Dawson's Creek - Season 1, Episode 5

In loving memory
Mitch's male pride
Season 1

"Hurricane"
Original airdate: 2/17/1998

Episode summary: Shaggy D.A. confesses her extramarital affair with Bob as Capeside is battered by what turns out to be a pretty benign hurricane.

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Recap: Dawson and Joey are hanging out in Dawson's bedroom watching movies. After the movie ends, Dawson clicks onto the local TV station in time to hear a local hurricane warning and then an announcement that all schools in Capeside will be closed tomorrow. After the two woot and cheer, Dawson gets irked by the sight of his mom bantering with her co-anchor Bob and angrily shuts off the TV. He tells Joey he's not in the mood to watch movies anymore...and she tells him that at some point he's going to have to deal with his mom's infidelity, then climbs out the window while Dawson turns the TV back on to grimace at the rest of his mom's newscast.

Around town, Capeside extras are busily boarding up their windows and moving patio furniture indoors. Shaggy D.A. complains to Mitch that the network has assigned Bob (and not her) to cover the hurricane, and sourly adds that he only got the assignment 'cause he's a man. Mitch is like, "Yeah, whatever" and says he's going next door to check on Grams and Jen and invite them to ride out the storm at Casa Leery. Once he's out of earshot, Dawson moans about what a monumental jerk Bob is compared to what a super awesome guy his dad is, and Shaggy D.A. contorts her face into a stricken expression while muttering, "Oh boy.."

Pacey helps his cop brother Doug post no swimming signs on the beach, then needles him to the point of obnoxiousness about being gay. Doug doth protests too much about how he couldn't possibly be any straighter, but Pacey argues that his CD collection containing Barbra Streisand tunes and the Les Misérables soundtrack contradicts that.

Joey helps Bessie and Bodie bring in anything that's laying around their property that could become a projectile during a hurricane, then suggests that the three of them retreat to the safety of the Leery house until the storm passes.

Pacey spots Tamara on the porch of her beach house as she's bringing her flower pots inside. He scampers over and leans in to kiss her - but she's like, "No! Don't!" just as Doug appears from the side of the house and offers to help secure her place. Doug razzes Pacey about his presumably subpar performance in Tamara's English class, then exchanges flirty banter with Tamara while a jealous Pacey stares daggers at him.   

Grams and Jen decide to take Mitch up on his offer to ride out the hurricane at his house, and Jen finds Dawson cleaning up the porch and explains that Gramps' corpse won't be joining them 'cause he's in the hospital, undergoing tests. She offers to help him secure the outdoor furniture, but he declines...and when she calls him out on the cold way he's acting towards her, he pretends that it has less to do with her slutty reveal during the previous episode than the lengthy to do list that's currently floating around his head. 

Dawson eavesdrops on his mother, who's sitting on the stairs while chatting with Bob and making kisses noises at him over the phone. Subtle, Shaggy. She's all, "Ack!" when she notices Dawson looming over her from the upper landing and hastily ends the call. Dawson sourly congratulates her on the new award he'd like to present her with: a scarlet A for Adulteress. She rolls her eyes in response and mutters, "Oh fer fuck's sake.." [sorry, no, that was my reaction] and races upstairs after him to try to explain why she felt the need to start hitting the sack with her co-anchor. Dawson's like, "Ew.." and says she should probably be telling this to her spouse, not her son...which is probably true enough. He then storms into his bedroom, where Jen has been hiding out, and rhetorically barks, "Is the proposition of monogamy a Jurassic notion?" and Jen somehow refrains from asking why in the hell everything that comes out of his mouth has to be the kind of wordy gibberish that no fifteen year old would formulate ahead of time and articulate, much less blurt out during the course of normal conversation. Jen points out that, the extramarital shagging notwithstanding, Shaggy D.A. is generally a good person...and when Dawson lets out a bitter sounding guffaw, she takes that as an insult about her own slutty past and storms out of the room. A few seconds later, Dawson realizes that Joey has been eavesdropping from inside his closet, and she sheepishly tells him she went in there to reminisce about all the times they used to sit in the dark and recite the script from Jaws, which...um, OK. She then lectures him for daring to ask why his mom is cheating instead of thanking his lucky stars that he has a mom.

