"Not to worry, Little J. This is going to be a very short conversation. I let you walk away after you whored yourself out to Chuck because I assumed you were smart enough never to come back. I might've been willing to make exceptions for holidays, birthdays, health emergencies of immediate family members, but I don't believe any of those scenarios apply?"

This whole storyline got under people's skin for being unrealistic, which seems to me quite foolish indeed. "Unrealistic" is to Gossip Girl as "atonal" is to pizza toppings. Plus, Jenny's story has always been about the monarchy, her Sophia Coppola "let them eat punk" aesthetic, her Brooklyn advance, those endlessly outrageous costumes and masked balls and cotillions and farces, her new world/old world attempts to bring praxis to the Pinkberry. G-L-A-M-O-R-O-U-S.

You knew last year when Blair banished her that this would come up, did you not? And the three years preceding that pronouncement: Are they somehow all a blur? Come now. The outsize personal metaphors and narratives are the hallmark and the best thing about this show. Nate's fairytales, Blair's six things, Serena's Russian tragedy, Dan's Bukowski bullshit, Chuck's Jacobean tragedy. When Dan took Blair's crown, in the NYU stairwell, it took her most of the year to become Empress. It was the fight between Hamlet's father and uncle that took that away from her. And the only thing now that would ruin her more is if it came about that she didn't abdicate: That it was another girl, the same dirty little girl as ever, Lady Jane Grey to her Bloody Mary, who forced her out and then, in her shame, caused her to flee to France. It's not even very subtle, this time.

Thanks to Chuck, though unbeknownst to either queen, Jenny's been offered an interview with Tim Gunn -- gatekeeper of Parsons, seneschal to fashion's most elite artistes, and sex symbol for the ages -- a wizard in the territory of her enemy. Jenny throws herself on Blair's mercy, although as the queen points out, should she gain entrance to those hallowed halls she'd still be breaking the ban. "If people think I'm not a woman of my word, the whole system could break down."

Because she has learned the ways of dignitaries and of dignity itself, Jenny does not blow Blair's mind with the facts -- that none of this actually exists and that Blair is about three steps away from going Heavenly Creatures on everybody -- and simply says she has no reason to "destabilize" Blair's "social order." Last time she did that, she became what she feared most -- which was, as a Humphrey, basically being awesome -- and then before you know it she was carrying condoms full of coke and newer drugs that haven't even been invented yet in, well, in all sorts of places.