Nate and Serena decide to "take it slow," but because they have the attention spans of guppies, they are unable to finish saying the word "slow" before they are fucking on every surface in Eleanor Waldorf's house. Since Dorota's on holiday with Vanya, the implications there are pretty dire. Then Dan and Blair get their big stupid faces involved and confuse the brainless toothsome twosome with all kinds of words, but they only have a certain amount of time to feel helpless and confounded before they have to go to the French Ambassador's Ball.
Jenny and her drug-dealing crush cook up some damned elaborate Ocean's 11 scenarios so they can deliver drugs to the French Ambassador's Daughter, and eventually come to the natural conclusion that the simplest possible solution is to create a shrug made of drugs -- a drug-shrug -- and wear it to the party. But then because of Blair's random comparison of Nate's penis to her own bulimia, Serena decides to make Nate jealous by going as Damian's date. As though Nate could even understand that concept.
Turns out S and Damian knew each other at that boarding school she attended for either six months, or a year or more, depending on what the spacetime continuum is up to. I'm sure Damian also ended up there for fucking his best friend's significant other, having a drug-fueled threesome on camera, and then killing a guy, all on the same night.
Flummoxed by feelings about drug-dealing Damian, resourceful Jenny goes back to Plan B, which is apparently just always going to be Nate, who has meanwhile let Dan Humphrey talk him into treating Serena pretty much exactly like you'd think he would. Serena wears the ugly drug-shrug to the party, but then she and Nate see each other and they suddenly remember that they are dating, so they end up fucking on every surface at the French Ambassador's Castle. Jenny gets the drug-shrug to its intended recipient, and informs Damian that she is interested in him, as far more than just the guy that uses her as a drug mule.
Rufus went to Telluride with Lincoln Hawk and when he came back, he went into hiding so that he wouldn't have to talk to his wife about her many, many lies. Like, people literally keep finding him lurking all over New York City and being like, "Go home, Rufus! It's cold outside!" Meanwhile, Lily did not have sex with Dr. van der Woodsen during her Tour of Deception last summer, but they did make out. You know Rufus thinks that's the same thing. So he hops on the elevator of the building his wife owns and heads down a few floors so he can mack on his fellow Real Housewife. Dumb, Rufus. You're going to have to get a job at this rate. This story continues to be totally boring, because Lily being sketchy and Rufus getting self-righteous is like having a storyline where Dan acts judgmental and Vanessa is repulsive.
And finally, Chuck tracks down that mysterious grave-visiting lady Elizabeth, and she talks sort of weird. She tells him she was just one of his dad's hos, but Blair -- after going on a slight wobbler involving La Table Élitaire, strange sex costumes, and an array of scary outfits -- can see into her mind and realizes that she's lying, so she attacks old Elizabeth in her special way. Eventually the lady calls Chuck, but he misses the call, and we learn that in the other half of the locket is a picture of her, holding baby Chuck and looking totally not dead.
So is she his mother? I don't know. They are both freaky enough to be related. I thought that would be really offensive if she turned out not dead, but Chuck and Blair discuss that whole thing at length and it seems okay now. I still hope it's a mean trick.
Find out what we want to see happen on this show this spring and check back soon for the full recap.
Serena pretended to get a job, then pretended to be Jackie O, then pretended to be in love with Nate. Blair became the future Ruth Madoff she's always about to be, while Chuck pretended that they weren't both totally insane right now. Nate pretended to be Nate, as usual. Vanessa pretended Dan wasn't in love with her, and that her homosexual boyfriend was not a homosexual. Jenny pretended that her drug-dealer mentor was attractive, and that she was also a drug dealer. Lily pretended all manner of things while Rufus pretended to be a cheating housewife. And some weird lady pretended to be some other weird lady.
GG's theme tonight is the word "time," so she just keeps saying that word in different languages placed in sentences that don't even make sense. There's a lot of really bad dialogue in this episode generally, but it's so precisely shitty and awkward that it almost seems stylized, like Secret Life or something. I don't get it. In the same way that Blair yelling at Georgina turned her evil enough to murder Poppy for no reason, or the entire fucking Rachel Carr travesty, it's like that. And then in addition to the dumb storylines -- which strain believability anyway, in terms both of character and general human behavior -- everybody's talking all weird the entire time.
