Gossip Girl - "There Might Be Blood"

Finally we get a week off from the Chuck and Blair show and I've got to say that this was probably one of the strongest episodes in a while.

I thought that the central storyline, involving Jenny's efforts to stage a guerilla fashion show (and not, as I had hoped, a gorilla fashion show), was reasonably compelling. The Jenny-Nate-Vanessa triangle is shockingly compelling and Jenny's bubbly, destructive self-absorption can be interesting when used in the right way.

After last week, Nate and Jenny aren't talking (apparently Jenny also forgot that even she was creeped out by Weird Model In Need of Acting Lessons) and Jenny's been working on a secret project: the aforementioned act of fashion terrorism (speaking of fashion terrorism, I didn't mention Jenny's awful new haircut or equally ugly outfit last week, but both seemed to improve this go around). Jenny, with the help of WMINOAL's sketchy friends, busted up a gala event honoring Lilly and Bart.

To be honest, everything before and after the fashion show worked, but I had a couple of issues with the event itself. First of all, I didn't find it nearly as awesomely rebellious as the show seemed to (and a note to Jemina Pearl and Thurston Moore: nice try, but no). Is it really that punk rock to bust up a party like that if your stated goal is to get funding? Shouldn't she have been trying to say something a little deeper than "pay me?" I also didn't like that everyone seemed to love it. If everyone loved it then the stakes are dramatically lower and there's no real consequence to her actions? And aren't these supposed to be old, boring people? No one was bothered by this?

That said, I thought the ending kinda redeemed this. Rufus' poor parenting and Jenny's refusal to care about anything but Jenny make for some interesting conflict. Its hard to say who's worse off at the end of the episode, but I'm going to go with Jenny, just because running off to live with WMINOAL is only ending in tears.

Meanwhile, Blair faced off against a mini-Blair (who reads Gossip Girl obsessively but hadn't seemed to have heard of Blair) in order to get on the good side of someone who can get her into Yale. The girl is determined to have her cherry popped before her friend Muffy, but Blair needs to stop her from doing that. Blair succeeds, thanks to an assist from Chuck who plants a fake story about Muffy on Gossip Girl. It was a pretty slight plot, but it gave Blair the chance to finally get catty again and we also saw a really nice moment of humanity in the end. Again, I felt kind of let down that Blair didn't end up blackmailing her way into Yale (because how perfect would that have been), but nonetheless it looks like she and Serena will be classmates. I also thought it was interesting, considering how both Blair and Jenny alluded to her, that Eleanor was absent. Given how her real daughter may have just opened up some previously untapped feelings and her fake daughter just declared fashion war in the New York Times, I would be kind of disappointed if we don't hear from her next week.

In other news, Dan judged Nate and, more interestingly, was inspired by his failure to connect with Yale professors and Jenny's rebellion to write the Chuck Bass Story - a move that I whole-heartedly support. Rufus didn't approve, but I'd say there's a difference between publicly airing out the tawdry affairs of Chuck, who has never been anything but obnoxious to Dan, and what Jenny did. And I think its better if Dan doesn't always do the "right" thing. Meanwhile, in the night's only plotline that didn't connect for me, Serena continued to try to connect with her Creepy Ex-Husband (seriously, you would have to change very few details of this storyline to make it fit on South Park). Serena, here's a bit of free advice: if you try to speak to or call someone three times and each time you end up talking to a different girl, the guy you are dealing with is sleazy. Ah, but young Serena finds his douchey advances irresistable, so we will be treated to another week of CEH.

Still, those are but small concerns for an episode that was otherwise pretty good. And on a week like this, I'm willing to let a few small things go.

B+