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What a breath of fresh air that was, after weeks of nonsense, uncharacteristically stupid decisions and serious grammar issues! We found the entire episode, even Dorota, to be fantastically watchable, squeal-able, and in a few cases "Oh, GIRL!"-able, which hasn't happened in a while. And the best part is, the quality wasn't dependent on shocks, schemes or shipper smooching: It just made a great deal of both logical and character sense, and contained engaging and sparkling dialogue, and just the right number of Shakespeare references.
So the A story is definitely What Happened In South Beach, Santorini, France and all the other Lily Places. Serena found Lily chillin' at the Florida pad where Dr. William (nice to know Keith's brother's name, finally, so we can stop calling him Carmen Sandiego) was making his home. She and Lily fly back to the UES together, laughing about the whole grunge-era love quadrangle that meant 20 years of angst for Rufus and Lily, and several ill-fated marriages for all of them, not to mention damage to the timeline that only Grant Morrison will ever be able to fix. The upside: Lily's not banging Will. The downside: She's got an "illness" (they call it various words that don't mean anything until an abrupt blow-by reveals that it's the C word) that only Will can fix. Serena plays hopscotch all over the idea that her Daddy is back and she can finally stop whoring around, but in the end we learn -- of course -- that Will has a secret agenda we don't know about yet.
Serena's other main prob is Nate, to be specific his tumor they're calling "Little J," and all the problems crazy Jenny can toss between Serena and Nate. She's a valiant little psycho, complete with Desdemona's scarf -- and at Chuck's behest, since he's realized the only thing Nate loves more than him is S -- but eventually S catches J in the act, barks at her in a badass way we've only ever dreamt about, and tells Nate to stop being stupid and just be her boyfriend for five seconds. Nate, he's easy. But pissing off Little J? Get ready for her to pull the same shit week.
Blair decides to throw a sort of reverse-cotillion in order for all the eligible boys of the UES to come a-callin' so she can pick one to replace Chuck. Dorota whines about the essentially unhealthy way she's going about this, but in the end it doesn't matter, because no boys will show up for her frightening Rose Ceremony. She spends most of the episode bawking like a loon about how obviously this is because Chuck has put out a "dating fatwa" -- which is awesome mostly because she says this like a million times, and then Chuck says it even more amazingly -- which sounds crazy until the end of the episode, when you find out he totally did. Also, Chuck is whoring it up on an unprecedented level, which makes him act hilarious.
Having run out of boys in the UES, Blair forces Dan to take her to a bullshitty hipster party in Bushwick, while wearing Vanessa's tights. Things are dire. She meets a cute boy named Cameron, but mostly realizes that she must grieve her Chuck life upfront, without rebounding, and lets Chuck -- and herself -- know this in a conversation and ritual respectively, both of which had us in tears. Imagine caring about this show again.
Meanwhile, that fucking Willa girl is all over the whole Dan v. Vanessa showdown for the one writing spot at the Tisch school, which Vanessa gets and which Dan pouts about. (This is one of those episodes where both of them are alarmingly cool.) The narrative here was kind of confusing, because nobody listens when Willa speaks because she's horrible, but basically, shit blows up and Dan and Vanessa hate each other because they are both fake-artists desperately trying to get validation for their nothing shitty art. So in the end, either Dan and Vanessa get back together, or they don't, or they do but with seething horrific resentments still in play, and any of these is fine, because who cares. As long as they're miserable.
What else? Eric week, which hopefully means more Hot Elliott. Nate and Serena are back together, for now, but schisms in the van der Humphrey household -- and Rufus's expected pouty-face meltdown about accepting Dr. Will into the family -- will push Serena to do all kinds of insane shit, which is exciting. Probably nobody will say the word "fatwa," but we sort of got our fill this week, and besides: Wild Man Chuck is as fun as it gets. I, for one, would like to see how far this goes.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Good morning! And who's the blowsy blonde prowling Nate's Empire suite kitchen, looking for strawberries in his big Hugo Boss shirt from last night? While it could be literally anyone on this show, since apparently everybody lives at Chuck's house now, you know from the tired hoary joke about waffles that it's Little J. I do believe that in nineteen episodes, nineteen times we've heard that joke. Nate's hair looks wonderfully morning-esque, even as he's stupidly asking her anorexic ass why she doesn't weigh 500 pounds, given how often we're subjected to the waffle joke about her family. Not okay to ever talk about: A teenage girl's weight.
Jenny changes the subject -- after Nate points out apropos of nothing that the shirt she's flouncing around in is Serena's favorite morning attire also -- to how Serena totally ditched him at that dumb wedding and has been gone with Carter ever since. As much as I enjoy the idea that Nate Archibald is too stupid to live, sometimes it's just embarrassing. "Hey, stop kissing me and sabotaging my relationship! Oh, you say you're not doing that, even though you obviously are? Put on this shirt and no pants and run around impersonating my girlfriend. And if you have a minute to give me really bad advice, I'd appreciate it. Just don't gain any weight."
"Time flies when you're having a Wii Tennis death match, Humphrey," Nate says -- which when you think about it is at least three different untrue things at once -- and Jenny tells him that, regarding how nothing sketchy is going on and all that, could he help her lie to Rufus that she slept at Sawyer's house. (Sawyer is one of the Mean Girls but I'll be damned if I care which one at this point.) "If anyone asks, you're an insecure brunette who has an unnatural love for designer handbags." So: Nate. If anyone asks, you're Nate. The kind of plan only Nate could screw up.
"Are we still on for the Tim Burton exhibit at MOMA?" Jenny asks, and instead of pointing a finger at her little nose and taunting, "You are the Tim Burton exhibit at MOMA," which is what's called for here, he gets all kinds of excited and runs around the kitchen a few times. But then just when Jenny's got it in the bag, Serena finally manages -- after several days -- to send a text message. "Just landed. So sorry. Call you when I'm home." Nate, on hearing that his girlfriend has finally returned from her mysterious errand, thinks it might be a good idea to go see her and figure things out.
