The Dawson's Creek Episode Guide: Uncharted Waters
I’ve been rough on most of the parents involved in Dawson’s Creek, but I think it has been for good reason. Even though the marriage drama between Mitch and Gail Leery is fully relatable to most of the audience—half of all marriages do end in divorce—but since Dawson was the anchor of the primary teen drama in Capeside, anything happening in his home life undoubtedly felt perfunctory by comparison. For all of his borderline caustic self-analysis, Dawson largely approached his parents’ separation with whiny petulance. How could we, the eager viewing public tuning into the WB on Wednesday nights, care about Mitch and Gail while the far more interesting (and emotionally advanced) stories were happening in the bedrooms of high school kids?
And even when there was a little more meat on that bone, it tended to skew in the direction of Gail, who was the one left in the house and thus more directly interacting with Dawson. Mitch’s whole role was never terribly well-defined as far as his place in the universe goes (I always imagined he was cooking up Kramer-from-Seinfeld-esque schemes to get rich off camera), and with him outside of the Leery house, there’s less and less for him to do. So I approached this episode, one of the rare ones I don’t have tattooed on my memory, with a healthy bit of skepticism. What could a Mitch-centric story really offer at this point?
It turns out there’s a lot! “Uncharted Waters” has two parallel stories, each of which revolve around a Leery parent. At the Leery homestead, Gail recruits a handful of Dawson’s female classmates to participate in a news package she’s working on whose goal is deeply vague. (Is it just about teen girls? Because that’s not a thesis, Gail.) While Joey, Jen, Andie and Abby Morgan figure out their feelings, Dawson and Pacey are accompanying their respective dads on a fishing competition. (Jack also joins them in a story thread that goes nowhere.)
Though he’s been talked about and invoked plenty, this is the first opportunity we’ve had to meet Pacey’s father, Sheriff John Witter. Pacey has always talked about him as a disappointed, overbearing, drunk tyrant, but there was always some suspicion that Pacey might have been exaggerating. But John lives up to his legend, largely thanks to the outsized performance by That Guy John Finn. (It’s telling that I thought he was in this show a lot more than the four episodes he actually appears in—it’s that memorable a character.) Compounding Pacey’s frustration with his dad is John’s affection for Dawson, in whom he sees endless potential and isn’t bashful about crowing about it. It sets up a neat little spider web that finds both Dawson and Pacey trying to connect with their fathers but also with one another through the prisms of those relationships.
The set-up is simple but effective: John gives Pacey menial jobs and gets unreasonably angry with him when things don’t break his way. Then Pacey ends up catching a big ass fish and wins the whole competition, and it briefly seems like this is the big transition moment for Pacey and his dad: Finally, at long last, can there be a mutual respect running between the two of them?
Alas, it’s not to be. I like the fact that Dawson’s Creek leans into John Witter’s darkness, and at the end of the episode he is still an overly competitive alcoholic who ends up passed out on the beach while Pacey tries to bring him home. He makes no progress, which would be anathema on a lesser show, but Dawson’s Creek is more about changing the way individuals interact with and react to the world around them rather than influencing their outside environment. It’s a show that acknowledges there are no easy answers, and most everything that happens in life is way beyond your control. Pacey’s dad still lets him down, but Pacey is figuring out ways to cope with the unfixable fissures in their relationship.
The stakes are a little lower when it comes to Dawson’s revelations about his own father, though it’s no less effective. This is John Wesley Shipp’s best performance so far as Mitch, and he does it with very few lines. Mitch has an interior confidence in himself that few characters on this show possess, and unlike his son he is free from crippling self-analysis. So it's extra-heartbreaking when he and Dawson have their chat about how Mitch is constantly worried that he has let his son down as a role model. “I respect you more than anybody I’ve ever known,” Dawson tells Mitch, and you can tell in that moment that Van Der Beek really means it. It's a nice, sweet moment that is dramatically undercut by Mitch's move to go into the house he no longer lives in. It's a little cheesy, but it drives home the Ballad of Mitch Leery better than any moment has in the past.
The Leery house is no stranger to drama this week, as Gail invites a bunch of teens over to talk about their feelings and their experiences. The story itself is a whole lot of nothing (Gail's producer must have been pissed), but it does allow for another push-pull between Joey and Jen over the romantic fate of young Dawson. Joey pleads with Jen that they drop the competitive nature of their relationship, and Jen admits that there is room in Dawson's life for both of them, which is all hilarious because Dawson is such a dud. Andie and Abby also have a moment where they realize both of their lives are sort of shitty, but it doesn't really mean anything or go anywhere. This episode belonged to the Leery men, and the juxtaposition between the men they could be (the love-averse Witters) and the men they choose to be (heartily themselves).
Also:
-Abby admits she's been waiting all night for a ride home from her mother, and she was so embarrassed she just slept outside Dawson's house. Isn't Capeside a small enough town where everything is sort of walkable?
-Joey's shirt simply reads “High School” which I find funny in its vagueness. That was probably an Abercrombie & Fitch piece?
-I assumed the song playing in the beginning of the episode while Pacey plays darts was a stand-in for something better on the original broadcast, but no! It's something called “Heaved Away” by Mackeel. Also every time there's a song replacement I assume the original was by Eagle Eye Cherry (Dawson's Creek adored Eagle Eye Cherry).
-We are told that Jen is apparently very good at being Dawson's producer on his movie, but there's very little attention given to the making of our hero's second film (save for a few Rachel Leigh Cook scenes).
-The best sequence in the episode is completely pointless but charming nonetheless: The girls eventually get bored with Gail's failed attempt at making news out of their shopping habits, so they go snooping in Dawson's room (soundtracked by B*Witched's “C'est La Vie”). Abby gets shoved in a closet, where she finds a VHS copy of a porn film called Good Will Humping. The girls then decide to watch some of the porn on Dawson's VCR. Is this something teen girls would do together? I've never been a teen girl but I would assume communal porn watching, even in the '90s, would not have been high on anyone's list of group activities (or maybe all my friends were just prudes or liars).
-Joey really has a weird episode: She tells Jen “Stop encroaching on what's mine” which is some really bad writing that did Katie Holmes dirty, but then there's the really sweet scene later wherein Gail tells Joey she thinks of her as a surrogate daughter and is proud of her. Joey is about to slip into a really good mode on the show, just in time for the producers to muck her up again by getting her back together with Dawson.