Bass and Elizabeth in particular speak this stilted, contraction-free Yoda way, but Damien also gets some really curious turns of phrase in there. And of course you have that Blair problem that sometimes happens where the dialogue is not as smart as the character, so she ends up making weird grammar mistakes or just straight-up using the wrong word for no reason at all, which makes her look trashy instead of brilliant as intended. Not a hugely fun way to start the spring season, but I've missed these bitches enough that it'll slide.
Anyway, Serena is all excited because Nate's coming home from van der Bilt country tomorrow. Which, I guess now that Aaron is a total disgrace and Grandfather hates his bitch wife, maybe Nate can finally just be a member of his family. I wonder where Anne Archibald is these days? They should just get a house in the Hamptons and be done with it. "Mother wanted me to come out in a kimono," he'd say, "So we had quite a fight." But honestly, you'd dress up Nate all the time if you had one.
In pretty much precisely that way, Blair equates her missing of Dorota -- who's spending the holidays with Vanya and becoming more and more pregnant with her industrial East European baby -- with S's missing of Nate, which S finds hilarious. Blair gets suddenly and for no real narrative reason obsessed with the idea of S not hooking up with Nate until some relationship time has passed, which S thinks is stupid and cute, and talks up her big first date with him: The French ambassador's dinner tomorrow. Blair says something random about chastity belts, S rolls her eyes, and Blair says for the sixth time -- while randomly coming across the "E" locket from the cliffhanger before -- that if S wants her thing with Nate to "become real," she's going to have to take it slow. "Slow" is the only way either of them does anything so I'm not sure why this is such an urgent topic. Slow is their default setting. Well, unless you are talking about fucking, which is I guess B's point.
S gets off the phone with Crazypants so she can say hi to Damien Dalgaard, Jenny's drug dealer friend, because apparently they went to the boarding school together. Which was apparently called Boarding School, because nobody ever thought up a name for it. This is the beginning of their actual conversation:
S: "I thought you were gonna become a Belgian prince or something after Boarding School."
DD: "My father took the ambassador post."
I love the idea that possibly they're both just that confused about how things work. "I thought you were going to become an Alsatian after grad school. Like Rin Tin Tin, isn't that what you always said?" "No, I ended up being a spaceman."
They talk about how PTSD Serena was during her five minutes or one year at Boarding School Boarding School, due to having whored it up with three different castmembers and then killed a man, and then about how Damien was the "Mr. Perfect" of Boarding School Boarding School, due to having great grades and much in the way of athletic achievement. It's easy to excel when you're thirty-five years old and still in high school. Anyway, they talk about catching up and an amazing thing occurs. I want you to try and discern the problem here:
DD: "Well, I'm late to meet a friend, so... I'd love to catch up some more."
S: "Yeah, great. Text me your number!"
So when that doesn't work out -- which I guess they already know it won't but maybe don't know exactly why -- they'll see each other at this dinner. Serena leaves, Damien is grotesque as usual, and of course he has the sneak for her. Oh, I hope he thinks she's still Bad Serena and she has to set him straight about How She's Changed. That would be novel.
Speaking of novelty, B's back on her fucking Table Élitaire kick, even though she's already gotten over that idea like three times, but spinning her wheels is what Blair does this season, so whatever. Chuck's lost some weight and looks resplendent in pink. They discuss the locket from the grave, and how Chuck is totally trying to find this mystery lady even though he keeps saying he's not looking for the mystery lady, and it's totally uninteresting and they repeat themselves one hundred times. She wants C to introduce her to some horrible French douche who just happens to have linkage to both Parisian hotels and secret college jerkoff societies. Not even trying anymore, show. Perhaps Monsieur Duris will need some CBGBs memorabilia that some other dumb person also needs, and C and B can fight over it only to discover that Monsieur Duris, and in fact the country of France, are all an elaborate deception by one Georgina Sparks.
So Bart Bass was all about giving his hos mementos of whatever, and one lady got his name tattooed on her ass (Which: Um, no she didn't, have you ever even met Bart Bass? Come on) so Chuck sure doesn't want to find the person he's obviously really trying to find, and it works in that he's trying to convince Blair of the thing he's trying to convince himself of, so she can bounce it back to him and be on his side, except later he explains this word for word, so -- much like the rest of the episode -- it's a null sum.
