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By Sars | Season 2 | Episode 21 | Aired on 05.18.1999
A deeply bizarre shot of a mounted deer head, under which Mr. McPhee does some sort of number-crunching in his study. Jack comes in, hands jammed into his pockets; from the light flickering on Jack's face, it appears that Mr. McPhee has lit a fire. IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, WHAT SEASON IS IT? Jack announces that he plans to stay. Mr. McPhee takes off his glasses, rubs his forehead, and asks, "And your sister?" Jack doesn't know what Andie will decide, but whatever she does end up doing, he's "not going." Mr. McPhee, wearily incredulous: "So you want me to leave you here alone, at seventeen? I don't think so, Jack -- I'm going to be selling the house." Jack, firmly: "Dad, I don't care about the house. I can't live with you, not the way things are." Mr. McPhee, not facing Jack, says after a moment, "With your mother's illness, and Andie's problems, and even with Tim's death, those I could find reasons for, but with you, I feel like I'm to blame." Jack, looking up quickly: "But you aren't." Mr. McPhee: "If I'd just been around more -- " Jack cuts him off: "It wouldn't have made a difference. I'm gay for the same reasons that Tim wasn't, okay? It just happened that way." Mr. McPhee remarks as he turns to face Jack that "there are people who change. They go back." Jack, utterly dismayed by this show of ignorance, responds, "I'm hardly the encyclopedia of the gay experience, but I'd wager to say that their change is skeptical [sic]." He probably means that he feels skeptical, or that their change is superficial, but whatever; Mr. McPhee asks how Jack knows unless he tries. Jack says, "I don't want to try. You want me to try." His father doesn't understand "how anyone could choose that kind of life," and Jack says that he didn't choose it, but rather he chose to be happy with it, and says he can't go back to Providence with his father because "slowly but surely, I'm going to sacrifice my happiness for yours because I want you to be proud of me." Mr. McPhee regards Jack with surprise as Jack adds, "I do. But not under your terms. It just won't work." Jack gets up to leave the room. Mr. McPhee calls after him, "Jack -- Jack," and gets up also, and Jack turns around, and Mr. McPhee struggles mightily to say something like "I love you" or "I'm proud of you," but he just can't, and Jack is touched and disappointed at the same time by this, and Mr. McPhee puts his hands in his pockets and walks quickly back to his desk as Jack looks sad again. Not a bad scene, that.
Over at the pier, Pacey and Andie stroll along and remember their first dance, and their first kiss, on that very spot. Andie remembers her knees "were shaking like crazy," and Pacey remembers his heart "was like boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom." Pacey has on a NuRo velvet shirt. They talk about how happy they felt that night, and Pacey refers to it as "a long long time ago," and Andie observes that it "seems like yesterday," and can she just go to Providence already before I fall into a coma? More banter about their first impressions of each other and about who hated whom more. Andie: "It's been a wild ride." Pacey: "It's only just begun." Sars: "[Humming Morrissey's 'Dial A Cliché' to herself.]" Pacey asks her to dance, and she accepts. They gaze tragically at each other. Andie starts crying. Pacey asks why. She says she's so happy to be with him, and so sad too, because she loves him so much and she can't "hide from the truth anymore" about her illness. Pacey flinches, since he knows this means she'll go back to Rhode Island after all, and sure enough she tells him that she's going to leave the next day: "I have to." Pacey, bravely: "I know. I know." He buries his nose in her eyebrows again to console himself. They sway. Andie makes quavery wailing noises. They do their "no goodbyes" routine as The Theremin Of Melodrama starts up on the soundtrack. More swaying. Heather Nova comments that "every dream is just a dream after all." More Pacey's nose in Andie's eyebrow. A tremendously unflattering shot of both of them, crying on each other. Sars wondering aloud why someone, anyone, on the set couldn't have yelled "cut" by now.