‘Gossip Girl’ Season 3, Episode 14 ‘The Lady Vanished’: TV Recap

Last night on “Gossip Girl,”little J acted out, Chuck brooded, Serena pouted, and Dan and Vanessa fought to prove their relevance. Seems like everything is as it should be on the Upper East Side.
After a gratuitous sex scene involving Nate, Serena, and conveniently placed bowls of strawberries and whipped cream, Blair tells her BFF that she’s down in the dumps. Chuck has been shutting her out ever since he began searching for his long-lost mother. But as B, S, and N soon learn, the twist is that now, Chuck and Mom-of-Chuck have switched places: she’s trying to get in touch with him, but he’s ignoring her calls.
Serena, who knows from absent parents, decides that Chuck must at least hear the mysterious Elizabeth Fisher out. She conspires to have E meet Chuck at a restaurant. But even then, the Bass refuses to budge—he gives Elizabeth a sizeable check and tells her to get lost. She soon obliges. When we next see Blair and Chuck at their hotel, B asks her boyfriend if he wants to talk about what happened. Instead, he wants to have sex.
Since she still can’t let well enough alone, meddlesome Serena follows Elizabeth to the Algonquin Hotel and demands to know why she never contacted Chuck until now. Elizabeth tells her story: when she got pregnant at nineteen, she and Bart Bass decided to give the baby up for adoption. But once Bart saw his little boy, he couldn’t go through with the plan. Even so, Elizabeth didn’t want a family. She told Bart to tell their son she had died so that he wouldn’t try to track her down, then left her former paramour and their love child forever. Finally, we know where Chuck Bass got his ruthlessness. Before she flounces out in a huff, Serena tells Elizabeth once more that she should get to know her son.
E does get in touch with Chuck once more—and this time, perhaps because he’s mellowed out after getting some action, he agrees to speak with her. As Chuck and mom chat for the first time, Serena calls her own deadbeat dad and declares that she’s through trying to get his attention. Right, S: calling him certainly sends that message.
Meanwhile, little J is still mixed up with no-good drug dealer Damian. When he comes to Lily’s apartment to drop off his stash, Mrs. van der Woodson-Bass-Humphrey catches him and Jenny in her room and thinks they’ve been fooling around. She calls in Rufus, who’s still smarting over the news that Lily kissed her ex-husband, and he immediately blames everything on Lily’s bad parenting.
Jenny, intent on rebelling at all costs, makes everything worse by revealing the drugs and claiming they’re hers. But then Damian swoops in to save her, telling R and L that the drugs actually belong to his father, a serious addict. Though his story makes Rufus’s wrath subside, Mr. Humphrey still tells Jenny that she needs to go back to Brooklyn in order to get straightened out (because there are no drugs or sex in Brooklyn). Little J, though, has other plans—she runs away while her dad’s getting packed. We last see her getting into a cab with Damian, a bottle of Lily’s headache pills—read: Oxycodone—in her handbag. And as it turns out, Lily has more to worry about than a missing bottle of pills: Vanya the doorman to her comes bearing a scarf, telling her that Rufus left it in another woman’s apartment.
And at NYU, Dan and Vanessa go to a “South Beach” themed party, accidentally kiss, decide just to be friends, then have sex. We struggle to care.