Gossip Girl

Gossip Girl

Episode 9: Rhodes to Perdition

By: Carlos Uribe

Gossip Girl is a show about some wealthy college kids living their lives.

Spoiler Alert!

Charlie spends the whole episode trying to get money to Max so that he doesn't spill the beans. He is using his new romantic relationship with Serena to apply some pressure, since he threatens to use the newfound trust he has in her to tell her the truth. There's also some problem that grandma Rhodes needs to sign for a sum that large, and so they have to find a way to get her signature. Serena then finds out about the lie that Charlie told Lily about pretending to be Ivy. Serena pieces some info together and confronts everyone about it, but then buys Charlie's lie. Her secret is kept safe, no money had to be given to him, and he threatens to find a way to expose her. Overall, the plot continues to be stalled and create no real drama.

The problem is I don't care at all if Charlie's true identity is exposed. The whole drama that her pretense of being a Rhodes simply doesn't work as well as the writers seem to think it does. In fact, the viewer should be rooting for the exposure, not siding with Charlie. When she was first introduced, she duped our characters so that Carol could get trust fund money. She came back, as a series regular, and since then we're supposed to care for her. The show has given us no reason to care about her, and frankly the show has given us no reason on why we should be rooting for her. It's also giving her a lot of screen time, assuming that this is going to get us hooked. She's not a very interesting person and in every episode she's been in, she has almost always dragged everything down. To make matters worse, she seems to serve no real purpose but to create as many blackmail storylines as possible. Oh and the biggest problem? The actress who plays her sucks at acting.

Blair is pissed that Louis has turned out be more like Chuck than she originally thought. Realizing that Chuck has actually managed to change, she turns to him. She hopes that she can use Chuck's source of change and bring it to Louis. The problem? It turns out that his source of light was having admitted that he has lost Blair. His darkness has been, for the longest time, been his fear of truly losing her. When he did lose her, he fell into despair. He has survived by accepting the fact. Blair realizes that while she may not cause people to fall into darkness, the fear of losing her might. This seems to fit with Louis' motivations when he schemes, so Chuck is probably right. Blair is also probably dealing with her feelings for Chuck and some guilt.

Not that I really care. The whole Louis storyline is frankly dragging too long, far longer than I thought the show was going to take it. It's gotten to that point that I wish Blair would just leave Louis already. The show is also trying to push Chuck and Blair to get back together, except that at this point I'm hoping the show decides to explore the Dan and Blair story instead. The show needs to start to move on, rather than sticking with plots that by now have run their course. It looks like the one-hundredth episode will make it to the royal wedding, which sadly means we'll have to deal with more romantic drama that has gotten stale and repetitive. Maybe the mid-season finale, which according to the previews is looking to have a car crash, will find a way to breathe some fresh air into a dull storyline. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

Dan is having to deal with the failure that his book was only one week in the Top 10 New York Times Bestseller List. Which, frankly, is a failure that I would love to have. He's spending most of the episode dealing with online critics, before realizing that he should be a hater on his own book for free press. His book agent turns into a defender, and this somehow works. The show should follow Rufus' advice and just move on already. The book was interesting when it was first released, but this is something the show should have moved on from already. Of course, I'm not looking forward to the next obvious plotline: Dan trying to recapture the “magic” of the first book.

Finally, Nate is now an editor. He gets a story that involves his cousin Trip, which wasn't interesting for me to recount. It was simply used as an excuse to create some family drama that never really turned out to be any compelling or even interesting. There was no doubt that Nate would find a way to perfectly deal with the situation, which essentially meant that there was no tension. You'd also think that with Gossip Girl going down, the show would find a way to make this work. Except the show barely mentions that Gossip Girl seems to be dying, which essentially means that the story only served to bring Trip back for this episode.

The episode failed by lacking nothing interesting. The show is simply dragging every storyline way past their due date. To make matters even worse, it looks like the show has decided there's a chance there will be a sixth season, so they won't be ending it. Which completely and totally makes no sense, since the show seems to be heading to a finale with killing Gossip Girl off. Unless the show can start picking up, I don't see myself reviewing a sixth season-though I'll probably with until the very bitter end.