Life Unexpected & Gossip Girl: Father Unfigured, refigured. Inglourious Bassterds, Bass is an ass.
Life Unexpected (s1ep12): Father Unfigured - ****
This week on Life Unexpected, Cate, Lux and Baze go on a road trip to track down Cate’s long-absent father.
You go, show. Watching this episode, you just validated my vote I made earlier today for Save One Show at EOnline. This and Vampire Diaries are my favorite shows of the ‘09-’10 season. I highly recommend both.
Gossip Girl (s3ep17): Inglourious Bassterds - ****
This week on Gossip Girl, Chuck and Blair face a challenging decision and Dan and Vanessa’s relationship hits a snag. Meanwhile, Serena arranges a surprise party for Nate, but Jenny attempts to wreck those plans.
Wow, we’re 2 for 2 tonight in episodes. This is how Gossip Girl should be every week.
Life Unexpected (s1ep12): Father Unfigured
Previously: Ryan and Cate are engaged to be married in two weeks. But Baze has just rediscovered his feelings for Cate.
Cate and Lux are looking through Cate’s mother’s attic when Lux finds some old birthday cards Cate’s dad sent her and Abby when they were growing up. Only problem is Cate never received them. She’d always thought her dad had left them and never looked back, because that’s what her mom had always told them. She then decides to take a road trip with Lux to meet her father, while Ryan stays behind to do last minute wedding stuff, and ask him to walk her down the aisle at her wedding.
Cate: My own father doesn’t even know that I’m getting married. If Lux was getting married, and I didn’t know, I’d kill myself.
Lux: I will be sure to send you an invitation.
Cate: Every girl pictures her father walking her down the isle. I can barely even picture my father.
Meanwhile, Bug gets in trouble with some guys from his past and in retaliation they trash Baze’s bar. Bug is worried about getting fired, so he asks Lux to get Baze to close down the bar for a couple days until he can get it all cleaned up. You can see where this is going right?
Lux amusingly convinces both her mom and Baze, who after talking with Bug has decided to avoid Cate at all costs because of his newfound feelings, to take a family road trip. Road trip! The three of them are too cute. Baze and Lux are the cutest father-daughter duo. And I can’t decide between Cate/Ryan or Cate/Baze in the ’ship department. I love both of them, you guys. Can’t we just squish them together and call it a day? Decisions, decisions.
Unfortunately, it turns out Cate’s dad is a dud and never wanted to be a husband or a father. He married her mother when she got pregnant, but refused to be trapped into a life he didn’t want, and so he left. Baze tries to tell Cate his suspicions about her father, but of course she doesn’t want to hear it. They get into an argument and Baze leaves to go back home. Plus, another stab in the heart for him when Lux admits she only asked him along to cover for Bug. Ouch.
Cate later learns the truth for herself just as Baze comes back. Turns out he never left his girls and simply slept in his truck overnight. Could Baze finally be growing as a person? And I totally cried guys when Cate cried in Baze’s arms and the camera panned to Lux. You see Lux realize her mother is just as broken and fragile as she when it comes to feeling unwanted. That’s the third time this show has made me cry.
Cate: Thank you for being there.
Baze: Always.
We’ve seen so many episodes showing us how bad Cate and Baze are at being parents, or even adults, that this episode puts things back into perspective. We realize even worse than having a father who doesn’t know how to be one, is to have a father who doesn’t want to be one.
Cate: All this time I’ve been blaming Baze, like he’s the only one who has left me. I thought he was the one that wrecked me - you were.
But on a good note, Cate has finally gotten over and forgiven Baze for being ‘that guy’ and blaming him for the mistakes of her father. And Lux has allowed Cate and Baze to fully adopt her.
Gossip Girl (s3ep17): Inglourious Bassterds
Previously: Dan and Vanessa are dating. Jenny is drugged and Nate to the rescue. Chuck is tricked by his mom.
