In the middle of a rooftop college party, Vanessa (Jessica Szohr) tells Dan (Penn Badgley) that “Just because someone has to be on top, doesn’t mean it has to be Blair.” This spurs him to address the crowd, upsetting Blair (Leighton Meester)’s best-laid plans and threatening to upend the social order we’ve gotten so comfortable with in the past two seasons. The pattern is a familiar one: the kids who were unpopular in high school find college to be an environment they can thrive in, while old power structures become unworkable and ache to be torn down.

The realist theory of international relations states, among other things, that states exist in an anarchic system, where there are no higher authorities to pass judgment and the only agreements that are worth anything are those backed by force. In such a system, states make rational decisions to maximize their power and security whenever possible. Several conclusions can be taken from this, one of the most important being that anyone will betray you if the rewards outweigh the costs.

This view of the world was perfect for feeding into Cold War paranoia and guided many of America’s policymakers; it also put us into bed with brutal dictators and made us complicit in atrocities and state terrorism. It’s not hard to paint Blair as a realist; she tries to dominate her first week at NYU by flaunting her economic power and prestige, and she sees everything as a zero-sum power struggle between her and Georgina (Michelle Trachtenberg). Her paranoia against Georgina may not be unwarranted, but her actions paint her as, well, a total bitch.

Realism isn’t the only way to view the world. The constructivist theory of IR is a reaction against realism and neorealism: in it, the system is more than anarchic, it is a blank slate for actors to determine their own relationships with each other. It is more than the power struggle between the hegemon (dominant state) and its challengers; people are not governed purely by power-seeking and desire for security, but can let other values dictate how they pursue relations. When Dan and Vanessa reject the Blair-Georgina struggle as a valid one, they are constructivists.

The problem is that Blair may not be wrong. After all, Henry Kissinger has the blood of multitudes on his hands, but even now it’s hard to say he was definitively one hundred percent wrong. Similarly, Dan hooking up with Georgina is problematic, and not only because it adds to Gossip Girl‘s “Let’s figure out every possible permutation of hooking-up that we can” quotient. (I can’t wait until Season Eleven when they exhaust all possibilities and pair up Blair and Dan. Also by then the show will be a espionage thriller about the war against the Illuminati.) When you have Georgina Sparks waving around a copy of The Prince, that is probably the most blatant symbolism you can devise.

Meanwhile, Serena (Blake Lively) is off in her own little bubble. Afraid of finally taking the plunge and going to Brown, she descends into histrionics: jerking around Carter Baizen (Sebastian Stan), disrupting Chuck’s (Ed Westwick) business plans, and generally pissing off Rufus (Matthew Settle). She fears being trapped by college, but can’t articulate her misgivings beyond that. She seems to be going through what Émile Durkheim termed anomie: left without the clear direction of high school and facing the dissolution of familiar structures, she is adrift and disconnected from the system. She is alienated and seeking connections where she can: her absentee father, Blair, and Carter.

Serena is a cipher. For all of Blair’s cattiness and realpolitik, she is a driven, goal-oriented person with a clear agenda. Serena is more of a free spirit, which at her best expresses as open-mindedness and a fun spontaneity; at her worst it transforms into a libertine’s excess and a hurricane-like path of devastation. She’s emblematic of Gossip Girl as a whole — she’s smart when the plot calls for it, dumb when the plot calls for it, good and evil, subject and object. When the show does it right, she’s complex and multifaceted. At other times, she comes off as schizophrenic.

It’s only fitting that the show’s seen fit to pair her with Carter, another cipher. He’s been a con-man douchebag, a servant of a shadowy secret society (are we seriously going to forget that ever happened?) and now Serena’s confidant. Who knows where that’s going, although now that Chuck Bass appears to be domesticated, perhaps he will be the show’s resident rakish sleazeball.

Then there’s the Nate (Chace Crawford) and Bree (Joanna Garcia) plotline, where the show doesn’t even  bother to disguise that this C-story exists solely to fill in the episode’s template and perhaps fulfill contractual obligations. With an ensemble cast as large as Gossip Girl‘s, they’re not going to fit everyone into every episode, but Gossip Girl generally drops the ball when trying to cover up its filler plotlines and character absences. Joanna Garcia is a fairly talented actress, so let’s hope they do something with her.

Cultural references in this episode:

• Georgina waves around a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince at the college bookstore, telegraphing her intentions as the political tract deals with manipulation and machination as the main method to seize and maintain power. Blair paraphrases from the book as well when she talks about it being better to be feared than to be loved.
• “Good Girls Go Bad” is a pop song by Cobra Starship that plays at Georgina’s rooftop party. It’s somewhat of an in-joke since the song features vocals by Leighton Meester, who plays Blair Waldorf.
• The Freshman is a film starring Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick about a first-year film student at NYU and the shenanigans he gets into with a dead-ringer for Don Vito Corleone. Honestly, they’re not really trying with the episode titles this season, are they?