Joey asks what Dawson's watching, and he tells her; she asks if they saw it on their first date, and he confirms that they did and calls the date "unsuccessful" movie-wise. Joey asks, more fearfully than last time, what he means by that, and he says they never got to see the end. He recaps the film's plot again, but using more clipped cadences than he did before, and when he gets to the part about "everyone alone, everyone hating each other," he shoots Joey a look of smug loathing as she sits stiffly on his bed. After he delivers his "pretty depressing, I don't know why I'm watching it" line and snaps the TV off, he sets his jaw and asks coldly, "So what was it you wanted to talk about?" Joey gibbers her excuse about Bessie and Alexander and takes off. After she goes out the window, Dawson half-sobs angrily and pinches the bridge of his nose. ["I seriously, SERIOUSLY could not despise Dawson more if he came to my house, slapped my mom around, and took a shit on my floor. Even as a fictional character, he is a reprehensible excuse for a human being. This scene turned my stomach. He is evil. And the idea that the show's teenaged female audience is meant to side with him and his outrage over the moving-on of the girlfriend with whom he broke up A YEAR AGO is even more reprehensible. Shame on the writers for trying to make him seem sympathetic here. Dawson doesn't deserve to have friends so concerned about what his reaction to their happiness might be; Dawson doesn't deserve to have friends, period." -- Wing Chun]

Cut to the porch/lawn scene. Dawson opens the front door and slips halfway through it to see Pacey and Joey holding hands; Joey is protesting that she tried to tell Dawson the truth but couldn't bring herself to do it. A shot of Dawson's giant, livid jaw before we hear Pacey's murmured "you failed, right?" line, and Dawson pulls himself together and clomps towards the front of the porch. Fade forward to Pacey apologizing that they didn't want to tell him "this way" and Dawson saying smugly, "You didn't tell me." Joey looks at him, stunned, and says that he knows, doesn't he, and he flaps the nostrils and says yeah, he knows, and Joey looks terrified -- as she should, since Dawson's nose is threatening to block out all the forms of sunlight on which life on this planet depends -- and Dawson asks all sneering if she planned on telling him, "or was this just gonna be a secret fling?" Joey argues that "it's not like that," and Dawson asks what it was like then, "because Jen was a little short on details." "She told you?" Joey gasps, and Dawson shrugs that Jen "thought [he] knew," and his nostrils imitate a bellows as he continues in a quavering voice, "I'd have to be pretty frickin' stupid not to know, right, that the two people I trusted most in the world were lying to me?" Dawson's lips form that self-satisfied butthole shape we've all come to know and despise; then he parts them to ask Joey, "So are you, are you bored, are you confused, or just malicious?" Like anyone cares enough about you to spite you actively, Dawson. I mean, Joey has acted pretty capricious romance-wise over the last two seasons, but coming from Dawson, the criticism really rankles. Joey looks down and shifts from foot to foot, and Pacey steps up to tell Dawson that, if he blames anyone, he should blame Pacey, but Dawson cuts him off: "I don't think you're in any position to talk about what's fair. You were my best friend." Pacey, evenly: "I still am." Dawson finds that "a little hard to process right now," and Pacey tells him softly, "It's the truth, Dawson."