HBO Max’s Gossip Girl revival-boot wrapped its second and final season on Thursday, culminating with the most dramatic Met Gala moment since Solange and Jay-Z shared an elevator.
Showrunner Josh Safran spoke with TVLine about the finale’s biggest twists (and how they would have shaped the now-canceled third season), but let’s start with a quick recap:
Julien conspired to sneak Zoya onto the Met Gala carpet where she would “reveal” herself as Gossip Girl, hoping the attention would make the real GG jealous enough to come out of hiding. When that didn’t work, they floated a rumor that Zoya was meeting with big-time directors to sell GG’s story, enlisting one last Gossip Girl OG (Matt Doyle as Eric’s now-husband Jonathan) to help pull it off.
“We also tried to get Connor Paolo back [as Eric], but he was busy shooting a movie,” Safran says. “We were very happy to have Matt there to tell the story of their marriage.”
In the end, it was Kate’s hubris that did her in. To quote special guest star Andy Cohen, “A teacher? What a twist! Also… gross?” With GG finally slain (and everyone rightly horrified to learn that a teacher was behind it all), the gang celebrated their victory in Italy, where we got a taste of what their futures hold.
Luna’s modeling career is skyrocketing, as evidenced by her ubiquitous Oscar de la Renta campaign; Julien connected with her estranged aunt (played by Broadway icon LaChanze), who suggested there’s more to her late mother’s story than she knows; Zoya enjoyed what appeared to be a meet-cute with a fellow theater enthusiast (played by Aaron Dominguez, who would have been a regular in Season 3); and Max, freshly dumped by Aki and Audrey, was drowning his sorrows at a bar in Germany, where a mysterious stranger offered a helping hand.
And if you stuck around for the finale’s MCU-esque post-credits scene, you’d know that Roger Menzies offered Jordan a job that would turn GG into a global, teen-snitching app. Perfect.
HBO Max’s decision to cancel the series means that we won’t get to see any of that play out, but we have good news: Safran and his writing team were fortunate enough to have “mapped out the entire season,” and he was more than happy to answer TVLine’s burning questions about what was going to happen next.
Read on for our full Q&A with Safran, then grade the series finale in the poll below. When you’re done, drop a comment with your review of the episode, as well as your thoughts on these Season 3 storylines.
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With Kate in prison, would we still see her in Season 3?
Image Credit: HBO Max screenshot “She definitely would have been back,” Safran assures us. “Would she have been back in every episode? No. But part of the fun is letting the new world order take control. We definitely had a plan for Tavi [Gevinson], though. And Kate was always going to be arrested eventually. We knew that back in Episode 5 of Season 1. We had a one-year deal with Tavi, which we then extended. We knew the teachers would no longer be Gossip Girl by the end of Season 2.”
Safran also knows that many viewers weren’t crazy about the teachers back in Season 1, but he says, “I think the audience really came around to them this year, and I think they would have come around to them even more in Season 3. They just get more and more evil. The morals were out the window in Season 2, which a lot of people noted. I saw the tide shift and people really started to enjoy them.”
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So Jordan made that deal with the Devil?
Image Credit: HBO Max screenshot “Yes, that was also always part of our long-term plan,” Safran says. “We wanted to see what would happen if we ‘democratized’ Gossip Girl. We were really excited about that story.”
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Who did Max meet outside the club in Germany?
Image Credit: Courtesy of HBO Max “Aaron Dominguez, who you see meeting Zoya in the theater, originally also meets Max, Audrey and Julien separately, giving each of them a different name and coming from a different background,” Safran says. “He’s British when he meets Max, he’s American when he meets Zoya, he’s Italian when he meets Julien and he’s Spanish when he meets Audrey. That’s the stuff I cut [when we were canceled]. People would have been like, ‘Who is this guy meeting all of these characters, pretending to be different people, and what is his endgame?'”
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So I was right not to trust that guy when he met Zoya?
Image Credit: HBO Max screenshot “Yes, that’s exactly what that scene was supposed to be. The actors acted this scene knowing that something was off [with Aaron’s character]. But then I cut [Aaron’s] other scenes. So I tried to make this sweet and romantic, but that wasn’t how we shot it. There’s only so much a score can do. Aaron had some really fun stuff coming up, and I’m sad that it won’t see the light of day. He was going to be a regular in Season 3.”
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What big secret was Julien going to learn?
Image Credit: HBO Max screenshot “Julien and Zoya don’t know much about their mother, really,” Safran says, promising that there wasn’t going to be a “Bart Bass is actually alive” twist. “Marion is definitely dead. But Julien would find out that not everything she’s been told by her father, and everything Zoya was told by Nick, was correct. That was going to be a driving factor for Julien and Zoya’s emotional spaces.”
(Bonus scoop: “In the original cut of the finale, before we knew we were being canceled, I took a lot of that scene out,” Safran says. “You didn’t even know who LaChanze was. You just knew that Julien wanted information from her. It was actually a good cliffhanger. When we got canceled, I put the whole scene back in.”)
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What's next for Luna in her rise to superstardom?
Image Credit: HBO Max screenshot “We were really interested in the fact that Julien always wanted to be a famous influencer and was just happy to have a ton of followers, and Monet always wanted to be at the top, but only the top of Constance, or New York City private schools at most,” Safran says. “They never could have imagined the level of superstardom that Luna gets at the end of Season 2 and has going into Season 3. We were going to deal with them realizing that there’s an echelon they never even thought they could achieve, and now their best friend has achieved it. That was going to drive them incredibly mad with jealousy and envy, and they were going to team up to try and take Luna down.”
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Was this really the end for Audrey/Aki and Max?
Image Credit: HBO Max screenshot “What you see is what was always going to happen, but Season 3 would have explored Audrey and Aki realizing they jumped the gun,” Safran says. “Max is trying to move on because he’s been so hurt, but they come to realize that they miss him.”
In fact, there’s a scene in the finale where Audrey is looking at a painting that’s supposed to remind her of Max. Before Dominguez’s scenes were cut, “the camera was supposed to pull back and Aaron was there next to Audrey,” Safran adds. “He actually said, ‘You’re staring at that painting like you know that person.’ And she said, ‘Maybe I do.’ They have a whole conversation about her missing Max, but I had to cut that scene.”
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Image Credit: HBO Max screenshot “It makes me incredibly sad that people who don’t read the internet might think I was saying that polyamory can’t work, which is not at all what any of us were trying to say,” Safran adds. “That’s the one thing that keeps me up at night, that their relationship ended. I really believe polyamory is real and I wanted to get them back together. In all of our minds, they were endgame.”
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