Episode 7x20 "As Time Goes By"

Oh.

This episode is bad, we all know it's bad, and I have a lot of work I want to do today. On the other hand, we're at the very end of the series and I don't want to start shortchanging after we've come this far. So let's try to give it the full treatment, even though nobody cares.

The very first shot shows us what we'll be dealing with. It's supposed to be a noir film, with Eric as the narrating detective protagonist. Someone's been murdered, who we quickly learn is Topanga, and Eric aims to find the culprit among the noir film alter egos of the other characters. Except Morgan, obviously. Is it fair to say that I'm more interested in Morgan than Rachel? I don't think anyone's made that comparison yet, but it's not far off. Cory doesn't have an alter ego in this scene for some reason. He shows up pretty early in Noir Land and it's not some big reveal. I can't think of a good reason why he'd be left out of this scene.

Alter Feeny is wearing a fez, and Eric only addresses him as "fez head," so let's compromise and call him Feezy. Fezzy? Ehhhh I like Feezy. So Feezy tells Detective Eric that the murder victim (Alter Topanga) "got in the way," which is supposed to be ominous and symbolic, a la The Psychotic Episode. Cory symbolicaly killed everyone except Topanga in his dream in that episode, now Topanga is symbolically dying in what may or may not be time travel. I admit that that sounds like a decent enough premise.

In reality, Cory is overreacting to road runner cartoons instead of writing a paper, the same paper that Topanga's been working on all day. Cory's got a bowl of popcorn to much on while he writes, and there's about ten times more popcorn on the floor than in his stomach. Topanga is somehow bewildered by Cory's behavior, even though she's known him her whole life and he has always been this way. I don't know what she expected when she married him.

Cory tries to convince his wife to watch cartoons with him, but she thinks Cory needs to be more responsible, to have "more stress" in his life. The next exchange is important, so I'll just write it out.

Cory: "You think I should make everyone nuts by being a stressed out control freak until everyone wants to kill me?"
Topanga: "Oh, you wanna kill me?"
Cory: "No... I'm just talkin about, you know, everyone that knows you."

And like we saw in Boy Meets Noir a minute ago, everyone she knows was standing around her dead body. Not exactly subtle, but there it is. Topanga finds a cabinet in the closet whose contents remind Topanga of the "time continuum vortex things we're studying in physics." It's troubling that the audience doesn't laugh at that. Either way the vortex sucks her in to Noir Land.

Rory's Shangri La Cafe, where people come for many reasons, "but stay for just one, to forget." This first scene is actually pretty fun as we meet the Noir versions of all the characters. In particular are William Russ doing a hilarious evil-guy voice for his character "Costello," and Rider's character Isaac "Goodshot" Kelly, who simply wandered into the bar yesterday and never left, and now he's tending bar. He pours a shot, but of course no one drinks it because that would be morally reprehensible.

Okay this is already better than No Guts, No Cory, so that's officially my least favorite episode. Everything is going to go to shit very quickly here, but these character introductions were fun.

We meet Cory's alter ego Rory, who of course owns the Cafe, and he immediately takes a liking to Topanga, but she can't remember who she is. Aaaaaaand now I'm bored. You had a good run, As Time Goes By.

So Topanga goes to Detective Eric for help finding out her identity. Rachel is Eric's secretary or something.

Topanga can hear Eric's narration for some reason. It seems like every scene had someone burst into the writers room like "hey wouldn't it be funny if..." and they didn't really even think about it before putting it into the episode.

Everyone's back at Rory's Shangri La Cafe again, and it's hard to explain what's going on. Normally when I write these reviews I just focus on the important details, the things that are moving the plot forward. But almost none of this is important, there's nothing to say except that Eric thinks he has a lead on Topanga's case, and she was starting to forget that she even had a case. There's this afwul, awful, cancel-the-show-it's-so-bad recurring gag with piano playing noir Jack, where he hears someone speak famous song lyrics and immediately thinks about turning the words into a song. He always decides against it though, and the audience fucking loves it.

