married for love, and she did it twice. I can't let that go, I think it's remarkable that they've pointed to it so many times in this last act of the season.

Blair was so convinced earlier that there was some kind of trick or gimmick to it, that it was a mystery that needed figuring out, and the whole time it was there in front of us all: Eleanor digs Cyrus, Cyrus digs Blair, Blair digs Cyrus. They have fun, they nourish each other, they laugh and they work shit out. I was worried that he'd heal Blair too quickly, because I'm still waiting every week for Blair's nuclear explosion, but I wonder, because I think more than just loving Blair as much as she needs to be loved, he might have actually helped more by demonstrating, with Eleanor, how easy love can actually be once you're honest about it. It's not sexy, it's adorable but it's not aspirational in any way but the real. Blair wanted Cary Grant for a stepfather, but that wasn't about Eleanor, and watching Eleanor and Cyrus together teaches us -- Blair, you and me, Lily and Rufus too -- what wonders are possible when you let go of the fantasy. It doesn't really matter if you make a Good Couple, if you are a good couple. (And if you look at it that way, marrying Bart was just Lily's Perfect Prom, Bart was her Nate. She didn't not love him, but it was too far in the clouds to do anything but contribute to the phase.)

Eleanor tears up at this honesty, and Blair suddenly goes still, feeling wild and afraid. "Cyrus told me," Eleanor says, her voice a hush in her daughter's ear, strong hands on her shoulders. "You told Chuck how you felt and... He ran away. You seeing him tonight?" She wraps her arms around her daughter, and looks into her eyes through the mirror, and holds her tighter than anything. "Don't let him get away with it." Blair laughs, her eyes dance, and they are more mother and daughter than ever before. I'm bummed about the lack of Dorota in this episode, at this moment in Blair's life, but I don't begrudge it, because this is a much more important narrative that Blair needs to let go. Consider the image, knowing what we kno

w, of Eleanor and Blair both looking at Blair in the mirror -- her beautiful face, but more importantly her beautiful body, and more importantly still her beautiful self -- and it's enough. Finally enough.

Nelly Yuki dances around drunkenly and acts like a retarded fucking cartoon, and Nate awesomely catches her at some point with an offhand "Oh hey, drunky!" before she goes whirling off on yet another pointless tracking shot past Isabel hissing at her not to embarrass herself, and immediately thereby launching herself at Dan to weakly stutter and stammer and come very close to admitting she's in love with him, before seeing Serena and getting scared. Dan and Vanessa stare at each other as she runs off, unable to process this weirdest of all possible occurrences, but at least it breaks the ice between them and, you know, socializing with other people at this party.

Blair, having arrived with this last piece of armor, the last weapon, the last tool she needs in her hands, breathes and makes ready to have one more try at Chuck. Jenny steps in front of her, and warns her about the fact that GG knows about Uncle Jack on New Year's Eve, which came up once and never again. Blair goes from dismissive to terrified to steely in about one second, and can't really be expected to see what Jenny's doing, so she reacts in her usual feral way. But it's interesting, because actually what Jenny's doing is asking Blair's advice, as reigning Queen, to help her gauge whether it's worth using. The fact that it's about Blair is not the point, the point is What Blair Waldorf Would Do. Jenny tries to wake her up to the fact that as of today the Mean Girls aren't listening to her anymore, and really haven't been for awhile, in their own incompetent way, which is the last thing B needs to hear right now. She needs all she can get, right now.

So Jenny gets the correct answer, but not in words, because Blair goes off on her, predictably flailing and saying the meanest shit she can think of -- "I'm sorry I wasted my time on you. You don't have what it takes. You never did" -- which essentially makes the point that Blair can go fuck herself, so Jenny does what Blair would do, having been given means, permission and opportunity, and runs straight to Isabel with the gossip. Nasty little Emma Boardman stares at her hatefully, and Jenny looks truly satanic for a sec.

"I want to talk," Blair says, and Chuck tries to put her off with Pose #1, the Libertine: "I prefer to talk after," he says, and they're alone. She pushes him down on the couch and he looks up at her, eyes shining. She asks his opinion of her coat. "I like it." She drops it to the floor. "And now?" (In my dream version of this episode, the Sohodolls would start playing at this point.) He nods. "And what about my headband?" He admires it. "And my stockings?" Oh, he grins, he adores them. The dress? "I worship it." She stands before him, the girl behind the poses and the clothes, strokes his face, leaning over him; he looks so young, breathing her in. "How do you feel about me?" Exactly right. This is exactly how it happens; this is how the film falls off the projector. She's finally there. That's when the phones start ringing.

"What is it now?" Serena screams, and Dan starts yelling, and everybody pulls out their phones: "Serena Van Der Woodsen just couldn't leave well enough alone. Since she had to find out the truth about me, I'm going to tell you the truth about everyone. Every gossip bomb I've got is about to drop. And if you've got a problem with that, take it up with her." And the hits start rolling out, and they don't stop, and everybody screams about it at everybody else: Dan in jail with Charlie Trout and fucking Rachel Carr, Jenny dancing with Agnes and kissing Nate, Blair fucking Jack Bass, Chuck fucking Vanessa.

The idea's more interesting than the execution, because the idea is somewhere between the endings of The Manchurian Candidate and Fight Club, which means that -- like the occasional fever/Dark Phoenix stuff with Serena -- it's never going to be as awesome to watch as it is to think about. The idea is transcendent, literally: exhausting the sum total of all secrets, the unGossiping of Gossip Girl. Complete disclosure. Sudden inevitable honesty, the naked lunch where everybody sees what's on the end of every fork. The only possible sane reaction to the critical mass they've been building for the last four years. The queasy relationship each character has with their mirror double, the distances and uncomfortable proximity of those secrets to their deepest fears, exploding. The complete disintegration of glamour, in both the entertainment and the magical sense. The morning after, the bright sunshine. I mean, that's amazing. The shitty thing about the Red Pill is that you have to hang out with filthy hippies in a cave somewhere, right?

But at that point, all you can do is dance, and that's all Serena has ever tried to tell people, but now she's getting nailed by it too. Because she was the one that brought the war to GG, she has to be accountable for the ways all their fantasies and defenses just died. She assumed responsibility for it the second she took up arms. And the best thing is that she didn't do it out of some high-minded principle, or even on her own (and Eric's) terms, that honesty is the key to everything: she did it out of the pettiest, silliest embarrassment of all. GG told her to walk the walk, and called her bluff. What gave her the power to take down Gossip Girl is exactly what Gossip Girl gave her, and is taking away now. Again: execution F, idea A+ to the infinite power. They create each other, they destroy each other. And because GG has the one thing none of them could ever have, and would never want -- anonymity -- she can do it, and still laugh while everything burns. Midnight's when the masks come off.

Over everybody's escalating ego explosion, Serena yells about how they're playing into GG's hands: "She's trying to create a divide between us! This is exactly what she wants!" Of course that's how it looks to Serena, because her entire life is about keeping everybody stable and together, and making sure everybody gets out alive. Every character sees it in their own way: Blair of course thinks it's the apocalypse, because fantasy is all she has, and Chuck sees it as the ultimate confirmation of his theory that he deserves to be betrayed. Dan and Jenny and Vanessa are all screwed by the fact that it keeps getting on them no matter what they do. Nate... is very pretty, and stands around looking bemused, because he and Eric van der Woodsen are about the only people who could give a fuck. But Serena: of course it looks that way to her, because that's literally her only responsibility. She did it, by trying to save them from their impending future doom. She only wanted to be a princess, never a Queen, because she knew she can hold everybody in her hands at once. And now they're trickling out.

Blair, of course, can't wait to inform her of this: that it was her test, and she failed. Chuck strikes even more brutally: "I don't think it's her that created the divide. I think it was you." Because why did Serena come home? To save Eric, she thought; but also to save Blair, and to save Lily. To keep everybody safe, to fix Nate and Blair, to get everybody back in line. To throw her arms around the world. To bring in Dan, even, and Brooklyn, and to get Lily back in line, and to cheer for Rufus/Lily, and for Blair/Chuck when it was healthier for them. Why was she in Santorini? To heal every divide, no matter how messy it gets everybody. Why was Georgina the scariest thing in the universe? Because she embodies the divide. Why did Blair take out Georgina the first time? To save Eric, she thought; but also to save Serena, because she knew that without Serena's limitless love they would all be destroyed.

Serena's always carried every one of their burdens on her back, drunk or sober, and that's all she's being asked to do now: watch the whole universe she knows expanding out into space, everybody getting further and

further apart. To once again attempt to put the atom back together, with nothing but her Hufflepuff powers, which are always the lamest and most thankless powers, and the only ones that matter in the real world. Protagonists are tricky, because to be the still center of a story means you stay still. Serena's always been irrelevant in this story, because she's the only one who never does anything; Serena's always been central to this story, because she's the center of gravity. She moves the pieces around, quietly and while attempting to redeem herself for the few times she actually tried to do anything active, and got burnt black by it.

