Episode Report Card Sars: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Future Tense
By Sars | Season 4 | Episode 4 | Aired on 10.24.2000
Joey, a cross-eyed look of tipsy concentration on her face, sloshes herself another cupful of punch. As she raises the cup to her lips, Dawson cracks, "So, number four with a bullet, huh?" Joey glares unsteadily at him and asks how he knows that. Dawson smirks that "Kenny Reiling and his friends have already established a betting pool." Color me impressed that the writers actually used a name from seasons past! But not that impressed. Joey rolls her eyes and semi-slurs, "Kind of pathetic, isn't it," and talks about spending twelve years "being a total control freak about school" and practically giving herself an ulcer and doing a ton of extra credit projects, and it only gets her -- she raises her cup -- "fourth," and flops down in a seat. "Joey, fourth is amazing," Dawson tells her, standing over her and adding that "the race isn't even over yet." Fixing her with a smitten gaze -- ecchhh -- he asks if she's celebrating. "Yeah," she snorts, "the future -- whoopee!" Dawson sits down and tells her that, with her grades and SAT scores, she can go anywhere she wants to, but Joey grumps that she'd just like to "make small talk without the subject of college coming up," and asks sarcastically if he's not going to ask her where she sees herself in five years. "I don't have to," Dawson smarms. "Aren't you the same girl who wanted to be an anthropologist or an oceanographer?" She's also the same girl who "wanted to be" an artist, so whatever. Joey rolls her eyes and asks him if he knows how little money anthropologists make, and then tells him that she only said that "to get [his] goat." "Goat"? Dawson looks mildly dismayed as she continues, "I mean, your buttons are so easy to push -- well, were so easy." Ha! Looks good on you, ass (tm Wing Chun).
Dawson arches a brow and asks if that means she has no desire to do anything or go anywhere in her life, that she'd "be just as happy hanging around here in Capeside," and she closes her eyes in a mixture of weariness and drunkenness and slops that she didn't say that, and he shouldn't put words in her mouth. "I'm just trying to figure out why someone who's about to reap the benefits of something she's worked for her entire life -- she's trying to drown herself in 80-proof fruit punch," Dawson murmurs. Joey rolls her eyes again and turns away: "Look, don't do this, Dawson." Word. Go talk down to someone else. Dawson, shocked that his emotional manipulation doesn't work on her for once, passive-aggressives, "Okay. Cheers," and walks away. Joey watches him go with a big old "whatever" face.