I hope you’ve cleaned your room and put your bong away, because it’s Parents’ Weekend on this week’s Gossip Girl. In an episode aptly dubbed “Parentsite” (more on that later), the show’s already expansive cast expands even further: New parental units are introduced to lend support and/or cause trouble as the case may be, while the moms and dads to whom we’ve already been introduced add and/or subtract fuel to various storyline fires.
We’ll cover the previously known parents first, starting with Kiki, Audrey’s mother. Comatose since the still-unspecified incident that hospitalized her last week, she’s attended to—to a degree that has the hospital staff running scared—by her doting daughter; Audrey in turn is cared for by her boyfriend Aki and their mutual hookup Max. When Kiki regains consciousness, she’s all thank-yous and apologies to Audrey, and it seems their relationship is patched up.
It’s a celebratory mood, then, that finds Audrey trying to patch up a pair of relationships in one fell swoop. Hosting a dinner for her two helpers while wearing a little black dress with a daring décolletage—you could see this one coming from space—she inveigles Aki (more on him later) and Max into the threesome all three of the characters have probably been fantasizing about since Max first struck up his extracurricular shenanigans. It took the original Gossip Girl multiple seasons to work up to its one and only threesome, a relatively un-daring FFM affair; this iteration of GG is clearly taking advantage of changing times and HBO Max’s nonexistent bureau of standards and practices. Hooray!
As for Max, he too has reason to celebrate: As far as he knows, he’s both fended off the increasingly stalkerish advances of Rafa Caparros—who goes so far as to target Max’s father Roy, who thankfully says he figured out what was really going on and declined—and helped steer Roy to a rapprochement with his estranged husband Gideon. Maybe it’s too early in the show for a cad like Max to develop a conscience, but keep in mind that the original Gossip Girl made Chuck Bass an attempted rapist (a case of art unintentionally imitating life, if allegations about a certain actor are too be believed) in its pilot episode before slowly steering him into antihero status. GGv2.0 decided to just get on with it already and make Chuck’s equivalent, Max, a bad boy with a heart of gold from the jump, and who can blame them? (Caparros also targets Max with an STI-rumor leak to Gossip Girl; Max retaliates for all of this by sending a video of the two of them having sex to GG, though Caparros, who’s weaseled his way back into Kate’s crew by then, deletes it before the rest of the GG group can do anything with it.)
Then there are the continuing adventures of the nice-guy fathers of Julien and Zoya, Davis and Nick respectively. Davis, upset by Julien’s lousy PSAT scores, encourages his daughter to turn her influencer gig into something that actually makes money. The result? A brief dalliance with a Black capitalist of the sort lampooned in Ziwe sketches, which lasts until the ostensibly woke brand in question discourages Julien from, y’know, actually protesting anything. (More on that later, too.) Nick, meanwhile, attempts to strike up a romance with Zoya’s tutor Kate Keller, who calls it off when her meddling co-conspirator Jordan makes her realize her obligation to be Gossip Girl must come first.
Which brings us to the new batch of ‘rents—a complicated bunch, to say the least. In fairness, Aki’s mo (played by Hettienne Park, so great and so underutilized on Hannibal) seems like a nice enough person. But his father Roger (played by fucking Malcolm “A Clockwork Orange” McDowell) is a straight-up Rupert Murdoch manqué, or at the very least a copy of Succession‘s Brian Cox’s copy of Murdoch. And he’s in business with Obie’s mother Helena (Lyne Renée), a real-estate mogul whose joint project with Roger at the Brooklyn Navy Yard is the subject of Obie’s dilettante-ish protesting. (Remember “Parentsite”? It’s not just a Parasite pun—the episode actually centers on a site run by the parents, get it?)
At Julien’s instigation, Zoya invites herself to the big family dinner with Obie and his mother, Aki and his parents, and Audrey, who spends a lot of the episode badmouthing Zoya until she needs a shoulder to cry on. Also at Julien’s instigation, Zoya lets them both know what she really thinks of them, from Roger’s right-wing media empire to their ploy to tear down a homeless shelter for their big real-estate maneuver. Roger, who’s used to being the most powerful man in every room he’s in, takes it all in stride; Obie, however, is horrified by the scene Zoya makes at the dinner. It’s enough to drive the couple apart, and drive Obie right back into Julien’s arms when she shows up at the protest before it gets rousted by the standard NYPD protest-breaking goon squad.
Everything comes full circle when Roger and Helena attempt to leave the site while dodging protestors and press alike. During the disastrous dinner, Zoya grills Roger about a discrimination lawsuit centered on his company’s treatment of LGBTQ+ employees, and the conversation gets so uncomfortable that Aki excuses himself from the table. One slip of the tongue from Audrey later and both of Aki’s parents realize he’s queer. This gives Roger the perfect out when a reporter corners him on his exit from the site and asks him about the lawsuit. How could he possibly discriminate against gay employees, he says, when his own son Aki is gay himself? It’s a shitty way to use your kid for sure. But in the sense that it leads directly to your kid’s very first MMF threesome, is it really that bad in the end? Alongside money, sex and social justice are this iteration of Gossip Girl‘s currency. This is our last episode before a mid-season hiatus, so go ahead and spend it all, I say!
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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August 25, 2021 at 01:18AM
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