"Thank Bergdorf's for Blair (Leighton Meester) and Dan (Penn Badgley), whose non-romance is the most exciting this show has seen all season."

from Entertainment Weekly’s TV section- What to Watch.

Напомню что Kristin Dos Santos is a huge Chair shipper and has labelled Dair as a “nomance” and is not above trying to angle spoilers so they favor her POV. But based on what JS told her: looks like we haven’t seen the last of Dair!

My big problem with GG is that I'm so completely beyond bored to tears by scheming and back biting and plotting and the such. Which is one reason that I'm wondering if I'll like the last few episodes at all. I DON'T CARE about all the melodrama. What has been so reinvigorating about Blair and Dan is that they have not been about all this horrid melodrama that has pretty much destroyed the show. I largely fast forwarded through most of the Bass Industries stuff, but it sounds like the arcs are all too interrelated in the last few episodes to do that.

One word on keeping posts to their appropriate threads. At this point we know so much about the spoilers for the future that I find it almost impossible to post anywhere except here. How can you write about Chuck or Dan or Blair or Serena while keeping what you know - or think you know - out of the post? It is hard. Right now we are trying to put together a jig saw puzzle for which we have about 40
% of the pieces. But I personally can't forget that we have the pieces.

I agree that many if not all of the characters will end the season alone. I do think that there will be a gesture by Blair towards Dan. I absolutely am convinced that she is in a state of acute denial about her feelings for Dan. There are a couple of dozen reasons to think this and no very convincing reasons to doubt it.

E.g., her perpetual denial that she and Dan are friends for the past 7 or 8 episodes.

The fact that she stays in bed for a week after kissing Dan. And remember, if you want Blair immediately prior to the kiss, she was having trouble maintaining emotional control. The way she was shaking and the subsequent week in bed, regardless of her bizarre conclusion afterwards, is much more consistent with her unconsciously repressing her feelings for Dan than realizing that she really just feels for him how you feel for friends. There is also the textual reason for reading her as repressed: they have built up to The Kiss as a seminal, game changing event. They'll make it pay off, but making it pay off makes vastly more sense if she is in denial. Finally, there is Gossip Girl's voiceover. You know, "The bigger question is what happens when you stop fighting [fate]." What happens when you fight fate? You go into denial. Blair is still fighting fate. And she may for a while.

I do think we'll get a Dan/Blair gesture towards the end. Someone said something about Blair picking up a copy of the New Yorker and seeing something Dan wrote. But I think it would be killer if she picked up the Atlantic Monthly and see the very article that she passed along in 4.15. That would make it really, really personal.

I wonder if the show runners or their assistants pitched Dan being the darkhorse to EW. If so, that is good news for Dan, because the darkhorse almost always wins in situations like this.

Loves it. I wish GG would be cute more often. Cute works! Dair is uber cute, that's why I love it! Enough of this Twilightesque Chair angst and enough of these dark and dreadful IP storylines.

OK, let me take a stab at this.

Are Dan and Blair friends? Think if this sequence of statements.

Blair: “I told you that it was just one movie on one lonely holiday break. That’s it.” (4.13)
Dan: "I'm here to see Serena." (Look of mild disappointment on Blair's face)

[And let me interject that Leighton Meester sells ALL of these scenes. I love her enormous palette as an actress and her ability to go through a dozen emotions in a 20 second period, all while delivering the best lines this side of Lauren Graham on the first GG. You couldn't do these scenes with any other female on the show and only a handful of other actresses on TV.]

In another episode she says, “Going to movies is a one . . . or four time thing. It’s not like we’re friends.” (4.14)

Yet later she says, “How many times do I have to repeat myself? We’re not friends Just because we went to see a movie, or five, together doesn’t mean I’ll go out on a limb for you.” (4.15)

We know from recaps that she acknowledges in the next couple of episodes that she and Dan are, in fact, friends, but she was in a genuine state of denial about it until then.

Then there is The Kiss. Go rewatch that scene five times and then tell me that Blair wasn't enormously excited by the whole thing, that she wasn't as nervous as hell. She is just trembling, barely keeping herself under control. Put that together with the fact that she spent a week in bed immediately afterwards. Read between the lines. You simply can't conclude that she felt nothing. So what can you conclude? Either she is lying or she is in a state of denial. I don't think she is lying, ergo she is in a state of denial.

It fits her pattern with Chuck as well. She denied repeatedly being interested in Chuck, in liking him, or being in love with him. It is her character.

I think that her pattern with Dan has been first to hate him, then gradually to see that he has some redeeming qualities even though he is from Brooklyn. Then this season she found she enjoyed spending time with him and that he made her happy, even though she would have denied it if asked. It was simply too much for her to go from liking to spend time with him (but not admitting it) to acknowledging she has romantic feelings for him.

I think this is consistent with what we know about the show. She gets this grand epiphany that seems completely at odds with everything we saw with The Kiss. Put the two together and it makes absolutely no sense.

Getting from hating Dan to loving Dan in a romantic sense is a process. A process in which she has to come to terms with her feelings. She ALREADY has feelings for Dan. We saw that in the last two episodes. But Blair is in transition. She is confused about what she needs and what she wants. And she is in denial about that. She knows what she wants, but mistakes that for what she needs. She wants either Prince Louis or Chuck Bass, but that is because she is in denial about Dan in general and The Kiss in particular.

I think the next stage in her moving from denial is learning that what she wants isn't really what she needs. I don't know if this will be because she realizes that the Prince and/or Chuck don't really fulfill her needs, or because she misses Dan. But if the title of the finale, "The Wrong Kiss Goodnight," is any indication, something happens that makes her break through her denial about the significance of The Kiss. The title seems to imply that someone knows that some kiss is the wrong kiss, and hints at consciousness. It would not be unreasonable to imagine that it is Blair. And the title would seem both to imply a right kiss, and the most obvious kiss in the entire series to date was Dan and Blair's kiss. And realizing The Kiss was The Right Kiss implies Blair realizing something about what the kiss meant for her. The photos and footage that we've seen of the kiss that was not in the last episode and that Psappy says is not in the next two episodes (or am I hallucinating that?) has to appear sometime. I think it will appear when Blair has an OMG moment, when it suddenly hits her that she does have feelings for Dan.

And all this can be tied to Gossip Girl's question immediately prior to The Kiss, when she says, "The bigger question is what happens when we stop fighting [fate]." It turns out that we thought that they would kiss and acknowledge that they had feelings. but now it turns out that in fact Blair IS still fighting fate. Use whatever term you want - denial, repression - but she is fighting fate.