Gossip Girl - Rhodes to Perdition

Proving that we listen to commenters and we take requests, we took a study break long enough to write about the last Gossip Girl episode. We’ll probably go ahead and throw in this Monday’s finale too, because Gossip Girl finales are usually eventful.

Less eventful was this penultimate episode. It dealt with Charlie a lot. This show is trying to make her a little sympathetic, because she wants a family and had no dad or something.

But it’s really hard to forgive the fact that she is stealing and tricking everyone. Plus, what kind of psycho wants someone else’s family. And what kind of psycho wants THE RHODES-HUMPHREYS, one the worst, most dysfunctional families on TV.

So it’s hard to care about all the Charlie stuff. We don’t think she is going to be a permanent fixture on the show and we don’t care about her. It all seems like a distraction or a waste of time. It was more interesting to see Blair trying to figure out the secret of Chuck’s newfound mental and emotional help. When Blair finds out that Chuck started making real progress when he dropped the ring off at Harry Winston, Blair assumes that she was the reason for Chuck’s darkness, rather than the other way around.

Because he's awesome now, and he won't torture Blair just for the sake of it anymore. Chuck makes it clear that she is wrong. Then Chuck commiserates with Nate over how he has become the man for Blair just in time for her to marry someone else. He says he can’t imagine a time when he won’t love her. This was so beautiful. Our hearts grew three sizes that day….

Dan goes on Twitter pretending to be a random fan of his book. A Dan lover. Pathetic. Of course Dan is his own number one fan. He's alienated the other contender for that title: his dad. Dan goes online to do this in response to a Twitter hater who turns out to be his agent, Alessandra, trying to get him talked about. It works when Katy Perry retweets their online feud.

One of Nate’s reporters finds out that Tripp’s deceitful wife, Maureen, is cheating on him. Nate figures out that she is faking an affair in order to win Tripp sympathy and bolster his career. Nate finds a classy way to address this on his news site but keep everyone anonymous at the same time. We like Nate, but having him be classy AND run a gossip site doesn't really make sense. What gossip can he print and still be classy? Is he going to just be a regular news site? There aren't really a lack of news publications in New York City.

CeCe (oh, hey, another person who don’t care about at all) came to town with cancer again (the only way to keep this woman interesting). Ivy finds out and gains CeCe’s trust by keeping the cancer a secret. She uses all the new trust to run Max out of town and get the whole family to back her against him and believe her crazy stories. Serena now believes that Max was just using her to get to Charlie, and she is all grateful to Charlie for trying to protect her.

Blahblahblah. We hate Charlie, CeCe, and Aunt Carol, although we do want to know what really went down with the real cousin Charlie. And CeCe is looking good lately. What a pretty older woman. We also love CeCe's insistence on calling Charlie "Charlotte." But why does CeCe get to have a nickname? Should she go by Cecilia, since she is so traditional she can't use "Charlie"?

We have high hopes for the finale. Once again, watching Chuck heal is just as fascinating as watching him get hurt and be a bad boy. We love when TV characters experience growth. That was one of the things we loved about Sex and the City, for example. The four girls started out a maniac, a shallow one-night-stand addict, a workaholic, and a woman who was only interested in living out romantic, perfect fantasies rather than finding a real person. If you’ve seen that show, you know how drastically those women changed and it was a very deliberate journey for each of them, crafted carefully by the writers.

We really want Gossip Girl to do something like that with all of its characters. These kids need to grow up. Having Nate classily running a business and Chuck facing his demons is a great start. Now what about whiny/self-righteous Dan, naïve/victim Serena, and jealous/shallow Blair? Let the journeys progress, even if yoga masters must be included.

Episode grade: B-