'Gossip Girl' recap: 'A troubled young woman'

No matter how bad your Thanksgiving was, the "Gossip Girl" crew's was almost certainly worse. By now, these dark holiday episodes have become something of a tradition, and after all the turkey and togetherness that most shows force us to stomach every November, they're always a refreshing palate cleanser. This year's model wasn't the best I've seen (I'm partial to Season 2's "The Magnificent Archibalds"), but it may well have been the most twisted.

The episode opens with our Upper East Siders preparing for Thanksgiving. Serena hasn't shown her face since the Saints and Sinners ball, but no one is particularly worried. While Blair assumes she's hiding at Lily and Rufus', Lily decides Serena's out having some kind of temper tantrum, as usual, and resolves not to go looking for her. The preparations for a lavish Humphrey-Van der Woodsen Thanksgiving go on as planned — until Blair and Lily compare notes and realize that Serena is missing.

That's when we cut to the heiress herself, waking up groggy in an unfamiliar room littered with pills and alcohol bottles, still wearing her Saints and Sinners dress. She gropes for her bedside phone, calls 911, and rasps that her name is Serena van der Woodsen, and she doesn't know where she is. With the ambulances en route, she's out cold again and doesn't wake up until she's at the hospital, where Lily has already decided to send to her to rehab.

It's an odd choice, to be sure. Although the doctor tells Serena's family that she called them from a motel room in Queens, where she suffered a minor overdose, the story just doesn't add up. One of the drugs in her possession was an antidepressant that would most likely have been used in a suicide attempt. The idea that Serena — who hasn't had a drug problem in a good, long time — would choose to end a bad night out with a deadly bender or by purposefully offing herself doesn't make much sense to me. Everyone on "Gossip Girl" is always acting like Serena's a time bomb, liable to explode at any second, but if all we ever see her doing is acting confused and stealing people's boyfriends, then how are we supposed to believe she's dangerous?

When Eric and Lily come to visit her in rehab, Serena still can't remember what happened to her, but she's sure she isn't responsible and lashes out at her mom for having her committed. (I was kind of excited to see her express a strong, clear emotion, for once.) "Your daughter wakes up alone, drugged in an empty motel room, and you don't call the cops?" Serena demands. "You don't ask if she's OK or what happened? You just have her committed? What kind of mother does that?" It's a good question. Lily has never been the world's most sensitive or attentive mother, but she's really gone off the rails this season.

Only Dan believes Serena, and his support probably has more to do with his undying love for her than anything else. Leading with his hero complex, he breaks her out of rehab. They head to the Brooklyn apartment to regroup and plan a temporary escape from the city, but when they open the door to leave, they run right into Blair and Lily. Perhaps Lonely Boy should have realized that home was the first place the family would come looking for them. Lily briefly maintains that her daughter is "a troubled young woman" before admitting to Dan that her own insecurities are stopping her from listening to what Serena has to say.

Clearly, this kind of rationality can't last. Cue Gossip Girl! As soon as the clan converges to figure out what to do about Serena, the scourge of the Upper East Side is back with a damning photo of her snorting a line with her mask still on. Now, even Serena is convinced she's out of control and goes willingly back to rehab.

Of course, the photo isn't of Serena. It's the final element of Juliet's set-up. And it's kind of strange that no one — including Serena! — realizes it. They may be wearing the same dress and mask, but Juliet and Serena aren't twins!

Another surprise: It isn't Vanessa who cracks under the pressure of Serena's tragedy and confesses the Saints and Sinners plot to Rufus — it's Jenny. And later, when she goes looking for Juliet, she finds her co-conspirator's apartment abandoned. Only a few trash bags remain, along with the mask in the photo. When she figures out what has happened, Jenny runs straight to Blair before heading home to Hudson to extricate herself, once again, from the machinations of Manhattan's elite.

This also strikes me as a weird decision. Why would Jenny, who's supposed to be done with scheming, go to her enemy with the information instead of enlightening her family and getting Serena out of rehab? Obviously, it will be more fun to watch Blair ruin Juliet than to see Rufus and Lily call the cops on her. But is this a decision any real person, even Jenny Humphrey, would make? I don't think so.

