Which, we've talked about this before: Chuck has a flavor, Gothic, which is all whores walking around with candles in abandoned manses and ladies showing up graveside. And yes, it's harder to write that than is Serena's Austen issues or Blair's French farces or Lily's Russian tragedies or Jenny's freakout moderne, or whatever Kyra Sedgwick dyslexic heart movie is always going on with Dan and Vanessa and Rufus. Hard.

But it's not that hard. And if you're not selling it -- which happened there with Elle and the Mystery of the Wide-Shut Eyes, and keeps happening here with Rooster and Lily St. James -- then the people who aren't attuned to the many colors of Western Lit 101 are going to see it for what it is, which is: Preposterous. Bad, silly, stupid dialogue in service of a story that can never, ever afford to seem cheap, because it's already so bizarre. Heightened reality and suspension of disbelief are the hallmarks of this show, and when done well they are magical, but when you've taken it out of the real world completely and made smart people act this stupid and speak this dumbly -- which happens a lot with Blair, honestly -- then you've sorta failed, no?

You can fudge the storyline/dialogue foliage and push the plot forward that way with almost anybody but Blair and Chuck. Lily's got so many secrets she has no secrets. Vanessa and Dan and Jenny are so blasé with their nuttiness/obnoxiousness that they can turn on a dime. Nate, he's a sexy bleeping box that sounds come out of so his decisions always make sense. Serena, Lord! I've seen her take what should be a five-scene, three-episode setup and crush it into one single marble-mouthed line of dialogue, "It was X but I'm Serena so now it's Y." And nobody ever blinks, including me who loves S more than anything, because that's believable.

But Blair and Chuck are machines, made of logic and viciousness, and unfortunately, so are the majority of insane fans of the show, and they're the ones watching Blair and Chuck most carefully. Making it the hardest thing to pull off and the most instrumental to the show, and so when you gloss this weirdness with a random "it's Gothic drama, who cares," you're missing the point entirely.

Like, Blair points out that Jack's gotten into Chuck's head again, and he responds by literally bullet-pointing the entire plot. "He has a point. She turns up out of the blue, doesn't know things about my father. And when she hears that Jack -- the only person who actually met my mother -- will be at the party tonight? She bails. Blair, she's supposed to be dead!" All true. But then the clop-clopping of Elizabeth's heels from the foyer -- which on this show is usually in hearing range of nothing, because they're up on each other all the time -- signals that she overheard it all.