‘Girl Meets World’ season 3, episode 7 review: The power of hope (and positive police)

“Girl Meets World” fittingly chose to take a little bit of a detour Friday night from all of the drama recently when it comes to its “love triangle”, and as a result of that, probably delivered a better, more important story in “Girl Meets True Maya.” If you’re not going to give us answers on Lucas’ decision, we’d rather not really hear about it.

The importance of this episode to us goes beyond just the confines of traditional Disney Channel sitcoms. Sure, there is that message at the center of it that your friends can make you better, which allowed Maya to realize that there are times that it’s great she is more like Riley than she used to be. She can channel right and wrong better, and she knows to steer clear of some of the extremely-bad crowd.

To us, whether intentional or unintentional, there was also a really important message about the police in this episode, as well: They’re not all bad. Reginald VelJohnson of “Family Matters” fame guest-starred as a local police officer trying to protect the park in which he’s stationed. He took notice of some of Maya’s actions, but in the end opted to let her off with what was effectively a warning.

You can argue against the realism of this said cop character, but reading between the lines, it felt as though the show was trying to enforce that there are still good police officers out there, ones who exercise empathy and know that certain punishments do not always fit certain crimes. In the wake of recent headlines we’re not advocating for one side over the other between the police versus victims; instead, we’re advocating for unity and common ground, where police don’t jump to the worst-case scenario and citizens don’t assume that every officer is out to engage in needless brutality. In some ways, “Girl Meets True Maya” was representative of that common ground, where there was respect towards the law but also an understanding from the law about measures of guilt. Maya and Riley understood what the park meant to this particular officer, and in turn, he could recognize that the lesson was already learned.

Maybe we’ve gotten too political this week, but this discussion for us helped to live up what was otherwise a little more of an uneventful episode that hit the same note on several different occasions. Episode Grade: B.

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