HA! So awesome! So Blair, Nate and Chuck unite to follow Serena's plan: track down Gabriel and get the stolen money back without anybody -- especially Lily -- finding out it's gone. Of course, Dan goes running straight to Lily and tells her what's going on. She shifts into Ice WASP mode and tells Serena not to do anything: she's going to repay the money out of the Bass coffers, including setting up a handy $5000/month dividend for Rufus so he won't have to worry about Yale. Thereby proving Eric -- who shows up for about two seconds to warn Rufus that his mother is scary -- completely right, and completely throwing Rufus's big proposal plan into disarray.
Serena learns that Poppy's the real culprit, Gabriel's a sadsack bystander who's fallen for the Serena spell, and she and Lily majorly lock horns about going after Poppy. Lily is very insistent on not letting "adult scandals" reach their boiling point, and in so doing manages to turn into something worse even than Bart (which, it turns out, is CeCe Rhodes). She sends Serena to jail rather than letting her carry out her plan of blackmailing Poppy into giving the money back, which is just the tip of the mountain of problems this Gabriel/Poppy situation presents her relationship. And not even Jenny can explain Twilight.
How will they do this? By sending in a gloriously dizzy Georgina Sparks, who's all WWJD'd up. She balks at first, but Blair pulls some religious rhetoric worthy of the great heretics in order to get her to play along: basically that the Old Testament God is a jealous God and wants Poppy destroyed. Usually if I say that in a recap, you know it is my interpretation of events. Rarely does God actually enter the conversation. Not so this time! Blair arms Georgina with some spiritual ire and aims her at Poppy. Everything's going swimmingly until Lily has Serena arrested, in order to get her out of the situation, and Poppy escapes in the confusion with all the money, including Georgina's Jesus Camp Bible Fund.
Meanwhile, Nate awesomely tells Chuck to man up and go after Blair if that's what he wants, or stop dicking them both around. A few minutes later, Blair tells him the same thing, and then in one of the more tearjerking scenes I can think of on this show, he lies once again that it's just a game. Needless to say, Blair is devastated but quickly rebounds, while Serena clomps up and literally goes, "Chuck why did you do that." He is totally in love with her, but also a major mess, and he's afraid of hurting her, or at least not earning her. Blair tells Nate that she's no longer invested in Chuck, and they agree not to move in together, but will be attending Prom together.
End results, to a really inspired Gotye ("Heart's A Mess," every bit as evocative and iconic in its use as "URA Fever," "Kids," or even "One Week Of Danger") accompaniment: Rufus and Lily are maybe broken up but definitely not moving forward in any way, Blair and Nate are taking it slow, Chuck is truly tragic but officially declared both the only person who can do anything ever and Serena's brother, Jenny and Eric are still nonexistent, and Serena's in jail with her whole family of friends rallying to her aid with all the political, financial and scheming clout they can muster, and Georgina -- that didn't take long -- might well murder Poppy Lifton for her kidneys to get that Bible money back. Great, great episode.
Next week: Serena's jailtime and mentions of CeCe send Lily spinning right round baby to the '80s, where she remembers how awesome she used to be. Presumably the following will also take place: Georgina kills everybody's enemies and then comes after our guys, but is most likely vanquished by Dan, who thereby redeems himself in some way; Rufus reconsiders the upside of whoredom and Eric says something wise; Blair starts overclocking her Prom Queen campaign; and Serena gets into a knife fight in the big house and we see her stab a motherfucker to death, but later it still somehow turns out to be a coincidence.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Chuck's taxi meter is at $267 by the time they cross the bridge. "Four wise men once said, 'I get by with a little help from my friends.' But on the Upper East Side, there's the added challenge of figuring out who those friends really are..." GG's referring, of course, to Georgina, but there's a bit of business -- Chuck asking the driver for a glass for his flask whiskey and being turned down, as though Chuck would honestly be that naïve; still, his disappointed sigh is fairly hilarious -- before we see her. He chats with S and gets the newest info, which is that Gabriel skipped town -- or so we think -- with Poppy's money -- or so we think. Chuck's not surprised ("Well, his suits never did fit right"); Serena apologizes for not believing them last night. She starts to ask how it was that he confirmed the BUTTERY LIES, but whatever, he hangs up.
The song in this scene is "Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh" by the artists formerly known as Say Hi To Your Mom; it's a little too lite for this show, but they just loop the beginning measures and one line of the lyrics anyway so it's all about the riff. But dig on this, because the second verse is about a girl buying a 7" of "Randy Described Eternity," the first track on Perfect From Now On, Built To Spill's third album, which:
Where are you going to be? Where will you spend eternity?
I'm going to be perfect from now on, I'm going to be perfect starting now...
I will say I forgot it but it was only yesterday/ And it's all you had to say
So we're listening to a so-so song about a so-so song about Georgina. Anyway, she turns down Chuck's offer of a drink ("The Lord cannot enter a body sullied by alcohol"), and Chuck smarms in that incomprehensibly filthy way he loves so much ("Good, because I like to be the one doing the entering"), which correct me if I'm wrong but I think means that he plans on sodomizing Our Lord. I mean, leave it to Chuck Bass, but that's still sort of iffy. "To each their own holy water," he says, hopefully changing the subject back to his morning scotch, but definitely grossing Georgina out more than a little either way. "I got something I think I really want to do right now..." the song says over and over, and then ends on the DING of Serena getting off an elevator. Which she spends the first half of the episode doing, at every opportunity.
Serena's clomping fast through the apartment, while Lily talks about some random function requiring a harp, two cases of champagne, and no cello whatsoever. I don't know if we know what this party's even about, but I love how that's the scene business to show Lily van der Bass is a very busy lady. You could just have her saying any old thing: "Remember, we need six live swans to descend from the ceiling precisely at midnight, and those little quiche tartlets Marc Jacobs likes. Don't fuck me on this, Rudolfo. Oh, and some balloons." Lily totally interrupts Serena's harried attempt to explain her current predicament so she can fawn over Gabriel, his scary teeth, and the incredibly retarded business venture to which she and all her friends have apparently given hundreds of thousands of benjies in the last three hours without even calling a lawyer.
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