I always get reamed for going on and on about Serena, but I mean it's the most basic use of capital-T Theory: take apart the pieces of a story and see what they're resting on, because the most interesting parts of a story are the parts you don't think about, and that's always going to be Serena. Any binary opposition you can draw, Serena's on the bottom of it, so she's the key to like every deconstruction you can perform on the text, and the most interesting moments on the show, to me, are the parts where they let her do that particular operation on the text, because she always catches fire, and it causes everybody else to grow and change at twice their normal rate. I do identify with her an awful lot, I'm not really secretive about that, but it's not why I'm interested in investigating her character. I promise not to bring Buffy into this, but you can see it from here: I'm obsessed with Serena's use and significance because she embodies the line you can draw from Gatsby's Daisy to Jessica Simpson: a girl who is vitally important, but for everything that surrounds her and isn't her. She's essentially a negative space.

Which isn't the end of the story, because she's also subjectively a person regardless of how we, or they, view her. That's a lot closer to my actual experience of being alive. There's a feminism that is about the constrictions of the constructs and a very evocative and exciting outrage about the ways that we are hedged in; there are humanisms and gay schools of thought that go those ways, and they offer a sense of community and an exhilarating sense of victimhood in which nothing we do matters, because somebody else is oppressing us and therefore our decisions aren't our own. And then there's a feminism that says there's a utility in understanding and being conscious and eventually working magic with the actual reality around us. The hard yucky facts that won't go away no matter how often we get together and complain to each other about them. And the main thing that I have learned in thirty years is that there is incredible power in being an object, as long as you don't fall in and forget your options for getting out.

Watching Serena dance around that abyss and construct these elaborate rules for herself, and honestly try to stay in contact at all times with her own unnatural capacity for compassion, when it would be so easy to coast on the It Girl thing, is really empowering. So I like that this episode is essentially a finale, and thank God for the Blair/Chuck wonderment and Blair/Eleanor reconciliation, but as a single episode: Serena making war on Gossip Girl is Serena making war on everything that's not Serena. And because of who she is, that's everything and nothing at all, because it's all her. Blair's the hero, but she works outside the system to do so, and takes some fucking lumps for it. Blair's the taste of the meal, but Serena's the ingredients, and the smell of it all cooking.

Anyway. Nate tells everybody to be nice to Serena, and Dan joins in the chorus, and Blair unloads gorgeously on him too. "What do you know about anything? Besides, your label was the only one that was true: You're friends with Nate Archibald, you played on the soccer team, you got into Yale." He gets more and more embarrassed, her voice speeds up faster and faster. "...You got the lead role in the school play, you got published in The New Yorker. You had sex with a teacher..." Nelly Yuki bumbles into the scene for some more terrible acting and being in love with Dan, and Blair resumes once she's done. "You pretend not to be like us, but you are. To the bone." And even more wonderfully, she turns to Serena: "And you should have known better."

Hands up everybody who assumed Blair would take to the postapocalyptic complete-disclosure thing faster than anybody else? That's what I thought. Like a duck to water. At some point in this flurry of activity she yells at Chuck for sleeping with the "dregs of DUMBO" (to which Vanessa screams, "I'm standing right here!") but it's such a drive-by moment of awesomeness it's sort of just punctuation before she storms off to lay down some more motherfucking science on some people, while Serena quietly thanks Dan and Nate -- who's back to staring into space -- for taking up for her. Especially, note, because the divide started with him. He was the harbinger of this, when he said they would all die alone and he didn't like her anymore or whatever, so the fact that he was the one that jumped in with Nate and tried to scoop everybody back together for her actually really means something. And even better, because it's the secret awesomeness of Dan, is that he can't be trusted for shit about these things, because even if he says he doesn't love you he still totally does, and all it takes is for him -- or Rufus -- to act out of that love instead of a pose is to startle him, like with a loud noise or something.

Penelope says some snarky shit to Serena, obligatorily, and asks Jenny what she was going to say, because they both know it doesn't matter anymore. Meanwhile, Blair's trying to help Chuck jump over this latest thing, back in that room. He turns with his hands up, palms wide, exhausted, and begs her to leave him alone. But she's too smart: between Eleanor and the end of the world, she's got everything she needs. He spent so long trying to bring her life crashing down around her so that she would come back to her, remember? Before Bart died, and he sabotaged all her shit. And then after he went crazy, she started doing it to herself because she could tell there was something outside the movie theatre of her life. But he was right all along, and they both knew it: after the world ends, at midnight when the masks come off, only then could they be together.

But he's still smarting from it, and she's not having it. "You're not mad at me because of that. Just like I'm not mad at you about Vanessa. We're just doing what we always do, finding excuses. Well... I won't do it anymore. I know you told Serena you love me." He grits and yells and fusses ("Don't tell me what I feel!"), but it's just... Through another lens, the burlesque is about shapechanging. They've been going through so many poses and outfits and movies, both of them. It's easy to see the Blair ones because she titles them and assigns them placecards -- "femme fatale," "socialite philanthropist" -- but it's true of him too, maybe to the point that burlesque isn't really his metaphor anymore.

If you know your myths, you know that shapechangers and love are a terrible combination, because it always gets real bad. Usually around midnight, actually: You go to them at the crossroads and you have to hold onto them no matter what happens, until the changes are over. They turn into dogs and wolves and dragons, they turn into your mother and your father, your face looking back at you, nightmares unimaginable, they bite and scratch and turn in your hands, they turn into fire and burn your hands, they turn into ice and freeze you to death. And this is the part that would appeal to Blair: if it's true, if it's real, if it's meant to be, you will have the strength to do this until the sun comes up, and they're released from the spell. Not a beast, not a frog, not a monster or a God: just the man you love, looking back at you, finally free. You can see his true face.

That's honestly how it looks, onscreen: she holds him so hard, like a frightened horse wheezing and blowing and rearing away, and she doesn't let go for anything. He fights back with words and tears and shame, and he turns into flame and ice, and the harder he fights the more love she has in her eyes. He tries to escape, and he can't, and the words just keep coming, ripping at him, taking him apart. "Gossip Girl can be right about you all she wants, but I won't let her be right about me. I will not be weak anymore. You can't run. You have to stay here and hear it this time. Chuck Bass... I love you. I love you so much it consumes me. I love

you... And I know you love me too."

He begins to fall apart, at the moment she could have him, and she makes the fatal mistake: she drops them back into the story. Not now, but before. Not them, naked, at midnight, but the movie that brought them here. The narrative she keeps telling herself, that keeps her alive, is the thing he needs to twist out of her grip: "Tell me you love me. Then everything we've done -- all the gossip, and the lies, and the hurt -- will have been for something. Tell me it was for something." She looks into his true face, the tears in his eyes, and shivers. "Maybe it was. But it's not anymore." He twists himself out of her grip, and covers up his eyes again, and leaves. And she's there, still naked, but no longer enough.

Rufus and Lily reminisce -- of course, they are now eating everything in the house -- about this concert where he covered "How Will I Know" and dedicated it to her. Which is not only awesome to think about, but also pretty on point as a connection between these two scenes. Then they have a long, very stoned conversation about how their story is sort of a romance, but also sort of a Choose Your Own Adventure, because they keep picking at weird snags and going off vrooming in the oddest directions. Rufus does some of his excruciating poetry talk ("Maybe it just wasn't the right time. Maybe it never will be. What if it is? What if we're just too stubborn to see it?" Rufus is the fucking worst) and then takes a Lincoln Hawk concert wristband and fashions it into a wedding ring, and they kiss and are affianced. Which is oddly perfect, because all anybody really needed was a reminder of how desperately they deserve each other.

Nate follows Serena down to the street, promising her it will all blow over, but that's not her issue, she already knows that. "Nate, high school is over. If I don't fix this tonight some of these people will never talk to me again." She stresses out about how GG is going to keep doing this to people -- "the Serena and Nate and Dan and Blair" -- and he asks what on earth she can expect to do about that. Which is something Lily would say, which is enough reason for her to pull a fourth scheme out of thin air. She texts Gossip Girl that she knows who GG is, and to meet her at the Oak Room or else. Nate, of course, is like, "That's not true! ...Is it?" Heh. Serena's proud of herself, and a little scared, and resolves to bluff GG out one more time.

