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.

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.