Dawson's Creek is a teenage melodrama about a small group of friends who grew up in the mythical Capeside, MA. In the first four seasons, the story was based in Capeside and revolved around a group of high school students. In season five, the characters started to branch off and attend college. The setting moved to Boston, MA and occasionally found its way back to Capeside and Los Angles, CA. In season six, the same approach is taken. The content remains to be overly dramatic, but I found the stories generally to be better than past seasons. For more details about the series, please refer to DVD Talk's reviews of season one, season two, season three, season four, season five, and the series finale.

I am not a very big fan of Dawson's Creek. The melodrama is usually a little too thick for my tastes and the characters more or less sound like they are whining rather than anything. But despite my lack of appreciation for the show, I admit, I do enjoy watching the series. Part of the excitement comes from the eye-rolling, overly melodramatic moments, and like past seasons, season six has plenty of those.

Most of the drama followed the friends trying to renew friendships with each other while at the same time destroying others, meeting new people, experiencing new situations, and ultimately trying to grow into the people they were destined to be. Some of these stories are entertaining and gripping, while a few are lackluster. I usually found it depended on which characters the stories included as to whether or not they would grab my attention. A few just made me want to shut off the TV, i.e. the character Audrey.

Audrey was introduced as Joey's college roommate at Worthington in season five. She is a rich, spoiled brat from Los Angles without a hint of the real world. In my opinion, Audrey just kills any situation or scene she is in. For instance in the early part of season six Pacey finally grows up and gets a real job as a stock broker. When this happens, Pacey starts to spend all of his time focused on work because he really wants to succeed. Audrey has a hard time dealing with the lack of attention. She yells, screams, bitches, and starts to ruin her life with alcohol and drugs. While it is understandable her character would suffer from lack of attention, Audrey was more annoying than dramatic.

On the flipside while the rest of the cast is quite dramatic (and sometimes annoying), they are not nearly as bad. For the most part the other overly melodramatic personalities and situations are tolerable. A few are even fairly enticing.

The love triangle (Dawson, Joey, Pacey) is one story of interest. Dawson and Joey start off the season finally having sex and admitting their love for each other, only to have it ruined when Joey finds out Dawson has been dating the lead actress in the movie he is the assistant director for. For the rest of the season Dawson and Joey are at odds and they slowly try to find their place as friends again. Pacey and Joey also rekindled their flame temporarily, only to be ruined when Joey embraces her love for a new boyfriend Eddie.

Throughout the season Dawson's future in filmmaking is an important story. In season five, Dawson was fired as an intern from a movie set. Oddly enough the director Todd brought Dawson on board his latest project as the assistant director. Todd is a great character. He is rude, vulgar, but most importantly funny. He adds a humorous dynamic to the serious tone of the show.

Jack turns his college career around by focusing more on his studies and less on frat parties. He also starts a new relationship with a guy named David. Jen also finds a new boyfriend, who plays hard to get at first and really complicates matters when he sleeps with Audrey.

All of these events (and more) lead to the series finale which puts us five years into the future. The cast is reunited for Dawson's mom's wedding in Capeside. Dawson is the executive producer of a television show The Creek, a show about his life, Joey works for a publisher in a New York City, Jen is a single mother, Pacey owns a restaurant, and Jack is a high school teacher. The finale is a very dramatic, over-the-top sad story. Jen is dying and it forces the cast to get together and overcome their indifferences. The finale does a decent job putting all of the loose ends together (specifically the love triangle).

With the exception of my pure annoyance with Audrey, I found season six more entertaining then the past seasons I have reviewed. Part of what I liked about this season is how the cast started to grow up and that little thing called reality became more important. While the show is still one big fairy tale, the stories were better and the characters were easier to deal with. However, this is not to say I was in love with the season (because I was not). Season six of Dawson's Creek is worth sitting through if you enjoy teenage melodramas. It is entertaining in one of those "it's so bad, it's good" ways.

Episode Guide
1. The Kids Are Alright
2. The Song Remains the Same
3. The Importance of Not Being Too Earnest
4. Instant Karma!
5. The Imposters
6. Living Dead Girl
7. Ego Tripping At the Gates of Hell
8. Spiderwebs
9. Everything Put Together Falls Apart
10. Merry Mayhem
11. Day Out of Days
12. All the Right Moves
13. Rock Bottom
14. Clean and sober
15. Castaways
16. That Was Then
17. Sex and Violence
18. Love Bites
19. Lovelines
20. Catch-22
21. Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road
22. Joey Potter and Capeside Redemption
23. All Good Things... & ...Must Come to An End

The DVD
The two part series finale episode is presented in the same extended version found on the 2003 DVD release of Dawson's Creek: The Series Finale (Extended Cut). It contains the original theme music.

Video:
The video is given in its original television aspect ratio 1.33:1 full frame color. The picture quality probably could have been a little better. There's a noticeable grain in the picture. There are a total of 23 episodes that are spread across 4 DVD-9s, with six episodes crammed on three of the discs and one with four episodes and a two-part episode. As a result, the picture quality suffers slightly from problems associated with video compression. There are also some points during the episode that have low frame rates (ghosting) and slight color distortions.

Audio:
The audio track in this DVD release comes in English 2.0 Dolby digital stereo sound. It's your basic TV on DVD release audio track. It's fairly flat, because it consists mostly of dialogue. The music comes off fairly rich. The sound quality is very clear, with no noticeable flaws. Overall, it sounds great for this release, much better than broadcast or cable television. There are subtitles in the Portuguese and Spanish languages. As well, this release is closed captioned enabled for the hearing impaired.

Extras:
For extras there isn't much. The first item is an audio commentary for the two part series finale "All Good Things..." and "...Must Come to An End" with creator Kevin Williamson and executive producer Paul Stupin. This commentary is the same track included with the 2003 Dawson's Creek: The Series Finale (Extended Cut) DVD release. Since I'm not a huge fan of the series, I thought the commentary would be pretty dry. It was, however, not. Both Williamson and Stupin are informative throughout the commentary. They manage to pack in a lot of information about the actual episode, dissecting certain scenes, pointing out the extended/deleted scenes, making important notes about the characters, and a few sidebars. Fan or not, it is worth listening to.

The other big extra is the scrapbook entitled "Dawson's Creek: Over the Years". The booklet includes a lot of photos from the series (high school years, college and beyond, moments to remember, favorite hangouts), memorable lines from the characters, character biographies, teleplay pages from pilot episode, did you know (facts about the show and its cast), vital statistics (cast and crew), and trivia questions. The booklet is not anything spectacular. After a quick look over you will probably never touch it again.

Final Thoughts:
While I enjoyed season six more than past seasons, I feel the replay value is low. The season episodes are easy to get into (although there are a few "rough" spots that will make you want to turn off the TV), but they really lack anything powerful to keep you coming back for more. If you enjoy teenage melodramas with a thick layer of drama, then the sixth and final season of Dawson's Creek should make for a good rental.