"Adulteress!"

"Lemme guess: the over-the-phone kissing noises to Bob tipped you off."

Mitch and Shaggy D.A. are watching Bob's coverage of the Capeside hurricane...and when Mitch says he hopes that Bob is being careful, Joey snarkishly says he doesn't need to worry about a shithead like Bob, who's perfectly capable of looking out for himself. She then wanders over to the foyer to sit at the foot of the stairs and stare mopishly into space...and is soon joined by Shaggy D.A., who admits that she's really screwed the pooch on her marriage and is thinking seriously about ending her affair with Bob, which is kinda like closing the barn door long after the horse has gotten out.

Tamara has prepared Doug and Pacey something to eat, and they're about to sit at the table and dig in when they hear a crashing noise on the porch. When Doug rushes out to see what happened, Pacey takes the opportunity to get canoodly with Tamara. She giggles and half-heartedly pushes him away while saying, "Quick reminder: this is a felony" - but then giggles again and allows him to get within kissing range of her lips. In mid-kiss, the two tumble to the floor and accidentally pull the tablecloth with them, which causes their dinner to crash to the floor. Doug bursts in to see whassup, and is all, "Wha-a-a-a?" when he sees the two sprawled on the floor together.

Dawson interrupts his dad while he's working on a model of his dream restaurant chain and is about to spill the beans about his wife's infidelity when Shaggy D.A. enters the room and tells them she has something to confess. She natters about how much she looooves her news anchoring job, despite not having the journalistic chops to become the next Diane Sawyer or Barbara Walters...and eventually Mitch tells her to stop prattling and just say what she came to say. She takes a deep breath and admits that for the last two months she's been bumping uglies with another man...and a stunned Mitch stares back at her with his default dumb-faced expression before the storm cuts the power and plunges them into darkness.  

"Surprise! You've been cuckolded."

"I knew all that dry humping and superfluous kissing was too good to be true."

After the commercial break, Mitch directs his anger at learning that another man has been balling his wife for the last couple of months towards a frenetic search for batteries. When Shaggy D.A. starts sobbing, he shoots her the stink-eye and growls, "You don't get to cry!" and storms out of the room - just as Grams pokes her head in to ask if everything's OK.

Tamara tells Doug that she and Pacey clumsily tripped at the same time and simultaneously tumbled to the floor, and Doug appears to buy that implausible explanation and suggests they play the 'if' game so they can get to know each other better. His first question to Tamara is 'if you could live in any city, where would you live?' and she says New York, aka her hometown.

Bessie is nattering to Bodie about the perils of circumcising their soon-to-be infant...and when Bodie points out that they don't even know if the baby is a boy, Grams chimes in, "Or black or white", then quickly diverts attention from that openly racist jab by pretending that what she most objects to is "when children raise children". She tells Bodie to buckle up and get ready for his child to be identified as different, to which Bessie tearfully retorts that it's irrelevant that her baby will be half white, half black, 'cause he/she will be 100% loved. So suck on that, Grams.

Jen and Joey sit on the front porch and watch Mitch sitting alone in the driver's seat of his SUV, miserably contemplating his cuckolding. Joey tells Jen that Dawson was wrong to spew his anger about Shaggy D.A. onto her for her slutty past, and says he's probably indignant that she dared go to bed with anyone prior to meeting him. The two then wonder about the dimensions of Dawson's manhood (e.g. does his penis most resemble a pistol, rifle, or BB gun?), and Joey blushingly muses that when factoring in his height and hand size, his nether regions likely measure higher than average.

