Dawson's Creek: Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road (6.21)

I guess it's only right to end Dawson's Creek with Dawson acting like a horrendous jackass once again. There seemed to be real attempts over seasons four and five to make him sort of relatable and endearing, but the way he's been removed so heavily from season six probably ensured that nobody on set was particularly invested in making him a good person anymore. I gather that Dawson's absences this year were at James Van Der Beek's own request, but it has this unforeseen consequence wherein you don't care a whole lot about his movie or all the money he's lost. He just comes off like a ghost from the past, somebody who sits in the background assuming things will fall into his lap and becoming aggressive if they don't. Snore.

With the financial hooey, you can hardly pin Pacey as the villain. Sure, he got a bad tip and ended up losing his clients a lot of money, but anybody with half a brain knows that playing around with the stockmarket and investing all your funds in shady new corporations is a risky gamble. Sometimes you pocket big, more likely you'll lose everything. The fact that Dawson was putting all his eggs in one basket, regardless of Pacey's insistence that it would all work out, is his own fault more than anyone else's.

While the two of them whine and yell at each other, Joey is left stranded in the middle. There's some cute nostalgia at the top of the show with Joey climbing up that ladder into Dawson's bedroom again, but it only gives way to more over-analytical prophesying about their future and talk of how much they've drifted apart of late. The fact that this doesn't work folds into Dawson's absences this year. The only times they've shared scenes this season have been all about the angst and volatility, resulting in anybody with sense praying they'd stay the hell away from each other. They did, but for so long that it's hard to care all that much about them anymore. The season has proven that they don't necessarily need each other in their lives anymore, and returning to their friendship only ends in heartbreak and fighting anyway...

Back in Boston, Jen has decided to make Grams' cancer all about her, inviting her mom to visit under the guise of needing emotional support, and effectively cornering Grams until the truth comes out about her diagnosis. Ugh. There's not a whole lot to any of this, Mimi Rogers disappearing after a couple of scenes, and the whole gang deciding to up sticks to New York sometime in the next couple of weeks. It's not all that interesting.

That's actually a theme that frustrates throughout the whole episode. You can understand why the writers would want to resurrect the Dawson/Pacey tension, even if nobody was exactly crying out for that, but the stakes are so insignificant and Dawson so horrible as a person that you only leave wishing Joey and Pacey would abandon his ass once and for all. C

Credits
Guest stars Jensen Ackles (C.J.); Mimi Rogers (Helen Lindley); Jack Osbourne (Himself); Geoffrey Lewis (Bill Braxton)
Writer Anna Fricke Director Peter Kowalski