Blair, still looking amazing, comes to see Jenny in the bathroom. Jenny looks so powerfully good in this episode. She's looked really cute in a variety of ways, some of them really ill-advised, but her look tonight is all seriously shiny red lipstick and flouncy riot curls; it's like all her outfits of the season teamed up to make one consistent grownup look. Blair, of course, is convinced that this latest thing -- "I told Chuck I loved him. Again. And he didn't say it back. Again" -- is totally fascinating, but I'm not sure anybody would really care. But for the purposes of this conversation we'll agree that this would be truly, truly outrageous somehow. Jenny tries to tell B she's not into being Queen, and that in fact she's grossed out she even thought about telling the Uncle Jack secret, but Blair stares her down.

"That's the thing, you need to be cold to be Queen. Anne Boleyn thought only with her heart, and she got her head chopped off. So her daughter Elizabeth made a vow never to marry a man. She married her country. Forget boys. Keep your eye on the prize, Jenny Humphrey. You can't make people love you, but you can make them fear you. For what it's worth, you're my Queen. I choose you."

Jenny's touched; I think of all the narratives for Blair to cut/paste herself back into, after the Chuck scene, the Lonely Queen thing is the best for her. At least it's not about a boy. What I can't figure out is why this brought her back into Jenny's orbit except that they both knew she was just being a bitch before when she said Jenny was a failed attempt, and are both willing to edit that part out. Any case, they get a blast from GG to join Serena and Nate at the Oak Room.

"She's gonna come," Serena says over her martini. "I know she is." Dan comes in, which causes Nate to squeal, but of course Dan's not GG -- he's just there to continue making amends for his horrible behavior earlier, and because without Nate and Serena there he had no reason to be at the party. Nate, fearing correctly that Dan and Serena are about to have an obnoxious conversation, disappears, while Dan lectures Serena about how her singleminded pursuit of Gossip Girl is not only stupid but also indicative of Serena's worthlessness. She admits that "irrelevant" pushed her buttons, and Dan -- most impressively -- manages to make it all about him in the time it would take a normal person to blink:

"Irrelevant? You're Serena van der Woodsen. Gossip Girl might be right about me, but she's wrong about you. Without Serena van der Woodsen, who would I have dreamt about? I might have spent my whole life on the outside if you hadn't let me in. Which I'm holding against you."

Joke at the expense of Serena and her friends? Check. Dan Humphrey as the only reason Serena van der Woodsen is relevant? Check. Mention of GG's label on Dan as the only context in which Serena's label signifies anything? Check. Serena's existence being entirely contingent on his masturbation fantasies? Check check check. I believe that's a checkmate, Humphrey. Congratulations on being the worst.

Blair walks in, blowing Nate's mind for a second time -- Dan's like, "Okay, now it makes sense" -- and followed by Little J, which makes Nate scream even louder than before. "Wait. They're a team!" I wish Nate had been giving us this much color commentary on the actual shit literally happening before his eyes the whole time, it's hilarious and adorable. Eric and Jonathan come in, and then the Plastics, and they all say that GG texted them to meet Serena in her stead.

"You wanted to meet Gossip Girl? Well look around, you just did. I'm nothing without you. And while most high school friendships fade, it's my hope that what happened today will bond you forever. Now that all my secrets are out, you have a clean slate..." (It's amazing how every actor up in this piece manages to raise their eyebrows at the exact same point in the voiceover!) "Until college. Congratulations, I'm coming with you." Nice! Serena gets a round for the entire student body of Constance Billard/St. Jude's, and everybody cheers. And just like that: no divide at all.

B approaches, contrite, and S tells her she doesn't need to apologize, taking her hand. When Blair tells her it didn't work out, Serena is sympathetic, but it doesn't cloud her real response to his absence: "It doesn't feel right without him here. You know, everyone's here." And that's Serena van der Woodsen. Over her shoulder, Blair watches him down in the street, staring up at the window. On the outside again. "Yeah... Everyone's here," Blair says sadly, and he walks away. It was her test, and she failed.

One week later, Lily's wearing a serious engagement ring and not that piece of crap from before -- I assume we can thank Eric for that -- and they make out while Eric unwraps the Humphrey's like only possession: the wafflemaker. "I've dreamed about this for so long," he says, which is sort of gay but not really what he means. Waffles are to Rufus Humphrey what bagels are to Sandy Cohen, and while Lily has one thousand kinds of jam, until today the house of PRADA had no waffles at all. Not the kind you make, anyway. Eric lusts after the wafflemaker precisely the same way Jenny lusts after Lily's pots of jam: you need both. Eric needs a dad who makes waffles, messy and funny and full of love. And Jenny needs a mom who buys jam, who has navigated these waters and swum with the sharks, been rich and poor and seen what they both do, and can teach her how to live in the world. Eric and Jenny are the new Serena and Blair: raising each other, desperately craving what the other one has. Of all the things I'm excited about for year, the idea of this household is the most exciting. Eric wants waffles immediately, but Jenny's got a meeting -- at Rouge Tomate, where this episode started -- with the Queen.

Blair giggles and helps Serena pack for her summer tour and they talk about the last week, in which GG's spotted Chuck in France, Germany, Italy... Blair is able to laugh about it, and wish STDs on him, and Serena's impressed and encouraging with every grin and chuckle. "Open your present!" Blair says, handing over a framed print of Serena's gorgeous mugshot. They laugh, and Serena is delighted. "It's to remind you of who you are," Blair says, and they grab at each other, trying to memorize as much as possible for when they're apart. Serena asks her to come, but Blair says she's content to sit in the wreckage of her dreams all summer and get her shit together. "I need to just stop moving, and contemplate the failure of my life," in case you thought I was exaggerating. And of course Serena says the best possible thing: "Well. When you're ready to start moving again, you know I'll be here."

At some NYU coffeeshop, Dan's fugued out on Vanessa, and admits it's because he misses St. Jude's after all. "I miss Blair Waldorf and her daily ego demolitions. Nelly Yuki stealing my lunch. Even Chuck Bass, who would get ... so close to talk." His voice is equal parts wonderment and stark terror, but it's so nice to hear him say the words. "I think it's safe to say that the nostalgia's officially begun." Nate walks up, and while Vanessa feels awkward and sad about not dating him, he tells them about how the Mayoral internship put him squarely back into Cougartown, and even though the Deputy Mayor is hot, he has made a personal vow to stop being a rentboy. So, he wonders, can he come with Vanessa on that fucking backpacking trip?

Her heart leaps, but she can't actually do anything legit so she lies and says she's going with somebody else. Who? A guy that walks up. This is the dumbest fucking scene. So the guy's like, "I'm going with her." And then for no reason that makes rational sense, he exposes his own lies by saying, "Yeah, we're gonna have a great time, Melissa and I." NOPE. I call foul. Because there's an infinite number of names for a girl to be called, and you don't know the name, you're not going to make up a name, because you have infinite minus one chances of getting it right. So this whole stupid conversation is bullshit, and we're not doing it.

Nate begs to go with her, once the random guy is exposed as a random guy, and then to add stupidity to this scene, goes, "We'll just go as friends, don't worry. It won't be anything romantic. Unless, you know, we drink a little too much in Vienna one night." Which nobody, not even Nate, would ever say. So whatever, he flutters his eyelids and she talks shit about his necktie, and it's all just nonsense and dumbness. They leave so that Dan can talk to the random guy about how Welcome To Not Being Nate Archibald, who always wins, and that part is kind of cute, and they talk about how they're both going to NYU in the fall, and of course this random guy is Scott, aka Pilot Inspektor, aka Dan and Serena's brother.

Penelope hands a diamond headband over to Emma, but B snatches it out of their hands and gives it to Jenny just as a well-timed GG blast comes out containing all of those secrets Nelly Yuki told Jenny during the Pinkberry War, when Nelly Yuki pretended to go along with Jenny's anarchist post-Agnes ways, while secretly trying to get herself installed as the second-in-command in her regime. (Remember?) In effect it's basically a mini-version of the graduation blast, an erasing and leveling of the Plastics' secrets that didn't rate the original apocalypse, but it does result in Blair retaining the crown and handing it over to Jenny. The music goes crazy when she puts it on; also, Isabel is wearing a giant Minnie Mouse bow around her neck and looks mentally ill.

Penelope goes predictably nuts -- "How can you do this? Letting some girl from Brooklyn carry on our legacy?" -- but Blair explains to them that this is in the tradition of the foreign queen, and then makes the very salient point that, once Rufus marries Lily, Jenny will be the richest person in school. Um, yeah, season is going to fucking rock. That's so thrilling. So Blair makes them shove over for Jenny -- "not enough!" -- and Blair takes off while Nelly Yuki curries favor and Jenny begins to explain, "Okay, so starting year, no more headbands. Except for this one..."

