Date of airing: February 17, 1998 (WB)
Nielsen ratings information: 8.04 million viewers, 5.2/8 in Households
This was easily the best episode of the series so far, which isn’t hard to do, considering it’s only the fifth episode, and the show was still in the middle of finding its footing. But the level of emotional drama and character work done in this hour was almost fascinatingly beautiful. I worried about the Leery adults in the house, I worried about whether Dawson and Joey will ever find their way back on the road of increasing adulthood together (they will need each other just to survive the teenage experience), and I worried that Dawson and Jen were about to become history as a romantic couple, right before they even started to get serious with their relationship (okay, they have been talking about sex, so it’s serious already). And besides all that, I loved that Jen and Joey were developing a friendship repertoire between each other, having a talk for once that did not necessarily have to be all about their boy troubles.
In the previous episode, one was asking for advice about the boy in the other one’s life, and even if they were pretty much just talking about Dawson’s, uhm... size, it showed that the two girls can manage to be with each other without seeing each other as competition or enemies. They still might do so in upcoming episodes when this is turning into a love triangle, but they are white suburban girls in the Northeastern part of the United States, and they happened to be intellectually gifted, so hating on each other over a boy they like is not their style and would be a waste of their precious time. Honestly, it makes for a more interesting story seeing Joey and Jen become best friends, while also dealing with their hearts and minds for Dawson.
The biggest draw of this episode was the clash between Gail and Mitch, and how their marriage was either about to become more complex and hardened due to her infidelity or if it turned into the unexpected finale of their bond, meaning Dawson is about to go through some of the seriousness of being a teenager, experiencing the separation and divorce of his parents, as some of us can attest is quite the crappy experience to go through as a teen. Besides sex and the first love and school life, separation of your parents is a major part of one’s teenage life, if you happen to go through it. I did, and it informed and defined me (it might have even been a reason for my anxiety today, but that’s a topic for another blog or a whole therapy session), so I’m kind of expecting the same for Dawson here.
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| Here we have just another trigger-happy police officer in America. |
And there is a kicker to the story I would have wished I realized when DAWSON’S CREEK first aired on German television: I didn’t watch it immediately (instead, I waited a few years before I discovered the show, after it changed networks on German television), but what would I have felt if I went through the divorce of my parents, while also watching a scripted television show at the same time, in which the titular character goes through the divorce of their parents? Had I felt different because I wasn’t going through this drama all by myself, even if I knew the only other person sharing my experience is a fictional character? There was no other TV show I watched back then that had the same story I went through as a kid, and when I finally discovered DAWSON’S CREEK, it was already too late.
The truth-telling during the storm was fascinating to watch. I was impressed at first that Gail still found the words to the truth after digressing away from it, and I was impressed that she went full into the truth at the end, when Mitch asked for the reason for her actions. Especially the latter scene was wonderfully written and acted, which can only mean someone in the writers’ room, maybe Kevin Williamson himself, went through the same issue in his teenage years (he might have just written Doug’s story though, which I find more plausible). Besides the emotional value of the scene, it was also an important one for the show in general: DAWSON’S CREEK just showed that it won’t just be about the teenagers it considers the leads of the series. Every once in a while, the parents get the lead story of the episode, or the big twentysomething brother gets thrown into one of the main characters’ arcs because sometimes it’s important to see why the teenagers are so self-aware of their lives and decision-making. It can’t just be because they live in the Northeast of the US, right?
The image of the hurricane on top of the characters’ lives was obviously the biggest metaphor the show could have delivered for this episode, but I liked that it was used as a plot device to bring characters into the same room and have them interact with one another while a huge storm is going through them, both literally and figuratively. In a huge case of convenience, the Witter brothers were stuck with Ms. Jacobs during the storm, only furthering Pacey’s story while also potentially starting a new one, as Pacey may have found competition to Ms. Jacobs’s heart in the form of his probably closeted older brother. And in another huge case of “not enough time in this episode,” the Leery house almost exclusively focused on the rising tension and the fallout of Gail’s infidelity, even if I would have loved to see more of Jen’s grandma dealing with the sight of a mother and father-to-be not being married, or the baby being of mixed race. It almost looks to me like the writers wanted to bring some racism into the narrative, but without having it be this brutally racist, let alone having Grams look like a 2020s Republican in disguise. In her case, it all comes down to her beliefs, which is an interesting point to raise here and then a conflict to take on against Jen, the atheist teenager with an unhealthy sex life back in New York (by the way, this episode had the first mention of drugs, albeit drugs being replaced with alcohol). One might wonder if Grams grows a little softer with Jen’s life choices, if Jen acquires a little bit of belief throughout the series, or if the two will always butt heads with one another.
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| Post-drama drama. |
By the way, can I say that I found Pacey’s behavior in this episode utterly absurd? He openly flirts with Ms. Jacobs and almost heckles her to get her to make out with him, even with his brother in eyesight. She is continuously telling him that their relationship can’t continue (she even used the phrase “sloppy”), but in the end, they still land in bed and just don’t care about how risky their relationship is. It’s only one of the examples of why some of the characters are so damn stupid. Pacey is for not realizing that his sex life with his English teacher is about to crash and burn. Dawson is stupid for being so awfully selfish. Gail is stupid for having the audacity to give Bob kisses on the phone while in her own home, with her son, her husband, and a bunch of visitors walking around. And Grams is stupid for being a racist for a hot minute, not accepting the life that is happening around her