Jenny snottily submits to Lily's affectionate questions about her Xmas holiday with Awful Alison, and they talk about Jenny's belief that Lily opted out of going to Telluride with Rufus and the rest of Lincoln Hawk. I can literally think of nothing more obnoxious. I'd probably pick Alison Humphrey too, given the choice. Lily covers and lies and acts like their marriage isn't falling apart due entirely to the vast and incomprehensible conspiracy she has mounted against her husband for no reason, and Damien shows up with a box of cookies and acts like a slimy thirty-year-old, which is what he is.
In a tenderly green moment that marks the first time she has ever tried to parent a child, Lily invites Jenny -- who is just hateful toward everybody in this set of scenes, which made it harder to register how totally awesome she ends up being for the rest of the episode -- to keep the door open rather than rawdogging her elderly drug-dealing paramour away from prying eyes. Jenny tells her to stuff it because they would just go to a hotel -- you are in a hotel -- but he still just sees her as a little girl, and the drug-dealing Arthur to his drug-dealing Merlin if you will, so no dice. She tells Lily to fuck off and stop bugging her about Rufus because she has stuff on her agenda, and then goes back into the bedroom, where instead of smiling at Damien she just acts like an asshole some more.
Speaking of assholes, Rufus is home from his ski trip but squatting at DUMBO, ignoring Lily's calls, and scrambling to eat all the waffles in the world, and it's really sad because Dan's only got the toaster out there at DUMBO, because Jenny and Eric took the waffle iron back to the UES with them if you recall, so they're not even Rufus Waffles he's going to be eating, or Kotter mugs he's going to be drinking his coffee out of, because now that you're in the gay bachelor pad that Dan calls home, the only luxury to which you really have access is knowing with full certainty that Vanessa Abrams won't be stopping by.
There is an unbelievably retarded conversation with the jeweler who... We're not clear. Because after getting his palm greased, he says that "Elizabeth Fisher" brought this particular locket to him to get the hinge fixed, about a month ago. And I guess sometime in the subsequent month, Elizabeth Fisher broke that motherfucker again, because the biggest plotpoint in this episode is what's in the other half of the locket. So what did she do with it to break the hinge so immediately? I had this image of her in the pool at the Iroquois Hotel putting it on her belly and smashing it with a rock, like an otter with a clam, but I realize that's unlikely. Although she's so fucking weird who knows.
Anyway, the jeweler is like, "Jeweler-Client privilege!" which is not a thing, but then he's like, "She paid in cash!" but then he produces this fucking dossier of information about her, like her birthdate and social security number and favorite book character growing up, her GPS location at the moment in time, and Chuck takes this info and peaces. And like a lot of his scenes this week, you can tell they're so painfully stupid and badly written that it's inhibiting his acting. Which, some people that would help maybe, but because it's Chuck it's like watching one of those Easter Island tiki-head people slip on a banana peel.
GG babbles about time and S comes home to the Waldorf house, where Nate is sitting on the couch and staring into space, and he talks about how he was annoying Grandfather with the constant sexting and so he flew his pretty ass back a day early, but so can they make out, but actually he has to leave, and S takes insane B's insane advice and offers to "take things slow" and Nate is like, "We already are, implicitly," and she's like, "I cant wait to try not fucking you!" And he's like, "I know! It's going to be... And now we're fucking. Well, saw that one coming."
Nate shows up at the Bleecker and Dan's all rude to him and then explains -- nobody would ever say this -- that he is just disappointed that Nate -- whom he invited to meet for coffee -- is not Vanessa -- who is not speaking to him. Trying to understand this terrible writing in this terrible episode, Nate goes, "You invited Vanessa here? Too?" Like desperately trying to understand the connection. But no, Dan's just nuts and thinking maybe because Vanessa drinks coffee she might go to a coffee shop, and then he goes, "I read like five self-help blogs about how to turn Friends into Lovers," which is a wonderfully Dan-like line that causes an amazing Nate face in response. Then, once again redirecting the episode for no possible reason but the plot, he abruptly goes, "You know, they say that you should take things more slowly with a friend than you do with someone you just met." Oh, is it? Is that what they say, Dan? He tells Nate to read the love blogs before hooking up with Serena, and Nate has like forgotten they just did it, so he agrees.