While Scott pores over his portfolio of creepy Lily Bass and Rufus Humphrey memorabilia and generally acts like something from Middle Earth, Dan gets a call from the other main problem that is going to happen season, which is Georgina's crazy ass. She tells him Poppy's never going to be a problem again, which is chilling -- except what the fuck, like we wouldn't rather see what went down there? -- and that she'll see him year at NYU. He almost faints from fear and she hangs up on him without explaining herself, and then we see her with the NYU bursar totally requesting Blair Waldorf as her roommate. So now we know what the first three episodes of S3 are going to be about, and I couldn't be more excited. This really is the best possible advertisement for year, this last little act.

Off Georgina's bizarre expression we fade to Serena, who for some reason is standing near a towncar staring into space while the camera slowly turns around her in slow motion. I submit to you that whenever we're not with her, this is how Serena spends her time. Carter Baizen appears out of nowhere, having come back home after Serena forced him out of the country, bearing news of a mysterious Thing that he torturously does not name for a ridiculously long time: "I have something you might want to know before you go," he says, and she says she hopes he's not coming after B again. "No, it has to do with you. It's about Santorini, What You Were Looking For there. While I was on the trip you so graciously gave me, I found It again. Only It's not in Santorini anymore, It's in Fiji. At least, He was last week." WHO TALKS LIKE THIS? Only people trying hamfistedly to give some weight to Serena's reply: "You found my father?" The Shiny Toy Guns song starts again, and she jumps into the car, bringing him along with her on this new adventure.

Chuck's standing on the sidewalk in a suit, holding a painfully unnatural chest-thrusting pose like a scary mannequin, holding lots of crap, when Blair walks up -- for the fifth scene running, out of nowhere -- wearing green and gold. She doesn't see him at first, but then she does. He explains, delicately and tenderly, that he tried to run from her, but everywhere he went, she was there: In Paris, but only to get her favorite macaroons; and Germany for her favorite stockings -- "You know how I adore them" -- and he figured out she and GG were right. He was a coward, but she kept catching

up. So, he says with a sweet smile, he had to come back.

"I want to believe you," she says, "But I can't. You've hurt me too many times." He promises she can believe him, and her eyes coast across the packages. Is that it? "I love you too," he says, and she kisses him, and he says it again, and again. XO XO XO XO.

Every graduation speech ever written starts with a simple fact: "commencement" means something beginning, not ending. You see it as the endpoint of something, because it's the end of the whole world that you know. And every grownup and parent and teacher in the room knows it's the opposite, so they enlighten you with a little vocab. They're not wrong. But they're also not precisely right, because it's been too long for them to remember that it's both. It's the beginning of what they think is the real story, and sometime soon you'll agree. You'll forget that any of this mattered. You'll turn around and condescend to the kids that come after you, and assure them that it's not something ending, it's just the beginning. Real life starts here.

But you'll get the same speech when you graduate college, when you have a kid, when you turn twenty, when you turn thirty. When you turn forty, oh my God they'll tell you that speech a million times when you turn forty. "This is when your life starts. This is when it's real. This is when it starts mattering. Everything before this was stupid and doesn't mean anything. This is the day you become real."

And you can feel relief, every time, because the last chapter was so fucking exhausting and you learned so much and hurt so much and changed so much, it really does feel like the beginning of something. And in that long stretch between twenty and thirty, and thirty and forty, maybe you'll secretly wish for a few more ceremonies, a few more commencement speeches, just to give you that permission to start the new chapter. To become more, to start your life, to treat it like it's real, like these moments matter.

You'll get tired, and you'll get discouraged, and you'll stare yourself down in the mirror and promise to be perfect from now on. You'll break up, you'll get divorced, you'll suffer unbearable disappointments. You'll pick up again and keep moving. You'll get fat and you'll get skinny. You'll learn languages, and you'll forget them. You will fall down on the job, and you'll be ashamed of your weaknesses and your unthinking, exhausted cruelties. You'll see the patterns in your life taking shape in your children, and you'll want to warn them to be better, stronger, faster. Quieter. You'll wish for silence more than anything, and for a moment to sit still in the sun. You'll beg for the right to feel your actual age, and not like a horrible mistake has been made where you're suddenly accountable for your own actions. That feeling never goes away. You'll have as many epiphanies as there are seasons, and some of them will take. Most of them won't.

By Jacob Clifton

Not that there aren't echoes, especially in the areas of our blindness. Rufus surprises Lily somewhere in a house somewhere and they have a brief conversation about their current grievances. He's pissed because she told the Waldorf-Roses that he's a romantic disappointment, and she's pissed because he is a romantic disappointment. She says... Basically everything I just said, which is that they've examined and pored over each other in a new way every week for the last twenty-five episodes (and twenty years!), their histories and their relationships and their differences and their samenesses, and he's still afraid, and she's still scary, and either you drop the bullshit and commit or you wait for everybody to be perfect. He's a romantic, she's a realist. And the thing about romantics is that they honestly don't think anybody but them really knows about love.

You get these boys who think love defines them, that the state of love is not only sustainable but the point, and maybe for them it is, and anybody who feels differently is not only heartless and clueless, but is also attacking their worldview simply by disagreeing. Because if we don't all agree that love is the most important thing, maybe it's not, and the world falls apart. And then you have Lily, who as a Rhodes woman knows precisely where to prioritize that fluttery love feeling, and has her own complicated relationship with it, but has told herself over and over that, rationally, you can't afford to overestimate that feeling. That this idealized irrational silly retard love is the shadow on the wall of the cave, and the real thing is gritty and scary. That truly wanting love is about the dumbest thing you could ever do, because real love is not that romantic: it rips you open and burns you alive, and it takes you apart and puts you back together, better. (Which try telling that to a Rufus, and you'll see a grown man cry, because he just wants the easy part.) But it's dangerous in either case, because the whole point of that feeling actually is letting it burn all the way through you.

The scary thing about loving Rufus -- and these are the only men I involve myself with, so take this with a grain of salt -- is that he lives so far into the future of possibility, of the perfection, he can see it so clearly, that you're afraid to move because disappointment hurts him so much more than other people. It's a betrayal, not a rerouting, if things don't go according to plan. And the scary thing about loving Lily is that she can close up faster than a motherfucker, because all it is is rerouting. She doesn't require perfection, but if things warp enough off the x-axis that it starts to suck, she can cut that cord faster and more brutally than the eye can follow.

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By Jacob Clifton

(And, I think, the secret key here is that you can replace "Rufus" with "Blair" in the above paragraphs, and "Lily" with "Chuck," and it answers pretty much every question you, or they, could ever have about why it's so fucking hard. It's supposed to be, that's how you know you're alive.)

So to me, the definition of a relationship is in holding onto this particular livewire and letting it be both things at once: perfect and difficult at the same time. That's dynamic. Do it right and you keep changing yourselves and each other, forever and ever, and nobody gets cold and nobody gets hard and nobody gets settled, because the challenge is always there and it's always asking you to synthesize and transcend, to take a disagreement and work it out so that you can hit another plateau and another disagreement, until ... You are both superheroes, and then you fight crime. Which as a day-to-day war against stability isn't very romantic (or comforting) but you kind of asked for it by falling in love with Lily and/or with goddamn Rufus Humphrey.

Nate looks amazing! William Granderbilt agrees, as usual, and has a sort of disinterestedly prurient interest in Nate's talk about the Hamptons and the older woman ("Welcome to Washington!" he says, which actually makes less sense the more you think about it, like most of the dialogue), and then eventually kind of shocked by the actual prostitution that came about. I can't believe Nate left out the incest part. I mean, I know it didn't really involve him, but it was the most WTF thing about that whole deal, and would be just as damaging in the long run, due to being part of a cougar prostitution harem of boys. Chuck walks up looking for Blair, and Nate finally tells him that they broke up. Which you would think Chuck would have picked up on, when B was opening and closing her mouth like a codfish, but I don't really get these people this week. And if he didn't know that, what is he looking for her for? Maybe the GG thing.

So Vanessa's standing around the party with Dan, talking predictably about how shitty it is and how they should go get doughnuts at whatever cruddy place, and Serena -- this is brutal, this scene, but very funny -- comes up screeching about OMFGG and all this, and the terrible labels and the humanity of it all, and what will we do, and the sky is falling, and they just sort of... Make fun of her for caring, which as an adult watching the show is pretty satisfying if you don't consider the source. Vanessa literally walks away rolling her eyes in the middle of Serena's meltdown. It might be my favorite moment in the whole episode, because neither Dan or Serena notices her disappearing act, and all three of these things are beautifully in character.

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By Jacob Clifton

Dan tries to talk her down, and explain about how high school is stupid, but he... I am sympathetic to them both, because they're both right, but he's more right, but for the wrong reasons. If he didn't tell himself every day for four years that GG was just stupid and for stupidheads, he would have killed himself. And yes, GG is stupid and GG is for stupidheads, and S needs to chill the eff out, but that's not where he's speaking from. Which is why he goes too far in the other direction, and says some hurtful things that are almost out of character but in a better-written episode would feel less out of character. He says they all need to move on, away from the backbiting and conniving BS, and she's like, "Sure, but these things are actually true and they were actually said. That's not a game." And he tries to get her to think outside that box and consider the fact that she's still taking part in an optional economy and that, as Serena vdDub, she can hold onto those relationships without necessarily hooking them up with the GG phenomenon.

