Episode Report Card Sars: D | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Secrets And Lies
By Sars | Season 3 | Episode 6 | Aired on 11.09.1999
The gala. Miss F looks around and says "splendid" a couple of times. Her dress turned out nicely. Cut to the Leery table, and Dawson -- who, I suddenly and blissfully realize, we've barely seen this episode -- wonders aloud "where Jen is." Gale whispers that a couple she hates is approaching; Dawson observes that he hates them too. The Leerys head to the bar, only to get cut off, and Hateful Lady greets Gale with, "I heard all about Philadelphia." Gale says fakely, "I'm sure you did," and tries to excuse herself and Dawson to get a drink, but Hateful Lady and her husband basically out Gale: it turns out Gale got sacked by the network for looking too old. Gale looks crushed. Dawson glares at the Hatefuls. As the couple retreats, Dawson asks Gale, "Mom, is there something you want to tell me?" but Gale gets distracted by...
...the entrance of Jen, attired in a rag-bag outfit from the Gypsies, Tramps And Thieves clothing line (tm Wing Chun), and Henry, on Jen's arm and kitted out in an ill-fitting ruffled tuxedo and eye makeup. Miss F rips on Jen for her tardiness, fulminates that the entertainment still hasn't arrived, and notes that "that wardrobe is far from appropriate." She demands that they go home and change, and guilt-trips Henry for joining Jen in making the event "into a travesty." Jen tells Miss F to relax and confesses that she put Henry up to it, and adds that Miss F hasn't seen anything yet, and in the background we hear a deep voice announce, "I swear, it's hotter than a French prostitute in this dress." Enter the entertainment. Jen and Henry smirk as a brace of drag queens sashays in the front door. Good thing drag queens didn't lose their ability to shock anyone with a pulse sometime around 1996. Oh, wait. They did. And by the way, Jen? When you hired the drag queens, did you check to make sure that none of them had female secondary-sex characteristics? Because, by definition, they don't, and a couple of the ones you signed don't have Adam's apples. Just thought I'd pass that along. The girls strike poses and look at Miss F, who says she needs "to sit down."
McPhee Manor kitchen. Joey asks if Andie has told her dad what happened with Rob. Andie says no, she didn't want to upset him, and "it's not like anything cataclysmic happened." "Cataclysmic"? Joey says that Rob could have hurt Andie; Andie says she knows, but maybe she overreacted. Joey asks if Andie thinks she overreacted. "Well, I didn't cry wolf, if that's what you're saying," Andie snaps, and Joey says she isn't saying that at all. "Then what are you saying?" Andie demands, in the same overly snotty tone she's used throughout the episode. Joey stares at her in disbelief before picking up the cutting board and saying, "I have to tell you something." Andie looks scared: "What?" Joey tells Andie about Rob's visit, and Andie gets defensive and accuses Joey of coming over to bust her for lying: "You of all people are gonna believe that scum." Joey, again disbelieving: "I didn't say I believed him!" "No? You just stopped by for a friendly little chat," Andie sneers. I would have rolled my eyes and left Andie to stew in it at that point, but Joey protests that she stopped by to make sure they'd done the right thing by not reporting Rob the night before. Joey adds that she should have turned him in herself just for the way he acted towards her at the marina: "Maybe I could have prevented this whole thing." Andie tosses her head and says nothing. "Your water's boiling," Joey says, and Andie tends her pasta and says, "Listen, Joey -- maybe all of this happened for a reason. I mean, maybe something good came out of it." Joey, baffled: "What do you mean?" Andie informs Joey with more than a little self-satisfaction that "as of last night, Pacey and I are back together." As I wait for Nurse Ratched to come to the aid of all of us in the viewing audience, Andie goes on to say that she's happy, and now "everything can just go back to the way it was." She shrugs. Joey stares at her, looking weirded out and disappointed at the same time, but she tries to smile encouragingly. Andie stirs the noodles as Joey frowns.
Jen introduces the drag queens, who sass out on stage and proceed to do the feeblest lip-synch of "It's Raining Men" in the history of transvestitism. Miss F looks faint. Dawson smiles. Gale, God bless her, rolls her eyes. Henry thinks he has "the hots for" one of the trannies. Jen smiles, all proud of her bad self, and the song drowns out the sound of Grams twirling in her grave, even though she hasn't died yet, but Jen's dreadful manners would probably kill her. Henry says Miss F will kill him. Jen says she thinks that, deep down, Miss F "gets it." She pontificates on the fact that homecoming queens and drag queens both dress up and pretend to be "something they're not -- playing a role." She drags Henry out on the dance floor, "in the hopes of performing a miracle and awakening the dead." Because anyone who doesn't see the world Jen's way is, metaphorically speaking, a corpse -- or, as I like to call it, "polite." Old men boogie down with the trannies. Miss F secretly taps her foot. I wish she'd tap it in Jen's ass. Hard.