I have to say that I absolutely loved this episode for the most part, and it’s definitely one of my favorite season finales for all of the shows that I watched last year. It’s also one of the few shows that had me thinking about the season finale and speculating about what will happen next season all summer long. Although, I suppose some people might consider the episode before the season finale part one of the season finale, because it ended with several cliffhangers and this episode pretty much picks up right where the previous episode ended. To me, they are two separate episodes. The only other shows that have had me thinking about their season finales this much all summer long are House and The Office. I think the reason why I’ve been thinking about the season four finale of Gossip Girl all summer is because it had a lot of cliffhangers and shocking plot twists, which I will discuss later in this post.
This sure was a pretty suspenseful episode with Charlie acting very erratically and Serena, Vanessa, Dan, and Rufus all looking for her after he runs off and nobody can find her, and Russell Thorpe holding Blair hostage. The whole search for Charlie was rather interesting to me, but I found Russell’s reasoning for holding Blair hostage as a way to hurt Chuck pretty lame. After all, part of Russell’s vendetta against Chuck and the rest of Chuck’s family was due to his wife’s death, but they said that his wife’s death in the fire years ago was essentially his fault, which makes his holding Blair hostage kind of idiotic. I’m glad that Chuck, Nate and Raina found Blair fairly quick, because of the stupidity of the writing for explaining Russell’s reason for holding Blair hostage was truly pathetic.
I’m also glad that Raina learned the truth about her mother’s death being her father’s fault and turned her back on him. He definitely deserved that. I really hope that Russell and Raina Thorpe won’t be back for season five though. I think that they are both rather boring.
One thing that I’m confused about is the fact that they said that Russell was holding Blair hostage in Chuck’s new hotel. Maybe I’m forgetting something, but I don’t remember anyone mentioning Chuck getting a new hotel prior to this episode.
Also, I don’t get how Blair and Chuck found out about the bar mitzvah that they crashed. I know that they pretty much just showed Blair and Chuck at the bar mitzvah during a montage with several of the other characters off doing their own thing without any dialogue between them at the party, but from looks of it, it looks like they somehow became the center of attention at that bar mitzvah. That’s pretty rude, if you ask me. The guests’ attention should have been focused on whoever’s bar mitzvah it was, not Blair and Chuck. I hate how characters on the show like Blair, Chuck and Serena constantly seem to steal the spotlight at times when people’s attention should be focused on someone else. It makes them all pretty narcissistic, especially Chuck and Serena.
I found it pretty frustrating that Blair once again found herself being drawn in by Chuck and almost left Louis to get back together with Chuck. Doesn’t she remember that it wasn’t all that long ago that Chuck attacked her in a fit of rage? I’m glad that Chuck decided to be selfless for once and gave Blair and Louis his blessing for them to get married, even if being with Louis isn’t entirely what Blair wants now. Regardless, Louis is definitely a lot better for Blair than Chuck is. I really want Dan and Blair to be a real couple though.
One of the main highlights of this episode was definitely the return of Georgina Sparks who is now married to some guy who’s raising Milo as if he were his own son. It’s obvious that the domestic life doesn’t agree with Georgina. She spent the whole episode trying to get involved with all of the chaos that was going on with everyone trying to find Blair and Charlie. I laughed really hard when Dan said that whenever there’s trouble going on, the last thing that anyone would want is for her to get involved with it.
My other favorite moment with Georgina is the part where Charlie, who’s drunk, runs into her and asks her where there’s a window that she could jump out of, and Georgina tells her where an open window is! That was both wrong on so many levels, and yet it was absolutely hilarious all at the same time. It was also classic Georgina to say something that alludes to the idea that she may have been at least somewhat responsible for the death of an old lady who was staying in a hospice, so she could have the old lady’s house, which I thought was very twisted, but extremely hilarious at the same time. Georgina wouldn’t really be Georgina if she didn’t do and say stuff like that.
As much as Serena typically annoys me, I did like the part where she finally finds Charlie when she was about to jump out of a window because she’s upset that she’ll never be like Serena. It was really nice to Serena admit that she has often times been unable to make her own decisions and that she couldn’t really decide between Dan or Nate the previous summer. I thought it was also interesting that Serena said that she didn’t even decide on her own to go to Paris the past summer, Blair decided that for her. Serena is still my least favorite character on the show, but I have a lot of respect for her apologizing for her indecisive nature in the past, especially when it comes to her love life though. I’m glad that she told Charlie that they would get her some help for her condition, which I’m guessing is that they think Charlie is bipolar. However, after everyone except for Charlie and Georgina left the room, Georgina told Charlie that she knew that all of the weird things that she had done were all an act, and not brought on by not taking her medication. Georgina gave Charlie her phone number and told her to keep in touch when she told everyone that she was planning to go back to stay with Carol until she was ready to live on the Upper East Side.
It turns out that Georgina was right about Charlie’s behavior all being an act, because toward the very end of the episode. They revealed that “Charlie” was actually a con artist named Ivy who Carol had hired to impersonate Charlie, because she didn’t want the rest of her family to come looking for the real Charlie. They also showed Ivy giving Carol the checkbooks for Charlie’s trust fund. Why Carol hired a con artist to impersonate her daughter, I’m not sure. If I had to guess, I would say that either the real Charlie is dead, which might mean no one would get the money from her trust fund that her grandmother had set up for Charlie. My other guess is that Carol is just being greedy and wants the money for herself. After Carol left Ivy, they showed Ivy taking the piece of paper with Georgina’s phone number on it, which I’m also hoping is foreshadowing that Ivy and Georgina will be teaming up as a part of some scheme since Kaylee DeFer has been made a series regular for season five.
