Gothic Wonder-Creek

We don't care what happened with Pacey. There's no burning desire to discover where Jen's going to college. No, the real question on everyone's mind during last week's Dawson's Creek premiere was "How did Katie Holmes get that dorm room?"

As the adolescent soap opera selected Duke University as its newest character stomping grounds, it seems it also took some liberties with life here on Blue Devil turf. Besides holding a writing class inside the Gothic Reading Room, and transporting our entire campus up to Boston, the movers and shakers at Dawson's Creek replaced Bill Burig as the Housing gods of Durham, North Carolina. Joey's dorm room at fictional Worthington College (a bizarre cross between Harvard and Duke) featured a prime view of West Campus, a beautiful mosaic floor, and an unheard-of window seat. As hundreds of Dukies scoped the prime setting in horror, one thought flooded through multiple highlighted heads: "If this is what she gets first year, what is her room going to look like as a senior?!"

As if watching this Dawson's didn't already feel like a glorified episode of the Twilight Zone, fiction and reality flirted a little more closely as the camera panned Duke's campus. Mixed in with the lip-glossed girls of the WB were none other thanÉ us. We were everywhere: on the path with Katie Holmes, in her writing class, by her dorm roomÉ at this point, we'll be only mildly surprised if she turns up on the Nu Sigma bench next week.

Recess rates the new season of Dawson's Creek, complete with location change and extras from the Face Books, as "cool but, like, totally weird." Omigosh, indeed.

--By Faran Krentcil