The Dawson's Creek Episode Guide: Secrets & Lies
I always think of my high school experience as fairly typical, particularly for when I grew up. But if we had a homecoming court, then I have no memory of it whatsoever. We had a vague homecoming weekend with a football game and a dance, but our football team was always terrible and the dance never felt any different than any other dance. My only knowledge of homecoming queens (and the cutthroat politicking among teen girls to attain that status) was from teen movies and lazy sitcoms. So I have no real context for the main plot in this episode, which finds Jen having to serve as homecoming queen after having been accidentally elected (after having been accidentally made head cheerleader; her character really doesn’t make any sense at this point). She has to meet with some sort of grand homecoming dame to plan a party, which also brings former homecoming queen Gail back to Capeside. The old lady spends a lot of time matchmaking Jen with her handyman/gardener/friend(?) Henry, though Jen is adamant she doesn’t want to date such a moon-eyed child. There’s a climax with some drag queens. The old lady doesn’t like it but then comes around. Jen mostly doesn’t like it but then comes around. I mostly don’t like it and never entirely come around.
Look, this is not the best episode of Dawson’s Creek. It’s also not the worst. It’s just kind of there, and that might actually be by design. The actual timeline is hard to pin down, but this episode appears to be the inflection point between what the show had been under showrunner Alex Gansa and what it was about to become under Greg Berlanti. Changing the course of a TV show is a lot like steering a boat: you have to give yourself a lot of space, and it happens very slowly. But while the devoted watchers of Dawson’s Creek were rejecting the third season on the TV messages boards I was already haunting, the show faced a much more immediate revolt from the cast itself. They knew the scripts had taken a dive in quality and that their characters weren’t acting like themselves, so they staged something of an internal revolt that led to Gansa’s dismissal. Berlanti took over the reins about a third of the way into the season and ultimately righted the ship, but it took some time. The screenwriting credits on this episode belong to both Gansa and Berlanti, and it’s easy to project a figurative and literal handing of the baton in this hour. Not a ton happens that suggests the superior narrative thrusts to come, but again, it’s not the worst way to spend an hour of your life on Earth.
The biggest problem is that A-plot, which is meant to give Michelle Williams a bit more of a spotlight but mostly feels like the show spinning its wheels (particularly considering Jen had been fairly invisible for a big chunk of this season so far). Dawson ends up intertwined with the homecoming plot, as it forces him to spend some time with his returning mom and also leads him to the revelation that she got fired in Philadelphia but is sandbagging the idea of returning to Capeside. I’m slightly more involved in the Joey/Pacey/Andie plot, which finds Andie going on another date with Rob, Pacey finding out about it and getting super mad, Andie calling Joey to save her from a sexual assault, Pacey taking care of her (and possibly banging her?), Andie then kind of implying she made up the whole thing about Rob raping her, Pacey roundly rejecting her and then Andie yelling at Joey because she thinks she manipulated Pacey somehow. I like the way the show is playing around with the interconnectedness of the relationships of all those characters, but I don’t like that Andie continues to act like a goddamn lunatic who should be under heavy sedation. It’s pretty clear the writers ran of out of stuff for her to do, and wouldn’t you know her time as a regular is rapidly coming to a close?
The next few episodes very much feel like transition pieces—you could almost slip them in anywhere on the episode lineup and they would mostly make sense. It makes me wonder if these were evergreen scripts they broke the glass on so as to give Berlanti time to reconfigure, though I have no evidence of this. What I do know for sure is that “Secrets & Lies” is not especially good, and that homecoming queen seems like more of a burden than anything else.
Also:
-I looked up my old yearbook online, and while there is no mention of a queen in the pages about homecoming weekend, there is a note that our homecoming dance was Austin Powers themed, and I have utterly no memory of that. Did I dress up? Did I even go? Mysterious!
-ANYWAY, this episode of Dawson’s Creek aired on November 10, 1999. The day before, I bought Fiona Apple’s excellent sophomore effort When The Pawn… and Prince’s underrated turn of the century workout Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, probably from Circuit City. The week before, which saw no new episode of Dawson’s Creek, was when I bought Foo Fighters’ There Is Nothing Left to Lose, Rage Against the Machine’s The Battle of Los Angeles, Counting Crows’ This Desert Life and Rah Digga’s Dirty Harriet, all from Record Express in West Hartford. Those were all records that were hotly anticipated (at least by me) and it’s worth it to watch Rage Against the Machine’s takeover of TRL that week, which features like ten solid minutes of Tom Morello explaining how he makes weird sounds with his guitar.
-At the movies the week this episode aired, you could have bought a ticket to Pokemon: The First Movie, the underrated high school heist movie Light It Up, a movie called Anywhere But Here with Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman that doesn’t exist, and the deeply strange action epic The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. I went to opening night of Dogma, Kevin Smith’s goofy ode to Catholicism that was pretty controversial at the time (there were about four protesters outside the Showcase Cinemas Buckland Hills when I saw it). Also at some point around this time I saw Princess Mononoke in theaters and became entranced by the gorgeous and strange animation of Hayao Miyazaki.
-The Andie plot is extremely uncomfortable because it never really resolves on whether or not Rob actually assaulted her. The show seems to lean into the idea that she just made the whole thing up (either to get Pacey to come to her aid or just because she’s crazy) but Joey does point out that Rob is never not sexually harassing her at work and seems perfectly capable of rape. Pacey still punches Rob anyway, and Joey gets fired, which leads directly to her opening a bed & breakfast with her sister.
-That all being said, the best scene in the whole episode is when Andie confronts Joey about the whole situation and sort of half-blames Joey for not nipping Rob in the bud and reporting him for harassment. Andie ends that exchange in heartbreaking fashion when she announces she and Pacey are back together and “everything can go back to the way it was.” She gets broken up with two scenes later.
-I am less enthused by Henry’s pleas for affection in the greenhouse after the homecoming event. That relationship does go to some interesting places and has at least one classic moment, but my dude just comes across as sad and desperate there. Jen is right to reject him, no matter what the old homecoming lady says!
-Not much in the way of soundtrack highlights this week, though the original airing included a song from a Christian rock band named Bleach who also had a track on last week’s episode and whose self-titled album came out the week this hour aired and who never really became anything (though the song “Super Good Feeling” is solid and is one of the highlights of their 1998 album Static)
-Next week is a pretty good little supernatural episode that also kicks off an extremely strange running b-plot. Spooky!