At least, I think that's what he's trying to say, but her points are valid enough that she backs him into a corner and he ends up saying that their high school relationships essentially mean nothing, and he'll never talk to her again. It's either brilliant or really stupid writing, I can't decide. Because you can see the battle of the logic that gets him there, but I mean, I'm always surprised when Dan does stuff this stupid. It's not like Serena van der Woodsen is terribly complex.

The core four sit on the stairs and have a long conversation trying to narrow down exactly who GG is: she basically only talks about Constance/St. Jude's, she probably knows them personally, she started in ninth grade so is probably their contemporary, et cetera. Nate is particularly amazing in this scene, because he keeps repeating everything everybody says like he just thought of it. Chuck's like, "I assume she's our age," and this giant lightbulb goes off over Nate's head and he literally says, "So you're saying Gossip Girl's a senior, like us?" Thanks, Nate. So Serena points out that their entire graduating class is there at the grad party -- even Uninvited Dan -- so fuck it. Chuck goes through Facebook on his phone, and they discount them one by one. Blair pshaws "Rebecca Sherman" because she doesn't pay attention; that crazy-face girl that did the Prom ballot and skulks around Queller all the time is apparently named Fiona, and she's out too.

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By Jacob Clifton

They look at Nelly Yuki, who's eating like a crazy person, and name all the reasons she might be the one. And since Jenny's not there to explain it -- because Jenny knows how cringing she actually is -- they actually stick with Nelly Yuki for awhile, before Serena reveals that apparently she hangs out with Nelly Yuki like constantly, and has seen her get and be mindblown by GG blasts plenty of times. Which, um, we all have.

Serena gets that resolved mouth again and sends GG a tip, and she's like, "Chuck, get the room quiet." He says, "I'm way ahead of you," even though he's ... not, and then starts some fake speech just long enough for the culprit's phone to ring. And it is Jonathan! No! The music has fifteen dark orgasms and Chuck and Serena cross in front of each other in a phenomenal way that gives the appearance of lots of movement, and everybody stares at everybody else for a million years, but there's the proof: "Now I know who you are," right there on the phone. It's unbelievably dramatic, but also: A) GG will never be unmasked because that's stupid, and B) the episode is half over. So the music and the drama and the way everybody shits their pants for like the third time this week, it's sort of insulting.

Guess what? Jonathan isn't Gossip Girl. I know, I am just as shocked as you. So he explains that he "hacked into her server over Spring Break," because he was bored, and Eric notes that they now have access to every tipster email. Jenny flips through the tips with abandon, and Eric blushes when she points out that he obviously dyes his hair, which is cute enough -- as is watching Serena, Jenny and Jonathan giggling about it -- that the fact that he's never tried to hide it and has actually mentioned it before and has gone from blonde to brunette multiple times and thus is not ashamed of it, we'll let that slide. Serena takes Jonathan off for more of her Byzantine plotting that never goes anywhere, and Jenny and Eric have a very literal conversation in which Jenny uncovers something truly scandalous that would make her Queen if she used it, but will she, because would that destroy her soul, but would it be worth it, because she could then abolish the monarchy forever. The whole royalty Queen B motif, I like it at around a six, seven if they're wearing costumes, but man, Jenny is taking that shit to eleven.

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By Jacob Clifton

Blair was so convinced earlier that there was some kind of trick or gimmick to it, that it was a mystery that needed figuring out, and the whole time it was there in front of us all: Eleanor digs Cyrus, Cyrus digs Blair, Blair digs Cyrus. They have fun, they nourish each other, they laugh and they work shit out. I was worried that he'd heal Blair too quickly, because I'm still waiting every week for Blair's nuclear explosion, but I wonder, because I think more than just loving Blair as much as she needs to be loved, he might have actually helped more by demonstrating, with Eleanor, how easy love can actually be once you're honest about it. It's not sexy, it's adorable but it's not aspirational in any way but the real. Blair wanted Cary Grant for a stepfather, but that wasn't about Eleanor, and watching Eleanor and Cyrus together teaches us -- Blair, you and me, Lily and Rufus too -- what wonders are possible when you let go of the fantasy. It doesn't really matter if you make a Good Couple, if you are a good couple. (And if you look at it that way, marrying Bart was just Lily's Perfect Prom, Bart was her Nate. She didn't not love him, but it was too far in the clouds to do anything but contribute to the phase.)

Eleanor tears up at this honesty, and Blair suddenly goes still, feeling wild and afraid. "Cyrus told me," Eleanor says, her voice a hush in her daughter's ear, strong hands on her shoulders. "You told Chuck how you felt and... He ran away. You seeing him tonight?" She wraps her arms around her daughter, and looks into her eyes through the mirror, and holds her tighter than anything. "Don't let him get away with it." Blair laughs, her eyes dance, and they are more mother and daughter than ever before. I'm bummed about the lack of Dorota in this episode, at this moment in Blair's life, but I don't begrudge it, because this is a much more important narrative that Blair needs to let go. Consider the image, knowing what we know, of Eleanor and Blair both looking at Blair in the mirror -- her beautiful face, but more importantly her beautiful body, and more importantly still her beautiful self -- and it's enough. Finally enough.

Nelly Yuki dances around drunkenly and acts like a retarded fucking cartoon, and Nate awesomely catches her at some point with an offhand "Oh hey, drunky!" before she goes whirling off on yet another pointless tracking shot past Isabel hissing at her not to embarrass herself, and immediately thereby launching herself at Dan to weakly stutter and stammer and come very close to admitting she's in love with him, before seeing Serena and getting scared. Dan and Vanessa stare at each other as she runs off, unable to process this weirdest of all possible occurrences, but at least it breaks the ice between them and, you know, socializing with other people at this party.

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By Jacob Clifton

Blair, having arrived with this last piece of armor, the last weapon, the last tool she needs in her hands, breathes and makes ready to have one more try at Chuck. Jenny steps in front of her, and warns her about the fact that GG knows about Uncle Jack on New Year's Eve, which came up once and never again. Blair goes from dismissive to terrified to steely in about one second, and can't really be expected to see what Jenny's doing, so she reacts in her usual feral way. But it's interesting, because actually what Jenny's doing is asking Blair's advice, as reigning Queen, to help her gauge whether it's worth using. The fact that it's about Blair is not the point, the point is What Blair Waldorf Would Do. Jenny tries to wake her up to the fact that as of today the Mean Girls aren't listening to her anymore, and really haven't been for awhile, in their own incompetent way, which is the last thing B needs to hear right now. She needs all she can get, right now.

So Jenny gets the correct answer, but not in words, because Blair goes off on her, predictably flailing and saying the meanest shit she can think of -- "I'm sorry I wasted my time on you. You don't have what it takes. You never did" -- which essentially makes the point that Blair can go fuck herself, so Jenny does what Blair would do, having been given means, permission and opportunity, and runs straight to Isabel with the gossip. Nasty little Emma Boardman stares at her hatefully, and Jenny looks truly satanic for a sec.

"I want to talk," Blair says, and Chuck tries to put her off with Pose #1, the Libertine: "I prefer to talk after," he says, and they're alone. She pushes him down on the couch and he looks up at her, eyes shining. She asks his opinion of her coat. "I like it." She drops it to the floor. "And now?" (In my dream version of this episode, the Sohodolls would start playing at this point.) He nods. "And what about my headband?" He admires it. "And my stockings?" Oh, he grins, he adores them. The dress? "I worship it." She stands before him, the girl behind the poses and the clothes, strokes his face, leaning over him; he looks so young, breathing her in. "How do you feel about me?" Exactly right. This is exactly how it happens; this is how the film falls off the projector. She's finally there. That's when the phones start ringing.

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By Jacob Clifton

"What is it now?" Serena screams, and Dan starts yelling, and everybody pulls out their phones: "Serena Van Der Woodsen just couldn't leave well enough alone. Since she had to find out the truth about me, I'm going to tell you the truth about everyone. Every gossip bomb I've got is about to drop. And if you've got a problem with that, take it up with her." And the hits start rolling out, and they don't stop, and everybody screams about it at everybody else: Dan in jail with Charlie Trout and fucking Rachel Carr, Jenny dancing with Agnes and kissing Nate, Blair fucking Jack Bass, Chuck fucking Vanessa.

