‘Girl Meets World’ season 3, episode 1 review: High school — and the latest on Riley, Lucas, Maya
The season premiere of “Girl Meets World” arrived on the Disney Channel on Friday night, and if there is one prevailing message from the episode, it’s probably this: Change is hard. You want to be able to imagine things being the same way that they once were forever, but you can’t. The world just doesn’t quite work like you would want for it to.
Take, for example, Riley, Lucas, and Maya’s new “relationship” (which is still relatively undefined despite a whole summer passing and the group entering high school) crumbling as they all try to find their footing in a new setting. Lucas wanted to handle the arrival of upperclassmen and football players in his own particular way, and when Riley challenged him on some of his beliefs, he claimed that she was a little “much.” There were some real fights, but we feel like by the end of the half-hour, most of our main characters decided to put some trust in their new surroundings and press on after being “stuck in a whole” — a symbol for where people start off high school before bursting out and moving forward.
The biggest thing that the show has to watch more moving forward is potentially even dispersing some of its screen time through its cast members too much. By that, we mean mostly that while adding Smackle and Zay in a larger capacity seems to be a wise move, you cannot have it happen at the expense of everyone else’s story or development. We feel like with this premiere in particular, the show tried to do a lot with a rather small amount of space.
In the end, we’d say that this was a worthy start to season 3, even though with all of the high schoolers (plus Cory’s own transition and Auggie and Ava) tried a little too hard to cram a whole lot of big stories. The Auggie and Ava one in particularly comes across as the most emotional, largely because of her father leaving, and this giving Maya a chance to serve as a sort of mentor to her. Episode Grade: B.
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