Episode Report Card Wing Chun: D | 1 USERS: D YOU GRADE IT Four To Tango
By Wing Chun | Season 3 | Episode 9 | Aired on 11.30.1999
Outside somewhere, Joey and Dawson walk down a flight of stairs. He tells her what they just saw was inevitable, since "Pacey's brooding, disillusioned tough-guy persona was destined to collide with Jen's fake sexual bravado." Ha! Joey asks how Dawson, the ultimate romantic, isn't more upset about this. Dawson says that if Pacey and Jen want to mess around in a coat room, that's their business. (But, clearly, if Pacey and Joey had wanted to do the same, it would be Dawson's business. I get it!) Joey tells him about the sex pact, and says that Pacey and Jen are "just using each other." Dawson says, "We're all guilty of that." Joey looks shocked, and asks if Dawson thinks it's okay for two people who don't care about each other to "let their sexual impulses run wild." Dawson says that if they made the sex pact, it wasn't because they wanted sex: "I think they wanted comfort." Joey says, "I'm sure that's all they were doing in your bed, Dawson -- providing each other with comfort." Dawson says he doesn't think that's impossible, adding, "It's all you and I ever did." Joey makes a "I can't believe you said that, ass" face. Dawson tells her to give them a break, because "they're just lonely." Joey sneers, "Being lonely is no excuse to just throw yourself at the first available warm body. I mean, could you sleep with someone that you didn't love?" Dawson says he couldn't, and that she couldn't either, but that he does understand the impulse "to put your hand out and want someone there at the end of your reach. To want someone to be close. To want to kiss or touch -- even if it's wrong." Joey says that's just it -- that it's wrong: "If a kiss is just some purely physical thing, and if there's nothing else behind it, what's the point?" Dawson says that it's impossible to control those feelings, and that they're always there. She looks confused, then notes that she forgot her coat, and has to go back and get it.
Back at the studio, Joey emerges from the Coat Room of Love to see Pacey moping at a table beside the dance floor. They briefly make eye contact, and he looks away. She starts to go, then turns back and sits down beside him. She says, by way of explanation, that she forgot her coat. He says that she did run out of the coat room in "a bit of a hurry." He adds that, if it makes her feel any better, he and Jen never slept together: "Not even close." She says that it's none of her business what he and Jen did or didn't do, and that she's sorry she overreacted. Pacey says, "Yeah, you did overreact, didn't you?" Joey tells him not to be so smug: "I'm not saying you're right, or that I approve of what you guys are doing." Pacey corrects her: "Were doing," and that the time limit on the limited-time offer has run out by now. Joey feigns indifference. He says, "So, you got your coat. What made you come in here?" She says that Dawson convinced her to take pity on the testosterone-addled Pacey. Pacey says that he guesses he owes Dawson another one. They get up to leave, but Miss Nosy stops them at the door and says another class is about to start. Joey says she thinks they've done enough dancing for a lifetime. Pacey tells Joey not to be so hasty: "We've still got a scholarship to work for, right?" Miss Nosy confesses that things have been kind of tight at the studio, so that there's no scholarship, but she can offer them six months of free dance lessons, during which they'd learn the cha-cha, the rhumba, the merengue, and eventually the tango -- "the dance of love." Pacey chuckles, and Joey says no. Pacey says he thinks they may have found their calling at the Starlight, and she tells him to give it up: "You definitely were not that good." I'm glad they left it ambiguous, because the possibility of a Joey-Pacey pairing is the first thing on this show that I've cared about in a very long time.