Meanwhile S walks into lunch with B, looking quite satiated, and B makes a joke about clogs that is not funny, makes very little sense, and is horrifically irrelevant, and we don't need to discuss it further. Over at the Bleecker, Nate's espousing a "whatever happens happens" philosophy, which burns Dan's skin of course, so he immediately starts in on Nate about how Serena is a whore and a vile woman of the night and will break his heart by not acting like a china doll who can somehow be both rich but poor and wild but responsible and a virgin but also a whore, which as he sees it was mostly the reason she's to blame for their failed relationship. Well, that and the fact that it's now incest or whatever.
Nate's like, "I've known this girl my whole life, and we're pretty much the same person anyway, so step off?" But no dice, and meanwhile B is giving S her blessing to try things with Nate, as long as it doesn't involve trying anything with Nate. Which is very Blair Waldorf of her. Serena, noting quietly that we're heading into "My Best Friend The Whore" territory, suggests gently that B has no idea what she's talking about, and it's like she didn't even say a word, really, because Blair is about to launch on a speech that... Seems to have been written by a person who has literally never seen this show.
"You are the one thing Nate has always wanted and could never have. It's like a diet. After years of starvation, you can't just let him gorge on sundaes. He'll panic and decide he hates ice cream!" Or, um... BARF? Did you seriously just give me Blair using diet metaphors? Incorrectly? Are you kidding me with this shit? I know we're pretending she doesn't have an eating disorder and never did, but... Aren't you just begging the question here? And isn't the question, "How come this show sucks sometimes? And how come when it does, it's never only partially?"
So Serena points out that she's "not ice cream," which is basically true, and that she and Nate are too dumb to play games. Blair's gorgeous hair is like, "Everyone needs to play games. Look, you've already failed to come out of the gate with any restraint or control. Now all you can do is introduce some competition, make him work for it." Serena actually laughs, adoringly, because it honestly the dumbest thing Blair has ever said. But Serena and Nate will always be dumber than the dumbest thing Blair says, so S pretends that it's not working its way into her brain like a secret icicle of stupid.
Jenny lolls about on the bed waiting for her silver fox drug dealer to make a move, while looking at this... scrapbook he's apparently put together all about the French ambassador's horselike daughter Violette. Why is it there? So Jenny can stare at the pictures and flash like Chuck on her fashion problems, and the solve DD's problem, which involves getting drugs to the overprotected Violette during an affair of state. So there's a hideous shrug with bedazzle all over it, and she's like, "I will make this hideous shrug, but we can put pills in the paillettes, and then some more pointlessly complex things can happen in order to make sure Violette leaves with the drug shrug. He's like, "You're a genius!" And she's all giggly and cute and crushing on him and he doesn't even know.
Dan comes home to DUMBO, where Lily is just wandering mindlessly, and Dan figures out that A) Lily has no idea where Rufus is and B) given the skis in the corner, Rufus wants it that way. Lily's thrown by this reveal and immediately takes off with her brittle smile she has sometimes, and Dan feels very terrible and very much like getting all up in somebody else's shit instead of contemplating the fucking abyss of monsters that being in love with Vanessa clearly implies about your soul.
Blair has dressed up in furry boots, a huge fur hat, black leather gloves that lace up to the elbows, and an adorable gunmetal chemise. This is what she does when nobody's supervising her, I guess -- or she's going over the top because she knows Chuck is hiding something from her, and has decided to take her own advice and game the whole situation. She calls him "Vronsky" and herself "Anna Karenina," but unlike the literary references we think of as "literary references," it has little to do with this entire situation and has already been referenced a few times in other situations. Whatever, she's game-playing but he doesn't have time for her shit and she still wants to do this "formal introduction" to the French guy, which is as least gesturally in character, and he's like, "I don't have time for this! I have to not be looking for the mystery lady!" Well, there's one good line: "I just assumed you'd rather not cross paths with Carla Bruni," he says, and she's like, "Word."
So she has now confirmed that he's lying, and leaves in her weird costume just as Nate comes home to the penthouse, where he giggles about how crazy she is and she acts crazy and brittle, and meanwhile Chuck is talking in this weird ascot argot to the doorman, a conversation that would never ever happen but particularly in this fucked up way: "I've been waiting here for four hours. Has Elizabeth Fisher still not returned? Why did she not get my message that I was waiting for her in the bar?" Why are you talking in this manner to a random doorman outside a strange hotel? The doorman is like, "She checked out and went somewhere else." Which we find out later is the Algonquin, which is down the street.
