Episode Report Card Sars: D | 2 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT The Longest Day
By Sars | Season 3 | Episode 20 | Aired on 05.02.2000
Dawson flops on his bed and stares up at the ceiling, knitting his caterpillar brows and fluttering his nostrils; an ovary provides the entertainment at his pity party. Fade to the same scene from The Last Picture Show that we saw before, with Jeff Bridges doing his best-friends harangue; pan to Dawson in front of the TV, pouterrific nostrils in full flare. Now, we know that he's rented this film on purpose. Ooh, how symbolic -- if by "symbolic" you mean "puerile and passive-aggressive." He looks over at the window to see Joey climbing through it. "Changed your mind?" Dawson chirps, but this time he's loaded up the line with suppressed anger. Joey says, with less hesitating than the last time, that she wanted to talk to him, and as Dawson stares at her in self-righteous expectation, she asks if Pacey's there, and Dawson says no and asks if Pacey's "supposed to be" there; the last time, Dawson just sounded quizzical, but this time he's obviously waiting in the high weeds for Joey.
Joey asks what Dawson's watching, and he tells her; she asks if they saw it on their first date, and he confirms that they did and calls the date "unsuccessful" movie-wise. Joey asks, more fearfully than last time, what he means by that, and he says they never got to see the end. He recaps the film's plot again, but using more clipped cadences than he did before, and when he gets to the part about "everyone alone, everyone hating each other," he shoots Joey a look of smug loathing as she sits stiffly on his bed. After he delivers his "pretty depressing, I don't know why I'm watching it" line and snaps the TV off, he sets his jaw and asks coldly, "So what was it you wanted to talk about?" Joey gibbers her excuse about Bessie and Alexander and takes off. After she goes out the window, Dawson half-sobs angrily and pinches the bridge of his nose. ["I seriously, SERIOUSLY could not despise Dawson more if he came to my house, slapped my mom around, and took a shit on my floor. Even as a fictional character, he is a reprehensible excuse for a human being. This scene turned my stomach. He is evil. And the idea that the show's teenaged female audience is meant to side with him and his outrage over the moving-on of the girlfriend with whom he broke up A YEAR AGO is even more reprehensible. Shame on the writers for trying to make him seem sympathetic here. Dawson doesn't deserve to have friends so concerned about what his reaction to their happiness might be; Dawson doesn't deserve to have friends, period." -- Wing Chun]