“Who am I? That’s a secret I’ll never tell.” That is, until now. On Monday’s Gossip Girl series finale, the blogger known for posting everything about the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite unveiled her true identity. Or should we say his true identity! Yes, that’s right. After six years of covering the Upper East Side, it was revealed that Brooklyn-born Dan (or Lonely Boy as he referred to himself) has been writing the blog. Dan told Manhattan — including Mayor Bloomberg, who like us, thought this whole time that it was Dorota — that he made the blog way back when so that he could write himself into the high society crowd that he was not naturally born into like S, B and everyone else. So, thanks to the idea from his dad, Rufus (Matthew Settle), Dan started posting items not long after he met the love of his life Serena (Blake Lively) and made himself someone by talking about himself on the blog as “Lonely Boy” as soon as Serena returned from boarding school. As the Gossip Girl Season 1 tagline said, “You’re no one until you’re talked about.” Sure enough, Dan not only started dating Serena soon after, but also started getting a lot of help with the blog from pretty much every petty/bitter/burned teenager on the Upper East Side. As Dan proudly said to Blair (Leighton Meester), “All this time, I had more power than you.” Although the revelation came as a shock to the entire gang, especially Blair, who insisted Gossip Girl ruined her life, on closer examination, everyone realized they had achieved their goals despite — or in some cases because of? — the blog. As Serena said, Gossip Girl wasn’t really a takedown, but a “love letter” to all of us. The revelation of Gossip Girl in Dan’s final chapter of his book — which went wide via Nate’s newspaper, The Spectator — brought many familiar faces back into the mix as they all proclaimed their own version of the show’s signature “OMG” including Vanessa, Lola and Juliet. However, the best scene was that by the real Gossip Girl, actress Kristen Bell, who stared straight into the camera as she recited Gossip Girl’s signature line in a very meta moment. The camera quickly peeled back to reveal Bell was reading from the script for the movie based on Dan’s book and helping her friend, Rachel Bilson, go over lines for her audition.