Jenny's like, "Don't push!" because Jenny doesn't understand how things work with these people. There is no "push," ever, because the only resistance in this triangle is the resistance of the other two people to letting Jenny fuck Nate. Nate and Serena can squawk all they want about the power dynamic, but there really is none: Just shiny hair and this one shirt. He stares at her with his sexy hair waving in the breeze and Jenny finally gets the hint, or so one might think. Really, she ankle-dips and has the balls to be offended. "My girlfriend just got back into town, can I postpone our date?" is just not one of the things you get to be pissed about.
The Valkyrie contingent of Rhodes Women has touched down and is in the car on the way back to the men they have ignored, lied to and repeatedly ditched for as it turns out no real reason whatsoever. It's nice to see Lily and Serena back on the same side, because they're a good team, but the fact that this whole season-long issue between them is actually just something Serena created out of thin air and fed with Lily's pointless lying? That will take longer to heal. They have a good laugh about how much Rufus and Dr. William van der Woodsen hate each other, and you can hear the time machine starting up. "Nothing like a grunge-era love triangle," says Serena, and they laugh, I hate to say it, but they laugh like serious bitches. It is an incandescent moment.
Lily -- who has always had a charming sense of whimsy about her own ridiculous life -- nearly snorts: "Yes, well, complete with an unplanned pregnancy, a trip to a French sanatorium, my mother and a whole lot of flannel!" (Can't you just see CeCe tossing off something like that, gin sloshing onto her furs?) The two snuggle and hug and get ready for the steely-eyed guilt trip they're both in for now that they've come home from their whatever it was.
Blair screams and yells at Dorota for awhile, and we eventually learn that she's thrown herself a sad little episode of The Bachelorette, complete with caterers and an eight-month pregnant chaperone. Dorota thinks the plan -- to have a brunch with the effete elite young men of the UES, who surely have nothing better to do than go to a sausage party with the meanest girl in the entire universe and a bunch of other bi-curious tea party-lovers -- is awful, and offers to take Blair to the park instead, to feed the ducks. Blair is totally sure that this weird social event will prove to Chuck that he is not the boss of her, which means of course that he is still the boss of her. Zinger one: "Dorota, you really need to stop buying your prenatal vitamins over the internet." Zinger two: "For this I postpone honeymoon?" Then she hands Dorota a box of Chuck Bassiana she, Rory Gilmore-style, wants never to see again.
Rufus, having received no doubt the same exact text message as Nate did, comes running into PRADA, screaming Lily's name. He's met by Will, aka Keith's brother and the first Mr. Lily and the father of Serena and Eric, not to mention the Second-Ranked Baldwin Brother Billy (late of Dirty Sexy Money, where he played Trip Vanderbilt only instead of Serena, it was a transsexual, and instead of that ginger-haired ceiling-eyed harridan Maureen, it was a suicidal nutcase with a golf club and poor balance. Gosh, I kinda miss that show).
Will says Rufus's name the way you want everybody to: Italicized, like you're saying Miley Cyrus or Jill Zarin. They make with the sexy eye and identical gravel-voices at each other, and Rufus doesn't really have much to say besides "Go away" like ten different ways, because of course he doesn't know the whole story. Well, technically we don't either, right, but all Rufus knows is that Lily kissed Will in Santorini, which made Rufus take the inordinately vicious step of one time getting off the elevator on the wrong floor and leaving his scarf lying around. Will's confused that Rufus doesn't know What Really Happened In Santorini and Rufus demands to know it and Will says, just like CeCe always does, that Rufus should for once in his life talk to his wife instead of running around, crabbily babbling, as though he's just eaten an entire bag of Pop Rocks on his way back from summer camp.
"There's an outlet by the bed, and I will be in in a minute." Sounds sexy, Chuck! But really the two ladies he's talking to need to dry their hair or their bras or something. It's all very Hayes Code with Chuck. Jenny looks at him and seems content with her lot: "You look like hell." She loves it. He says this is "a small price to pay to feel like heaven," and asks where Nate is. Since of the three of them, Jenny does not live here. He hopes they finally screwed, and Jenny gets grossed out and tries to fake her way through it, and then -- clearly, luxuriously wiping off coke snot with his silk pocket square -- Chuck, I think, tells us a little too much information about how things work in his head.
"Was it as you always imagined? Late night? You two engaged in a sweaty Wii duel... Your bodies touch... He looks at you like he's never looked at you before..."
You say "creepy sexual harassment of the girl he raped zero times," I say: He is not talking about Jenny at all.
Chuck continues to encourage her to bag Nate, without regard to Serena's return, and then realizing she probably thinks they can't have this conversation, tosses out the old "I probably won't remember this conversation anyway." Given token permission to explore the topic now, Jenny digs in and before long, they've arrived at a plan to Desdemona that shit using this Hugo Boss shirt. If Chuck can't have Blair, obviously he wants Nate instead. But between Nate's anger at the prostituting, and Serena's intoxicating existence, a bunch of things need to change at once, which means shit-stirring. And now that Jenny's back from Brooklyn, you've got grade-A shit-stirring talent right here. Chaos incarnate! Wind her up and let her go!
Rufus hisses and weaves and lisps at the unflappable Dr. Sandiego until their wife comes home. Lily's moderately pleased to see Rufus, and disturbed by the presence of Wills, but mostly this scene suddenly becomes about Serena, who hasn't seen her father in fourteen years and spent the better part of the summer looking for him under every rock and bridge on the Continent when she wasn't letting yacht-owning Eurotrash drink Belvedere off her tits in Ibiza. Her mouth goes bwuh?; her issues sigh, and finally arise from their disco nap, because it is time to DANCE!
After some Timmy-in-the-well style whining-barks from Rufus, Lily spills the story, which is that every word she's said this entire season has been a lie. "It wasn't my mother who was sick. It was me. And that's why William and I were together last summer. He wasn't treating CeCe. He was treating me." Which, we've pieced that together, fine. But when it gets wicked ridiculous is when the scene starts answering questions we didn't need to discuss, because of how silly it all gets so instantly: "I wanted to see you [Serena], but as her doctor, I couldn't tell you why I was there [in Santorini], and I... I didn't want to lie."
