| In the midst of Fashion Week, a furious Blair (Leighton Meester) learns that her mother, Eleanor (guest star Margaret Colin), at the suggestion of her protégé Jenny (Taylor Momsen), has given Serena (Blake Lively) and her new socialite friend, Poppy Lifton (guest star Tamara Feldman), front row seats to the Eleanor Waldorf show. Hurt once again by Serena’s popularity and her mother’s betrayal, Blair decides to sabotage the show. Meanwhile, Dan (Penn Badgley) starts hanging out with Chuck (Ed Westwick), but a walk on the dark side always has its risks and Dan learns that the hard way. Lily (Kelly Rutherford) learns a secret that her new husband, Bart (guest start Robert John Burke), has been keeping from her. Matthew Settle also stars. | Last week's episode of Gossip Girl was filled with all the delicious scandal and glorious backstabbing we've come to expect from the series. Blair successfully ran Marcus and Catherine out of town after Vanessa found the evil MILF making out with her stepson, but her absence now leaves Nate (Chace Crawford) with a ton of debt and nowhere to turn. Proving that B isn't the only one capable of evil mind games, Chuck hired a girl named Amanda to woo Dan, all in an effort to convince Serena to reclaim her rightful place as queen of Constance Billiard. The ploy worked, and now S is in charge, Dan is shunned, and Blair has to share the spotlight with her supposed best friend.
On tonight's Gossip Girl, the Upper East Siders head to New York Fashion Week, where the rivalry between Blair and Serena reaches very well-dressed new heights.
Fashion Week is on as tonight's Gossip Girl kicks off. Over in Brooklyn, which is hardly the sartorial capital of the world, Dan is chatting with Little J about the thrills of college applications. Dan thinks his sister is headed to school, but Jenny is still burying herself in her internship to avoid the evil girl mafia.
Over at Constance Billiard, B plans to win over the girls with second row invitations to Fashion Week. She passes out the sought after invites, but B quickly gets shown up when the mafia sees Serena and socialite Poppy Lifton in the latest issue of Women's Wear Daily. Apparently, they're BFFs now. Chuck tries to rub the embarrassment in B's face, but she snaps back by telling him he has fewer friends that Dan Humphrey. Ouch!
All of Dan's college essays are autobiographical, which is boring his Pulitzer-winning adviser to death. The guy tells him to get out in the world and experience something new. To get started on his little adventure, he goes to visit Mr. Debauchery himself: Chuck Bass. They make plans to go out on the town, though Chuck (Ed Westwick) seems less than thrilled with the idea. At Eleanor Waldorf Designs, Little J convinces her boss to invite Serena and her new socialite friends to Fashion Week to help their show trump the Marc Jacobs presentation. B not only has a screaming fit when she finds out the news, but she immediately plots to annihilate Jenny Humphrey.
B confronts Eleanor and is surprised to find that Serena accepted the Fashion Week invitation. Eleanor also drops the news that Little J has an independent study at school, which sounds totally fishy to B. Meanwhile, the odd couple of Chuck and Dan (Penn Badgley) are hanging out at a nearby bar. C offers Dan a mysterious pill and tells him to chase it with a giant shot of booze, which Lonely Boy actually agrees to. This version of Dan is so much more enjoyable than regular Dan. It's all fun and games until the limo ride home, when Chuck kicks Dan out of the car and makes him walk home without his shoes. Hee.
Serena knows that B will be pissed if she sits in the front row at Fashion Week instead of hanging out backstage with her best friend. Poppy and Lily (Kelly Rutherford) somehow convince her it's a good idea. Over in Brooklyn, B shows up at Rufus's door to deliver some chicken soup to the supposedly sick Little J, but her real motive is to tell Rufus his daughter has been skipping school. Ah, Blair is the best. Rufus heads to the design studio with B to confront Jenny, which is the perfect opportunity for Gossip Girl to get her Heidi Klum on by saying, "one day you're in, and the next day you're out." Jenny tries to explain herself the next day, but she still has to go meet with the headmistress to prove that she's worthy of not being expelled.
