Recapping the Dawson’s Creek Pilot, 18 Years Later
There is one thing that is clear from the very first moments of Dawson’s Creek: Dawson Leery is a fucking idiot. The very first scene is of 15-year-old Dawson and his female best friend Joey on the eve of their first day in high school and he’s trying to convince her that she can still spend the night in his bed just like they’ve been doing since they were in third grade. Nope, that’s not weird at all. It’s like they’re at some summer camp for asexual idiot savants where all genitals have been shot with a neutralizing gun and promise rings actually mean something.
Any 15-year-old boy that tries to get a girl to spend the night in his bed isn’t doing it because he’s friends with her. He’s doing it so that he can push his boner up against her in the middle of the night and then be like, “Oh, sorry. I took an Ambien last night. I have no idea how that happened. Oh, that stain? That’s, um, some yogurt I must have spilled on you when you were sleeping and I was Ambien eating in bed. Sorry about that.”
This scene, where Dawson tries to convince Joey that he has no interest in boning her ends with them wrestling in his bed like they’re going to stop at any moment and just French the fuck out of each other. I spent years in high school wrestling with my male friends and pretending like we were playing Randy “Macho Man” Savage when really I was just randy and trying to figure out a way to savage that kid’s macho man.
But that’s not the only reason that Dawson is an idiot. He absolutely, positively does not understand women. This does not bode well for the future of his virginity and it being eventually lost. In that opening scene, Joey is making jokes about how his long fingers mean he has huge junk and he’s like, “A doy. Do you have feelings for me?” Of course she does, Dawson, you blonde-tipped dunce bucket. It’s even worse when he starts hanging out with Jen, who clearly doesn’t want any part of putting her hands underneath his oversized oatmeal-colored sweater that looks like a tarp you would use to protect a medical tent after a Haitian hurricane.
So, Dawson tricks Jen into going to the movies with him and then asks Joey to tag along, even though she’s not at all happy about him spending time with Jen. Then Dawson freaks out when Joey is asking Jen whether or not she’s a virgin and is basically behaving like a female Spencer Pratt, but without any of the charm or the bar tab at Les Deux. After totally misjudging how Joey was going to react, then he tries to French Jen and she’s all like, “I would rather hang out with my religious grandmother and her weird collection of rolling pins than French with you, dude.” Dawson just can’t read the cues at all.
I think that’s because his relationship to sex is totally messed up. He lives in a household where his mother and father are just macking on each other in the living room in the middle of the work day and his father is desperate for Dawson to start boning every woman who lives within a stone’s throw of the creek. His father literally tells him to “wrap it up” when going out with some girls and Dawson totally freaks out because he thinks sex is icky.
This doesn’t make any sense at all. First of all, Dawson doesn’t realize what a sexualized atmosphere he lives in. His parents allow him to keep a ladder to his bedroom window so the “troubled” girl down the block can come and sleep over whenever she wants. He also takes Jen up to his room and gives her the grand tour and no one questions if he’s going to try to take her bra off with one hand. My mother wouldn’t let me take a girl up to my room while no one was home, and that was after I vogued my way out of the closet.
This environment is definitely turning him into a serious sex pervert. First of all, he’s watching his mother on TV and obsessing about how she is sleeping with her co-anchor, which is gross (though true). Secondly, he confesses to Joey that he jerks off every morning while watching Katie Couric on the Today show. That is the grossest thing I’ve ever heard and I spent one summer cleaning the toilets in an old folk’s home after they had prunes for lunch. I have no problem with Katie Couric, but his mother is also a newscaster. He’s basically jerking off thinking about his mom. His admission is like if Dave Thomas’s daughter Wendy confessed that she taps her twat looking at pictures of Ronald McDonald. That’s just enough to make me want to chemically castrate myself.
So Dawson, future sex pervert and current panty sniffer, can be having all the sex he wants but he doesn’t because Spielberg doesn’t have any sex scenes in any of his movies. If there is any rationalization that is dumber than that, please let me and Colin Powell know so that he can use it to justify military action into another foreign country. It may be true that Speilberg doesn’t use sex scenes, but he made multiple movies about aliens. Does that mean that Dawson thinks that aliens are real but that sex isn’t? Does that mean he watches those weird Japanese anime porn movies where tentacle monsters rip apart women’s vaginas in fits of pure ecstasy? Does that mean that because Spielberg made a movie about a giant killer shark Dawson wants to put his dick in one of those? God, Dawson is such a fucking idiot.
Joey, well, she’s not that great either. She obviously wants to French her best friend Dawson real hard but she can’t because he has the same attitude about sex as the female star of a Disney Channel comedy. Then, when they get in a fight, she climbs up her ladder to his room and hides in his closet. What? That is illegal in all states but Iowa (because they have a long tradition called Closet Hopping that was brought over by Norwegian immigrants in the 1860s, and this is a fairly common occurrence there). Dawson doesn’t even think that it’s weird that a criminals’ daughter is camped out behind his The Color Purple poster.
