The Dawson's Creek Episode Guide: None of the Above

I will give the third episode of the Eve Era credit: It’s got a nice cold open. Any time this show kicks off in a place that isn’t Dawson’s bedroom (as it did last week and the week before), it just feels wrong and incongruous. So I was relieved when I pressed play and faded into the familiar confines of the Leery house. Dawson and Eve are hanging out watching Felicity, the show that aired right after Dawson’s in its first season (it moved to Sundays and then back to Wednesdays in its tumultuous sophomore year). Eve prefers TV to movies because “A TV show is just a movie but shorter,” which isn’t even really all that true anymore. Dawson does some meta riffing about teen angst shows (“She’s kind of chatty,” he says about Felicity), laments the lack of resolutions in weekly TV shows, and ends on a riff about how TV always has to cut away when it gets to “the good parts.” At that moment, Eve flops herself on Dawson’s bed and we hit the credits. Clever enough!

And then the wheels kind of fall off.

This is an extremely weird episode of Dawson’s Creek that largely revolves around Eve somehow getting ahold of a copy of the PSAT. She hands it off to Dawson, who promptly loses it, creating a sea of mistrust surrounding his friends and co-conspirators. That’s a perfectly reasonable (albeit elevated) plot for a teen show, and I’m not even mad at the way it is executed. But the big problem is the story ends up underlining (and highlighting and bolding and italicizing) the fact that this show suddenly has no idea who most of the characters are. Dawson gives a speech about the system being rigged like he’s Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. Andie continues to be really mean to Pacey, this week giving him back a box of stuff he gave her (including a mix CD and a stuffed Dumbo). This sends Pacey spiraling, so he gets drunk and tries to talk to Joey and then gets into a fist fight with Dawson. Jen is suddenly very into the idea of Jack playing football; meanwhile he gets a concussion that is played for comedy. Only steadfast Joey Potter acts like a person we’ve met before this hour, and even she has one weird interlude where she just kind of ducks out of a scene and takes a nap.

Look, I don’t have a ton to say about this episode. It’s not very good, and there are few signs of improvement. These episodes are so much worse than I remember them, and I feel like I have the exact same experience every time I rewatch this section of the show. I want to be the contrarian who is like “Actually the Eve stuff is really strong” but it simply isn’t. There are two things about this episode I’m really hung up on, though. First: Why is Eve still so hot to trot for Dawson? She is so horny for the guy, and it remains unbearably perplexing. We know so little about Eve, and not to spoil anything but we really don’t learn all that much more about her going forward. (If I’m remembering correctly, she just kind of leaves and nobody ever mentions her again.) Did she have some ulterior motives? Where does she go when she’s not with Dawson? Does she still work at that strip club? The more I think about it the more I repeatedly wish she had been treated like Tyler Durden and was imaginary, though I’m not sure how you would have ultimately resolved that story (you can’t have Dawson shoot himself in the jaw after laying waste to several skyscrapers, but on the other hand maybe Dawson just forgets she existed and moves on with his life, with only his closest confidantes aware of his brief but formidable psychotic break).

The other thing I can’t get over is this: Why does anybody in this episode take the PSAT seriously? I know you could win a scholarship, but at least when I was growing up that seemed like a deeply non-serious test. In fact, I was a part of a gifted and talented program (hold your applause) and took the PSAT when I was in like the sixth grade. And I think I did pretty well? Anyway, that’s truly my only association with the PSAT, which I probably took again when I was a sophomore but your guess is as good as mine. I haven’t been in high school in a while but from what I understand nobody really takes the SAT all that seriously anymore, which is a mild bummer to someone who was always proud of his score on that.

ANYWAY, there’s a weird standoff among all the friends, Dawson turns his back on Eve, and the test remains missing. Pacey and Dawson make up, and we assume the mystery of the missing envelope will remain unresolved, except the final shot is the reveal that Andie is the one who lifted the test and is now actively cheating on the PSAT. Who are you, lady?

Also:

-This episode aired October 13, 1999, and was written by Bonnie Sikowitz and Hadley Davis, a team that later did a lot of work for Spin City. It’s an inauspicious debut for them, though they would return for a much better episode later in the season.

-The week this episode aired the number one movie in the country was Fight Club, which I assume Dawson would have seen right away (I think he ends up with a Fincher poster of some sort in his room later on). Also opening that weekend was the bombing The Story of Us, a romantic drama starring Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer that is more good than bad. Rounding out the top five that week were Double Jeopardy, Three Kings and the Best Picture winner American Beauty. What a time to go to the cinema!

-The albums released the week of this episode include Mos Def’s classic debut Black on Both Sides, 311’s inexplicably gigantic Soundsystem (that’s the one with “Come Original” on it, and it went Gold), and a Yanni box set called The Private Years that I assume is just raw audio of him having sex with Linda Evans.

-There are big problems with a lot of the characterizations on this show at the moment, but there are little ones too. When Dawson and Pacey are forgiving each other at the end of the episode, Dawson notes that if they’re going to fight it should be “over a chick.” It sounds so unnatural and dire; I don’t think that character nor that actor has ever actually referred to a woman as a “chick.”

-When I’m not that interested in the drama I get distracted by set dressing, which I have to say is on point in this episode: Pacey has a Tom Green poster hanging up in his room (obviously Pacey would have enjoyed “The Bum Bum Song” which had become a TRL phenomenon earlier that summer) and Dawson has a bumper sticker in his locker plugging the band Gigolo Aunts, who never had a mainstream moment but were from Boston (as someone who was also living in New England at the time I can testify to their local hero status). If you know one Gigolo Aunts song, it’s probably “Where I Find My Heaven” which was on the soundtrack to Dumb & Dumber.

-Speaking of music, the songs that originally appeared in the broadcast version of this episode included Nine Days’ minor hit “Absolutely (Story of a Girl),” Train’s “Swaying,” and “From My Head to My Heart” by Evan and Jaron, a pair of twin power-poppers who I often confused with Swirl 360 who were also twin power-poppers. It’s really weird that there were two sets of twins playing very similar music at the same time, right?

-The episode of Felicity that would have aired that week was during the fallout of the title character’s haircut. You cannot fathom what a big deal that pixie cut was in 1999.

-We saw him in the last episode, but this week marks the official introduction of Henry Parker (Michael Pitt), a freshman football player who wants to woo Jen (which he hopes he can do by helping out Jack).

-Also Jack totally gets a concussion in this episode and it’s played for comedy, which you probably don’t get away with in 2025. (Actually, the James Van Der Beek vehicle Varsity Blues also plays concussions for comedy, so maybe that was the height of humor in ’99.)

-Next week: Eve vanishes again, though the show remains middling save for one beat that absolutely destroys me. Should be fun!