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.

I sat for a long time trying to find a way into this episode that felt satisfying, either from a cultural context perspective or via a personal connection. Certainly there were options for both: this is the first official two-parter for Dawson’s Creek, although the end-of-episode cliffhanger is a little dramatically lame. And this is also an hour of TV I very vividly remember watching when it first aired: I was in a youth chorale that rehearsed on Wednesday nights, so I always had to record Dawson’s on VHS to then watch with my girlfriend and one of her friends on the weekends, but I dropped out of that chorale when 1998 became 1999, and though I was supposed to still wait for the weekends, I cheated and started watching the show live; this was the first episode since the pilot that I watched when it was actually broadcast.

But ultimately neither of those avenues felt all that satisfying, largely because this is a banger of an episode. Though it doesn’t operate as such because that’s not how TV worked in 1999, it is a hell of a Spring premiere (though in hindsight, the cliffhanger probably should have arrived before the holiday break so as to drive the teens crazy). I just really want to go through this thing blow by blow, so here we go.

One thing I’m realizing during this particular re-watch of Dawson’s Creek is that this show really struggled to balance out its multiple plots within episodes. Generally speaking, most hours of Creek have two concurrent plots, often dividing the core characters into pairs for one reason or another. One of those stories always centers around Dawson while the other generally revolves around Joey (unless their story is the same, in which case Pacey tends to get elevated to that other position). Even when everybody is in the same place at the same time (like in “The All-Nighter”), there are still dividing lines and factions and divergent stories. Sometimes all of those plots will be satisfying, and sometimes one will totally eclipse the other.

When Dawson’s Creek first premiered in January 1998, countless articles were written about the somewhat elevated language of the show’s teen protagonists. They were obsessed with self-analysis and casually tossed around dimestore SAT words that certainly felt out of place among their TV brethren, though not necessarily in actual high schools. That angle was used as criticism and praise in equal measure, but what it really drives home is creator Kevin Williamson’s general love of language.

Of course he loves words—he is, after all, a writer by trade. But we’ve all seen enough bad movies and middling television to know that not everybody who works with language actually has an affection for it.

I know I’ve been hard on Dawson Leery, but throughout the first 19 episodes of the show bearing his name he has proven himself to be a petty and manipulative narcissist. Those qualities have been on particularly powerful display in the past few episodes as his relationship with Joey has slowly disintegrated, ending in their break-up in “The Dance.” In real life, I would never wish a break-up on anyone, but in the case of Dawson, getting dumped was the best thing that ever happened to him.

My wife and I have been obsessing over Moonlighting, the hit dramedy from the ‘80s that launched the career of Bruce Willis. With a redesigned office and some deconstruction of Cybil Shepherd’s hair, Moonlighting would absolutely fit into the modern television landscape and would still be mildly ahead of its time today even though it went off the air in 1989.

Dawson’s Creek was sometimes referred to (often in derisive terms) as a “teen soap,” and “Full Moon Rising” is certainly an episode that could be submitted as evidence of its soapiness. It features the continued presence of Tamara Jacobs (I had completely forgotten how long she sticks around in her second visit), as well as a deeply twisted escalation of the open marriage plot between Mitch and Gail and the sexual assault of poor Jen Lindley. It’s all pretty soapy.