Dan comes upon them converging in a stairwell and makes with the stealthy as Serena begs Blair to explain what set off this latest thing. "Why am I mad? You mean why aren't I furious?! I can't believe for one second I thought that it'd be different this time!" Blair goes into depth about how Serena takes everything, everything away from her, all the time, like Nate and Eleanor and the modeling and being pretty, just by existing, and nods in the direction of how that's not really her fault but doesn't fully grasp the concept, just keeps screaming and screaming. "When you glanced at the call sheet, did you see my name on it? When I wasn't in hair and makeup, didn't that seem strange? When the dressing room only had your name on the door, what, did you think they just forgot?" Serena swears that they were just doing test shots, and she thought Blair was just running late: "Look, Blair, I encouraged you to do this. Why would I try to steal something from you that I pushed you to do?" Because, again, that's how you roll, Blair tries to explain.

It's awesome because this is the whole dynamic: Blair instinctively knows, correctly, that she deserves to be loved, which makes it so confusing that Serena's "it" makes everybody give her stuff instead. We came into this at a weird time, but it's their whole relationship: trying to hold onto each other in the constant onslaught of this narrative unfairness. A friend emailed me, before this episode, like, "Why do you care about this show? Why do you care if Serena and Blair work it out?" And I was like, "Because Serena will always get the thing, and Blair will always lose the thing, and they will try to love each other anyway, and it's riveting. Blair is going to want a thing this week, I promise, and whatever it is, she will almost get it, and then Serena will get it instead, and they will both want to die as a result. And if you've never been on one side of that relationship at one time, and on the other side of that relationship at another time, what have you been doing instead of having friends, because you always feel one way or the other, and you have to recognize how gross it makes you feel to be on either side of that, because it's nobody's fault, it's just how it happens. There's a totem pole, and you're on it, and there's always somebody above you and somebody underneath you, and you have to be kind to them both or else you're in an uncomfortable position, and learning this is how we get ourselves under control." It occurs to me that this dynamic also perfectly describes the show's relationship to wealth, our country's frighteningly widening class gap, the Ski Trip Conundrum, even the whole Hobbit/Chuck thing this week, but lest you think I'm going off on a thesis, I will tell you that really, it's because I like watching very beautiful, moneyed people doing very naughty things, to be quite honest.