Gossip Girl: School Lies (Episode 112)

I must have been pretty good last year, since Santa fulfilled so many of my holiday wishes: I got Chuck back on this side of The Pond, I got Nate more naked, more often (with bonus moments of heroism and competence on the side!), I got Blair doing something vaguely compassionate, even if it was for selfish reasons, and best of all, I didn't have to deal with Jenny Humphrey or her mother for an entire hour. Happy New Year, indeed!

"WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?" -- Do you think this episode would have made more sense to me if I'd seen the title homaged School Ties? Between the secrets, the lies, the videotape, and the whiplash action Blair has going on with Chuck and Nate, I confess to being a little befuddled, but I'll try to break it down for you. Somebody planned a pool party at the school and used a key to break in. Some other bodies took lots of pictures of the carousing, weed-smoking, underage drinking, and skinny dipping that ensued. Had a boxer-clad boy not had the unmitigated gall to injure himself and practically drown, I doubt anything else that happened would have caused much of a ripple, but the 911 call brought everything up to the surface, so to speak. Fortunately for the drunk boy who knocked himself out, Nate can dive, do a rescue hold and give great mouth-to-mouth. My hero! In the books, Nate spends so much of his time stoned to the gills that I doubt he would have remembered how to doggie paddle, let alone hoss a hefty chunk of unconscious meat to the side of the pool, start his heart again and blow some air down his lungs. Book!Nate is sweet and clueless and adorable, but as Vanessa puts it later, TV!Nate is "one of the good guys."

Chuck slyly picks up the key that was used to get in after hours, slipping it into his pocket. Vanessa, who accompanied Dan, who came to the party at Serena's request, films Chuck secreting the key with her video camera. All of which seems unnecessarily complicated, since Chuck openly plays with the key at Blair's house the next day. Blair takes it from him, strips the lanyard off it, then hides it in her dresser drawer. When Nate delivers a love letter Blair has no apparent interest in reading, he finds the key and takes it. Why is the key so dang important? Well, the new headmistress at the school (dubbed, in Hogwartsian splendor, "Miss Queller") has vowed to identify and expel the instigator of the party. If she can't identify the culprit from among the students photographed at the party on a conveniently abandoned cell phone, she'll expel ALL of the party participants. The rich kids aren't happy, but they're not too worried either; they know if they stick to the party line (pardon the pun) that nobody knows nothing about anything, there's nothing the administration can do. Blair says that's how it always works, implying this is far from the first time they've pulled something rotten and gotten away with it. For a poor kid like Dan, though, (and presumably Vanessa, though maybe she was so invisible behind her camera that no one noticed her? She's not in the group being lambasted by the headmistress), this is serious business. He could lose his scholarship and his best chance at a decent future. Because no one who attended public school in Brooklyn ever amounted to anything. That's sarcasm, in case you wondered. St. Jude's isn't the only school in town, boy! Serena's more worried than some - her past offenses might keep her from being accepted at any expensive private decent school and she might have to go back to boarding school, God forbid. *yawn* Dan points out the disparity between them, climbing on some moral high ground apparently built from a mound of Brooklyn garbage and stays up there, waiting for Serena to climb up the slippery slope in her high heels.

Nate, in a sweet and utterly misguided attempt to protect the lying, cheating, scheming woman he loves, confesses to Miss Queller that he's the bad guy, the scum, the one who planned the party, and coughs up the missing key. Miss Queller wasn't born yesterday, though, and she sees right through his ruse. He's off the hook for the party, but since Miss Queller hates liars as much as ill-behaved hooligans, she suspends him. Let that be a lesson to you, Nate! No good deed goes unpunished! Dan, by now quite furrowed of brow, asks Serena why the heck she doesn't speak up about what she knows, and she confesses that she was the one with the key, leftover from a freshman tryst with the swim-team captain. When it's Dan's turn with the headmistress, he hems and haws and does his best not to cave, but Serena interrupts, coming in and confessing her part in the party, saying she knows the headmistress appreciates honesty. Miss Queller says Serena's file reads like a rap sheet (hee), but Serena says that was the old Serena, and the new Serena's not like that anymore, citing coming to confess as Exhibit A.

The consequences for Serena? A slap on the wrist and 25 hours of community service. Dan scoffs at that (what, did he want her to get expelled?), sneering that she gets special treatment because she's young, beautiful, well-connected, and rich. Um...duh, dude.

