The Dawson's Creek Episode Guide: Homecoming
Last week’s season premiere was uneven and strange, but it’s possible Dawson’s Creek just had a case of the yips thanks to its new showrunner and some complicated emotional cliffhangers. Maybe the ship would stop capsizing in the second episode now that the cobwebs were shaken off a bit?
No, we are still sinking. “Homecoming” is a bad episode of television, perhaps the worst hour Dawson’s Creek has put forth thus far. But even in the midst of this nightmare, there are still two really stellar scenes that stick. There are a lot of shows that have completely disposable entries (I have friends who tell me entire seasons of Grey’s Anatomy could be dragged to trash) but we have yet to hit an episode of this show that calls for throwing out both the baby and the bathwater.
Ironically, the two scenes in question in this script written by Greg Berlanti (who would take over as showrunner pretty soon) are at opposite ends of the narrative spectrum. One resolves a character and puts a bow on a story line, while the other makes the stoutest bet yet on an arc that will pay out like gangbusters down the line. The former is a really nice scene between Jack and his dad, who returns in this episode because he is moving his business (whatever it is) from Providence back to Capeside, which would allow for Jack to leave Grams’ house and come back home. But Mr. McPhee is still wound up about his son’s sexuality, and his pitch to Jack is pretty half-assed. You know from the jump that he doesn’t mean it, and Jack sees right through it. With Grams’ approval, he elects to stay at her house and remain Jen’s roommate.
Later, Jack and Jen commiserate over their shared trauma regarding their respective fathers (as well as Jen’s strange ascent to the captain’s chair of the cheerleading squad, and also somehow their coach?) when Jack catches an errant pigskin thrown by someone on Capeside High’s very bad football team. Mitch, who is now CHS’ head football coach, likes that anybody can catch anything and pitches Jack on joining the squad. Jack is reticent, partially because he’s never shown a single interest in any kind of athletic endeavor and also because he’s gay and isn’t sure how that would play among the rest of the football players. Mitch makes some kind of pitch about it being mutually beneficial, and before we know it Jack is on stage at a pep rally wearing a blue jersey. (Andie, who just returned from a psychiatric treatment center: “So I got sane and everybody else went crazy?”)
For some reason Mr. McPhee attended the pep rally, and now that Jack has done something heterosexual he’s a little more apologetic. He admits to Jack that he thought living with him would be too hard, but somehow seeing him on stage with the football team unlocked a level of understanding in him? It’s dubious logic, but Jack goes for it, though not enough to take his dad up on his offer to move back home. “Ask me again some time,” Jack tells his dad as he walks away. It’s a nice little scene that feels emotionally honest even if it comes across as a little wonky on the page, and Kerr Smith really finds the light in those lines.
The only other good part of this episode is a scene right after that with Pacey and Joey. The title of this episode is drawn from Andie, who is now well enough to leave her mental rehab clinic and reintegrate herself into life in Capeside. Pacey and Joey go to pick her up, engage in some overly wacky shenanigans to get inside the hospital, and encounter a dude named Marc who we instantly know Andie had an affair with while she was there. Pacey wants to give her the benefit of the doubt but can’t help but feel Andie is keeping him at a distance and is actively avoiding being alone with him. They finally lay their cards on the table and Andie admits she had sex with Marc, though they both agreed it was the wrong decision. Still, Andie feels guilty and Pacey is deeply wounded—he spent his whole summer pining for the woman he loved and now feels intractably betrayed. He doesn’t come around, though in a really lovely scene Joey manages to soften him a bit. She tells him it’s OK to feel hurt but he shouldn’t punish Andie forever, because it’s impossible to know what she was going through while she was trying to get better. “We’re going to keep changing our minds and sometimes even our hearts, and the only thing we really have to offer each other is forgiveness,” she tells Pacey. “Don’t let yourself get so angry you stop loving.” It’s an exceptionally simple, poetic speech from Joey masterfully penned by Berlanti and executed deftly by Katie Holmes.
