Dawson's Creek - 515 - Downtown Crossing

 Original air date: February 13, 2002

When we last left our Boston crew, Dawson had wrapped filming an angry white boy movie, Pacey and Audrey might be dating, Jen and Jack might be reuniting, and Joey got manipulated into liking her professor. If you wanted to see where any of that was going, too bad! Oh, you thought that ominous To Be Continued, meant that the storyline was, you know, being continued? No, heck no. We are in for a very special episode and the official start of Joey's Creek. You thought I was joking back in season 4 that the college years were more about Joey but if anything cements that fact it's this episode right here. Did Dawson get an episode where he's the only cast member to appear and it's all about him? No, because he sucks and this show is Joey's now. Let's go.

We pick up the episode right where we left off, with Joey walking down the streets of Boston alone. She is dreamily walking around because she's happy and getting a bit full of herself, if you ask me based on last episode where she declares herself Dawson's sign. I was always baffled as to why last episode got a To Be Continued when it seemingly ended quite randomly and not on any type of conceivable cliffhanger other than, Joey walks down a street and pretends to be a baseball player with a snowball. Like what even were they going to do from this? Apparently, where they were going is that Joey goes to an ATM to take out some cash and call Professor Wilder. We don't hear him but he apparently tells her to call him David and she says it feels weird. It feels weird because he's your professor and you're only used to referring to him by the very position in which he holds power over you. I'm sorry, I cannot stop harping on how creepy and not hot this is. To make matters creepier, a guy is trying to get into the ATM area but it's night so only card holders can get in, so he walks off. 

Joey leaves only for the man to start following her. He crosses the street and is now behind her and I cannot tell you how much this is every woman's nightmare. The tension is really great, and then he lunges in front of her and says "hey" and Joey flinches in surprise but goes around him to continue walking. Then the mugger starts to banter and the whole story has lost all tension. He quips that he's not going to mug her but he's still getting in her face so like, you know something bad is going to happen and honestly the least awful scenario is a mugging. The guy has the gall to joke about how he's not going to rape her as if that would make any girl walking late at night being accosted by a man feel any better. Like, even if he was going to do nothing, saying "I'm not going to rape you" does nothing to calm a person you followed and now won't leave alone. Go. Away. Unfortunately, this guy wants money and Joey declines to give him any so guess what this guy is going to do? Yep, mug her. He's a lying liar who lied so, you know his whole thing about not raping her is looking less and less true by the minute, especially since he's now brandishing a gun. 

So, as per very special episode rules, we are treated to a much more somber opening credits sequence. Everyone's names are over a dark night sky with wind whistling through to set this lonely, cold, late night feel. It's weird to me that not even Mitch's death warranted this kind of gravitas. This is the episode they really want to stand out in your mind. This is the one that's special and oh man, I can't tell you how much I hate this episode. Actually, I can and I'm gonna, so just bear with me.

Ooooh, so dark and gritty! This ain't your grandma's Dawson's Creek

So, if all of that scared you or set you at unease, allow the writers of this show to ruin all of that for you because, guess what? After brandishing a gun at one of our beloved characters, the mugger just banters more. Like most people, they're just going to demand money, rip your wallet out of your hand and dip, hopefully without shooting you. They're not going to argue with you about whether you're rich and can afford this because you go to a fancy Ivy League school. He even says the line "we're going to have to get past this if we want to have a successful mugger/muggee relationship." Like, yeah, this is how muggers talk. Dawson's Creek gets shit on a lot for it's fancy and quippy dialogue and honestly? It never bugged me before, I liked it. It was part of its charm. But here, for an episode like this, it does not work. I can see how ridiculous it sounds now because this character, should not be talking this way. I'm not saying muggers can't be smart or talk fancy but speed is of the essence in that line of work especially if you're not wearing a mask and this dude is not and is just talking up a storm with her, letting her see his face and memorize it, hear his voice clear as day. This is not smart mugger behaviour.

