Snaps to notworking and Wing Chun.
Previously on Dawson's Creek: Joey told Dawson that "things are changing," an idea he resisted, saying that "growing up does not equal growing apart," and Joey in turn resisted that idea; Andie admitted that maybe she liked Will, and thought that maybe everyone should just "be honest and open about things like this," which made Pacey shake his head; Pacey told Joey he didn't want to keep initiating "this thing," which prompted her to kiss him.
Take one of the Dawson's Creek rip-off of Go, a.k.a. Go Away. Fade up on a shot of a blood-red sunset as Joey "Whistler's Sister" Potter says in voiceover, "Ever have one of those days you wish you could live all over again?" Fade cut to the waterfront and Andie "Perkaholic" McPhee chirping, "Oh, hey, look, there's Dawson and his dad." Mitch "The Flash" Leery and Dawson "The End Of The Afforehead" Leery get out of the Flash-utility vehicle and head down to the dock, and Dawson has a bottle of champagne which he pretends almost to spill on the Flash. Like, ha ha. Not. Dawson greets the gang, including Buzz (ugh), and Andie asks where's Joey and says she thought Joey was coming with Dawson, and Dawson says Joey had to stop by the library and work on a Watergate assignment for school. The rest of the gang nods.
Cut to a boathouse containing Joey and "Love To Love You" Pacey Witter, making out with the lip mics cranked up so loud that we can hear individual bubbles of saliva bursting. As Pacey hoists her onto a counter, Joey protests weakly that they should get going: "It's your boat we're planning on christening." So that's what the kids call it these days. Pacey's all, "My own boat?" and keeps kissing her. "No, we have to stop doing this, it's wrong," Joey says, not very convincingly, and Pacey says, "Yes, dead wrong," and attacks her again, and Joey emits a somewhat disturbing little semi-moan in response to Pacey kissing her neck and tries again to bring him back to the subject, saying as the two of them lock hands that they've "been in denial all week," that around other people they "pretend like nothing's changed, and then the minute we're alone it turns into thimfpffh --" Pacey mercifully shuts her up by kissing her again, but asks, "'This' what?" "This -- embarrassing grope-fest," Joey whines, and Pacey says sarcastically that yes, it is kind of embarrassing, "especially for [Joey], given how much [she] protested." Heh. Joey says she didn't protest; Pacey says she did too. More one-hundred-plus-decibel smooching, but this time Pacey stops it, saying that they have to tell Dawson as soon as possible, because the longer they wait, the worse it'll get. Joey says she knows, she's tried to tell Dawson "plenty of times," and Pacey interrupts to say that every time he sees Dawson, he feels -- but Joey interrupts him to say, "You don't have to bother filling in the expletive, okay?"
She continues that "this isn't exactly the easiest thing I've ever had to do, Pacey -- telling Dawson that, while he wasn't looking, I developed this bizarre gravitational pull towards his best friend, and I can't stop thinking about him or wanting to be near him or wanting to kiss him all the time," and Pacey draws close to her, and she takes his face in her hands and starts kissing him. More kissing; more inappropriate-for-the-eight-o'clock-timeslot groaning. "I'll do it," Pacey says firmly. Joey: "What?" Pacey: "I'll tell him." Joey can't let him do that, it's her responsibility, but Pacey nixes that idea, reminding her that "I'm the one that started this, remember?" He got her into this, he goes on, and besides, to save his friendship with Dawson, he'll have to come clean -- although why he'd want to preserve his relationship with that balloon-headed fuckstick escapes me, but more on that later. "All I need is one day. Just one day," Pacey says, leaning his forehead against Joey's. Joey repeats, "One day," and Pacey repeats, "One . . . day," and kisses her forehead.
Credits. Cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.
Back from commercials to the Pacey's-eye view. Pacey explains the meaning of lateness to Buzz. Enter "Dig" Doug Witter to exposition that Buzz's mother bricked, so now Pacey's stuck with Buzz for the day. Pacey tries to fob Buzz off on Doug. Doug says no, picks Buzz up bodily, and hands him to Pacey; Pacey says he has this thing he's got to do and it's important, and he hands Buzz bodily back to Doug while saying that he'll "just do this one thing" and then take over. Doug objects, but Pacey says, "It's just one thing, I'll be right back, I swear," and he takes off, and Doug shouts, "Pacey!" but Pacey just shouts back, "Dougie!" and doesn't turn around.
At the Ryan Home For Prematurely Sexualized Girls, Grams "Boot Sweet" Ryan bustles out to the car with Jen "Mary Kay LeTour-not" Lindley -- whose hair looks fabulous -- in tow. Grams describes Henry as a "very respectable young man" and says she doesn't "suspect him of ill intentions, but with no one here to chaperone --" Jen helps Grams load the trunk and finishes for her, "You never know what sort of hijinks might ensue." Grams chides her that it's no laughing matter, adding that she established "these rules" not because she doesn't trust Jen, but because "the sexual impulses of a teenage boy --" Jen cuts her off again by saying that she can handle Henry's sexual impulses just fine on her own. Grams gives her a look and gets into the car. Jen waves goodbye. As an ovary keens on the soundtrack, Jen spots Pacey standing on the Leerys' lawn with his arms folded, and she goes over to talk to him. "Anybody home?" she asks. Pacey doesn't know. "Could knock and find out," she suggests gently. Pacey says he could just walk right in, because "they never lock it"; he's walked right in and made himself at home since the age of five. Yeah, I think we get it.