See, because Dr. Sandiego is so dedicated to his medical ethics that he didn't even want to look his daughter in the eye -- as she was going visibly, globally slut-crazy -- on the off chance that she might say, "Hey, I know for a fact you are here on this continent so I just thought we could hang. These hors d'oeuvres are great. So listen, any chance my mother has a mysterious illness that only you know about, or can treat, so she's pretending to be at my grandmother's place in the Hamptons?" And he would have to be like, "Mmm, noooooo. No, that's not what's going on." And that would be a lie. He would have lied.
"The one bright spot is that Lily's illness is very treatable," Will explains. "We're just waiting on the last round of test results." If you wondering why this "illness" is so sketch and mysterious even though it's 2010 and we have names for like most diseases, it's because there is something sketchy about this illness and we don't know what it is yet. I mean, I don't want to blow your mind, but the guest star around whom this short end-of-season story arc revolves, he's sort of sketchy. Unlike the usual people who show up on this show for a few episodes and end up changing everybody's lives for the better with their soothing, gentle natures and warm words of encouragement.
Oh right because the other ridiculous thing, I forgot to say, but the other ridiculous explanation for this season-long arc being so lame is that per Will, Lily was not allowed to talk about her "illness" or even say "the C word" because just saying it apparently makes you die. So the more people know about it, the more likely one of them is to say the "C word" and Lily will just fucking drop dead wherever she is. Apparently Dr. Sandiego graduated from the The Secret School of Medicine, where you can have anything you want thanks to the age-old power of wishing for things.
I mean, I think it's a writing issue -- and like I said, this episode is way better than they have been -- because in somebody else's hands this could come down to the very basics of Lily, which is that she is an überWASP trapped in the body of an überWASP and she has never met a problem that she didn't immediately figure out how to muzzle and ignore and squash down, down, down. I mean, that's Lily. It's what nearly killed Eric. Lily exactly and precisely wants to hear that the best treatment for her terrifying illness is pretending it doesn't exist, because that is her other terrifying illness.
But firstly, Lily's become basically unlikeable this season, and secondly, you would really think this writing staff -- of any staff ever, maybe -- would have a wiser/lighter touch when it comes to serious illnesses like "the C word," and could maybe get there without making Lily and Will both seem like gullible assholes. So instead of getting a story that could revolve around Lily's nascent ability to deal frankly and honestly with her family's problems, while still always ignoring her own, you get... An explanation for the major mystery of the entire season that basically resolves down to Cancer is Magic. Cancer can hear you when you talk about it. Which, I'm all for the power of positive thinking, but really against magical thinking, which is its precise opposite.
There is nothing positive about ascribing supernatural characteristics to arbitrary phenomena, because where that leads is blaming the victim, which is yourself. Just on the syllogistic level that's not a course of thought that anyone could endorse: "If only I had remained more positive, if only I had kept it a secret from more people, if only we hadn't told Eric, if only I hadn't kissed Dr. Sandiego." If only, essentially, I had not earned this suffering in some way or another. Gross me out. Illness is neither a third mortgage on your existence nor an excuse to go nonrational. Cancer can't hear you when you talk, cancer doesn't care how much Chicken Soup For The Soul you read. Taking care of yourself -- physically, mentally, spiritually -- is something you should be doing anyway, as a major consequence of -- and your first and greatest responsibility for -- being alive.
Anyway, Will wants to get together with Serena and Eric, since he's never met them, and Eric can't come because he's at Andover, with the debate team -- What were we just saying about not answering questions nobody asked? And why not just say "Vermont" no matter what? "Where is Eric?" Vermont, with Vanessa Abrams and Poppy Lifton and Georgina Sparks and Aaron Rose and that Ponzi Scheme guy that wasn't Lord Marcus -- so once he's gone with Serena's assent, Rufus sweetly and quietly asks if she's okay, and she's grateful and acknowledges it. "After all he's done for my mom, I at least owe him a conversation," she says, which is Serena-speak for "I am all about being strong now, but get back to me in twenty minutes when I totally melt like an ice-cream sundae. This is not going to be one of those times where I stick to my convictions."
...Oh. I just figured it out, I think. This show has always been an exploration of the way media and technology mediates these people's experiences of intimacy and personal knowledge. Never the thing, but the way surveillance of and gossip about and reportage on the thing provides a way for the characters to create meaning and story for themselves, absent any other moral or mythic structure. The tug-of-war with seeing and being seen, the reflections of each other they use to understand themselves. Nate's fairytales, Jenny's machinations, Serena's identity crises: There's no outer metafictional way for us to experience them in the way this show has always trained us to do. Even Blair has gone so internal with her personal narrative that you have to piece it together from the crude and repetitive way she informs us what's going on with her: "I am the good wife, I am the Empress, I don't know where I am going or who I am."
Because what's going on this season, I think -- or at least the second half -- is that the central metaphor has dropped out of things entirely. They're not telling each other or themselves the story of themselves, they're just floundering in those stories with no direction and no way to find a direction. They sit around feeling their feelings and negotiating the landscapes of their relatively empty souls, without a tinge of that burlesque or propaganda or the other many terms we've used to describe this negotiation through the years. But if you take the "gossip" out of Gossip Girl, if you lose the heightened reality and continual self-examination that being in the public eye represents, you've become just a low-rated drama on the fourth-running network: You're just One Tree Hill with less trashy people. Does that sound valid? I think I'm onto something.
And now we got Dan, who's telling us the same story he's always telling us, but has somehow become, along with Vanessa and maybe Lily, one of the only characters still trying to bring his narrative -- gifted romantic artist -- to bear on the outside world. Because you will not be surprised to hear that A) He has been denied entry to the dramatic writing program at the Tisch School of the Arts, because B) There's only one spot for NYU transfer students, and that C) Vanessa got that spot. I mean, that last thing he's plenty confused and upset to hear about, because it's sort of obnoxious that she did this without telling him.
