Episode Report Card Sars: D | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Guess Who's Coming To Dinner
By Sars | Season 3 | Episode 8 | Aired on 11.23.1999
Oh, brother. Jen drags a reluctant Pacey into the gardening shed for angry sex. Pacey doesn't want to. Jen reminds him of their agreement. Pacey says he has to head home. Jen unzips Pacey while reassuring him that she won't giggle anymore. Jen says with irritation that their "arrangement precludes any sort of emotional foreplay," and Pacey says yes, it does, and he removes her hands from his fastenings and points out that it "also precludes the idea of angry sex." Jen stares at him, furious. Pacey asks if she wants to talk about what just happened with her mom. Jen bites off the word "nothing," and Pacey just looks at her; she relents and says, "Okay, long story short -- like mother, like daughter. Seems I'm not the only girl in the Lindley family who can't say no." Doesn't she mean "in the Ryan family"? Pacey makes a comment about Helen's sanctimony, and Jen more or less says "word" and says she plans to file the whole Eve revelation "under 'wish I never knew.'" Pacey doesn't agree, saying that he's just gone through something similar himself, and that "when you come to see your parents as human beings with their own problems, it is, oddly, kind of liberating." Jen closes her eyes and begins to cry as Pacey continues, "And when you realize -- they're way more messed up than you are, it's not worth your time or energy to go on despising them for it." Well put, young Witter. They hug, and Pacey has the grace not to get a "grief-on" (tm Bill Maher).
Sunset. Then darkness. Lieutenant Data -- uh, I mean, "Helen" packs her car and gets ready to leave, but as she's about to get into the car, Jen appears at the front gate and asks, "Leaving so soon?" Helen says dryly, "I think I've wreaked enough havoc for one holiday, don't you?" She opens the driver's side door. A disconsolate ovary wails in the background. Jen tells her mother that she won't "spill your little secret" to her father: "I won't get in the middle. It's your marriage and your life." Helen starts to say something, but Jen cuts her off, telling Helen she doesn't regret the things she said before and she won't take them back. Helen says feebly that she "deserved them -- I deserve everything that happens to me." "What do you mean?" Jen asks. Helen advises her, "Don't marry a cold man, Jen. Don't wake up at forty and realize that one false move and everything you've built your life around could be pulled out from under you." Jen's eyes fill with tears, and she asks, "Why don't you just divorce him?" Helen says she can't, and Jen wants to know why not, and Helen says that, basically, women like her get dropped socially and shunned by their set when their marriages fail, and I can state categorically that, in Manhattan anyway, nobody cares if you get divorced, and in fact a woman who gets a sizable enough chunk of her husband's money will do better in the social round than he will post-break-up, so once again the writers don't know the first thing about anything. Anyway, Helen finishes, "You just disappear," and Jen looks at her, and a light dawns. Jen says, "Ever since you put me on that plane, I always thought that you hated me. But you never did, did you?" Helen shakes her head and says firmly, "No." Jen goes on, "If anyone, you just hated yourself." I don't know where Jen gets that; in the hands of a more capable actress than Mel Harris, we might have derived that conclusion from Helen's dialogue, but I don't think so. Helen looks down; Jen says that the past year would have gone a lot more easily if she'd only realized earlier that Helen didn't hate her. Helen apologizes. Jen says, "I know." Helen says that now she can stop worrying that Jen will turn out like her, "because you're already so much stronger than I ever was." Oh, gag me. Grams appears, and Helen says she guesses she should get going, and Grams slings an arm around Jen and says mildly, "Goodbye, Helen," and Helen says, "Bye, Mom," to Grams, and Jen says, "Bye, Mom," to Helen, and they smile at each other, and Jen says, "Call me sometime," and Helen starts crying and says, "I will," and The Synthesizer Of Emotional Manipulation soars in the background. Helen pulls out of the driveway, and Grams asks, "You all right?" and Jen waits a minute, then says, "Yeah. I'll be fine," and Grams squeezes her arm and goes indoors.
Jen turns toward a campfire and sees part of the gang sitting around it. Pacey pulls up on his bike, nearly running over her, and Jen asks what he's doing there, and Pacey says that he got up to his front door and he "just couldn't do it," and he'd rather spend time with his friends than with his family. Jen says she's glad he's there. Pacey asks, "No hard feelings about this afternoon?" and Jen says no, except for "ones of utter embarrassment," and she in turn apologizes for putting him in that position. Pacey makes a joke about the fact that beautiful women don't throw themselves at him every day. Jen thanks him for "conduct above and beyond," and he says that "it was nothing," and Jen says, "Pacey, you're a sixteen-year-old boy, that must have taken superhuman restraint," and Pacey puts his arm around her and says, "Aw, Jen, you have no idea." Hey, hasn't Pacey turned seventeen yet? He should have, because he had his birthday party way at the beginning of last season, so how come he hasn't had another one? Oh, right. We have no idea what time of year that actually took place, do we? Because the writers treat the time continuum like a big old editing salad? Right, right, silly me.