Episode Report Card Jessica: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Highway To Hell
By Jessica | Season 5 | Episode 17 | Aired on 04.02.2002
Capeside. Lily sleeps in her playpen while Dawson sits beside her and moons. Gale tiptoes into the room, holding Joey's still-wrapped gift, and asks after Jen. Dawson mutters that they had a fight. "I guess what it was about was moving on," he explains awkwardly. Gale wonders how he feels about that concept. "Well, apparently I'm against it," Dawson snorts. And Gale spouts some boring parental-type stuff that basically boils down to the fact that, with the Flash manning the counter at The Big Dairy Queen In The Sky, she needs to Get Some somewhere else. Dawson doesn't really say anything about this, but indicates that he ought to go find Jen. "Hey, Mom?" he offers. Gale turns. "I know. I should have told you," she whines. She just didn't know how. She also didn't know, apparently, how awful she would look in that hot pink shirt and thick black eyeliner. "I was going to say it was nice, tonight, meeting your friend," Dawson tells her. Well, that was really pretty nice of him! Wonders will never cease. At this, Gale smiles and takes off, leaving her son to sit on the sofa and open Joey's gift to Lily (which is a lovely scrapbook of sketches of the Leery family, including the Flash) and look longingly off into the distance as Jewel caterwauls in the background.
Roadhouse. A bad situation has only gotten worse. "It's kind of like watching figure skaters fall," Pacey whispers to a horrified-looking Audrey. Onstage, Charlie is whispering to his band members. Mid-song, the band segues into Joan Jett's "I Hate Myself For Loving You," and Charlie joins Joey for a duet. Okay, a "duet," since Charlie only really sings -- okay, "sings" -- the first three or four lines before Joey and her frightening falsetto take over. And the crowd, in a matter of mere seconds, does a complete 180. They love Joey. They worship Joey. They're ten minutes away from creating a shrine to Joey in their trailers. I suspect that part of the attraction stems from the fact that Joey is now wagging her rack all over the stage. The camera zooms in on it -- her rack -- and holds the shot for a good twenty seconds, just in case we forgot that in addition to being a gifted songstress, a great artiste, a talented writer, and a crime-fighting superhero, Joey is also stacked.
And then we have to sit through the entire song. Eventually, however, I enter menopause and the scene ends with the crowd acting like they've just seen the second coming of Christ and it turns out that He's Axl Rose.