"I honestly didn't think I had a shot. It was only after I wrote that short that I started thinking how great would it be if we both got in," she sorta explains, and to his credit Dan pulls a full-on Rhodes Woman and immediately congratulates her, trying not to be prickly or Rufussy when he does so. He even makes a cute joke: "If it wasn't gonna be me, um, I'm glad it was you... And they also 'Wish me success in my future endeavors,' so it's not a total loss." I think that might be the cutest thing he's ever done. So immediately he invites her to an "art party" of which he is aware, and which promises to be "Tisch student central." Can you even imagine? He bounces with a pithy-yet-breezy "Ain't no party like a Bushwick party!" And even though he's being adorable, Vanessa can feel the shivers of a coming storm. Of bullshit.
Rufus cries and rends his garments and tries in every passive-aggressive way he can to make Lily feel guilty about protecting him from her Illness. Finally she admits that the major problem, besides her magical Illness, was the horrible idea of seeing his puppy-dog face when she told him, because it would make it "real." Which honestly, it would have been better if we'd stuck with that and left the Illness thing out of it, because yes: The worst part of this would have been watching her tell him. He would have crumbled. But instead, now he gets to feel this perverse entitled moral high ground because she didn't trust him. Which is elegantly Rufus.
Blair stomps around Chez Waldorf yelling at Dorota all kinds of crazy shit, but you can tell just in the acting alone that this storyline is less onerous for our heroine than the unending Jack/Elizabeth/Empire nightmare. Her lightness, her playful evil, her fickle weirdness, are all suddenly back in spades. She asks a waiter if he'd date her, and when he asserts that she is "totally hot," her posture on the chaise longue shifts from petulant to overjoyed in a split-second, like a pampered longhair cat who's just heard the clink of silver against Waterford crystal.
Dorota starts telling some story about her royal husband, but Blair interrupts her for a zinger -- "Dorota, I need answers that don't end in And then I came to America" -- before realizing that Dorota has just handed her the answer: It's the first husband, Chuck, that's ruining everything. "Isn't it obvious? He's declared a dating fatwa on me!" And so begins the great Fatwa War of 2010, where everybody competes against themselves and everybody else to see how hilariously they can pronounce the word "fatwa." Props for finding comedy in unlikely places, but you know the second Chuck says it the game is going to be over.
Jenny just happens to run into Serena downstairs, and just happens to prominently display the shirt she ganked from Nate's house, and then just happens to lie really unconvincingly about how she "kinda crashed at Nate's" because they were "just hanging out" and "totally lost track of time" and he slept on the "couch" and Serena has to like totally believe her. I have a weakness for good-acting-of-bad-acting like this, and scenarios where you tell the truth in order to make it look like a lie, and Little J/Momsen is a master of both. It's hilarious. And then you've got Serena, whose head is already full today of like three other thoughts and that's her limit and besides, she's got to go see Dr. Sandiego, so whatever, say hi to Nate and don't forget to totally sabotage our relationship. Jenny is like, "Can do!" S calls Nate, but I'm sure Jenny has that one on lock too.
Effin Willa Weinstein appears out of nowhere to say how sorry she is that Dan didn't get into Tisch and how sorry she is that shitty old Vanessa did get in. She does more of the Jenny stuff from above, like, "Wow, she didn't tell you she was applying? What a bitch your girlfriend is to you! Ouch!" Dan mentions that it's even more stinging because -- and this part really confused me the first like three times I watched the episode, so I want to be clear -- it's annoying that she got in, because as far as he knows she based her short film or play or whatever on the story he published in The New Yorker. She didn't do this, but he has no way of knowing this, so it rankles.
And what's cool about that is, for the first time in his entire life he's totally blameless in this scenario (for now): There's no second level or agenda where he's unconsciously or meanly undermining Vanessa, like he used to do to Serena all the time. The situation, even though it's confusing in execution, is for once completely clear of him being jealous or shitty, and I really like that. Of course, Willa can't handle any of that, so she reminds Dan/tells us that her dad, a "John Weinstein," is on the board, and told her that it came down to Dan v. Vanessa. Which is the first thing she does not need to be saying. And also, now she's got to get Vanessa kicked out, because it wasn't an original work: Which is the second thing she shouldn't be saying, because it's not even true and she has no way of knowing either way. Dan flees, because she's the fucking worst, and she immediately calls Daddy to tattle.
Serena is... Somewhere, and Nate appears there, and she asks why he's not answering her calls, and I guess he just felt like it would be more polite to hunt her down in person. She says she doesn't have time for his obsession with triangulating everybody's ass with GPS all the time, but she's got to go see her dad. Instead of explaining the far-reaching complications and explanations for why Will is here, why she and her mother keep disappearing and hurting anybody's feelings, or what she's now doing that's so important Nate can go fuck himself, Serena remembers that Illness can hear her, and thus she cannot explain anything about her atrocious behavior, or else her mother will drop dead, so she just takes off after one more time apologizing condescendingly to him for being so condescending all the time and keeping him in the dark. I mean, I know this is the point of this parallel, but Nate and Rufus should just start a club.
Nate gets fussy in a very Humphrey way about how he's getting tired of always waiting around, and she goes Othello on him about how Jenny's been all around and up his ass. As though that's a new issue. Jenny watches through some mysterious doorway in the lobby of wherever they are, and Serena's like, "You got secrets too!" Which is confusing for Nate, since he doesn't, because he never does, and Chuck's prophecy about how all it takes is one seemingly hypocritical move from Nate and S will bolt. Which, that's so great, and so Serena: Sleepovers with Jenny, that's fine, we can talk about it after I cure Illness, and yeah, I've got creepy secrets and mysterious errands like I always do... But by no means may you imply that I've got secrets at the same time that you're having sleepovers with Jenny! That is a bridge too far, sir! Jenny lurks and quirks and smirks and lurks some more, and GG is like, "Little J, you might actually pull this one off."