Jen cuts to the chase: "She wants to be with you, Pace. She does." Pacey asks how she knows, and Jen allows that Joey told her so that morning, and Pacey asks why he isn't happier to hear that "right now." Jen says it's because right now, Pacey has to walk through the Leerys' front door and tell his best friend that the only girl his best friend can't live without -- "is the same one that I can't live without," Pacey fills in the rest. Jen murmurs, "Yeah." Pacey says he's had this conversation with Dawson in his head "a thousand times." Jen asks how it goes, and Pacey says, "You know, Dawson saying something along the lines of, 'Vaya con dios, Pace. I had my shot at making her happy, now -- why don't you give it a try?'" and I choose to view this line as a minor shout-out since Wing Chun says "vaya con dios" frequently. ["That's true. I bust it out for situations where 'smell ya later' would be inappropriate." -- Wing Chun] Anyway, Jen says it could happen, "minus the Spanish part." Yeah, and minus that other part. Pacey chuckles. Just then, the Flash comes out the front door and tells them that they've just missed Dawson; Pacey asks if Dawson said where he was going, and the Flash says Dawson said something about going to the library. Pacey looks queasy.
Cut to Andie walking through the library, sporting a camo mini and flatter hair than a Fiona Apple look-alike contest. She runs into Pacey and they greet each other awkwardly; he comments on how happy she looks and asks why: "Just your usual library glow?" She babbles that "well, you know, free books make me giddy," but we see "Non-Triumph Of The" Will Krudski come up behind her, so we know that's not the reason. Pacey and Will greet each other, and Will makes a snide comment about the unlikelihood of Pacey studying on a Saturday; then Will says, "So, ah, see you tonight, Andie?" "Yeah," she perks. Will claps Pacey on the shoulder and leaves. Whatever, Will -- spin off already and leave us alone. Pacey gives Andie a little guff about having a date with Will, and she gets embarrassed, but he puts her at ease about it. She asks what he's doing at the library, and Pacey says he's looking for Dawson and asks Andie if she's seen him, which she hasn't, so Pacey says he'll let her get back to work and takes off, and Andie wistfully looks over her shoulder at him as they go in separate directions.
Buzz is jumping on Doug's bed. Doug, with rubber gloves on and a dishtowel over his shoulder, is bitching Buzz out for breaking his answering machine. Buzz is ignoring Doug's queries as to what became of the answering-machine tape, as well as Doug's demands for him to "stop bouncing," and when Pacey comes into Doug's apartment, Buzz bounces off the bed and heads over to Pacey, observing, "And I thought you were boring." Like, ha ha. Not. And excuse me, but don't nine-year-olds usually have their front teeth? Because young Lipnicki has a gap you could drive a Mustang through. Pacey bribes Buzz with a "Pokémon blue" something or other, and Buzz flops on the bed to play with it as Doug snaps at Pacey for not coming back earlier. Pacey apologizes but tells Doug that he and Joey "came to a really important decision."
Doug asks since when he and Joey decide anything together, and Pacey tells Doug that he's "gonna like this one, 'cause it turns out you were right," adding with a who-da-man smile that "she's into me, man. That's why she got so freaked out when I kissed her." "Really," Doug says noncommittally. "Yeah!" Pacey says enthusiastically, opening the fridge. "So, then, you told Dawson," Doug says flatly, and Pacey confesses that he hasn't, "not exactly," and in response to Doug's warning stare, he says that he tried to tell Dawson, that that's the errand he had to run, but it "turned into this wild goose chase," and he apologizes again while swigging from a jug of milk. Doug gets all judgmental for some reason and asks, "Look, telling Dawson that you kissed Joey in a moment of weakness is a hell of a lot different than [sic] sneaking around with her behind his back, don't you think?" Pacey makes a "how typical" face and snorts mirthlessly as Doug continues that, in the end, Joey and Dawson will stay friends, "or whatever it is that they are," and Pacey will wind up alone with no girlfriend and no best friend, and he tells Pacey to "think about it -- I was right before, wasn't I?" Pacey looks ill again, and I have to say that, between Joey's capricious definition of Finding Herself and Dawson's monumental self-absorption, Doug is probably right.
