“Gossip Girl” — Seventeen Candles
Wow, that is so embarrassing for you.
Here’s a life lesson for all of us: while Guitar Hero is extremely cool, and girls who play Guitar Hero instantaneously become four times more attractive (that number shoots to eight if it’s a real guitar), and performing admirably on “Free Bird” at the expert setting is certainly cool in and of itself and reason for boasting, and having Guitar Hero set up at a Super Sweet Seventeen party is a nice touch… while all of this is true we should never overlook the fact that no one (NO ONE!) looks cool playing Guitar Hero. It is physically impossible, because no matter how hard you are rocking all anyone sees is some idiot prancing around with a tiny plastic guitar strapped to their stomach, and not even the hotness of Serena van der Woodsen can make us forget this. More after the jump…
All that being said, the Serena/Vanessa Guitar Hero square off at Blair’s birthday party might have been the single most gleeful, fun, idiotic, cheesy, awesome, ridiculous, embarrassing, forced and utterly amazing moment in the show’s short run. I mean, “Free Bird!” That moments later Serena would again momentarily explode at Dan for things that are kind of out of his control or not all that important (like failing to tell her first that his mom has returned from the suburbs) just points a finer point on why this show is so fun to watch: because it’s more or less always ridiculous and completely unapologetic about this fact.
Now, while multicolored keys weren’t being pressed in time to seventies hard-rock classics, there were some serious romantic entanglements a-brewin’. For starters, Nate, who for the first time ever seemed to be an actual human being and not just a mopey rich kid (coincidence that he also happens to have split with Blair?), gets pressure from his parents to get back together with Blair, not so much for the sake of love but because his dad’s recent legal troubbbles would be helped by a proposed acquisition deal with the Waldorf family (honestly, I don’t really understand this part, but suffice to say there are external pressures). Nate considers getting back together with her, but in the end opts to skip the birthday party and instead go hand out with young Jenny Humphrey, who are later caught hugging on the Gossip Girl website. SHOCKING!
Elsewhere, and maybe a little inexplicably, Chuck has fallen head over heals for the newly single Blair, going so far as to buy her an extremely expensive though more or less ugly diamond necklace. Blair is conflicted. She wants the storybook love life with Nate, but Chuck, well he’s just so… um… daterapey available.
Guitar Hero exhibitionism aside, the best moment of the episode cam right off the top when Blair went to confession to look for guidance and bare her soul about her recent back-seat transgressions with the aforementioned Chuck. It was funny and maybe kind of sweet and like Nate this week was the first time Blair came off as anything other than an annoying rich girl. The show is at its best when it allows its characters personalities to bleed through the type (kind of a no-brainer, really). Leighton Meester, who plays Blair had an especially strong episode, running the gamut of emotions (or at least those sanctioned by top ranking CW brass).
Tags: Gossip Girl, The CW
