Let’s talk about professional wrestling for a minute.

The thing that strikes me most about this episode, which moves a lot of chess pieces in place for our second season finale of Dawson’s Creek, is the jarring tone juggling it manages to pull off. There are essentially two A-plots: On one side of town at a romantic French restaurant, a sextet engages in some high-concept sitcom-level shenanigans; at the same time, a deeply intense kitchen sink drama unfolds. It’s not always smooth, but I admire the balancing act.

Let’s begin with the goofball stuff first.

With the end of season two in sight, let’s take a look at the state of Jen Lindley. When she first arrived in Capeside back in the pilot, she was the outsider who instantly provided an object of affection for Dawson and a rival for Joey. In those early days, the show seemed interested in fleshing out Jen’s three-dimensional life: her sordid history on the streets of New York, her fraught relationship with her grandmother, her quest to use her exile in Capeside to reinvent herself, her complicated relationship with Dawson. But once the narrative zeroed in squarely on the ever-expanding dynamic between Dawson and Joey, Jen was left flapping in the wind. Since the end of the first season, she’s mostly been drifting between b-plots wherein she only occasionally brushes up against the rest of the core cast. Some of her biggest narrative moments—the death of her grandfather, the thawing of her relationship with Grams, her multi-episode relationship with Bible-thumping Tye—seem to exist in a vacuum, isolated from the rest of the show. It has made for some maddening inconsistency: Sometimes it seems like the core Capeside crew of Dawson, Joey and Pacey are not friends with Jen at all, and sometimes it seems like she’s still a centerpiece of their social lives.

This is all a shame, because obviously Michelle Williams is a tremendous talent, and her ability to grab ahold of characters was evident even in this early stage of her career.

Parenting is psychologically impossible, particularly for a mental weakling like myself. I constantly worry about what my son is thinking, and how he’s perceiving me and the rest of the world around him, and whether or not he’s going to grow up to be a well-adjusted human being. But there are internal struggles as well: For example, I am constantly trying to square the idea that the little guy is constantly growing and evolving. It’s been a joy watching him learn and grow, but it’s also devastating. Every time I think I have a handle on who this kid is, that version of him exits and is replaced by the updated version. Every day is a desperate attempt to hang onto something solid, but he slips through my fingers like so much beach sand. Everybody touts the inherent joy of raising a child, but nobody told me there would be so much coping on a daily basis.

I am depressed. That’s not a wild confession or revelation or anything; I’ve been depressed for long stretches of my adult life. When I’ve been in therapy, I usually trace its original manifestation back to my sophomore year in college, which was a tumultuous and disconcerting time in my life. But in watching this week’s episode of Dawson’s Creek, I so instantly identified with Dawson’s particular version of teenage ennui that I’m starting to wonder if perhaps my anxiety and hopelessness first began to creep in while I was still in high school. I know I have been rough on Dawson during this re-watch and have also wondered how I ever related to him the first time around, but his loneliness, ennui, and general malaise in this episode were all directly talking to me across the decades.

For a panoply of reasons, I never drank in high school. Part of it was because I was too afraid of breaking the rules, but part of it also felt like it was logistically difficult—my friends who partied always seemed to be figuring out exactly how to acquire alcohol and then map out specific opportunities to drink said booze. They always seemed like they were driving six towns over to get somebody’s distant cousin to make a run to the liquor store for them, and then had to figure out what place in the woods offered the best cover for their imbibing. It just seemed like it couldn’t be as much fun as all that was worth.

This entire two-part deal was supposed to be all about Jack coming out, but much like last week, “…That Is the Question” ends up getting hijacked by another character. Pacey is still on his crusade against tyrannical English teacher Mr. Peterson, but that story—as well as Jack’s—takes a back seat to the internal struggles of Joey Potter. It’s not that the episode doesn’t try, as it actually gives Kerr Smith a couple of spotlight moments, but the drama can’t help but be enveloped by Capeside’s number one ingenue.

For all its elevated conversations and teen angst, Dawson’s Creek never really fell into the “very special episode” trap. It was not a show that was particularly socially conscious or ever political. Perhaps to their detriment, the characters on the show were always so impossibly insular in their thinking that there was never really room for whatever issues the real world might have presented. There was no time for Dawson to fret about Y2K or for Jen to suddenly get invested in the fate of the Kosovo—the kids on Dawson’s Creek had feelings to feel and intense chats to have about them.

The second season of Dawson’s Creek represents its highest rank among network television series during its entire run. Though the average audiences were slightly smaller than its premiere season (an average of 6.6 million viewers in the first, down to 5.4 million in the second), it managed to tick up a few spots to be the 119th most watched show on broadcast TV that season. That’s not much, but it was progress for the WB, a still-fledgling network that was slowly grafting its identity to the teens who starred on their series and made up the bulk of their core demographic. Dawson’s Creek was still not as big as 7th Heaven, which had its biggest season ever that same year, but it had captured the imagination of the zeitgeist in a major way.

I’ve been rough on most of the parents involved in Dawson’s Creek, but I think it has been for good reason. Even though the marriage drama between Mitch and Gail Leery is fully relatable to most of the audience—half of all marriages do end in divorce—but since Dawson was the anchor of the primary teen drama in Capeside, anything happening in his home life undoubtedly felt perfunctory by comparison. For all of his borderline caustic self-analysis, Dawson largely approached his parents’ separation with whiny petulance. How could we, the eager viewing public tuning into the WB on Wednesday nights, care about Mitch and Gail while the far more interesting (and emotionally advanced) stories were happening in the bedrooms of high school kids?