A nighttime shot of Pacey coming up the Leerys' porch steps with a determined look on his face. As he approaches the front door, Joey runs up behind him all out of breath and stops him from going inside. They hug, and Joey gasps, "Look, Pacey, we can't do this, okay?" Pacey wants to know what they can't do, and Joey says she should tell Dawson about them, not Pacey: "Things are really complicated between me and Dawson, and it has nothing to do with you, it's just --" She drags him outside. "Look, it has to come from me, or else . . . it's going to ruin everything." Pacey strokes her face and tries to calm her, saying that it's okay and they'll do whatever she wants to do, and they hug -- kind of a dumb move right in front of Dawson's house, if you ask me, but nobody did. Pacey confesses that he'd "been in the process of chickening out the whole way over" to Dawson's, and he strokes Joey's face some more. Joey says dully that "maybe it's a sign, Pacey," and when Pacey asks of what, Joey says, "It's just that for so long, he's been everything to me, Pacey, I mean, this guy has been my family when I haven't had one, and he's the one person in my life that I can always depend on" -- to behave like a jackass, at any rate -- "and, and this? This is gonna kill him!" Like that's a bad thing. Pacey adopts a stern mien and chuckles grimly, "You never had any intention of telling him, did you? You didn't come over here tonight to tell him; you came here to stop me from telling him." Joey sputters that she tried, she went up to Dawson's room and she tried to tell him; Pacey interrupts in a wearily sarcastic tone, "Of course you did. But let me guess -- you failed, right?" Enter Sir Flares-A-Lot, commenting from the porch, "I thought I heard something out here." Joey and Pacey both turn towards the house with "busted!" looks on their faces, and Joey stammers, "Dawson, we were just --" "Having an argument," Dawson finishes flatly, coming through the screen door with his hands in his XXXL pockets. "Obviously. What about?" Joey says, "Mmm," but faced with Dawson's indignant nostrilage and bristling Sam-The-Eagle hair, she can't go through with it and she looks down.
Pacey looks to the side, then takes a breath and says, "Us, Dawson," and Joey whips around to look fearfully at Pacey, and Pacey says, facing her, "We were arguing about us," and Dawson's mouth forms the shape of a cat's asshole as Joey looks away from Pacey and Pacey faces Dawson again: "Me and Joey, there's an 'us' here now." Nostrils at full extension, jaw jutted out so far that it's a wonder he can keep his lips together, Dawson glares first at Pacey and then at Joey in a self-righteous fury. Joey looks at him, then looks down as if she might begin to cry, and we go to commercial before Dawson's nose cartilage sends her and Pacey reeling backwards into the creek.
Take two of Go Away. Blood-red sunset. Waterfront. Flash and Dawson; champagne; Andie asking where's Joey, Dawson saying she's at the library. Jen tells Dawson she finished All The President's Men and can return it to him now; he says he'll come pick it up and asks what she thought. "Incredible movie," she says, but apparently Henry didn't think it had enough cute girls in it. Har. Dee. Har. Har. Not. Jack "Lost In The Ethan" McPhee, attired in a mondo cheezo football jersey-esque garment with -- I'm not kidding -- cap sleeves, says, "Don't look now, but I think that's the captain of this vessel," as Pacey appears, and Andie says they can get started, and Dawson says, "Not without this, we can't," and he jogs up to Pacey with the champagne. As Pacey thanks him, Joey comes hustling out from behind the boathouse all shamefaced and sits down to Jen a bit awkwardly, so I guess this is the Joey's-eye view.
Cut to Jen on a pay phone, telling Henry to stop by around two o'clock; Joey stands nearby, shifting from foot to foot. Henry says something dorky which we don't hear, in response to which Jen smiles her usual oh-Henry-you-innocent-non-New-Yorker smile and tells him she's taking Joey to the library and then returning the car to Grams, so she'll see him later. After she hangs up, Joey thanks her again for the ride and babbles that she meant to go that morning but then she "got kind of busy" (yeah, I'll say), blah blah blah forbidden-lovecakes, and Jen says Joey doesn't have to explain, "unless of course there's something that you want to explain." They drift off down the access road -- well, Joey drifts; Jen idles in first gear -- and Joey says, "Recently you and I spoke about unrequited feelings that a certain someone --" "Namely Pacey?" Jen interrupts, and Joey cops to it: "Namely Pacey, uh, may have had for me . . . and how those unrequited feelings expressed themselves in the form of a kiss." Joey, you aren't delivering a graduate-level lecture; just spit it out already. After much hand-wringing, Joey goes on, "They're not. Uh, unrequited, that is. They are actually, uh . . . they're very much requited." Jen asks, now that Joey has kissed that "certain someone" back, whether Joey would like that to continue. Joey says she thinks so, then smiles and says yes, but her feelings "have been clouded by" her fear of Dawson's reaction. Jen says with a gentle smile that if Joey's asking her whether she should tell Dawson, "the answer's a big fat yes." Joey says that they will, that Pacey plans to tell him today and that she tried herself, "plenty of times," but when they tell him, Dawson gets hurt, and if she tells Pacey not to tell Dawson . . . "Pacey's gonna get hurt," Jen finishes for her.
Joey bemoans the fact that, whatever she does, "[she's] the villain," and rambles on about how, "in stories like these," the woman is always the villain, "she's always some wicked conniving whore who manipulates her way between two brothers or two best friends," like, whatever, Joey -- your life isn't Tolstoy, get over yourself. Jen interrupts her, thank God, to observe that most of those stories "have been written by men." Joey makes a wry face and says, "I really wish I was [sic] more like you." Don't we all. Jen joins me in rolling her eyes, but Joey means it: "You feel things and you act on 'em. Pacey does the same thing, he's -- fearless." Jen lets Joey in on a little secret "about the fearless," namely that "we're not as tough as you think we are." She goes on to say that "Pacey's heart can break just as easily as the guy [sic] -- maybe even more so, considering it was already broken when you got there." Joey looks stricken by this.
At the library, Joey walks through the reserve room, and she pauses to see Andie and Pacey chatting on the level below, and she closes her eyes, then opens them, then rolls them.
