Gossip Girl: A Nate at the Opera

There comes a time when every imaginary teenager must leave behind the safety of pretending to go to high school, and embark upon the new adventure of pretending to go to college. And that time is nigh for our Constance Billard students, because this episode is all about college. Well, college and opera, and stupid teachers from Iowa with a crush on stupid Dan Humphrey. (A sidebar: if there’s anything more tedious than the Applying to College plot, it’s the point when the characters actually go to college. There’s got to be a reason why the list of great high-school dramas includes this show, Buffy: The Good Years, Veronica Mars, Freaks and Geeks, 90210, Degrassi, I could go on—and the list of college dramas includes… um, Buffy: The Disappointing Later Years. And Felicity. High school is a contained environment, and there are rules and limits, which makes for better drama. College is too unstructured. Honestly, can you think of a show that got better once its characters went to college? So it makes me fear for the future of GG. On the other hand, these kids don’t really spend much time doing anything school-related, anyway, what with their busy lives of running major corporations, writing feature articles for magazines, and being muses to really lame artists with annoying facial hair!)

So, college: for Blair, it’s Yale or nothing. This episode is kind of a big commercial for Yale. I guess they need to rehabilitate their image after the ignominy of graduating the most disastrous president in American history. Blair’s gay dads and Dorota celebrate her impending acceptance to Yale, of which they are all certain in a way that is really just tempting the gods of plot machinery, by presenting her with a cute little bulldog (Yale’s official mascot), blueberries (Yale’s official fruit?), and tickets to the opera (nothing to do with Yale, but gays love opera!).

Dan and Serena have also applied to Yale, and are totally excited about going to college together, except for the part where Serena secretly isn’t. Serena confesses this to her favourite new teacher, Miss Carr, who is fresh off the bus from Iowa and about 19. Honestly, the actress who plays Miss Carr can’t be more than two years older than her “students.” She also seems about five seconds away from jumping Serena’s boyfriend, by the way. So when the Yale bulletin arrives, and Serena finds out that she was accepted along with Dan, while Blair was waitlisted (yikes! Blood will fill the streets), she lies and says that she was waitlisted as well. You see, it turns out that Serena has just been going along with what everyone else wanted for her, and no one’s ever asked her what she wants! It’s so difficult for an extremely wealthy, attractive American teenager whose mother lets her do pretty much whatever she wants to follow her dreams.

But back to Blair, whose dream of getting into Yale has been doubly foiled—first, by not getting accepted, and second, by getting a B on her English paper from noble, idealistic, uncorruptible Miss Carr, threatening her chances on the waitlist. Serena turns down the place at Yale so Blair can have it, and all is right with the world, except that Serena needs to tell Dan, which she’ll do that night—at the opera! Also, Blair still feels the need to teach Miss Iowa a lesson. There’s a very funny scene where she lies on her bed with her minions to either side, and Brown-Haired Minion plays the devil on her shoulder, and Minion of Colour plays the angel. No points for guessing whose side she chooses. Blair fake-sweetly calls up Miss Carr and invites her out to dinner, then to the opera at 8. Little does Miss Carr know that the restaurant is closed, and the opera starts at 7! Ah ha ha, that’ll show her. Oh, Blair: weak. Besides being lacking in imagination, this revenge scheme is entirely traceable back to you!

Meanwhile, Rufus and Lily are having all kinds of sex all over the place, causing huge embarrassment to their children. And why wouldn’t Dan and Serena be miffed? Their parents are clearly having a lot more fun than they are. Things are going so well for the freshly widowed Lily and her new/old lover that she wants to present him to society! At the opera! Uh-oh. Rufus don’t know much about no fancy opry, ‘cause he’s just a regular, blue-collar dude who owns a hip art gallery in Brooklyn and sends his kids to private school. So it’s up to Jenny (still relegated to subplots until she grows out her hair) and Eric (gays love opera!) to play Henry Higgins to his Cockney flower girl and school him in the ways of The Magic Flute. (Don’t worry, that’s not a euphemism. This family isn’t that weird… yet.) I don’t know why Rufus is so worried, because seriously, cultural snobbery in America is dead, even at the opera. Half the people there are going to be tourists in shorts and jerks with corporate box seats who would just as happily go to Cirque du Soleil.