Rufus is standing on some street corner somewhere staring at nothing and that embittered housewife with the funny name I can't remember right now is like, "Are you going to forgive your wife for the random thing?" And he's like, "No, I'm going to wander the streets like a ghost forevermore, setting a horrible example for my awful kids as usual," and she invites him for coffee. I wish they would do it already but he's such a fucking wuss she'll have to drug him Georgie style to get any play. Pretty lady, I wish I could warn you about this one. A Humphrey's not a catch, he's a virus.
Nate's shooting pool in the boy house because that's all he does, and Serena comes up in there and actually gets up on the pool table so he can fuck her without taking off his shoes, but I guess he's been reading those blogs Dan recommended or something, because no way is this episode that stupid that one word from Dan would even stick in his dumb head, much less keep him from having sex on a pool table. Serena points out that hours ago, they were fucking on the Waldorf floor, and now he's taking it "slow" and uninviting her to the dinner for no reason whatsoever, and he's like, "I'm just trying to stick to our dumb plan!" And because she can't even remember why or what the plan was about, this registers as him being an asshole, so she takes off and he stands there with his hard-on feeling sad for about five seconds until he sees his old friend the pool table and smiles and goes back to playing.
Meanwhile Serena -- who has apparently "texted" or been "texted" Damien's phone number some-fucking-how -- calls Damien, and GG has a brain hemorrhage about something -- "Heure, hora, laat... No matter what language you say it in, looks like S just started the clock on a ticking time bomb!" -- and Serena offers to "text" Damien the address of the Waldorf house so he can pick her up for the ambassador dinner. No matter what language you say it in, this episode is bullshit.
Waffles in the toaster and coffee at DUMBO, and Dan being absolutely amazing. I love it when people act so fucking shitty that he gets to call them out and being the caring, responsible, wonderful man he so seldom gets to be. So Rufus is like, "Why aren't you at school?" And Dan goes, "I thought you lived in the Upper East Side. With your wife?" Rufus whines and moans and acts totally dumb and won't tell Dan anything even though it's clear that something really bad and really huge is going on -- "I'm not going to justify myself to you about how I'm wandering around like a scared four-year-old who doesn't want to talk to mommy about the stain on the carpet, so don't ask me to" -- and finally Dan's like, "Fuck it, later." Like he just leaves altogether, because Rufus sucks so much. And then at the door he reminds Rufus of the one thing he gets right, ever, about honesty and how it's important or whatever. "I really hope you're not gonna let your marriage die because you're scared to take your own advice." SERVED! I love you, Dan Humphrey. Live it up.
Jenny's got her drug-shrug all made and they're very proud of her, but then Damien drops the news that he's taking S to the dinner instead of Jenny, and Jenny's like, "A, she's with Nate now, not that I'm okay with that; B, she's not a drug mule like me, because she has finally found a little self-esteem; C, do not ever fucking scorn a Humphrey, because their fucking-things-up powers are stronger than any mortal's, even just on accident." To illustrate the point, she says she'll warn S about the drugs in the shrug, but Damien shrugs and mugs and tells Little J she's implicated anyway, so blackmail's off the table, which sort of flips her back into remembering not to play this like a little jealous girl, so she backs off for the nonce, pissed as hell, gears already turning.
Damien Dalgaard, you best check yourself before you irrevocably wreck yourself. You are looking into the fiery depths of the worst kind of Jenny there is, right there, because her ass does not give a shit. Set you on fire, light up your panties with an invisible dress, get your boyfriend ambushed whilst wearing priceless movie memorabilia, launch a guerilla fashion show, stage a proletarian uprising at Pinkberry -- whatever it is, as long as it involves Nate's dick somehow, she's already got it mapped out on graph paper and she will not hesitate.