Joey does Watergate research. Andie comes up behind her and jokingly gives her shit about the "twenty-minute time limit" on using the computers; Joey apologizes and says she just had to finish the Watergate assignment. Andie's "nowhere near done" but she's going home anyway because she has a date that night. "Will?" Joey asks. "Yeah," Andie says unenthusiastically (gee, go figure), and we cut to a camera angle that has Joey in the foreground and Andie behind her as Andie says that she likes Will because he's really smart and he's cute but doesn't know it, "which is key, because God save us from the ones who do," and she's babbling, but word to that last part anyway, although Will is about as cute as a block of concrete, but anyway, Joey smiles as she continues pointing and clicking and asks tolerantly, "So what's the problem?" and Andie stammers out that "he's -- he's not Pacey." Joey's face freezes and then falls. Andie claps her hands over her face and says, "Uhhh, pathetic, I know! I know! And I thought I was over him, I really really did, but then I bumped into him a little while ago and then . . ." Joey wishes fervently for a hole to open up and swallow her, but Andie just keeps percolating: "I mean, technically we're friends, right? And that's how I played it." Joey nods numbly. "But then it's like, when I saw him, every irritating-slash-adorable thing he ever did flashed before my eyes, and . . . I mean, that's the true test, right? When you just bump into somebody and boom! Floodgates." I experienced a similar sensation during this scene, except that my entire life flashed before my eyes, because at the beginning of the scene, a caddy wandered through my apartment but I didn't pay any attention, and the thing I know, I hear this "whoosh" from behind the couch, and I turn around, and there's Tiger Woods halfway through his backswing with the Three-Iron Of Dramatic Irony and boom! We get it.
When I come to, Joey's on the street and she's run into Dawson, and she's babbling some excuse about the library and having to get home because she told Bessie flap flap flap, and could she make the something rotten in Denmark smell any more obvious? Dawson says that he meant to call her and asks if she wants to do movie night that night, and Joey says way too breezily that she doesn't think she can. Dawson asks if she's all right; she says oh yeah, she's fine, she just has to, uh, um, er, she has to, uhhh . . . "Go?" Dawson adds, arching a brow. "Yes. I gotta go. Bye!" she chirps, and she just can't get away fast enough, and Dawson says with confusion in his voice, "I'll see you," and Joey repeats a bit too loudly, "Bye!" and hustles away, cringing, right past a granite historical marker that clearly said "NORTH CAROLINA" on it, like, way to catch that, location scout. When Joey books out of the frame with her product-placed can of Diet Coke, we see Dawson and his wilted-dandelion hair staring after her.
Cut to a pay phone. Joey leaves a message on Doug's machine telling him not to talk to Dawson, because she just ran into Dawson herself so he's not home anyway, and also she thinks she should tell Dawson. Oh, criminy -- I'll tell Dawson, for god's sake. I'll tell him a bunch of things. ["Save some of that action for me, sister." -- Wing Chun]
Nighttime. Joey runs across the footbridge and climbs the ladder to Dawson's room. In the Sanctum Dawsonorum, Dawson watches The Last Picture Show, and on the screen Jeff Bridges is yelling something about "she's my girl," and in the foyer of my apartment, Tiger Woods takes a few practice swings with the Pitching Wedge Of Parallel Plot Development. Joey clambers through Dawson's window as Jeff Bridges continues to bellow about marrying her "one of these days," and Dawson says, sounding neither surprised nor unhappy to see her, "Changed your mind?" She stammers that she wanted to talk to him, then asks, "Pacey hasn't been here, has he?" Dawson isn't fazed: "No -- is he supposed to be?" Joey says no and flails her arms a bit before asking, "What're you watching?" Dawson tells her, and Joey asks if that's the movie they saw on . . . "Our first date," Dawson completes her sentence, adding wryly that it wasn't a successful evening, "at least not movie-wise." Joey asks what he means, and Dawson says they never got to see the end. Joey's face twitches for a second before she takes a seat, adopts an inappropriately flirtatious face, and asks how the movie does end. Dawson explains matter-of-factly that it's about three friends who grow up together, and Jeff Bridges is in love with Cybill Shepherd, and she dumps him and breaks his heart, "and he's devastated -- and she's not," and Dawson laughs as he says this, ending by saying that "she kinda just moves on to the other guy." I take Tiger up to the roof and write "WE GET IT" on hundreds of golf balls in Sharpie marker, and he hits them in the direction of Wilmington, North Carolina with his titanium driver, because we do in fact get it, but thanks so much for including that focus-pull close-up on Joey's face for emphasis.
Dawson keeps discussing the plot, saying that the friendship gets ruined and "that's pretty much how it ends," with everyone alone and hating each other, and then he snorts, "It's, it's pretty depressing, actually, I don't -- I don't know why I'm watching it," and if you haven't already, you should go back and read the way I've described Dawson's mood in the scene so far, because he seems in relatively good spirits, and in the context of the whole episode, it doesn't make sense. Anyway, Joey is silent, and Dawson asks what she wanted to talk about, and Joey gets up and says in a rambling near-tears tone that she just remembered she'd told Bessie she'd help with Alexander so she'd better go, and she turns and goes out the window with a hurried "bye," and we get an extreme close-up of Dawson's face in profile, and it has absolutely no expression.
