Gossip Girl Herself Is Ruining the New ‘Gossip Girl’
Kate Keller (Tavi Gevinson) has always been one of Gossip Girl’s more morally questionable characters. But the high school teacher-turned-Gossip Girl mastermind herself has finally reached full villain status. It took until this week’s episode, the penultimate of Season 2 of the HBO Max reboot—which found both Julien (Jordan Alexander) and Camille de Haan (Amanda Warren) waging war on Gossip Girl—to let her loose.
Things are falling apart for the members of Manhattan’s elite as we near the end of the season. Julien has alienated Audrey (Emily Alyn Lind) and Zoya (Whitney Peak) with her constant scheming; Monet (Savannah Lee Smith) has fallen from Queen Bee to persona non grata; Obie (Eli Brown) is still somehow the most boring character on television, despite conspiring to send his mother to jail; Grayson de Haan (Rick Worthy) puts out a bounty on Gossip Girl’s identity, putting an end to her posting; and the throuple’s bond is starting to break.
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All this comes to a head at the annual Rhinebeck Summit, or, as Obie so eloquently puts it, “that whole bonding for billionaires thing.” It’s an event so exclusive, the de Haans can somehow add four more guests to their list at the last minute — including Kate, who sneaks her way in as Monet’s tutor, but is really there to connect with Camille; Nick Lott (Johnathan Fernandez), who is supposedly coming to deliver some very important documents; and Nick’s two plus-ones, his daughter Zoya and her half-sister Julien.
Convinced that Camille is on GG’s side, Kate attempts to strike a side deal with her to obtain incriminating documents on Grayson to get him off her back. The catch: Camille will only meet with GG in person. For a moment (after an appropriate amount of hijinks) Kate beats Camille at her own game, keeping her identity a secret and getting her hands on those top-secret documents. But it doesn’t take long for the other shoe to drop: It turns out that Camille had been playing GG the whole time. After Kate uses the docs to accuse Grayson of union-busting, he turns around and blames it all on Nick, thus destroying Nick’s reputation as a legal professional.
Nick (right) and Kate Keller, back in Season 1.
It was bad enough when Kate was posting photos of a 14-year-old Zoya Lott changing in Obie’s apartment, driving a wedge between two teenage sisters. But getting Nick fired, even accidentally, has taken her to a whole new level of evil. When Kate went after the teens of Constance Billard, posting about their sex lives and petty rivalries, it was definitely icky—but it was the kind of icky that Gossip Girl fans could overlook. If the drama is juicy and absurdist enough, we can forgive the fact that, at its core, the show is about a 20-something white woman using her position of power to anonymously cyberbully her teenage students, many of them non-white.
But, looking back on the reboot so far, it’s hard not to notice that Kate has a pattern of causing real-world damage to Nick. Damage that cannot be fixed by a heart-to-heart or a sleepover party.
What makes Kate’s continued abuse of Nick is that he is the kind of person Kate portends to champion. He’s not rich like the other Constance parents, and he raised Zoya to be respectful of teachers and her peers. He should be the one parent Kate goes out of her way not to destroy. And yet, he’s the one she’s hurt the most.
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In the very first episode, Kate exposed the truth about Julien paying for Zoya’s scholarship, putting the freshman’s education at risk. Later in the season, her GG accomplices—Jordan (Adam Chanler-Berat) and Wendy (Megan Ferguson), her fellow teachers—helped expose the fact that Zoya and Nick were living in his mother’s rent-controlled apartment, which essentially caused them to be evicted.
And now, she has inadvertently helped frame him for union-busting, making him unemployable in New York City and a target for potential legal action. Let’s put it in another way: A white woman potentially ruined a Black man’s life for no reason other than to protect her own ego and keep spying on minors. And we’re just supposed to… be okay with that?
Longtime GG fans know that plenty of bad, horrible, unforgivable things have happened because of the anonymous blogger, but it felt less sinister back when it only affected (mostly) rich white people. No matter what happened, no matter how horrible or devastating the plot twists, the main characters would always bounce back because of their youth and privilege. It’s part of why Serena accepted Dan when he revealed himself as Gossip Girl in the original series—at the end of the day, everyone survived, despite all the rumors. (Almost everyone. RIP Bart Bass.)
Wendy (left) enables the uber-annoying Kate throughout the show.
The fact that we didn’t know the identity of GG until the very end of that show also helped us forgive him for his misdeeds. By the time the audience learned about Dan’s double life, it was too late to be mad at him for what he’d done to destroy his best friends. Who at the end of Season 6 remembered the time Gossip Girl published a tip about Jenny sleeping with Chuck? Not me. Maybe if we’d known Dan was GG at the time, more people would remember Dan as a creep who shared details about his teenage sister’s sex life on the internet, and not the Lonely Boy we all crushed on.
Revealing GG’s identity in the first episode of the reboot, however, was a great twist at the time. But nearly two seasons later, it feels contradictory. Gossip Girl presented Kate as a character you root for, but what she just did to Nick makes that impossible. Not even the best redemption arc in the world could make Kate remotely likable after this, and it makes all the time and effort spent on her Season 2 arc feel like a waste of time.
Fans spent eight episodes watching Kate beat Georgina Sparks (Michelle Trachtenberg) at her own game and get not one, but two love interests! That’s more than we can say for Luna (Zión Moreno), Zoya, Monet, and Shan (Grace Duah), all of whom were tragically underused. And for what? Putting Kate front-and-center might have been a fun idea in the beginning, but it could turn out to be the show’s greatest mistake.
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