Blair is now dressed in black sequins, I'm going to stick with Blade Runner as the reference, and looks like a million except for her ugly earrings. Chuck says he can't meet her "for dîner ce soir," for some reason, and she rants at him about whatever the hell, and she looks a little bit like Elizabeth in this scene, somehow, and whatever, she's jealous but mostly obsessing on Table Élitaire, moreso than the constant pointless lies of Chuck, and finally interrupts the list of his crazy evidence, a little harshly, "...Clearly has no interest in being found by you. You've been looking for weeks, and nothing. One dinner with me won't make a difference." He hisses back about fuck the Table Élitaire and that his real life has actual real problems in it, and she... You know how good she is. Her face goes from WTF to what just happened to this fight can't risk escalating to just turning and leaving. And by the time Chuck turns round to apologize, she's at the elevator. No amount of crummy writing can really hurt their chemistry, the acting is always going to keep it aloft, but it is maddening sometimes.
Diplomats, wearing their little outfits and wives. Serena gets out of a towncar with her usual boob dress, under the stupid drug shrug, looking mismatched and dumb, and Damien escorts her inside, and Nate stares like he's losing control of his bladder, and Little J appears out of nowhere, like maybe that's one of the tricks B bequeathed her as Queen, and goes, "His name's Damien." Nate stares at her for a sec, this is brill, and then exclaims, "Oh! Hey, Jenny!" Like it took him a second to place her. He's so amazing.
Jenny looks absolutely fantastic, makeup-wise, like three different blue eyeshadows and Barbie-pink lips, and her hair in a great little middle-part/bun nobody else on this show ever does, and they all head inside so Serena and Nate can literally gasp, "I can't believe you're here with her/him!" S tries to be bitchy about it, but it's so out of character and dumb that it barely registers; the two couples quietly and calmly file inside with the most non-drama of all non-drama, and Gossip Girl is screaming, like, "CAN YOU EVEN BELIEVE THIS SHIT?"
And you're like, "No, actually. Because this whole episode is a lot of urgent spirit-fingers hand-waving around the very simple, very stupid plot, which is that Blair and Dan unrealistically pushed Serena and Nate to take random other people to this dinner that none of them should even be at anyway, and there's a jacket made of drugs in play, and their weird objections and warnings shouldn't have even worked in the first place, so yeah. The only realistic thing in this mess is that Jenny Humphrey can literally turn anything whatsoever into an attempt to fuck Nate Archibald. Which we already knew. So stop trying to make me think something is happening here, because it's not. There are times when GG getting coked up has added a certain frisson to things, but if you're going to tell us how exciting it is, don't forget the part where you at least make it interesting."
Blair is wonderful and overjoyed to see Serena there without Nate, which charms Serena no end, and if you posit this dumb story it really is charming, and Damien goes off somewhere to be gross, and Serena tells Blair that her dumb idea is dumb, but working because guess what, Nate is also totally dumb. He makes pretty, sad faces from across the room, to demonstrate, and Blair reminds S about how Little J is, so obviously her coming with Nate was entirely her idea, and then goes back to babbling about her stupid secret society thing, and Serena commits to saying, "Blair, you know you don't need Chuck. Anyone who meets you can see you're an elitist snob who's perfect to run a secret society. Bonne chance." Which is a perfectly acceptable line of dialogue, if you like hearing the same jokes over and over. She kisses B and runs off, and Blair heads out to look for Monsieur Duris while jenny ambushes Damien as he's getting reamed by French Daughter Violette. This is the first time you can see her fucked up dress, which is topped with black netting and a spiderweb design. They gleam and dimple and smarm at each other, but eventually Damien promises Jenny that the jacket is coming off Serena, sober or drunk.
Nate whines at S about how she doesn't even need to make him jealous, because -- when she's in the room, at least -- she's all he can think about. They make mouth-noises at each other for about a million years and how they are so into each other, but then Damien comes running back to get that jacket off S, dicks with Nate on the way out just for fun, and then... Leads Serena into an unnecessarily dark and abandoned hallway of the French Embassy or whatever, where he summarily attempts to dry-hump the drug-shrug right off her manly shoulders. But this is New Serena! She has Changed! Clomp clomp! Clomp!
Blair annoys Duris outside -- He's French, so he's smoking! LOL! -- and he's not having her, and Chuck shows up to apologize for once again abandoning her, and she calls the mysterious lady a whore and he explains that this particular whore might be his mother. Staring!