Joey dismounts the ladder to see Pacey striding up the front lawn, and she breaks into a run to stop him in time, and she catches him on the porch and they hug and she says she has to tell Dawson about them because things between her and Dawson -- well, we've seen this already. When we get to the part where she drags Pacey out onto the lawn, we cut up to the Sanctum, and Dawson, brooding in his chair, hears them talking on the lawn and goes to the window in time to hear the part where Pacey accuses Joey of not coming to tell Dawson at all, but coming to stop him from telling Dawson. Then we cut back to Pacey saying his "let me guess -- you failed" line, and then Nostrilla looms over the Capeside horizon: "I thought I heard something out here." Joey "oh, uh, duh, we were just" blah blah blah Dawson "having an argument -- obviously. What about?" blah blah blah Pacey "us -- we were having an argument about us" blah blah blah looks of horror all aroundcakes. As the Donner party emerges stunned from Dawson's left nostril -- and have I mentioned that Dawson's hair looks like a small, extremely angry octopus died on his head? Because it does -- Pacey apologizes, saying that "we didn't wanna tell you this way," and Dawson looks very satisfied indeed with his own righteous anger and snits, "You didn't tell me." Joey looks up, shocked, and says, "You know, don't you," and Dawson nods, with a mixture of bitterness and his trademark intolerable smugness, "Yeah, I know."
I've got Tom Green's Road Trip right here -- IN MY PANTS (tm Bryan).
Here we go again -- take three of Trashomon (tm notworking). Sunset. Waterfront. Flashmobile. Champagne. "Where's Joey," "she's at the library," blah dee blah, cut to Joey and Pacey kissing, and agreeing to tell Dawson, and kissing some more. Um, whose point of view have we got here? Joey stops the kissing, thank god, and tells Pacey to go ahead and she'll catch up. More kissing. Dear sound editor: please turn down the lip mics, because I can hear snippets of molar conversation. Love, the tattered and bleeding remains of Sars's eardrum. Pacey appears, Jack comments, Andie says they can get started, Dawson says not without the champagne they can't, and as Pacey stammers that sparkling cider would have worked just as well, Joey appears and does The Walk Of Overly Casual Guilt over to sit to Jen.
Dawson says condescendingly that Pacey took something "destined for the scrapheap" and made it "a thing of beauty" and "a viable mode of transportation." Like, buck up, little sailor! Pacey doesn't know what to say, so he makes that grim chuckling noise again; from the dock, Jack urges him to "get this show on the road," and Pacey tells him to hang on before asking Dawson if he'll "be home after all this." Dawson says yes, for a little while, but he has to work later; Pacey says, "Cool," and trots down to the boat, saying he'll keep it short. Joey watches him go by with adoring eyes, which she drops when Dawson follows Pacey down and stands beside Joey. Dawson greets her warmly; she responds awkwardly. Pacey gives a speech thanking Hurricane Chris for letting him afford the boat to begin with, and thanking everyone who helped him get the boat in seaworthy condition, and then he christens the boat "True Love" with a quick glance in Joey's direction, and Jen gives Joey a look, which Joey avoids, and Pacey smashes the bottle on the side of the boat and everyone claps. Whatever.
Library. Dawson is lurking in the stacks and sees Will, who's looking for the "secret room" Andie usually studies in. Dawson directs him, but before he goes Will asks what Dawson and Joey did on their first date. Dawson categorizes this as a "left-field question" -- not entirely accurate, since on occasion people have cared what came out of left field, whereas nobody cares about Will and his Hair-Club-For-Men non-plot -- but Will needs ideas for his date with Andie. Dawson says he and Joey went to the movies, but calls this "a terrible idea" because you can't talk to or look at your date, although anyone on a date with Dawson would probably describe that state of affairs as "a great idea" or "the only tolerable idea," particularly given the current condition of Dawson's hair, which in this scene resembles a big old kinky claw parted down the center and foofed out into a fugly over-processed yellow proscenium framing his gigantic forehead -- I mean, his hair is so unbelievably, horrendously bad that it defies my powers of description. Anyway, Dawson suggests, "There's always the creek," and blabbers on about moonlight on the water and how it's "achieved cliché status because it actually is that romantic," and Will asks about getting a boat, so Dawson offers his own boat. Will asks politely what Dawson's up to that night, and Dawson says smugly, "I think I might try to hook up with an old friend." Yeah, good luck with that, Frizzy Gillespie.
Henry "And June" Parker leans morosely against Jen's front door and whines about Grams's not letting him in the house; Jen, sitting on a sofa on the porch, blithely shrugs that Grams declared him "public enemy number one." Henry harangues her about it some more and Jen makes some more "whatever" noises, and then Henry lurches across the sofa and starts kissing her, and Jen laughs in his face. A moment later, she spots Dawson crossing the lawn, and, thinking Dawson knows about the Joey-Pacey situation and will want to talk, she stuffs Henry into the house; Dawson opens the screen door and apologizes for interrupting and makes to leave them alone, but Jen tells him not to worry about it, because she "was expecting that [he'd] come by anyway." She asks how he's doing and if he's okay. Puzzled, Dawson says he's fine. Dawson's hair -- oh, I give up. I suspect a Flowbee got involved somewhere along the line but beyond that I refuse to speculate.
