Again With This: Dawson's, Melrose, 90210

It was just one episode ago when Dawson thought he'd discovered a link between Eve and Jen, but that's not the titular secret -- it's about Gale and therefore much more boring. Jen wouldn't have time to deal with the bombshell of a possible half-sister anyway: as Capeside's latest Homecoming Queen, she has the responsibility of...planning a gala for fifty years' worth of past Queens? When Jen visi...

Dawson has arrived at the film noir section of his film class, and why not -- he's living in one, what with femme fatale Eve mysteriously popping up and disappearing all the time, making him feel like a mark! He's just snapped off The Lady From Shanghai when he notices shady doings across the way at Grams's place, and wouldn't you know it: the person creeping around with a flashlight is none other...

We are NOT here for football, and yet it keeps happening to us! Offscreen Gale gives Dawson an opportunity to produce a human interest piece for a national news broadcast , completely on his own. He decides to do something about Jack, the gay football star, and gets signoff from everyone except Jack's coach, Mitch. Jen is also implicated in football culture when the other cheerleaders make a kiss...

The entire junior class is in a tizzy about the imminent PSAT, the practice for the test that could possibly determine the entire course of their lives. But maybe they don't ALL have to stress about it so much: somehow, Eve comes into possession of a copy, which -- in her established role as a chaos agent -- she gives to Dawson. Then, he lets all his closest friends know he has it so that they can...

Mitch is, as we learned in the premiere, Capeside High's football coach, and both he and Principal Green are very focused on turning around the team's years-long losing streak. (This contradicts what we were told about now long-gone football star Cliff, but never mind; he's in a better place.) Mitch and the principal thus enlist Dawson to create a promotional film for the team, and somehow he find...

Dawson, returning from spending his whole offscreen summer in Philadelphia with Gale, ends up on a bus next to a very confident pixie-cut blonde. When she disappears after he apparently bores them both to sleep yammering about Joey, he assumes he'll never see her again. He assumes wrong, and is no match for her aggressive come-ons. Her sexual overtures while Dawson's out driving them around in Mit...

We’re off this week but we bring you two Again With Again With This episodes full of SPIDERS?! and death traps. AWAWT 092: Let's Watch Thomas Calabro, Patrick Muldoon, AND Vanessa Williams In  Ice Spiders ! What happens when a top-secret scientific task force tries to breed gigantic spiders in order to harvest their extremely strong and versatile silk? Well, the spiders break out and menace a ski...

We’re off this week but we bring you two Again With Again With This episodes full of Jasons Priestly. AWAWT 123: Let's Watch Jason Priestley In  Christmas At Tiffani's ! In this special holiday episode of Dinner At Tiffani's , our titular hostess -- with some assistance from her real husband, Brady Smith -- throws a dinner party for two of her TV husbands, the guy who was her 90210 love interest f...

Dawson has a secret and REALLY wishes he didn't. Hoping to avoid telling Joey about her dad's return to drug dealing, he takes Gale's advice and goes straight to Mike, telling him what he knows in the hopes that Mike will...knock it off? Or something? Instead, The Icehouse gets firebombed while all the cocaine -- oh, and also all the kids we know -- are inside. The situation does bring Pacey's dad...

Jack having resolved, at the end of the last episode, to call his dad for help with Andie since he couldn't put it off a single second longer, Joseph arrives with a distinctly unhelpful announcement: he's selling the house and bringing the kids back to Providence so that both Andie AND her extremely offscreen mother can get full-time medical care. This is, of course, bad news: Andie doesn't want t...

However Joey and Dawson might classify whatever they're currently doing relationship-wise, they've been doing it for a month, so Dawson is taking her out for dinner at Capeside's fanciest French restaurant, Entre Nous. Except oh no, when Dawson made his reservation two weeks ago, the maître d' didn't realize there were TWO Leery parties of two, and he's already seated the only one he thought he ha...

As the news of Abby's passing spreads through Capeside, everyone gets a chance to make it about them. Girls at school who were definitely not Abby's friends distribute yellow armbands in her memory. Jen displaces her guilt onto Andie, then starts drinking. Andie -- worried that Jen might be right when she says Abby would still be alive if Andie hadn't kicked her and Jen out of the wedding -- doesn...

The Icehouse caters a wedding for Capeside blue-bloods! What could go wrong?! (Actually, it's...mostly fine.)