In any other context, the fact that the mugger is showing his face so easily can add to the dread because you get this sense that it's not going to end well for the character but here, you know Joey's getting out of this. Come on, she's the main character. So, all it does is just remove tension and make a viewer bored. I'm sitting here going "just mug her already and leave!" and I don't think that should be my reaction, right?

Anyway, this guy takes her money and reveals that she only took out a $20. He's bummed and asks if she has a cell phone or something. Joey tries to lie but he threatens to pat her down and gets creepy again, I really want to stress that he makes jokes about raping her because just wait. She hands over her cell phone and he eagerly starts checking it out. Joey takes a step back and we get the return of Joey the Vampire Slayer! Oh man, I forgot her weird, hidden kick boxing skill makes a comeback.

The return of Joey's mysterious fighting ability
even caught the mugger off guard

Unfortunately, he catches back up with her and tackles her to the ground. I can't believe no one is outside and seeing this but let's just go with that Boston is a ghost town at night I mean, I don't know I've never been. It very well could be. He demands the phone back, since she grabbed it in their scuffle to try and call the police and she gives it to him. He then demands to know her name under threat of being shot and when she tells him he says that he likes boy's names for girls and says it's cute. ugh, I hate this douche. I mean, we're supposed to. At least, at this point we're supposed to but hold on. He then takes her wallet and sees her ATM and decides to force her back to the bank to take out her money.

Joey tells him she only has $27 in her account but when they check she actually has a whopping $47. The mugger is not pleased but then checks her savings account where she has just over $500. He takes it out, super pleased with himself. Joey tells him to get a job and the mugger is like, I have one it's in sales. Joey guesses telemarketing but the mugger says it's pharmaceuticals. He's a drug dealer in other words, do you get why this is boring yet? They're chit chatting while in a mugging. This is not going to happen in real life and I know it's just a show but this is not as interesting or as tense as they think it is. It's tedious. 

He goes on about how much he likes Joey and how she's super special because she kept herself together and her sense of humour. He thinks that in another time and place they might have made a great couple. Even the muggers fall for Joey. Oh man, it's starting. My hatred for Joey is already heating up. She is (justly) completely grossed out by the suggestion and the mugger does not make things better by asking if she's a virgin. Joey asks if he could be a bigger dick and he responds by saying he could kill her, or worse so that's rape threat number three? It's ok though, because it's just a prank bro. He's just messing with her. Hot tip, women do not find rape threats funny, ever. Especially when made by strangers and especially stranger who are in the process of mugging them. Just keep this in mind, please. Keep all this info in mind. He asks her for dating advice, namely how to make it up to a girl who is pissed at you. Joey suggests getting her something and tries to walk away but the mugger demands her coat. So now, he's taken all of her savings, her coat in the dead of winter, made multiple "joking" threats on her life, and multiple rape threats. He does leave her with a scarf though so I guess he's "nice"? Joey leaves the bank, bewildered and cold. She hears a whistling and it's the asshat mugger waving goodbye to her and kind of rubbing it in her face that he has her coat but then blam! He's hit by a car that drives away super fast.

Joey is shocked by this turn of events. She walks over to the mugger, grabs her coat and then checks his pockets for her phone. He wakes up and grabs her hand, telling her not to. Joey insists she's calling for help but he thinks she's going to call the cops. I mean, both will come for a hit and run and it's either she calls for help or you die but whatever. He insists she give him the phone and he chucks it down the street. Joey goes after it but he pulls the gun on her again. She tells him she's going to go for the phone and call 911 but he threatens to shoot again. He then pulls the trigger but we just hear a click because it's not loaded. Joey freaks out that the gun was never loaded but like...does it matter? Does that make him a better person? Maybe a teeny tiny bit but he still threatened her life and used the gun as if he were going to kill her. 

