Season three of Girl Meets World has been, as I’ve discussed before, a season of conflicting goals. The show wants to be Boy Meets World, and it wants to be a Disney Channel staple. It wants to be a study of the changing tides of high school, and it wants to remain within the safety bubble of middle school conflicts. It wants its characters to grow, and it wants the foundation to stay just the same.
“Girl Meets She Don’t Like Me” is another solid hour in a short sting of them, but it demonstrates this duality all the same. It’s cleaner than “Girl Meets Bear” which tried to hit both targets in quick succession, to energetic but mixed effect—but it’s no less strange, watching the show weave together a story about Riley discovering that not everyone is going to like her and that not everything in life can go her way just by asking for it.
It’s not that these are inherently different things—or even that one is more childish than the other. Both lessons speak to the same truth: You can’t always get what you want. Both lessons have a core in the idea of high school. At a new and larger school, Riley might easily want to make new friends. At that same new and larger school, it’s not surprising that you’re going to come across material taught in ways that aren’t going to be tailored to you (and it’s a nice added sting that it’s heath class, with material we all wish could be handled the least awkward way possible).
The problem comes when you dive deeper. It’s, again, a great touch to have Riley of the fairy tale princess romance be brutally thrown into the world of sex and puberty (even if the show dances around the fact that this is just what she’s learning). The show gets a nice bit of comedy in here torturing her, even with the censorship, from the coach’s adamant assertions that he just wants them all to get out of this alive and without parental-interference to Cory getting stuck with a session of teaching bodies very publicly to a class of her peers. It feels close, if not exactly, to the kind of hells a younger Cory had to go through and it all ends in a good place—if one where it feels like Riley learns less that she can’t control everything and more that things can work out even when she can’t.
It’s less of a win to see Riley face off with Girl Who Just Don’t Like Her. Maybe, in earlier seasons, this sort of story could have worked. Pre-Riley being bullied, there’d be story cause to believe Riley just hasn’t sorted this out yet, and post-elementary school in the swing of middle school, it’s true that kids start to shift their relationships. They’re leaving the simplicity of elementary school, where everyone in the class got invited to the birthday party and factions were divided by the dodgeball teams at recess, and moving on to the adult world—which, Maya points out pretty astutely, is largely made up of surface-level relationships that we don’t have the time or patience to flesh out.
Season three is post both though. Riley is innocent, a trait that the show harps on a lot. Yet, for the number of times it’s been a plot point, it still hasn’t really sorted itself out. It feels distinctly different from Cory’s inherent belief that there’s good in the world, as Boy Meets World often stuck to. That was a hope, something that could be tried and tested and sometimes even shaken, but in the end allow him to pull through. Too often with Riley it feels like a vice. It is stated to be a vice. And yet Riley learns mainly the immediate takeaway lesson in front of her and generally keeps the worldview intact—often in a way that still feels like it supports her initial instinct. The girl doesn’t like her? Fine. But Riley likes her, she emphasizes at episode’s end—and last we see the girl, she’s smiling, impressed.
It all leads to a disjointed feeling the episode never quite shakes, but structurally I do emphasize—“Meets She Don’t Like Me” comes together pretty pat. There’s not much of a B story, in the grand tradition of GMW episodes, but a simple thorough-line of Auggie reacting works just enough. The cast all gets a chance to play, in a way that feels genuinely well integrated. The conversations feel like scenes, and the scenes transition nicely. It walks the line a little less gracefully than the best GMW episodes. As long as the line is there and as long as the goal is both sides of it, there’s not much the show can do.
