By Hannah Sole | TV | November 22, 2023 |
By Hannah Sole | TV | November 22, 2023 |
It’s been 14 years since the most gloriously melodramatic Thanksgiving episode of Gossip Girl blessed our screens. This dinner scene has everything: desire, fear, jealousy, secrets, affairs, scandals — and in the middle of it all, a Classic Dad who just wants to have a lovely turkey dinner, damnit, why does everyone keep storming off?
We’re in season 3, episode 11, and Rufus and Lily are hosting. Rufus is a poor downtrodden musician who isn’t really poor, but as he’s married to a literal billionaire, it’s all relative. Rufus’s son Dan and Lily’s daughter Serena used to be a couple, but now they are step-siblings. Awkward already? Roll with it. Lily’s son Eric is also there, as is Rufus’s daughter Jenny. Eric is sweet; Jenny is The Worst. Jenny is trying to be the queen bitch at school, and Eric has been trying to sabotage her for her own good to stop her from turning into The Worst. It’s too late, Eric. Just enjoy the disappointing sweet potatoes. Anyway, she’s just found out about the sabotage.
Lily’s step-son Chuck, also a billionaire, is there. Chuck is often terrible, but he has a few redeeming features: excellent cheekbones, a natty sense of style, a respectful fondness for his step-mother … but mostly, loving Blair, Serena’s bestie. Blair’s ex, Nate, is also there. He cheated on Blair with Serena and is still in love with Serena. But she’s having an affair with his cousin Trip, who is a politician, and he is also there, with his wife Maureen, for reasons. Roll with it.
Serena and Trip hooked up in Chuck’s hotel earlier because a billionaire’s daughter and a Vanderbilt need mates’ rates for some reason; Chuck — who is remarkably hands-on for a teenage billionaire — has a copy of the security footage. He shows it to Nate, who nicks a copy of it to give to Maureen, to stop the affair so that he can have Serena back. She hasn’t done anything with it yet. Following so far?
Blair is there with her mother, and due to a comical misunderstanding and Blair being her regular brand of extra, Blair thinks her mother is pregnant, and is freaking out about it. Dan’s bestie Vanessa, official runner up of The Worst competition, is there with her mother, and yes, that’s Gina Torres, swooping in to be fabulous and terrifying. Vanessa’s mother brings her own brand of disapproval to big events, and has already poured some cold water on Dan’s rapidly developing secret crush on Vanessa. She loves stirring the pot — as does Lily’s mother, CeCe, who is keeping a whopper of a secret too. Rufus — who CeCe never really approved of — has invited CeCe as a surprise and as an attempt to bond with her after her recent illness. Lily has been away from Rufus for months allegedly looking after her poor sick mother, but the whole time, Lily was secretly the one who was sick, and the only person who could treat her was one of her former husbands, Serena and Eric’s dad, except he was mostly just tricking her into needing him so that he could get back together with her. ROLL WITH IT.
And that brings us up to this wonderful moment: they sit down to dinner together, and, well, the roof caves in and the truth comes out… Oh boy. If you have never seen this before, just know that it keeps going long after you think there’s no more melodrama to be wrung out of the awkwardness. It’s absolutely glorious — resplendently, unashamedly cheesy. Just how I like it. If there is a big turkey dinner in your near future, I hope for you all that it isn’t as dramatic as this one.
What happened next, you ask? Well Dan changed his name to Joe and took his stalking to the next level. Nate became a fishy superhero. Gossip Girl was revealed to be a billionaire tech genius called Nolan Ross, who got bored when there wasn’t enough revenge going on anymore, and thus, an entire franchise was spawned that I like to call the Implausibly Rich Meanies universe. Unfortunately, the IRMiverse only exists in my head. Ugh, OK, they coupled up in predictable ways and then Dan was Gossip Girl and it was weird. But for a wonderfully shining moment, they only meant well. Honest.