Gossip Girl!! What did you doooo??? Last night's episode definitely stepped on some toes, what with its swift plotting and actual things happening. Josh Schizzy must be pissed, yo. Queller, was this your doing?

I mean, hah!, before you get all excited, it wasn't really a good episode. Actually it was sort of more ludicrous than any other episode because the show decided to pretend that it was TV and have things occur in an unfolding, point A to B to C to D etc. plot structure. And when that happens it means that people who look like hardened and sculpted blocks of fromage get treated like they're real people. What the hell am I saying? On to the episode!

You know what's charming about Natalie Archibald? Nothing. He's Greenland. All icy uselessness. So why is Blairbeetle dating him? Because he's a shiny smooth sexfop with a hidden drinking problem. Actually I just made the drinking problem part up, but wouldn't that be interesting? Like if Nate was furtively sluicing booze down his gullet while Blair twirled in the fore? That should happen. You hear me, Savage? Make Nate's horrible, shameful, secret drinking problem happen. Then I won't feel so alone.

But Blair and Nate were dating, is what did happen, and they were so in love. But there was one problem. Blair hates black people and "middle class professionals" so she will not take the surbwee. Why won't you take the surbwee, Blair? It's so much fun. Why just this morning I was crammed onto the F train, didn't even have room to open my book (it's about Paris! Because I'm going there! In five days! Wheeeeee!!!!!!!) and read it. So I just stood there. Feeling that strange feeling of a stranger's ass pressing against yours. I imagine it's like when Diana Ross has sex. What is this thing...? And what of this? Chile, turn on the damn lights. Blair honey, I feel your pain. But you should try it! There's a world of adventure going down undah groun', not just scary Mole People. Though the Mole People do, definitively, exist. And one day when the train is stopped between stations, they will attack. And they will eat my skin. Of this I'm convinced.

Blair and Nate were fighting because he's a twinkbot and she's going to NYU and so they're gonna be like miles apart! Which brings up an interesting conundrum that many a high school show has faced. What do you do when your stars go to college? Do you bring in a whole new crowd, like the dark-eyed warlocks at Disney are doing for High School Musical 4? (That kid, you know the annoying one from the third movie, he's starring in the fourth one, so I guess he's not "new" but he certainly is awful.) Or do you take the bartered ridiculous route of having people serendipitously end up at the same place. You know like SBTB: The College Years or Dawson's Creek, where everyone lived in Boston except none of them did. Griswold's Girls has decided to opt for the latter. But, Richard, you might ask, your glasses falling off your face as you fart into your desk chair, isn't Serena going to Brown and Dan going Yale? Like aren't those in other states? You'd think!

But as it turns out, no. See what had happened with Dan: Rufus, an old dishrag that someone taught to play the guitar, is selling his life. He's taken off his beardwig and poked out the glass eye and unscrewed the wooden walkin' stick from his knee and that's that. Because Dan wants to go to Yale sooooo badly. Dan and his younger brother Jenny feel real just regular terrible about this and, aw gee mister, isn't there anythin' we can do? But there isn't. Rufus would like to remain stoic and muted, all trussed up like some man from the 1950's, except that Rufus is basically Robin Tunney wearing a beardwig, so there's nothing really American Man about him. But oh well. Also, because of the fire in the writers' room, Garfunkel's Gaggle decided that last night Rufus would have two competing narratives, neither of which made sense. Did he want to marry Lil Rounds? Or did he want to sell the catalogue of his Deep Blue Nothing Lincoln Hawk songs? A catalogue worth millions! Just think of the hits! Like "Can't Stop Thinkin' About Chat Rooms," "Why Is Seattle The Coolest?", and "Did You Hear About Neve Campbell". These are very important, classical songs, man. And the Coffee Connection is never goin' out of business! Fuckin' Models, Inc. forever, man!

So that was happening in Brooklyn. Meanwhile on the Upper Beast Side, Sereenz was having sex with a wooden clock that someone put a magic spell on and made animate. All Gideon does is tick-tock with his big stupid cuckoo face, and Serena falls crazy in love with him. Everything about him is perfect! Except for everything about him. See, isn't he a bit mysterious? And remember when a while back the news was all "Oh, yeah, on Gargamel's Galley Serena is going to be dating Raphael Follieri or whatever Anne Hathaway's grifter boyfriend was named." Like, that was going to be a plotline? And you were like "Oh, that sounds cool." Yeah, well, this is it America. It's a mound of baloney talking to Serena and thinking he's people. That's your exciting high-finance espionage plotline! It involves ONE FUCKING SCENE where he talks to old people (and Sinead O'Rebellion, Rufus Humphrey) and takes their money for his big WiFi investment idea.

Now, I have no idea how this will precipitate Sarlena not going to Providence, but it will. She'll fall down a mineshaft or explode like a dying star or all of her momz money will be taken so she can't afford Brown and has to go to poor people school (Fordham, Lincoln Center campus). So Brown will be out. But Serena will be in. In the meantime, though!