Pacey, Doug, and Tamara play Monopoly and talk about their favorite movies. Doug invites Tamara to accompany him to the Rialto for a showing of the old classics and says they can leave Pacey at home and make a romantic night of it: dinner and a movie. Tamara chuckles and points out that it wouldn't be a real date on account of his gayness, and he's all, "Wha-at?" and glares over at Pacey. Tamara hastily says that she guessed his orientation 'cause of her stronger-than-usual gaydar - and Doug is all 'since I'm nowhere near ready to come out of the closet', he pulls his service revolver on Pacey and demands that he confirm his heterosexuality. Pacey's like, "OK, OK, you're not gay" while Tamara stares at Doug in horror.

"Let's go out to the movies sometime."

"I'd love to. After all, a girl can never have too many gay pals."

A soaking wet Shaggy D.A. climbs into the passenger seat of Mitch's SUV, and he contorts his face into a pained expression as he reminisces about the first time he saw her and decided it was love at first sight. His face then darkens when he adds that as quick as that love came will be his rapid decision to hate her now. Shaggy D.A. cries, "Nooooooo Mitch!", but he yells at her to get out of his SUV before he physically removes her from it. Yeesh. She hastily climbs out, and he squeals off while she stares after him, weeping in the heavy rain.

By the next day, the hurricane changes course and doesn't end up causing too much damage in Capeside, and eventually the residents emerge from their homes and remove all the plywood covering their windows. Tamara thanks Pacey and Doug for keeping her company all night...and when Doug insists that he really really wants to take her out, she declines and tells him she's committing a felony by doinking his underage brother - I mean, seeing someone right now. Pacey grins happily.

Dawson runs into Jen, who explains that she lost her virginity when she was twelve (holy fucking crap) to some older guy who got her drunk. After that, her sexcapades were a blur of getting it with multiple partners on while drunk and avoiding pregnancy scares. It all came to a head (no pun intended) when her parents caught her having sex in their bed, and figured a reasonable response was shipping her off to Capeside and fobbing her off on Grams...as if the elderly woman didn't have enough to worry about, caring for her inert husband.  Jen insists to Dawson that she's not "that girl" anymore, but that she's also not as pure as the driven snow...and is somewhere in between. Dawson admits that he has his own idiotic hangups, and that he assumed his parents had a happy marriage just 'cause they always made such a show of pretending like they didn't want to get caught by Dawson or his friends while smooching or dry humping in the living room. He then sheepishly admits that his behavior has been horrible and hopes that Jen even wants him back, and she says she'd loooove for him to be part of her effort to start over, then hugs him and says, "Take two..?"

"I promise to be less slutty."

"And I promise to be less insufferable."

Pacey returns to Tamara’s place and says he has one more 'if' question and asks her what she'd redo in life if she had the chance. She says she wouldn't have married her shitty New York husband...and he laments not being of age and not having the ability to enjoy consenting adult type sex with the grown ass woman he's nailing. He gives her a from behind canoodle, and she tells him they're going to have to end this 'cause it's too dangerous [AND, as she earlier admitted, A FELONY] - but Pacey points out that that's exactly what makes it such a turn on. He then asks her what she'd do right now if she could do anything, and she shoots him a saucy grin and grabs him by the shirt and pulls him inside her house...and that's all I'm going to say 'bout that.

Mitch returns home and finds his wife sitting on a chair on the front porch, staring despondently into space. He lowers himself on the front steps and asks her why she started an extramarital affair, and she sheepishly tells him that the reason is completely preposterous: she got restless by her perfect, happy life and "wanted to want" again, and figured that hitting the sheets with Bob would satisfy that want. That said, all she wants right now is to have everything back that she lost overnight. She cries, "I'm sooooooo sorry", but Mitch tells her to shut it 'cause he doesn't want to talk anymore...and the two just sit quietly in front of the house.

​Upstairs, Dawson apologizes to Joey for his rude 'tude lately and promises to rectify his belligerent ways and make every effort to be a friend worthy of her. Joey apologizes for using "the mother card", and admits that she's always putting her sainted late mother on a pedestal. She suggests they go back to being friends and do something fun, like reciting the Jaws script inside his closet...and when he says he's game, they laughingly scamper into the closet, where Dawson parrots, "Sheriff Brody, that's a twenty-footer."

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