Episode Report Card Sars: F | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Scarlet N
By Sars | Season 4 | Episode 15 | Aired on 02.13.2001
Jacob: It's no trouble. Actually, he helped us raise a barn today.Sars: Oh, is that right?
Foreshadowing: What took you so long?
Sars: I got lost on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, if you must know -- now get your things and get in the car so these nice people can get some sleep.
Jacob: See you next time.
Sars: Okay. Thanks for feeding him.
Foreshadowing: Can we stop at McDonald's?
Sars: You make that poor man hitch up the buggy and ride into town to call me from the corner store, and now you want to eat? Get in the damn car!
Foreshadowing: But I'm hungry.
Sars: Oh yeah? OH YEAH? Well, here's the map -- EAT THAT!
Sorry about that. Anyway, back to the recap. Pacey stares at her with weary skepticism: "And you'd do that." Joey stares back for a long moment, slitting her eyes even further: "Yes. Absolutely." Pacey just keeps staring at her, then sighs. Joey turns away, her face melting. Pacey returns to his chips and observes in a non-neutral tone of great neutrality, "You wanna know something funny? You haven't touched me." Joey, slowly: "What?" She hasn't touched him all morning, he says: "And here I was, thinking that sex brought people closer together." He continues munching on his chips. Joey sets her jaw, her eyes filling with tears, then gets up, slams her bag of snacks into his lap, and storms out of the lounge. The macking couple watches her go, then turns to look accusingly at Pacey.
Pacey goes after her and finds her sitting outside, crying. A testicle sings a line about "wondering what went wrong." God, Pacey...please, just leave it lie. Please. Pacey sits beside Joey; she won't meet his eye for a moment. Then she says bitterly, her face wet: "You wanna know why it was so 'nice,' Pacey?" Pacey looks ashamed of himself as Joey describes a moment from the night before when he brushed her hair over her forehead (zuh?), and it "felt really nice" and made her feel "safe," like he would stick around and protect her no matter what. Well, if your psycho hot-and-cold routine hasn't chased him off by now, I'd say that's a safe bet. ["Plus, how lame are you when you need your boyfriend to protect you from YOUR OWN HAIR?" -- Wing Chun] Joey goes on to say that, when she looks back on the experience "years from now," she'll remember that moment, not "the clumsy positioning or the morning-after awkwardness, or whether or not the experience itself met the textbook definition of great sex." "Clumsy positioning"? Oh, ew. Pacey smiles a little to himself. Joey adds, "I'll remember how sweet you were," and says that he took her to "a brand-new place." I don't know what that line means, exactly -- if you didn't have an orgasm, how is that a new place? Best not to think on it too deeply, I guess. Anyway, she says she's glad she had sex, and she's really glad she had sex with him. Pacey smiles for real, gratified, as Joey wipes the tears off her face with a gloved hand and says that now she kind of wants to go home, "so [they] can do it again." Huh? What does that line mean? Why would they have to -- oh, fuck it. They schmoop, pan over to the snowy birches, end of segment.
"The Big Picture." These titles give me the ick.