Chuck is having lunch alone with his stage fright -- because consider that diagnosis vis-à-vis Blair and that's another gun on the table entirely, that goes off at the end in a surprising way -- and runs into an old friend of his father's, a Mr. Campbell, who pays his respects about Bart and Chuck is very cool with him. Then he sees Carter Baizen, who is played by Leighton's boyfriend in real life Sebastian Stan (and doing a fucking fantastic job on Kings, although Jack's sickly coked-out bitterness seems to just have taken up permanent residence on Stan's face in this episode), just to add another level. You may remember him as Sexy Hobbit in the first season, who took Nate to that poker game and tried to screw him out of a bunch of money and then Chuck had to save him with that baseball. And who's that having lunch with Carter? None other than the stunningly blank Elle, who I swear to God is on every TV show now for just unfathomable reasons. Chuck gets snotty about it, because he's soooo emotionally into Elle because of that time she was a nanny-slash-prostitute and roofied him. Which, let's be honest, makes sense as one of the more probable ways to Chuck Bass's heart.

Elle pretends her name is Hayley and that she doesn't know Chuck at all, which is so ballsy to do with somebody you actually know, and yet in my experience always works. I guess because it's so random and fucked up people think you would never do it. Elle beats it out the back window while Chuck and Carter compare penises, and Carter says he just got back from Singapore, whence he had to leave in a hurry and come back to America, where he immediately "rolled into" what I'm told is a characteristic destination for Carters, Apothéke, and met whatever her name is. He's pretty high on himself until the maitre d' comes back all, "Your chick just ditched." Poor Carter! I would hate to be shown up like that. In front of Chuck, of all people! But instead of being like, "I guess something fishy is going on and she's having some kind of crisis like you said," he just tosses money down and disappears embarrassedly. Like there's no causal connection between Chuck showing up and her going, "I have to get out of here the back way." And a few tables away, Mr. Campbell quietly vanishes too. Chuck's face is so intense at all times that I don't even really know what he's thinking about that, honestly.