The idea's more interesting than the execution, because the idea is somewhere between the endings of The Manchurian Candidate and Fight Club, which means that -- like the occasional fever/Dark Phoenix stuff with Serena -- it's never going to be as awesome to watch as it is to think about. The idea is transcendent, literally: exhausting the sum total of all secrets, the unGossiping of Gossip Girl. Complete disclosure. Sudden inevitable honesty, the naked lunch where everybody sees what's on the end of every fork. The only possible sane reaction to the critical mass they've been building for the last four years. The queasy relationship each character has with their mirror double, the distances and uncomfortable proximity of those secrets to their deepest fears, exploding. The complete disintegration of glamour, in both the entertainment and the magical sense. The morning after, the bright sunshine. I mean, that's amazing. The shitty thing about the Red Pill is that you have to hang out with filthy hippies in a cave somewhere, right?

But at that point, all you can do is dance, and that's all Serena has ever tried to tell people, but now she's getting nailed by it too. Because she was the one that brought the war to GG, she has to be accountable for the ways all their fantasies and defenses just died. She assumed responsibility for it the second she took up arms. And the best thing is that she didn't do it out of some high-minded principle, or even on her own (and Eric's) terms, that honesty is the key to everything: she did it out of the pettiest, silliest embarrassment of all. GG told her to walk the walk, and called her bluff. What gave her the power to take down Gossip Girl is exactly what Gossip Girl gave her, and is taking away now. Again: execution F, idea A+ to the infinite power. They create each other, they destroy each other. And because GG has the one thing none of them could ever have, and would never want -- anonymity -- she can do it, and still laugh while everything burns. Midnight's when the masks come off.

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By Jacob Clifton

Over everybody's escalating ego explosion, Serena yells about how they're playing into GG's hands: "She's trying to create a divide between us! This is exactly what she wants!" Of course that's how it looks to Serena, because her entire life is about keeping everybody stable and together, and making sure everybody gets out alive. Every character sees it in their own way: Blair of course thinks it's the apocalypse, because fantasy is all she has, and Chuck sees it as the ultimate confirmation of his theory that he deserves to be betrayed. Dan and Jenny and Vanessa are all screwed by the fact that it keeps getting on them no matter what they do. Nate... is very pretty, and stands around looking bemused, because he and Eric van der Woodsen are about the only people who could give a fuck. But Serena: of course it looks that way to her, because that's literally her only responsibility. She did it, by trying to save them from their impending future doom. She only wanted to be a princess, never a Queen, because she knew she can hold everybody in her hands at once. And now they're trickling out.

Blair, of course, can't wait to inform her of this: that it was her test, and she failed. Chuck strikes even more brutally: "I don't think it's her that created the divide. I think it was you." Because why did Serena come home? To save Eric, she thought; but also to save Blair, and to save Lily. To keep everybody safe, to fix Nate and Blair, to get everybody back in line. To throw her arms around the world. To bring in Dan, even, and Brooklyn, and to get Lily back in line, and to cheer for Rufus/Lily, and for Blair/Chuck when it was healthier for them. Why was she in Santorini? To heal every divide, no matter how messy it gets everybody. Why was Georgina the scariest thing in the universe? Because she embodies the divide. Why did Blair take out Georgina the first time? To save Eric, she thought; but also to save Serena, because she knew that without Serena's limitless love they would all be destroyed.

Serena's always carried every one of their burdens on her back, drunk or sober, and that's all she's being asked to do now: watch the whole universe she knows expanding out into space, everybody getting further and further apart. To once again attempt to put the atom back together, with nothing but her Hufflepuff powers, which are always the lamest and most thankless powers, and the only ones that matter in the real world. Protagonists are tricky, because to be the still center of a story means you stay still. Serena's always been irrelevant in this story, because she's the only one who never does anything; Serena's always been central to this story, because she's the center of gravity. She moves the pieces around, quietly and while attempting to redeem herself for the few times she actually tried to do anything active, and got burnt black by it.

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By Jacob Clifton

I always get reamed for going on and on about Serena, but I mean it's the most basic use of capital-T Theory: take apart the pieces of a story and see what they're resting on, because the most interesting parts of a story are the parts you don't think about, and that's always going to be Serena. Any binary opposition you can draw, Serena's on the bottom of it, so she's the key to like every deconstruction you can perform on the text, and the most interesting moments on the show, to me, are the parts where they let her do that particular operation on the text, because she always catches fire, and it causes everybody else to grow and change at twice their normal rate. I do identify with her an awful lot, I'm not really secretive about that, but it's not why I'm interested in investigating her character. I promise not to bring Buffy into this, but you can see it from here: I'm obsessed with Serena's use and significance because she embodies the line you can draw from Gatsby's Daisy to Jessica Simpson: a girl who is vitally important, but for everything that surrounds her and isn't her. She's essentially a negative space.

Which isn't the end of the story, because she's also subjectively a person regardless of how we, or they, view her. That's a lot closer to my actual experience of being alive. There's a feminism that is about the constrictions of the constructs and a very evocative and exciting outrage about the ways that we are hedged in; there are humanisms and gay schools of thought that go those ways, and they offer a sense of community and an exhilarating sense of victimhood in which nothing we do matters, because somebody else is oppressing us and therefore our decisions aren't our own. And then there's a feminism that says there's a utility in understanding and being conscious and eventually working magic with the actual reality around us. The hard yucky facts that won't go away no matter how often we get together and complain to each other about them. And the main thing that I have learned in thirty years is that there is incredible power in being an object, as long as you don't fall in and forget your options for getting out.

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By Jacob Clifton

Watching Serena dance around that abyss and construct these elaborate rules for herself, and honestly try to stay in contact at all times with her own unnatural capacity for compassion, when it would be so easy to coast on the It Girl thing, is really empowering. So I like that this episode is essentially a finale, and thank God for the Blair/Chuck wonderment and Blair/Eleanor reconciliation, but as a single episode: Serena making war on Gossip Girl is Serena making war on everything that's not Serena. And because of who she is, that's everything and nothing at all, because it's all her. Blair's the hero, but she works outside the system to do so, and takes some fucking lumps for it. Blair's the taste of the meal, but Serena's the ingredients, and the smell of it all cooking.

Anyway. Nate tells everybody to be nice to Serena, and Dan joins in the chorus, and Blair unloads gorgeously on him too. "What do you know about anything? Besides, your label was the only one that was true: You're friends with Nate Archibald, you played on the soccer team, you got into Yale." He gets more and more embarrassed, her voice speeds up faster and faster. "...You got the lead role in the school play, you got published in The New Yorker. You had sex with a teacher..." Nelly Yuki bumbles into the scene for some more terrible acting and being in love with Dan, and Blair resumes once she's done. "You pretend not to be like us, but you are. To the bone." And even more wonderfully, she turns to Serena: "And you should have known better."

Hands up everybody who assumed Blair would take to the postapocalyptic complete-disclosure thing faster than anybody else? That's what I thought. Like a duck to water. At some point in this flurry of activity she yells at Chuck for sleeping with the "dregs of DUMBO" (to which Vanessa screams, "I'm standing right here!") but it's such a drive-by moment of awesomeness it's sort of just punctuation before she storms off to lay down some more motherfucking science on some people, while Serena quietly thanks Dan and Nate -- who's back to staring into space -- for taking up for her. Especially, note, because the divide started with him. He was the harbinger of this, when he said they would all die alone and he didn't like her anymore or whatever, so the fact that he was the one that jumped in with Nate and tried to scoop everybody back together for her actually really means something. And even better, because it's the secret awesomeness of Dan, is that he can't be trusted for shit about these things, because even if he says he doesn't love you he still totally does, and all it takes is for him -- or Rufus -- to act out of that love instead of a pose is to startle him, like with a loud noise or something.

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By Jacob Clifton

Penelope says some snarky shit to Serena, obligatorily, and asks Jenny what she was going to say, because they both know it doesn't matter anymore. Meanwhile, Blair's trying to help Chuck jump over this latest thing, back in that room. He turns with his hands up, palms wide, exhausted, and begs her to leave him alone. But she's too smart: between Eleanor and the end of the world, she's got everything she needs. He spent so long trying to bring her life crashing down around her so that she would come back to her, remember? Before Bart died, and he sabotaged all her shit. And then after he went crazy, she started doing it to herself because she could tell there was something outside the movie theatre of her life. But he was right all along, and they both knew it: after the world ends, at midnight when the masks come off, only then could they be together.

But he's still smarting from it, and she's not having it. "You're not mad at me because of that. Just like I'm not mad at you about Vanessa. We're just doing what we always do, finding excuses. Well... I won't do it anymore. I know you told Serena you love me." He grits and yells and fusses ("Don't tell me what I feel!"), but it's just... Through another lens, the burlesque is about shapechanging. They've been going through so many poses and outfits and movies, both of them. It's easy to see the Blair ones because she titles them and assigns them placecards -- "femme fatale," "socialite philanthropist" -- but it's true of him too, maybe to the point that burlesque isn't really his metaphor anymore.

