Gossip Girl (2021) Season 1 Episode 7 Review: Once Upon a Time in the Upper West

Can we have Thanksgiving on Gossip Girl every single episode?

Gossip Girl (2021) Season 1 Episode 7 was the best installment of the series to date, thanks to all of the storylines converging at Nick and Zoya’s apartment.

Who would have thought everyone would wind up spending Thanksgiving with the Lott family?

We’ll start with the sisters. They truly need to stop fighting over a boy. In 10 or 20 years, they’re going to be looking back on this relationship and wishing they had spent more time being sisters.

Obie isn’t precisely a catch and seems to get a kick out of playing Julien and Zoya against each other.

The fundamental issue with this relationship is that Zoya thinks she’s entitled to a relationship with Obie, aka her sister’s on-off boyfriend.

If Zoya wanted any semblance of a relationship with Julien, she should have put Obie out to pasture and worked on the sisterly relationship.

Zoya being mad about the hookup is another tough pill for me to swallow. There is still a connection between Julien and Obie, and Zoya fails to understand her arrival interrupted it.

Nick and Davis working together to repair the relationship with the sisters was compelling because you can tell these two men have a lot of hatred for one another, but they don’t want the sisters to lose out on a relationship because of their mistakes.

Davis telling the truth about robbing Nick of his daughter’s birth and the final moments with his lover floored me. Now we’re truly delving into the origins of their feud, and we need much more of it.

Nick conceding that he would have done the same thing was a nice gesture to allow the girls to bicker about it.

Now that the sisters are officially on the outs, the road to reparation between them is murkier than ever.

Obie continues to be the weakest character on the show because his actions never come back to bite him. He’s your typical rich kid, but he wants everyone to believe he’s this upstanding guy.

The sooner Julien and Nick realize it, the better. He’s also been a terrible friend to Aki.

Evan Mock was one of the weakest parts of the cast at the beginning of the series, but he’s blossomed into one of the best in recent episodes.

As he tried to move on from what happened with his father while simultaneously pondering the future with Max and Audrey, Aki’s pain made for great TV.

Aki is at the stage in his life where he’s unapologetically himself, and his comment about spending the night with Audrey and Max was hilarious.

Every single person at the table was shocked because it came out of nowhere.

We didn’t get much of an answer about why his father warned him to stay away from Julien, but that will probably be one of the driving forces of these final episodes of the season.

Max revealing all to his fathers about Rafa was needed. He couldn’t just brush this under the rug and be done with it. He had to come to terms with what it meant for him.

Rafa quitting his job and telling the truth came out of nowhere. His erratic and menacing behavior throughout the first half of the season made me think this was going to wrap up horrifyingly.

Granted, Max played a huge role in the teacher coming to his senses, but this was a nice change of pace. Trading in the high-action for compelling character progression is a surefire way to get fans invested.

The big surprise is that Rafa didn’t tell the school anything about the other teachers. He clearly had some strong feelings about using the account, but something tells me this is not the last we’ve seen of him.

He will pop back up at some point down the line to start the scheming all over again.

The teachers continue to be frustrating because they think they have a right to destroy the lives of these kids.

I would have much preferred Rafa to say he gave the account to someone more appropriate, leaving viewers in suspense until the conclusion.

Part of the original series’s allure was piecing together the clues to unmask Gossip Girl, but the reboot missed a trick from the beginning by switching it up.

We also need to talk about Lola. Davis doesn’t like her as much as she likes him and the way she was adamant about revealing the engagement came out of nowhere.

The comment about him only proposing to stop her from testifying against him was another hard left turn that would come back to bite everyone.

Will Kate use this intel to derail Davis and Julien’s lives, or will she do some fact-finding to unmask what really happened first?

“Once Upon a Time in the Upper West” was a thrilling return for the series. It put all of the characters on new and exciting paths.

What did you think of the dinner?

Do you think any of the characters went too far?

Hit the comments below.

New episodes of Gossip Girl drop Thursdays on HBO Max.

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Paul Dailly is the Associate Editor for TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter.

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