Rory spontaneously proposes to Topanga and she accepts. Yeah that's about par for the course on this show.

 Detective Eric asks Topanga if she knows what a time continuum vortex is. This jolts her memory, causing flashes of all the stressful goings on of her real life, but she chooses to remain here in what we now know is her escapist fantasy. I want to point out that Topanga's fantasy casts both Rachel and Angela as complete morons. Best friends indeed. This would actually have been interesting if everyone was a caricature of how Topanga views them. The only one that really works is Cory as Mister Suave and Handsome, and mayyyyyyyyyybe Shawn because of the whole alcohol thing.

I would really like to see that episode honestly, but we got this instead, so let's keep going.

Real Topanga starts seeping in through the cracks here as she gets irritated by Rory's poor grammar, and again when she's clearly unimpressed by Rory's career as a "dandy". Jack writes an original song and we're supposed to care but we don't.

After the fade out, everybody at Rory's got the blues. Topanga has managed to bring down everyone's good time with her grammar and political correctness and penchant for responsibility. Feezy decides that "the interloper must die." So here we are, just like Cory said earlier, everyone wants to kill Topanga for ruining their good time.

Perhaps the very worst thing about all of this is the voice Trina McGee has been doing as Noir Angela. It's like that cutesy baby ditzy voice that people thought was endearing in like the 20's.

Eric sets off to, I don't know, vaguely find a way to fix the problem, when he passes a ringing phone booth.

So Detective Eric wibbles into the real world where Cory is still watching cartoons. What is this? I thought we were doing an escapist fantasy thing, why is Real Cory getting involved now? Why are we so flippantly using this time vortex thing? I don't need to explain to you why this is ridiculous, I think we're all on the same page right now.

Real Cory heads back into Noirville with Detective Eric, but they're too late. Topanga's already been murdered. Cory confronts Rory for murdering Topanga, and Rory explains that she was ruining his good time, ruining everybody's good time and their whole way of life. So now I'm thinking that this was actually Cory's fantasy and he's about to learn a lesson. Cory explains to Rory that Topanga's changes to their lives would always be for the better, like studying instead of watching cartoons, so it definitely looks like this is Cory's fantasy after all.

Yeah it's not though. The fantasy wibbles out of existence with the camera centered on Topanga, so it was definitely her fantasy. Cory decides to start working on his paper, but Topanga tells him not to so they can watch cartoons together.

Excuse me? That's what she learned? To be less responsible so that she doesn't piss off her stupid lazy friends? She learned to watch cartoons so that her husband doesn't want to murder her? In all seriousness, this episode is clearly about not working so hard as to forget to enjoy your life, but then what was the point of having Topanga murdered? Why was the episode centered on a murder mystery if the murder had nothing to do with the resolution?

And like I said, the other characters in Rory's Shangri La Cafe were totally worthless. William Russ was given an inch and he took a mile with his character, so he deserves praise for making something out of absolutely nothing, but even he ultimately contributed nothing. This could have been really interesting if they wrote the characters in Topanga's fantasy as exaggerated versions of how she sees them, like I was talking about before, so that was a huge missed opportunity. Everything about this was a miss.

Plot: 0 - The main plot (the murder mystery) and the resolution (Topanga taking time to smell the flowers) have nothing to do with each other. It's unbelievably disconnected. They had two ideas and just cut them both in half to Frankenstein this episode together.

Character Development: 0.5 - Topanga takes time to enjoy a cartoon with her husband. She's always been a perfectionist so this has been a long time coming. It just seems like they threw it in here at the very end to get it out of the way without much thought.

Humor: 0.5 - Eric's narration hit a few good notes, William Russ was a highlight, not much else.

Life Lesson: 0 - If you annoy your friends too much, they'll kill you.

1.0 out of 4.0. Still better than No Guts, No Cory.

Thanks for reading, see you Monday.

All images used under Fair Use.