Dawson's Creek: seasons 1 and 2
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Overview of seasons 1 and 2 of Dawson's Creek.
[edit] Season 1: 1998
(For episode details, see Dawson's Creek Season 1)
Set in the fictional Massachusetts seaside town of Capeside, the show began during the tenth grade and the first year of high school for Dawson Leery (James Van Der Beek), Pacey Witter (Joshua Jackson), and Joey Potter (Katie Holmes), three lifelong friends and Capesiders, who were joined in the pilot by Jen Lindley (Michelle Williams). All were fifteen.
Dawson was a dreamy romantic obsessed with movies, especially those of Steven Spielberg, Dawson having posters of all his films in his room, by box office success, with the least important of them, 1941 and Always, on the inside of his closet doors. He had the theory that all of life's questions could be answered in a Spielberg film. His parents were Mitch (John Wesley Shipp), who had no visible profession except puttering around the house with dreams of owning a seafood restaurant, and Gale (Mary-Margaret Humes), an Emmy-winning anchor on the local TV news.
Joey, named for Jo in Little Women, was a highly intelligent tomboy who had always been in love with Dawson though she often denied it and he was oblivious to her adoration. For years, she'd been climbing in his bedroom window and platonically sharing his bed. She lived down the creek from Dawson and often took a rowboat to visit him. Joey's mother had died from cancer when Joey was thirteen and her father, Mike (Gareth Williams), was in prison for “conspiracy to traffic in marijuana in excess of 10,000 pounds.” Her unmarried and very pregnant sister, Bessie (Nina Repeta), who was about ten years older than Joey, was raising her while running the Ice House restaurant, where Joey worked as a waitress.
Pacey was best friends with Dawson and engaged in playful love-hate banter with Joey. The three had grown up together and known each other since they were all five years old. Pacey, the youngest of five children, was considered to be his family's “great disappointment.” Being the least intelligent of his friends and most of their classmates at school, Pacey's own siblings never stopped reminding him of how much a loser he was. Pacey's father (John Finn) was Capeside's police chief, but he was also an alcoholic and never passed up a chance to browbeat and put Pacey down leading to Pacey's low pride and self-esteem, especially when his own parents either ignored him, or called him a loser right to his face. Since Pacey was the youngest of his siblings, he often bore the brunt of his drunkard father's anger and moodiness because he was not smart enough to run and hide, or get out of the way when his father stumbled home drunk every night from his demanding job at the town's police station just itching for a fight or hassle. Not a happy childhood. Pacey's older brother, Doug (Dylan Neal), was a cop wanting to follow in his father's footsteps. As part of their ongoing brotherly banter, Pacey (believing Doug was a homosexual in denial) incessantly urged Doug to come out of the closet in which Doug vehemently denied being. Pacey often used sarcasm and other means of pushing someone's mental buttons as a way of getting out of his constant emotional pain, or making every excuse to avoid his dysfunctional household. Pacey also has a sexual relationship with his teacher, Tamara Jacobs.
Jen's parents, either unable or unwilling to do anything with their seemingly out-of-control daughter; she'd begun having sex at twelve and the last straw was her being caught in flagrante delicto in her parents' bed—had exiled her from New York City to live with her rather forbidding and deeply religious maternal grandmother, Evelyn Ryan (Mary Beth Peil), a retired nurse her granddaughter called “Grams.” (Ostensibly she was sent to Capeside to help her grandmother care for her bed-ridden grandfather, who was only seen asleep and would die in the season finale.) Jen and Grams lived next door to Dawson. Smitten at first sight, Dawson wooed Jen to Joey's consternation. Dawson was shocked to learn of Jen's past, not knowing what to think. Then, Dawson discovered that his mother was having an affair with her Bob, her co-anchor from work. Persuading her to come clean, Gale told everyone that she indeed was having an affair with her co-worker from her job in the episode where most of the principal characters took refuge in the Leery household during a violent hurricane hitting the town. When Mitch, Dawson, or anyone else asked Gale why she was unfaithful when she's happily married, she kept failing to provide an explanation or kept changing the subject. She ultimately told Mitch that there never was a reason for her infidelity. Apparently since Gale was bored with her happy and perfect life, she allowed herself to get into a reckless and selfish extramarital affair. Rather than end it out of hurting her co-worker's feelings, she unwisely let in continue for several months. She and Mitch would ineffectually try to reconcile. But they eventually divorced in the second season.
In another episode, Bessie went into labor and had her baby in the Leery’s living room, delivered by Mrs. Ryan, who disapproved of Bessie's not being married to the child’s black father, Bodie (Obi Ndefo). (The boy would be named Alexander.) To Pacey's utter astonishment, his English teacher Tamara Jacobs (Leann Hunley) took him up on his lewd suggestions and they began a torrid affair that turned surprisingly tender. When word leaked out, Pacey, in order to save her reputation and certain legal repercussions, told the authorities it was all fiction, merely adolescent braggadocio that got completely out of hand. Miss Jacobs left town shortly thereafter.