Ha! I'm so sure. If Jenny Humphrey ever got one damn thing she wanted on this show the world would end. Which is probably the main thing she wants, anyway.
"So what's step two?" Jenny calls to ask her big brother, since he's well-versed in the ways of brute-force seduction, and Chuck explains that all you have to do is get him drunk and rape him. "Do women just not get this?" Nope. No matter how many times you try to explain it, or even give them practical demonstrations by getting them drunk and raping them, women are just too dumb to understand this one. Jenny points out that Nate is not going to go out drinking with her: "He made me call my dad when I slept over!" Chuck, immortally: "Be here, six sharp. And look like someone who doesn't even have a father."
Which, the stripper-pole joke of that is pretty funny, if a bit of a worn-out stereotype, but also kind of inappropriate considering your lead character is doing exactly that, and has fucked everybody from Congressmen to Carter Baizen in the name of her daddy issues. The joke hinges on the irony -- nobody is actually that simplistic that they end up on the pole because of daddy issues -- while the entire season's storyline revolves around the increasing implication that maybe people are that simplistic. Or at least that both the horse-rustler Serena, and Chuck -- never forget the Little Orphan Annie broken locket -- are.
Blair runs in screaming as he hangs up the phone, all about how he's twisted and manipulative, and he asks her to narrow it down ("It's been a busy few days") and they just say the word "fatwa" at each other like a million times, as if somebody on the writing staff has just learned that word, and true to expectations the way Chuck says it makes you feel like a fatwa is something incredibly pleasurable that he's about to do to you on the kitchen table. "We're over, Chuck. Unclench!" He promises (this is a lie) that he didn't interfere with the party, and that it's not about his threats but about how "no one could ever measure up" to what they had, before he whored her out. Blair -- and this makes very little sense, except maybe as a measure of how fucking nuts she's going -- says she's prepared to date outside the UES gene pool. "By this time tomorrow, everyone in the five boroughs will know that Chuck Bass's threats mean nothing."
Do you think that's really real? Would she do that? It's sort of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, in my opinion. If they had bathwater in Bushwick, I mean.
Willa calls -- she's and I quote "about to head out to Bushwick" to "get a vibe on the space" -- to tell Dan that she's officially set the wheels in motion to destroy Vanessa, and Dan whines and moans and Humphreys just enough that she's able to hang up with plausible deniability, and Dan goes "ack!" when he realizes she's hung up, and if it is not the cutest thing he's ever done, it is a close second. I never ever thought I would love Dan Humphrey the most. Just saying that makes me want to sit on a knife.
There's a lot of Will's gravel voice and Serena's tapioca-pudding mumblecore voice, and '90s references to spare (apparently he's the Christiane Amanpour of Médecins Sans Frontières and goes anywhere terrors happen), but essentially he's had a whirlwind of a fantastic life without Serena, and in recompense would like to take her for literal ice cream, like he did when she was four. Then he totally goes, without irony and straight-faced, "This gulf, this chasm that's between us... It's gonna take some time, but we can make it go away."
Which first of all and mostly, not even Chuck could pull that one off, but second of all, bad call to draw attention to the ruffled fact of the intense cleavage Serena's brought to lunch with her estranged father. You had to know when you were writing about the gulf, the chasm between them that most of the screen would be filled up with our old friends Witch Baby and Cherokee Bat, because whenever Serena is onscreen that's going to be the case. Even if, and to be fair this is the case here, it's a relatively calm amount of giant boobs showing, it's still already a laughable line and now twice as... Serena and her father is a giant fucking horrible mess. I don't know what else to say. Glad I'm not a girl.
Dan finds out in about five seconds that Vanessa's Tisch submission was in fact an original piece -- and that she knew this requirement while somehow he didn't -- and she thinks we're having a romantic conversation about how it's her first original play and all about how they are lovebirds in love. Can you fucking imagine a play written by tortured Vanessa Abrams about her tortured relationship with tortured Dan Humphrey and how it finally got untortured? I hope in the play they dress up like Rear Window and prance around drinking mojitos with Gay Paul Hoffman, because that shit was golden. Anyway, I guess now Dan doesn't want to go to the party, because of the murdering that will take place if Willa -- and you know she would waste no time -- spills the beans about his accidental sabotage of Vanessa's life.
More Carmen Sandiego murmuring about how he wanted their whole family to move to Tibet, but it turned out that long-distance relationships are just too hard for Lily, especially with that amount of travel time, so she got bored and wandered away. Serena's always looking for a reason to be pissed at Lily, so she eats that up, but then leads him back to the more salient point, which is that four-year-old Serena and infant Eric did not ask for a divorce, so it's still a question where he got off to.
"I couldn't blame her for needing consistency in her life -- in your lives. Serena, I just don't want you to think that one day I woke up and decided that I was going to leave you and never come back. After a while, I just didn't know how." So essentially you woke up and decided you were going to leave and never come back, then? Serena's on it: "So that's it? You just forgot how to be a father?"
To the rescue! Somebody who never knew how to do that in the first place! Rufus comes poking around to ruin his stepdaughter's reconciliation with her estranged father, because he literally has nothing better to do and Lily probably lied and said she needed to lie down so he'd stop staring at her. Will sees him at the front desk and immediately -- this is so Spader, so West Coast van der Woodsen -- heads him off: "I've got plenty of fresh towels, Rufus, but thanks for checking in." Can't you just see somebody saying that shit to Molly Ringwald? So Rufus starts yelling about how Will better leave town, although there is no way he doesn't know that Serena is here, because she just said, "I'm going to go hang out with my father" in the last scene. So I mean, either Rufus is being stupid or Rufus is being stupid. That old dilemma.
