The second season of Gossip Girl took the adventures of those privileged Upper East Siders in a new direction, exploring the ups and downs of the newly created Bass-Van Der Woodsen family, Cyrus and Eleanor’s marriage, Jenny’s rebellion, the main five planning their university careers, Bart Bass’ ‘death’, Chuck’s adoption, Lily and Rufus’ secret child, and of course, the love affairs between Serena and Dan, and Blair and Chuck.
Despite all of these stories, there are masses of continuity errors to dig our teeth into throughout.
Reversing Cars
The second episode of the season introduces us to Marcus and continues Nate’s strange relationship with Catherine, but it is the closing scene that provides the strangest and most obvious mistake.
For some reason, the final shot, in which we see a helicopter taking off, must have been reversed when played in the episode. All of the cars are going backward. Unless this is some sort of worldwide attempt to reverse as much as possible, this seems pretty strange.
The Wrong Title
In the same episode, we are presented with an error that doesn’t match up with real life, rather than the continuity of the show.
Marcus’ stepmother is referred to as Duchess Beaton. In the UK, the correct way to name a duchess is as such: Duchess of (place). This makes her title make very little sense because she should technically be called the Duchess of Beaton.
Headphone Issues
One of the slightly more artistic moments of the often relatively shallow Gossip Girl comes when Serena and Dan are forced to face their issues while stuck in a broken elevator together. However, Nate seems to have even bigger fish to fry.
These fish are headphones, and they won’t stay still. When Nate is talking to Marcus, we see him take his headphones out from two different angles. Then there are two different angles that show the headphones in two different places. Firstly, Nate’s headphone wire goes up to his right shoulder. Secondly, the headphone nearly reaches his collarbone.
The Wrong Restaurant
In ‘The Ex Files’, Blair has lunch at Centolire. For various spite and espionage reasons, Penelope tells Jenny about the location, and she then goes on to tell Vanessa.
When Vanessa goes there in order to find Blair and Marcus, the actual restaurant she is in seems to have a totally different name. This suggests that they might have changed filming locations, or simply used the wrong exterior shot when showing where Vanessa was going.
Lacrosse Stick Extra
This seems like a weird one to leave in. If you’re shooting a scene that requires an extra to walk across the background, surely you’d make sure that this extra only did it one time, so that they walk through the shot in a logical way that seems to make scientific sense.
Instead of this, the extra holding a lacrosse stick walks behind Dan and Serena while they’re talking in the school courtyard (during the episode ‘Pret-A-Poor-J’) twice, casually defying to the laws of physics through teleportation.
Jenny’s Charm
In the episode ‘There Might Be Blood’, Jenny and Rufus are standing outside of the hotel having a chat. Jenny, ever the fashion-conscious teen, is wearing a charm necklace that seems to move back and forth with every changing shot.
This shows that the different angles of this scene were shot separately, making the different angles make very little sense when edited together.
Dan’s Arm Change
Despite his tendencies to be pretty judgemental of the relationships of just about everyone around him, Dan Humphrey ends up in a relationship with his teacher, Rachel.
When they’re in the locker room together, he is holding her with his left arm. When the angle changes, he is holding her with his left, before changing back again when the shot changes next. Unless he is throwing her between his arms with such exceptional force that it happens in the split second of the angle change, then this proves how the two shots have been filmed separately.
Rufus’s False Shock
‘Valley Girls’ is one of the more interesting episodes of Gossip Girl. It was originally conceived as a backdoor pilot for a spinoff which followed the youthful life of Lily Van Der Woodson, but the show never came to fruition.
However, when Lily tries to get Serena arrested (back in the present) Dan, Rufus and Jenny all seem particularly shocked by such a brutal move from the mum; however, Rufus literally did exactly the same thing to Jenny in an earlier episode, meaning he shouldn’t have been confused by another parent mirroring his own actions. You wouldn’t think Jenny or Dan would be overly shocked either.
She Hadn’t Seen The Tudors
The Tudors was a show that depicted the reign of King Henry VIII. Serena claims to have an impressive bit of knowledge about how Pope Pius XI canonized Sir Thomas Moore, which is completely true.
However, she claims to know this through watching The Tudors, which doesn’t cover this piece of the timeline, so wouldn’t mention the event. This means that Serena gleamed this piece of knowledge from elsewhere entirely. Why did she try and downplay her own intelligence by bringing it down to pop culture?
Dan Isn’t Gossip Girl
As with almost every article looking at Gossip Girl, it is almost impossible to mention how it makes no sense for Dan to be Gossip Girl herself. In the final episode of the show, we find out that he had been pulling the strings and ruining everyone’s lives from behind the scenes this whole time.
Despite this, season 2 gives us many reasons to say for certain that Dan wasn’t Gossip Girl at any point. He reacts while alone to her blasts, depicting shock that only he could see. He didn’t need to cover things up when no one was watching, so the continuity between this and the big reveal is particularly bad.