Jen mentions gently that she and Henry could "use a chaperone," and Dawson, still a bit baffled, says sarcastically that it sounds "tempting" but he's going to go watch a movie and "relive better days," and of course he's referring yet again to his melodramatic non-midlife non-crisis, but Jen thinks he's talking about Pacey and Joey: "God . . . I know this must seem like the hardest thing in the world right now, but . . . you know what, in the long run it's better that Pacey told you." Oops -- oh, hello, cat emerging from bag. "Told me what?" Dawson asks suspiciously. Jen stares at him sadly. Dawson, openly smelling a rat: "Jen, told me what?" She tries to backtrack with, "That -- nothing," but Dawson doesn't buy it, wanting to know, "If it's nothing, then why were you so concerned about me?" Jen lies that she wasn't concerned, but Dawson says that "you were concerned because you assumed Pacey told me something -- told me what, Jen?" Jen looks at him with genuine pity, closes her eyes, and looks away. Dawson gets out the bar of self-righteousness soap and starts to work up a lather: "Okay, you know, the fact that you're unwilling to answer my question speaks volumes." He pinches his lips together to form a little facial anus. Jen looks back at him with that pity-face, and he guesses, "It has to do with Joey, doesn't it?" Still the commiseration look from Jen. Dawson prepares to deploy the nostrils: "It does, doesn't it?" Jen shakes her head, whispering, "God, I'm so sorry," and Dawson splutters, "Wha -- you've known about this?" As James Van Der Beek rolls his eyes and juts his jaw back and forth in a gruesome imitation of "betrayal," Jen says she didn't consider it her place to say anything; she didn't want to interfere, and she wanted to protect Dawson. Dawson grunts in disgust and stomps off the porch. Jen follows him to the door and asks him to wait, to "say something." He insists angrily that he's fine, but Jen insists that he's not, and she asks what she can say or do to help. Dawson turns and points at her all schoolmarmishly and sneers that she can do him "the same favor that you did them -- you can keep this to yourself," adding snidely, "thanks for protecting me." He tromps his XXXL cargo-pants-clad ass back to his own house. Jen leans against the doorjamb and sighs.
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]
Cut to the porch/lawn scene. Dawson opens the front door and slips halfway through it to see Pacey and Joey holding hands; Joey is protesting that she tried to tell Dawson the truth but couldn't bring herself to do it. A shot of Dawson's giant, livid jaw before we hear Pacey's murmured "you failed, right?" line, and Dawson pulls himself together and clomps towards the front of the porch. Fade forward to Pacey apologizing that they didn't want to tell him "this way" and Dawson saying smugly, "You didn't tell me." Joey looks at him, stunned, and says that he knows, doesn't he, and he flaps the nostrils and says yeah, he knows, and Joey looks terrified -- as she should, since Dawson's nose is threatening to block out all the forms of sunlight on which life on this planet depends -- and Dawson asks all sneering if she planned on telling him, "or was this just gonna be a secret fling?" Joey argues that "it's not like that," and Dawson asks what it was like then, "because Jen was a little short on details." "She told you?" Joey gasps, and Dawson shrugs that Jen "thought [he] knew," and his nostrils imitate a bellows as he continues in a quavering voice, "I'd have to be pretty frickin' stupid not to know, right, that the two people I trusted most in the world were lying to me?" Dawson's lips form that self-satisfied butthole shape we've all come to know and despise; then he parts them to ask Joey, "So are you, are you bored, are you confused, or just malicious?" Like anyone cares enough about you to spite you actively, Dawson. I mean, Joey has acted pretty capricious romance-wise over the last two seasons, but coming from Dawson, the criticism really rankles. Joey looks down and shifts from foot to foot, and Pacey steps up to tell Dawson that, if he blames anyone, he should blame Pacey, but Dawson cuts him off: "I don't think you're in any position to talk about what's fair. You were my best friend." Pacey, evenly: "I still am." Dawson finds that "a little hard to process right now," and Pacey tells him softly, "It's the truth, Dawson."
Dawson, still unable to get over his envy of Pacey's superior sexual experience, snaps that apparently Pacey values sex over friendship, but Pacey shoots him down by saying in a fairly condescending tone that "this has nothing to do with sex." Dawson, shooting for "searing contempt" but taking a wrong turn at "wounded ego," whines, "Oh, what, are you in love? Is that what this is?" Joey, looking like she might bolt at any time, is still looking at the ground and rocking herself autistically, and Pacey turns to look at her before he answers, which infuriates Señor Supercuts even more: "Oh God, don't look, don't look at her, all right! Don't --" He stabs a finger in Pacey's direction and snarls, "You know what, Pacey, I feel sorry for you. Because when all this is over, you're really gonna need your friends and you're not gonna have any, you're not gonna have a single one." Um, right -- look who's talking, Foreheady Lamarr. Nostrils knocking Mir out of orbit, mouth rucked up into a livid little anus, Dawson wheels around with his Anthony-Michael-Hall-in-Weird-Science hairdo and starts to snit into the house. Just then, Andie and Will materialize; Andie asks, sort of cringing, "Hey guys, what's goin' on?" Pacey and Joey, holding hands, abruptly stop doing so. Dawson can't wait to rat the two of them out: "Whyn't you ask Pacey? Ask him how long he and Joey have been sneakin' around behind my back -- or better yet, ask Joey! Ask her long she has been lying, to me and to you. Go ahead, ask 'em, 'cause I -- can't stand to look at 'em anymore." The phrase "good riddance to bad rubbish" springs to my mind, but Joey starts crying and puts her hand to her head. Dawson flails inside. I can't believe they don't feel relieved to have rid themselves of his arrogant condescension and whiny-ass, boring pretensions. I really can't believe I'm going to have to sit through this story AGAIN after the commercials.
