Ever since Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively) got off the train at Grand Central in the pilot episode of Gossip Girl, she’s been desperately trying to trade in her former party-girl ways to become the goody-goody type of girl that middle class folk like Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley) can stand to be around. And guess what? It’s gotten a little bit boring.

To be perfectly honest, I never really believed Serena’s claims that she used to be a bad girl. Sure, she was responsible for stealing the keys to the school pool, resulting in a raucous, drug-filled pool party that nearly got a student killed. Sure, she slept with her best friend’s boyfriend before running away to boarding school. And yes, she does enjoy a cocktail or five on a schoolnight. But Serena’s earnest attempts at being good always strike me as wishy-washy. I don’t know, maybe it’s the simpering way Blake Lively delivers her lines.

Even last night, the first time Serena winds up very drunk with her old friend Georgina (Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Michelle Trachtenberg), I couldn’t really see why she got so upset. After all, G hadn’t roofied her drink at that point, so S could have left at any point to go and study with Dan. If getting drunk and not studying were sufficient criteria for Serena returning to her bad girl ways, I was worried, racy publicity posters notwithstanding, that Gossip Girl was going to churn out some milquetoasty version of a teen scandal more appropriate for, say, 7th Heaven.

By the end of the episode, however, I was heartened to see that there is more juicy stuff in the works. It seems that Serena really does have a dirty little secret. What’s more, the secret has the power to take down both of them. I only hope that this storyline doesn’t become a repeat of Michelle Williams‘ on Dawson’s Creek, in which Williams’ Jen Lindley spent the better part of three years delving into her past of lukewarm sexual deviancy that ended so anticlimactically that I don’t even remember what her big secret was.

Due to the writers’ strike, the season is artificially abbreviated, so we won’t have to wait very long. We may even find out what it is in next week’s Gossip Girl. I’m hoping for something involving sex, drugs and dead people.