<em>Gossip Girl</em>: "Carrnal Knowledge"

Gossip Girl: "Carrnal Knowledge"

By Monica Kim

5:44 p.m. Feb. 2 2009

So for nostalgia’s sake, I went through and watched the first half of season one over the weekend. It’s interesting to see the direct contrast between then and now, even just between now and earlier this season. It’s just my opinion, but the storylines seem to be all over the place and coming out of nowhere, plus Nate, Vanessa and Jenny aren’t getting much screen time considering their main character status.

Summary

Blair: Gets revenge by posting on GG that Dan and Miss Carr are doing it. Nelly Yuki betrays her, and she gets expelled, but Daddy gets his lawyers together to defend her case. In the end, she gets back into school but loses some of Daddy’s respect for being a bratty liar.

Chuck: Wakes up in a hotel only remembering part of his night. Figures out that he was at “the ultimate private gentlemen’s club” where he had a quasi-liaison with his double-jointed dream girl. He tracks her down, but she says that she invited him because she thought he was Bart Bass, and when she figured out the truth, she had to drug him to protect him, which makes total sense. She tells him he has to forget/ignore everything he remembers, or he’ll be in danger. Unfortunately she seems to have disappeared. So it turns out Bart was a member of some sketchy, secret organization, and Chuck’s on a mission to find out what it is.

Serena/Dan: They’ve been distant ever since the whole “omg different colleges, our parents are dating” fiasco. And Dan’s been meeting up with Miss Carr (Serena’s mentor) outside of school hours… It’s okay though, she’s just reading his stories. After the rumor and Blair’s expulsion, Serena’s feeling a bit sketched out. She ends up seeing Dan creepily comforting Carr — he was caressing her face, pretty much — and turns the photo of it over to Blair (who uses it to get back into Constance). Serena realizes Dan/Carr weren’t hooking up, he was just inappropriately touching his teacher, but that things just aren’t working out between them. Again. S goes to apologize, but Carr shoots her down. Dan goes to apologize, and Carr jumps all over him. “I don’t teach at Constance anymore,” she said immediately before proceeding to statutorily rape him. Does 17 count as statutory in New York? Well regardless, turns out Carr isn’t being fired because there isn’t enough evidence… I bet she’ll be thrilled to find that out the morning after.

Nate/Vanessa: Were they on screen for longer than three minutes all together? Cute but useless.

Thoughts

Although a lot of drama went down, there really didn’t seem to be much going on overall. It wasn’t the most exciting of episodes, kind of a letdown.

Chuck’s story line is insanely random and kind of out there. Secret societies? This isn’t The Da Vinci Code, it’s a show about spoiled Upper East-siders. They’re supposedly going for an Eyes Wide Shut kind of story, but I’m not feeling it. I guess we’ll just have to see where they go with it.

Blair was really bratty and immature this episode. What happened to the whole “Grace Kelly, I’m 18 and going to be mature” bit? Hopefully Daddy’s disapproval will help her re-reform.

However, no cell-phone usage during school hours is mad harsh. And having to check them in? I too would have rebelled against the heinous witch Miss Carr.

Speaking of, I’m starting to think Miss Carr is more hate-able than Georgina. Teacher/student relationships are pretty taboo. It’ll be interesting to see what they’re like back in school. Tackling some pretty awkward and creepy material with this one, although I kind of get the feeling they’re going more for the shock-factor and not really focusing on in-depth, good stories.