The Dawson's Creek Episode Guide: Escape From Witch Island

After The Blair Witch Project became a surprise theatrical sensation in the summer of 1999, it spawned countless copycats looking to capture its low-fi approach to visceral spook-em-ups. It didn’t necessarily invent the found footage movie, but it definitely galvanized it as its own oft-appropriated subgenre.

Blair Witch picked up buzz at Sundance at the beginning of 1999 and arrived in theaters in July. Considering this episode aired in November of that year, that almost certainly makes Dawson’s Creek the first media outpost to directly react to the Blair Witch phenomenon. “Escape From Witch Island” isn’t presented as a found footage construction. It’s still shot like an episode of Dawson’s Creek. But Dawson spends the bulk of the hour shooting a documentary that somehow ties into a project about The Crucible that finds him exploring an island where accused witches were burned to death.

Here's the other way this episode of Dawson’s Creek ties into the Blair Witch copycats: It’s really bad.

Dawson’s Creek creator Kevin Williamson made his bones in Hollywood with his Scream script, and he carried over that love of horror into his teen angst drama, from Dawson’s first feature Sea Creature From the Deep to the spooky Halloween tie-in episodes that appeared in each of the first two seasons. You can really feel his absence in this episode, which never really picks out a tone and doesn’t make a ton of internal logical sense. (Also this episode aired a good three weeks after Halloween in 1999, which is extra confounding.)

While the scare-em-ups are unfolding on the island, Dawson and Joey play a familiar tune about their relationship and its relative inevitability while Jen and Pacey consider why they never got together romantically. The former is well-trod ground for this show, and both performers (but especially Katie Holmes) do their best to try to make it feel fresh. But that Jen and Pacey bit is one of the more disastrous decisions this show makes during an already questionable run of episodes. Over the next few entries, Jen and Pacey will attempt a casual sex relationship that answers the question why those two characters never got together: because they have no chemistry whatsoever. It’s actually an illustrative example of how chemistry can be illusive: Obviously both Michelle Williams and Joshua Jackson are talented and have had long careers with crackling energy between their respective co-stars, but that spark is completely absent in all of their stuff together. It’s not entertaining, but it is interesting in a kind of morbid way.

Also:

-As mentioned, this episode aired November 17, 1999, so we saw the Halloween episode just before Thanksgiving

-That was a huge week for new music at the dawn of the holiday shopping season: Dr. Dre’s long-awaited The Chronic follow-up 2001 landed that week, alongside Will Smith’s Willennium (that’s the one with “Will 2K” and the best single of ‘99) and Korn’s Issues. That Korn record is pretty bad but they were such a huge cultural juggernaut at the time that Issues sold nearly 600,000 copies in its opening week and kept Dre, Smith, and Celine Dion (she put out a hits compilation that week) from the top spot on the Billboard album chart.

-At the box office that week, you could have bought a ticket to the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough (that’s the one with Denise Richards as Dr. Christmas Jones; it was critically lambasted at the time but is actually a pretty fun entry in the Pierce Brosnan era) or Tim Burton’s adaptation of Sleepy Hollow (with Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, and Christopher Walken as the Headless Horseman).

-Even though we haven’t seen him in there in a while, Dawson apparently still works at the video store, though I believe this is the last time we see it on the show. (Apparently Pacey still works there too, as there’s a shelf of “Pacey’s Pix” behind Dawson.) Joey goes in looking for The Crucible because she didn’t read it (it’s a play, Joey, it won’t take you that long) and I assume she’s looking for the 1996 version with Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder and not the French version from 1957 with a screenplay adapted by Jean-Paul Sartre.

-I didn’t discuss it up top, but during the action on the island the show sometimes cuts back to school to find Andie drunk with power as the head of the new disciplinary committee at Capeside High. It is boring and bad and I’m at the point where I’m looking forward to them dispensing with Andie, a character I have previously enjoyed. Great job, show!

-Next week we get a Thanksgiving episode with the arrival of a long-discussed character. Intrigue!