Joey calls the ambulance and waits with the mugger for them to arrive. They chat a bit more because they really think they're doing something with this episode. She helps him light a cigarette, which I don't know, if I were in pain and having a hard time breathing, my first instinct wouldn't be to want a hit of my vice but I'm not a smoker so maybe I just don't get it? They bond over dead parents who both died of lung cancer, apparently Lilian Potter was a smoker and Joey swore she never would but I could swear they said that she died of breast cancer? I don't know why but I just can't picture Lilian as the smoker in the family. 

Joey asks him if he's a drug dealer why is he mugging college girls since drug dealing is usually really lucrative. The answer is, the writers just think criminals do all criminal things and also banter politely with their victims. His excuse is that he's going through a dry spell right now and needs the cash. He also makes sure to call his wife a demanding wench so that's neat. I sure do feel bad for this shithole character, please don't let him die, that would suck, I say with all the sarcasm the world has to offer me. Joey offers to call his wife but he doesn't want her to. Joey asks how they met and he tells her they met in highschool. Then he asks why she's being so nice to which she says that she just wants to see him put in jail but then she confesses that her dad is a drug dealer. Ah, this is the angle they're going with. I still hate it. Joey says that she never understood why her father did it and maybe she's being nice to him because she wants to know why. The cops finally roll up and ask Joey if she's ok.  He asks about the mugging and the getting hit by a car and thinks that if stuff like this happened more often, he'd be out of a job. One could only hope. Anyway, he suggests Joey go to the hospital but she just wants to go home. Then she faints.

Joey wakes up in the hospital and the doctor tells her that she was in shock which given what happened to her, makes sense. She's good to go though but Joey wants to know how the guy is doing. The doctor tells her he's fine but that he's still in surgery with lots of internal bleeding so...not fine? I can't tell if the doctor was being sarcastic but I think he was since he referred to him as the creep who mugged her which is super fair, just maybe a bit unprofessional. Anyway, Joey grabs her coat to leave when she sees a little girl alone in the hallway. She asks where her parents are but the little girl just thinks Joey's hair is pretty because Joey is the most perfect girl to ever grace the Earth. I'm sorry, it's my weird hatred of how her character is treated from here on out seeping in. She takes the girl by the hand and offers to help her find her mom and like two seconds later they see her and it's a wild Mercedes McNabb!

Aka: Harmony from Buffy the Vampire Slayer!

The mom is super thankful and grateful but just as Joey is about to walk off she asks for a big favour which is not a thing any normal stranger would do. Like, yes Joey brought her daughter to her but why in the hell would she then want Joey to watch over her child while she does other things? I'm sorry, I'll be intensely grateful should something like this happen to my kid but once I get my kid back, I'm certainly not going to ask the stranger to babysit for me. It's weird. This whole episode is weird and unrealistic in a way that is not fun tv unrealistic just gratingly hard to swallow. Joey agrees and takes the girl aside where she reveals that her daddy got hit by a car. Oops. 

The mom comes back with coffee for Joey and thanks her again. She introduces herself as Grace and her daughter as Sammy. Guys name for girls. Oops. Have we pieced this contrivance together yet? Yeah, this is the mugger's wife and kid. Grace tells Joey that her husband was in a car accident but she hasn't gotten any details yet and then mentions that they're not together. She asks Joey what she's here for and Joey actually reveals that she was mugged. Grace asks if she's ok and Joey says she's just shaken up but then asks about her husband. Joey, you can't possibly still be wondering, it's so obvious this is the family he was talking about. Grace unloads all her drama and it's boring but basically it's just to tell us that she kicked the guy out but her daughter is too young to understand and still cries for him every night. You see, they are drawing some very meaningful parallels here to Joey's life. Can you tell how not riveted I am? Grace asks about the mugger again and Joey lays out what happened and that just as he was about to get away, he was hit by a car. Grace gets a kind of oh shit face and asks where it happened. Joey tells her Downtown Crossing and Grace immediately puts two and two together. She's pissed and disgusted and apologizes to Joey because she thinks the mugger is her husband. 

