It comes as a surprise to learn that this is the one-hundreth episode of Dawson's Creek, since nothing particularly special happens, even if most of the hour implies that a game-changer is right around the corner. It's particularly evident with Dawson and Joey; Dawson pining over her for most of the hour and coming to some kind of major epiphany wherein he realizes how much he loves her, all accompanied by sepia-colored flashbacks to their mighty (and mighty annoying) courtship. But the episode ends with Dawson standing in the sand, looking out to sea, pining over his lost love, who he assumes spent the last night boning Chad Michael Murray. For shame. Meh.
The very best episodes of Dawson's Creek are usually the ones in which characters get thrown together in the same place, hanging out and conversing with one another, sharing scenes for the first time in a while. Cigarette Burns takes place at the premiere of Dawson and Oliver's movie, a movie that remains vague in terms of story, but is supposedly as long as The English Patient and features a vast cameo from Chad Michael Murray's penis. But Cigarette Burns isn't really about the film itself, and instead more about what the film brings out in the cast. This is the strongest traditional DC episode in a while, every character given material that says a lot about how far they've all come as people, and where they'll go from here.
The same kinds of themes that made In a Lonely Place something of a drag appeared this week, too; characters coming together, falling apart and finding each other. Typically for season five, there's this erratic quality to a lot of the stories, the writers seemingly unsure of where exactly things are going, and I'm still none the wiser over whether we as an audience are supposed to support, say, Joey growing close to Charlie. For the first time in the history of the show, I feel alienated to the point of strangeness, failing to understand what the show is really trying to do.
With serialized dramas on network television, there are naturally one or two episodes every year that bring all the major arcs to a standstill, everything pretty much pausing for a week to allow the writers to re-group and plan the rest of the season. It helps create a successful final run of episodes, but does unsurprisingly leave in its wake hours like this one, which struggles to be anything more than a time-filler. In a Lonely Place is also something of a bottle show, the three stories this week taking place in what is pretty much one location each. This isn't a major problem, but there comes a point during some of the hour where you're left thinking "are they seriously still in that room?"
With dream episodes, there's definitely a "been there, done that" familiarity most of the time. Every genre show does a dream episode at least once, and they usually rely on the same visual tricks over and over again. But what's unusual about these kinds of episodes is that they rarely get old, in spite of how generic the plotting usually is. Conscious is no different. While it utilizes the same devices, from split-screens to characters dressed in unusual outfits, it's hard to not get absorbed by Sydney's hallucinations, primarily because it latches onto that familiar dream scenario: you're chasing after something that you don't recognize, and your feet feel like their sinking in quicksand. Sydney keeps on running this week, bouncing between various locations, that illusive answer getting closer and closer.
This is the kind of episode that looks like one thing on the surface, only for it to actually be a lot deeper on closer inspection. Sydney spends the week locked in an NSC prison getting her brain sucked out, leading all of her CIA buddies to launch a rescue mission. Being Alias, what follows is a bunch of routine action sequences, mostly involving people running down corridors and shooting tranquilizers at each other. From that angle, Breaking Point becomes a little repetitive, Sydney only an active protagonist when she launches into various doomed escape attempts. But then, around the episode's midpoint, Breen Frazier's script becomes a little more layered and interesting, exploiting character dynamics over lobotomy thrills.
So far, Sydney's lost years have produced a mixed bag of results. The effort put into making most of the cast seem either blind or ludicrously moronic in regards to ambiguous hitwoman Julia Thorne has become majorly contrived at points, particularly when characters seemed to be going out of their way to not suggest that "Julia" could have been a code-name for Sydney during her trip to amnesia-ville. When the story has truly worked is when the writers have capitalized on the real horror of having your memory wiped, the idea of your body being out there and doing irrational things but you yourself not being in the driving seat. It's a terrifying idea, explored here through hazy visions and body-horror nightmares, and it finally feels like this arc is building to something screwy.
I'm probably showing my age when I say this, but there's always something so rewarding when you're watching an episode of this show and suddenly spot the overriding theme that seems to link all the storylines. I'm sure it's usually a narrative idea that hits most people like a freight-train, but it's hard for me to not get a sense of excitement when the various subplots, seemingly so disparate at first, are all of a sudden all connected and written to express a certain sentiment or a specific concept. It happened here towards the very end, the three storylines clicking together and being all about signals and warnings, both those we use to impart messages to others, as well as the ones we're not entirely conscious of, but which alter circumstances all the same.