Jenny, having become completely awesome at some point in this episode, immediately tracks down Nate so she can tell him to get Serena back. Which is nice because of their relationship, nice because even a Humphrey knows how easy Nate and Serena actually are to reconcile, but mostly because she just saw Serena clomp-clomp away from Damien and wants to lock him down before S forgets and goes back to being his date. She points out that you shouldn't take dating advice from her brother, which goes without saying, and Nate whines about how maybe his relationship with Serena -- which the whole point of this episode is that it hasn't even started yet, just fucking -- is no longer fun, and besides he has blown his chance. Jenny finally sighs and explains in small words that there's no such thing as a blown chance between them, because they're both so fucking dumb you just wait five minutes.
Blair and Chuck have an interminable conversation about how the lady is or is not his mother, and Blair says the following words: "Look, it makes sense that when you finally let your father go, your mother would reappear" -- WHAT? It does? How so? What does that mean? -- and Chuck justifies this entire stupid episode by saying that he knows how crazy it sounds, which is why he kept playing this awful shell game with her and her outfits and her need to meet Monsieur Duris. Which she accepts, for some reason, before they both get reckless in their offloading wild amounts of questionable emotional exposition having to do with this lady and how if she's the mom then he doesn't have to feel guilty about her death, but if she's not it will probably kill him or whatever, and he just goes on and on with that face of his, and finally she realizes that her storyline in this episode is offensively dumb, and hops in the car with him because she'd rather be with him than stuck in a storyline she already wrapped up half a season ago.
Nate grabs Serena as she's walking past the coat check, and it's totally adorable the way she gasps and giggles into the edit, and then after commercial they're both agreed that they don't want to wait or that they don't want to take it slow or fast or whatever, you know how they are, it makes sense but not really semantically speaking, and Nate's like, "I've waited for this for like so long" and Serena lies that she has too, and then she just drops the drug-shrug and her shiny shoes and various elements of clothing and then they hook it up. No sex is better than tuxedo sex. None.
Rufus comes home to PRADA MARFA looking fairly stylish, and guess what Lily's doing? Sitting on that one couch drinking that one glass of wine, of course. That's what she does. So she asks him WTF he's been up to, and he says... Whatever Humphrey stuff, you know, whatever turns his atrocious behavior around on her so he can be like, "I was wandering the city because I didn't want to talk you because I needed to talk to you but I wouldn't talk to you because I was wandering the city because you are a whore!" So he invites her to explain to him the story of the envelope of the jacket of the wife of the Senator that said she spent the night with old mister vdDubs himself while on her Cancer & Deception European Tour last summer, back when apparently almost their entire family was abroad and ignoring their daughter running around naked right in front of them. Lily's like, "Well, fuck."
Damien feels nervous nearby while a coat check girl steps on one of the drug-filled pailletes and Serena and Nate continue to fuck intensely while the music goes, "Go slow, go slow, go slow." We... Get it. Jenny pulls up to Damien to rub this whole stupid disaster of a plan in his face, and he gets really hilariously dramatic about it, rending garments and throwing around different accents just for the hell of it, and talks about how his career might be over, but then Jenny spots the drug-shrug on the floor and puts on her Queen voice to yell at the coat check girl to make sure Violette gets it, and Damien is impressed, because Jenny is rad.
Blair and Chuck are staring weirdly at each other when Elizabeth comes back to the lobby of the Algonquin, and then Chuck and Elizabeth have a total weird-off about who can make the weirdest face and say things in the most stilted weird way. It sounds like a romance novel written by a bright eighth grader who thinks they understand how royalty must speak to each other. It reads like Twilight, basically, is what I'm saying. Like, at one point she says conversationally, "Your father and I simply shared a few memorable months, many years ago," and later he goes, "Most people say I more closely resemble my mother," and throws the locket in her face like it's Mysterious Cities Of Gold time, and she tells him to get lost and very sadly explains that she can't help him with this deal he's clearly upset about. But you know Blair's standing in the background of this scene buying not one tiny shred of her story, because that's the amazing thing about Blair: Her psychic powers.
So Chuck feels dumb and Elizabeth tearfully runs away, and Blair knows better than to jerk him off-track again by switching perspectives on this situation, so she excuses herself and immediately jumps up Elizabeth's ass, using the wrong words in the unfortunate ways of every other scene in this episode, and guilting Elizabeth hardcore about how Chuck thinks he killed his mother, so whatever Elizabeth is hiding, she's a bad guy for doing it. GG is like, "Could there be a secret even B can't crack? Only time will tell..." Because the word "time." That's literally all that was there for.