In a bid to make her feel better, Joey says he was nice about it and like no. No, he was not. He repeatedly threatened her life and to rape her. Yeah, yeah, he said he wasn't gonna and was just messing around but I'm sorry, you don't get to say those things to someone you don't know and assume they'll be put at ease by a stranger's assurance they won't be harmed especially when that person is holding a gun to your head. Yeah, the gun wasn't loaded but that still doesn't absolve him. What are they doing with this story? I hate this episode so much. No, I'll save the rant to the end, just breathe. We gotta get through this, ok? Grace is me and is not comforted that her husband mugged a girl at gunpoint in a "nice" way and decides to dip with her daughter. 

Joey is no one in this situation because she's shocked that the wife would leave. Grace absolutely should leave and has a right to feel any damn way she wants about this. Joey, he threatened your life and made rape jokes towards you, how do you think that translates into "good father" for a little girl? She is better off without him, to be quite frank. Joey tries to shame this woman by saying that she should give her little girl a chance to say goodbye and I can kind of see that but at the same time, it's none of Joey's business and what if the guy does make it and assumes everything is ok and that he can insert himself back into their lives? Is that a good thing for her? Grace tells Joey to butt out and leaves.

Out pops a doctor who asks what Joey is still doing here and Joey tries to say that the wife just left but the doctor says that actually, this guy was looking for her. Imagine if the wife hadn't left. Imagine if the doctor came out, the wife and daughter are still there, anxious to hear anything and the doctor is like, nah, fam, he actually wants to talk to the stranger he mugged. How would that make a little girl who thinks her father can do no wrong feel, Joey? HMMMM?? Because guess how this is going to go? They had to write the family leaving otherwise this next part would really infuriate me, it still does but just a bit less. The doctor tells this stranger (hello, HIPPA??) that he's got a sucking chest wound and that they're waiting to see if he needs more surgery. He then tells her she doesn't have to do this because WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THIS???

Joey walks in and the mugger asks how he looks. She tells him he looks hideous. He starts talking about apologizing but Joey says she wouldn't forgive him anyway. Again, why is she here? Joey mentions his wife and kid but that they also left. She mentions his daughter and how it sucks that she has a dickhead for a dad and he retorts that she did too but she turned out great. She's smart and funny and hot and oh my god, does one of the writers have a crush on Katie Holmes? This episode has done nothing but awkwardly flatter her which makes it feel like some weird fanfic or something. It also just feels gross him talking about her like this in relation to his daughter also turning out fine? Anyway, the reason he brought her here was because she asked why he would do this when he had a daughter who loved him and he wants to answer.

You see, he held a girl up at gunpoint and made repeated jokes about raping and killing her, and stole her money because he stole his kid's $500 daycare payment to buy dope and wanted to repay it. That's not even a cool motive, it's shitty and also still a crime. He's just the worst kind of loser and I really hope this show wasn't expecting me to feel bad for this loser. But they do because he asks if his daughter will ever forgive him and Joey launches into a story about how her dad took her to a park for her birthday and they played together for hours. She says that he did a lot of really shitty things but that this one day still goes down in the books as one of the best days. This offers some comfort to the guy and here is where I go on a music rant.

Ok, so at the beginning of the episode, Joey is humming. She is humming a very specific song but in the Netflix version, it's silence. Silence is all you hear which is odd because you can even see her moving her lips like she is saying something. What she's supposed to be humming is the tune to Close To You by The Carpenters. I'm sorry, they had to cut out her going "hmmm hmm hmmm Close to you..." because what? that was too expensive?? How does music licensing work exactly? Because now I'm confused. I thought actors singing made it cheaper but she's not even singing the whole damn song. She's literally humming and singing three words. And it's supposed to tie into this scene where he asks her what she was singing and she reveals it's a song her dad used to sing to her and they start singing it together. THEY JUST CHOPPED IT OUT. Literally they go from her telling him that day with her dad was the best ever and then him coughing and then back to her and she's got a tear and he dies. Like, I hate this episode and I think that part was so overly cheesy and it's probably better for having been cut that they sing it together (just a bit of the chorus not the whole song) but come on! They seriously couldn't allow that much to be used? Yes, they had a cover of the song playing at the end of the episode but why not just leave in their singing and use your generic pop to cover the actual song like you usually do? This is so bizarre to me. Why are they cutting stuff like this?? I actually tracked down a bootleg episode online and the scene is there, in tact, and I have to say neither of them are singing it in an egregious way, like they're mumbling under their breath. Are The Carpenters really that pressed about the mentioning, humming, talk-singing of their song that they demand to be paid for that? 

