Godmother Eleanor scares the shit out of Dorota by attempting to eat the baby Anastasia, then saying she never wants to go back to Paris, because she loves the baby. Nobody even blinks about the fact that Eleanor already had a baby of her own, and broke it -- they just accept that Dorota raised Blair and that this is the first baby Eleanor has ever dealt with. Downstairs, Dan figures out that Nate at some point sent Vanessa the picture of them in bed together. In Haiti, there is no Gossip Girl, but there is Nate. In addition to asserting that their relationship was "so easy" because they didn't know each other as well as the NJBC, which: what show are you watching, they also agree that Nate is within his bitchy little rights to break up Dan and Vanessa after she's been gone for literally a day.

One of the things in Wharton or Austen or Thackaray that you get used to is that there are always going to be scoundrels, but you rarely get to meet the girl half of the equation. Darcies will always embarrass nameless third daughters, and Willoughbys will always run away with the vicar's sister. She's a ruined lady, possibly crazy, definitely not the kind of person your heroines are ever going to come across. And of all the things I love about this episode, the part where Jenny's liminality is leveraged against that fact is one of the best, because it creates two of the greatest scenes in the episode, both of which -- not by coincidence -- feature Blair and Chuck.

The entire show, the entire story, these two characters who have always acted as the UES's immune system, takes every possible opportunity in this hour to say, "You do not belong here." Almost as if the story itself is pushing, pushing, pushing her out. Almost as if it has been doing so for three years. Almost as if all her madness and grasping and hard-won power came from somehow knowing it would lead here, eventually. That she was only ever going to be granted temporary leave from her real life. In that case, all the heightened reality, from "Glamorous" to the Masked Ball to her jagged Cotillion gowns, puts her right where she needed to be, in order to keep the show moving and alive. I'm not saying the show is about her character, but I do believe that her character has always been about the show, more than even Serena's has been.