In one episode, the gang got trapped in detention one Saturday afternoon à la The Breakfast Club during which a game of truth or dare, instigated by Abby Morgan (Monica Keena), a resident bad girl, forced lurking attractions and tensions to the surface; a boys-only trip to a bar during which shenanigans ensued between Dawson, Pacey, and Jen's ex-boyfriend from New York, Billy Konrad (Eion Bailey); a night of horror-pranks and maybe-murderers thwarted in "The Scare"; and a "Beauty Contest" that showcased a tomboy Joey being coaxed out of her shell by a well-meaning Jen while a renegade Pacey ran as the first male contestant in a formerly all-female contest.
Throughout the season, Dawson struggled with a choice between blonde Jen and brunette Joey—the new girl in town versus the girl he’d always known. Dawson and Jen kiss first, but towards the end of the season, he realizes his feelings for Joey. Dawson and Jen date for a short time, while he is unaware of Joey's feelings for him. Meanwhile, Pacey exhorted him to see what was right in front of him, telling him to make a choice, especially after he, himself, spent an afternoon trawling for snails for a biology-experiment-gone-awry with Joey that turned into a surprisingly fun interlude that found the two connecting differently, beneath their previously prevalent antagonism.
In the season finale, Joey and Dawson had a passionate first kiss in his bedroom, part of the cliffhanger which asked if Joey would take the school's offer to be an exchange student in Paris.
[edit] Season 2: 1998-1999
(For episode details, see Dawson's Creek Season 2)
The second season, which began the morning after the events of the first season finale, brought Dawson and Joey together (she had decided to stay in Capeside), but their dating was short-lived, lasting six episodes.
There were two new students at Capeside, siblings Jack (Kerr Smith) and Andie McPhee (Meredith Monroe). Their mentally disturbed mother had never recovered from the death of their brother Tim (shades of Ordinary People) and was delusional, carrying on imagined conversations with him. Their father (David Dukes) was a business man who owned a small furniture-making company in nearby Providence and was usually out of town and distant from his children. Andie was an extremely perky, ultra-competitive, straight-A student who clicked with the slacker Pacey. After some testy initial bantering (he had initially dismissed her as a spoiled trust-fund baby), they fell in love and eventually became lovers. Joey, feeling suffocated and lost in her relationship with Dawson, broke up with him. She fell for Jack and they dated for a time. However, Jack eventually acknowledged that he was gay, causing some furor at school (when Pacey stood up for him against a malevolent teacher and almost got expelled), at home (with Andie and their father), and in his personal life (with the increasingly confused Joey). This, Mrs. McPhee's mental problems, and Andie's renewed instability spurred their father to swoop in and try to move the family back to Providence, but Jack refused to leave Capeside. Despite both her brother's and Pacey's attempts to keep her at home in Capeside, Andie was eventually dispatched to a mental hospital to be nurtured through her issues with professional help.
Pacey, who had been Dawson's sidekick, found love and new purpose with Andie. Stepping up his scholastic efforts--he started getting A's on his papers and studying more, this season glimpsed a maturing Pacey that faced down several of his demons—his feelings of unworthiness, a past affair coming back to haunt him when Tamara Jacobs briefly returned (now employed by a real estate office in New York), and his difficult and often abusive relationship with his domineering and alcoholic father. Pacey also showed patience and compassion with Andie's mother, loyalty and courage with Jack's coming out, and a deep, abiding love for Andie.
Jen, who had tried to make a fresh start in Capeside, returned to her old sullen ways, hanging out with the manipulative Abby Morgan (Monica Keena), who brought out Jen's inner bitch. When Abby suddenly died (she fell off a pier while drunk), Jen delivered at Abby's church funeral a hateful diatribe against religion designed to irritate her grandmother. Jen found herself kicked out, Mrs. Ryan throwing up her hands. However, Jen also renewed a more balanced and supportive friendship with Dawson after her attempts to win him back fell by the wayside. Reconnecting as friends, the two were able to support one another through trying times. In the season finale, after Jen had lived with the Leery’s and the McPhee’s, Grams welcomed Jen back into her home—as well as Jack, who chose to stay in Capeside while Andie and her mother stayed in the mental hospital and Mr. McPhee remained in Providence.
Mitch became a substitute teacher at Capeside High as he and Gale tried to figure out how or whether to try to rebuild their marriage. At the end of the season Gale moved to Philadelphia to take a news job there.
Joey's father, Mike, was paroled after three years in prison and returned a changed man it seemed. He had ambitious plans of expanding the Ice House, making a life for himself, and getting to know his daughters better. Joey, feeling things were settling down in her life, reconciled with Dawson, and they resumed their relationship. But Mike Potter soon fell back on his old ways. His competitors in the drug trade threw a Molotov cocktail into the Ice House and the building was a total loss in the resulting blaze. Dawson had seen one of Mike's deals and told Joey. Although she hated herself for it, Joey is convinced by Sheriff Witter to wear a wire to entrap her father. After her father's arrest, Joey told Dawson she could never forgive him for taking her father away again.
[edit] See also
| Dawson's Creek |
|---|
| Characters |
| Dawson Leery | Jen Lindley | Joey Potter | Pacey Witter |
| Locations |
| Capeside | Capeside High | Worthington University |
| Other |
| Young Americans | List of Dawson's Creek episodes |
