Episode Report Card Miss Alli: C- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Making money hand over fisticuffs
By Miss Alli | Season 6 | Episode 20 | Aired on 04.22.2003
In Joey and Audrey's Better-Than-Rent-Controlled Dorm Room, Joey is lounging on her bed while Eddie paces the room talking about Budapest and the best route to take. He suggests skipping central Europe in favor of more time in Spain, but Joey nixes that idea. She wants to see some castles and visit what's left of Kafka. Eddie tells her that in order to finish the trip before 2005, he may have to limit her to "one writer's grave per country." Heh. She nixes this too, saying it would be impossible to pick between Proust and Flaubert. "Aren't they the same guy?" Eddie teases. Joey flips around until she's half in Eddie's lap and tells him that if he kisses her, she won't tell Flip-Flops that he said that. When did Joey turn into quite this much of a nitwit, anyway? Didn't she used to be earthy? Wasn't that kind of the point? Sigh.
They smooch. Joey says that if they go on this trip, he will need to know something about her. He says he knows she snores. God, don't remind me. Then she says that what she actually wants to discuss is all the art museums she will demand to visit. He acts like museums aren't what he had in mind, which rather shocks me, because if you're going to see Europe on five dollars a day and you don't want to do art museums, you aren't going to really sink into the spirit of the occasion. And why is Eddie wearing a yellow-and-white striped shirt over a cornflower blue t-shirt, anyway? "So what you're saying is that you want to do everything?" he asks her. "Yes!" she says, and then modifies this to "everything within reason." Thus does yet another argument start about Joey's inability to be spontaneous, as Eddie rides her ass till it blisters about how she can't expect to apply logic to something as fundamentally romantic as dashing off to Europe. We also get another chance to see her refer to her history as Joey: The One That Got Away, because she tells Eddie that running away together isn't as easy as it seems. Gee, do you suppose the viewers got it? Maybe they should have had her say, "Especially if you take a boat. With your True Love." That would have clued in at least 26 percent of the target demographic.
At any rate, Eddie talks about how much he wants to spend the summer with her, she talks about how scared she is of the fiscal and practical implications of bumming around without a plan for three months...wow, good times. She tells him that they can't run away from things just by taking a trip. As this conversation progresses, we learn that Joey is in fact uncomfortable with the whole trip, or at least at the scope Eddie has in mind. She wants to scale it back and work for part of the summer before they leave. He gives her the ying-yow about how they're going to spend the rest of their lives working and so forth. "Nobody said we have to go tomorrow," she says angrily. "I do," he says. Oh, of course. It's The Giving Of An Ultimatum. One of Joey's favorite things. Because it forces her to act tortured and then have an epiphany, and God knows she loves her some of that. She knows she's never cuter than when she's having an epiphany. Eddie accuses her of not really wanting to go with him anyway, and she insists that that isn't it. She thinks he's asking her to throw her life into chaos, he insists that she's thinking too hard, and every dynamic of Little Joey Potter's life is repeated yet again. She insists that Eddie is living in a literary fantasy that isn't realistic, and Katie Holmes unleashes a really bad acting moment when she instructs him that people always have to come home and "deal -- with the real -- world." "Who you are, Joey," Eddie tells her, "is not some scared little girl who's afraid to take chances on anything, who's afraid to really love someone because of the risk or the pain. That does not define you as a person." Well, Eddie, I hope that speech didn't define you as an orator, because it sucked the bag. "Or maybe it does," he asks inevitably. "Are you done?" Joey asks sadly but with her constant air of superiority intact, and then she throws him out.
Glass, Steel & Paneling. Pacey strolls into the office to find a morose band of suits sitting around contemplating their life insurance policies. He looks around suspiciously. Cut to Boss Man Rich in his office, telling someone on the phone that it's "like a morgue" at the office. I don't think most morgues have this many guys in suits this tragically hip, but I could be wrong. As Boss Man Rich finishes the call, Pacey walks in. He asks BMR what exactly is going on, and BMR chastises him for being late before allowing that he doesn't even want to hear about what happened between Pacey and Sadia. He then breaks the news to Pacey that Stock-O-Doom was rejected by the FDA, and the stock is apparently worth bubkes. Pacey looks stricken, and tells BMR that he promised Pacey it was a sure thing. Apparently, Stock-O-Doom's flu medication has "nasty side effects" (probably the kind that take five minutes to explain in a pharmaceutical TV ad), so the FDA said no. Pacey terms this development "a disaster," but Rich encourages him to calm down. Pacey is heartsick that he's been pushing Stock-O-Doom on clients for months, and now it's worthless. BMR assures him that this is the way the cookie crumbles -- at least, the cookie you get when you're a giant heartless asshole. BMR tells Pacey not to worry about the many people who are inevitably going to rip on him today. "Professional hazard," he explains. Pacey leaves the meeting, looking ill and unconvinced by BMR's attempts to reassure him that he did nothing wrong. Wistful Pacey thinks of Dawson and becomes miserable. Hey, that's always what happens to me, too.