Oh, the Gossip Girl writers are so cute. This week’s episode even had a theme! And it was identity and if anyone ever changes, and anyone that’s seen much of the series so far already knows that none of these people ever turn over a new leaf. So, a bit predictable. But still: renewal! Change! All things that people think college will afford them, but everyone, including our Upper East Siders, eventually finds out that a change of scenery doesn’t mean a change of self. And these folks didn’t even really change scenery.
So things went as they usually do: Blair and Chuck were narcissistic, Georgina plotted malignantly, Dan had no idea what to make of the women in his life, Secret Brother Scott continued to want to skin Dan and wear him like last year’s Versace, and Serena had poor taste in men. Carter continued his three-episode streak of not wearing a belt.
First and foremost: Dan and Georgina are so on! Sort of. He doesn’t want to get, you know, tied down or anything. Which is accurate – 18-year-old guys are, by and large, jerks! And 18-year-old girls are often clingy psychos, so Georgina naturally has a picture of the two of them as her computer wallpaper, despite the fact that they’ve only been boning for, what, a week? Two? But Dan likes getting laid and Georgie is happy to oblige him, so he was willing to pretend that she isn’t actually a total psycho until he was forced to confront further proof of what he already knew, which came from Serena, via Blair and Chuck.
You see, Chuck is trying to become a little commerce,trademan, and that requires him to wheel and deal and not bone his girlfriend (the sexing, after all, is what this show is actually about). So in order to impress some club owner with whom he’d like to work, he needs to win an auction of a totally unartistic and Facebook-looking picture of the guy and some chick in a costume in order to impress him. Like his billions of dollars aren’t impressive enough. He eventually realizes that they are, in fact, all that matters and cashes out his shares to buy a hotel, on a whim. I’m not kidding.
And, as luck would have it, Blair wants the exact same mediocre photo. Why? Well, because some secret society with a French name that I can’t remember (I took Spanish, German, and Italian in college. Why can’t they choose one of those?) needs her to win it so she can be a member, of course! Because that makes perfect sense.
But really, Blair should have known better when the invitation she got looked like it was scrawled by an eight-year-old, but she’s so down-and-out because no one at NYU likes her and her boyfriend won’t have sex with her that she doesn’t even realize that, duh, it’s totally fake, and Georgina totally set her up to rip her and Chuck apart, nevermind that there’s no way she could have known that Chuck needed that photo as well. Wait, did she orchestrate that too? I’m at my parents’ house without a DVR and I’m mix upd. If she did, then additional points for her, I suppose. Ya know, if we were assigning points.
Even Serena took one look at the invite and knew that it was Georgie up to her old tricks, and when Serena is figuring out social trickery more quickly than Blair, well, the very thought makes my head spin. Plus, she figured out that it was Blair and Chuck setting Carter up to look like he was still a whoring deaddefeat – are we experiencing a Serena renaissance? She did step in and buy the photo out from under Blair and Chuck, a move that actually made me LOL. Like, in real life. Not just in letters.
And Georgina isn’t the only problem in Dan’s life – he’s also got a stalker-y half brother that faked an admission to NYU and seduced his best friend in order to get near him and, possibly, kill him and steal his identity and inhabit his carcass. Well, Vanessa finally figured out that Scott isn’t actually going to lesson,coursees and as soon as he was confronted with that information, he spilled the beans about his Dan brotherdom and then used the totally undermine-y “If you have feelings for me, you won’t tell” line on her that has so many variations that we’ve all heard from insecure, weasely guys at some point in our dating lives. To Vanessa’s credit (wow, I don’t get to say that very much), she immediately told Dan that Scott’s a lying SOB; she just didn’t tell him precisely what it was about.
So Dan, realizing that Georgina is devious and wicked (and he’s banging her besides – another scarily accurate detail about dating in college), goes to her with his limited information on that lying liar of a Vanessa-smoocher and they do some Googling and figure out that he’s the same kid that wrote Dan the fan letter about his New Yorker article, and they decide that Scott’s a stalker. For some reason, the writers treat this conclusion like it’s not true, but, well, it totally is. He fake-transfered to NYU, he’s dating Dan’s best friend, he’s taking corny,tacky guitar lessons from Rufus in Lily’s apartment. The kid’s a stalker. Being a blood relative doesn’t negate the stalkeration!
But when the time comes to cough up the genetic information to Dan and Rufus, he just can’t. His crazy adoptive mom who lied to Rufus and Lily about their child being dead shows up out of nowhere, which probably is what makes him balk, and he instead tells them that he’s the adoptive brother of Rufus and Lily’s dead son, which makes this whole thing obnoxiously difficult to explain in any reasonable string of words.
Vanessa knows, though, and now so does Georgina, because she doesn’,Miumiu bags;t actually go to class, ever. She just spends her days being a creeper outside of people’s dorm rooms so that she can gain information to use against them later, which is where she overhears about the brother scandal and her mind reels with what she might do with that information. You see, when Serena told Dan about Georgina’s Blair/Chuck stunt, Dan tells her that he thinks they should take a “break,” which is silly, because they’re not actually dating, they’re just screwing in a dorm. I know that when you’re 18, that might seem like dating, but it’s not, and no “we need a break” conversation is required.
But for whatever reason, Georgina books a train ticket to Boston to chase after Scott as he returns home and figure out some way to use whatever information she has to screw with the people around her. Oh, and she also deletes the totally creepy Dan Humphrey wallpaper from her computer – no need to sully the MacBook Pro with that sillyness, G.
Oh, right, and Nate. Still with that Buckley girl. She knows Carter somehow. Her family doesn’t like him, which, you know, Carter hasn’t always been a very likable guy. This subplot still has no bearing on the rest of the show. Even if it eventually does, I doubt I’ll care by then.
Particularly next week, when we get ultra-crazy person Tyra Banks to distract me. Oh, and Hilary Duff.
