The time of Gossip Girl‘s pilot may seem like so long ago that it is easy to forget that it actually had a relatively sophisticated narrative structure, the highlight being the use of a fourth-wall breaking flashback to link two interconnected scenes that were separated by space but not by theme. This episode, written by Executive Producer Stephanie Savage, recalls some of that style — it features less naturalistic tricks such as starting the episode with a flashforward and externalizing Chuck Bass’s inner demons through a dialogue with his deceased father. The question is: to what end?  With the style of the show cemented after several seasons, the use of such narrative devices has a greater metaphysical weight; it is a Very Special Episode whether it wants to be or not. But is it any good?

The central plotline of the episode is dominated by Serena: the stresses placed upon her love affair with Trip, its dissolution, and her car accident. Apparently Gossip Girl was not content with the Kennedy parallels by the fake Chappaquiddick earlier in the season that they had to have a real one: Trip crashes his car after being accosted by three wolves (really?) in the middle of the road, and he and his wife try to cover up the incident by making it look like Serena was driving the car or something similar. Ignoring the fact that this was a plotline used in the comedy Arrested Development, and that there is a huge bloody indentation in the passenger-side windshield, the problem is that this is putting Serena into the utterly cliche “girl in peril” role. The answer to all the dramatic conflicts in this episode is “Serena is hurt, let’s all rush to the hospital!” The Jenny-Eric conflict fizzles out with a rather weak justification about family, considering all the horrible things they’ve done to each other this season — they seem to be setting Jenny up for the even-more-insipid plotline of “Jenny is a drug dealer!”

The events turn the rather bland character of Trip into a scumbag rather quickly, but he seems schizophrenic (as a politician usually ends up seeing, true), another hodge-podge of plot necessities that only exists to create artificial conflicts. It also places Nate conveniently in the role of protector, voice of reason, and hero, finally punching out his own cousin. (The quality of a season of a Josh Schwartz show can be judged by how frequently someone gets punched out. Season One: a punch in the pilot and in almost every other episode. This season: it took twelve episodes for the first K.O.)

The problem revealed by this storyline is that it shows that at this point, in order for Serena to be a sympathetic figure, she has to be a pitiable one. She has to be wronged; she has to be weak; she has to be placed in grave danger. In other words, she has to be Marissa Cooper. The Marissa Cooper Problem was seen in The O.C., where Mischa Barton’s character was a loathsome, vile creature: self-centered, over-dramatic, codependent. She always made incredibly stupid decisions, tried to make herself the center of attention with transparent cries for help, and generally ruined every plotline she was remotely involved in. Contrast this to the Serena of Gossip Girl’s first season, who was intelligent and reasonable; even though she wrestled with her past and with inner demons, she was possessed with a self-awareness and confidence that Marissa Cooper lacked. Unfortunately, it seems as the seasons wore on, Serena trended downwards toward that broken characterization like it was some kind of baseline equilibrium. I’ve mentioned similar problems with the character of Jenny Humphrey; it’s interesting that the most well-adjusted and sympathetic female main character on the show is Blair Waldorf, who also happens to be the character who hews the closest to traditional gender roles.

In fact, the only character really served by the episode and treated with a measure of dignity and thoughtfulness is Chuck Bass; it’s the anniversary of his father’s death, and the weight of that lays heavily upon him. His internal monologue is externalized as a dialogue with a ghostly vision of Bart Bass, and in those scenes the show actually takes time away from the relentless pushing of plot points to breathe in and realize one of their characters as something more than the conjunction of conflicts. Chuck continually compares himself to his father, and part of what drives his character is the indelible fact that his father died knowing him only as a wastrel and a dissipated lush. Bart Bass will never see his son be a man, and this invests Chuck with a measure of guilt, compounded by the fact he couldn’t even muster up the courage to see his father on his deathbed. It’s a powerful internal struggle, as we see Chuck deciding between whether to wall himself away from others and retreat into the exacting security of work — in other words, to honor his father by being the same man as he was — or to connect to others, to reach out and admit his own inner humanity — to honor his father by being a better man than he was.

Friday Night Lights also recently dealt with a plot arc about one of its main protagonists, Matt Saracen, dealing with the death of his father. Although the shows are diametric opposites — rural Texas versus Upper East Side Manhattan, raw and subtle versus stylized and soapy — it’s interesting to see the commonalities between the two arcs. Both seem to manifest the loss of the father as a spiritual wound; for Matt it is fresh and deep, while for Chuck, it is a dull ache, scarred over and yet impossible to ignore. Both are confronted with images of their fathers, unsure of how to reconcile the man they see with the man they knew and will never see again. Both shows meditate on how grief is a personal and supremely unique torment, impossible to share with others; and yet we do it anyway because we don’t know anything else. Without indulging in normative claims about what a family should be, both shows dramatize that we live in a society that is bereft of fathers and yet that same society will always live in their shadow. And finally, both Friday Night Lights and Gossip Girl tell us in order to heal the wounds and pain caused by the loss of their fathers, the characters must confront their own fears and misgivings about who they are as individuals. Chuck and Matt are men, not their father’s sons.

Of course, Gossip Girl is a soap opera, and it can’t escape that; it has to plant and pay off another over-the-top storyline about “Chuck’s mother didn’t die in childbirth and has been living in secret for decades, isn’t that crazy?” But let’s ignore that for now. Of all the characters’ obsessions and conflicts with their parents, Chuck’s is the most potent and the most thoughtful. And of all of Gossip Girl‘s reversals and inversions over the years, the supreme one is that the most villainous and corrupt character has matured into the most nuanced and truly understandable one.