Episode Report Card Sars: D+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Failing Down
By Sars | Season 4 | Episode 2 | Aired on 10.10.2000
Later, Joey finds Crush hosing down a boat at the marina and demands, "What just happened in there?" Crush says that Joey should thank him for saving her job. "Who are you?" she snaps. "Drue. Drue Valentine," he tells her. Okay, did the Valentines just move to Capeside? Because Joey would KNOW HIM, people. Because the town? SMALL. GOD. (And does he have a sister named Emily? Just wondering.) Joey asks if Mrs. Valentine is his mom, and after he snarks that she picks up "quick," she says, "But you said all that horrible stuff about her." "Which doesn't make it any less true," he grunts, flipping his hair out of his eyes all Backstreet Boy. "You lied to me," Joey seethes. "Correction -- I was playing with you." "Why?" "It was fun," he says, going on to say that he figured out she'd lied to get the job, "which I totally dig about you, by the way." "You're a freak," Joey grumbles, but she can't help smiling. He is pretty cute. Please don't hurt me for thinking that. He tells her to lighten up: "So I'm not who I said I was, big deal. I'm actually a lot more fun." He clambers into the rigging. Joey regards him curiously. Foreshadowing uses the last of my floss.
Over at the Leery dock, Dawson tells Jen that "it's okay to be hurt." Jen whimpers that she's not hurt, but the "only real boyfriend" she ever had (no comment) enlisted her best friend to dump her for him, so she's angry. Dawson tells her that he spent most of last spring "angry at the world," and it's not worth it: "It might numb the pain a little bit, but it's basically just a distraction." Whatever, Mr. Miyucki. He gets up to stand beside her and says, after a moment's pause, that "if you do it right, loving somebody's gonna hurt." Oh, brother. Shut up, Dawson. But no, he can't shut up, instead advising Jen to "let [herself] feel that" so that she can love again. Okay, sincerely? I just threw up. That's why the recap took so long this week -- it's not because my cat-sitter bollixed up the timer on the VCR, and it's not because I left the back-up tape at Wing Chun's house, it's because I had to spend the better part of an afternoon cleaning chunks of repurposed lunch out of my keyboard.
Thankfully, Jen reads my mind: "Dawson, I don't need one of your sappy self-help seminars right now." Preach it, sister. Dawson says he heard similar speeches from her over the summer, and when Jen asks why he didn't just throw her into traffic (heh!), he says that she helped him "through the worst of times," and adds, as though it's just occurring to him, "I've really learned a lot from you, Jen!" As they stroll up the dock, Jen asks if he's learned things "like how to downward-spiral your way into adulthood?" Okay, writers. "Downward spiral" is your "Rae Dawn Chong." We get it. Now for God's sake buy a thesaurus. Dawson remarks that Jen taught him that "love can suck." Only when it's you doing the loving, Grease Witherspoon. Then he blathers on about things changing, passions fading, dum dee dum dum, but "one thing remains sacred": friendship. He says that, without the gang, the summer "would have just been this huge black hole of depression for" him, and we pan out as Jen laughs defeatedly that he's too "damn earnest" and she'd like to drown him in the creek (shout-out? And even if it isn't, Jen, get in line), and he puts an arm around her shoulders and says that it's "part of [his] charm," and while I lease an electron microscope in order to search for said charm, compared with which a quark must look like a meatball, Dawson cranks up the Cliché-o-matic and something about bad news and good intentions spews out, but I didn't hear it because I kept staring, transfixed, at Dawson's hair, which makes him look like Fred from Scooby Doo. Enter Jack, whose appearance Dawson greets with, "Jack. Thank God. Take her off my hands for a little while?" Like, ha ha. Not. After a dorky male-bonding shoulder-punch, Dawson goes inside, presumably to anoint his giant pate with another handful of Crisco, and Jen apologizes to Jack, and Jack says that's "supposed to be [his] line," and Jen rambles on about sorries, and how "somebody's always sorry," and a relationship is a string of sorries "culminating in a big final messy sorry." Jack cracks that it sounds like Jen "is drowning herself in an economy-size vat of self-pity," and Jen says that the recently dumped "get to wallow just a bit." Then there's a weird jump-cut to Jack saying he's really sorry -- I think part of this scene must have gotten left on the cutting-room floor -- and she says she's sorry too, and she shouldn't have killed the messenger, but she didn't need to hear the bad news from Jack: "I needed you to be my shoulder." Jack smiles ruefully: "Come here." Would that I could, honey. Oh, he's talking to Jen. Dammit. They hug. "Better late than never?" Jack asks. Jen hugs him tighter. Aw.
