Nuestro seguidores de Twitter son lo mejor y Mike Guretxean (@otsoko514) nos ha traducido el texto sobre el personaje de Meredith Monroe al inglés!
To be clear: if Dawson Creek had been produced in the social network era, it would have been based on trending topics. Beyond the battles between Dawson/Joey (DJ-ers) and Pacey/Joey (PJ-ers) shippers, a more select group, perhaps a small minority, but one with a lot of strength (but one with a loud voice), would have started a boycott of the series in the name of Andie McPhee.
Played by Meredith Monroe, one of the series’ funniest characters got trashed in the third season. Her appearance in the second season came as a breath of fresh air. The continual spats between Dawson and Joey had run their course, so we needed someone to show us a good time and make our little corner of fandom happy. That mission was accomplished by Andie and later by her relationship with Pacey.
Pacey went from being the black sheep of the family, and of all Capeside, to becoming a hero who got good grades thanks to Andie’s unwavering support. She was the first to tell him that he was worth it, that he was smart and charming. This doesn’t mean that the two didn’t have their problems, because of course they did. At first their quarrels were those typical of adolescence and young love, but there was none of the phrases like «I need to find myself» or «I don’t know who I am without you» as uttered by Joey Potter that always sounded too grandiloquent for a fifteen-year-old girl.
We forgave the storyline of Andie’s illness, despite our losing the joy of the Andie-Pacey relationship, with its plot points taken almost directly from Melrose Place, because we were given first-rate acting as well as dramatic scenes that made even the guy holding the mike boom cry. Andie’s good-bye scene in the second season made me cry almost to the point of suffering an anxiety attack. It really hit me.
Did they go too far with the whole storyline of Andie seeing her dead brother? Well, yeah. The truth is that the theme of Andie’s anxiety would have enough and adding that touch of schizophrenia — or whatever it was – it was too much to burden the plot with, because how could they write their way out of it? It was important to address the issue because these illnesses do exist, they do affect teens, and the media never seem to offer an informed view of the topic, but Dawson Creek didn’t know how to handle it very well either.
If Kevin Williamson had stayed on for the third season, maybe they would have resolved it in a better way, but instead of resolving plots they decided to assassinate a character that we liked so much. Juan (R del Rosal) has already described the arrival of a new showrunner for the series, Alex Gansa, a man who had neither seen the series nor liked it much. Everyone was out of character, but what he did to Andie’s was unforgivable. What happened was that they decided that she had cheated on Pacey with another patient during her stay in the psychiatric clinic (we suppose a pretty luxurious one). Andie’s excuse was pretty good, that she wasn’t thinking straight at the time and furthermore she was alone, not knowing if she would ever recover or not. Come on, if I had been Pacey I would have at least made an attempt to let it go and try to fix the relationship. Maybe the Pacey of the second season would have done that, but we’ll never know because we’re given a devolved Pacey who has ideas like going to a strip club.
Andie’s character is given other off-the-rails storylines like having her cheat on an exam. Who was the screenwriting genius who thought that this made sense? Andie who had supposedly recovered from her illness somehow returned even worse than before. She talks to herself in front of the mirror, copies exams answers (despite being the girl who studies the most in her class) and fakes being a victim of sexual abuse.
This was in 2001, so these sorts of issues were not as topical, even so it was a huge blunder that one of the most beloved characters was made so despicable. By 2018 this storyline would have become a huge deal, and the character would have dug her own grave. At that time it was not that big a deal, but it was the beginning of the end for the character.
The character of Andie was increasingly relegated to third place although she was redeemed a bit with the revelation of the relationship between Pacey and Joey. Andie proved to be that girl we loved so much when, despite still being in love with Pacey, she urged him not to give Joey up (that doesn’t mean that she didn’t react when she got the news, but it took her a lot less time than Dawson to accept it).
In the fourth season the character is finally written off (and given that the fifth and sixth are dead boring, maybe she was better off) and if that episode doesn’t touch you, you have no heart. Andie’s gesture of forcing Dawson and Pacey to pose side-by-side made it possible for them to re-connect and we’ll always love her for that. But above all we love the relationship she continues to have with Pacey, it’s a true friendship between ex-partners — unlike Dawson and Joey. We never see Pacey happier than when he reunites with Andie at the end of the fourth season. Andie returns briefly for graduation and to be once again the voice of Pacey’s conscience and every time that they are together, it’s true love. Personally Pacey and Joey don’t make a convincing couple to me, no matter the good it brought to the series or how much chemistry they had, their characters spend their days suffering every time they are together: Joey for Dawson, Pacey because he feels inferior. I will always be more Pacey +Andie because Pacey starts to believe in himself.
In the fifth and sixth seasons Andie doesn’t make an appearance and you’ld think that in the finale Kevin Williamson would have had some input. And he did. But then he erased it. What a betrayal, kiddo. It turns out that the character of Andie as well as the actress who played her, Meredith Monroe, had been unpersoned during the final two seasons and on top of that you call her in for the finale and then you just cut her scene. Bad Kevin, very bad. Meredith deserved much more than that considering that she wasn’t even invited to the party for the 100th episode of the series. Joshua Jackson didn’t like this at all, and so he showed up at the party with a picture of Meredith pinned to his lapel because according to him «she was part of the series and should be here». I don’t remember much more of his comments because it happened in 2003 and I haven’t been able to find the original source.
We Andie fans can only convince ourselves that the scene in the finale between Pacey and Andie is canon. The scene, according to Kevin Williamson, got cut because it went with an ending in which Dawson and Joey ended up together and Andie was the consolation prize. But the truth is that it could have existed in both realities since the relationship of Andie and Pacey had always been about more than seeing who ends up with whom.
So if there’s ever a Dawson Creek reunion let’s hope we see Meredith Monroe together with everyone else, and hopefully get a photo of her and Josh Jackson together again.
Dawson Forever 