For a panoply of reasons, I never drank in high school. Part of it was because I was too afraid of breaking the rules, but part of it also felt like it was logistically difficult—my friends who partied always seemed to be figuring out exactly how to acquire alcohol and then map out specific opportunities to drink said booze. They always seemed like they were driving six towns over to get somebody’s distant cousin to make a run to the liquor store for them, and then had to figure out what place in the woods offered the best cover for their imbibing. It just seemed like it couldn’t be as much fun as all that was worth.
So I never had a bad teenage drinking experience like Dawson Leery did in this week’s episode. But I still feel like I can relate, because there’s a key difference in the average teenager getting loaded and Dawson’s dalliance with rum & co*ke: The former drinks to try to have a good time, but Dawson drinks because he’s sad. At the beginning of my drinking career in college, I was drinking to have a good time and be social and to try to hook up with girls. But around my sophom*ore year, I discovered the power of sucking down liquor in order to forget about my troubles. When I drank to party, it seemed like nothing terrible ever happened. All my worst drunk stories and hangovers came from sad drinking. I never destroyed my own surprise birthday party with my depressed drunkenness, but like Dawson, I did tell people exactly what I was thinking about them at the time. (I lost a lot of friends this way and do not recommend treating your depression with cheap scotch.)
“Be Careful What You Wish For” opens with a familiar scene: Dawson, in his bedroom, freaking out about his place in the universe. It’s only a few hours before he turns 16 years old, and he feels stagnant. Every one of his friends seems to be moving forward, and he remains the same guy he was a year ago. The one thing he feels he accomplished in the past year? Figuring out his feelings for Joey, and even that ended disastrously. Pacey suggests Dawson simply find something that he wants and make a definitive statement about it. “I had her, I lost her, and I’m going to get her back,” Dawson tells Pacey. “How’s that for definitive?”
Thus begins Dawson’s inherently doomed quest to get Joey back. She’s still shellshocked by Jack’s coming out, even though she tells Pacey she’s totally fine with everything and it’s Jack who is going through something, not her. (She’s lying, of course, a common theme when Joey deals with her own feelings.) Besides, she’s too busy plotting Dawson’s surprise party, which requires Pacey and Andie to take him out and distract him while everything gets set up at Dawson’s house. Before any of that can happen, Dawson and Joey take a walk along the pier and talk about how they used to make a wish on the first snowfall and eat roasted nuts. Dawson, ever the emotional strategist, just comes right out and tells Joey how he feels about her and how much he wants her back. He says this even though Joey has clearly explained why they originally broke up, and poor Joey has to explain the whole scenario to him again: They’ve been so tethered to each other that she wasn’t sure if she could exist without him and wanted to do something that didn’t involve him. Dawson takes this explanation in his typical way. “The only thing that makes sense to me is you…we’re soulmates, you and I are meant to be,” he tells her, creepily. “Joey, if you and I aren’t meant to be together then I don’t know anything.” Dawson is, as always, the worst.
With his big swing resulting in a whiff, Dawson depressively goes along with Pacey and Andie on the distraction portion of his birthday evening. He laments that his only plans are to play third wheel to his friend and his girlfriend while they ride around in Pacey’s father’s patrol car. (Considering what we know about Pacey’s dad and his general terribleness, how is Pacey allowed to drive his cop cruiser around? It doesn’t track.) Andie, riding in the back seat and making good on her therapist’s suggestion that she cut loose for a night, spots a juke joint she insists the trio visit. Is it the same juke joint that Ty has been taking Jen to? Or are there multiple juke joints in Capeside? It is never explained.
It's there where Dawson and Andie execute an all-too-easy ruse on their waitress and trick her into bringing them alcohol rather than the straight co*kes they had been swilling. It’s open mic night at the juke joint, and Dawson gets up with Andie to sing an off-the-cuff blues song about how much his life sucks. (He also does some embarrassing half-in-the-bag dancing.) During the song, he admits he knows all about the surprise party, and Pacey finally cottons on to the fact that both his best friend and his girlfriend are five co*cktails deep. He hustles them out of the bar, only to arrive at what is already a disastrous party.