Jenny vs. Nate vs. Serena: It’s Nate’s birthday and Serena is planning him a surprise party. Only catch, Nate can’t know about the party and so Serena pretends she doesn’t have anything planned at all. Jenny finds out about the whole thing through Gossip Girl, finally to Gossip Girl being included again in a matter relevant to the story, and thinks, “Bohoo, poor Nate.” Really, she’s thinking, “Yipee, this is my chance.”
She invites Nate to lunch, which he quickly takes once Jenny plays the sympathy card with him about almost getting date raped. Now, I actually like Nate and Jenny together, but scheming her way into his heart isn’t the way to do it. But on the other hand, if Nate didn’t actually return her feelings, it wouldn’t have been so easy to do, right?
Later, they actually make it to Nate’s surprise party, and an upset Serena who wonders what he’s been doing with Jenny all day and why he’s late. They play an intriguing game of Assassins, you steal a person’s photo from them and they die, and Jenny wins in both love and war as she steals a kiss in a battle between the last two, her and Nate.
Dan vs. Vanessa: We also get a somewhat interesting story between Dan and Vanessa as they finally get past their simple problem of friends vs. relationship. They exchange writings for each other to critique, which sets off a chain reaction of lies and deceit. Dan doesn’t want to tell Vanessa he didn’t like her piece, but when she says she liked his story, he agrees he liked hers as well.
Then, Dan finds his story all marked up in her bag while getting a camera and Vanessa finally admits it wasn’t his best work. We later learn Dan’s story is for his application to Tisch, and Vanessa is also secretly applying to Tisch. So is she getting Dan’s help? Is she setting Dan up to fail? It’s a bit more interesting than their usual, but it does feel like it came out of nowhere.
Etc. Etc. Eric is finally back and looks like he’s getting a love interest. Oh, and Dorota gets engaged.
Chuck vs. Blair: But the best part of the episode, as usual, has to go to Chuck and Blair. Chuck’s storylines and character arcs are usually a force unto themselves.
Chuck is attempting to make a deal with Jack for his hotel back, but his uncle will only sign it back over under one condition, an unspoken proposal which Chuck later tells Blair he refused. Meanwhile, Blair receives a proposal of her own from Jack while dress shopping, sleep with him or watch Chuck go under. Oh, and by the way, wear this lovely dress when you come by later.
Blair: Serena, you’ve done some unforgivable things, like sleeping with Nate when we were saving ourselves for each other or killing Pete Fairman. How far is too far?
Blair feels helpless as she watches Chuck get more and more frustrated with losing his hotel, until a final breakdown when he kind of yells at her, and she decides to help out her man by finally giving into Jack’s indecent proposal.
Gossip Girl: When all other weapons fail, there’s always human sacrifice.
She shows up at Jack’s place, and just when they’re about to do the deed, they don’t. Jack tells her it was all a lie, and the plan was not for Blair to give it up to him, but for Chuck to give her up to him. Turns out Chuck planned the whole thing as a way of getting back his hotel. He told Jack where she’d be. He bought the dress. He gave up his own girlfriend like a lamb to the slaughter. When Blair sobbed at the realization, I teared up too:
Blair: I never thought the worst thing you’d ever do would be to me.
And then, he has the audacity to tell Blair that she said she’d stand by him and do “anything” for him. But really, was the unspoken agreement for her to do anything for him, or him to do anything to her? So, instead of asking her upfront, which he says Jack would have realized what was going on, he used the trust and knowledge she gave him in their relationship to trick her into it. She was just a pawn in the game. She slaps him, good riddance, and leaves.
Later Chuck has a talk with his uncle right before he boots him out, and sadly, Chuck thinks Blair and him will be able to work this out. I’m not so optimistic.
Jack: Blair has seen the real you now. It’s over. She could never love that. No one could.
Last questions: But what I want to know most of all is, what is up with the CW and Bing? First Vampire Diaries and now Gossip Girl are using that site.