“They need to know you no longer want to be their child.”
We pick up this week with Jenny still trying to get her business off the ground by becoming an emancipated minor. Unfortunately, despite making Eric watch Irreconcilable Differences about fifteen times, Jenny still has no idea what this actually means, since she is surprised that she can’t just like, sign a paper in secret and magically divorce her parents.
Not that it matters of course, because you know that Rufus isn’t going to let his Little J go. After Lily finds out that Jenny has been staying with Eric while she and Bart were out of town, she tries to broker peace between Rufus and Jenny. They are both stubborn, of course, but in the end, Rufus is Rufus. He tells Jenny that he loves her and she decides to come home, where she rips up the emancipation papers. It’s a Thanksgiving miracle!
Of course, the Thanksgiving miracle to which I am referring is that this stupid storyline is over and Jenny finally washed off the eyeliner of discontent.
“Except for the occasional celebratory glass of champagne, I’m pretty much a teetotaler.”
So new Serena continues to suck like a Hoover. It was bad enough last week when she abandoned the face that she’s not a “seeing other people” kind of girl, just so Aaron would like her. This week, she lies about her drinking just so Aaron would like her. This isn’t helped by the fact that Aaron totally seems like the type of guy who would like it when a girl would change to fit his beliefs. It is also not helped by the fact that Aaron, in general, is a total douchewad.
He runs into Dan at the grocery store and is generally slimy, making comments like, “I guess you don’t know her that well,” when Dan makes an offhand remark about Serena drinking wine. Seriously. If the current person my ex was dating came up to me and said something like that, I’d shove that wine bottle into his eyeball. Instead, Dan takes the boring, nice guy route when he’s confronted about it later, telling Aaron that he lied about Serena.
Boring Serena eventually comes clean and admits to Aaron that she may have left some things out about her past. Luckily, Eric found the surveillance files that Bart has on all of them, so Serena was able to give Aaron her entire past in a neat little package, since she believes that she’s not allowed to have any secrets from some dude she’s been dating for like, a day. Anyway, Aaron decides not to read it, because he knows it’ll make him look noble, for which Serena will be grateful, which increases his power over her.
I really do not like this guy.
“It’s all about his family, his traditions—his notes on my pie!”
Meanwhile, Blair is having a Thanksgiving meltdown of her own. We learned last year that It’s her favorite holiday, but like last year, it’s not going well. After Blair finds out that Cyrus proposed to her mother, she is (rightly) offended at the fact that Eleanor doesn’t plan on telling her about the engagement until she tells everyone else at dinner.
However, as seems to be her pattern with all matters concerning Cyrus, Blair has jumped to conclusions. Yes, Eleanor and Cyrus were waiting to tell her about the engagement, but it was because Blair’s father flew in from France to meet Cyrus. If he didn’t approve, the wedding wouldn’t happen. However, he did approve, so Blair is getting a stumpy new daddy.
“Were you really planning on holding me and mom for ransom?”
The whole Nate as a squatter storyline was also resolved in this episode. The Captain came back, complete with a pervy new mustache. He comes home spinning a tale of riches and island living and tells Nate that he wants him and his mother to come live with him. Since Nate has pretty much alienated everyone he knows, he’s about to agree. However, the lovely Vanessa steps in once again to save the day.
After being visited by an FBI agent who has been trailing the Archibalds, Vanessa enlists Chuck’s help to tell Nate what the score is. Basically, The Captain hasn’t exactly cleaned up his unreliable cokeheaded ways and has pissed through all of the money he was able to take with him when he made his escape. His plan was to basically extort money from his wife’s parents by threatening to take her and Nate away.
When Nate finds this out, he confronts his father and tells him to turn himself in. This is where things get confusing for me. Nate’s dad is a cokehead and has clearly spent the past several months cultivating an International Criminal mustache. There’s no way in hell he’s going to turn himself in. However, the next scene shows the FBI coming to the apartment and leading The Captain away in cuffs. My next thought is that they’re fake FBI agents, but nope. Apparently they’re the real deal. The whole thing is rather ridiculous.
Nate and his mom get their home back from the government, so with his father in jail, it looks as though all of Master Archibald’s problems are over. So what does he do to celebrate? He jumps back into his romantic entanglements, of course. He tells Vanessa that he hasn’t heard from Jenny in weeks, so they make plans together.
Vanessa goes over to the loft and finds the letter that Nate mailed to Jenny that Jenny never received. She reads how Nate has feelings for Jenny, and then steals the letter so Jenny can’t read it. I wonder if Vanessa stops to think that she’s competing with a 15-year-old for a dude with mousse’d hair. That must make her feel good.