Dawson has a new teacher for film class, and (presumably) unlike Mr. Gold, she has an actual track record: Nicole Kennedy (Mädchen Amick!) is in town on sabbatical to write a screenplay and is just teaching as a lark? Also teaching as a lark: Mitch, who has apparently taken over Mr. Peterson's course load. Dawson's being as normal about it as he is able, but Mitch is not able to be normal about hi...

Dawson Leery makes the world bend to his will most of the time, so you can just imagine how much more of a monster he is around his birthday -- or, actually, you don't have to, because that's what this whole episode is about. As if Joey doesn't have enough on her mind right now in the hours after her second-ever boyfriend came out as gay, Dawson has decided that the thing that will make him feel c...

As Pacey wraps up his week's suspension, Capeside High is still abuzz with speculation about Jack's sexuality -- including from a very offscreen Mr. Milo, who's given up on getting Mrs. McPhee in to the school to discuss the situation (thanks to Andie running interference) and calls their dad to make his first-ever on-camera visit to town. Mr. McPhee endures Andie's nonstop chatter over dinner, th...

Jack is suddenly in Mr. Peterson's class with Pacey and no one else we know for not-at-all-contrived reasons: everyone is assigned to write a poem, but Jack is the only one Mr. Peterson calls on to read it aloud. Jack is upset enough by the reading to flee the class crying, and that combined with the fact that the subject was male causes the rumor to spread with lightning speed: Jack is gay. Joey...

It's so fortunate that Dawson happened to stop by Joey's art class the day she was sketching nude female Devon (Rachael Leigh Cook!) because it turns out she's also a drama student at the college and she's PERFECT to play "Sammy" in his movie...which is starting production mere hours after Dawson casts her! Jen's been busily lining up volunteers. Jack agrees even though he and Dawson only stopped...

The Capeside we heard way back at the end of Season 1 was wrapping up its tourist season is, months later, having a fishing contest. Pacey is going with his father John even though they hate each other. Mitch is going even though he knows nothing about fishing, so Dawson is going too, for the bonding. And: surprise! Jack is also going because Andie asked Pacey to invite him, and whoops, Pacey forg...

Conveniently -- almost TOO conveniently, you might say -- Mr. Peterson's English class has arrived at its unit on mysteries. Abby blows off his first attempt to get her to give her presentation. Then, thanks to Chris's eagle-eyed spotting of a folded note abandoned on the classroom floor, a mystery falls into her lap and inspires Abby to attempt a project that's a little unorthodox: solving the my...

Upon Andie's request, Pacey has gotten an HIV test, and presents her with his negative results. She makes sure he understands this isn't an immediate green light for them to have sex, and he's like, "I know, that's fine," and she's like, "Wait, you DON'T want to have sex with me?" and suddenly it's the only topic they're talking about -- other than when he runs into her in the drugstore and accost...

We’re off this week but we bring you two Again With Again With This episodes full of Melrose peeps and swimwear. AWAWT 141: Let’s Watch David Charvet And Brooke Langton On  Baywatch ! Baywatch S03.E01: River Of No Return, Pt. 1, isn’t only Charvet’s debut on the dominant syndicated T&A show of the nineties; it’s also Nicole Eggert’s… and Pamela Denise Anderson’s, so there’s a lot going on. Not...

The school year is nearly half over, so naturally it's time for the current sophomores to vote on who will represent them for, oh, six months or so. Andie understands that, as a new student, she's going to be at a deficit just because people don't know who she is, but she's also already looking ahead to her college applications so she's willing to risk it. She's also SO new that she thinks her tic...

Though his life has mostly sucked lately, Dawson gets some good news for a change: his horror movie won a special award at the extremely offscreen film festival in which he entered it, and the prize is a not insignificant amount of money to help him make his next movie. (Oof, the threat inherent in that phrase: Dawson's NEXT movie.) He's excited to reunite with Joey, his producer on the last film,...

Mr. Peterson, in whose English class everyone but Jack is enrolled, makes such a big, apocalyptic deal about the imminent midterm that all the students we know head straight for his afterschool study session. He's too sick to show up himself, however, so new lothario Chris Wolfe (future Roswell star Jason Behr) offers the use of his giant, currently parentless house for an off-campus cram. Andie d...