We’re rewatching all of Dawson’s Creek in honor of its twentieth anniversary. Will require some mind-numbing. Drinking game rules can be found here.
Audrey starts out this episode by announcing, “I don’t want to go to rehab.” Oh, Audrey. I have a song you’re going to LOVE three years in the future.
I’m going to start off by remarking that watching this episode–in which Archie becomes the ringleader of an almost-all-white juvenile detention center with a gang problem and teaches his fellow inmates to reclaim their humanity with football–and then almost immediately going out to watch KJ Apa in The Hate U Give, a sensitive and honest drama about blackness and racism and police brutality–was a surreal experience.
I have to wonder what KJ Apa thought of this episode himself. There is just such a difference between his work in The Hate U Give — playing a white boy with a black girlfriend who is slow to, but willing to, learn about the racism she experiences — and this episode, which creates a fantasy blithely oblivious to the realities of mass incarceration, a world in which it’s all white kids in the jail and the key to their spiritual liberation is for a white boy to tell them not to act like animals. I mean, at least they didn’t cast a bunch of black kids to play the other boys at the center, right? Because that would be an overtly offensive white-savior narrative, whereas what they ended up with is “just” a bizarrely out-of-touch dreamworld–still, I think, a creation of white privilege, but just more subtly so.
Previously on Riverdale: Jughead asked Betty to be the queen of the Serpents, Veronica bought Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe, Betty’s dad was evil, Betty’s sister offered to help her mom at “the farm,” and Hiram framed Archie for Andre’s murdering Cassidy.
When we open, Voiceover Jughead has decided to get mildly pretentious. He asks how “you” spend your last summer of high school, while describing various possibilities, some of which seem not to have actually happened (like him watching Betty and Veronica swim in a pool where it later seems they’ve never been). I don’t really get it TBH, which is embarrassing to admit about the voiceover of a teen soap on the CW, but whatever.
We’re rewatching all of Dawson’s Creek in honor of its twentieth anniversary. Will require some mind-numbing. Drinking game rules can be found here.
Audrey’s Downward Spiral continues in spectacular fashion in this episode.
What also continues is Joey and Eddie’s never-ending melodrama. Joey is being weirdly “tactful” (read: condescendingly coy) about Hetson’s class, worried that it’ll upset Eddie, but now that they’re all hot and heavy he doesn’t take offense. I guess the making out put him in a better mood. Which is good. Joey, for her part, claims she feels smart now that she’s free of Eddie’s “snarky feedback.” Yes, Joey. It’s called “negging” and it’s designed to make you feel like shit so you’ll make out with him, and it worked, so why bother coming to class anymore?
Welcome to the last season of our Dawson’s rewatch! We have no idea what we’re going to do with our lives when this is over, but before that happens, there is so much to talk about!
For season 6, we’ll be adding to our drinking game rules. Take a shot:
We’re rewatching all of Dawson’s Creek in honor of its twentieth anniversary. Will require some mind-numbing. Drinking game rules can be found here.
So, this was the 100th episode of Dawson’s Creek. When it aired, I still wasn’t yet watching it in real time (it took me till the middle of season 6 to catch on, because I’m very very slow), but I was a major Gilmore Girls fan, and I remember how the WB was just covered in ads for this big event, which turns out to be surprisingly inconsequential: the main story is that the gang-minus-Dawson go to Florida for spring break. (On the other hand, M2M, the underrated gem of the early aughts, shows up and sings. That’s pretty awesome. I’d almost call it event TV.)
OK, fine, there is one thing of significance. Dawson and Joey have a Grand Good-bye! Oh wait… that happens so often that we have a shot for it. So never mind.
We’re rewatching all of Dawson’s Creek in honor of its twentieth anniversary. Will require some mind-numbing. Drinking game rules can be found here.
Well, this episode is named after Professor Creeper, so… I have concerns. And they are fully borne out by the events to come.
