Gossip Girl: Gone With the Will

Hello, Gossip Girl fans! Well, it was a busy week of scheming, plotting, lying, manipulating, and trying to figure out if it’s okay to date your father’s love child’s mother’s daughter. So let’s not waste any time and get to it!

Dan has been avoiding Serena ever since finding out that she’s his half-brother’s half-sister, giving their relationship a new, incesty twist. Because Dan has this big, top-secret secret that nobody can know, he calls up Rufus from the middle of the school courtyard to talk about what a big secret it is. Naturally, Blair’s Witches, who have gone rogue while their queen’s been distracted by Chuck (more on that later), overhear, figure Dan’s cheating on Serena, and pass it on to Gossip Girl, who puts out a “hit” on Dan. Wow, I hope Gossip Girl never gets her lines crossed with the mob. It would be a massacre on the steps of the Met! Plaid and coloured tights splattered everywhere. Next, Dan, still guarding this soon-to-be-not-a-secret with his life, tells Vanessa about it in the middle of a crowded candy shop, and manages to not notice Nelly Yuki, hoping to advance her social status, pilfering his phone. Yeah, there’s nothing to prove you belong in the ranks of the bluebloods like pickpocketing electronics. Oh, and I must note the reappearance of those tiny, lacquered and polished tween mean girls, who confront Dan in the candy shop about his alleged infidelity, and who are possibly both the most amusing and terrifying characters on this show. Eleven-year-olds with designer handbags… shudder.

Meanwhile, Serena is moping around, all sad eyes and bouncy hair, wondering what her boyfriend’s hiding from her. She pays Vanessa a visit to ask why Dan’s acting so weird. Vanessa stonewalls awkwardly, then texts Dan to tell him that he has to tell Serena the truth. Only instead of writing “You have to tell Serena,” like a normal person, because of course Dan’s not going to be like, “What? I should tell Serena that I had tuna for lunch?” she writes, “You have to tell S the truth about Rufus’s and Lily’s child! That they had together! From his sperm, and her egg! Making you and Serena related!” I exaggerate, of course, but only slightly. And since Dan’s phone is now in the hands of Blair’s rogue minions: the beans, they have been spilled! God. A lot of plotlines on this show hinge on the stupidity of Vanessa, don’t they?

And what of the birth-control-shunning adults responsible for this whole mess? They’re in Boston, still looking for their son. Well, Rufus is looking for their son. Lily is mostly making pained expressions and wishing Rufus would just forget about this whole ‘lying to him for 19 years about the existence of their child” thing and kiss her already. They track down the adoption agency, but the official tells them that since it was a closed adoption, they can’t contact their son unless he registers to find them. Lily sensibly points out that the kid has his own life, and it’s selfish of them to try to barge into it if that’s not what he wants. But no, Rufus must know his son! He might have a point; it is likely that his union with Lily’s superior DNA would have produced a child less dippy than Dan or Jenny. So, the adoption official, kindly but probably illegally, or at least unethically, offers to contact the adoptive parents to see if they’re willing to talk. Later, when they’re back at the hotel, he calls and tells them that the parents said no. It’s then that Lily confesses that she’s afraid Rufus will hate her forever, because she’s still… in love… with him! It’s all very melodramatic and soapy, so of course I love every second of it. Rufus walks over and kisses her and… after commercial, we find them in bed together, reminiscing about their musician/groupie heyday. We’ll give Rufus the benefit of the doubt here and assume that time was condensed for dramatic purposes. And then! Adoption Guy calls back to say that the father wants to meet with them in secret. The father has bad news, though: their son, “Andrew,” was drowned in a recent sailing accident. Everyone is bummed. Later, though it turns out that the couple is lying—it was their other son that drowned, not the one they adopted from Lily—because they feel threatened by their son’s biological parents, who have more money than them, and clearly, way better clothes and hair.

In other main plotlines this week, Bart’s will has made Chuck the head of Bass Industries, but only on the condition that he accept skeevy Uncle Jack as his legal guardian. Seriously, Uncle Jack is like Chuck, minus the gentlemanly charm and wit. Uncle Jackass proposes to Blair that they hold a surprise brunch for Chuck to celebrate his becoming a powerful captain of industry at the age of 17. Great idea—surprise parties on TV always work out so well, don’t they? But on the eve of the celebration, when Chuck is supposed to be having a friendly dinner with Blair, Uncle Jackoff distracts him with a trio of escorts! Poor Blair is left alone with a whole lot of romantic candlelight and a dress that, let’s say, most people would not choose to wear to a friendly dinner. Oh, I’m so tired of how this whole Chuck storyline has turned my darling Blair into a desperate doormat. What happened to the scheming, manipulative girl I fell in love with?

So, the next morning, Chuck is late to his celebratory brunch with all the important board members and stuff. At last, Uncle Jackhole arrives, and suggests to Blair that she take some of the board members upstairs to see young Charles, hard at work in his office! Of course, they walk in on Chuck, inebriated, at his desk with two “professionals” in their underwear. Oh, yawn. Show, at this point, you are going to have to do better than that to shock me. I am now completely desensitized to drug-fuelled implied underage threesomes! The board members, however, obviously aren’t regular viewers of CW teen dramas, as they turn away, appalled. Chuck and Blair have a confrontation, in which she tells him that she believed in him and he let her down, and he tells her to stop acting like his wife. Ouch!

At the very same brunch, while all this is going on, the minions have released their Dan bombshell to Gossip Girl, and soon everyone is gawping at their phones. Eric and Jenny are shocked, and Serena is, naturally, a little bit upset. Later, though, Eric—who, because he is gay, is not permitted to have storylines anymore, but only to counsel other characters sagely on their romantic difficulties—tells Serena she shouldn’t let a little thing like a shared half-brother get in the way of her relationship with Dan. Yeah, what’s the worst that could happen, really? That Dan and Serena get married, and their half-brother won’t be sure whether to sit on the bride’s side or the groom’s, creating a really awkward moment for the ushers? Plus, Serena’s mom has been married, like, a lot of times. You can hardly expect her to exclude every ex-step-relation from her dating pool! Later, Serena and Dan discuss the literary precedents for their situation. Dan references the work of Flannery O’Connor, while Serena cites the cinematic masterpiece Clueless. Doesn’t it make your head hurt a bit that Serena has watched a movie starring Wallace Shawn, who plays a character on this show? Do you think when she was dating Aaron Rose, she was like, “Dude, your dad looks EXACTLY like Mr. Hall!” Oh well, suspending disbelief!

Wrapping things up: Chuck visits Blair, flowers in hand, to apologize, but, in a scene that might have been powerful if we hadn’t already seen it about six times already, she tells him that she’s done with him. Yeah, we’ll see if that lasts beyond about the 35-minute mark of next week’s episode. Oh, also, it turns out that there’s a “morality clause” in Chuck’s contract, and apparently hookers and drugs violate said clause (who would have thought?), so that means crafty old Uncle Jacks, as Chuck’s legal guardian, is now the head of the company! And darn it if he didn’t plan this whole thing all along.

Rufus and Lily return home, and as they’re standing outside the door to his place, she tells him that maybe they were never meant to be a family after all. Then they open the door to see their four beautiful children, eating and laughing together. They take each other’s hand—because, yeah, their kids are dating too, but at this point, what the hell?—and we fade out on one big, happy, quasi-incestuous family.

Photo courtesy zap2it.com