Serena pours over all the pictures of Aaron-Bobby dressed as Cecil the Caterpillar that she apparently saved for the last ten years despite last week taking six hours to remember that Switzerland even exists. Blair comes in bitching at Serena about how she has once again ruined Blair's life, but ... I'm not sold on the writing for Blair this week, frankly, because there's not another layer going on here, she's just being a cunt because she's stressed, and if you keep pushing that button you lose the power of that button, which is showing how deep into meltdown she actually is, which ... this week, she's not that deep into meltdown. We're not learning anything about her, because she spends the episode being a bitch out of proportion to her motivation to be a bitch, and there's not a second layer here, so you have to imagine in your head that she's going back to the Yale jealousy from a few weeks ago, except that's not how Blair works.

If she's going to be a total bitch to Serena, she needs a new reason, and "once again my Yale dreams are endangered" just doesn't raise the stakes enough, in my opinion. Which gets even hairier in a second, because last year Blair was the one on a singleminded mission to lose her virginity, so by the end of episode she should have learned that something about that was dumb, but she doesn't seem to, beyond telling the little girl that she was in love with Chuck at the time she fucked him, which I do believe but I don't think B would have decided or figured out yet, so it's a little confusing because it comes off like she's lying to the girl and being a hypocrite, which it itself at odds with the explicit moral of her story here, which is that blackmail is only one of a number of options, which should be explored before you start taking people's marriages apart for your own purposes. Oh, and that her mother has fucked up her entire brain, but that's not something that she's going to work out in one episode.

Anyway, fishy. So Serena's all WTF and Blair "explains" crazily that "Little Emma" is "less Holly Hobby and more Jenna Jameson," which doesn't clarify. Serena totally goes, "Can you speak plainly?" Blair explains: "She's determined to become a woman on my watch, and if I don't help pimp her out, she's gonna character-assassinate me to the Dean." Serena's confused, because earlier it was made clear that Emma "liked ice cream ... and magic," which is one of those things Serena says that sounds normal until you think about it -- or how she keeps up this bizarre, rueful mad scientist dialogue with invisible Cecil the Caterpillar this whole episode -- and then you realize that Serena van der Woodsen is vastly weirder than we think.