Then there’s Chuck, wondering who will rid him of his troublesome uncle, who is a coked-up maniac who’s going to run his father’s company into the ground. Chuck has tried every method in the book to get rid of Uncle Jack—underage hookers, transsexual hookers, buying anthrax with his credit card, getting him on the pedophile registry, all to no avail. See, Blair needs to pick up some refreshers in scheming from Chuck! Chuck approaches Lily for help, but then gets mad when he finds out she’s dating Rufus with the leftover hors d’oeuvres from his father’s funeral still in the fridge, etc. Good thing they’re all going to be at the opera later so they can sort things out.

Also, Nate and Vanessa are still around, sort of, and Nate’s still pretending to be in love with Vanessa despite his obvious mad, smouldering passion for Dan. At least, that’s what I get from the subtext; I don’t know about you. So Nate bought Vanessa a set of combs, only she cut her hair to buy him a watch chain, and… oh, sorry, wrong story. Actually, Vanessa bought Nate tickets to, guess what, the opera, because she loves Der Ring Das Nibelungen and made Nate sit through all 16 hours of it. (Oh please. Vanessa doesn’t listen to Wagner. Vanessa would listen to, like, Delibes, and then think she’s all unique and alternative and better than everyone else for doing so.) But Nate also bought her opera tickets, only his are expensive ones, which shows that the gulf between the well-off-enough-to-buy-tickets-to-the-opera and the well-off-enough-to-buy-really-good-tickets-to-the-opera is just too huge to cross. Do you care how this ends? Me neither. Wake me up for the next Nate and Dan Scene of Love. Although I must admit to growing fonder and fonder of Nate, partly because he’s about the only character on the show who’s not all uptight about money and class divisions. And partly because of his pretty, pretty blue eyes.

So, did you get that? Everyone’s going to the opera! How fortuitous. I’m sure many plotlines will come to their conclusions there.

And so they do—Serena admits to Dan that she was in fact accepted at Yale and turned it down, and he’s mad because as her boyfriend of approximately a week, he deserves to have any kind of say in what she does with her life. Also because he’s a self-righteous ass who’s constantly judging and disapproving of his pretty much perfect girlfriend. I think they break up again or something. I’m not too sure, because Serena’s wearing another one of her boob-tastic evening gowns and I was a bit distracted, frankly.

Rufus and Lily turn up and make out inappropriately in the aisles. (By the way, the items used to hide Kelly Rutherford’s pregnancy in this scene include a banister, an evening bag, and Rufus’s hand. It’s like a scene from Austin Powers.) Rufus is shocked to discover that the opera on offer is actually Tristan und Isolde, but it works out okay, because he finds another doofus to talk to. Between acts, Lily comes up with the brilliant plan to adopt Chuck, which she was planning to do before Bart died, making her Chuck’s guardian and head of the company, and ousting Uncle Jack. Curses, foiled again! Said Uncle Jack—who, really, might as well be wearing a moustache and top hat by this point—locks the widow Bass in the lavatory and attempts to tie her to the railroad tracks, er, kiss her, only to be set upon by young Charles and decked quite deservedly in the face. So everything ends happily: Lily agrees to run the company until Chuck is of age, and they make up, and Rufus has the nerve to complain about how his hair looks in the paper the next day even though his girlfriend almost got raped and she clearly had the worse night, and horrid Uncle Jack is shipped back to Australia, never to be heard from again. So the Island of Abandoned Secondary Characters is Australia? Well, that makes sense, I guess. Say hi to Aaron and Agnes for us, Jack! Or actually, don’t.

And back to Blair, Queen of the Night: while at the opera, she receives a call from the headmistress to let her know that Miss Carr did indeed agree to raise her grade, and thus her revenge scheme is groundless. And still really lame. Blair feels bad, and goes to fetch the dumb stood-up Miss Carr and apologize. But Miss Carr calls the headmistress and tells on Blair! And now, it is war. War!

Don’t feel too bad for Miss Carr, though: here she is in Brooklyn, ordering a coffee from our marble-mouthed young scribe, Dan, and as she sits down, and he ignores a call from Serena, she takes off her jacket and fixes him with a look that communicates exactly what she wants to do with his magic flute (sorry). Oh, poor, poor Serena!

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