Episode Report Card Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Barefoot At Capefest
By Wing Chun | Season 3 | Episode 11 | Aired on 01.11.2000
Back at the campsite, Ethan is thanking Jack for putting him up and checks once more to make sure Jen won't mind Ethan's using her sleeping bag. Jack assures Ethan that she won't, since she's "a bit of a night owl." Ethan asks, all non sequitur, if Jen's an old girlfriend; Jack says she isn't, but that they "did get set up once." I'm surprised that the writers even remember that! Jack and Ethan get into the tent. Ethan beds down and says goodnight. With evident disappointment, Jack mumbles, "Goodnight." Ethan asks if Jack plans to turn off the light. Jack asks if they might talk a little while longer. Ethan begs off, due to fatigue. Jack reluctantly kills the lamp.
As Henry packs up his guitar, Jen wanders over to tell him how great his song was. Not. Henry says, "Whatever." Word. Jen says she didn't know he could sing, and Henry mopes, "I think we've established there's a lot you don't know about me." Seriously -- when is Jen going to catch her damn snap already? He starts to walk off and she hurries after him asking him to wait. He turns around and barks, "Why?" She quietly says that she wanted to talk to him, and he wearily says, "You can't keep doing this to me." She asks, "Doing what?" and he replies, "Trying to be my friend and then pushing me away when my feelings scare you." Jen tilts her head to one side and admits that she misses him (although when she describes what she misses, it sounds more like she misses the attention). Henry says he used to spend every day thinking and dreaming about her, and every time she walked by, he lost himself. He asks her if she knows what that feels like, and she admits that she doesn't. Henry says, "Then you couldn't possibly know what it feels like to have that person not have the same feelings back." Jen makes a face of dawning comprehension, but Henry's not finished: "Look, I'm sorry you miss how I looked at you, but I don't miss how you never looked at me." He walks off. Jen's face reveals that she FINALLY realizes how much she unwittingly hurt Henry. They walk off in opposite directions. Okay, I never liked Henry that much, and I am generally a Jen fan, but she really, really was long overdue to hear this speech.
In the Sanctum Dawsonorum, Dawson is removing all the Spielberg posters from his walls. Joey comes in the window, looks around, and asks, "Have I stepped into some parallel universe?" and then asks the follow-up question of whether his re-decorating has anything to do with his parents. Dawson says he doesn't know what it's about; all he knows is that he was at Nikki's house today, and that in the course of talking to her, something hit him (and, as we know, it unfortunately wasn't a bus): "The kid who hung these posters up? I'm not him anymore." Joey looks puzzled. He explains (sort of): "I don't see the world the same way. My viewpoint then was so limited. And now, I don't know what I see, but I don't see this." Joey, trying to catch up, says, "So you were at Nikki's house -- your worst enemy --" Dawson cuts her off to say that, in the first place, she isn't his worst enemy, and that, in the second, Joey seems to have missed everything he's said. She tells him the she never thought she'd say it, but he's "such a sell-out." Dawson quits his poster-rolling long enough to snap, "What?!" Joey goes on: "First Eve practically tugs you around town by a dog-collar, and now this new film girl breezes into town and you're tossing your whole identity out the window." Dawson stomps to the other side of the room with all the grace and poise of an ourangoutan escaped from a lab in which experiments were performed to compromise its motor skills, and insists that he isn't doing that at all, and that, to the contrary, for the first time in his life he's getting close to finding out what his identity is. Yeah, he's going to need some therapy before he can even contemplate staring down that prospect. Yeesh. He concludes by saying that Nikki helped him to sort through "this weirdness" surrounding his parents. Joey screeches that she wanted to talk to him about that, but that he didn't want to talk. Dawson agrees that he didn't want to talk to Joey about it, and then, flapping his arms some more, demands, "How did this become all about you?" Now that is ironic. Joey says it became all about herself because Dawson "ran" to Nikki. Dawson starts to say that he didn't, but dissolves into arm-flaps instead, and actually stomps over to the corner. When he turns back, it's to tell Joey that an abiding theme of their friendship is that whenever Dawson expresses the tiniest interest in a girl other than Joey herself, Joey attacks him. That's true, actually. Joey doesn't deny it, but snaps, "Oh, and you don't attack me." Dawson decides that the best way to demonstrate that he doesn't attack her is to point his giant, accusatory finger at her and remind her that he has "not once asked about Mr. Ivy League." Joey suggests that Dawson's failure to ask about A.J. is worse than her attacking Dawson. Dawson's not done pointing yet, and points, "My choice is civil." She says, "I'm not civil?" He says that she isn't civil, she's yelling, and she yells that he's yelling too. Oh, God, BOTH of you just SHUT UP! He pauses, perhaps to decide whether he should start pointing with his other hand to avoid a repetitive stress injury, and as he hesitates, she snaps, "Out with the old, in with the new, huh? Have fun." She climbs out the window, which Dawson closes behind her. Joey, dude, get a life. Fixating on someone who's already inexorably fixated on himself is just not going to get you anywhere.
Maybe Sarah Michelle Gellar's born with "it." Maybe it's Maybelline. I'm not coming down on either side of that debate.