Gossip Girl: The Last Days of Disco Stick

A Lady Gaga cameo and Hillary Duff leaving, is this the best episode of Gossip Girl ever?!?!  Actually no, it was an average episode, but there was a lot of good stuff and bad outfits in it and I’ll take Gossip Girl’s average over other shows’ best any day.  “The Last Days of Disco Stick” brings us a sublimely ridiculous play, a creepy drug dealing boy to entertain Little J., and some skank on congressman action. 

The C plot this week was Jenny taking out Damian a creepy, supposedly Belgian, diplomat’s son to show him around town as a favor to Chuck.   Initially Jenny is mortified to think that this eerie Zac Effron looking live ventriloquist dummy would play with motorized sailboats in the park.  However, once she realizes this was all a ruse to do an ecstasy deal she’s totally on board with hanging out with him, because Jenny makes poor life choices.  Chuck busts Damian in the end and throws him out of the hotel, warning Jenny that he’s bad news…so of course Jenny immediately texts him she’d like to hang out again, genius move Little J.  [sidebar: yeah Damian was really familiar looking and not just because of said Effron resemblance.  I realized halfway through the episode that he’s totally the dude from Transamerica.  When I looked him up I found that he’s Kevin Zegers and also in Dawn of the Dead, and the seminal classic Felicity: An American Girl Adventure.]

In the meatier plots this week we have Serena wearing not-appropriate-for-the-office open-backed, too short mini-dresses and blatantly flirting with her married boss.  She does have the good sense to come to Nate about it and he cautions her to stay away.  Actually, he gets her drunk and confesses that he used to love her, which we all know if TV speak for “I love you”.  I was getting excited that they may be heading in this direction, because Serena is one of the few characters that the often boring Nate actually has chemistry with.  And also, if Tripp is supposedly a US Congressman than he should be leaving New York soon for D.C anyways.  But no, Tripp finds out about his wife’s subterfuge in staging his heroic rescue of a drowning victim and decides that if his wife lies to him than as a Congressman it is his duty to go hit on a drunken 18-year-old who works in his office.  I can suspend my disbelief pretty far, but COME ON! How could anybody ever be that stupid?

But the bulk of this episode was about the Dan/Vanessa/Olivia threesome of gross and their getting wrapped up in producing a terrible play to really let the tension sink in.  I don’t really know what to make of the whole Tisch School of the Arts thing. I get that it is a really prestigious school inside NYU, but does Blair really have to suck up to theater kids, even if they are really elite ones?  I’d call shenanigans but it all seemed to be setup for real-life former Tisch student Lady Gaga to appear so I’ll just call it awesome!  The play itself is god-awful hilariously bad.  Dan Humphrey writes a play based on Snow White with Lady Gaga music in a plot that is completely ripped off from a Saved by the Bell episode, right down to the part where Dan has to kiss his best friend Jessie Spanno, I mean Vanessa, on stage.   I love you Gossip Girl but Dan Humphrey’s play would be something morose and Salinger-esque, not a hip-hop fairytale. 

But the play was just there as an excuse to get Dan, Vanessa and Olivia all working together so the girls could be petty and we could see hilarious flashbacks to their tryst.  The tension between Olivia and Vanessa was pretty funny, but not as funny as Blair using her physic ability to find sexual tension to realize what they’d done, then blackmailing them with it.  Last week my BFF said to me, “You know I hate Samantha from Sex and the City, but she was right that you should always be the guest star in a threesome”.  A variation of that was used this week with every character who finds out reacting, “the third person should always be a stranger”.  Personally I think Samantha is more correct, if you’re going to screw up a relationship do it to somebody else’s not your own.  Of course in this case there were three relationships to screw up: Dan and Olivia dating, Olivia and Vanessa as roommates and Vanessa and Dan as best friends.  Olivia decides to take the next train out of Akwardville and breaks up with Dan to skip town for a movie.  And thus ends Hillary Duff’s reign of terror!  Just kidding, in the end I didn’t hate her nearly as much as I thought I would, but she’s still no Georgina!  Now we’re left to wonder, with Olivia out of the picture will Dan and Vanessa finally turn that won’t they into a will they?

And also, Lady Gaga was freaking awesome!  30 foot red dress, a ladder for no apparent reason, her new song “Bad Romance”!  I only wish we could have seen more of the performance, I mean seriously WTF were those kids doing having deep relationship talks during her one-song performance.  Gaga is in the house bitches, respect!