"GOOD CATCHING UP" -- I think I'm too old dumb naïve to get all the complicated nuances of the Chuck/Blair/Nate triangle. I need someone to explain Blair's deal, here. I get that she's worried about Chuck telling Nate that they had sex. So she's keeping her distance from Nate, but still wants him? But tells him she doesn't want him anymore? Kisses him, then ditches him, saying, "Good catching up"? I'm getting dizzy trying to figure out who likes who for what reasons. Well, I get Nate, who seems to have no freakin' idea why the girl who finally forked over her virginity now treats him like the plague. Hey, wait a minute…that's just how she acted with Chuck, after she actually lost her virginity. Sex is obviously not an endorphin rush for our favorite Waldorf; maybe she could get a patch or something to help with that. When she finds out that Nate hurled himself in front of the metaphoric bus on her behalf, she thinks it's the most romantic thing he's ever done, but still blows hot and cold…until he comes to her and tells her flat-out that he loves her, and that nothing can ever tear them apart. "I love you, too," Blair says. "Always have. Always will." Awww. If I thought it would last more than a microsecond, I might have gotten a little choked up over that. As it is? Well, we all know the shit's hitting the fan soon enough. Poor Nate. He's like a Labrador who keeps getting bonked on the nose with a wet newspaper and can't figure out why.

"I DON'T SPEAK UKRANIAN, BUT I DO SPEAK ENVELOPE OF CASH" -- Amidst the pool party mess and the tightly strung love triangle, Vanessa insinuates herself into the action by filming a documentary about Dan (titled "The Outsider Goes Inside Serena van der Woodsen") in hopes of earning a local arts grant so she can pay her rent. The whole "not for distribution" angle comes in handy when she films Chuck and Blair discussing the sex they had that they're not telling Nate about. Blair says she won't sign a release so Vanessa better not use that tape blah blah blah. Chuck has more luck when he offers V cold hard cash for the tape, saying he knows what $10K means to "girls like her." Vanessa takes the cash and gives Chuck the tape, only that's not the end of this Shakesperian tale. Honestly, I expect Chuck to show up dressed as a girl and spouting lines in iambic pentameter one of these days, the plots are so twisty and complicated. Vanessa goes to Blair, handing over the actual tape (having given Chuck a blank one). In return, Blair goes to Vanessa's landlord and pays her rent for an entire year. She says she does it so that she can get back to disliking Vanessa, fair and square. Hee. She gets one teeny tiny little point for doing a good thing, even if she didn't do it for good reasons. She asks Vanessa what she did with Chuck's money, since she obviously didn't pay it on rent. V says she might have created a medical grant for teens with genital herpes…in Chuck's name. Oh, V, you've got a tiger by the tail now. I wouldn't want to be on Chuck's bad side, and I'm not sure he has a good one.

"I WOULD RATHER BE CHUCK'S STEP-SISTER THAN DAN'S" - Oh, Serena. Really? Because I'd choose pretty much anyone else over Chuck as an addition to my family, especially after listening to his incestuous insinuations to Serena. One last taboo for the road, Chuck? I guess after Monaco, he's feeling the need to up the sexual ante. For about four minutes, it looks like Lily might decline Bart's proposal, when he interrupts lunch to conduct some business and she sees her future flash before her eyes, but then Serena finds out that Lily's wavering on Bart and leaning towards Rufus and pleads with her mother not to go there. "Wow, that's selfish," My Mister said. Yeah, it is. Besides which, I didn't see Lily saying anything about becoming Lily Humphrey; she'd said to Rufus, "Let's do it. Let's see what we are. Let's see what we could be" and they agreed to go away overnight to talk things over and have hot actual grown-up sex. That's a long way from walking down the aisle in some church in Brooklyn. And even if she did, Lily doesn't seem to have much staying power when it comes to husbands; the kids probably wouldn't have been step-sibs for long. Mostly, though, it really just isn't Serena's place to tell her mom who she can and can't date, any more than it's Lily's place to tell Serena the same (or Grandma CeCe's to tell Lily way back when). Butt out, Serena, or else congratulate Lily on having the good sense to take a few minutes to wonder if there's something more out there than corporate tycoons and loneliness. When Lily meets up with Rufus at the appointed time and place, he takes one look at her and knows. "You packed light," he says. He leaves her standing there as traffic passes and she contemplates exactly what she's losing.

Even Eric notices that all's not well at the "celebratory" gathering of the new van der Woodsen/Bass clan. "Mom looks about as happy as Grandma at last call," he says under his breath to Serena. Eric, we don't see enough of you! Lily's buttoned up practically to her ears in funereal black, obviously already regretting accepting Bart's proposal, but the deal's already been sealed. Oh, not the engagement, but Bart and Chuck's intervention on Serena's behalf with the new headmistress. Yup, the new dual-named library should be ready by the time Eric's an upperclassmen. In other words, Serena's in debt up to her lovely eyeballs with her prospective new dad and bro. *shudder* She goes to Dan, telling him he was right about her and her world, and they sit together on Dan's bed to study for an upcoming test. They look really comfortable together, companionable, familiar…why, it's almost like they're brother and sister.

Everything I Need To Know I Learned From Gossip Girl:

If you're at a pool party, acrylic martini glasses are a great choice
In the electronic age, there's no such thing as a secret
Boxer shorts are in
Parental happiness is out