Serena -- drunk on the thought one of her schemes may actually work, sick with the thought that Cousin Lola may be eclipsing her -- sinks the latter's audition with Lars Von Trier in such a hamfisted, contrived way that Lola instantly figures out that Serena is Gossip Girl, and runs to tell Nate. Nate Archibald, that is. Nate, who only dates crazy girls. Crazy girls who make up stories.

So Nate tells Lola to stop being crazy and/or talking out of her stupid mouth, because he's too busy dealing with Diana Payne's creepy come-ons, dying of loneliness, and freaking out about Chuck. Who is in turn freaking out about learning that none of his previous mothers are actually his mothers, and that in fact he wasn't born at all: Somebody left a bunch of hair and a whiskey-soaked rag in a bucket full of sex, and then a month later Chuck Bass just appeared.

Lily and Rufus are on the verge of making up, but he still takes time out of his day to horrifically and needlessly harrass his son Dan about what a mistake it is to date Blair, because these UES bitches just make you their bitch. Being a Humphrey goddamn through and through, Dan runs with this concept, stonewalling Blair about all kinds of shit for no reason and generally being a walking advertisement for why people never date him for all that long.

Lily charms Rufus back into Manhattan by schlepping all the way to Brooklyn with a covered dish. Of salad. Which she did not make. But then the second their dumb old asses are back home, Lily finds out that Rufus has been keeping Ivy Dickens in the SoHo Grand so she won't be homeless. Because Lily literally wants to see Ivy eaten by dogs, for no real reason, she throws Rufus one of these: "With my money?" And although he doesn't quite say, "Our money," you know he was thinking it. Probably he just didn't want to see the goon hand.

So now Rufus is BACK out the house, AND she totally closed his bank accounts. Lily is on a motherfucking tear, I tell ya. Which is great! But still not as satisfying as Rufus admitting what a limp little houseboy he was born to be. If only he would stop getting his mess all over my shiny new Dair, I could be excited. Remember the chokers? God, what I'd give for a choker and some Lincoln Hawke right now. Just go for it, bro.

Thanks to the evergreen shittiness of Rufus -- plus a run-in with some deeply creepy Real Life New Yorkers I've decided I don't care to know more about -- Dan and Blair decide to host a salon, in the grand tradition of Gertrude Stein and people like that, people with original and incisive thoughts, but because what they actually are is children, an empty hipster and a mental case to be precise, it's sort of a vomitous nightmare from the second they start talking about it, first the things that sound like smart people might have thoughts about, and then building entire nonsense conversations about these subjects, and the vomitous "Did you read?" freshman year nightmare of their love just never, ever stops. And we're all invited!

So into this hot mess rush Chuck, Nate, Lola and Serena -- none of whom were invited by the brainy couple, because in this episode we're pretending some of the people on this show are more retarded than other ones -- so that Lola, in her Vanessa Abrams way, can by trying to out Serena as Gossip Girl, accidentally/finally outs Diana Payne as Chuck's mother.

(How's Chuck doing with all of this? Well, imagine masturbating to the sound of your boyfriend, fucking your mom, feet away, in the same apartment.)

What's funny is that first of all, Serena figured it out on her own -- by overhearing things, because have you seen this show -- and then, Diana was only there at the salon to work some kind of angle on her, because GG wrote to blackmail her about making Serena give her the site back. Which was a cool way to go with it, especially since at the end of the episode GG texts again to say that Chuck's not even Diana's actual Big Secret, so now she and Serena will have to have a rematch.

In the end, Nate dumps Lola, who quits the UES (until her big van der Secret comes out), Ivy is probably homeless again, Serena admits that she has become a pathetic blogger version of her former self but stays the course, Chuck actually gets to add more things to his sexual dysfunction list, and Dan and Blair can be pretty fucking gross sometimes.

The rest was just Elizabeth Hurley trying to make sense of Chuck's storylines over the last five years, like, you can see her actually burning calories trying to put it all together and make sense as she's saying it. Girl, we feel ya. We xoxo ya.