It came as a shock to me — though it really shouldn’t have been — when I found out that the main demographic for Gossip Girl was not teenaged girls (which only make 16% of the viewership) but “18- to 34-year-old women, with a median viewer age of 27 years old.” It doesn’t change my primary analysis, and it makes sense: the kids from the Upper East Side and their hyper-literate self-awareness seem like it would skew slightly older. In depicting teenagers that are practically adults, it appeals to adults who want to vicariously experience teen-dom. This can be seen in The O.C. as well, where some of the best plots were based on fundamentally adult conflicts that were pared down into a teenage context, giving them a layer of abstraction that allows for a great deal of subtext that may be lacking on a show like 90210. Gossip Girl the television series is definitely aimed towards a different audience than Gossip Girl the novel; I haven’t read the books but even a two-page preview is filled with eye-bleeding neuron-murdering prose featuring gems like “The candlelight was making her horny.” It is true, though, that the CW commented on the demographic issue to head off a minor furor over the supposed centerpiece of this episode, the fabled “3SOME”.

It isn’t even really the centerpiece of the episode, as the main plotline revolves around Jenny Humphrey and her power struggles over cotillion. There are a lot of backward-looking and cyclical references in the episode: cotillion, the Lost Weekend, Serena getting trapped in an elevator. (In that regard, it’s amazing how often Gossip Girl synopses read like they were cut and pasted from Screenwriting for Dummies and they actually manage to end up quite good — most of the time, at least.) Jenny’s fixated on her debut as the final erasure of Jenny from Brooklyn and replacement with Jenny, Queen of the Upper East Side. To that end, she’ll do whatever it takes to make cotillion go off without a hitch.

The writers haven’t fully justified Jenny’s internal psychological shift to reach this point. It wouldn’t take much; they did a fantastic job of redefining the Chuck-Jenny relationship in a few short scenes in Season 2. I mentioned before that Gossip Girl seemed to have some of the strongest female voices on television; I’m not so sure that claim holds up anymore. True, the men on the show are rather one-note, but they play their single notes well. Nate is good-natured, dopey, and charming in a leading-man sort of way. Dan is good-natured, dopey, and charming in an artsy-hipster sort of way. Chuck Bass is, as always, Chuck Bass. Blair Waldorf is at the very least a coherent character, but Jenny and Serena transparently move at the whims of the writers, making the characters so flighty and schizophrenic to the point it seems they’re playing to stereotypes. It’s sad, especially when they could be doing so much more.

What’s interesting about the Jenny plotline is the other threesome of the episode: the triple alliance against Jenny consisting of Blair, Eric, and another Constance girl, Kira Abernathy. The pattern of attack fits into the model of power transition theory, which attempts to explain the organization of states in the international system. In this model, there are three kinds of states: the hegemon is the most powerful and has the greatest capacity to shape the system in its own interests. Dominant powers are states who have bought into the hegemon’s system; to them, the disruption that would be caused by unseating the hegemon is outweighed by the benefits they enjoy under the status quo. Then there are the challengers: those who are marginalized under or are dissatisfied with the hegemon’s system. What keeps them from unseating the hegemon (or foils their attempts to do so) is their lack of power to effectively mount a challenge. Therefore, the hegemon’s continued dominance relies on keeping the powerful elements satisfied and the dissatisfied elements powerless.

Apply this template to Gossip Girl, and Jenny Humphrey is the current hegemon; she’s the United States. (Yes, I said Jenny was Hitler last time, but the transitive property doesn’t apply here.) In the status quo, Blair is content to assist Jenny as her cotillion mentor, and Kira is content to be part of the established social order, where she is somewhere in the middle or bottom. But Jenny pursues a dangerous path of unilateral action and shuns both girls; she thinks she can achieve all of her goals on her own. This turns Blair and Kira into challengers who wish to see Jenny taken down. But their combined power isn’t enough — it requires Eric to bring a credible challenge to fruition. Eric’s been a challenger for most of the season; he sees Jenny sliding into corruption and darkness, nearing a point of becoming irredeemable; after suffering several humiliating affronts at the hands of the hegemon, he has been radicalized to the point where he believes only a direct attack will have any results. (Take a guess who he’s supposed to be.)

The triple alliance’s plan to steal away Jenny’s escort succeeds, but she is saved by the deus ex machina of Nate being at cotillion and ready to go for absolutely no reason at all. With the alliance defeated, Jenny’s response and their individual counter-response varies. For Jenny and Blair, it’s an attitude of mutual respect; once Blair is beaten, she makes a negotiated disengagement from the system, content to return to the status quo ante. Kira, on the other hand, feels the full force of the hegemon’s wrath; although Kira may have her own ideas, Jenny makes it clear that any further challenges will be met with massive retaliation. Then there’s Eric — Jenny at least makes a surface gesture of a peace offer (which is easier to do when victorious) but Eric will have none of it. He’s too radicalized at this point, and nothing but Jenny’s destruction will satisfy him. His breakup with Jonathan may have been a little pat, but it makes a good parallel in that the bloody game of realpolitik and geopolitics often forces actors to pay high prices; once you’re locked in, you’re in for a long haul.

There are no grand political parallels in the Dan-Vanessa-Olivia threesome, or at least I don’t think there are. It’s not very shocking either, regardless of what the Parents’ Television Council thinks. Two interesting things about it, though, are its categorization and its display. The ménage à trois is an attempt to collapse the love triangle into a stable entity. Because it’s an order of complexity above a standard coupling, the threesome is often deployed as an element to complicate and create friction in a plotline. The threesome comes in many flavors, most of which I learned from Roland Joffe’s Undressed. (Seriously, Undressed is one of the most overlooked and bizarre gems to ever appear on television. You would never expect that the Academy Award-winning director of The Killing Fields and The Mission would work with MTV to make a series that’s basically a porno with all the sex bits cut out. And if that ever happened, it would be awful, right? Well, that’s Undressed. And it is awful — but in that low-rent “it’s bad enough to become awesome” kind of way. It’s also probably subtly influenced the past ten years of teen sex comedy.) There’s the wedge or V threesome, where the arrangement is the supposed end of competition between two people going after the same object of affection. There’s the T-shaped threesome, where it’s a couple bringing in a third party to breathe new life or expand horizons. There’s also the catalyst threesome (aka the Y tu mamá también), where one person purposefully or inadvertently bridges the gap between two people. It’s murky on what they intend do with Dan-Vanessa-Olivia.

But a thing to consider is how Gossip Girl has mapped the portrayal of same-sex romance and its different portrayals between the sexes. As great as it may be to see Hilary Duff and Jessica Szohr make out, and although the show’s characters seem to have no issue with the concept of gay couples in their midst, there’s a double standard. Eric and Jonathan, for their vaunted relationship, behave almost neutered and platonically in every scene. The show doesn’t revolve around their relationship, so perhaps that’s fair. But consider that the most specific moment of homosexuality depicted on the show was when Dan basically stumbled into a back alley to see Eric getting groped. It’s seen from a voyeuristic angle and depicted as transgressive and wrong — exactly the same way Vanessa stumbled on a scene of incest a season later. Somewhat of a double standard there.

But whatever the faults of this episode, staging a threesome backed by an acoustic cover of T.I.’s “Whatever You Like” is one of those tiny stars-aligning tremor-like strokes of genius that makes you glad the American pop cultural hegemony is good for something. Although they really should have featured the best lines of that track, with Anya Marina crooning, “Shawty you da hottest, love the way you drop it / Your brain’s so good, could’ve swore you went to college.”