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Friday, August 5, 2011

Gossip Girl: Dan and Blair go on a road trip, and Serena goes on a trip down memory lane (My thoughts on episode 4.11: The Townie)


I have to say that I absolutely loved this episode. Serena didn’t even annoy me for the most part in this episode, which hasn’t happened since the beginning of season two. The highlight of this episode for me was definitely the scenes between Dan and Blair when they go on their road trip to track down Juliet. I’ve always loved their scenes together, and the banter between them is always fun to watch.

The reason Serena didn’t annoy me in this episode was the fact that it revisited the way Serena was when the show started. It also gave us some backstory on what happened with Serena when she went away to boarding school after she slept with Nate at the Shepard wedding and part of the reason why she was so determined to turn over a new leaf and not be a wild party girl when she returned from boarding school.

Back to the main highlight of the episode: Dan and Blair. It really was a lot of fun to watch them work together to track down Juliet and deal with her once and for all. Their scenes together have always been pure gold and this episode was no exception. In my opinion, Dan is one of the most morally grounded characters on the show, and yet he also has this really fun schemer side that comes out from time to time, so having him team up with Blair in who’s almost always concocting some kind of scheme in this episode was pure genius on the writers’ part.

In my opinion, despite the difference in their economic status Dan is a much more suitable match for Blair than Chuck is in terms of who Blair should be with. Dan and Blair are the same intellectual level, and they do seem to have a lot in common with each other if you really think about it. The last scene between them at the end of the episode pretty much proved that when they told each other that they were planning to go to film forum over the holiday break while they were cleaning the dishes. If you ask me, all Blair and Chuck have in common is there constant need to scheme, get revenge on people who’ve wronged them and their obsession with elevating their social status. To me, those aren’t the ingredients for a healthy relationship. Dan and Blair, on the other hand are two people that I think could have a healthy romantic relationship with each other that would be based on genuine feelings and mutual respect for each other. I also like that Blair pointed out that Dan hadn’t been doing any writing in a long time, and that it’s obvious he took her words to heart since he said that he wanted to do some writing over the holiday break at the end of the episode.

Another highlight of this episode for me was the return of Damien Dalgaard. I’ve always thought that Kevin Zegers plays the role very well, and I thing that Damien is a very interesting character. I really like it the writers brought him back for some episodes in season four. It was also nice to get some more backstory on Damien by having him appear in the flashbacks of Serena’s time at boarding school. I found it kind of surprising that he was a bit of a nerd when he went to boarding school with Serena. I really hope that the writers continue to periodically bring Damien back from time to time in the future.
I’m glad that we finally got a little bit more backstory on Juliet and what the deal is with her parents. They showed Juliet and Ben’s mother and she mentioned that Donovan was her first husband’s last name, which explains why Juliet and Ben have different last names. They didn’t really explain what the deal is with Juliet’s dad. Perhaps he abandoned Juliet’s family or he died and he didn’t leave them any money when he died, leaving Juliet’s cousin, Colin, to support her financially. After all, in the flashback where they showed Juliet, Ben, and their mother when learned about the forged afavadit Juliet said that they were “nobodies”, so maybe they didn’t have very much money to begin with. If there’s one thing about the whole Juliet revenge plot against Serena storyline that I think the writers could have handled better, it would be that I think they could have done a better job of explaining why Colin is the one who was supporting Juliet financially.

The fact that this episode featured flashbacks to explain the rest of the mystery of what happened with Ben and Serena and how that led to Juliet and Ben concocting their revenge plot against Serena kind of reminded me of Desperate Housewives and how they’ve usually used flashbacks to reveal the remaining details of the mystery of season in their season finales over the years. I don’t think the writers of Gossip Girl should do a mystery plot every season now, but I think the writers should consider doing another mystery storyline of sorts in the fifth or sixth season. I wouldn’t want them to do another mystery storyline just for the sake of doing another storyline like this one and make it a habit like Desperate Housewives has.

Frankly, I think a lot of the mysteries on Desperate Housewives were written very poorly and badly paced after season one. At this point, I think the writers of Desperate Housewives really need to drop the whole mystery of the season concept of the show. I just don’t think it’s working very well anymore. Anyway, I digress. I think that as long as the writers of Gossip Girl can come up with another idea for a mystery plot that isn’t extremely contrived and poorly handled that they should do another storyline like this. I thought that the storyline with Juliet had good pacing, did a good job of bringing all of the characters into the storyline and really helped the show get back to its roots instead of just being some extraneous storyline that didn’t have any point to it. I thought that Katie Cassidy did a wonderful job playing the role of Juliet and making her a villain of sorts that wasn’t purely bad. There were definitely times where I felt sorry for Juliet. For example, when Colin cut her off financially after he found out that she took pictures of him with Juliet and continued her vendetta against Serena after he told her to end it; I still felt sorry for her even though Juliet kind of had it coming to her since she explicitly defied Colin.

I have to say that I also felt that Juliet and Ben were kind of justified when it comes to their vendetta against Serena. After all, they were led to believe that Serena had signed the affidavit saying that she had had an inappropriate relationship with Ben, which resulted in Ben being sent to prison for four years even though he was innocent. They had no idea that Lily had forged Serena’s signature on affidavit. I know that Lily did that because she felt that it was the only way to get Serena back into Constance when she decided to return to the Upper East Side at the start of the series, but that was extremely reprehensible on Lily’s part to do something that would send an innocent man to prison. She should have tried harder to make things right once she realized what she had done.

I also found the subplot with Lily and Chuck working together to deal with business matters for Bass Industries and damage control with the press regarding the whole situation with Serena overdosing on drugs. Although, I think it was wrong for Lily to go behind Chuck’s back and put Bass Industries up for sale. After all, it was Chuck’s father’s company, and Lily isn’t even Chuck’s biological mother. She’s simply his legal guardian, and she had told him that she would merely be running Bass Industries until he was ready to run it himself so his uncle Jack couldn’t take control of the company away from him, never to give it back to him. All things considered, I would not want to be Lily right now.

Once again, I found myself loving Nate’s storyline because it focused on his family drama rather than his love life. Nate’s family drama is a 100X more interesting than the problems that he has with his love life. I do think it was pretty stupid on Nate’s dad A.K.A. The Captain’s part to use Nate’s mother, Anne, and Nate’s address as his residency to get parole and use Anne’s money lease a house outside of the city. This time I think Anne is justified in filing for divorce, because The Captain clearly hasn’t changed at all like he had been saying. I do think it was nice of Nate to go away with his dad for the holidays after he got out of prison though.

The only thing Serena did that annoyed me in this episode was the fact that it seemed pretty obvious that she still has feelings for Ben is on some level interested in acting on them since they don’t have to worry about Serena being underage or Ben being her teacher anymore. At least Serena is trying to fix Lily’s mistake and get Ben out of prison, so I’ll try to look past Serena’s obvious ongoing interest in Ben. I was also mildly annoyed with Serena when she basically tried to ask Dan out on a date at the end of the episode, but at least he turned her down and she realized that it wouldn’t be a good idea for them to get back together.

All in all, I absolutely loved this episode, so I give it a rating of an A+.

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