Gossip Girl: One Week You’re In, And The Next You’re Out

It’s Fashion Week on Gossip Girl and Eleanor Waldorf, with the help of our favorite truant and liar Jenny, is showing.  Add in a dash of Blair’s delicate ego in the face of Serena’s ascendency and this should be fun.

Unable to woo girls away from Serena, Blair displaces her anger at torturing Jenny, who’s been getting more of Mother Waldorf’s love than Blair has.  In the end Serena tells Blair to either be happy for her or to piss off, and Jenny drops out of school to pursue her fashion design career.  You see Blair’s attempt at sabotage-by having Serena wear something that Jenny, and not Eleanor, designed backfired as the dress was the hit of the runway.  In the end, Serena tells Blair either to grow up and support her as a friend or to piss off, and Rufus is once again an ineffective father-an underwritten theme of this show that will be studied on college campuses for years to come.

Our other storyline follows Dan’s quest to be a writer and in the process discovers himself in a totally non-gay way.  A crusty old writer tells Dan to have someone shoot a shot glass of his head and live life.  So Dan goes to talk to Chuck to get out of his comfort zone, prompting Chuck to ask if Dan’s gay.  We don’t know the answer because before Chuck can say “get in before I change my mind,” they then spend the night together . . . at a bar.  And at that bar, Chuck orders some shots, asks if Dan’s “in for the full ride” down the “rabbit hole” and gives him some blue pills.  And it just got weird.  But then Chuck steals his phone or wallet and shoes and abandons him somewhere in the city.  Talk about a crappy first date.

On the second date, Dan finds Chuck calling his father, only to be summarily dismissed.  Dan enters and asks if that was “really the best you had last night [because that wasn't] the great Chuck Bass.”  I don’t see Blair complaining.  Anyway, Chuck solicits a woman for sex, her boyfriend gets upset and shoves Chuck, and Dan punches him-because that was justified.  So justified, they wind up in jail, where Chuck confesses his father blames him because Chuck’s mother died in childbirth.  Anyway, Chuck gets released but the guard gives him Dan’s things instead, including Dan’s last story about Chuck/Charlie Trout.  Chuck yells at Dan and says he made up the story about his mother…she really died in the Andes (just like Jock Ewing!).

And in the adult storyline of the week, Lily is trying to buy an old Mapplethorpe photo of her (hopefully not with a whip coming out of her behind) to hang in her living room-I’m sure Chuck will like that.  Anyway, she finds out her new husband bought it for her so no one else would know about it.  He also reveals he hired an investigator to spy on her and shows her some file that upsets her.

We end with a montage about everyone having secrets and the truths people “thought [they] could never reveal that once spoken change everything.  But don’t worry B, the brightest stars burn out the fastest, or at least that’s what I heard.  Waiting for a star to fall . . . ”

Wait, Dan’s out of jail.  The old man bailed him out, and Dan thanks him by neither serving as a booty call nor continuing to exploit Chuck (anymore).  His new story?  It’s “about an egomaniacal, washed-up writer who manipulates his protégé.  It’s a classic tale of disillusionment.”  Kind of sums up this episode, no?

Season 2, Episode 5: The Serena Also Rises (originally aired September 29, 2008)

Mondays at 8/7C, The CW

Photographs courtesy of The CW