But the rest of this episode should be flushed down a toilet post-haste. Eve reappears, now as a student at Capeside High, and despite her ultra-revealing Y2K outfits I do not like seeing her. She still desperately wants to bone Dawson for reasons that remain muddy at best (she tells him she likes his eyes or his soul or whatever), and that continues to short-circuit him. There’s a plot involving Dawson cutting a highlight reel for the football team, a dire scene of him buying condoms, and a climax involving the members of the pep rally catching half-naked Dawson and Eve about to do it. It’s terrible and jarring, though I do like in the end that Joey (who is clearly devastated when she witnesses Dawson attempting to lose his virginity in public to a woman who barely exists) ends up taking the same advice about forgiveness she doles out to Pacey. At the close of the episode, she tells Dawson she’s not mad at him, and in fact seeing him with Eve reminded her that they’re better off apart at the moment. It will prove brief, but I really do like the emotionally intelligent détente they arrive at in this scene. “Do you think every Joey has a Dawson and every Dawson has a Joey?” he asks her as he puts his pukka shell necklace around her neck. “I hope so, for their sake,” she replies. That’s an all-time great Dawson’s Creek exchange in an otherwise lackluster hour, a flawless diamond in a pile of puke. But let’s not get so angry we stop loving this show.
Also:
-This episode aired October 6, 1999. In addition to new albums by Live, Melissa Etheridge, Inspectah Deck and No Use For a Name, that week also saw the arrival of a new album by frequent Dawson’s Creek contributor Chantal Kreviazuk. She never had much of a run in the United States but is huge in her native Canada, where she is one half of a musical power couple (she’s married to Our Lady Peace frontman Raine Maida). Colour Moving and Still is her best album, an exceptional example of post-Lilith adult alternative. Strangely, it has a song called “Eve” that is not about the character from Dawson’s Creek but does get used in an episode down the line.
-Speaking of music: When it originally aired, this episode closed out with a sweet acoustic cover of “Time After Time” (a bit of a cheat as it would be hard to screw up a song so perfect), but on the streams that song has been replaced by some anonymous nonsense. The version that was in the show was recorded by Tuck & Patti and is worth adding to your rotation.
-The top movie in the country the week this episode aired was the Ashely Judd thriller Double Jeopardy, a deeply dumb but wildly entertaining thriller that was a big time hit. This was its third weekend, and it held newcomers Random Hearts (kind of misguided romantic drama with Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott-Thomas) and Superstar (deeply weird SNL feature vehicle for Molly Shannon’s Mary Katherine Gallagher character) from the top spot.
-Last week Dawson filled his house with strippers while his dad was away, and as far as we can tell received no punishment. This week he almost has sex in front of a pep rally crowd and Mitch just kind of laughs it off? I guess he’s taking the post-breakup good cop/no cop approach to parenting.
-I didn’t mention this last week but they completely re-did the opening credits for the new season, largely so they could add Kerr Smith and Meredith Monroe to the cast. They also updated a lot of the clips, which also works out nice—a lot of the core cast, particularly Holmes, looked insanely young in the old credits and it started to feel divorced from the rest of the show.
-The football footage that Dawson has to cut together is, insanely, all housed on 35mm reels. Apparently Buster Keaton was in charge of recording Capeside High’s football team?
-There’s a banner up at the pep rally, which is full and raucous, that says “I hope we score this year!” I hate that the show is trying to have it both ways. Either make the student body into football or don’t.
-I also don’t understand what is happening with the cheerleaders. They’ve started following Jen around and dressing like her, and the squad has taken on a real “performing during the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ video” vibe. Also, seriously, did Capeside not hire a coach? Why is Jen writing the cheers? Why is Jen doing ANY of this?
-I don’t want to give it more oxygen than it deserves, but the scene where Dawson goes to buy condoms is just the worst thing in the universe. The button on that deeply unfunny affair is an old woman encouraging him to try the “Brown Betty,” which sounds like the name of a dildo but is apparently just a phrase invented for this show.
-When Jen spots Dawson’s bag full of condoms, she gives him advice on cunnilingus. Poor Michelle Williams somehow makes it almost work!
-Andie’s hair is blonde again, I guess suggesting she’s regained her sanity. (Not to spoil anything but this show never figures out what to do with her now that she’s back; she gets shipped off the show in a hastily thrown together story only a few episodes down the line.)
-Dawson is skeptical about most everything about Eve (he even doubts that’s her real name) but by the end of the hour she tells him her last name is Whitman (though it’s unclear if that’s real either).
-Next week there’s more Eve! Shit!