They talk about how Will has changed or has not changed or is a witch doctor. "Telling Lily to hide her illness from me and the kids is just like the guy I used to know!" To which I must respond, OH IS IT? How is that a quality? "You're just like the kind of guy that would make a towel joke while wearing a watch like that! With your grey suit and your comfortable shoes! That's so William van der Woodsen." Will tells Rufus in no uncertain terms that pretending she had neither Illness nor a family has worked wonders for her health, and Rufus goes, "Well, for that, I'm eternally grateful, but now that I'm part of this, she gets a new doctor." Which is delightfully Rufus: "Thanks for saving my wife's ass with your life-giving hands! Now suck a dick!"
Serena pops up to see what the fuck Rufus is up to now, and he executes this amazing about-face and slink-away, mumbling his exit line as though he's about to be arrested: "Oh I'm sorry for intruding I'll see you at home." Serena offers to go with him, since she's now looking at the person who forgot to be her father vs. Rufus who constantly forgets he's not, and Will realizes he lost this round. I have always liked the Serena/Rufus relationship, and I like Will if for nothing else than his radicalizing effect on it.
Because you know the shit is going to hit and it's going to be a love triangle between Serena and her two dads and where does her loyalty lie and what's Dan going to think/say/do and how will Jenny's latest bullshit factor in, you know? Like, let's settle the offensive Daddy Issue issue once and for all by bringing the entire family into it, because Lily right now couldn't carry a storyline if her life (literally) depended on it, while Who loves Serena more? is a question nobody on this show can seem to quit asking themselves, even after years of fighting about it.
Dan cannot get Willa on the phone, maybe because there are no cell towers in Bushwick or maybe because the "vibes" of the "space" are getting in the way, or maybe because she's a vapid bitch, or maybe because she's a plot device, or maybe all of these things. Blair comes stomping up to him in the Bleecker demanding him to solve her problems and being as rude as possible in the process. She tells him to shut the fuck up about eleven times, tosses "fatwa" around like it's still in play, and out of nowhere Dan invites her to the "art party" because -- this is where I started getting confused again -- when he uninvited himself and Vanessa, that was before Willa actually set about destroying Vanessa, so now he realizes he needs to go to the party after all because he can't track her down.
(What I would like to say at this point, and can't, is that he could also be thinking that having Blair on your side when you're going up against Willa is an excellent move, because Blair will fuck her up as collateral damage to whatever scheme she ends up perpetrating. You could just aim her at a target just past Willa, and the vector of her destruction would slay Willa in her wake. But while this script is smarter than the last several, it's still not there.)
"Oh, a party where you two are guests? Perfect. Brimming with young men who are not socially astute enough to fear the length of the Bass arm..." (Ew.) "Now I'll need a disguise if I'm to blend in. Perhaps Vanessa can loan me a serape?" (Perfection. Well done.)
Now that he's ruined their reunion, Rufus reverts to sweetheartedness all about how she shouldn't let his shit with Will get in the way of her relationship with him. Um, except for how you just did exactly that, loser. S doesn't notice how ridiculous Rufus is being -- the white noise of his constantly fucking everything up -- and says she won't let Rufus's irrelevant bullshit interfere with her life on any level. Only the way she says it, it's like she's doing him a favor and not totally dissing his entire bullshit personality. "Right now I just need to keep things about my mom, think about what's best for her," says Serena, which is the warning flag Rufus can't see, because obviously the medical issues trump all the whining Rufus could ever... There we go. Will just called Lily, in the time it took her husband and daughter to get home, having coincidentally received the test results, which are not good.
Chuck's almost impressed by Blair's field trip to Brooklyn, to an "art party" no less, because that shows commitment to destroying everything that means anything. He offers some money to somebody, this part I didn't understand so well, but the point is that of course the fatwa is all too real. Nate comes home, and of course Chuck immediately starts trying to pour alcohol down his throat, because the seduction must begin. Nate pretends to be bitchy about Chuck whoring out Blair, but Chuck says he's very sad and sorry, and then embarrassingly enough goes, "After all these years, you can't see through one of my smokescreens?"
People do not talk like that. Ever. He heads away from this lexical danger zone to discuss how he misses Nate so much and misses the old times when they'd go off for private vacations in the middle of the school year while everybody else on the show was in class or doing normal-people things, and the sodomy and whatnot. And stinky old Serena has really been cramping their style in the five minutes that Chuck and Blair have been broken up, which puts Chuck in a precarious place where he has to do a bunch of drugs and fuck a bunch of girls and various sundry other of his "smokescreens." Then, having found the perfect solution to about half the storylines this week -- solving everybody's problems, like he always does, in the grossest way possible -- he invites Nate, along with Jenny, to the "art party."
Blair immediately starts throwing around "fatwa" when they get to the party -- which is the worst fucking thing, there's a nerd girl with a fake bird in her hair, and some kind of gothic tranny, and everybody's dirtbags -- and Dan and Vanessa are both still upset about the Tisch thing, and Vanessa says some dumb thing about how Blair in her Vanessa costume better not spill anything on Vanessa's "pleather leggings," and Blair sets out to find a boy to make out with for Gossip Girl's sake, and then over by the bar Nate is bitching at Chuck for bringing Jenny, because she's "just a kid," and Chuck points out once again that Jenny's now older than Serena and Nate were when they "christened the Campbell Apartment" that time. Chuck lasciviously asks if she "honestly" looks like a kid, and the camera travels along her little-kid body and allows you to make up your mind, because in fact, yes: She does look like a kid, because she is one. The only difference between N and S three years ago and Jenny now is that the actors that play N and S were forty-five years of age.
Blair meets a suuuuuper cute guy named Cameron, who like Nate attends Columbia. They discuss (her brother!) the work of Aaron Rose, but finally figure out that they're looking at an Ikea light fixture, and it's adorable. They meet-cute for a while, but across the party Chuck is hitting on some girl, so Blair suddenly fakes heat stroke and falls ridiculously into Cameron's vicinity for a second. Cameron doesn't find this odd, for some reason, and Chuck -- well, can you really tell the difference between Normal Chuck and Brooding Chuck? Maybe he gets it, maybe he's fooled and getting pissed, maybe he's saying a quiet inward prayer to Satan. No idea what goes on in there.