Blair (Leighton Meester) puts up her dukes, or at least her headband, and confronts Serena about her new position as queen of the school. B doesn't want to watch the next episode of The Serena Show, and though she tries to tell her friend not to bother attending Fashion Week, she only succeeds in making S want to defy her more. Meanwhile, Dan's adviser tells him to try writing his story from the point of view of Chuck, who Dan has hilariously renamed Charlie Trout for fictional purposes. Mr. Adviser knows that Chuck, or Mr. Trout, is more interesting than Dan and will make a fantastic protagonist.
It's time for Fashion Week, and Serena is surprised to find that B has assigned her a seat in the back row. Blair tries to get her way, but Eleanor shows up and lands S a seat in the front. At the bar, Chuck, who we may have to rename Lonely Boy if he keeps moping around without sexy twins, calls up his dad to chat. Bart has no time for his son, but at least Humphrey does. Dan arrives a moment later and demands that Charlie Trout get him involved in more wacky shenanigans. Oh Dan, you're truly not cut out for Mr. Trout's semi-charmed kind of life.
After Dan plays shrink and fails to analyze Chuck's particular brand of psychosis, Chuck decides to hit on a woman at the bar by implying she's a hooker. That particular pick-up tactic only succeeds in earning the ire of her boyfriend, who Dan then has to punch in the face. Go Dan, acting manly for a change! The new BFFs wind up in a jail cell, where Chuck reveals that his dad loathes him because his mom died in childbirth. Wow, that's kind of dark, isn't it? Mr. Trout's lawyer bails him out a minute later, and Chuck agrees to help Dan escape the situation without Rufus finding out.
At Fashion Week, B sends all of Eleanor's models home in an attempt to get J in deep trouble. It's a clever ploy, but Jenny (Taylor Momsen) just improvises and asks Serena and her friends to model instead. Meanwhile, Bart purchases an artistic photo that Lily once posed nude for, but he doesn't do it out of the kindness of his heart. He does it so the photo could never leak to the press and cause a scandal. Lily puts the pieces together and discovers that he could only know about the photo if he had an entire file about her past, which she demands to see immediately.
Evil Serena (Blake Lively) isn't all that evil just yet, so she still worries that Blair will turn against her if she dares to strut her stuff on the catwalk. Poppy talks her into it, and B even tells her to go for it, which is probably a sign that she's plotting to dump pig's blood on everyone in the middle of the show. It turns out her scheme isn't quite that terrible. She just sends S out on the runway in a dress designed by Little J instead of one made by Eleanor Waldorf. Talk about a fashion faux pas!
Little J sees that Blair is in a funk over Serena, at which point she actually tries to cheer B up. It doesn't work particularly well, but at least she tries. Eleanor soon shows up and tells J that she's a total Eve Harrington (All About Eve reference for the win!), but she takes Jenny's advice when she tells her to go ahead and take credit for the dress. The crowd loved it, and now all the kudos will go to Eleanor. While Eleanor takes a bow, Bart confronts Lily about some scandalous secret from her past. He doesn't specify what it is, but he knows it's something so terrible that she wouldn't want her children to know about it.
Chuck finds some of Dan's notes and is pissed that Humphrey has been writing about him. He immediately terminates their bromance, tells Dan he can rot in jail, and also explains that his mother died in a plane crash when he was six-years-old. I guess that's a little less depressing than the whole dying in childbirth thing, but Chuck is likely lying about the crash. D calls Mr. Adviser to bail him out instead, and also explains that he has no desire to use Charlie Trout's tale for his writing. He's going to write about an egomaniacal, washed-up writer instead. Someone like Lucas Scott, perhaps?
Rufus (Matthew Settle) heads to Fashion Week planning to ground J until she's 30, but all is forgiven when he sees how she saved Eleanor's show. Okay, that's a lie. All is forgiven for about five seconds, until J admits that she told the headmistress she's not planning to go back to school. EVER. Now she's going to be grounded until she's 67. As the episode comes to an end, Serena tells B to get over herself. She's tired of holding herself back and dealing with Blair's insecurities, so she's going to shine as bright as she wants and force B to deal with it. I think we can officially refer to her as Evil Serena now.
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