“I’m sure we’re all wondering what happens next.”
Warning: Full spoilers from the episode follow.
Well, that was ambiguous.
Closing out its weekend-long “Texas” arc, Girl Meets World tackled the Riley/Maya/Lucas problem head-on in “Girl Meets Texas: Part 3” — or at least I think it did. In general, this whole episode was pretty amorphous, despite being very specific about who likes who and to what degree. In the end, though, we were left with more questions than answers, and not in a good way.
I guess let’s start with the obvious. This storyline was probably supposed to be vague, because the characters kept bringing up how confused they were about their feelings for one another. In that sense, this episode was spot-on. It perfectly captured the frustration and angst surrounding young love, and that’s totally relevant to the core of these five since, as Cory and Topanga pointed out, Riley and her friends will soon be off to high school.
The addition of Charlie Gardener (“Cheese soufflé!”) didn’t help with that frustration, but it did spice things up a bit as far as Riley and Lucas were concerned. Actually, this was a pretty great episode for Lucas overall in terms of his reactions to both the Riley’s situation with Charlie and his own awkward dates with Maya. (“Who goes on a date and doesn’t talk to each other? Oh yeah, we do. Hi.”) I also liked how Zay and Farkle were on hand to give their own humorous commentary, even when they themselves weren’t sure what to make of everything.
That said, such indefinite behavior doesn’t always make good television. This episode started caving in on itself around the time Farkle took Riley outside to analyze every possible instance there was chemistry between her, Lucas and Maya. I assume the flashbacks were the writers’ way of showing how much they’d peppered in these little moments of affection, but strung altogether, it seemed like no one could make heads or tails of them — including the trio in question.
I was also a bit thrown by Farkle’s lingering looks at Riley. I’m not sure if we were supposed to interpret that as him having feelings for Riley too or if he was just concerned for his friend. Either way, these last few scenes certainly didn’t clear things up. If anything, they just messed them up even more. And regardless of whether that was the point, I feel like it could have been expressed a little more clearly, from an objective standpoint.
Even Cory was hopelessly baffled by the situation, albeit humorously. I admit, I laughed at the fact that he dropped all pretense and literally made the lesson “Riley. Maya. Lucas.” At this point, the classroom scenes are kind of a bust, so they might as well have some fun with them. Also, Cory leaving his own class before the period was over pretty much summed up my thoughts on the whole thing: “Nah, I’ve had it.”
Even though tonight’s Girl Meets World was all about settling what happened during the gang’s Texas trip, nothing was really resolved at the end of it. Granted, there were funny moments throughout — like poor Lucas trying to make sense of his new “relationships” with the girls — but things sort of fell apart towards the end. While a series flashbacks tried to piece together answers, all that came from it was more confusion for the characters and, as a result, the viewers.
