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.