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STUDIO: Sony Pictures
MSRP: $119.95
RATED: Not Rated
RUNNING TIME: 948 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
Commentary on the series finale
Scrapbook
Bonus CD
Deleted Scenes
Featurette
The Pitch
You remember when Indiana Jones told Marion to not look at the ghosts coming out of the Ark of the Covenant? I looked at them, people. I saw that crazy old Jewish ghost lady turn into a skeleton. I welcome the face melting.
The Humans
James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Michelle Williams, Joshua Jackson, Kerr Smith
The Nutshell
Joey almost takes over the show in the final season. Dawson’s arc for the season involves him working for some asshole director and dating a hot actress. Pacey, Jen, Jack and the others spend their time chatting with Joey at the bar. She works, they bullshit about nothing. People grow, people go to rehab and there’s a future flash-forward. Then, the show finally dies.
The Lowdown
Joey Potter is such a half-assed character when you think about it. She goes from the girl next door trying to understand her role as a future sex object. While the show was supposed to belong to Dawson and his fascination with her, it is shat into something else. Joey has become the face of everything that didn’t work with Kevin Williamson’s television project. There is no grand plan about idealistic dreamers that find themselves among a band of friends. The entire show is about nothing more than a fucking girl who can’t make up her mind.
Dawson’s Creek takes on this truly fucked dimension when you watch the show from the pilot to the finale. Dawson is such a bit player in his own life that you can’t help but to despise him. He only discovers that he’s alive when his father dies. The desperate attempt to strangle maturity out of the early college experience makes one wonder what’s going on. That’s when Joey enters back into the picture.
From the first season to the last, she’s the ultimate succubus. She fucks up Dawson’s plans to be the successful Spielberg prototype. She drives a wedge between Pacey and Dawson that is never truly healed. Fuck, she even turns on her father and sends him to jail on a charge that she never directly witnessed. Joey Potter is this big raging rag of hate.
While everyone else tries to fight against Joey’s whirlpool of bitch, she never progresses. She becomes this creation of what she wanted but never attained. She’s educated but not a genius. She works in publishing, but she’s just another cog in the machine. If that wasn’t enough, you have to deal with her role in the finale. It’s almost as though Kevin Williamson wanted to drive the point home.
When the show advances five years into the future, we get a finale that is unearned. Jen is dying from something or another, while the gang reunites. There’s a wedding and the gay dude landed a guy. Dawson forces Joey to choose in a moment of unseen testicular fortitude. Joey goes off with Pacey to make his life miserable. Thus, we’re left with an older Dawson back at the start of his television life. Just another sad bastard staring into a creek and hoping for his life to suddenly match his dreams.
In
the
end, this show only succeeded in pissing me off. I could buy the downer ending if there was anything to suggest that it was earned. The series creator Kevin Williamson shows up to try and salvage the dying body of his creative body. Piecing together loose pieces of original theory after four years of shit does no favors. What have you is the bloated body of a pop culture footnote packaged together in a rather nice looking DVD release. I can’t say that I recommend buying it. But, if you have the time…rent it. The show takes on a new perspective once you realize that Joey is the villain of the piece.
is the last time I’ll be a legit television star. Just let me savor the moment.
The Package
The Complete Series Package actually contains real special features on a bonus disc. There’s a final page inset that includes some key recipes throughout the series. If that wasn’t enough, you get featurettes that take a look back at the show’s six years on the air. Plus, there are deleted scenes and the alternate ending to the original pilot. For the gamers, there’s a trivia game that works like a limp dick in the crumpled hand of Stephen Hawking.
The key inclusion is a bonus CD that contains five songs. If you actually care about what’s on there, it’s some Paula Cole and Shawn Colvin. There are other bands that were shat out of Adult Contemporary during the dying days of American Supremacy in the Western World. I don’t know what the point of the bonus CD was meant to be. Who the hell pops in a piece of physical media that only contains five songs. Am I supposed to wistfully remember the Discman era and forsake my IPOD? Will Steve Jobs allow that to happen?
After seventy plus hours of Dawson’s Creek, I don’t give a damn anymore. Teen melodrama works in cycles and it never ends. Love, lust, anger, regret, reconciliation and cancellation. It never ends. Actors grow older and new shows replace the old stock. Networks rise and fall. But, there’s always the latest fresh face cattle to mope and eye-fuck the audience into ratings gold.