Before the episode is out, we do learn something interesting about Juliet: She didn't let Ben in on her plan to drug Serena. In fact, when she visits him in prison, proud of her success, even he thinks she went too far. So, Juliet has gone rogue and is about to disappear, but not before extorting some cash from Lily for keeping Serena's secrets, warning her that she'd better send a new bribe check each month and wishing her a happy Thanksgiving. That's the closest we get to holiday cheer on "Gossip Girl," and I, for one, continue to like it that way.

Other scattered thoughts:

-- How symbolic is the moment when Vanessa walks into Lily and Rufus' apartment to celebrate Thanksgiving only to find that everyone's gone but Dorota and her baby? If that is not a metaphor for the character's diminishing place on the show, I don't know what is.

-- Dorota and her baby! They are wonderful! I may be a coldhearted lover of dark holiday programming, but even I cannot deny the adorableness of that child.

-- Now that Juliet is finished manipulating Nate, the writers seem to have no idea what to do with his character. Hence the totally random (and utterly shrug-worthy) subplot about his attempt to reunite his mother with his incarcerated father. Sadly, even in throwaway scenarios, Nate is stupid and gullible. It turns out his dad only wants his mom back because it would look good for his parole.

-- Finally, an episode where Chuck and Blair's star-crossed love is reduced to less than five minutes of screen time. Let's have a few more of these, shall we?

Your weekly "Gossip Girl" fashion top five:

1. Jenny's silver Tania Spinelli boots.

2. Blair's orange, yellow and brown plaid dress.

3. Chuck's rich, brown suit and plum shirt.

4. Vanessa's gold earrings with the enormous, dangly black stones.

5. Lily's belted camel coat.

— Judy Berman
twitter.com/judyberman

Photo: Jenny discovers Serena's mask at Juliet's apartment. Credit: Giovanni Rufino / the CW.

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'The Event' recap: A new, horrifying meaning for the phrase 'forever young'

If there's one thing I always say -- and I do always say this, and you should ask anyone who knows me -- about TV shows, it's this: "If you can't end an episode of your TV show with a little girl entering a mysterious apartment full of what appear to be other little girls but are actually some kinda weird old people in little girl drag, then your TV show is a complete failure." The list of shows which this old maxim could be applied to is incredibly long, including such illustrious series as "The Wire," "Mad Men" and "The Dick Van Dyke Show," and tonight, "The Event" joins their ranks, as Leila's little sister, whose name I haven't bothered to learn just yet, is ushered into an apartment that looks more like a library in an ancient country house, then confronted with the fact that all of the little girls there look like old women. (And some look like old men!) Cue the end of the episode.

I have no idea what any of this means, other than the fact that "The Event" just wants to keep tossing weird stuff at us in the hopes that we'll keep watching. Tonight's episode was a decided step back from the last one, which at least suggested the series was figuring out its voice and its structure, so maybe this last scene was just a way to keep the weirdness quotient high. It happens. But in terms of making sense of anything or dragging the story forward or even making Leila's little sister a character who's something beyond "generic little girl," the scene didn't work. It was just oddness for oddness' sake, and the producers would surely be pleased if you tuned in for next week's episode, which is already going to the well of "let's watch the highly-rated pilot from a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ANGLE." Usually, shows don't go to this well until Season 3 or 4. There'd better be a darned good reason for "The Event" to be doing so so soon. (And, as we all know by now, there won't be.)

Anyway, this is the part where I'd theoretically summarize what happened tonight and talk about what sort of bearing it had on other events. Except, the thing is, pretty much nothing DID happen. The show wisely kept to the character-specific flashbacks of the last episode, this time letting us get to know Zeljko Ivanek's Blake Sterling just a little bit better, but the connection between the past and future storylines was far more tenuous this week than it was the last time around. In that last episode, Simon was the focus of both the present and past storylines, and the two of them commented on each other in interesting ways. In this episode, Blake is pretty much just hanging out around the edges of the present storyline, and all of the big decisions are made for him in the past (outside of one crucial one). It leaves the episode feeling oddly shapeless, especially since the main plot -- the aliens making sure that Simon isn't fingered as one of them -- has so little to do with Blake.

