...Oooo, or alternately, this Louis thing could still make sense if he was gay, because of Harold: Regressing to daddy's little princess. Not pretty, not funny, but Blair is not a pretty or a funny person, and it's not like this story is less gross than that would be. Just something. Something to say that the story we're unsubtly being told we're being served is not exactly the story we're being served. But in the meantime, I guess the only narrative line you can follow to where we're at now is the whole "Palace" and "Empire" thing, which seems to mean nothing this season anyway. I don't know. "Princess," though. It grates, doesn't it?

Her royal stuff was always Queen B and the French aristocracy: She was already queen of an island nation, not a wannabe princess for some principality that doesn't even matter. I'm not saying you couldn't cross the streams into real life, plausibly, I'm just saying if you're going to transpose the very painstakingly symbolic crown/tiara/Jenny stuff into real life, you have to make up for what you're losing. And what you're losing can't be Blair, which is what has happened. Serena is the one who picks between suitors, and defines herself against it; that's her tragedy but it also is something she gets real power from. Blair is the one who pursues, and forces the issue. Switching them around just waters them both down into nothing. It's not growth or dynamic if they're both just putting up with shit with which they would never put. You push further into the future, not sideways into somebody else's past.

Anyway, deal with what you're dealing with. Judge on the merits, not the what you wish. I always say that but sometimes it's hard. So, Serena, riding the high of most cogent sentences ever said at one time, offers the Minions a halfhearted, bitchy apology for calling them wannabes, but even that is to be denied her: "We didn't hear your speech, we've been too busy reading. Sorry!" Serena's like, "That hurts in at least two ways." Then she sees what they were reading, and it hurts in several more.

Meanwhile, Dan is in the Waldorf elevator gettin' his Humphrey on: "Hi, okay, yeah, I'm, as you can tell by my casual attire, I'm crashing this party, but it's only because I needed to stop whining, start becoming a man of action, and a man of action wouldn't just do nothing, a man of action would, uh, would show up and finally confront the person he's been meaning to have a conversation with for a very long time now. I wouldn't expect you to understand what I'm saying. Who the hell are you people, anyway? Must be friends of the groom."