Hey, I was supposed to be singing before you died!

Anyway, he dies. Joey sads. She leaves and bumps into Grace and Sammy who've returned and Joey let's them know he didn't make it. Grace sits down and cries and Joey walks over to Sammy who asks her if her daddy did something bad to her. Joey lies and says he didn't and that he actually did something nice. She tells her that she was not watching while crossing the street and he pushed her out of the way, thus keeping him a hero in Sammy's eyes. Grace mouths a thank you to Joey. As Grace is consoling her daughter, Joey slips her money that the mugger took from her, into Grace's jacket pocket. She walks out of the hospital and thus endeth the episode.

Hoo boy, they really really thought they were doing something here. I saw one of their old promos of it and yeah, they thought this was going to be Emmy worthy from the sounds of that commercial and I hate it. I hate all of it. Was Joey nice for giving her money to the family? Yes, absolutely that was nice because it wasn't the little girl's fault her father sucked so incredibly hard. But everything else? It's dull, it's lifeless, it lacked tension and realism, and I don't think the ending worked at all. In that, Joey is called in to see him on his deathbed so that they could exchange more stories. Like, great this is a story about compassion and understanding but I'm sorry, given what the guy did, I don't think he deserves it. Yes, he happened to have a wife and kid but he's still a piece of trash, not because he's a drug dealer but because he held a teenaged girl up at gunpoint and made jokes about raping and killing her multiple times. I'm sorry but I got no sympathy for him. Karma definitely got him and I don't care. I think they spent way too much time with the mugger and he sucks. This episode would have been improved tenfold if they made it less about Joey and the mugger and more about Joey and the family. Seeing that there was another side to him that way, through their eyes and giving compassion to them rather than the mugger. I don't think he deserves compassion. I guess Joey is a better person than me though. 

I've tried looking into why this episode exists and I'm not finding much about it other than making me feel like I'm in the minority for hating it because apparently this episode blew most people away. Look, Katie did a great job for her monologue about her dad and it was a nice bit of info about her life that we don't get to see often. I still stand by that the framing of this episode is way off and I don't want to sympathize with a man who steals his daughter's daycare money, then mugs a college girl at gunpoint while making "jokes" about killing and/or raping her. I'm sorry if that makes me heartless but this story didn't work for me. I think it might have been fixed had they had the guy seem less relaxed, cocky, and snarky about the whole thing, have him not have a gun, and seem way more panicked and desperate. The mugging and the car accident should have been all done before the credits. Joey and mugger have their confrontation as she tries to call for help, she learns the "gun" was just his fingers in his pocket, making him seem more desperate and a bit pathetic. They have their exchange, police come, Joey faints and she wakes up in the hospital where she runs into the family, the rest of the episode can happen as is, except maybe don't write in that the mugger wants to see Joey instead of his family as a dying request. That's a bit garbage on his part too and I have no idea how you could rework that. Maybe have the wife insist that he clear his conscience and pull Joey in herself? There's really no point in doing this because the episode is decades in the can but I think this would have helped things. My main point is that if the mugger is Joey's dad, and the girl is Joey then I think Joey should have made more of a connection with the girl and they should have developed that more and waaaay less with the mugger.

Next time we return to the Creek, the storyline will actually matter to the season's plotlines so yay. But you'll have to wait until we get to A Lonely Place.