The Dawson's Creek Episode Guide: Rest in Peace
With the end of season two in sight, let’s take a look at the state of Jen Lindley. When she first arrived in Capeside back in the pilot, she was the outsider who instantly provided an object of affection for Dawson and a rival for Joey. In those early days, the show seemed interested in fleshing out Jen’s three-dimensional life: her sordid history on the streets of New York, her fraught relationship with her grandmother, her quest to use her exile in Capeside to reinvent herself, her complicated relationship with Dawson. But once the narrative zeroed in squarely on the ever-expanding dynamic between Dawson and Joey, Jen was left flapping in the wind. Since the end of the first season, she’s mostly been drifting between b-plots wherein she only occasionally brushes up against the rest of the core cast. Some of her biggest narrative moments—the death of her grandfather, the thawing of her relationship with Grams, her multi-episode relationship with Bible-thumping Tye—seem to exist in a vacuum, isolated from the rest of the show. It has made for some maddening inconsistency: Sometimes it seems like the core Capeside crew of Dawson, Joey and Pacey are not friends with Jen at all, and sometimes it seems like she’s still a centerpiece of their social lives.
This is all a shame, because obviously Michelle Williams is a tremendous talent, and her ability to grab ahold of characters was evident even in this early stage of her career. While “Rest in Peace” doesn’t do much for the character of Jen, it at least gives Williams the opportunity to flex a bit. Jen spends the whole episode spiraling following the death of frenemy Abby Morgan, who got drunk and fell off a dock during last week’s wedding episode. She is obviously missing her friend (last week she noted that the only happy times she could remember in Capeside were alongside Abby), but she’s also carrying a burden of guilt (she blames herself for Abby’s death, as she’s the one who got Abby drunk), dealing with a sort of morbid celebrity (she was one of Abby’s only friends and was with her when she died) and also horrified by the general hypocrisy of her peers. Nobody wants to necessarily speak ill of the dead, but Jen would rather Abby be remembered exactly as she was: As a conniving, manipulative bitch. In a great early scene, a grief counselor asks some students to share their feelings about “Abigail,” and not only is Jen annoyed that the counselor can’t get Abby’s name right, but she also can’t stand Andie spouting off the usual claptrap about the late girl’s spirit. She’s so angry at Andie, a girl I don’t think she’s ever really talked to over the course of a full season on the same show together, that she accuses her of being the reason why Abby is dead (it was Andie who threw them out of the wedding and sent them to the docks in the first place, after all).
Jen can’t be consoled, so she drinks a bunch and picks a series of fights with Grams, who insists that God has a plan for everyone, including Abby. Her rage—at her grandmother, at her late friend, at the world—erupts at Abby’s memorial service, where she takes the podium to lay out her nihilistic world view and celebrate the darkness that Abby brought into so many lives. “In Sunday school, they say God made man in his image,” she says. “But if God made Abby in his image then what does that say about God?” That’s a slightly clunky sentiment that Williams sells extremely well, and the growing discomfort in the church—particularly from a mortified Grams—is palpable and seems to fuel Williams all the way through her angry-grieving monologue. It’s a wonderful showcase for the actress, who had been largely done dirty by Dawson’s Creek’s producers up to this point.
Once Jen exits in a huff, it’s Andie who gets up to save the day (again). Earlier in the episode, she and Pacey encountered Abby’s mother in a coffee shop, and Abby’s mom mentions that her late daughter spoke very highly of Andie, and would she like to give a eulogy at the funeral? Andie is confounded: Abby spent a lot of time tormenting Andie, and she can’t imagine a reality wherein Abby spoke highly of anybody, let alone her. But she feels obligated to do this favor for the grieving mother and spends the rest of the episode trying to clean up Abby’s reputation, going as far as stealing her diary so nobody can ever read all the horrible things she wrote about everybody (including her own mother). Ultimately, she couches Abby as someone who challenged her and provided a galvanizing presence. “I’m a stronger woman because of her,” she says of the deceased, which feels like a really heavily distorted view of feminism, but whatever.