The flashback story for Blake isn't a bad one. Fourteen years ago, he was serving in the CIA under his father and happily married to a woman named Laura. Except, whoops, as it turned out, Laura was a Russian spy, embedded in a marriage to Blake to help leak U.S. state secrets to her compatriots back in just barely post-Communist Russia. Confronted with the truth of his wife's betrayal, Blake tells her that he knows everything about what she's done, but he believes she actually loves him. (Ah, we men! Always so stupid in these matters!) Of course she doesn't, and of course she bolts, and of course his father is lurking in the bushes to shoot Laura in the head. Blake's out a wife, but his dad offers to let him take credit for shooting the woman, the better to help him advance his career. Gee. That's great, dad. Anyway, in the "present," Blake apologizes to the president for not realizing the mole (the recently framed Murphy) was in his department. He's usually better at catching these things -- since he's cultivated a "mole sense" after the thing with his wife -- but he let the country down this time.

This is all well and good, but it has so little to do with the major plots of the episode proper, which mostly have to do with Thomas coming up with a way to get Simon off the hook when he's so obviously guilty and Sean and Leila seeking out a mysterious dude who can help them find her sister, that it feels inconsequential. It's nice to know more about the past of Blake, but it's simultaneously far from necessary. The title of the episode, "I Know Who You Are," is what Blake says to his wife when he finds out her terrible secret, but I think it's also meant to be applied to more and more of the characters, who reveal little things about themselves in this episode. (For example, as it turns out, Sophia is Thomas' mother, though I have this weird feeling we learned this before.) So, yes, it's good to know more about who Blake really is, but the best episodes of shows like this unite the past and present action through some sort of character and thematic continuity. This episode might have been better off as a flashback about Thomas, but it's obvious the series doesn't want to play that card this soon into its run.

So what we're left with is a centerless episode that doesn't do a lot to justify its existence. So little actually happens -- when the episode ends, we're basically where we were at the start of the last episode -- that it's tempting to write this off as yet another episode for marking time. Yet Ivanek is such a skillful actor and there are just enough neat little touches around the edges that I would rank this above the first few episodes of the show, where it felt like everything was just going to keep running in circles. And then there's that ending, which is just strange enough to make me want to see how it's resolved. (My prediction? The little girls are the ones from that encoded document Sean found, and the conspiracy dudes -- led by Hal Holbrook, who's mostly wasted but always a welcome presence -- have been trying various things to make them ageless, like the aliens, and have mostly failed.) This is a bland, shapeless episode of television, but it isn't as bad as it could have been.

The story in brief, in case you've checked out: It sure looks like Simon's the mole, which means that he's going to face some pretty horrific "enhanced interrogation" as Blake and his pals try to get information about the aliens' plan out of him. Thomas, however, has other ideas, and he spends much of the hour figuring out a way to get Simon off the hook, finally framing Murphy, the guy who caught on to what Simon was up to in the last episode, for the leaks. Oh, and Sophia is his mom. Blake, for his part, was betrayed by his wife 14 years ago -- she was a Russian spy! -- and then his dad killed her. Yikes. Sean and Leila spend most of the episode running around (when don't they?), but they at least find out that somebody somewhere was interested in girls around Leila's sister's age, right before the hacker they've turned to to help get this information blows up his apartment to stop the Feds, who are closing in. Oh, and Leila's sister? She's led to an apartment full of creepy old person kids. Yeah, we have no idea either.

--Todd VanDerWerff (follow me on Twitter at @tvoti)

Photo: Blake (Zeljko Ivanek, left) and Thomas (Clifton Collins Jr.) shared an elevator ride in tonight's "The Event," but mostly, they just talked about quitting smoking. Exciting! (Credit: NBC)

Related articles:

'The Event' recap: This show is about the wrong characters

'The Event' recap: Impossible choices and stories that make sense

Complete Show Tracker 'The Event' coverage

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