“Yale is for overachieving bookworms and preppies—the Blairs of the world.”
Okay, so we don’t exactly tune into Gossip Girl for the gritty realism. Although that would be funny—an Upper East Side prep school version of The Wire. Anyway, Yale is apparently searching for applicants on Page 6, which is how Serena snags a hand-written invitation to college weekend. Originally, she wasn’t planning on going, since her heart’s been set on Brown and Yale is Blair’s dream, but since Blair was a bitch to her about it, Serena changes her plans.
Serena is getting ready to go to Yale and, OH MY BOOBS. She is wearing the lowest-cut shirt ever. It’s so low cut that there is no way she’s even wearing a bra. I’m pretty sure double-sided tape is the only thing that’s keeping the girls from having their very own special meeting with the dean.
Despite not being entirely qualified, Serena somehow impresses the dean enough to get invited to a private gathering at his house. This whole storyline is kind of ridiculous, but it does lead to a hilarious catfight, so I’ll give it a pass.
“I heard Marc Jacobs named a purse after her.”
Blair is not doing any better with Serena’s newfound fame. As is her wont, Blair’s insecurity translates into hellacious bitchiness. However, once she finds out that Serena is close to stealing her Yale dream, her bitchiness is tempered, and in some ways enhanced by her wounded puppy dog-ness.
Serena and Blair’s rivalry comes to a head at the dean’s party when they sabotage each other’s answers to that ridiculous “who would you most want to have dinner with” question. Serena steals Blair’s answer, but then Blair changes it to that guy that Serena killed, making things… awkward.
The situation leads Serena to excuse herself and Blair from the party to go “work things out.” Awesomely, this involves Blair throwing her purse at Serena’s head and Serena ripping off Blair’s “stupid headband.” At the end of it though, the two make up and become besties again. That’s way more boring.
“We are three hours away from horny Women’s Study majors wanting to work out all their anger towards men … in their bunk beds.”
Chuck doesn’t exactly share Blair’s dream of being a Yalie; he’s going there this weekend because it has the most elite secret society: Skull & Bones. He hooks up with them almost immediately and starts his audition by gathering up some professional ladies for the guys to have fun with. This is well-received, but the S&B guys want more: they want Chuck to prove his loyalty to them by bringing them the head of Nate Archibald.
Apparently, Nate’s thieving cokehead dad caused a lot of these guys to lose trust funds and Rhode Island compounds and such, so Nate is automatically persona non grata. Chuck being Chuck, however, decides to kill two birds with one stone. Instead of selling out Nate, he sells out Dan, who he’s still pissed at for writing that story about him. Nate finds out about this and isn’t exactly touched by Chuck’s attempt to have his back. Instead, he ends up riding the train back to the city with Dan. All is not lost for Chuck, however, as he outfitted his ladies with lipstick cameras, so now he has blackmail ammunition for all of the S&B guys, which means that despite the fact that he’s still in high school; he effectively owns them.
“I’m not entirely proud of my choice of boxers.”
Nate and Dan have been pretty much intertwined the entire weekend, as Nate has been going around campus pretending to be him. He figured that being a sensitive writer from Brooklyn is probably a better bet than being the son of a criminal from Manhattan. This seems to be working out for him, as his Dan impression manages to snag him a lady, but they are interrupted by the real Dan, who conveniently is coming to her for help getting a letter of recommendation.
When the S&B guys get ahold of him, they strip him down to his boxers and tie him to a marble statue. There are a few things wrong with this: one: you know they wouldn’t have let him keep the boxers; two: if you happened to point out to any of these guys that this is an oddly homoerotic way to get back at someone for losing your trust fund, they would surely have no idea why you would say that: and three, Dan is so hairless! He looks like a baby dolphin.
“You said you’d give me one day, and you did.”
I don’t really care about Jenny Humphrey, but basically, she’s fifteen and since her dad routinely lets her wear shirts as dresses, she figures she’s also mature enough to drop out of school to work for Eleanor. Papa Humphrey respectfully disagrees, although he fails, yet again, to tell her to put some damn pants on. However, after an entire episode of people telling him how gifted she is, he relents and allows her to be homeschooled.
I enjoyed this episode, although I’m sad to see Evil Serena go. It’s also kind of silly to have everybody end up at Yale, but if it’s good enough for Saved By the Bell, it’s good enough for Gossip Girl. I also liked how the romantic entanglements stayed completely out of this episode, unless you count the Chuck/Nate/Dan love triangle—and I certainly do.
