But surely this line, delivered in the first five minutes of the reboot, will be enough to abate them: “This school produced some great people… Caroline Kennedy, Colson Whitehead… Nate Archibald!” Anyway, let’s face it: Gossip Girl has always been — and always should be — for the teens.
Not the teens we know, or the teens we were, but the teens we want to see on TV: aspirational, as comfortable with their sexuality as they are with their hashtags, and permanently played by 28-year-olds.
First, it’s revealed via wistful kiss-blows to the same old photo in two different boroughs, that the new scholarship student at Constance Billard, Zoya, actually shares a biological mother with Constance’s resident Instagram influencer and queen bee, Julien.
Zoya applied for the scholarship and convinced her dad to move them to her grandmother’s Brooklyn apartment, and Julien sent her the “Bey Superstars” that will earn her a spot inside the Constance elite on the first day of school.
Julien apologizes, but her sidekicks and creative directors, Monet and Luna, scoff at Miss Keller, noting it would take her a full month’s salary to replace the Louis Vuitton bag Julien was modeling.
“Maybe we should try it,” one teacher teases after Rebecca leaves the room, and they all laugh.
No, instead of Julien giving Zoya her explicit validation as a family member, she… gives her a cool pair of shoes, which she pretends to spot for the first time on the Met steps, asks for a photo for her famous Instagram page, then invites Zoya — a 14-year-old! — to hang out with her crew at Dumbo Hall that night.
Julien’s friends don’t want Zoya to come, but they stand down because Julien is being weirdly nice to her estranged sister… almost like if Julien had just said, “this is my sister, who I like,” they would have also let her hang out with them.
Excluding Monet and Luna, who clearly revel in being beautiful, rich, and mean — and Max, who is ready to bone absolutely anyone he makes deep, meaningful eye contact with — everyone else seems to be sullenly going through the motions of life at the ripe old age of 16.
Apparently, Zoya’s scholarship came not entirely on merit, but on the recommendation of Julien Calloway, whose father’s money plays a big hand in granting the school’s fine arts scholarship, a task he often passes along to his daughter.
This guy at least has the decency to act abashed when he hands the half-nude photos of teenagers over to Miss Keller, but Miss Keller is gleeful at the new Gossip Girl cheating scoop — which, again, is part of a plan to, uh, make these teens more cooperative students.
Monet and Luna insist that Julien has to get the power back from Zoya, and Julien insists she knows how to do it while still partnering up with her sister to pull a fast one on Gossip Girl: “a page from the Blair and Serena playbook,” she says.
As you can imagine, Luna and Monet’s plan has a little more pizazz; it involves stealing Zoya’s phone, taking a photo of Max’s junk, and airdropping it to everyone at the fashion show during Julien’s runway walk so that it looks like Zoya purposefully tried to ruin her half-sister’s big moment.
After the dick pic drops, and the set — quite literally — goes up in flames while Zoya is escorted out by security, the creepy Constance teachers note that Julien looks utterly victorious standing at the end of the runway.
Which is, of course, a 16-year-old influencer — and she does not mean that ironically! “I’m not just known, I’m influential,” Julien cries out at her sister, who she’s just humiliated after convincing her to move to New York City.
Obie is, in general, a bit sanctimonious for my taste, but he gets it right when he tells Julien that he’s been waiting for the moment when the “real her” would show back up after being masked by the influencer version of herself for so long — and, unfortunately, it seems like she just did.
Worst of all, Gossip Girl — again, four teachers wearing one extra-long trench coat — wasn’t fooled by Luna and Monet’s plan, and calls Julien out for her “callow ways.” I don’t even want to begin to imagine the self-congratulations that Miss Keller gave herself for that one.