Meanwhile, Dawson and Joey are processing Abby’s death in an entirely different but definitively teenage way: They can only think of themselves. Dawson pores over footage of Abby from the set of Creek Daze (a film in which she played the Jen avatar) and vows not to leave any regrets behind lest his life end suddenly. Joey gets lost in thoughts of her mother, whose funeral was the last she attended and whose memory doesn’t get discussed very often around the Potter household. She hasn’t even been to visit her mother’s grave in the three years she’s been gone, a lapse she rectifies by the end of the episode (a beautiful scene originally scored by Sophie B. Hawkins’ achingly simple “Lose Your Way”). Despite the tumult of the last few days of TV time, Dawson and Joey actually seem to be in a pretty good place: They’re skittish to talk about their kiss and declaration of love for each other at the wedding but have a very honest and adult conversation about it at the end of the episode. They admit to one another that they feel a little bit weird that they’re slightly relieved that Abby is dead, as she was often cruel to both of them and their dreams (even in his slightly nostalgic reverie, Dawson still runs across footage of Abby blowing a take to point out her co-star has food in her teeth). Joey admits early on that the reason she hasn’t been to her mother’s tombstone is because she still holds out false hope that she might return one day, and Dawson—in a very evolved bit of advice—points out that’s a child’s false hope and she’s going to have to grow up eventually. And then Joey takes Dawson’s advice, taking his hand for the walk to see her mother. That whole exchange suggests both these characters have evolved since their first romantic entanglement, and maybe—just maybe—they will both be better for each other this time around.
Of course, not everything in Capeside can be copacetic. After her meltdown at the funeral, Jen returns home to find her bags packed and her stuff stacked on the front porch. Grams has had enough, and she accuses Jen of deliberately trying to wound her at the funeral—not only because of all the blasphemy, but also because her unhinged behavior reflected so badly on Grams. So she’s done, and Jen is now out on the street. But even though she’s left weeping on the front porch, she’s still in a better place than poor Andie, who goes back to Andie’s house to retrieve her acrid diary and sees a vision of Abby in a mirror like a damn horror movie. In addition to all her mental health issues, will Andie also now be straight-up haunted? Only next week will tell!
Also:
-This episode was originally titled “Abby Morgan, Rest in Peace” but was changed to simple “Rest in Peace” so as not to spoil people watching on DVD or following along on streaming.
-Mike White gets writing credit—his final one for the show. He left to join the staff of the short-lived (but much beloved) Freaks & Geeks, which premiered in the Fall of ’99.
-“Abby Morgan, Rest in Peace” aired on May 5, 1999. I was hurtling toward the end of my junior year of high school, and I remember this episode very vividly because I had just purchased the Ben Folds Five album The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, which had just been released the week before. Instantly my favorite song from that record was “Magic,” and I was excited to hear it show up in this episode (it originally played at the beginning of the funeral sequence and is of course replaced by some bullshit on DVD and streaming). Reinhold Messner is one of the strangest bits of fallout of the alternative revolution in the mid ‘90s, and I wrote a bunch about it a few years back when it turned 15. It remains one of my favorite curiosities from that era (and “Magic” still slaps).
-Pacey doesn’t have a whole lot to do in this episode. He mostly tries to talk Andie out of giving the eulogy and providing moral support when she doubles down (she remembers all the lovely things people said to her when her brother Tim died and wants to give Abby’s mom a memory like that). He’ll have his work cut out for him over the next few episodes.
-Meanwhile, Dawson’s mom tells him she won an award for the piece she did on Joey, Jen, Andie and Abby back in “Uncharted Waters” and that she’s been offered a big job in Philadelphia (but wouldn’t move Dawson out of Capeside in order to maintain continuity in school). It’s absurd that anybody would like the report she put together, which must have added up to nothing at all, but plot machinations are what they are and we now have Gail’s impending exit to further drive a wedge between her and Mitch.
-The cold open finds Dawson and Joey returning to his room following the wedding, and at least this time around I thought the implication was they were climbing in the window in order to have sex (their potential coupling is derailed by Jen, who is waiting for them in Dawson’s room to tell them the news about Abby). It feels extremely out of character for the two of them to bone at this point, but it is a convincing demonstration of just how hallucinatory teenage love can be.
-As mentioned, the music cues in this episode are particularly nightmarish. In addition to the Sophie B. Hawkins tune and the Ben Folds Five song, “Rest in Peace” originally featured a great little romantic shamble from Paul Westerberg that scored Jen’s drinking and crying at the dock (it’s replaced by a U2-soundalike that sucks) and a jaunty digi-punk jam called “Life’s a Bitch” by Shooter that appeared on the original Songs from Dawson’s Creek soundtrack (which arrived in stores the same day as Reinhold Messner).
-Next time: Date night goes awry and Andie sees dead people as we hurtle toward the end of the second season. There is so much plot in these last few episodes, and I can’t wait to dig in.