If you know your myths, you know that shapechangers and love are a terrible combination, because it always gets real bad. Usually around midnight, actually: You go to them at the crossroads and you have to hold onto them no matter what happens, until the changes are over. They turn into dogs and wolves and dragons, they turn into your mother and your father, your face looking back at you, nightmares unimaginable, they bite and scratch and turn in your hands, they turn into fire and burn your hands, they turn into ice and freeze you to death. And this is the part that would appeal to Blair: if it's true, if it's real, if it's meant to be, you will have the strength to do this until the sun comes up, and they're released from the spell. Not a beast, not a frog, not a monster or a God: just the man you love, looking back at you, finally free. You can see his true face.

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By Jacob Clifton

That's honestly how it looks, onscreen: she holds him so hard, like a frightened horse wheezing and blowing and rearing away, and she doesn't let go for anything. He fights back with words and tears and shame, and he turns into flame and ice, and the harder he fights the more love she has in her eyes. He tries to escape, and he can't, and the words just keep coming, ripping at him, taking him apart. "Gossip Girl can be right about you all she wants, but I won't let her be right about me. I will not be weak anymore. You can't run. You have to stay here and hear it this time. Chuck Bass... I love you. I love you so much it consumes me. I love you... And I know you love me too."

He begins to fall apart, at the moment she could have him, and she makes the fatal mistake: she drops them back into the story. Not now, but before. Not them, naked, at midnight, but the movie that brought them here. The narrative she keeps telling herself, that keeps her alive, is the thing he needs to twist out of her grip: "Tell me you love me. Then everything we've done -- all the gossip, and the lies, and the hurt -- will have been for something. Tell me it was for something." She looks into his true face, the tears in his eyes, and shivers. "Maybe it was. But it's not anymore." He twists himself out of her grip, and covers up his eyes again, and leaves. And she's there, still naked, but no longer enough.

Rufus and Lily reminisce -- of course, they are now eating everything in the house -- about this concert where he covered "How Will I Know" and dedicated it to her. Which is not only awesome to think about, but also pretty on point as a connection between these two scenes. Then they have a long, very stoned conversation about how their story is sort of a romance, but also sort of a Choose Your Own Adventure, because they keep picking at weird snags and going off vrooming in the oddest directions. Rufus does some of his excruciating poetry talk ("Maybe it just wasn't the right time. Maybe it never will be. What if it is? What if we're just too stubborn to see it?" Rufus is the fucking worst) and then takes a Lincoln Hawk concert wristband and fashions it into a wedding ring, and they kiss and are affianced. Which is oddly perfect, because all anybody really needed was a reminder of how desperately they deserve each other.

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By Jacob Clifton

Nate follows Serena down to the street, promising her it will all blow over, but that's not her issue, she already knows that. "Nate, high school is over. If I don't fix this tonight some of these people will never talk to me again." She stresses out about how GG is going to keep doing this to people -- "the Serena and Nate and Dan and Blair" -- and he asks what on earth she can expect to do about that. Which is something Lily would say, which is enough reason for her to pull a fourth scheme out of thin air. She texts Gossip Girl that she knows who GG is, and to meet her at the Oak Room or else. Nate, of course, is like, "That's not true! ...Is it?" Heh. Serena's proud of herself, and a little scared, and resolves to bluff GG out one more time.

Blair, still looking amazing, comes to see Jenny in the bathroom. Jenny looks so powerfully good in this episode. She's looked really cute in a variety of ways, some of them really ill-advised, but her look tonight is all seriously shiny red lipstick and flouncy riot curls; it's like all her outfits of the season teamed up to make one consistent grownup look. Blair, of course, is convinced that this latest thing -- "I told Chuck I loved him. Again. And he didn't say it back. Again" -- is totally fascinating, but I'm not sure anybody would really care. But for the purposes of this conversation we'll agree that this would be truly, truly outrageous somehow. Jenny tries to tell B she's not into being Queen, and that in fact she's grossed out she even thought about telling the Uncle Jack secret, but Blair stares her down.

"That's the thing, you need to be cold to be Queen. Anne Boleyn thought only with her heart, and she got her head chopped off. So her daughter Elizabeth made a vow never to marry a man. She married her country. Forget boys. Keep your eye on the prize, Jenny Humphrey. You can't make people love you, but you can make them fear you. For what it's worth, you're my Queen. I choose you."

Jenny's touched; I think of all the narratives for Blair to cut/paste herself back into, after the Chuck scene, the Lonely Queen thing is the best for her. At least it's not about a boy. What I can't figure out is why this brought her back into Jenny's orbit except that they both knew she was just being a bitch before when she said Jenny was a failed attempt, and are both willing to edit that part out. Any case, they get a blast from GG to join Serena and Nate at the Oak Room.

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By Jacob Clifton

"She's gonna come," Serena says over her martini. "I know she is." Dan comes in, which causes Nate to squeal, but of course Dan's not GG -- he's just there to continue making amends for his horrible behavior earlier, and because without Nate and Serena there he had no reason to be at the party. Nate, fearing correctly that Dan and Serena are about to have an obnoxious conversation, disappears, while Dan lectures Serena about how her singleminded pursuit of Gossip Girl is not only stupid but also indicative of Serena's worthlessness. She admits that "irrelevant" pushed her buttons, and Dan -- most impressively -- manages to make it all about him in the time it would take a normal person to blink:

"Irrelevant? You're Serena van der Woodsen. Gossip Girl might be right about me, but she's wrong about you. Without Serena van der Woodsen, who would I have dreamt about? I might have spent my whole life on the outside if you hadn't let me in. Which I'm holding against you."

Joke at the expense of Serena and her friends? Check. Dan Humphrey as the only reason Serena van der Woodsen is relevant? Check. Mention of GG's label on Dan as the only context in which Serena's label signifies anything? Check. Serena's existence being entirely contingent on his masturbation fantasies? Check check check. I believe that's a checkmate, Humphrey. Congratulations on being the worst.

Blair walks in, blowing Nate's mind for a second time -- Dan's like, "Okay, now it makes sense" -- and followed by Little J, which makes Nate scream even louder than before. "Wait. They're a team!" I wish Nate had been giving us this much color commentary on the actual shit literally happening before his eyes the whole time, it's hilarious and adorable. Eric and Jonathan come in, and then the Plastics, and they all say that GG texted them to meet Serena in her stead.

"You wanted to meet Gossip Girl? Well look around, you just did. I'm nothing without you. And while most high school friendships fade, it's my hope that what happened today will bond you forever. Now that all my secrets are out, you have a clean slate..." (It's amazing how every actor up in this piece manages to raise their eyebrows at the exact same point in the voiceover!) "Until college. Congratulations, I'm coming with you." Nice! Serena gets a round for the entire student body of Constance Billard/St. Jude's, and everybody cheers. And just like that: no divide at all.

B approaches, contrite, and S tells her she doesn't need to apologize, taking her hand. When Blair tells her it didn't work out, Serena is sympathetic, but it doesn't cloud her real response to his absence: "It doesn't feel right without him here. You know, everyone's here." And that's Serena van der Woodsen. Over her shoulder, Blair watches him down in the street, staring up at the window. On the outside again. "Yeah... Everyone's here," Blair says sadly, and he walks away. It was her test, and she failed.

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By Jacob Clifton

One week later, Lily's wearing a serious engagement ring and not that piece of crap from before -- I assume we can thank Eric for that -- and they make out while Eric unwraps the Humphrey's like only possession: the wafflemaker. "I've dreamed about this for so long," he says, which is sort of gay but not really what he means. Waffles are to Rufus Humphrey what bagels are to Sandy Cohen, and while Lily has one thousand kinds of jam, until today the house of PRADA had no waffles at all. Not the kind you make, anyway. Eric lusts after the wafflemaker precisely the same way Jenny lusts after Lily's pots of jam: you need both. Eric needs a dad who makes waffles, messy and funny and full of love. And Jenny needs a mom who buys jam, who has navigated these waters and swum with the sharks, been rich and poor and seen what they both do, and can teach her how to live in the world. Eric and Jenny are the new Serena and Blair: raising each other, desperately craving what the other one has. Of all the things I'm excited about for year, the idea of this household is the most exciting. Eric wants waffles immediately, but Jenny's got a meeting -- at Rouge Tomate, where this episode started -- with the Queen.

