Does anyone even know what happened on Gossip Girl this week? Anyone? Do the writers even know? And more importantly, should any of us (or them) care? If you’re hoping that I have the answers to these questions, I’m going to go ahead and apologize in advance: I don’t have them. I’m not even sure if the universe has them.
What I can provide, however, is a blow-by-blow recounting of whatever it was that happened, complete with complicated family relations (the Lusty Professor is Juliet’s cousin?), a piano-top loin reunion for Chuck and Blair and a completely nonsensical guest appearance by the otherwise-awesome Robyn, she of the delicious European pop records. Oh! I almost forgot to mention: next week, our Gossip Girl recaps will be moved back to Tuesdays!
The episode began in a haze of sexual frustration, as Serena brought Colin coffee during his office hours and they pretended to talk about subjects that weren’t Serena’s boobs or his high, high cheek bones. The entire scene was slurred and blurry, like we had all had a gin and tonic (or ten) before beginning the episode, but thankfully no conversation between the two of them will every be particularly complex or interesting, so I had no problem figuring out what anyone was saying. I’m sure that the lack of focus was meant to represent their mutual sexual distraction, but since they’ve known each other for a week and are currently involved in a relationship of the student-teacher variety, I’m having a hard time feeling any kind of sympathy for them. Plus, they’re both incredibly hot, which means that I’m just kind of jealous and hate-filled toward their pairing in general.
Anyway, in other parts of New York, other things were happening, as they are wont to do. Blair had a 20th birthday party to plan, Rufus and Lily were going to have their first marriage anniversary, Dan was off in Brooklyn somewhere, earnestly growing his sideburns. For the second episode in a row, Eric actually showed up! (Right? He was in last week’s episode, wasn’t he?) Oh, OH. How could I forget. There was also peace in the land, since not only had Blair and Chuck declared a truce last week, but Serena and Nate had managed to sneak around and get them together to codify it on Monday night.
Regardless of the substantial leap of faith that it would require for me to believe that Sir Manbangs and Serena managed to get together and effectively plot anything more complicated than an episode of Blues Clues, the writers asked us to suspend disbelief, so I complied. They didn’t show us how the schemeing happened, probably because that’s too many lines for Chace Crawford to remember all at once.
Instead, they just showed the scheme’s aftermath, which was a treaty negotiation with a stenographer at a neutral location. Blair gets the Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks, Chuck gets both Art Basels and strip clubs in the outer boroughs. Before the proceedings ended, however, Serena and Nate were asked to leave so that Chuck and Blair could work out a private clause that, predictably, would later be used as a plot device.
Before that could happen, though, some other stuff had to happen. I’m not entirely sure what any of it meant or what we were supposed to make of it, so here goes my best shot: the writers threatened to make Jenny come back. Since it was Rufus’s and Lily’s anniversary, they both really wanted to celebrate with the entire family, but Blair’s fatwa meant that Jenny’s return would bring about death and/or loss of her hair extensions, which are basically the same thing when you’re Jenny Humphrey. So. She couldn’t come back. Dan and his sideburns objected.
Dan, for some reason, decided that this week was the time to get indignant and angry over Jenny’s banishment, even though he had just told her last week that being around Chuck and Blair was bad for her and that she had become a terrible person when she lived in Manhattan. So, what did he decide to do to combat all that terribleness? Why, become the exact same flavor of terrible, of course!
This is where I get really lost, so while I try to collect my thoughts about Dan and his evil plot, let’s talk about what Serena and Blair did for the entire episode, starting with Serena. As you might have guessed, her entire plot centered around her guy issues, just like her life in general tends to. Also in typical Serena fashion, she forgot what happened three episodes ago and decided that she and Juliet were new besties, which means that she told Juliet all the hush-hush details of her personal life. Because Juliet hasn’t tried to ruin her life before or anything. Of course not. And certainly not in the recent past.
Serena told Juliet that she was desirous of a certain male professor, although she didn’t say which one and I frankly assumed that Juliet already knew. As we found out at Blair’s birthday party (more on that later), however, Juliet didn’t actually know anything about Colin and his Serena-centric dalliances. As it turns out, he’s just her cousin who pays her school bills and rent while she’s at Columbia and he doesn’t actually have any designs on ruining Serena’s life. At least not intentionally. He probably will anyway, in some way or another.
Surprisingly, Serena managed to make it through the entire episode again without sleeping with The Lusty Professor, despite plenty of opportunities to do so and his ample willingness to violate their student-teacher relationship. She did kiss him at the end of the episode, though, by which time Juliet had already been told that they were smitten and had time to plant a secret video camera in his apartment to capture the moment.
Again, as with the Fashion’s Night Out Blackberry-to-TV broadcast, I don’t really believe that Juliet is handy enough to install secret video cameras with a moment’s notice. Where did she get the camera? Or the drill to mount it? Are we supposed to believe that it was already there? Because I don’t, and she would have logically had less than an hour to acquire the camera, learn how to use it, sneak into her cousin’s apartment, install it and leave after hearing about their potential hookup at Blair’s birthday party.
Ahh, yes. The party. We should probably discuss that, since as with all parties on this show, all of the episode’s various and sundry plots came home to roost while Blair was celebrating the beginning of her third decade on Earth. After her truce with Chuck, she was being bitchy in every direction because she no longer had a war to keep her entertained. The gladiolas were wrong (for existing at all), the dress Dorota brought her was wrong, EVERYTHING was wrong! Dorota put her back in her place with approximately six words, she put Chuck on the guest list, and everything was hunky-dory, right? RIGHT? Wrong. Sorry Blair.
Remember Dan’s stupid plot that I mentioned earlier? Well, it involved him getting ahold of Nate’s hard copy of the Bass-Waldorf Peace Accord and finding out that the secret, hush-hush clause about which no one knew concerned a video of Blair doing drunk karaoke in Europe last summer after a Robyn concert. Well. That was underwhelming.
Even more underwhelming was how it came out. Blair was having her spectacular party, which included Rachel Zoe getting a full dish of liquid chocolate tipped onto her head, until everyone just had to show up and ruin it. And by everyone, we mean Dan, but Blair actually thought it was Chuck. Somehow, Dan managed to get in contact with Robyn and have her show up to perform at Blair’s birthday party in only a matter of hours, never mind the fact that she lives in Norway or somewhere, and she brought with her the DVD of Blair’s drunken karaoke moment.
No one really bothered to explain why an international pop star would have been in possession of that particular DVD or why she would care enough to save it for all that time and then bring it to a random birthday party in New York, but the writers seemed to want us to believe it as truth, so believe it I will. The video was played and God and the Dean and Madeleine Albright and everyone saw it, and since Blair has a very, very low tolerance for embarrassment, she was crush. Naturally, she thought that Chuck was at the bottom of all of this and yelled at him. Sadface.
Dan managed to fess up to his whole Jenny-revenge plot right in front of Chuck, but even so, Chuck decided that Blair’s misunderstanding meant that the truce was over. Great. It lasted all of eight hours. I’m not sure why his reaction was so harsh, since Eva’s similar reaction to his false accusations broke his heart forever, but whatever, it was and I can’t change it. I knew the truce wouldn’t last long, but I expected it to be around for at least an entire episode.
As it turned out, though, its breakdown lead to the only redeeming scene in the entire episode. Chuck and Blair, alone in a darkened house, fighting and arguing and seething at each other until they couldn’t standing it anymore and then having hot, hot fully clothed hatesex on top of what was surely a very expensive piano. They should hate each other all the time, really. It’s so much better that way.
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