Gossip Girl: Let’s be boring 40-year-olds together!

Posted by sara November 18th, 2008 at 11:00am In Gossip Girl

Here’s my question for the week: Have the teenage characters on Gossip Girl always been, like, 35? Or 52? Because this week Blair wore a blouse I swear my mom owns, and Serena’s artist beau confessed that he’s a teetotaler and passive-aggressived that she should be, too (which, as Sars just mentioned, is bad for your relationship! Duh!). And Bart Bass dabbled in gay teenage romance, which I guess makes him kind of like a warped Emma Woodhouse. It’s starting to seem like Rufus and Jenny Humphrey are the only teenagers on this show. Oh, and the Captain. He’s about at Jenny’s maturity level with his whole let’s-run-off-to-Dominica! gambit. Tell me the TSA can’t identify Fake New York’s most-wanted financial fugitive when he comes through JFK?

It’s a good think I’m not a van der Woodsen, because on Thanksgiving I like to wear elastic-waist pants.

So Nate and Vanessa and Eric all returned this week, to varying results. I’m still not Vanessa’s #1 Biggest Fan, because I’m jealous of her hair and because everything she says makes me want to take a cheese grater to my ears. But mostly because she seems to hover halfway between earnest do-gooder and devious schemer, and the result is that she’s not very good at either. Nate’s eyebrows did the lion’s share of the heavy lifting this week as his father returned and declared that the nest egg he stole from his clients bought a lovely house on a Caribbean island where the Captain, Anne, and Nate can all live in delightful criminal exile. Except that the Captain is planning on kidnapping his wife and child for ransom? Or something? Since the Captain came up with it, it was a shit plan. Nate, being the only person on this show (other than Eric) with a moral compass, thinks that’s a terrible idea! Because then, how will Hogwarts Yale know where to find him when they send their acceptance letter tied to a unicorn’s horn?!

Eric finally got an AWESOME storyline. After Bart slithered in and revealed that Eric’s gentleman friend might be poking his swim captain (so the Gossip Girl writers are penning their own slashfic now?), Chuck revealed that both he and Bart keep a private investigator on retainer. I am choosing to believe that this PI is Veronica Mars. And then Chuck let Eric into Bart’s Safe of Magical Spy Tricks, where he grabbed both his and Serena’s files. What will we learn next? That Serena actually killed someone at boarding school? That Eric is the product of Lily’s second marriage, to Daniel Craig? That Nate and Serena are ACTUALLY SIBLINGS OMG?! No, juicier: That Lily was institutionalized as a teenager for as-yet undisclosed mental-health issues and she didn’t tell her son about it when he tried to kill himself even though that would have, maybe, I guess, helped. But Eric is a wise little elf who is incapable of holding grudges, although that seems to be more an evolutionary flaw of the younger van der Woodsen generation than a strength, because mark my words, S, this will end in TEARS. Or blood and fire. One of those.

P.S. The delightful Aliya won our Gossip Girl giveaway from a few weeks ago. So the DVD, soundtrack, and SUPER AWESOME BOARD GAME will be going to Aliya’s house, since she had the best answer to Never Have I Ever: “Voted for Sarah Palin.” Brava, patriot! Watch in good health.