Episode Report Card Sars: C- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Dear old golden rule days
By Sars | Season 4 | Episode 17 | Aired on 04.10.2001
Sanctum. Dawson twiddles away on a computer with a very expensive flat-screen monitor; Joey creeps into the doorway. Dawson asks how long she's been standing there. "Not long," she murmurs, lurking into the room, and Dawson sighs that it looks like Pacey "couldn't convince" her to take the money. Joey wrenches her mouth around and says she has to tell Dawson something, and she doesn't know if she can. Ohhhh, here it comes. Dawson bolts out of his chair all worried, and Joey asks him not to "make this harder." I ain't touching that one. "Make what harder?" "Telling you the truth," she grits out, and blunders ahead with an explanation of how, when she ran into him that night at the movies, "[she] was trying to make sense of things too," and when he asked her about her and Pacey doing the do, "[he was] right." Dawson's nostrils flutter ever so slightly. "I slept with Pacey over the ski trip." Dawson's left eyebrow rockets upward, and as Joey keeps talking, all the air literally leaks out of Dawson. Good job by James Van Der Beek here. Dawson's eyes slide away from her, and he slumps onto the edge of his desk like a large sack of virginal potatoes, making a tiny sound like the air hissing out of a balloon as Joey explains that things felt "right between [them] again" and "better than [she] ever thought it could be," and she thought that if she told him she'd slept with Pacey, he wouldn't understand. "So you never gave me a chance to understand?" Dawson bitters. "I know I should have told you the truth, Dawson," Joey whispers tearfully. Well, no -- you "should have" told him you didn't feel comfortable answering either way, and to mind his own beeswax, but whatever. Joey adds that she shouldn't have let Dawson go on thinking that things were still the same between them. "That I was the most important person in your life," Dawson finishes flatly. Joey says she never wanted to hurt him. Dawson greets this with a sharp chuckle. "I guess I should go," Joey says in a barely audible voice, and slinks out. Dawson watches her go, and as y'all know, I don't think Van Der Beek is a great actor by any means, but I've seldom seen a more eloquent facial expression than the one he's wearing as we fade to commercial, and here's what it says: "Dude. NOT!" And I com-PLETE-ly agree.
Is it just me, or does that disco Old Navy ad go on for, like, twenty minutes? Okay, just wondering.
Tom Frost's office, where Jen paces and complains that she only remembers that she and her father had a big fight, "which, given [their] history, is about as obvious as it is predictable," but she doesn't know what about, and Tom Frost says that maybe she's not ready to know: "When you're ready, it'll come to you." Jen calls him a "font of wisdom," and Tom Frost smiles that "these things take time." Jen asks what happens when she does remember. What does she think will happen? She'll have "another specific reason to hate" her parents, perhaps? Well, does she think she's there "to accumulate reasons to hate" her parents? No. (But, really, why shouldn't she? It's not like there's a shortage of reasons; her parents suck my left one.) So why is she there? "To stop hating them?" Close, Tom Frost says. She's there to stop hating herself. Jen stares at him, her face a mixture of confusion and anguish, as he explains that her adolescent behaviors constituted "a cry for love," and that she acts out because "something robbed [her] of her childhood in a way that [she'll] be angry about for a long time." Foreshadowing snuggles up to me with a bag of ranch-flavored Corn Nuts. Tom Frost, sounding almost angry, goes on to say that Jen has stayed "on a self-destructive path" not because she blames her father, but because she blames herself. Mmmm. Corn Nuts. That's why she doesn't want to remember -- as long as she doesn't want to remember, she can keep telling herself "that whatever happened…is [her] fault." You know, even though I wear a lock of Tom Frost's hair in a locket around my neck, he's way over the line here therapy-wise. He should let Jen come to these things on her own, not dictate her epiphanies to her. But there's no stopping my future husband as he continues that she'll "keep robbing [herself] of life's greatest moments" until she proves herself right, "but [she's] wrong." Jen is fighting tears, and losing big-time, as Tom Frost tells her that she's "a beautiful, innocent young woman, who's meant to shine in this world, in ways [she] can't even begin to fathom." And Tom Frost is there to help her see that. Tom Frost is also about to lose his license to practice psychiatry, but I still love him. Jen beams at Tom Frost through her tears and asks if she can keep coming, "like, four times a week," and Tom Frost chuckles, and I write "Mrs. Tom Frost" on my notebook.