Last night’s long-anticipated return of Gossip Girl featured a new year, new relationships, new secrets, and an unusually large amount of comic relief.

Jenny’s resolution, apparently, was to finish high school…but she’s dropped the “Little J” business and makes it her goal to save Nelly from Blair’s Queen Bee squad. She recruits Eric and Nelly to take over the “cool” table, and, since Blair’s having a Bass-induced breakdown, J manages to win the upper hand. Ironically, when Nelly realizes that Jenny has no hope of stealing Blair’s crown, she runs back to the popular kids. Ha, ha, ha. What satire!

Meanwhile, the writers took advantage of GG’s break to make a clean break from Serena’s art-beau, Aaron, who doesn’t even get a sappy break-up scene. (Thank God.) Instead, it seems that S. just flat out left him in Buenos Aires when she realized that Lily and Rufus weren’t shacking up and that she could bang Dan without feeling incestuous. Rufus, of course, is less than happy to find Serena and Dan blissfully happy. Remember last month’s cliffhanger? “Was it a boy or a girl?” We find out that it was a boy, and that Lily put him up for adoption and relinquished her rights to ever search for him, much to Rufus’s dismay.

Chuck, still wallowing in the aftermath of his father’s untimely death, has become a zombie that not even Blair can seem to crack. So, he brings a joint to school and breaks the news to Dan that he has an illegitimate half-brother out there somewhere. Blair remains faithful to her shell of a man-crush, and even tries to act as his guardian when he’s summoned to the office for smoking hash in the hallways (how cute), but then the mysterious new character, Uncle Jack, interrupts and takes responsibility. What does Jack have up his sleeve? Read More »

Did anyone else feel like their world turned upside-down last night, what with NO GOSSIP GIRL ep on the CW? I personally didn’t know what to do with myself, so I worked off my weekly-dose-of-Chace-Crawford- cravings on the elliptical for an hour. Maybe when the season ends, I too can have a Blake Lively body. Yeah right.

Since, sadly, there was no new episode to recap last night, I thought I’d do a brief refresher on what has unraveled so far this season. Feel free to post your fave GG moments of the year below, since there is simply too much for me to fit into one little post!

Nate Archibald
Early season partner: Catherine, the married cougar who turned out to be a Duchess. Nate walked the fine line between “partner” and “prostitute” with Catherine, after Catherine paid off some of Nate’s family’s debt in order to keep her sexy young stallion around.

Mid-season partner: Well… early-mid-season, Nate had a mini-fling with Vanessa, until Catherine scared V off. Then there was the hot Yale girl, who Nate posed as none other than Dan Humphrey for, in order to get into her lofted bed. Read More »