Pacey goes after her and finds her sitting outside, crying. A testicle sings a line about "wondering what went wrong." God, Pacey...please, just leave it lie. Please. Pacey sits beside Joey; she won't meet his eye for a moment. Then she says bitterly, her face wet: "You wanna know why it was so 'nice,' Pacey?" Pacey looks ashamed of himself as Joey describes a moment from the night before when he brushed her hair over her forehead (zuh?), and it "felt really nice" and made her feel "safe," like he would stick around and protect her no matter what. Well, if your psycho hot-and-cold routine hasn't chased him off by now, I'd say that's a safe bet. ["Plus, how lame are you when you need your boyfriend to protect you from YOUR OWN HAIR?" -- Wing Chun] Joey goes on to say that, when she looks back on the experience "years from now," she'll remember that moment, not "the clumsy positioning or the morning-after awkwardness, or whether or not the experience itself met the textbook definition of great sex." "Clumsy positioning"? Oh, ew. Pacey smiles a little to himself. Joey adds, "I'll remember how sweet you were," and says that he took her to "a brand-new place." I don't know what that line means, exactly -- if you didn't have an orgasm, how is that a new place? Best not to think on it too deeply, I guess. Anyway, she says she's glad she had sex, and she's really glad she had sex with him. Pacey smiles for real, gratified, as Joey wipes the tears off her face with a gloved hand and says that now she kind of wants to go home, "so [they] can do it again." Huh? What does that line mean? Why would they have to -- oh, fuck it. They schmoop, pan over to the snowy birches, end of segment.

"The Big Picture." These titles give me the ick.

Anyway, pan down over the rooftop of the Brookshaven, accompanied by the Counting Crows, to the Gretchenmobile pulling into the drive with Dawson "Bad Heir Day" Leery at the wheel. ["For those of you writing a book, that's the song that was playing while Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon did it in Cruel Intentions." -- Wing Chun] It's not even his car -- how come he's driving? He heaves a sigh as the car comes to a stop; Gretchen "Martha Raye" Witter leans over and kisses him on the cheek and tells him, "It's gonna get better. I promise." They get out of the car, and Gretchen gets an expositional assist by asking what Grams wants. Dawson doesn't know; Grams just told him to meet her at Mr. Brooks's after the funeral, and "she'd be in the garage." Then we get a filler shot of Dawson and Gretchen walking arm-in-arm to the garage. They had the funeral already? According to the timeline of this episode, it's only one day later. It happens all the time on TV shows and in the movies, and it drives me nuts -- you can't just decide to have a funeral the next day. You need to arrange for all the funeral home stuff and have the body embalmed and prepared and dressed, notify friends and family, call the paper to give them the death notice, start probate proceedings, organize a memorial service, and get a damn grave dug. All of these things take days to take care of, and you cannot do all that in one day, not unless you belong to an organized-crime family. It's not like running out to pick up a McRib sandwich or something. Jesus.