Marina. Pacey finds Joey sitting on the side of the "True Love." He greets her, then observes, "You're not liking me so much right now, are you?" Joey, clad in yet another overly revealing tank top, snips, "Not so much, no." Pacey sighs, then says with great effort that his sister said it's not such a bad idea to discuss problems with one's girlfriend. Joey comments wryly that "it's nice to know someone in the Witter family can boast a brain cell or two." "You're not gonna make this easy on me, are ya?" Pacey half-whispers. No response. "Okay," Pacey says, exhaling forcefully. "So where do I start?" "Wherever you want," Joey shrugs. Pacey takes another deep breath and says he'll start by saying that "you, Josephine Potter, have just wrecked me." Joey frowns. "In the best possible way," he barrels ahead, "you have absolutely wrecked me." Joey keeps frowning. Pacey explains that he fell in love with her thinking that they'd never get together, "knowing full well that a sizable chunk of [her] heart…[long, trying-not-to-cry pause]…would always be wrapped up…in our friend Dawson." He could have lived with that, "right up until the point that you chose [him]." She turned everything on its head by choosing him, Pacey continues, because then he got everything he wanted, "and from that day forward, I've just been a wreck." Joey, who has peered at Pacey throughout his breathless speech, asks, "Why?" He's waiting for the other shoe to drop, he confesses; he's really close to tears as he says that she'll eventually realize what a big mistake she's made, and that he'll wind up "a big disappointment." Joey can't believe what she's hearing. Pacey thinks she'll realize that "Dawson is the guy [she wants] to be with." Joey asks what Dawson has to do with his "screwing up at school." "Well, nothing and everything," Pacey sighs. He sits beside her and says that Dawson would never have screwed up like he has; it just wouldn't have happened. Joey concedes the truth in that statement, but asks if Pacey knows what else Dawson would never do. Pacey waits. "He would never inspire me to run away with him for the summer," Joey says matter-of-factly. Aw, that's sort of sweet. And, word. Run away from him, maybe. Pacey has to smile. Joey goes on that it wouldn't happen, and Pacey knows that. They had a magic summer, she says, and they shared something she'll remember for the rest of her life, and it's not about Dawson: "I mean, don't you see? We're creating our own history here, a history that has nothing to do with Dawson." "That's a nice way of lookin' at it," Pacey says, but it's clear he doesn't buy it. "Yeah," Joey says encouragingly. Pacey sighs, and Joey says that "this is where it gets rough," that they spent three months on the sea but "didn't even come close to weathering the storm," like, can we please dispense with the oceangoing language? Please? Because we get it. Unfertilized eggs get it, okay? Joey says that they ran away and created their own reality, but…"but it couldn't last forever," Pacey finishes. Joey tells Pacey that "a relationship isn't about a three-month cruise," and that "it'll be the details that define us." Oh, thank you, Deepak No-Bra, for that insight into relationships. Talk about watching too much Oprah -- since when do seventeen-year-olds talk this way about dating? Anyway, Joey goes on in this vein for a moment, and then Pacey breathes, "Okay. Joey…I am…really scared, um," and he stares into his lap, "I think that I screwed up, and I'm gonna flunk out of high school." Biting his lip, he heaves yet another sigh: "So I need your help." He sniffles. "Really badly." "That's all you needed to say, Pace," she says, drawing her to him, and he sniffles some more and says that's easy for her to say, and she strokes his face and says that whatever it takes, "we'll fix it," and everything will be okay, and she's not going anywhere without him, and they start kissing all Catharine and Heathcliff as a testicle wails the words "inside of meeeee" over and over again in the background.
Pacey asks how come Joey's "so much smarter than" he, and she says she's not: "You just happen to be a little emotionally retarded." She grins. He says that's a load off his mind and grabs her hand and suggests that they "go make out some more," and she snorts, "Sounds romantic," and her boobs waggle around in her unsupportive tank top, like, underwire -- look into i