Based on the spoilers that I have read for season five of Gossip Girl, it sounds like Ivy will be returning determined to ruin Serena’s family from within by pretending once again to be Charlie. I’m wondering if Georgina will be involved with that somehow. Also, given the fact that Ivy is a con artist and that she isn’t actually Charlie like all of the other characters think, I can’t help but wonder how the producers keep her around, especially if she’s going to try and destroy Serena’s family. Maybe the producers aren’t planning to keep Kaylee DeFer around for more than season five, or even the entire year. The other theory that I have is that perhaps she’ll decide to give up her attempts to destroy Serena’s family on her own before she does anything too unforgivable. If Ivy’s lies are exposed by another character after she’s done a lot of damage, perhaps the writers have a plan to somehow redeem Ivy so she can stick around.
Another thing that I’m wondering about is that there were still a few of the checkbooks for Charlie’s trust fund in Ivy’s bag after she was done talking to Carol and if that is meaningless and Ivy doesn’t realize that there were still some checkbooks in her purse, or if Ivy intentionally decided to keep some of the checkbooks for herself to use. This is one thing about the finale that I’ve been thinking about all summer, and I’m anxious to see how everything with Ivy plays out in season five.
During the search for Charlie, Vanessa came across a book that Dan had secretly been working on for years, which is apparently about all of his friends, and she read it. Vanessa told Dan that she understands him a lot better and that he seems to have always wanted to get into the social world of the Upper East Side even more than Jenny ever did. Dan was furious with Vanessa for reading it, and told her that he didn’t want to publish it because the people he wrote about are his friends now and he thinks if they ever read it, he would always be an outsider. However, Vanessa did say that some of them might like what Dan wrote about them, and that she wasn’t talking about Serena. I’m guessing that she was referring to Blair and that he must have revised the parts of his book where he talked about her once he and Blair started spending time together and became friends to put her in a more favorable light.
Dan seems to be pining for Blair big time now, because he seemed kind of sad when he was talking to Blair about her getting married to Louis and he also told her that if she ever gets lonely living in Louis’ family’s palace that he’s always a phone call away and they can watch movies together over the phone like they did in previous episodes of the season. Blair seemed to like that idea, because she had already picked out a movie for them to watch. I have to say that I’m really rooting for Dan and Blair to become a real couple in season five. I’ve always liked their scenes together, but their scenes together in the second half of season four when they became friends were beyond amazing.
I thought it was pretty harsh of Vanessa to tell Dan that she thinks his life was better before he met Serena, but it was also pretty harsh of Dan to tell Vanessa that his life was a lot better before she moved back to Brooklyn four years ago. Just when I thought Vanessa couldn’t become any more of a villain than she already is now, she took Dan’s book with her when they got off the phone and submitted it to a publisher anonymously, telling the publisher to send the checks for the book to her. That was a major “fuck you” to Dan before she left New York to go study abroad on Vanessa’s part, if you ask me, and I’m also guessing that she isn’t going to actually give the money to Dan like she told the publisher. I bet she’ll end up keeping the money for herself.
After Dan’s phone call with Vanessa, Dan told Rufus at the end of the episode that he thinks his writing days are over. I’m not sure what to make of that. Maybe he’s feeling guilty about writing a book about his friends now even though he doesn’t want to publish it.
I liked the scene between Chuck and Nate at the end of the episode when Nate tells Chuck that he must really be depressed about Blair being with Louis if he’s not drinking in an attempt to numb the pain he’s feeling. I’m glad that Chuck acknowledged that Louis brought out the side of Blair that he fell in love with, but I still don’t consider myself a fan of the Chuck and Blair pairing anymore.
They also seem to have set up a potentially interesting storyline for Serena in season five. It looks like she’s going to become involved with a movie studio next season that’s making a movie based on her favorite book, The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, serving as a studio executive it seems. If that storyline ends up with Serena being cast as the main female character in the movie, I would find that extremely ironic because I personally think that Blake Lively couldn’t give a good performance in anything even if her life depended on it. I’ve seen her brother, Eric Lively, in several things though, namely The L Word, and I think he’s a much better actor than she is. I’m guessing that having a talent for acting skipped a generation with Blake.
The season four finale had one last shocker; they showed a pregnancy test that was positive in Blair’s trashcan as Dorota was taking the trash out at the end of the episode. If I had to guess, the pregnancy test won’t end up being hers’ or it was Blair’s pregnancy test it’s a false positive. Perhaps it was Blair’s mother’s, Eleanor, pregnancy test. I think I remember reading that Blair’s mother had a child with Cyrus in the book series. One thing is for sure, I don’t see any of the younger girls on the show having a baby and keeping it. I’m guessing that if one of the girls is indeed pregnant, she’ll end up having a miscarriage or giving the baby up for adoption.
All in all, I thought that this episode was a great way to end season four. Season four is definitely my second favorite season of Gossip Girl after season one even though season four had several episodes that I absolutely hated. I’m really excited for season five to start.
All that being said, I give this episode a rating of an A-.
No comments :
Post a Comment