‘Gossip Girl’ Episode 4 Recap: They Say It’s Your Birthday

It’s Zoya Lott’s 15th birthday, but she’s not in the mood to celebrate. Indeed, she’s never in the mood to celebrate, at least not on her birthdate itself. In this revelatory, if kind of herky-jerky, episode of Gossip Girl, we learn that her mother—who was also Julien’s mother and who jilted Julien and her dad for Zoya’s father—died in childbirth. Her boyfriend Obie and her half-sister Julien take a while to catch on, but Zoya’s view of her own birthday is forever morbid.

But because of the machinations of Julien’s henchwomen/enablers/handlers/personal devils-on-the-shoulder Luna and Monet—who in a throwaway storyline conspire to have Zoya and her dad evicted from her grandma’s apartment (!)—Zoya winds up deciding to throw a party anyway. It’s her way to counterprogram the one that the minions have egged Julien into throwing.

The tit-for-tat goes on from there, in large part thanks to a surprising new character: Milo Sparks, the 10-year-old prodigy/espionage-expert offspring of the original Gossip Girl‘s archvillain Georgina Sparks. Milo digs into Julien’s old posts in an attempt to get her canceled. Julien counters by proclaiming that her party is a now a charity fundraiser. When their dads force the girls to throw a joint party, Milo doses the cupcakes that Julien’s been eating; Julien, who very nearly lost the booking of her special guest Princess Nokia thanks to Milo’s meddling, prepares to go nuclear by playing a video that reveals exactly why Zoya left her old hometown of Buffalo, provided to her by Monet and Luna.

Only the video is far worse than she imagined. It starts off innocently enough, with Zoya spraypainting “FUCK SCHOOL” in her old school’s hallway at the instigation of other kids. But then those kids turn on her, locking her in a classroom and triggering a panic attack that ends with her literally lighting the room on fire. (Hence the episode’s title, “Fire Walk with Z,” which doubles as a homage to the ep’s director, Jennifer Lynch, daughter of David.) Julien is so taken aback by the footage, which she hadn’t seen, that she winds up declaring herself a bully in front of the entire party (and anyone watching along at home via social media). She and Zoya patch things up. (Yes, again—so far this iteration of Gossip Girl can’t make up its mind if these two are friends or enemies for longer than half an episode at a time.)

And what’s the Gossip Girl collective up to this whole time, you ask? Policing their own. It seems that Kate, the ringleader of the now-trio of teachers responsible for the GG account, has been allowing it to eat up all her time, preventing her from writing the Great American Novel she’s dreamed of writing ever since she dropped out of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. (Yes, it’s like that storyline from Girls. Yes, they bring this up.) So her colleagues Jordan and Wendy step in, taking over the account and even blocking Kate so she can’t read it and perseverate when she should be working on her book. “I’m so turned on!” Wendy exclaims after firing off her first post; Gossip Girl winds up reporting mostly good news in the end, but it’s good to know there’s a sleazy, sexy side to everything.

Some elements of the episode are surprisingly wholesome. There’s the detente reached by Zoya and Julien’s dads, for example, who work together to squash the beef and come up with the idea for the joint party. The death of the girls’ mom no doubt has kept the wounds from their love triangle fresher than they might otherwise be, but at this point it’s been 15 years since she died, and the men seem to think it’s time to bury the hatchet.

The same can be said for Audrey and Aki. Having both hooked up with Max—Audrey a bit more thoroughly than Aki, to be fair—they now both have big questions about one another. Aki wonders if Audrey has cheated on him with anyone else; Audrey wonders if Aki is gay. The answers, it turns out, are “no she hasn’t” and “no he isn’t, though he’s probably bi, but it’s Audrey he’s really into so what difference does it make.” Much of the episode’s very mild comedy stems from their mutual reluctance to simply ask one another, but once they finally do, it seems like they’re back on solid ground.

By far the most interesting subplot of the episode—and whether coincidentally or not, it’s the one that has the least to do with the Julien/Zoya feud—centers Max, the wild child of the bunch. Turns out that since his parents’ marriage hit the skids, in no small part due to his own meddling, he’s been going a little too wild: missing school for a week, losing his phone at the Cock, carrying an Altoids tin full of Hunter S. Thompson’s proverbial whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers downers screamers laughers, rolling deep with a crew from the Mount Sinai Health System for some reason, you name it. And since the two kids he’s closest to, Audrey and Aki, are busy sorting out their own feelings in the wake of ill-advised hookups with him, he’s out there on his own.

Until Mr. Caparros steps in, that is. Oh, don’t worry, this isn’t some feel-good moment in which Max realizes the error of his ways, stops trying to sleep with his teacher, and starts listening to his advice instead. On the contrary, it’s precisely Caparros’s willingness to let Max into his place to crash that leads to his resolve against fucking his students wearing down entirely. Earlier in the episode Caparros faced down a pass by Max while fully nude in the showers (“You look like shit,” he tells the obviously inebriated Max; “Oh, you should see the other guys” Max deadpans in return—note the plural, lol.) But once Max is inside his apartment, he finally says “fuck it”—literally, he says “fuck it”—and gives in to sin, as the song says. The plot, and at least two other things I can think of, thickens.

Maybe this will give GGv2.0 the excuse it needs to pivot away from the on-again off-again Zoya/Julien war to other matters. But I’ll say this for the Z/J battle: The show is smart in showing how the ultra-rich perform virtue for the hoi polloi—dredging up old social posts strictly to punish someone under a woke smokescreen (wokescreen?), turning the party designed solely to spite someone into a fundraiser, denouncing bullying immediately after bullying the shit out of someone, and so on. These kids learn about privilege, cancel culture, et cetera only because they can use it to their advantage. For people who were worried Gossip Girl would be humanizing its characters by making them more socially aware than their predecessors, you can stop worrying. It’s just given them a new set of weapons.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Gossip Girl Episode 4 ("Fire Walks With Z") on HBO Max