So Blair's decided on her next Powerful Womanhood mark -- Indra Nooyi, Yalie PepsiCo. Bajillionaire -- and as luck would have it, Eleanor Waldorf is dressing her tonight. So Blair plays on her mom's lack of a Jenny figure in her life to get there first, pretending to intern for her while secretly scheming. Eleanor finds out, and they go into all-out war mode... Until Dan sits B down for a little talk and Blair realizes her mom is not a bad sort of Powerful Woman to model herself on.
Eleanor knows better, though, so they decide jointly that B will be the next Wintour/Roitfeld, which leads into the whole W internship storyline to which we've been so looking forward. It's neat to watch a story where B does all her crazy scheming without Chuck involved; even sweeter to watch Dan and Blair's tentative/reluctant steps toward BFFhood. We'll see how long that lasts once he joins her at the magazine, I suppose.
Not to be outdone, S and Chuck come up with an even more fucked up plan involving costumes and the like. You always knew Chuck would get his sister to dress up like Lily eventually, but you might not have even dreamed of all the sex jokes he'd make about it. See, S wants to get Ben out of jail and C wants to block Lily's sale of Bass Ind., so if they can get ahold of that forged affidavit -- hence the dress-up games -- they can blackmail her for both.
Once Eric finds out that Lily's been working the back end -- using her legal connections to get S off her trail -- he swings over to Team Kids. Chuck wavers slightly when Lily protests that she's trying to save the Bass Legacy from imploding, but gets burnt again when he realizes she led him astray with some other fake breadcrumbs, too. It all comes to a head at this big party (duh), but thanks to Dan's quick thinking the whole thing doesn't explode.
Or at least, insofar as the sale does get kiboshed, but then that turns out to be a bad thing. Lily's being the good guy again (as always) in the most bizarre way possible (as always), and the kids' antics have cost them their secret buyer. This opens up the sale to very aggressive Russell Thorpe, who holds a grudge against Bart and wants to sell his company off cheap.
And as for Serena? Well, after spending the whole day screwing Dan over with her inability to tell time -- costing him an internship, bringing out his gross paternalistic tendencies -- and not picking up on the subtle clues that Blair and Dan are getting close, she and Dan have a little talk. Essentially, they will not be dating until they are sure that she's not going to fuck him over, in a little town called Nowhere at the top of a snowy mountain peak in hell, and so they part amicably... And he takes his new bud Blair to another pretentious movie.
But all that behind-the-scenes work with the Judge wasn't just about keeping Serena's shit quiet: Lily was also secretly working to get Ben's parole moved up. So now Ben's free, and S is boyfriend-less, and so you know what happens next there.
Impressive setup for the second half, super fun stuff with Blair, and Serena putting on disguises. How on earth did we last this long?
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Two UES weeks ago, Serena thought long and hard about what to wear to jail and eventually decided to go with "Food Court Glam," for reasons that should be easily apparent. She decided once again that her mother was destroying the universe, and then Rufus jumped on board with turning Lily's entire house against her.
Otherwise, it was just mostly more of Dan's unending martyrdom to a cause that can barely remember his name most days, until eventually he and a similarly holiday-stranded Waldorf decided to go to the French monkey movies together, as sort of a Pyrrhic act of protest against the cruelties of life.
Now it's just the New Year, which Gossip Girl designates as a time to "donate that Fall wardrobe" and "present the world with a better version of you." That's a sentiment I can get behind, GG! Everybody's got internship fever except Chuck, who is a 40-year-old sot, and of course Serena, who has like four credit hours to her name. Oh, and Nate, who has imported his hot awful dad as a sort of white-collar crime refugee. With Dan and Blair both trying to forget they ever went on their BFF date -- and finding it difficult -- it seems everyone is even more distracted from reality than usual.
Wearing a truly adorable paillette-trimmed dress, Blair is more than a little happily surprised to see S back from her two-week mission, although she's about equally stressed between having accidentally dated Lonelyboy and the ridiculous outback-looking cowboy hat that S took with her on her journey. Why the accessorizing? Well, because Judge Stephens -- forger of affidavits, crony of Lily -- likes to go riding in Virginia sometimes. So S put her dumb hat on and went to his ranch, but he was not there. Knowing S's problems with being places ever, probably this took the full two weeks.
Then, back in Litchfield County, S put on a bustier and teased her hair up real high in order to quote "pull an Erin Brockovich" to get the court records. B immediately points out the irony there, considering public records are public, but S says the real irony is that they were in fact sealed, due to her being a minor at the time nothing actually happened. Somewhere up the river, non-rape victim Jenny Humphrey is like, "Yeah, prepare yourself to never hear the end of that one."
And what was Blair up to? "FUCKING NOTHING!" she squeals, and then comports herself: "I DID NOT GO ON A DATE WITH DAN HUMPHREY AFTER TOURING THE SEASIDE IN ADORABLE OUTFITS." One more try, Babydoll. "I SUPERVISED DOROTA TAKING DOWN THE CHRISTMAS TREE AND THE HANUKKAH BUSH AND THEN I SAT VERY STILL WITH JUST A GLASS OF WATER AND SOME MAGAZINES." Stealthy, stealthy moves the Waldorf.
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