“The ER said he would make a full recovery. Everything is ruined!”
Has there ever been a more delicious piece of dialogue on Gossip Girl than those two lines—so plump with the petty, blinkered self-absorption of the young and extravagantly rich? I’m reminded of those real-life (or reality-TV-life) meltdowns on MTV’s My Super Sweet 16, when some hideously spoiled monster lashes out at her mother for ordering the wrong model of BMW. Except it’s hard to stay mad at Blair, whose viciousness really does come from an honest place—in this case, her hurt over her newly gay father’s absence from her life. It’s lines like those that continue to make the show irresistible, because they somehow both parody Upper East Side princesses and capture their essence at the same time.
To be honest, I was really worried about Gossip Girl tackling another holiday after the calamitous Thanksgiving episode from a few weeks ago. There’s some obligation to offer up those feelings of warmth and togetherness, which is generally the enemy of melodrama, at least in large doses. So hats off to the writers for making “Roman Holiday” a sweet and sour Christmas, treating the holiday with all the stomach-churning ambivalence it deserves. It was clear from the start that this episode would not end with the Humphrey family playfully collapsing on each other in a pickup football game/bonding session, and for that we can all be grateful.
Now back to Blair, who was in fine bitchy form tonight. Burned over having to share her father with Roman, his indefatigably high-spirited French flame, Blair regresses into scheming mode. (As her mom later says, Blair combines her mom’s scheming with her father’s unrealistic dreaming.) Tripping up Ramon on the skating rink was about as raw (and hilarious) an expression of her dismay as could be imagined, and something that a girl half her age would do, which made it extra fun. Her later plot was more sophisticated: Call up Ramon’s former boy toy and invite him to the Christmas party as a way of sabotaging her father’s relationship. Again, it’s pretty obvious to everyone but her bruised papa that Blair was acting out, but it was still funny to watch Leighton Meester’s reaction shots: First joy at seeing the scene play out just as she’d hoped, then bratty petulance mere seconds later when the whole thing unravels.
Meanwhile, there’s a sliver of Christmas tension between Dan and Serena, who are still very much in their honeymoon period. Vanessa, looking like a 19-year-old Punky Brewster, gives Dan a gift that’s admittedly hard to top: A letter arranging publication of his short story, “10/8/05,” in The New Yorker. (Yes, that New Yorker magazine, which is apparently now actively soliciting unrepresented manuscripts from teenagers for their fiction issues. Boy, have things gone downhill under David Remnick. Lucky for him, nobody reads the fiction issue.) For some reason, the willfully oblivious Serena isn’t all that threatened by Vanessa, even though she should be; granted, she feels burned that Punky Brewster knows Dan better than she does, but she’s mostly upset because she’s at a loss about what to get him for Christmas.
Leave it to Blair, then, to raise questions about Vanessa’s endgame. To be honest, I’m a little surprised that Blair cares all that much about Serena getting hurt, since a Vanessa/Dan hook-up would be just the sort of betrayal that Serena brought down on Blair a year earlier. But on second thought, perhaps Blair’s intervention is more tribal: Vanessa, like Dan, is a crude, bohemian interloper in Blair’s world, and she’d be happy to knock both of them off her borough. It also gives her the second-best line of the night, when leaving the bathroom after her one-on-one with Vanessa: Asked why she’s not working on the snowflake art project like she’d offered, Blair says curtly, “I think my work’s done here.”