Dawson's Creek: The Scare (1.10)

With this and Detention, it's now two-for-two for Mike White, here lifting just as much from horror movie convention as he did from '80s teen genre staples three episodes ago. From the opening with Dawson and Joey watching Sarah Michelle Gellar run for her life in I Know What You Did Last Summer, straight through to the class discussion about Halloween, this is very much a dissection of genre traditions, each character getting scared out of their minds by a series of increasingly spooky pranks on Friday the 13th. While there's still a ton of romantic entanglement running alongside all of this, it's the horror comedy that winds up most entertaining.

By this point, the writers are really contriving to keep Dawson and Joey apart, even when it's long been clear that their bedroom wrestling matches and romantic jealousies are all window-dressing to latent attraction. I'm still unsure why everybody seems to have procured collective amnesia since the events of Detention, but Dawson is still in complete denial of Joey's feelings, despite yet another enigmatic stranger (in this case, Jennifer McComb's sassy bad girl Ursula) telling him point-blank that the girl's into him.

Elsewhere, Jen is still a little unsure of her feelings, something that once again feeds into the continuity-horror of recent episodes, but which I guess is believable for a fifteen year-old. Here she dates popular jock Cliff, but it's Grams who appears to have the bigger lady-boner over him. Grams is a wonderful character, especially with the comedic hypocrisy she indulges in throughout The Scare, even supporting a potential porch make-out session between her niece and the new guy she's seeing.

The stop-start romantic contrivance has started to bug me, but The Scare is at least high-concept enough to be one of the first season's strongest episodes. It looks and feels like nothing of its type, and there's added fun in seeing future Halloween H20 star Michelle Williams re-enact Drew Barrymore's Scream pursuit, as well as Joey preferring to watch Jerry Maguire over some schlocky slasher movie. If only she knew... A

Credits
Guest stars Jennifer McComb (Ursula); Scott Foley (Cliff Elliot)
Writer Mike White Director Rodman Flender