It is perfectly absurd that human beings have to begin to learn how to navigate complicated relationships and feelings exactly at the time they are the most unable to process most anything at all. I’m not a child psychologist or anything, but it does strike me that teen romance is a necessary evil: At what other time in your life can you learn something about yourself emotionally, romantically, and sexually and have the stakes be so low? Not that teen pregnancy isn’t a thing, but in general I found my 16-year-old experiences with girlfriends educational if only so I knew what not to do down the line.

I sat for a long time trying to find a way into this episode that felt satisfying, either from a cultural context perspective or via a personal connection. Certainly there were options for both: this is the first official two-parter for Dawson’s Creek, although the end-of-episode cliffhanger is a little dramatically lame. And this is also an hour of TV I very vividly remember watching when it first aired: I was in a youth chorale that rehearsed on Wednesday nights, so I always had to record Dawson’s on VHS to then watch with my girlfriend and one of her friends on the weekends, but I dropped out of that chorale when 1998 became 1999, and though I was supposed to still wait for the weekends, I cheated and started watching the show live; this was the first episode since the pilot that I watched when it was actually broadcast.

But ultimately neither of those avenues felt all that satisfying, largely because this is a banger of an episode. Though it doesn’t operate as such because that’s not how TV worked in 1999, it is a hell of a Spring premiere (though in hindsight, the cliffhanger probably should have arrived before the holiday break so as to drive the teens crazy). I just really want to go through this thing blow by blow, so here we go.

One thing I’m realizing during this particular re-watch of Dawson’s Creek is that this show really struggled to balance out its multiple plots within episodes. Generally speaking, most hours of Creek have two concurrent plots, often dividing the core characters into pairs for one reason or another. One of those stories always centers around Dawson while the other generally revolves around Joey (unless their story is the same, in which case Pacey tends to get elevated to that other position). Even when everybody is in the same place at the same time (like in “The All-Nighter”), there are still dividing lines and factions and divergent stories. Sometimes all of those plots will be satisfying, and sometimes one will totally eclipse the other.

When Dawson’s Creek first premiered in January 1998, countless articles were written about the somewhat elevated language of the show’s teen protagonists. They were obsessed with self-analysis and casually tossed around dimestore SAT words that certainly felt out of place among their TV brethren, though not necessarily in actual high schools. That angle was used as criticism and praise in equal measure, but what it really drives home is creator Kevin Williamson’s general love of language.

Of course he loves words—he is, after all, a writer by trade. But we’ve all seen enough bad movies and middling television to know that not everybody who works with language actually has an affection for it.

I know I’ve been hard on Dawson Leery, but throughout the first 19 episodes of the show bearing his name he has proven himself to be a petty and manipulative narcissist. Those qualities have been on particularly powerful display in the past few episodes as his relationship with Joey has slowly disintegrated, ending in their break-up in “The Dance.” In real life, I would never wish a break-up on anyone, but in the case of Dawson, getting dumped was the best thing that ever happened to him.

My wife and I have been obsessing over Moonlighting, the hit dramedy from the ‘80s that launched the career of Bruce Willis. With a redesigned office and some deconstruction of Cybil Shepherd’s hair, Moonlighting would absolutely fit into the modern television landscape and would still be mildly ahead of its time today even though it went off the air in 1989.

Dawson’s Creek was sometimes referred to (often in derisive terms) as a “teen soap,” and “Full Moon Rising” is certainly an episode that could be submitted as evidence of its soapiness. It features the continued presence of Tamara Jacobs (I had completely forgotten how long she sticks around in her second visit), as well as a deeply twisted escalation of the open marriage plot between Mitch and Gail and the sexual assault of poor Jen Lindley. It’s all pretty soapy.

I have lost track of the actual number of times I have made my way through Dawson’s Creek, though I estimate this current run is at least the sixth time I’ve made my way through the series in sequence. There are plenty of my favorite episodes I have revisited as one-offs, including the hour that is coming up next in sequence. (Actually, the next dozen or so episodes make up what is probably my favorite run of television in history.) And while I love Dawson’s Creek as a grand monolithic experience, it remains a serialized television show, and with the number of episodes they produced over the course of six seasons, there are bound to be some duds. We have already discussed several of them, and there are plenty more to come. Some of those fail for character reasons. Some of them simply have narratives I hate. But in the case of “Tamara’s Return,” my esteem for it remains diminished specifically because I can never remember anything about it.

It’s not that “Tamara’s Return” is a terrible episode of television.

Serialized storytelling has become so normalized on TV that audiences expect even the most casual shows to have some sort of larger narrative arc that stretches across a season (or multiple seasons). That was not necessarily the case when Dawson’s Creek’s second season surfaced in the fall of 1998, though looking back the WB was way ahead of its time in that regard. One of its biggest hits, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was already diving deep into teasing out long-term stories, and the just-premiered Felicity (which initially aired after Buffy) took a soapier path to extended narratives. Though it didn’t seem like Dawson’s was following that thread at the time, the show definitely dipped its toe in serialization—particularly in its first season, but certainly in a few mini-arcs in season two as well.

That all being said, “Alternative Lifestyles” feels like a standalone episode—the kind of “Monster of the Week” entries that The X-Files would slip in between entries in its larger mythos.

It’s appropriate that I write this only a few days after my own birthday—an annual event with which I have a deeply complicated relationship—on the occasion of Pacey’s case of “the Molly Ringwalds.” (Joey deduces that he is referencing Sixteen Candles, not Pretty in Pink or The Breakfast Club.)