AND THEN THEY MAKE A MESS! AHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA
This kinda shit makes me so sad, especially since the audience fuckin loves it. I'm ready to quit, but let's try to keep going. Through the window Cory sees his mother about to open the door from outside. Cory says "back me up, I wanted to use the lid, I was Lid Boy."
That's actually been going on all season, where Cory uses the context to make that pose and say "I am/was _____ Boy!", like they wanted to make it his catch phrase. I never mentioned it because I kept hoping it would just go away and I could pretend it never happened. Every time I thought "this has to be the last one, there's no way they'll do it again." But here we are.
Cory calls out to his mother that he's going to clean up the mess, but he and Shawn immediately abandon the mess and sit at the kitchen table to study for Mr. Feeny's geography test the next day. Cory says "I don't understand why we have to learn anything about geography." Really, Cory? That's how you wanna do this? In Mr. Feeny's social studies class this year, you've done math problems, discussed literature, put on a play, made up a future career, signed up for clubs... everything EXCEPT social studies. And now, now that you finally have to learn some easy ass geography to satisfy the syllabus, WOAAAAAAAAAAAAAH NOOOOO. Cory don't do dat, nuh uh. That's just asking too much. These punk kids, man... At least their jackets have sleeves today.
Anyway Cory wishes for Feeny to get sick so they don't have to take the test. Golly gee whiz, Mr. Feeny's out sick the next day. The substitute is going to have them read Beowulf and they act like that's a terrible way to spend a class.
Seriously, do they just freak out in every class? What do they expect? Blowjobs? Christ.
The boys are talking about how Cory wished for Feeny to get sick, and Cory does the pose thing again. He's "Sick Boy", this time, with the power to make people sick. Shawn responds with "Yeah, it's working on me right now." So I guess we have to look to Shawn Hunter to find a functioning brain in this episode. Terrifying.
We learn from Minkus that Mr. Feeny is in the hospital and Cory's sad because he legitimately thinks he might be responsible or something. They actually managed to get a good joke in, so for sanity's sake here it is.
A brief respite, but now it's back to the trenches.
Dream sequence. A four and a half minute dream sequence where the ghost of a recently expired Feeny haunts Cory to make him feel guilty. It's a tremendous waste of time, and if I don't talk about it then maybe it didn't happen.
What the fuck is the point of the dream? Feeny's not dead! It's not Cory's fault! He literally did nothing wrong here, for like the first time in the series Cory did absolutely nothing wrong, but NOW he feels bad. It doesn't make any sense at all.
Alan tries to give his dejected son a pep talk. He provides an anecdote to explain that Cory may one day need this school stuff that seems useless now, like geography. The problem is that Alan's story is an example of how math can be useful in the real world. Having a degree in math, I can verify that math and geography are slightly different subjects. I think that was supposed to be the life lesson too, I'm just falling apart here guys this is so bad.
Cory goes to visit his teacher in the hospital.
♫ THIS LITTLE LIGHT OF MIIIIIIIIIIINE ♫
♫ I'M GONNA LET IT SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE ♫
Thank goodness. That is a fantastically meaningful exchange. But perhaps it's only meaningful in hindsight, having seen the rest of the series. If I had only seen the first season before this, I would think that Cory is speaking from the perspective of his father, that these geography tests might be useful in his life somehow. And that's kinda dumb. Did Michael Jacobs already know that Mr. Feeny would be imparting wisdom for years to come? Who knows, but I certainly hope so. Imagine, though, if instead of lying to his son about geography's usefulness, the conversation went like this:
Alan: "Cory, there's so much more to learn from teachers than the silly things they test you on."
Cory: "No way, dad. Name one important thing Mr. Feeny can teach me about."
Something like that, right, so when Cory says that Feeny can still teach him stuff, we would be like "damn." That was an amazing opportunity. It's still a good scene, but it could have been profound.
It's the same kinda thing here. If Alan's conversation with Cory had been written like I wrote it, these last two clips would blow my fuckin mind.
So that's that. Everything up to the last six minutes was a train wreck. Cory was constantly flipping between feeling guilty and knowing it wasn't his fault, I'm not even sure where he ended up. The ending was good, worthy of being the season finale, but damn if they didn't make us work for it.
0 for plot, obviously. I want to give 0.5 for humor, but "lid boy" and "sick boy" are cutting it down to 0.25. I would give 1 for character development if Cory actually realized that the plant and the "proper gardener" were a metaphor for himself and Feeny, but he seemed pretty oblivious to that whole message so 0.5 for that. Now, life lesson, life lesson... I dunno, it was close, but the "learning important stuff from teachers" idea really isn't fleshed out very well. It would have been difficult to see that theme if I hadn't been looking for it so hard. Maybe it's not even there, maybe this episode was just a piece of shit. 0.5.
1.25/4 and no badges.
SoooOOoOOOoOoooOooo that's the end of season 1. *confetti* No more reviews this week. I'll start season two next Monday or the following Monday.
Thanks so much for reading and saying the nice things you say.
Clips and images used under fair use.
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