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.

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.

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.

One of the first things we learn in the pilot of Dawson’s Creek is that Dawson and Pacey are longtime best friends. But in the dozens of episodes that were subsequently rolled out, we saw very little evidence of that relationship in action.

This episode makes me angry, though not for the reasons you might think.

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.

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.

I’m not entirely sure when everyone became hyper-aware of the term “showrunner,” but it was well after Dawson’s Creek shuffled off the airwaves. In the late ‘90s, TV was not yet considered an auteur’s medium. People knew that shows had groups of writers all working to one goal, but the idea of a singular voice dictating the direction of a whole series wasn’t an accepted concept.

I missed me too.

Let’s talk about professional wrestling for a minute.

The thing that strikes me most about this episode, which moves a lot of chess pieces in place for our second season finale of Dawson’s Creek, is the jarring tone juggling it manages to pull off. There are essentially two A-plots: On one side of town at a romantic French restaurant, a sextet engages in some high-concept sitcom-level shenanigans; at the same time, a deeply intense kitchen sink drama unfolds. It’s not always smooth, but I admire the balancing act.

Let’s begin with the goofball stuff first.

With the end of season two in sight, let’s take a look at the state of Jen Lindley. When she first arrived in Capeside back in the pilot, she was the outsider who instantly provided an object of affection for Dawson and a rival for Joey. In those early days, the show seemed interested in fleshing out Jen’s three-dimensional life: her sordid history on the streets of New York, her fraught relationship with her grandmother, her quest to use her exile in Capeside to reinvent herself, her complicated relationship with Dawson. But once the narrative zeroed in squarely on the ever-expanding dynamic between Dawson and Joey, Jen was left flapping in the wind. Since the end of the first season, she’s mostly been drifting between b-plots wherein she only occasionally brushes up against the rest of the core cast. Some of her biggest narrative moments—the death of her grandfather, the thawing of her relationship with Grams, her multi-episode relationship with Bible-thumping Tye—seem to exist in a vacuum, isolated from the rest of the show. It has made for some maddening inconsistency: Sometimes it seems like the core Capeside crew of Dawson, Joey and Pacey are not friends with Jen at all, and sometimes it seems like she’s still a centerpiece of their social lives.

This is all a shame, because obviously Michelle Williams is a tremendous talent, and her ability to grab ahold of characters was evident even in this early stage of her career.

Parenting is psychologically impossible, particularly for a mental weakling like myself. I constantly worry about what my son is thinking, and how he’s perceiving me and the rest of the world around him, and whether or not he’s going to grow up to be a well-adjusted human being. But there are internal struggles as well: For example, I am constantly trying to square the idea that the little guy is constantly growing and evolving. It’s been a joy watching him learn and grow, but it’s also devastating. Every time I think I have a handle on who this kid is, that version of him exits and is replaced by the updated version. Every day is a desperate attempt to hang onto something solid, but he slips through my fingers like so much beach sand. Everybody touts the inherent joy of raising a child, but nobody told me there would be so much coping on a daily basis.

I am depressed. That’s not a wild confession or revelation or anything; I’ve been depressed for long stretches of my adult life. When I’ve been in therapy, I usually trace its original manifestation back to my sophomore year in college, which was a tumultuous and disconcerting time in my life. But in watching this week’s episode of Dawson’s Creek, I so instantly identified with Dawson’s particular version of teenage ennui that I’m starting to wonder if perhaps my anxiety and hopelessness first began to creep in while I was still in high school. I know I have been rough on Dawson during this re-watch and have also wondered how I ever related to him the first time around, but his loneliness, ennui, and general malaise in this episode were all directly talking to me across the decades.

For a panoply of reasons, I never drank in high school. Part of it was because I was too afraid of breaking the rules, but part of it also felt like it was logistically difficult—my friends who partied always seemed to be figuring out exactly how to acquire alcohol and then map out specific opportunities to drink said booze. They always seemed like they were driving six towns over to get somebody’s distant cousin to make a run to the liquor store for them, and then had to figure out what place in the woods offered the best cover for their imbibing. It just seemed like it couldn’t be as much fun as all that was worth.

This entire two-part deal was supposed to be all about Jack coming out, but much like last week, “…That Is the Question” ends up getting hijacked by another character. Pacey is still on his crusade against tyrannical English teacher Mr. Peterson, but that story—as well as Jack’s—takes a back seat to the internal struggles of Joey Potter. It’s not that the episode doesn’t try, as it actually gives Kerr Smith a couple of spotlight moments, but the drama can’t help but be enveloped by Capeside’s number one ingenue.

For all its elevated conversations and teen angst, Dawson’s Creek never really fell into the “very special episode” trap. It was not a show that was particularly socially conscious or ever political. Perhaps to their detriment, the characters on the show were always so impossibly insular in their thinking that there was never really room for whatever issues the real world might have presented. There was no time for Dawson to fret about Y2K or for Jen to suddenly get invested in the fate of the Kosovo—the kids on Dawson’s Creek had feelings to feel and intense chats to have about them.

The second season of Dawson’s Creek represents its highest rank among network television series during its entire run. Though the average audiences were slightly smaller than its premiere season (an average of 6.6 million viewers in the first, down to 5.4 million in the second), it managed to tick up a few spots to be the 119th most watched show on broadcast TV that season. That’s not much, but it was progress for the WB, a still-fledgling network that was slowly grafting its identity to the teens who starred on their series and made up the bulk of their core demographic. Dawson’s Creek was still not as big as 7th Heaven, which had its biggest season ever that same year, but it had captured the imagination of the zeitgeist in a major way.

I’ve been rough on most of the parents involved in Dawson’s Creek, but I think it has been for good reason. Even though the marriage drama between Mitch and Gail Leery is fully relatable to most of the audience—half of all marriages do end in divorce—but since Dawson was the anchor of the primary teen drama in Capeside, anything happening in his home life undoubtedly felt perfunctory by comparison. For all of his borderline caustic self-analysis, Dawson largely approached his parents’ separation with whiny petulance. How could we, the eager viewing public tuning into the WB on Wednesday nights, care about Mitch and Gail while the far more interesting (and emotionally advanced) stories were happening in the bedrooms of high school kids?

It is perfectly absurd that human beings have to begin to learn how to navigate complicated relationships and feelings exactly at the time they are the most unable to process most anything at all. I’m not a child psychologist or anything, but it does strike me that teen romance is a necessary evil: At what other time in your life can you learn something about yourself emotionally, romantically, and sexually and have the stakes be so low? Not that teen pregnancy isn’t a thing, but in general I found my 16-year-old experiences with girlfriends educational if only so I knew what not to do down the line.