Although there's a thing here which is worth thinking about, which is the fairytale motif with Nate -- maybe it's meant to be just as strong and underlying as Chuck's gothic flavor, or Serena's Franco-Russian tragic romances, or Blair's double feature of Austen/Brit class comedy and her Hepburn fantasies. You had Hudson Hero, and then the outright Prince Charming thing with the wolves and punching Tripp's beautiful face, and now again you have him playing into the hero stereotype. And I guess it's always been implicit in his character, watching him bend over backwards again and again for the Captain and Anne, not to mention the Vanderbilt lineage stuff, but of course it takes Jenny's own pomo perversion to twist that story to her own ends: Nate's propaganda is just as controlling as everybody else's. Neat, right?

My favorite line from the Fabolous song that's playing while Blair and S shop? Either "Everywhere that I be feel VIP baby/ And everybody's cool, but y'all just ain't me" or "Somebody better tell 'em that we in this bitch like an unborn baby." Poetic. So B and S are up in some bitch like an unborn baby, and S is wha-whaa about lying to Nate and giving him the ol' Polish Sausage in bed, and Blair is like, "Cruel to be kind, S. Nate'll be fine." Which seriously, if it weren't Jenny it would be something else, a Rubik's Cube or a chandelier reflection on the wall, ala Pollyanna. But about Blair, he's worried about Chuck's sit-down with Jack and the guilt that comes with having pushed Chuck to lose it all "because he opened his heart to that raven-haired con artist." Specifically, we're asked to believe, the Empire is suddenly all Chuck consists of. Serena rises into the air like the Love Guru on a cloud of champagne giggles and "explains" it'll be fine because Chuck and Blair love each other, and that all she has to do is buy this random dress and this will fix the roiling madness inside of Chuck. "Empire or no Empire, Blair Waldorf loves him, and no one else can say that." Weird, right? Like buying this dress is the only thing she... Ah.

Jack materializes out of the darkness and admires B in the dress, and calls his stalking "window shopping," which works on both levels you see, and she hopes aloud that Chuck ate his lunch for breakfast, and Jack explains that all he really wants is to fuck Blair. She wavers and feels weird and maybe, possibly, wonders if Chuck agreed and Jack's here to seal the deal. Which couldn't possibly be true, she thinks and we think, but in fact it totally is, and that's brilliant. It doesn't make up for Elle or Elizabeth yet, but it's so unthinkable and hard to pull off, and this episode does, again, a great job of doing it, that I don't mind.