God, it’s so great to finally have a True Original Gossip Girl episode!! More than “They Shoot Humphreys, don’t they?” I think this one will go down in history! So many brilliant dramatic issues reached out for the surface, allowing us at last to catch a glimpse of everything that was going on deep down for “neglected” characters…And I must say I was thrilled to see that my predictions were correct, since those characters are mainly…BOYS! But there’s so much to talk about, let’s start:

I absolutely LOVED the episode’s beginning, the great music along with Dan’s strut (which can’t help to remind me of Travolta’s famous strut by the end of “Stayin’ Alive” or more recently, Tobey McGuire strut in Spiderman 3); we really got a new perspective of Dan’s personality on that episode, that new aspect being…he’s a complete idiot, both for what he did and for the vanity he claims upon it; but no big deal, personally seeing him that cool and “I’m too sexy for my shirt”‘ was cult and hot and funny…Well, let’s just say it, it was all pure Gossip Girl, especially if you add the next sequences, the fantasied remembrance of the threesome, we hardly had a glance of. Somehow, it was new to understand that in spite of all the talking and the “being original-from Brooklyn-I want to be a writer”, Dan in fact is nothing more than an average college boy having average college fantasies. And you have to admit that, if we pretend for one minute that Blair, Serena, Nate and Chuck don’t exist in the series, well maybe we would”nt have liked all this ordinariness that much. And this is where things become interesting for us. Gossip Girl is not about an average student boy leading a normal college life full of experiences. Gossip Girl is about the rich and famous from the Upper East Side, their rules, codes, borderlines and the pressure they can put to outcasts who cross their way, whether they want it or not.

That being reminded, the whole threesome thing seems nothing more than another unintended blunder from the series’ Lonely Boy. He expected to bring this story to Nate like a trophy -the question remaining is, a trophy of what exactly, of awesomeness (“How awesome am I?!”)?- and he ends up losing his actual girlfriend and his true girlfriend. If we all were Upper East Siders we would pity him -or maybe make fun of him. But to most of us who aren’t (I suppose), we feel both the excitement and the delusion: for we too may have believed that besides money, one of the main things we envied the rich and famous was daring experiences, this strange mix of risk and adventure. And, “stupid” as we are, like Dan, we would have simply believed  confidence and self-assurance would do the trick:  the most important would then be to just do it.

Wrong: you can’t simply do it, make your fantasy come true: you also have to do it RIGHT. Who said anything about the rich and famous being more free from rules than we are? Good society, good “making your wish come true” experiences must be abided by. And in that case, the main rule was: in a threesome, the third person has to be a stranger, that’s all. Nate and Blair learned their lesson well from their “teacher”, Chuck. But instead of learning from his huge mistake and trying to avoid collateral damages, Dan remains under the influence of his perfect picture, without foreseeing any true clarification of the “status quo”. Even Olivia falls for some illusion (the scene where Vanessa kicks her out of bed) before accepting the truth. Vanessa is the one without any visual memory of the night, as well as she stands for the most lucid of them all, the one explicitly worried about the consequences. And the gap between her and Dan might have never been broader than when he kisses her on stage and sees, remembers and feels again the truth of his feelings for her -truth Olivia had also witnessed. On this very moment, Dan realizes that the only thing he managed to make come true through this threesome was his love for Vanessa. But since this love is just a very private experience, by the end of the episode it exists nowhere else but in his consciousness

In the previous episode, the girls were the ones highlighting the boys’ good sense and behavior;  here Dan turns the situation round, he underlines by contrast the girls’ perspectiveness, not only Olivia and Vanesse but also Blair who keeps cool to save her night (her absolute self control did impress me a lot, especially when considered the fun she had been made of by the Tisch students).

I shall end this first part out of two on the other Humphrey who fell into the same excitement-adventurous fantasy trap as her older brother -but we’re not surprised, Jenny has already shown she was capable of the worst as well as the best. Her movie-like “international drug dealer” (she even pictured him dealing in the alley) brings something new to her wealthy -yet boring- life. And I think here we all agree that his delusive figure makes her stupid…

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