Joey is really messed up because her mom is dead, her dad is a drug dealer, and her sister is going to have the world’s most beautiful biracial baby. (Holy shit, that baby is totally an NYU freshman this year and has probably annoyed me while I was walking to the Union Square Regal to see a midnight showing of Sausage Party.) It doesn’t help that, at this stage of her career, Katie Holmes acting ability seems to entirely consist of running away from the camera and folding her arms. Those are the only two things she can do. I would say that she could also put on lipstick to look sexy, but she can’t even do that, she has to have her slutty older sister do that for her.
Also, Joey has crappy clothes and lives in a glorified trailer with her knocked-up sister who isn’t working. How does she own the nicest row boat that I have ever seen in my life? It’s basically like the Porsche or row boats.
Obviously the best character on the whole show is Jen, who I know was a horrible slut and cigarette smoker when she was living in New York and that makes me want to be friends with her. I love sluts. My favorite moment of the whole episode is when White Michelle Williams gets out of the cab with an air of grief wafting behind her and the sound of Oscars echoing in her ears and immediately walks right over to the teens on the pier making a crappy horror movie. Never mind that her grandfather is dying of a heart ailment and her grandmother is oiling the chastity device she is going to snap on Jen’s nether regions in about 15 minutes. Jen doesn’t want to go talk to them, she wants to introduce herself to a group of random teens wearing aggressively neutral tones standing on a pier. Yup, that makes total sense.
What I hated about Jen though is how freaking thirsty she is to be Joey’s friend. She mentions to her several times how she hopes that they’re going to be really close friends. Meanwhile, Joey is colder to her than a fish stick you just took out of the freezer. Why would Jen want to be friend with Joey? Was she part of some S&M sex cult in New York and just wants someone around to punish her? Also Jen is a really cool slut. All the girls should be dying to talk to her.
And while we’re at it, how come Pacey, Dawson, and Joey are the only friends each other has? They’re in a small town in a class of less than 100 people, don’t they know all the other teens in their grade? Why isn’t anyone talking to them? Why are the only people who talk to Jen that weird blonde quaterback who doesn’t have any lines and future meth-addled stripper Nellie Olsen? It doesn’t make any sense.
Speaking of not making any sense, why does Pacey insist on wearing khakis that are so baggy that he could use the fabric from one pair to make a dozen pairs of MC Hammer pants and still have enough left over for a really cute jumpsuit? I do love Pacey though. This is an instance of when a character makes the actor that plays him look so much cuter, like what Chuck Bass did for Ed Westwick’s weak chin on Gossip Girl. I always thought that Joshua Jackson had a face like a bag of Skittles left in the back seat of a car in the sun so that all of them melted together in one giant lump, but after watching Pacey I finally understand the attraction.
Pacey’s story is also the most insane on the show. I mean, he’s basically raped by his teacher in the first episode. Yeah, I know he wants it and all, but she goes full Mary Kay Latourneau on his ass. I was not expecting that and, of all the stories that are introduced in the pilot, that’s the only one I want to see play out because, man, that is racy for TV in 2016 so it is real edgy for 1998.
Speaking of 1998, plenty of things about the show have not aged well. I was in college when these kids were in high school (even though James Vanderbeek and I were high school acquaintances and I got him high at our senior prom) so I’m all for ’90s nostalgia, but the pilot has Chumbawamba’s “Tub Thumper” in it. Of all the things that happened in that decade that need to be erased from human memory, that song is at the top of the list along with bucket hats and the Tori episodes of Saved By The Bell.
Speaking of songs, when watching this on Hulu, the famous Paula Cole theme song has been replaced with something that sounds like a possum dying on the highway. When the credits started to roll and I didn’t hear “I Don’t Want to Wait,” I started to question everything I knew about the world. Is the sky blue? Does the sun rise in the east? Is Ramona Singer a raging narcissist with a personality disorder and a propensity for peddling mediocre white wine to her fame guzzling fans? Apparently the show doesn’t have the rights to use the song for the DVD and streaming releases. Can’t we set up an IndieGoGo for Paula Cole and get the song back?
There is so much awful ’90s happening in this show, from the post-Friends comic sans font to the VHS store where Pacey and Dawson work. And the clothes. Ugh, the clothes. Was everything I wore in the ’90s that awful? It couldn’t have been. I remember being cool and hip and having all the best threads, but is that what cool and hip looked like back then? Did I also have floppy hair and a goofy necklace that you wear over a T-shirt just above the collar of a V-neck sweater that looks big enough to fit both Cee-Lo Green and his spinning chair from The Voice? That’s one thing about going back, it’s never quite as you remember it. Sometimes it’s even better, and sometimes you’re stuck in an idiot’s bedroom while he tries to push his boner into your back while explaining why Always isn’t actually a bad movie. Sometimes that’s the best of all.
My friend Anna Brand forced me to watch the pilot episode of her favorite show Dawson’s Creek, which I had never seen before, and write a recap of it. I did this for her and I hope you enjoyed it. If there’s a classic series you would like me to recap then get in touch.