Okay, just in case, a quick culinary PSA: if you have Italians visiting you, do NOT bring them to the Olive Garden. It's about as close to genuine Italian cuisine as sushi.
Oh, God and sonny Jesus. Here we go. Again. Take four of Whine, Lola, Whine (tm Wing Chun), this time from Jen's and Andie's perspectives. Couldn't we have it from Bessie's perspective, or Grams's -- or the scenery's? "Oh, please, no, not more chewing, no, stop -- [chomp chomp chomp] -- OW OW OW! Oh God in heaven, help me! I know I'm just particle-board, but I want to LIVE! OW! [chomp chomp chomp] I can't take this much longer -- what's happening to meeeeeee? [chomp chomp chomp] A pox upon ye, Van Der Beek!" Anyhow, fade back up on Jen asking what she can say or do, Dawson basically blaming her and stamping off, and Jen slumping against the doorjamb and sighing. Henry comes out of the house and says, "So -- where were we?" Jen tells him she just "did the most awful thing," and Henry says it can't have been that bad, but Jen says she really screwed up -- she accidentally told Dawson "something he wasn't supposed to know" and hurt his feelings. Henry points out, rightly, that she didn't mean to, but Jen says it's still her fault, she's still the one who messed up. Henry responds to this by grabbing her face and planting a kiss on her, a reaction which reminds me of the bit in Bill Maher's stand-up routine about comforting a woman and getting a "grief-on," and Jen must have a similar thought, because she backs away, saying she doesn't know what Henry thinks he's doing, "but it's not helping matters any." Henry says she's not giving it a chance. Heh.
He tries to kiss her again, and she ducks out of his grasp again, saying, "I mean it." Henry says he's just trying to make her feel better; Jen says no, he's trying to make himself feel better. Henry asks, "What did I do that was so terrible?" Jen asks if he has any interest in what just happened between her and Dawson, and Henry says maybe he doesn't: "Maybe I want to put us before whatever little mini-drama you and your friends have whipped up this week." HA ha! Go, Henry. Jen doesn't agree, narrowing her eyes and telling him to leave. Henry protests that she's "being irrational," but Jen insists on booting his "horny freshman ass," and he clomps off while she fumes. Sorry, Jen, but of all the many reasons to kick Henry to the curb, his lack of interest in Dawson's bruised ego doesn't even make the list.
A shot of the full moon. Will, rowing. Andie, perking. Sars, injecting Vivarin intravenously. Will tells Andie the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in a manner so annoying that I can't shift myself to transcribe it, except to note that anyone referring to Orpheus as a "kick-ass musician" should get drowned in a boot. Long story short, Will waxes pretentious and Andie is captivated. Nnnnnext!
Cut to Andie accidentally interrupting Lollapaloser '00. Dawson pitches a hissy, rinse, repeat, he goes inside, Joey finally breaks out of her trance and runs after him. Andie asks Pacey if it's true, and without looking at her, Pacey mutters, "Yes." Andie, on the point of crying: "I don't know what to say." Pacey, disoriented: "Me neither." It's Will's turn to pray for a trapdoor as Andie says that Pacey must really -- well, care for Joey, although Andie can't bring herself to say the words aloud, to have given up his friendship with Dawson. No response from Pacey. Andie reams him for "be[ing] so stupid," wailing that he's going to get hurt, that Joey will never love him like she loves Dawson (ugh), that Dawson is Joey's first love (hoarf), and Pacey seems to hear an ugly truth in this, because his face falls even farther. With a nonplused "uh," Andie waves a hand at him and walks off. Will sort of shrugs at Pacey and makes a "now what do I do" face. Pacey gestures towards Andie with his chin, so Will follows Andie. Pacey turns to look back at the house and heaves a sigh.
Dear scenery: My sincere condolences. Signed, Sars -- because we've followed the shouting match indoors. Joey stomps behind Dawson into his room and says she didn't intend "for this to happen." Dawson shouts with an emphatic arm-flap that that "does not provide [him] any solace." "Solace"? "SOLACE"? Okay, who gets that mind-bendingly upset but can still come up with the word "solace" in an argument? Nobody, that's who. Anyhow. Dawson asks if she loves Pacey or does she just want to sleep with him, what, and Joey groans, "How could you say that?" Dawson adds, "Because it's what he's gonna expect," as though there's something wrong with that, not that Dawson would know because he's never slept with anyone himself, and there's nothing wrong with that either, but it's awfully easy to act all sanctimonious about it when you've never done it, and Dawson's continuing and utterly infantile expectation that the entire world and everyone in it slow down so that he and his unrealistic -- not to mention dead boring -- romantic notions can keep up drives me fucking bonkers, I don't mind telling you, but ANYHOW, Joey points out to him, god bless her, that she and Dawson aren't together and haven't been for nearly a year.
