|
Sorry to have taken so long to respond to some of your other points. Once again, your own statements are in bold:
You see I don't think that mocking was meant to appease PJo fans, they certainly didn't do anything else to appease them that year after all. We have to remember PJo was a critical favourite too. It wasn't just screaming Pacey girls. Critics were raving about it. I think those lines were trying to take the usual complaints about DJo as a bit of a manifesto as to how they were going to prove us wrong. While also backtracking on the Coda kiss that they pushed in there because they thought Season 5 would never happen.
The writers didn’t do much to please Pacey/Joey fans in this season…apart from keeping Dawson and Joey apart for much of it for spurious reasons (having Dawson blame Joey for the death of his father was one of the lowest things the writers ever did to him). There was no ‘backtracking’ of the ‘Coda’ kiss. There was just no resolution of it (until a very bad season finale). If they did little to please Joey/Pacey fans, they did very little to please Dawson/Joey fans either. Putting Joey with Prof. Wilder! Getting Dawson and Jen back together (and then having them live together and then splitting up in the course of a few months…ridiculous!) Let’s all admit it – the final two seasons were (apart from a couple of episodes and a couple of characters here and there) a washout, with little to please either of the shippers.
Quote:
You'll have to refresh my memory, was there a part of Anti Prom were Dawson commented on her bracelet like he didn't know it was her mother's? I never got the impression that is what that line was about. The point was about showing how close Pacey and Joey had become that year, how he wasn't impressed by the diamonds like everyone else was. It was more like Beauty Contest where everyone is marveling at how pretty scrubbed up Joey looks and Joey says 'Its just hairspray'. When he remembers everything he's saying he's remembering every little moment they had together, including the one where she mentioned the bracelet in her blue snowflake sweater. And it makes her remember how she felt during that time and how happy she was compared to how she felt in that moment. I will also point out that knowing about someone isn't necessarily knowing someone. When Pacey is saying 'This is you' he's saying he knows Joey and what matters to Joey. And this is born out through the course of the series, how Pacey can see right through her. He's the first to know she's crushing on Dawson, he's the first to call her out on it when Dawson is oblivious. He can get to the heart of what she doesn't want to say, like the 'You don't want to lose your place' comment in season 5. So when he says 'Its not you', its very consistent with Pacey understanding her nature if not her exhaustive biography. I don't think that excludes Dawson, its not really about him.
The Pacey line: ‘I remember everything’ was clearly meant to suggest (since he was in open competition with Dawson at this point) ‘and Dawson doesn’t’. It is a low blow, given the fact that Dawson actually knew Joey’s mother and cared about her, whereas Pacey and Joey didn’t even like each other when they were younger. Your suggestion that Pacey knows about Joey (better than...who?) is stretching things. That he figured out in Season 1 that Joey was in love with Dawson (not crushing on him) hardly demonstrates any great powers of perception. Everyone knew that she was in love with Dawson (including the dogs on the street), apart from Dawson. Everyone. Jen knew it. Grams knew it. Dawson’s parents knew it. Her father knew it (from prison no less). Bessie knew it. The ‘psychic’ woman in the Halloween episode knew it within a minute and a half. Everyone knows. Even Pacey. Joey tells us who knows her best: Dawson. She asks him to write that part of her college application for her (which Pacey is not particularly happy about).
You never heard the complaints about Pacey in season 5? They had no idea what to do with him at all and he risked becoming a walking STD. How many girls did he have that year? I want to say 6, he said he slept with 7 girls before Audrey I think and we know of 3 between 1-4. So he had named, Melanie, Audrey, Karen, he nearly cheated on Audrey after so that leaves 2?
I did hear the complaints from Pacey lovers about Season 5. I wasn’t particularly impressed with these complaints then because I didn’t hear these same fans complaining when Dawson and Andie had their characters assassinated to facilitate a Pacey/Joey pairing in Season 3. In any case, I didn’t think there was any attempt to destroy his character in Season 5. He did behave out-of-character, but as I said before they were all behaving out of character at various times through the series. For example, not once did I buy it that Pacey would sleep with a married woman as he does in the finale. It wouldn’t happen. Nonsense. That he slept with 7 girls before Audrey…ok, I think it’s a stretch but it doesn’t bother me. But he would never encourage someone to cheat on a marriage or get involved in that kind of triangle.
Quote:
Its not so much that she is over Pacey in season 5, its just that its ignored beyond one scene. Rememeber that part where Audrey is talking about Joey dating other guys with Pacey there and Joey is really uncomfortable. JJax improved the extreme discomfort of Pacey while in the room and complained off screen 'There is no history on this show'. It hangs about as something that is not really said beyond a line or a mannerism. I remember in Four Scary Stories Joey says 'Who's Karen?' and Pacey says 'Do we really want to go through this now?' to which Joey replied 'Sorry, sugar rush'. Later in the season Audrey tries to set up a fake fight between her and Joey over Pacey that turns into a real one that blurs a line between joke and reality. Audrey clearly feels second best to Joey but that is mostly in Season 6 as they ramp up to Merry Mayhem. How do you reconcile 'I just don't feel it' with 'Its hard to be sorry for something that has been in the back of your mind' or her phone call at the end of that 'That was Then'? Or in Sex and Violence when she agrees to go to his apartment to sleep with him? The smile on her face that just drops when she sees Eddie and the way she says she moved on from him? Or in Clean and Sober when honest drunk Joey (the same honest drunk Joey that kissed Dawson in Season 1) says she never got over Pacey before kissing him? They were well into getting back together before Harley brings up bad memories of Prom. The british channel E4 did a great trailer focusing on how Joey ran hot and cold in those episodes.
Pacey and Joey's past relationship is not ignored in Season 5 – it’s just over (whereas, as she acknowledges, Dawson is her past, present and future'). As most viewers should have easily understood – there isn’t really any way to come back after ‘Promicide’ without requiring everyone to suspend credulity just to get two hot people together. The writers bring it up: they explicitly have Audrey ask Joey’s blessing because of her history with Pacey. Her past relationship with Pacey is emphasised. She explains something important to the viewer in that episode (and to Pacey – only he didn’t listen very closely): she doesn’t care who he sleeps with or who he is in a relationship with. All the viewers should know this by now because, as she explained carefully in Coda: the magic was gone. I completely agree with Pacey that ‘this show doesn’t do history’, and agree with your complaint that they tended to rush ahead without referencing back (hence all the Out of character behaviour). However, they did reference Pacey/Joey – to indicate why it didn’t work. In Season 6, after she is dumped by Eddie, Joey tries to give Pacey another go. He’s kind of an interregnum thing for her, filling in time. I don’t need to reconcile anything here – Joey’s last words to her relationship with Pacey clear things up beautifully. The second attempt with Pacey was for obvious reasons from Joey’s point of view: let’s see what happens between us if Dawson is not there in the foreground reminding me of other possibilities. And she finds out what happens – she doesn’t feel it, as she explains, ‘even without Dawson’. That she could drop Pacey for Eddie has always been the hardest thing to explain for Pacey/Joey shippers. Usually Dawson is held to blame for Joey’s supposedly bad choices, but here Joey explicitly sets out that Dawson is not the cause of this break up. The relationship with Pacey just doesn’t feel right. All the other episodes you are quoting come from before this breakup. Connecting ‘honest drunk’ Joey kissing Dawson in Season 1 to ‘honest drunk’ Joey kissing Pacey is Season 6 is a stretch. She would have preferred kissing … Eddie, had he been there. Basically, Joey gives the relationship a second go to see would it work without Dawson, and she finds out that the answer is, no, it wouldn’t.
|