Dear scenery: My sincere condolences. Signed, Sars -- because we've followed the shouting match indoors. Joey stomps behind Dawson into his room and says she didn't intend "for this to happen." Dawson shouts with an emphatic arm-flap that that "does not provide [him] any solace." "Solace"? "SOLACE"? Okay, who gets that mind-bendingly upset but can still come up with the word "solace" in an argument? Nobody, that's who. Anyhow. Dawson asks if she loves Pacey or does she just want to sleep with him, what, and Joey groans, "How could you say that?" Dawson adds, "Because it's what he's gonna expect," as though there's something wrong with that, not that Dawson would know because he's never slept with anyone himself, and there's nothing wrong with that either, but it's awfully easy to act all sanctimonious about it when you've never done it, and Dawson's continuing and utterly infantile expectation that the entire world and everyone in it slow down so that he and his unrealistic -- not to mention dead boring -- romantic notions can keep up drives me fucking bonkers, I don't mind telling you, but ANYHOW, Joey points out to him, god bless her, that she and Dawson aren't together and haven't been for nearly a year.

Dawson asks her if she's punishing him for not wanting to get back together with him, like, Dawson, come on over, and we'll go around the way to the Empire State Building with a grapple hook and a set of crampons so that you can climb to the tippy top and GET OVER YOURSELF; I mean, this high a level of self-regard in someone so obnoxious is INCOMPREHENSIBLE to me. Joey denies punishing him. Dawson says that Joey keeps saying she wants to go find herself and asks if Pacey's what she's been looking for this whole time; again, I know we've discussed this on the forums, but coming from Dawson, it's galling. Joey wails, "No!" and Dawson does a whole bunch of high-school-drama-club blocking, including the infamous run-the-hands-through-the-hair move, and asks how "two people who can barely stand to be in the same room with each other" end up outside his house discussing their future. I'd like to know how a dumb-ass with a higher opinion of himself than most demi-gods gets off asking that question when he's the one who condescendingly asked Pacey to "take care of" Joey in the first goddamn place, but Joey confines herself to remarking through tears that she can't explain, it just happened, and she starts to say that "everything between [Dawson and her] is so complicated," but Dawson interrupts to say that if things with them are complicated, Joey "made them that way." See my previous comments viz. a good point, but not coming from him. Dawson demands to know if Joey thinks that everything that was wrong when Joey was with him will "magically get better" if she's with Pacey. Joey quavers in a desperate tone that she doesn't know: "I just know that -- I need him." Dawson asks intently, "Do you need him like you need me?" Even Joey is speechless at this display of egotism, so Dawson says that "it's a simple question" and repeats it, but Joey gets to her feet and protests that he "can't do that" to her, that the two things have nothing to do with each other and that the way she feels about Pacey "is completely separate from the way that I feel about you, and our friendship." Dawson snorts dismissively that, right now, he and Joey don't have a friendship, and when Joey starts to splutter in disbelief, Dawson yells, "You can't have both of us! You can't have him as your boyfriend and me as your consolation prize [snort: some "prize"], you're going to have to make a choice, and I'll tell you right now, if you choose him, I'm not gonna be around to pick up the pieces when it all falls apart." Joey tries to get a word in, saying "no" over and over and fighting back tears, but Dawson isn't done: "This ruins everything! There's no goin' back." Amazingly, Joey doesn't throw up her hands in disgust and depart the premises forever, but, shouting, asks what he wants her to say, what he wants to hear; Dawson flounces past her, saying he doesn't want her to say anything, he wants her to leave. After he goes, Joey struggles to compose herself and climbs out the window. Katie Holmes did a good job with this scene, but damn -- James Van Der Beek left bicuspid grooves all over the room. ["I feel I must interject here with a comment to the young girls inexperienced in romance who think that kind of 'choose me or get lost' power-play is really romantic and tragic: It's not. It's emotional blackmail, and it's total bullshit. The person who demands that you choose is the person who doesn't get chosen. P.S. Dawson sucks!" -- Wing Chun]