Dawson asks her if she's punishing him for not wanting to get back together with him, like, Dawson, come on over, and we'll go around the way to the Empire State Building with a grapple hook and a set of crampons so that you can climb to the tippy top and GET OVER YOURSELF; I mean, this high a level of self-regard in someone so obnoxious is INCOMPREHENSIBLE to me. Joey denies punishing him. Dawson says that Joey keeps saying she wants to go find herself and asks if Pacey's what she's been looking for this whole time; again, I know we've discussed this on the forums, but coming from Dawson, it's galling. Joey wails, "No!" and Dawson does a whole bunch of high-school-drama-club blocking, including the infamous run-the-hands-through-the-hair move, and asks how "two people who can barely stand to be in the same room with each other" end up outside his house discussing their future. I'd like to know how a dumb-ass with a higher opinion of himself than most demi-gods gets off asking that question when he's the one who condescendingly asked Pacey to "take care of" Joey in the first goddamn place, but Joey confines herself to remarking through tears that she can't explain, it just happened, and she starts to say that "everything between [Dawson and her] is so complicated," but Dawson interrupts to say that if things with them are complicated, Joey "made them that way." See my comments viz. a good point, but not coming from him. Dawson demands to know if Joey thinks that everything that was wrong when Joey was with him will "magically get better" if she's with Pacey. Joey quavers in a desperate tone that she doesn't know: "I just know that -- I need him." Dawson asks intently, "Do you need him like you need me?" Even Joey is speechless at this display of egotism, so Dawson says that "it's a simple question" and repeats it, but Joey gets to her feet and protests that he "can't do that" to her, that the two things have nothing to do with each other and that the way she feels about Pacey "is completely separate from the way that I feel about you, and our friendship." Dawson snorts dismissively that, right now, he and Joey don't have a friendship, and when Joey starts to splutter in disbelief, Dawson yells, "You can't have both of us! You can't have him as your boyfriend and me as your consolation prize [snort: some "prize"], you're going to have to make a choice, and I'll tell you right now, if you choose him, I'm not gonna be around to pick up the pieces when it all falls apart." Joey tries to get a word in, saying "no" over and over and fighting back tears, but Dawson isn't done: "This ruins everything! There's no goin' back." Amazingly, Joey doesn't throw up her hands in disgust and depart the premises forever, but, shouting, asks what he wants her to say, what he wants to hear; Dawson flounces past her, saying he doesn't want her to say anything, he wants her to leave. After he goes, Joey struggles to compose herself and climbs out the window. Katie Holmes did a good job with this scene, but damn -- James Van Der Beek left bicuspid grooves all over the room. ["I feel I must interject here with a comment to the young girls inexperienced in romance who think that kind of 'choose me or get lost' power-play is really romantic and tragic: It's not. It's emotional blackmail, and it's total bullshit. The person who demands that you choose is the person who doesn't get chosen. P.S. Dawson sucks!" -- Wing Chun]
Later, Dawson pouts while sitting in the windowsill. Jen knocks on his door; Dawson basically says he doesn't want to talk. Jen doesn't think he should be alone right now, and he bitterly comments that he "might as well get used to it," but Jen sweetly says that he's not alone and he shouldn't ever think that. Dawson, who has swept all his hair off his forehead and now looks like a large pencil, asks whinily why Jen didn't tell him; Jen says her interceding would just have pushed Joey and Pacey closer together. Dawson asks if he's just supposed to accept it and go on like nothing's changed. Jen sits beside him and says he has to let things "run their course" and let Joey decide what she really wants. Dawson, his eyes shifting semi-psychotically, says firmly, "I can't let her go." "What else can you do?" Jen asks. Dawson says, "I can fight. You can fight for what you want." Jen rolls her eyes sadly at this delusion and pats his XXXL knee as The Flute Of Romantic Disappointment tweetles in the background.
At the waterfront, Joey finds Pacey sitting glumly on a railing. More Flute Of Romantic Disappointment. After a minute or two of silence, Joey delivers her line from the beginning about having one of those days you wish you could live over again. Pacey agrees that yes, he has, and asks what Joey would have done differently. Joey doesn't know -- everything, nothing at all -- but "we'd still end up right back here . . . and I don't think I know where 'here' is." "Here" is a world without Dawson. Go forth and prosper. Nope, no such luck; Pacey mumbles that "'here' is right where we started." Joey, uncomfortable, turns to look at the True Love and says she looks "beautiful in the water," but Pacey mutters that "this morning was just a formality. We still don't know whether she's seaworthy." Tiger Woods lines up his last tee shot of the evening with The Three Wood Of Ineptly Executed Metaphor while Joey says that "she looks pretty solid" and Pacey predicts "stormy weather ahead." "Pacey?" Joey half-asks, meeting his eye again, and he says slowly, "It's over, isn't it?" as he meets hers, and she says, near tears, "It has to be," and Pacey suggests quietly that she "be the first one to go this time," and she nods and sniffles as she walks away. Pacey turns to watch her leave, and a tear rolls down his face as an ovary moans, "Take away my pain," and Joey shuffles down the dock but turns to look back, and when she does, Pacey has gone. She slumps and runs a hand through her hair as the camera pans up and away from her, alone and small at the end of the pier.
week: Let's get ready to -- ruuuuuuumble!