Shawn Hunter returns and gets engaged in Girl Meets World, but unfortunately, “Girl Meets Upstate” isn’t an outing deserving of the milestone. A checklist of the typical issues in the show, “Meets Upstate” spins a tale of when Maya became Riley the second she had a chance at a real father, but while the emotional sense is there (and relentlessly underlined), the logic remains not.
The premise is simple: Maya and Shawn get along because they’re the same, and so Shawn’s lost himself too, settling down and chasing after the Cory/Topanga dream. Not in terms of Maya and Katie, though, so in terms of … what? His clothes? The cabin which as the show points out is more of a Feeny thing, if anything?
I don’t really know—but more importantly, I don’t think the show does either, and this is where I find myself disappointed. Girl Meets World wants me, I think, to believe it has a plan, and maybe it does. Certainly the show has a good handle of callbacks. But it doesn’t feel like it has a plan, and sometimes, that’s more important than actually having one. I trust the show to know what today’s lesson is, but I can’t trust it to feel real, or for it to not spin everything it can every which way in service of it.
Rather than playing with subtext or dramatic irony, the show has gotten in the habit of committing to a new direction, only to quickly flip itself around—with just as much commitment, but unfortunately with little regard for how an audience might feel. Maya’s reveal that she’s lost herself, for example, still is in concept interesting, and in practice, frustrating. Her brutalizing the painting, admitting her envy and and anger over Riley’s life, is moving; but, you know, her moment walking out into that store all those episodes ago, beaming over a new outfit, was moving too. Her telling the class she cherishes those clothes, and keeps them as clean and neat as she possibly can, was moving too.
And now all of that just means she was turning into Riley.
Likewise, Maya and Shawn get along because they’re the same—except apparently they are also using each other to chase the Matthews family dream. The show wants me to use this fact to bring them closer together, considering Shawn’s proposal at the end, but I can’t help but feel like their relationship should be, in fact, wrong given this new information. The only thing we’ve seen Cory push on Shawn lately is the idea of Katie and Maya. The only thing Shawn has been visibly doing lately that’s similar to Cory is, actually, propose to Katie and take Maya in like a daughter. Shawn can own these things in his own unique way, but I’m not really sure a rushed proposal is that way, even if Shawn is spontaneous. It still seems like chasing to me—and who knows. Maybe in the future it will be revealed as such.
This confusion informs, in a way, the show’s other flaws. There’s no real B plot in “Meets Upstate” and barely even an A plot. There is just, like many GMW episodes, the lesson, spread across locations and banter for the illusion—but then, when the writing hasn’t led us here naturally, pausing all action to shout the point is necessary. There’s no real reason for Lucas to blindly accept that his decision doesn’t matter—but then, he must, because this lesson mainly exists to complicate the triangle.
So it has been. So it might always be. While offering some clever bits that demonstrate how far the show’s come from its early days, “Meets Upstate” also demonstrates the ways how, three seasons in, I think it’s safe to say the show will never change.
It’s a shame, to be sure. But I guess at least now we know what the show is.
