Episode Report Card Sars: D | 2 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT The Longest Day
By Sars | Season 3 | Episode 20 | Aired on 05.02.2000
At the library, Joey walks through the reserve room, and she pauses to see Andie and Pacey chatting on the level below, and she closes her eyes, then opens them, then rolls them.
Joey does Watergate research. Andie comes up behind her and jokingly gives her shit about the "twenty-minute time limit" on using the computers; Joey apologizes and says she just had to finish the Watergate assignment. Andie's "nowhere near done" but she's going home anyway because she has a date that night. "Will?" Joey asks. "Yeah," Andie says unenthusiastically (gee, go figure), and we cut to a camera angle that has Joey in the foreground and Andie behind her as Andie says that she likes Will because he's really smart and he's cute but doesn't know it, "which is key, because God save us from the ones who do," and she's babbling, but word to that last part anyway, although Will is about as cute as a block of concrete, but anyway, Joey smiles as she continues pointing and clicking and asks tolerantly, "So what's the problem?" and Andie stammers out that "he's -- he's not Pacey." Joey's face freezes and then falls. Andie claps her hands over her face and says, "Uhhh, pathetic, I know! I know! And I thought I was over him, I really really did, but then I bumped into him a little while ago and then . . ." Joey wishes fervently for a hole to open up and swallow her, but Andie just keeps percolating: "I mean, technically we're friends, right? And that's how I played it." Joey nods numbly. "But then it's like, when I saw him, every irritating-slash-adorable thing he ever did flashed before my eyes, and . . . I mean, that's the true test, right? When you just bump into somebody and boom! Floodgates." I experienced a similar sensation during this scene, except that my entire life flashed before my eyes, because at the beginning of the scene, a caddy wandered through my apartment but I didn't pay any attention, and the next thing I know, I hear this "whoosh" from behind the couch, and I turn around, and there's Tiger Woods halfway through his backswing with the Three-Iron Of Dramatic Irony and boom! We get it.
When I come to, Joey's on the street and she's run into Dawson, and she's babbling some excuse about the library and having to get home because she told Bessie flap flap flap, and could she make the something rotten in Denmark smell any more obvious? Dawson says that he meant to call her and asks if she wants to do movie night that night, and Joey says way too breezily that she doesn't think she can. Dawson asks if she's all right; she says oh yeah, she's fine, she just has to, uh, um, er, she has to, uhhh . . . "Go?" Dawson adds, arching a brow. "Yes. I gotta go. Bye!" she chirps, and she just can't get away fast enough, and Dawson says with confusion in his voice, "I'll see you," and Joey repeats a bit too loudly, "Bye!" and hustles away, cringing, right past a granite historical marker that clearly said "NORTH CAROLINA" on it, like, way to catch that, location scout. When Joey books out of the frame with her product-placed can of Diet Coke, we see Dawson and his wilted-dandelion hair staring after her.