Kate Keller (Tavi Gevinson) has always gossip girl‘s more morally questionable characters. But the high school teacher-turned-Gossip Girl mastermind has finally reached full-on villainy status. It took until the penultimate episode of season two of the HBO Max reboot to release her.
Things are falling apart for members of Manhattan’s elite as the season draws to a close. Monet (Savannah Lee Smith) falls from queen bee to persona non grata. Despite his conspiracy to send her mother to prison, Obie (Eli Brown) remains the most boring character on TV. Grayson de Haan (Rick Worthy) puts an end to her post by gossiping with a bounty on her Girl’s identity. And the Thrupull bond is beginning to break.
All of this comes to life at the annual Rhinebeck Summit. Or, as Obie so eloquently puts it, “the whole millionaire bond.” It’s a very exclusive event, and DeHaan somehow manages to add four more guests to the list at the last minute: Kate sneaks in as Monet’s tutor, but she actually wants to hook up with Camille. there you are Nick Lott (Jonathan Fernandez) is supposedly there to deliver a very important document. Nick’s two plus-ones for him, daughter Zoya and her half-sister Julian.
Convinced that Camille is on GG’s side, Kate attempts to make a backroom deal with her in order to obtain documents denouncing Grayson and get rid of him. The catch: Camille only meets GG in person, and for a while (after the right amount of hijinks), Kate beats Camille at her own game, keeps her identity a secret, and has those top-secret documents in her hands. I put it in. But it doesn’t take long for the other shoe to drop. Camille turned out that the whole time she was playing GG. After Kate uses the documents to accuse Grayson of union busting, he turns around and blames everything on Nick, destroying Nick’s reputation as a legal expert.
Nick (right) and Kate Keller in Season 1.
Karolina Woitasik/HBO Max
It was bad enough when Kate posted a photo of 14-year-old Zoya Lott changing in Obie’s apartment, driving a wedge between the two teenage sisters. But firing Nick, even if by accident, took her to a whole new level of evil. When Kate followed her teens in Constance Billard and posted about their sex lives and petty rivalries, it was certainly uncomfortable. gossip girl Fans may miss. If the drama is juicy and absurd enough, we can forgive the fact that the core of the show is about a white woman in her 20s who uses her position of power to anonymously cyberbully her teenage students. .
But looking back at the reboot so far, it’s hard not to notice Kate’s pattern of doing real-world damage to Nick.
The reason Kate continues to abuse Nick is because he is the kind of person that Kate portends to be a champion. Raised Zoya. He should be the only parent Kate gets in her way No Destroy. Yet it is he who has hurt her the most.
In the first episode, Kate exposes the truth that Julian is paying for Zoya’s scholarship, jeopardizing the freshman’s education. Berat) and Wendy (Megan Ferguson), her fellow teachers, help uncover the fact that Zoya and Nick lived in their mother’s rent-controlled apartment. be kicked out.
And now she’s inadvertently complicit in a union-busting inset, leaving him unemployed and subject to potential legal action in New York City. Put another way, a white woman could have ruined a black man’s life for no other reason than to protect her own ego and keep spying on minors.And we… is that okay?
Long time GG Fans know a lot of bad, horrible, and unforgivable things happened because of the anonymous blogger, but it wasn’t all that sinister when it only affected (mostly) rich white people. No matter what happens, no matter how harrowing and devastating the plot is, the main characters will always bounce back because of their youth and privilege. At the end of the day, despite all the rumors, everyone survived. (Almost everyone. RIP Bart Bass.)
Wendy (left) turns on Kate, who is very annoying throughout the show.
Kara Howe/HBO Max
The fact that we didn’t know GG’s true identity until the end of that show also helped us forgive him for his misdeeds. Who remembers when Gossip Girl released hints at the end of Season 6 that Jenny was sleeping with Chuck? Perhaps more people would have remembered Dan as the creep who shared details about his teenage sister’s sex life on the internet had he known he was her GG at the time.
However, revealing GG’s identity in the reboot’s first episode was a major twist at the time. Almost two seasons later, however, it feels contradictory. gossip girl We introduced Kate as a character you root for, but what she did to Nick makes that impossible. All the time and effort put into the Season 2 arc feels like a waste of time.
Fans watched Kate beat Georgina Sparks (Michelle Trachtenberg) at her game in eight episodes, but they didn’t get one. 2 I love my hobbies! That can’t be said for Luna (Zión Moreno), Zoya, Monet and Shan (Grace Duah). And for what? Putting Kate at the center may have been a fun idea at first, but it could turn out to be the show’s biggest mistake.