Why does Joey declare it to be horrible? She doesn’t get specific, but I would blame her for the guest list. It’s been made abundantly clear that Dawson only has like four friends. Who the hell are the other people littering his house for his surprise party? And why is Abby Morgan there? Was she invited? Why would Joey invite her? Is she crashing? If so, why would she go to the birthday of somebody she is openly antagonistic to? Does she go specifically to hang out with Jack, who she views as a potential gay best friend in the sitcom of her life? And why does Jack buy into her vague claptrap about everybody being bisexual? Lock down your guest list, Joey. Of course, everything goes from bad to worse when Dawson arrives and starts dancing on the table. A mortified Joey brews him some coffee and tries to keep him away from his in-attendance parents by bringing him up to his room, but that plan is foiled by the sight of Jack and Abby making out on Dawson’s bed. Joey storms out and Dawson plays his blues riff again.
The big climax comes a few minutes later when Dawson’s mom presents his birthday cake. “Time to make a wish?” says the drunken Dawson. He goes on an epic rant about how much he resents his parents, how much he loathes Pacey’s do-gooder turnaround because it makes him feel bad, and how impossibly sad and angry he is about Joey’s quest to find herself. It’s all a bad look that I found all too familiar, though at no point in my boozed-up life did somebody push me face first into a cake (though I certainly deserved much, much worse).
Joey, ever the saint, somehow doesn’t decapitate Dawson to wrap up the series at this point. As he tries to recover from his drinking binge, he apologizes profusely but still leans on the fact that he is hopelessly in love with her and he got drunk because he feels impossibly alone. “I’m so lonely,” he tells her. “I’m 16 years old and I’m so hopelessly lonely.” Joey explains to him again that all she wanted was the opportunity to experience life away from him for a while. “I feel like you partially invented me, Dawson,” she tells him. “I need to find out if I’m capable of being a whole person without you.” This is a very reasonable argument, and yet rather than accept his fate Dawson tells Joey to “hurry up.” He utters “I love you” as he nods off. With him safely in dreamland, she says “I love you too, Dawson.” Maybe it’s because I know who Joey ends up with, but it seems impossible to spot what she sees in Dawson at this point. However, a full 22 years after this episode first aired, I’m able to relate to our hero all over again. When I aligned myself with Dawson when this show first aired, I got sucked into his hopelessly romantic visions of what he thought his life was supposed to look like. Now, I see a sad kid who doesn’t know what to do with his sadness, and that is the most relatable that dude has been in a long time.
Also:
-This episode marks the end of the relationship between Jen and Ty. They go to Dawson’s party together and end up making out inside Dawson’s brand new car in the garage. (Jen’s hand smacks against the fogged-up window a la Titanic.) But Ty bails, as he has been doing, because he doesn’t believe in pre-marital sex and can’t square his Christianity with the temptation he gets from Jen. He kinda sorta calls her a slu*t (he mentions her “history) and that’s the end of that. Poor Michelle Williams still gets the worst material on this show, and it'll stay that way for a while.
-There’s also a c-plot about Dawson’s parents that I don’t care about. Gail is pissed Mitch isn’t paying more of the bills during their separation, and Mitch is upset that Gail went ahead and bought Dawson a new car for his birthday. It does give Mitch the opportunity to use the word “jalopy,” which I’m fine with.
-For whatever reason, I was really digging the replacement theme song this week. I guess I’ve been feeling moody, but when Jann Arden bellowed “Every voice inside my head is telling me to run like mad” this time it really got me.
-I remember being horrified by this episode because it comes back from a commercial break with Dawson violently vomiting into a sink. I don’t like seeing people vomit! However that scene is strangely authentic as they are both convincingly sweaty and gross. Andie, who was wearing entirely too much body glitter, looks especially jacked up as she ralphs into the toilet. It’s one of the least glamorous things I’ve ever seen a TV star do.
-It was obviously removed from the streaming version, but the original song that played over the closing moments of this episode was Natalie Merchant’s “Frozen Charlotte,” a gorgeous tune from her second solo album Ophelia. The song features an assist from Karen Peris of The Innocence Mission, a band I have written about before on this website.
-The first time I ever got drunk was during my freshman year of college when I split a pitcher of margaritas with some friends at a place in Greenwich Village called Panchito’s that probably no longer exists. I didn’t drink too much and it was a sort of deliriously blissful experience. The worst time I ever got drunk was when I finished half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in my dorm room by myself because I was annoyed that nobody had invited me out on that Friday night. And then when somebody did finally call to have me meet them somewhere, I went to the bar and yelled at them because they hadn’t called earlier. It’s a wonder I made it out of college without needing extensive facial reconstruction surgery.
