Gossip Girl ep 17
If I may quote Miss Kylie Minogue, Wow Wow Wow WOW! What an episode of Gossip Girl this was.
At the risk of sounding like I’m 12 (I’m not), it was awesome. And weirdly, it was at its most awesome (seriously, I’m an adult, honest) when Blair and Chuck were on screen. Blair and Chuck whom I began the series loathing, grew to secretly quite like, and now to be honest, completely adore. Talk about character development. These two started off life in the pilot episode as mean, manipulative and generally malignant. And they still are all those things. But as well as that, they are also implacably loving, fiercely loyal, and thanks to magnetic performances from Leighton Meester and Ed Westwick, utterly mesmerising. They are bad and they are good, and in that way, they are all of us. Albeit in more expensive clothes.
Ostensibly, yes, this episode was about Serena. Serena sacrificing her relationship for reasons that didn’t make sense, Serena finally confessing the secret destroying her to her friends, and Serena getting the help she needed to gear up for her battle with a frankly psychotic enemy from her past. But, for me, this episode was about the people who helped Serena. Blair who saved her from her despair, Chuck who supported her, and Lily, her mother, who took Blair’s advice and helped her daughter throw open the door to her past and look on it in the light. Because it’s not the secrets that are the scariest thing, it’s the darkness and the loneliness of facing them by yourself. Gossip Girl this week was about facing secrets with family, whether it’s family by blood or the family of friends we choose for ourselves.
Sometimes we make the wrong choices. I used to like Dan, Serena’s boyfriend, but character development works both ways. As well as clever and kind, he is also judgemental and gullible, ill-equipped to deal with the machinations of the Manhattan elite. I don’t know whether their relationship will recover, I don’t know whether it should. Maybe Serena should look elsewhere for love and loyalty - she has it in her friends, Blair, Chuck and Nate. She has it in Lily, who, interestingly, was also a character I initially disliked but now like a great deal.
No matter. The Serena and Dan story will play out however it plays out. Gossip Girl, for me, is about Blair, and it’s about Chuck and it’s about the contradictions in all of us. And it’s brilliant.