Blair giggles and helps Serena pack for her summer tour and they talk about the last week, in which GG's spotted Chuck in France, Germany, Italy... Blair is able to laugh about it, and wish STDs on him, and Serena's impressed and encouraging with every grin and chuckle. "Open your present!" Blair says, handing over a framed print of Serena's gorgeous mugshot. They laugh, and Serena is delighted. "It's to remind you of who you are," Blair says, and they grab at each other, trying to memorize as much as possible for when they're apart. Serena asks her to come, but Blair says she's content to sit in the wreckage of her dreams all summer and get her shit together. "I need to just stop moving, and contemplate the failure of my life," in case you thought I was exaggerating. And of course Serena says the best possible thing: "Well. When you're ready to start moving again, you know I'll be here."

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By Jacob Clifton

At some NYU coffeeshop, Dan's fugued out on Vanessa, and admits it's because he misses St. Jude's after all. "I miss Blair Waldorf and her daily ego demolitions. Nelly Yuki stealing my lunch. Even Chuck Bass, who would get ... so close to talk." His voice is equal parts wonderment and stark terror, but it's so nice to hear him say the words. "I think it's safe to say that the nostalgia's officially begun." Nate walks up, and while Vanessa feels awkward and sad about not dating him, he tells them about how the Mayoral internship put him squarely back into Cougartown, and even though the Deputy Mayor is hot, he has made a personal vow to stop being a rentboy. So, he wonders, can he come with Vanessa on that fucking backpacking trip?

Her heart leaps, but she can't actually do anything legit so she lies and says she's going with somebody else. Who? A guy that walks up. This is the dumbest fucking scene. So the guy's like, "I'm going with her." And then for no reason that makes rational sense, he exposes his own lies by saying, "Yeah, we're gonna have a great time, Melissa and I." NOPE. I call foul. Because there's an infinite number of names for a girl to be called, and you don't know the name, you're not going to make up a name, because you have infinite minus one chances of getting it right. So this whole stupid conversation is bullshit, and we're not doing it.

Nate begs to go with her, once the random guy is exposed as a random guy, and then to add stupidity to this scene, goes, "We'll just go as friends, don't worry. It won't be anything romantic. Unless, you know, we drink a little too much in Vienna one night." Which nobody, not even Nate, would ever say. So whatever, he flutters his eyelids and she talks shit about his necktie, and it's all just nonsense and dumbness. They leave so that Dan can talk to the random guy about how Welcome To Not Being Nate Archibald, who always wins, and that part is kind of cute, and they talk about how they're both going to NYU in the fall, and of course this random guy is Scott, aka Pilot Inspektor, aka Dan and Serena's brother.

Penelope hands a diamond headband over to Emma, but B snatches it out of their hands and gives it to Jenny just as a well-timed GG blast comes out containing all of those secrets Nelly Yuki told Jenny during the Pinkberry War, when Nelly Yuki pretended to go along with Jenny's anarchist post-Agnes ways, while secretly trying to get herself installed as the second-in-command in her regime. (Remember?) In effect it's basically a mini-version of the graduation blast, an erasing and leveling of the Plastics' secrets that didn't rate the original apocalypse, but it does result in Blair retaining the crown and handing it over to Jenny. The music goes crazy when she puts it on; also, Isabel is wearing a giant Minnie Mouse bow around her neck and looks mentally ill.

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By Jacob Clifton

Penelope goes predictably nuts -- "How can you do this? Letting some girl from Brooklyn carry on our legacy?" -- but Blair explains to them that this is in the tradition of the foreign queen, and then makes the very salient point that, once Rufus marries Lily, Jenny will be the richest person in school. Um, yeah, season is going to fucking rock. That's so thrilling. So Blair makes them shove over for Jenny -- "not enough!" -- and Blair takes off while Nelly Yuki curries favor and Jenny begins to explain, "Okay, so starting year, no more headbands. Except for this one..."

While Scott pores over his portfolio of creepy Lily Bass and Rufus Humphrey memorabilia and generally acts like something from Middle Earth, Dan gets a call from the other main problem that is going to happen season, which is Georgina's crazy ass. She tells him Poppy's never going to be a problem again, which is chilling -- except what the fuck, like we wouldn't rather see what went down there? -- and that she'll see him year at NYU. He almost faints from fear and she hangs up on him without explaining herself, and then we see her with the NYU bursar totally requesting Blair Waldorf as her roommate. So now we know what the first three episodes of S3 are going to be about, and I couldn't be more excited. This really is the best possible advertisement for year, this last little act.

Off Georgina's bizarre expression we fade to Serena, who for some reason is standing near a towncar staring into space while the camera slowly turns around her in slow motion. I submit to you that whenever we're not with her, this is how Serena spends her time. Carter Baizen appears out of nowhere, having come back home after Serena forced him out of the country, bearing news of a mysterious Thing that he torturously does not name for a ridiculously long time: "I have something you might want to know before you go," he says, and she says she hopes he's not coming after B again. "No, it has to do with you. It's about Santorini, What You Were Looking For there. While I was on the trip you so graciously gave me, I found It again. Only It's not in Santorini anymore, It's in Fiji. At least, He was last week." WHO TALKS LIKE THIS? Only people trying hamfistedly to give some weight to Serena's reply: "You found my father?" The Shiny Toy Guns song starts again, and she jumps into the car, bringing him along with her on this new adventure.

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By Jacob Clifton

Chuck's standing on the sidewalk in a suit, holding a painfully unnatural chest-thrusting pose like a scary mannequin, holding lots of crap, when Blair walks up -- for the fifth scene running, out of nowhere -- wearing green and gold. She doesn't see him at first, but then she does. He explains, delicately and tenderly, that he tried to run from her, but everywhere he went, she was there: In Paris, but only to get her favorite macaroons; and Germany for her favorite stockings -- "You know how I adore them" -- and he figured out she and GG were right. He was a coward, but she kept catching up. So, he says with a sweet smile, he had to come back.

"I want to believe you," she says, "But I can't. You've hurt me too many times." He promises she can believe him, and her eyes coast across the packages. Is that it? "I love you too," he says, and she kisses him, and he says it again, and again. XO XO XO XO.

Every graduation speech ever written starts with a simple fact: "commencement" means something beginning, not ending. You see it as the endpoint of something, because it's the end of the whole world that you know. And every grownup and parent and teacher in the room knows it's the opposite, so they enlighten you with a little vocab. They're not wrong. But they're also not precisely right, because it's been too long for them to remember that it's both. It's the beginning of what they think is the real story, and sometime soon you'll agree. You'll forget that any of this mattered. You'll turn around and condescend to the kids that come after you, and assure them that it's not something ending, it's just the beginning. Real life starts here.

But you'll get the same speech when you graduate college, when you have a kid, when you turn twenty, when you turn thirty. When you turn forty, oh my God they'll tell you that speech a million times when you turn forty. "This is when your life starts. This is when it's real. This is when it starts mattering. Everything before this was stupid and doesn't mean anything. This is the day you become real."

And you can feel relief, every time, because the last chapter was so fucking exhausting and you learned so much and hurt so much and changed so much, it really does feel like the beginning of something. And in that long stretch between twenty and thirty, and thirty and forty, maybe you'll secretly wish for a few more ceremonies, a few more commencement speeches, just to give you that permission to start the new chapter. To become more, to start your life, to treat it like it's real, like these moments matter.

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By Jacob Clifton

You'll get tired, and you'll get discouraged, and you'll stare yourself down in the mirror and promise to be perfect from now on. You'll break up, you'll get divorced, you'll suffer unbearable disappointments. You'll pick up again and keep moving. You'll get fat and you'll get skinny. You'll learn languages, and you'll forget them. You will fall down on the job, and you'll be ashamed of your weaknesses and your unthinking, exhausted cruelties. You'll see the patterns in your life taking shape in your children, and you'll want to warn them to be better, stronger, faster. Quieter. You'll wish for silence more than anything, and for a moment to sit still in the sun. You'll beg for the right to feel your actual age, and not like a horrible mistake has been made where you're suddenly accountable for your own actions. That feeling never goes away. You'll have as many epiphanies as there are seasons, and some of them will take. Most of them won't.

You are the evidence and you are the only territory of any of this. You bear every scar, every moment since your birth is an entry in the book. And that book only ever gets longer. You can't tear out the pages and you can't burn it up. You can't edit and you can't rewrite. You just turn to a new page, and try to do better. And it never ends, and it never gets easier, but if you let it, it can get more and more beautiful. As long as you don't let your exhaustion get to you, as long as you remember that you always have choices, as long as you're willing to read the book and see where it's taking you, as long as you love the book and the sum total of things that have brought you to this place, right now, this very second, you'll stay afloat. As long as you remember there are no secrets, not really, because it's all in the book; as long as you remember there is no shame, not really: it's all in the book already. It's the best book in the world, and it never ends: it only commences. The point of any commencement speech should be just this very simple, very scary truth that so few of us ever own: The only person writing it is you.

The Lily spinoff may be dead, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for a better one someday. Here are our pitches.

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