The Dawson's Creek Episode Guide: Parental Discretion Advised
I missed me too.
Not to spoil anything, but there are rough waters ahead for the third season of Dawson’s Creek. There will be a notoriously polarizing character introduced early on, and the events of this episode will really derail a lot of narrative thrust until the show rights itself again by getting Joey and Pacey together. The accepted logic about the unevenness of that portion of the show is that they were adjusting to a new showrunner—this episode is the final one at the helm for creator Kevin Williamson, who ducked out to do a show at ABC called Wasteland that was canceled after three episodes. New showrunner Alex Gansa was such a disaster that he was replaced after only a handful of episodes (that’s when Greg Berlanti took over). But there are hints of the overwrought bugnuts nature of the Gansa era baked into Williamson’s season two finale.
Dawson’s Creek is a teen soap, but it has typically functioned best when it remained grounded and character-based. It could go operatic when it needed to (the very nature of the Dawson character basically demands it) but Dawson’s Creek was not a show that did well when it was neck-deep in plot. So rather than rely on the powder keg that is a hormonal teens emotional interior, this episode dives headlong into arson and attempted murder and Joey literally wearing a wire to entrap her own father.
We’ve come to the end of the semester in Capeside, and all our favorite high schoolers are holed up at the under-renovation Icehouse to cram for finals. Everyone is a little distracted: Joey is still adjusting to having her dad suddenly back in her life, Dawson suspects Mr. Potter is dipping back into the world of coastal drug trafficking, Pacey mourns the now-absent Andie, and Jen living with Jack and suddenly suicidal (or at least Jack is worried she might be). Mike Potter’s criminality drives the drama, and he appears to be the world’s worst drug lord: He’s associating with a known dirtbag named Pete who is currently being hunted by Sheriff Witter, and he’s conducting business in the middle of the day in the same place his daughter and her friends are doing homework. Maybe he thought they were operate as good cover or a clever diversion, but that plan blows up in his face when someone throws a Molotov cocktail into the building and burns the damn place down. Mike himself nearly dies of smoke inhalation while he tries to flush a gigantic supply of drugs down a toilet, but Dawson, in maybe his most heroic moment, goes back into the blazing restaurant to save him.
Joey is in mild denial over the incident, though she does suspect that something might be up. Her dad denies any knowledge of why anybody would torch their under-construction fish house, and while Joey chooses to believe him Dawson struggles with what the fact that he saw Mr. Potter slinging that Susan Sarandon. He goes to his parents for advice, and his parents tell him he has to go to the cops to dime out his soulmate’s dad.
On the one hand, that is in fact the moral choice to make, but it is truly wild how unambiguous Mitch and Gail are in their advice to their only son. Dawson tries to soft pedal the idea of Mike turning himself in so he can make some kind of deal, but Joey does not want to send her dad back to the slammer. She tells Dawson “We won’t survive this,” which is understandable from an emotional standpoint but is logically insane (it’s not like Dawson somehow got her dad back involved in the drug trade, he just saw something he wasn’t supposed to see).
There are some other factors at play (according to Sheriff Witter, the fire was set by Mike’s competitors and they are close to flipping on him if he doesn’t flip on them), so Joey ends up confronting her dad about the drugs and the fire. He breaks down immediately and confesses everything, admitting that his only real motivation was money. She lifts her shirt up to show that she’s mic’d up, and he looks almost relieved as he submits himself to the law enforcement gathered outside his house. As the cops take her dad away, Joey tells Dawson, “There are certain circumstances that love can’t overcome, and from now on I don’t want to know you.” She walks away leaving Dawson by himself in her yard, and that is how this season of TV closes.
It’s not like the show has never gone over the top, but this is one of those scenarios where everything is probably too heightened. In college I took a playwriting class, and the entire semester was devoted to crafting one perfect one-act play. Mine was thirty pages of a guy sitting with a girl in a bar trying to tell her he likes her (shocking, I know), but some of the other entries in my class were overloaded with wild plot turns. I distinctly remember my teacher telling one of those writers, “Look, it’s fine that you’re doing these things, but you have to understand that every character in your piece is crazy.” That’s how I feel about this episode. It’s not that all sense of character was abandoned, but if the twist at the very end was both Dawson and Joey had been swapped out for pod versions of themselves, I would have believed you.
Same goes for Jen, who after contemplating an escape from Capeside is now living with Jack, remains alienated from Grams, and is apparently contemplating taking her own life. She writes an essay about teen suicide that spooks Jack (though we don’t get to hear much about it, honestly) and when the fire breaks out at the Icehouse she just kind of freezes until Jack hustles her out the door. Maybe she was just terrified, or maybe it was something more. “I don’t want to die but I just didn’t care enough to run,” she tells Jack. All of that is fine, but it really could have used a little more runway. It’s almost like there were scenes missing, because we kind of pick up Jen already in crisis. Does it make sense she would feel that kind of darkness and desperation considering what she’s been through since Abby’s death? Yes, absolutely. I was just looking for more, particularly if we’re going to be invoking suicide.
Pacey is the only one who goes through a natural arc, and even that is a little more inflated than it probably should be. He’s so sad without Andie that he’s not writing anything a single word on any of his finals. He needs support, but his friends are distracted and his dad can only browbeat him, and then punches are exchanged. But they have a nice little moment near the end of the hour when Pacey’s dad tells Pacey he deserved to get his, and that Andie called the house and they talked for a while and now he gets it. “She said you were her hero,” he tells Pacey. “That was nice to hear.” He tells Pacey he somehow got his teachers to give him another shot on the finals he biffed and apologizes for not being more attentive. Pacey collapses weeping in his arms, distraught over the Andie-shaped hole in his soul.
The whole thing is a bit sloppy, and even at the time all my friends agreed that it was an unsatisfying button on what was otherwise a pretty good season of TV. There are choppy waters ahead, but after going through this finale again that dip in quality should not have been as jarring as it was when it was playing out the first time.
Also:
This episode aired May 26, 1999, a week after the release of The Phantom Menace. That was one of two times in my life where I had to attempt to see a movie multiple times before I finally got in. That thing was ultra-mega-sold-out. (The other time was the first Spider-Man in 2002. I didn’t see that bad boy for weeks.)
In the three years that elapsed since I last did one of these, I launched a podcast on SiriusXM that recapped every single episode. I think you can still listen to a bunch of it on the app, but it’s also possible that stuff was dragged to trash when they let me go. More importantly, I also got ahold of the original broadcast versions of the entire series, so my recaps will reflect those versions rather than the ones that are streaming or on DVD.
The most important difference between the originals and the digital versions available now is the music is entirely intact, and this episode had a bunch of top shelf needle drops: Alanis Morissette’s “That I Would Be Good,” Hole’s “Hit So Hard,” Oleander’s “Why I’m Here,” and Sozzi’s “Letting Go,” the latter of which made it onto the album Songs From Dawson’s Creek that actually hit stores a month before this episode aired.
In the cold open, Dawson and Joey watch The Age of Innocence, a 1993 Martin Scorsese costume drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer and based on the Edith Wharton novel. Dawson declares it “torturous” but Joey is taken in by the notion that even though the characters are doomed they still love each other.
Grams spends the first part of the episode just showing up places asking for Jen to come back home, and later Jack points out their current living situation is temporary because his dad is going to sell that house. Is Jack living with Jen and Grams by the time the third season dawns or does that play out in front of us? I guess we’ll have to watch to find out.
Next time (hopefully sooner than three years from now), we get to meet Eve and the show gets very strange indeed.