The Dawson's Creek Episode Guide: Guess Who's Coming To Dinner
Maybe this is recency bias working in reverse, or maybe I’m just in a catty mood, but despite the weakness of the opening of this year on Dawson’s Creek and the series of mild disasters that is season five, it is entirely possible this is the worst episode the show ever did. It brings together a bunch of storylines that absolutely positively do not work, and then takes the one broadly intriguing kernel of plot and just lets it sit there and peter out. This is a deeply frustrating hour of television, and it may represent the bottoming out of the whole show.
The good news is the very next episode is a vast improvement, and the run that came directly after that once the calendar turned over to the year 2000 is some of the best work the Dawson’s team ever did. The bad news is we have to gut out this bummer of a Thanksgiving episode, which is not unlike the experience of trying to survive an unpleasant holiday meal with family you’d rather ignore.
Since apparently nobody in Capeside has any extended family, everybody is hauling their fractured collectives to Grams’ house for a sort of misfit Friendsgiving: Dawson arrives with his still-divorcing parents even though they seem to be getting along (much to Dawson’s childish frustration); Jack and Andie were supposed to have dinner with their father but he got waylaid in Chicago on business; Joey and Bessie are perpetually alone (Bodie’s name hasn’t been mentioned in a good long while); Pacey bemoans the fact that he has to spend Thanksgiving with his parents and then just decides he’s not going to bother and hang with his friends instead. The one surprise entrant in this rumble is the mystery attendee alluded to in the episode’s title: Jen’s much-talked-about but hitherto-invisible mother Helen, played flatly by Mel Harris (best known from TV’s Thirtysomething but forever embedded in my memory as Macaulay Culkin’s mom in The Pagemaster). She shows up unannounced, and Jen is put off by her sudden emergence after a year without any communication.
Helen doesn’t seem to have much of an agenda. Though she later admits to Jen that her marriage to Jen’s dad is cold and loveless, she’s not looking for an out or advice or to bring Jen back to New York with her. Her arrival is of particular interest to Dawson, who asks her directly about Eve and whether or not the two are connected. Helen confirms Eve’s story as true but insists that Dawson keep the information from Jen, who must never know about her mystery older sister. Despite Dawson’s protestations, Helen just kind of shrugs and walks away.
Dawson isn’t just throwing a tantrum about Eve. He also spends most of this episode in a snit over the state of his parents’ relationship. Gail has moved back to Capeside and is living in the guest bedroom in Dawson’s house, and though they are cordial with one another they are still pressing forward on their divorce. Dawson doesn’t understand why they are still breaking up, and if they are still breaking up then why do they seem happy with one another? Gail tries to explain to her dumb son that she and Mitch have too much history and that they’re trying to figure out how to be friends, but Dawson mostly just pouts and stomps about his utter lack of understanding. What a dink.
Meanwhile Pacey and Jen keep trying to consummate their casual sex agreement but end up getting derailed by Thanksgiving-related errands and the appearance of Helen and the utter lack of chemistry between them. They attempt to bone down no less than three times in this episode, but it never manages to get past some light making out (and if my memory serves they never actually have sex, which is pretty funny all things considered). But Pacey is also distracted by Andie, who still carries a torch for him, and both he and Andie have parallel conversations with Jack and Joey about whether or not the other ever talks about them. Even if we didn’t walk around with the knowledge that Pacey and Joey were about to get together and Andie was about to exit stage left, these stories would still feel like so much wheel spinning.
There is one vaguely redeeming moment at the end of the episode that finds the core six teens sitting around a campfire bonding over their various woes and giving thanks for one another (as Helen noted, she has never had the kind of social support structure that Jen has built for herself in Capeside). Character-wise it doesn’t make a ton of sense, but it is nice to see these performers all in one place at one time after having been mostly scattered to the winds for the first part of the season. Luckily for us, their bonds are about to be tested in ways significantly more satisfying than what “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” had on the menu.
Also:
-This episode aired November 24, 1999—the actual day before Thanksgiving.
-Written by Heidi Ferrer, who also wrote last season’s excellent surprise birthday party hour (hooray!) as well as the Paris Hilton vehicle The Hottie and the Nottie (OH GOD KILL IT AHHHH).
-In the original broadcast version of this episode, Alanis Morisette’s “That I Would Be Good” played under the last 10 minutes or so. That’s a really lovely track from her album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, which had come out the previous fall and remains underloved. Shockingly, that song managed to survive the transition to home viewing and is preserved in the streaming versions of the show.
-Other needle drops include Eurythmics’ “17 Again” and Bree Sharp’s “America,” though both of those are replaced with inanities on streaming.
-Speaking of music, that was a big week for bands I loved to drop live albums: Phish’s Hampton Comes Alive (a six-disc box set commemorating a three-night run in Hampton, VA), Dave Matthews Band’s Listener Supported (a set capturing the tail end of their summer of ’99 tour; I saw all three shows they did in Hartford that year), Guns N’ Roses’ Live Era ’87-’93 (a compilation of a bunch of stuff from across their first run, featuring a truly majestic version of “Patience”), and Metallica’s S&M (the first live set they did with the San Francisco Symphony, which is mostly garbage but does feature the otherwise missing Metallica track “No Leaf Clover”). That’s a lot of live albums! I bought Listener Supported and Live Era right away, and then waited for Santa to bring me Hampton Comes Alive. I don’t think I owned a copy of S&M until I bought it used when I was in college.
-Also out that week? Beck’s immortal Midnite Vultures, a delightfully bugged-out ‘70s mutant funk record that nobody liked at the time but is now considered a forgotten masterpiece.
-If you went to the movies after Thanksgiving dinner or during Black Friday that weekend, your top option was the debuting Toy Story 2. For the more indie-minded, that week also saw the limited release of Ang Lee’s Ride With the Devil, a totally ignored bomb that is actually a pretty good little Western and features a topless Jewel.
-By the way, if you did go shopping on Black Friday in 1999, it’s likely you were trying to get yourself a Furby.
-At one point Gail compliments Dawson on his new striped sweater, a piece of clothing I actually owned (I think it was a J. Crew but it might have been from American Eagle; I weirdly still shop at both those stores a quarter century later).
-Pacey spends a lot of this episode getting around town on a bicycle, so I guess he couldn’t borrow a squad car?
-Next time we’ve got ballroom dancing and more of Jen and Pacey not having sex. That doesn’t sound like much of a sell but you have to trust me that it’s good, or at least better than this.