"I'm about to serve up a venti-sized serving of artistic justice!" Willa says, as she looks to be hanging a Starbucks barista in effigy. Willa's kind of amazingly en pointe for a two-dimensional joke about art students. Dan explains to her that Vanessa submitted an original piece, and just when you're thinking "Gosh, how can this storyline about the complicated application procedures for insular art-school programs get any more interesting?" Willa wipes the slate clean, by changing the subject from "Did Vanessa submit her application materials in accordance with the guidelines set forth by the Tisch Admissions Board" to "Fuck Vanessa."
She's like, "Okay, but don't we still kind of want her to get kicked out so you can come be at Tisch with me and I can give you the kind of frantic eager blowjobs all self-hating art students are known for? You deserve it. You can thank me later!" She tries to kiss him, he demurs because he's "with Vanessa," she laughs at him for even thinking dating is a real artifact in the deconstructed Ethical Slut world she has discovered this semester, and Jenny appears in this middle of this BS and says hi to Dan, and keeps walking. "Who was that slut?" asks Willa, and sadder still is the lukewarm shrug Dan gives in response. "Just call your father."
Dan chases Jenny down and starts in right away. "Please tell me what you're doing here, starting with Dad knows and ending with these drinks are not for me." Jenny laughs and says that she hasn't talked to Rufus all day, and that the drinks are for Nate and Chuck, who are escorting her because they are like her only friends right now. "Chuck's totally harmless, unless this place runs out of ice," Jenny says, having wiped her memory clean of every single traumatic time she didn't get raped. "Does Vanessa know that girl who was hitting on you?" Which is a valid question, but Dan's response -- "why do you go from zero to blackmail in 60 seconds?" -- makes me think we're supposed to be seeing Jenny's doom coming down the pike. "Dan, it was actually a question?" Great answer, delivered beautifully, but I wonder. Because of all the times she's done that creepy scary shit, this was the least creepy and the most awkwardly pointed-out, so probably this time the story means that it wasn't "actually" a question, but in fact Dan twigging to the monster his sister has become, or something.
Will's position is that treatment should continue, what with there being no other options. Rufus digs his heels in and says no. Not "offers another helpful suggestion," not "lists viable alternatives," not "points out that the world is full of doctors": Just "No." No thank you, doctor treating my wife, your services are no longer needed.
Will hands Lily the option of reversing this stance Rufus has made on her behalf -- Will is delightfully subtle and manipulative throughout this entire scene, juggling Rufus with one hand and the ladies in the other -- and Serena jumps right in there to take it. "I think we should stay with Dad. He's already cured Mom once," she says, which is just so fucking Nate Archibald a thing to say! "Dad cured Mom's Illness, and it was never to be seen again. For a year." Plus, he's family. Lily tries to explain that Serena is right and that, basically, Will is also Rufus's family now, and Rufus hisses and snorts and gives in. Will smoothly reinforces it: "We'll get started first thing tomorrow. And like Rufus says, we're all in this together." Genius. And evil. That's when I knew he was evil. Nobody's that smooth on this show.
Serena calls Nate and immediately throws a hissy fit that he's at a party -- "Chuck wants us to do shots!" Jenny shouts in the background -- instead of, I guess, pining and waiting around for her to explain herself like he usually is. She throws on top of this unreasonable pissiness that also she knows Jenny slept over, and because it's Nate he doesn't immediately nip this shit in the bud, so Serena gets to hang up after yelling at him for basically no reason at all. Poor Nate is no good at these things.
Meanwhile Jenny attacks Chuck: "Your plan sucks! He's on the phone with Serena right now." Chuck assures her that it's going to be fine, and just like that Nate drifts up with a hungry, pissy look in his eyes: "I'm so over this party! Let's just go back to the suite and get hammered!" Chuck passes Nate off to Jenny, sending them home together, and just like that his plan stops sucking altogether. And what's great is, he has to stay at the party to observe and stalk Blair, but also by never touching the Nate/Jenny thing directly, his hands stay totally clean. "You guys go home and do whatever you want!" he says, knowing full well that Jenny has no off button. I love it.
Blair and Cameron joke around about the horrible art at the art party, is it better or worse than the Ikea fixture, Nate goes to Columbia but never attends classes because why would he on this show, and finally Cameron cuts the bullshit. "Blair, do you want to make that guy who showed up jealous or what? I saw you two... You want to prove to him you're over him, ready to move on? Just have to take the plunge. Show him the past is the past." She totally likes him! He totally likes her! And his cunning words mean both things at once, that the act is the thing and the thing is the act, that by taking the plunge she'll actually be taking the plunge, if you see what I mean, and that's the show I know. They agree to kiss, and even as she's leaning up you can tell she'll never go through with it.
Vanessa has had it and she's going back to her cave in Central Park. Dan hilariously reminds her how Willa's obviously untrustworthy ("Keep in mind, she carries around lighter fluid") but Vanessa has the facts on her side. Dan whines about how he didn't know about the original piece thing, and that anyway Willa's going to fix it now, which Vanessa points out is not a great way to start in a prestigious program like this. Which I don't really think she's being unreasonable about that: Small, competitive group like that -- especially of notoriously shitty folks like writers and theatre people -- you don't want an iffy application thing constantly coming up.
Dan somehow makes this all about him and how she is ruining his life and taking away the one thing -- shades of Blair and Serena -- that he "wanted more than anything." For at least two episodes, he's wanted this more than anything! Vanessa falls into a bit of a quagmire at this point, because she says that she "explained" it -- her secretly submitting herself to the program he hasn't shut up about all season -- and he says that no, she "justified" it, which is bitchy and weird but also sort of right... Except for, just like how Dan didn't know he was accusing her of quasi-plagiarism when he whined to Willa, Vanessa didn't know there was only one spot for an NYU student when she submitted herself. So they're both wrong, which means -- in a stable, healthy relationship -- it's a wash and neither of them are wrong.
