Episode Report Card Sars: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Breaking the waves
By Sars | Season 4 | Episode 20 | Aired on 05.01.2001
Fade to Joey, sitting alone at a table. Pacey approaches, and she wipes her face and looks as far in the opposite direction from him as possible. He takes a seat and, after what seems like a week of fidgeting, tells her that, last year, he felt he could give Joey something that nobody else could. Joey pinches her lips together, heroically struggling not to sob, as Pacey talks about the wall and the summer they spent sailing and "that night in the ski lodge," and at the mention of the ski trip, Joey flinches. Pacey doesn't feel he has anything left to give her now: "I guess I'm…spent." Joey is crying openly now, and as she sniffs, Pacey says that he's "become a man who hates himself so much" that he can't stand to look at himself in the mirror, and being with Joey makes it worse, because the more she loves him "in spite of that," the angrier he feels towards her and the more he stops loving her back. I see what he's saying -- if she expects him to fail and doesn't demand better of him, she thinks he can't do better, and he resents the condescension -- but I don't think that's true of Joey, and I don't think we've seen any reason for Pacey to think that of her in the first place. Anyway. Joey asks how long he's felt this way. He doesn't know. Yeah, right, "writers." Pacey knows that his "failures" and "shortcomings" have nothing to do with Joey, but if they stay together, he'll keep taking them out on Joey. Joey makes a good point: "I've got news for you, Pacey -- how you treat me is actually totally in your power." Pacey doesn't acknowledge it, though, going into his we're-two-very-different-people-with-two-very-different-futures harangue, like, they both come from tough family backgrounds and don't have much money, and they both live in Capeside -- what more does he want? Jesus! He preaches to her that she's all about getting out of Capeside "because [she] thought [she] deserved better," and he is Capeside, and it just won't work. Joey breaks in that Boston and Capeside "are less than an hour apart," but he comes back by saying that they're "more than a world apart, and you know it," and she does deserve better -- better than Capeside, and better than him. Joey sneers bitterly, "You break my heart into a thousand pieces and you say it's because I deserve better?" Faced with the stupidity of the argument, Pacey's got nothing. Joey shows him the hand: "Just…leave me alone." Pacey sighs, "Okay," gets up, buttons his jacket, and disappears down a nearby staircase. Again, good acting by both.
The moon.