Date of airing: May 5, 1998 (WB)
Nielsen ratings information: 7.26 million viewers, 4.9/8 in Households
I should be getting a list together of the best television episodes of a certain holiday or general day of specific festivities, because this episode would absolutely make one of the top spots of best Halloween or Friday the 13th episodes. Mostly Halloween, because episodes like this are also good for a random October marathon of scary stuff on screen. This episode could be on such a list, thanks to the notion that it removed itself from the current boyfriend/girlfriend/dating material of the previous ten episodes and delivered a stand-alone hour of fun and shenanigans that doesn’t need you to know what happened previously. You don’t even have to know that Dawson and Jen are freshly broken up because it’s a backstory that is perfectly explained in this hour. You don’t need to know that Dawson and Joey are a couple-to-be, because that isn’t even important for this episode’s narrative. I don’t know whose idea it was to stop the storytelling of DAWSON’S CREEK and just go nuts with fun for an hour, but respect to that person. Although, maybe the network is to be blamed here. Maybe they asked for an additional episode for whatever reason, so the writers needed to come up with something – that tends to happen, which means quick bottle episodes are created. And while I wouldn’t consider this one a “bottle episode,” it’s definitely a prime example of how to pause the ongoing storyline for the sake of simple fun. We will get back to the drama next week, but tonight, we will rave.
Plus, turning this episode into a Friday the 13th special, which is practically a Halloween special, showcases the talents Dawson has for putting on his own little (horror) movie. Tongue-in-cheek references, simple but workable horror pranks, and even an opportunity for DAWSON’S CREEK to go a little meta at times. It was only a question of time until the writers decided to emulate a couple of genres to create an episode around a specific Hollywood premise. With cheap horror movie cliches having been the topic of this hour, does it mean there will be a 1930s golden age musical in the future? Or a black-and-white character study that could also be a chamber play? How about a DIE HARD-type episode?
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| High fives all around for the jokesters and pranksters. |
This episode was great if you haven’t caught my drift yet. It could easily be one of my all-time favorite episodes of the entire series, but to know that for sure, I will have to make my way through the entire thing first. Dawson’s plan to scare his friends seemed solid, and I loved the notion that it was clear from the beginning that Dawson wouldn’t be so dumb and cruel to Jen to play her a SCREAM-level prank, giving you a sense of mystery of who really called and “threatened” Jen this entire time. From the very first moment, it was obvious that Dawson liked jumpscare-type horror (which makes him kind of a lame horror fan, but one who knows that kind of horror enough to create simple pranks out of it), and that means he wasn’t going into a prank for the long run – he wanted enjoyment out if it immediately, and you don’t get that by scaring Jen for real over the course of a couple of hours.
The fact that Cliff even went this far in the first place should prove that he is an immature boy and should never be dated by anyone. If he needed to scare the crap out of the girl he wanted to date, maybe he should be shot into our closest star instead. Good job by Jen to immediately break up with the fool after he revealed that he was the note-sender. It’s time for Jen to live on her own a little bit, without a boy at her side, which is what she was planning to do when she broke up with Dawson anyway. I never understood why she decided to hang out with Cliff when having a boyfriend was the last thing she wanted.
The backstory of the serial killer on the run in Capeside was also pretty well put into the story, although some might ask if it was really necessary to create a moment of true horror as a coda into an episode about horror movie pranks. Who knows, maybe it helped to create a special bond between Dawson and Joey, but that doesn’t even count because of the episode’s disconnected state from the show’s greater narrative. Or maybe it was just “proof” that the world truly has dark horror going for itself, and that prank horror isn’t needed to scare you. But because of the episode’s nature, the reveal of the serial killer seemed like the punchline to a joke. No one is going to bother about the killer’s victims in an episode that has been detached from the greater narrative arc, and no one is going to remember the villain in a story that did not include any of the stories you got used to over the past ten hours.
Ursula was a weird character, however. Written to be a maniac, so she can be everything at once in a “horror” episode: The crazy chick you invited to your house who could end up being the killer, the one random element in your life that could ruin your friendships because she is something of a catalyst of hidden truths and secrets, or simply just the person who was hired to scare the kids. For a moment I thought that Ursula and her boyfriends played their own version of a prank on the kids by playing crazy lunatics, or that she may have been hired help by Dawson for the sake of including something crazier in his little seance among friends. But at the end of the day, she was just a comically horrible person – screaming after every jumpscare before laughing it away like a manic person. Protecting her boyfriend from being clobbered into the oven by Joey after she screamed at him to get the hell away and never talk to her again. This woman was pure Southern US: Not normal, conveniently contradicting herself for the sake of the plot and the characters’ journeys.
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| Crazy horror stories as told by the crazy guest star of the week. |
But she was also a funny character for a couple of seconds when she told the kids her horror story, while the lighting on her face made it seem like she had pitch-black eyes and was about to turn into a witch or demon or something. I saw what the producers were up to during that scene, and I’m kind of stunned what can be done to make things more creepy and suspenseful just by playing with the lighting of the scene, and not doing else because you don’t have a budget to speak of. This episode already felt like a filler or a bottle show (small cast, half of the episode set in the Leery house), so the budget may have already been burned away at this stage of the production, which is why I appreciated the lighting even more. Sometimes you can do a whole lot with just a little.
