Thanksgiving sees everybody miserable -- Chuck defeated, Nate a prisoner of Bart -- so when Lily announces she and Mr. Bass are leaving town for the holidays, Serena and Dan invite everybody to have dinner at PRADA. Interrupted in a rare show of self-knowledge, Blair decides not to flee her scheming nature and jump right back into ruining Serena's life for her. This takes the form of arranging a meet-cute between Serena and the Spences, whom she's obliged to invite to dinner after Steven apologizes and Sage bats her eyes adorably.

Blair's other scheme? Getting Chuck out of his Bart Bass funk by helping Nate draw a connection between the death of the Sheik and Bart's latest "accidental" murder, the coke- and whore-loving Bruce Kaplan. She enlists Uncle Jack to help Nate crack the Bass servers, and puts everybody at PRADA just in time to start planting seeds of doubt in Lily and Serena's minds about their respective fellas. (All of this is brilliant. Everything that happens with Blair is brilliant.)

Of course, the reality of dinner is scary as hell, since Lily and Bart's plane has been grounded and Nate takes a bored and horny Sage upstairs for some heavy petting (and computer-hacking, thanks to B's call to Uncle Jack) while Chuck watches. Downstairs, Dan acts like a little bitch the entire time and eventually gets into a fight with Steven, who announces his desire to take Serena back from him before abruptly disappearing.

After Serena gets everybody seated and gives a sweet speech, Georgina rises with a hilariously bizarre speech of her own, and delivers her greatest triumph: As it turns out, Dan has written two Serena Chapters for VF -- both insufferable in different ways -- but Georgina has made sure the more vicious of the two was published.

This is where it gets interesting, though, because when Serena asks Dan about it, he manages to have decided that he both thinks Serena is vapid trash and he is in love with her, so why is she being such a bitch just because he wrote these horrible, awful things about her? He gives a long rambling speech about how his entire neurotic obsession with the horrors of the UES is actually her fault, for being better than him, and that only by becoming what he hates most can he... Something.

Something we don't even really get a clear glimpse of until after Nate has punched his lights out -- "That was from all of us" -- and Bart's handed him his card as he's slinking out, and lonely fuckin' sad-ass Rufus has bitched him out about it: "I have a plan. And it's working." And the plan, it seems, is to write one Final Chapter (called "The Final Chapter") in which, it's to be assumed based on his hipster lack of talent, he writes the ultimate takedown: Himself, and how he was destroyed by his own need to be Inside. Or some such nonsense. I mean, what a perfect encapsulation of this show's/our country's vexed relationship with money and class, but still. Shut the fuck up, Every Humphrey.

Bart shows Lily a bit of his dark side, once Blair and Chuck -- in fine, fine form; they haven't been this great together in years -- present their evidence for the string of murders. Lily finally comes over to Chuck's side, but has to pretend otherwise for the duration of the meal, which sends Chuck back into his depression. After some high-suspense, low-drama conversation, she leaves town entirely and warns Chuck that Bart's coming after him now in earnest -- but that she memorized the 'microfilm' before burning it, because she is apparently Alias now.

So. Chuck invites Blair to go to war and it is beautiful, everything they do this week is fantastic, and we also got a great reconciliation with Lily, so that was good. It is nice to see the inherent contradictions in Dan's hypocrisy coming to light, if a bit on the nose overall -- it's the contradictions, not the hypocrisy, that have always made him (and the show) at all interesting -- although I'm sure he'll be instrumental in saving everybody from Bart Bass, sometime in the next two weeks. Meantime, Nate's still under Bart's thumb, joining Dan on the dark side, but as long as Chuck doesn't do anything dumb like get on a plane Bart can crash, he should be fine.

Next Week: Chuck gets on a plane, which Bart crashes.