Lily comes no closer to explaining even a little bit about what went on between the seasons, and it's getting so ridiculous that it's actually difficult to keep straight what we do know because they've scribbled over this hashed-up palimpsest of a thing so much that anything could, at this point, be true: Lily had to go give birth to yet another love child and this whole Dorota thing is an elaborate ruse. Lily caught cancer from her mom. Lily got drunk and accidentally married Dr. vdDubs in Santorini. Lily went into the booby hatch because she is suicidal and/or gay and/or a drunk. Lily broke her time machine. Lily had a videotaped threesome with a guy she then murdered, so she had to go to boarding school where she met a spaceman/prince/diplomat/drug dealer, which explains why her clothes are made of pills today...
Well, hmm. Because if you think about it, whatever happened the end result was that Lily was gone for a long time before this season started, and this season has increasingly become about what she was doing over there, so the Serena parallels are worth investigating: "Where has she been?" remains the first thing you hear in every episode. Anyway, Rufus turns this scene stupid with a quickness once Lily admits to kissing her ex-husband and then building a truly outstanding scaffolding of lies around that occurrence, which clearly we're missing something, but Rufus is too dumb to notice that, so he runs off to... Walk around the city and think. Which is all he's been doing this entire episode, because he was afraid of what she would say. So then she said it, and it was about one-tenth as bad as he thought, so he's going to... Go back to doing what he was already doing. Which, to be fair, Lily and her couch will also be doing.
Dan lurks around DUMBO in the dark feeling all kinds of feelings and asking Vanessa to call him because he's worried about his parents. Not, you understand, the fact that she's not returning his calls, but because he needs a "friend" to talk to about his disintegrating family. And I'm not saying that's not true, because it tracks with them both, but bad timing to decide this isn't something you can discuss with S or N, who would actually be able to help you bridge the DUMBO-PRADA gap that's actually at issue here, because Dan has never understood Lily any more than his dad does and he's not going to start now. And if Jenny hadn't spent all day being a bitch to Lily, and all night carting drugs around, she'd probably have already enlisted Little J's help and they would have sewn this up by dinner time, because nobody works Rufus quite as efficiently as Little J.
Rufus decides in the elevator to go down to the floor of that embittered housewife with the funny name that I like so much. She just smirks at him when he knocks on the door, because I guess it's at that moment that she realizes he's just as dumb as he appears to be, and honestly didn't know -- like you did, like I did, like she did -- exactly where this was headed. But on the other hand, it's Rufus: He's not actually going to do anything. So it's a wash. I'm just glad he grew a spine, even though it was only for the single millisecond it took him to press a button in the elevator, so nobody could even see him do it, even though it's the wrong call on every level and only does more to take away from his treasured victim status in this situation.
S and N are finally done fucking in the coat check, so they awkwardly dialogue about how he can't find her jacket, so she has to steal another jacket even though she's wearing a dress and is fully dressed, but she's been acting all night like she needed a jacket so maybe she's just feeling modest tonight. Psych! So they run all frisky out into the crowd with their clothes like not even buttoned up, all scandalous and adorable and après-sex classy, and Violette leaves in the drug-shrug, and Damien offers to take Jenny home, which finally gives her the option of telling him to ask her underage ass out on a date already. And you know, I think he just might.
While the show, for the eightieth time, screams at us about how Nate and Serena are the new Brangelina and we've all been waiting for this moment since we were little baby children and that feeling you're feeling is the feeling of something perfect and inevitable finally clicking into place, et cetera, Blair and Chuck have a little more of their meeting about feelings, the upshot of which is when she tells him that whether or not that lady is his mother, Blair will always be his family. She kisses his cheek and touches his beautiful face and leaves him to stare at the locket like it's his precious based on the novel by Smeagol and the music, no shit, is going, "My soul is a dark place/ My soul is a lonely one/ But I'm not alone." Like, for real. If you're wondering when exactly it was that Caprica officially ousted GG as the best show on TV? This kind of shit is why. We can do better.
But anyway, so then Chuck barely misses a blocked-number call from Elizabeth at the Algonquin! Who is holding the other half of the locket! In which is contained -- predictably enough -- a picture of Aileen Quinn, safe in the arms of a poor but good-hearted couple played by Bernadette Peters and Tim Curry, with that curly ginger hair just starting to come in. XOXO.