But so then Dan has to get very wrong by elliptically pulling some major Humphrey bullshit: "You said yourself that if you knew there'd only been one spot, you wouldn't have applied." Um, fuck you? How dare you even go there? Vanessa's not dumb, she totally calls him out for that one, and he points out -- also valid -- that he's reacting to a situation, which he's allowed to do. Once again stymied by their shared internal suckiness, they find themselves at a freshman year impasse, and Vanessa bounces.
Serena goes, "I still don't know what I want from you." That about covers it, but it's a weird sort of statement to drop into a conversation. (Nothing like referring to your "smokescreens" -- which is queerbutt in exactly the same way as when Corey Feldman used to talk about his "mystique" -- but still pretty weird.) Will understands, though, because it's the truth. "I was planning on giving you a big speech on regret, but..." I love him. He's like, "But fuck that. Mostly I'm happy your mother has Illness, because it means we get to hang out." Creeeepy. He talks about how he was in fact reading the tabloids and knew about the boat-stealing and the body shots and the time she stole a horse, and she points out that her whole point was pissing him off, and he thanks her kindly for I guess making the effort and letting him have a second chance. Well, Serena's whole point is those, so it's fine.
Chuck approaches Blair and admits that the fatwa was real, and that he's proved his point that she would never break the fatwa and she says that yes, she totally could have and wanted to, because Cameron is amazing, but that: "The way to get over you isn't by hooking up with some random guy, or pretending like we didn't happen. You and I loved each other. And then you broke my heart. I've been doing everything possible not to face that fact. I'm gonna kiss somebody someday. And when I do, it'll be for me." His smile when she quietly tells him goodbye and leaves, it's very sad. But I think also he has never been quite so in love with her as he is in that moment. And I can identify.
Back at the Empire, Nate and Jenny have switched roles so incredibly that he's actually saying her dialogue back to her: "What the hell is wrong with me?" he says, just like after the time she didn't get gang-raped and managed to talk her way past Rufus even while on roofies. Jenny explains that Nate is wonderful and should not worry so much about it because he's excellent, and then she tells him that S doesn't deserve him, and treats him terribly, and she would not do that. Jenny, totally going for it. So she leans in with a "you deserve better," which high school bitches have been using since the beginning of time because it's the secret key to all teenagers, boy or girl, and he kind of resists and she never makes contact, but guess who's standing behind them, looking about five seconds from Dark Phoenix? Oh yeah.
"I know what this looks like," Nate shrieks, and Serena's like, "I will cut your face up!" and Nate whines and asks why she's even there and she's like, "To fucking cut your face up!" and he swears nothing happened, tonight or last night, and why did she hang up on him at that party a minute ago, and she says she hung up so she could come over here and cut his face up, and Nate runs out of words finally so Serena goes, "And what about all that transparent Teen Bitch bullshit she was talking? Do you agree with that?" Jenny -- oh girl -- stands up like she's going to turn this shit to her advantage and goes, "Yes, he does!"
Serena is suddenly backlit by rising flames and a throbbing red light fills the room and water starts dripping upwards and cats meow all over the city in a strange syncopated tune and blood comes out of Jenny's fingernails and Nate gets a little woozy from the waves of dark power coming off Serena's face as she explains, "I'm talking to Nate, Jenny."
It is literally the most beautiful thing that has happened all season. I rewound it so many times I wasn't sure I'd ever see the rest of the episode. But then the flames die down and the room returns to its normal color and Serena and Nate talk about everything and work everything out and explain everything in like two sentences, and immediately figure out that Jenny refused to pass along Serena's message when she left Dorota's wedding, and then Jenny is almost as amazing as she insists, multiple times, that Serena is making up this entire conversation they had. Like just boldly lying, in a way nobody ever ever does, and it's sort of magical. Jenny just keeps talking and talking and lying and the whole time Nate and Serena are figuring out that they've been duped, and finally Nate tells Jenny to get the fuck out of there. "You know, you two deserve each other," she says sulkily, and leaves. Like she's going to leave it at that. She will come back with a machete and you will all be in trouble.
Blair goes home -- her Vanessa costume even more glaring and gorgeous in the harsh lights Chez Waldorf -- where Dorota has not gotten rid of the box of Chuck memories, and of course no longer needs the stuff gone. "It's no use to deny the past. Chuck is a part of me. He'll always be. It just hurts so much." Dorota explains this Polish saying that love is "like head wound" because make you dizzy you think you die but you recover. Usually. It's just my Dorota hangover keeping me from enjoying this scene; objectively it's great. Dorota offers to take Blair to the duck pond tomorrow. She already bought the bread.
Montage! With more awesome White Rabbits music playing! S sits Nate down and -- effectively choking on the words and making me very sad -- explains the entire unending story about Lily's one billion lies and her mysterious Illness, and Nate feels sorry for her. Blair takes everything out of the box of memories, but it's just the first dress that matters; Rufus and Lily batten down the hatches now that Will's back; Vanessa deletes Dan's apologetic voicemail without even listening to it; Will acts totally fucking sketchy on the phone, walking down the road: "It's Will. It's not working exactly as I'd hoped. I need you to write Lily another prescription. Well, you can't back out now! I need you to make this work. And I doubt the authorities would be pleased to know what you've been doing."
Tonight: Rufus/Eric hating on Will, Lily/Serena hating on Rufus, and the immortal tagline, WHO'S! YOUR! DADDY! Good Lord, they don't quit with this. I can't figure out what Will's up to, but given the way the dominos are falling, I bet we find out soon. Is he poisoning her? Doing something else weird? I bet not, I bet that was actually a legitimate thing that only sounded sketchy, but either way his voice makes it seem filthy. Here's to Vanessa dumping Dan, for the moment, and Jenny dumping her obsession with Nate and Serena, for the moment, and most of all, here's to finally wrapping up the Lily thing. XOXO.
While this was better, we really do wonder if this show should have quit while it was ahead.
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