Episode Report Card Wing Chun: D | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Decisions
By Wing Chun | Season 1 | Episode 13 | Aired on 05.18.1998
Prison exterior. Adjacent to the building is a yard fenced in only by chain link (that's secure?), and containing about fifty wooden picnic tables. The prisoners outside are being called in for "chow time" as several passengers disembark the bus bound for "Daleman, Mass." Dawson asks Joey if she's ready, and she says, "No." He takes her hand and they walk toward the prison.
At a guard booth, Joey exclaims, "You're kidding me. We missed visiting hours?" The guard impassively tells her that visiting hours end at 5 PM. Joey protests that they just spent four hours on a bus to get there, and what are they supposed to do now? Wouldn't Bessie have warned her about the time, and made sure she got on the earliest possible bus? Dawson looks away, apparently hoping no talent scouts see him in a venue so déclassé. The guard, who should have been given his own spin-off, gives Joey a reality check: "Look, Miss, I know you think your problem's very important and I'm sure, to you, it is, but here at a prison housing over eight hundred felons, they're not even a blip on the radar. Now, can I ask you, are we done here yet?" Joey scowls, and stomps off, telling Dawson (who, it must be said, was so very helpful during that whole exchange) that this is now a much bigger nightmare than she'd anticipated. Dawson tells her that if she asks him very nicely, he'll come back with her tomorrow. Joey thanks him for the offer, but says there must be a better solution than spending another day on the bus. Dawson chirps, "Maybe there is."
Just when I get scared that Dawson's going to go try to "sweet" talk the guard, we cut to a motel exterior, and then go inside, where Dawson is sitting on the bed, cheerily watching TV because nothing in his world has changed as a result of this trip, and telling Joey that he just called Mrs. Flash, who promised to tell Bessie that he and Joey are staying in Daleman overnight. Joey emerges from the bathroom, and Dawson asks whether she wants to watch TV, but she says she'd rather just go to sleep, so he turns the TV off and they go to opposite sides of the bed. Dawson asks, "So, are we sleeping left to right?" Joey says "as usual" is fine with her. Dawson starts (ugh) unbuttoning his shirt to reveal THE PENDANT and, chuckling to mask his awkwardness, points out that it's the first time they've "slept together in a foreign bed." Joey irritably asks whether that's a problem, and he says it's not, but that it's just different. They climb into bed in their clothes, and Joey complains about the lumpy bed, and Dawson spontaneously announces that he'll sleep on the floor. Joey tells him he can't sleep on the floor, since "it's freezing, and besides, what's the big deal?" The camera cuts to a long shot, which shows that they each have at least two unused feet of bed but are still squeezed next to each other right in the middle -- this bed is way bigger than Dawson's. Dawson turns on his side and props his head on his hand; Joey is also on her side, with her back to him. Dawson says, "Jo?" Joey says, "Yeah?" Dawson says, "I don't want this to affect your decision about France, but I would really miss you if you left." Um, I think you do want to affect her decision because you don't want to kill yourself, but I want you to kill yourself, and even if you didn't exist and your gory death were not a possibility of which I dreamed every night, she SHOULD STILL GO. Joey sighs loudly and says she'd miss him, too. Dawson says, "I've been thinking about us a lot lately." Joey asks what he's been thinking, and Dawson says, "I'd like to figure out where we are, what's going on between us." Joey rolls over and asks, even more irritably, "And how do we do that, Dawson?" Dawson flops down on his face and moans, "I'm sorry, Jo. I'm not -- I'm just not all there. I can analyze someone else until the cows wander home, but as soon as I turn all that indulgent perecption on myself, it's like I completely zzzzzzzzzzz." Oh, sorry, I nodded off there, because this speech was like half an hour long, but the gist was that Dawson is scared of what will happen if he can't figure out whether he likes likes Joey, or if he just likes her. Joey glares at him impatiently. Dawson asks whether any of this makes sense to her. Joey sneers, with a glorious contempt not seen since, "What are you so scared of, Dawson?" Dawson gazes back, all dewy, and she rolls back over. Dawson rolls onto his back and moans, "I don't know. I don't know." CeilingCam reveals that the bed is like nine miles across. Joey: Scootch over before Dawson makes another bid on your spinette set.
Morning on the creek. Jen clasps her hands in a hospital waiting room. Grams comes out, and Jen jumps up to ask how Gramps is. Grams, with cautious optimism, says that his tests seem to be going well, and that even though the doctors keep telling her Gramps was "lucky" to have come out of it, she knows that it was actually their daily prayers, and their faith in the Lord, that got Gramps out of it. Jen proves that, along with chastity, a sense of occasion was not among the few talents imparted by her parents in her laissez-faire New York City upbringing, and declares, "You know, Grams, no one is happier about his recovery than me, but I very much doubt that prayer had a whole lot to do with it." Grams tells Jen that "God has a hand in all good things." Jen looks around, decides this is, yes, exactly the PERFECT time and place to have a philosophical discussion, and sarcastically asks, "But He had nothing to do with war, famine, AIDS, huh?" Grams points out that it is not always "up to us" to understand the Lord's ways, which is a very nice way of telling Jen to shut the fuck up, and Jen says that "Gramps is better. That's all that matters," and that they should quit debating the reasons why. Jen, you brought it up. And you know what else you brought up? The bile, to the back of my throat, so cram it, pork chop.