There’s a nice symmetry between the beginning of this episode and the beginning of the last one. While that episode opened with all of the students getting ready for their first day at school, here we see all the teacher’s getting ready for parent/teacher conferences, including Kate Keller, Gossip Girl herself, taking a new pair of shoes out of the box stashed under her bed just like Zoya did a week ago. Is this showing the the power has shifted from the students to Gossip Girl, which was the teacher’s plan all along? Like windshield wipers in a rainstorm, it seems like the power is shifting back and forth so quickly we can’t even see what’s happening.

Once we establish that the teachers are more scared of the parents than the parents should be of them (Alec Baldwin has even been caught confiscating people’s phones) there isn’t much to the conferences other than the flirtation that starts between Kate and Zoya’s dad, Nick, which means that the two of them are going to bone. Naturally more of the drama is focused on the students, or at least their interactions with the teachers.

My favorite storyline of the episode is about Max’s pursuit of the classics teacher, Rafa, which a bunch of gays at the Dumbo Club tell him is the fuck of New York and that they couldn’t walk for a week after experiencing it. When Max corners Rafa at the urinal, he steals a peek and says, “Congratulations, even peripherally,” which is now something I will be using in all restrooms just to be kind. Too bad Rafa tells him he doesn’t sleep with students and there is no way he’s going to get it.