Blair is suspicious! It's partly because she is butt-crazy in love with Josh Chuck, and it's partly because she loves the thrill of the hunt, but it's mostly because Natalie Archibald is a strange doll made by a crazy Austrian professor that only knows the words for "water" and "sex toy." So she's bored as hell, and has decided that Gideon is not to be trusted. What a shocking fucking turn of events that she turned out to be right. What aroused her suspicion was a simple anecdote, a casual wrist flick back into history that didn't sit right with her, like Pad Thai after 10pm. What had happened with Gideon: he told everyone that even though Serena met him while roofie'd by Dawn Summers, things were totes cool and they just met at Butter which is fine, whatevs. Trouble is: Butter was closed that night. See, Blair had been using their chef for her Nellie Yuki SAT assassin plot last season, so it couldn't have been at Butter. So, that's totally sneaky right? Right.

Meanwhile Nate was puttering and whirring in his slick, bejeweled way, trying to figure out how these crazy kids were going to solve the affair of the surbwee. Instead of saying "grow the hell up Blair and be a person," he decided that the best course of action was to rent an apartment for himself and his beloved to live in. That way they could have awkward not-sex and then take cars to their schools. I mean this sincerely. There was a plotline on Gilgamesh Gilmores about a girl not wanting to take the subway, so let's move in. That's where this show is at right now. Next week Vanessa is allergic to cereal, so she runs for state senate.

But really—I mean let's not oversimplify here!—Natalie didn't want to live with Blair because of the subway thing. He wanted to live with her because he was jealous of Charlene Bassington. Charlene and Blair have this mystical connection, and all he has is an elaborate series of pedals and dials that cause his porcelain penis to make pumping action. So if they live together, then he'll be able to keep her! Hold her close to his ivory bosom, her heaving breath and his processors whirring, and there they would stay forever. Pooping back and forth, forever. The funny thing is that he said he found an apartment that was equidistant between Columbia and NYU, so that would actually be Hell's Kitchen. Which is funny, because, you know, gay people. Nate is gay. Is the joke. Nate, gay. Hilarious. Actually! Apparently the apartment was in Murray Hill? Which makes no sense? Because why would they live on the east side if they both went to school west? Especially Nate? Can you imagine trying to get to Columbia from 31st and 3rd every morning? No thanks.

So while Nate sat there, twiddling his apartment keys, Blair and Chuckles went scheming. They just didn't trust Gideon, so they planted the seed of doubt in Serena's melony head, though she initially yelled them off and said "you're jerks" and then began weeping like an asshole. She wanted to trust Gideon so badly because they're so in love after being in these three episodes together, I mean they were almost Spanish married! And everyone knows that a Spanish marriage is the equivalent of an American fingering! So they're at least going steady. The trouble is, like I mentioned earlier, B&C were right. Gideon is no goodeon. He's still boffing Poppy Montgomery and, worst still, he's stealing people's money. Including Ruby Foo Rufus's.

Yeah, Rufus showed up at the Give Gideon Money to Make This Episode Happen party, and he sadly asked to invest his savings. Gideon blinked at him and said "You want me to invest a Mac Perfoma and a framed headshot of Liv Tyler?" And Rufus nodded gravely. After he said "don't patronize me", which was funny and sad. Because if you have to say, as a grownass man, "don't patronize me" to a guy who is dating your teenaged son's future half-step-sister, then you have failed as a person. That's it. If Gideon the rotisserie chicken can talk down to you: F minus. But anyway. Serena figured out that Gideon was lying, but it was a bit too late, because he'd already gone a'griftin' and Poppy's haircut isn't paying for itself and oh god next week is going to be about the economy, isn't it? I hate life.

Dan, meanwhile, got drunk with Vanessa. That didn't make any sense, but it was a fun excuse for those two actors to pretend like they were drinking and drunk and there was a funny shot of Dan passed out like an asshole on his bed. I wouldn't know anything about that. I mean, I didn't wake up in my pants this morning or anything. I didn't wake up on my bed rather than in it. Subtle difference there. But a significant one. Yes, he got drunk with V, our most needless character, and she confessed that she twiddled diddles with Chuckles, and he confessed that he's not, in fact, going to Yale. Because he's poor and the world only spins in one direction, and there's this camera crew here and I'm actually saying lines and Dan doesn't actually exist and my real name is Penn. Yeah, Penn. I'm tennis balls.

I don't know? Other things happened? Blair and Chuck, to prove Serena right and to anger Nate into frowning in that way that he does (Nate has: concerned frown, angry frown, furrowed brow of perplexion, and furrowed brow of sex confusion), they went to see Georgina. See cause Georgina would know if Butter was open. So turns out she's born again, and whatever, Chuck and Georgie saw kindreds in each other and they're totally gonna scheme it up come next week. The world, as I mentioned, only spins in one direction.

This is the worst recap ever written, and I apologize. But sometimes life intervenes and life, all winey and ridiculous, did in fact intervene last night. Did I mention I'm going to Paris in five days? I mean, speaking of wine.

At the end of the episode everyone found out that Gideon was the killer. Serena and Walter ran up to the roof and they saw the fireworks, and they were so happy that Labor Day was so far off, because the summer was wonderful. Blair, Dan, and Mindy all decided to open that old bottle of champagne that Alan brought over for the housewarming, all those years ago. So they stood by the window and drank the dry old bottle and they laughed a lot. Nate and Chuck and Darryl made precarious love to each other, their eyes sparkling like ancient champagne. In the corner, Rufus sobbed, while holding an old, ugly witch's ring. What has the world come to, he wondered. Hadn't he just been jamming out to Five and sipping a Zima? Where did the 90's go?

Where did any of it go?