Episode 1x04 "Cory's Alternative Friends"

It's week two. Let's jam.

The students in Mr. Feeny's class have paired up to give presentations on environmental issues. Cory and his best pal Good-Hair give a pretty hilarious presentation, but it's also pretty nonsensical so Feeny's not happy.

Mr. Feeny blames himself for allowing the school's worst students to pair up and thus lets them try again with different partners. He pairs Good-Hair with Minkus, and Cory with a character we haven't met before, Topanga Lawrence (we hear her first and last names in this scene). This doesn't make sense. Wouldn't Minkus and Topanga already have partners/already have done their presentations? I don't like it. It's like they don't WANT a plot badge. Anyway, in this process Mr. Feeny calls Good-Hair "Mr. Hunter", but we still don't know his first name. 

Maybe the writers were still trying to decide what to name him? The characters' names aren't in the credits either, so... I should tweet at Rider Strong and see if he knows.

Regardless, we learn that Topanga's gimmick (at least for the time being) is that she's weird. She asks to check Cory's energies to see if they're compatible partners. Topanga is essentially a second Morgan here. Her "weird" lines get a lot of laughs the way that Morgan's "cute" lines get laughs, but the only times I'm laughing are when Cory is sarcastic toward her (as with Morgan). 

Cory is pretty funny. I think that my own sense of humor was influenced heavily by this show. It's awesome that Ben Savage nailed this kind of delivery and timing at such a young age.

It turns out that some girls don't want an unnamed "brillo head" (a hair based name! I could have been a writer for this show) to come to their party. Cory overhears, and we all assume they're talking about him. If it turns out that they were talking about someone else, I'm going to redact my Not Being a Predictable, Shitty Sitcom Badge from episode 2. Well that sets the stage for this episode, Cory is insecure about his hair. Cory and Good-Hair chat about their projects, and Good-Hair has his most insightful line so far in the series.

Now we're at the Matthews house and Morgan does a bit. The crowd goes "hahaha" then "awww" then "hahahah". It hurts. 

Cory and Topanga are working on their project. Topanga wants Cory to read poetry while she does an interpretive dance. This bit is actually really relevant like 5 seasons from now, so remember this image. 

Cory is a little bitch about the whole thing and Topanga gives the "you shouldn't care what people think" speech. Yawn. 

Good-Hair arrives and forces Topanga out the door. How is she supposed to get home, Good-Hair? It's 1993, she doesn't have a cell phone. That was a dick move. Now Topanga has to wander home looking like a mental patient.

Good-Hair has come over to chemically straighten Cory's hair, having obtained the product from his alleged sister Stacy. Naturally, they don't follow the instructions and Cory looks ridiculous. Stacy doesn't actually exist outside of this one episode, so I'm going to conclude that Good-Hair made her up from the beginning and is just masterfully trolling Cory because it's funny. 

This whole scene is pretty funny, thanks in large part to Will Friedle, who plays Eric. He's got some great timing and facial expressions here. I would really like to see more of him in the early seasons. Imagine if they cut Morgan out and gave all of that screen time to Eric. Alas.

Now it's time to give the presentation and Cory still looks silly. Everyone laughs at him except Topanga, prompting that touching clarinet music. 

Cory sits with the "losers" at lunch since Good-Hair and someone else who honestly might be Bad-Hair are making fun of him, and the losers aren't laughing. 

I fucking love this kid playing the keyboard. That's literally all he does in this scene. Doesn't say a word, just plays his keyboard like a boss. 2nd favorite behind Minkus. The losers are trying to get a petition signed to help save the job of some teacher we'll never hear about again. Cory gets the idea to make a human chain blocking what must be the only exit in the entire school in order to force people to sign their petition. It works. Topanga is very grateful for Cory's efforts, and thinks it would be fun and enlightening for Cory's first kiss to be at a time when he looks ridiculous. 

Cory is handcuffed from being part of the human chain, not because Topanga is kinky. Or maybe it's both, I don't know. Look at that bad ass water fountain. 

The kiss setup is actually really well done. Cory's awkward about it but Topanga's pretty damn smooth. I definitely wasn't sold on the "appearance isn't a big deal" theme of this episode until this kiss. It wasn't sappy, it wasn't corny, it wasn't uncomfortable. A well placed kiss in a sitcom is frustratingly difficult to find, but they pulled it off here. This scene also moves Topanga much further away from Morgan and much closer to Minkus on the character scale, and the relationship between Cory and Topanga is central to the series, so I'm willing to throw down a Character Development Badge. 

During the end credits, we find out that the girls from earlier were not in fact talking about Cory when they said "brillo head". Godddddddddd dammmmmmmitttttttt Boy Meets World. You almost made it.

Big fat zero for plot, .5 for humor (thank you Will Friedle), 1 for character development, .25 for life lesson. 

1.75/4

This episode was kinda crap, but Cory and Topanga's first kiss is a big deal, so it's probably worth watching.

 I learned how to make gifs in a quick way, so we'll definitely see more of those. If anyone's curious, I've been using Format Factory for this stuff. It's the VLC player of video conversions. Free, any format to any format (including gifs), and you can tell it to only extract certain time ranges. So I'm pulling a 5 second gif out of a 20 minute mkv in one step, for free. That's fucking impressive.

Thanks for reading, see you Wednesday.

Clips and images used under Fair Use for the sole purpose of review.