August 18, 2011

Vulture on Set: Imagining the Plot of Gossip Girl’s Fifth Season

By Samantha Zalaznick

Photo: MAP / Splash News/? www.splashnews.com

Blake Lively, Chase Crawford and Ed Westwick filming an episode of 'Gossip Girls' in Long Beach, CA.
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Pictured: Blake Lively, Chase Crawford and Ed Westwick
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Picture by: MAP / Splash News<BR/>
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</P> — *Gossip Girl.* Photo: MAP / Splash News/? www.splashnews.com

Gossip Girl’s fifth season doesn’t begin until September 26, but with new, informative pictures from the set arriving every day, there’s more than enough material to make some educated guesses about upcoming plot points. So that’s exactly what we did! A quick catch-up: When we left off, Serena was spending the summer in Malibu interning for David O. Russell; single Chuck and Nate were off to party in a magical place where, we presume, STDs are noncommunicable; Blair was still with Prince Louis; and Vanessa had Dan’s UES manifesto Inside published anonymously. Click through to see what’s in store for this season, including new characters, a Nate-kissing Elizabeth Hurley, medical marijuana, and Game of Thrones.

Nate gives up playing it cool and crosses the continent for Serena. "How many items do I have to wear around my neck to compensate for not wearing any pants, do you think?" Serena asks. "Don't worry, I've never, ever looked at anything below your waist," Nate replies. "Speaking of things below the waist. I'm worried about Chuck. I lost him a few weeks ago off the coast of Johnny Depp's private island. I haven't heard from him since."

"Don't worry, he'll show," Serena says while leading Nate to her medical marijuana hookup. "Just relax. They gave me a prescription when they saw my rhombus cleavage-to-waist ratio," she winks. "Back problems."

And lo, because Serena always gets her way, Chuck appears. Hugs all around before Chuck pulls back and disparages Nate and Serena for engaging in anything that could be mistaken for something as declasse as a three-way kiss. He follows that up with a pervy remark about how he really prefers his three-ways.

Of course, Chuck has a secret: a horrible case of road rash after some foreplay on a Ducati went horribly awry because he could only think of Blair.

Meanwhile, back in New York, Louis prepares a young woman (played by French actress Roxane Mesquida), who is probably a relative, to meet Blair. "She's nice ... deep down on the inside."

Blair, who wasn't pregnant (but be sure to forget that by the end of this season, when the show uses an unexpected pregnancy as its season-ending cliff-hanger for the third year in a row), offers to show the French girl around and feign interest while she speaks.

Chuck comes back to New York in disguise as Ed Westwick, part of a sex game he cooked up with a girl he met in Cali.

Serena also returns from California, having achieved her real, summerlong goal: finding a man who is taller than her (even if he just works on the Gossip Girl set).

Left alone with no friends all summer, Dan has embraced his authorship as "anonymous" and experimented with his inner artist while wearing jorts and a plaid newsboy cap.

Looking for things to do, he joined an artists and writers baseball league. He thinks he's made some real, down-to-earth friends, but they're just using him ... for something.

He gets a call to meet with a girl he met while playing softball, who turns out to be an undercover gossip columnist whom he will eventually ignore for Blair/Serena.

Getting nowhere with the cleaned-up softballer-cum-gossip columnist, Dan tries to convince her he wrote Inside: "You gotta believe it's me!" She pretends to be skeptical, even though that confession is the reason she's seeing him. They start dating.

Blair contemplates her new life while staring at bikes, thinking both of Lonely Boy, his new lady, and escape.

She's so emotionally distraught, Blair's even taken Cyrus's suggestion to start reading Game of Thrones. She tells people it's research for how to behave in her soon-to-be-role as princess and orders a sword to prove it.

Elizabeth Hurley shows up in her guest-starring capacity as a "media mogul" to become Nate's latest older woman: "I'll teach you everything you need to know. Just hold still."

With Jenny gone, Eric in college, and Serena distracted by tall people, Lily decides to take her house-husband to "work" with her. She lets him take notes.

Bored with the Cali girl, Bass throws her over and gets back to Bass-ics (ba dum dum). He attaches a tracking device to a dog's collar to get to the bottom of whatever happened off the coast of Johnny Depp's island. He tells Dan, getting misty eyed and horny at the same time, that it's the same tracker he used to use on Blair.

Even back in New York, Serena is hard at work fielding phone calls on the set of David O. Russell's new movie. Most are from a guy named Leo, who won't stop calling.

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Vulture on Set: Imagining the Plot of Gossip Girl’s Fifth Season

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