The What If episode is a sitcom staple, but even if it somehow weren’t, it’s hard to imagine Girl Meets World never taking this cast out for a spin with it. People change people is written on every frame of the show (sometimes literally) and so the automatic question becomes clear: How? If people change people, what is the baseline they otherwise would have operated on? What would have changed without them?
As a diversion, it delivers. There’s more plot structure in this one episode than in most episodes combined, with the show playing right into our expectations of the usual Halloween anthology tale before the reveal: Auggie is not just narrating. Auggie, in this reality, never existed at all. Faced with the existential crisis of his narrative getting out of hand (and slowly fading even his ghost away), Auggie works to reset reality, but it soon becomes obvious that the paths may have diverged too much to ever come together again.
Is it strange? Sure. But the Meets World universe has often enjoyed a detour from reality and its own rules—and as impossible as it is to believe things won’t turn out in the end, it’s nice to see a story with real stakes and a clear concept. It’s not a perfect home run. The show sidesteps completely just how it is things do get back to normal, with the tag simply showing us Maya and Riley’s meeting happening just as it once did only because it must. Not does the show ever really care to explain what it was that gave Auggie his powers in this one instance. But as a meta story about storytelling, it appeals just enough to let things slide, even if it makes for slightly more mess.
Unfortunately the real issue of “Girl Meets World of Terror 3” is more intrinsic than that. What would happen if people hadn’t changed people?
That answer seems to be basically what you would have thought. It might seem inevitable that we would have had this episode eventually, but in different ways, we’ve had this episode before. An entire arc just this season revolved around who Maya would have been without Riley, and how she’d lost perhaps too much in her quest to live up to her admiration for her friend. It’s easy to guess what we’d get in "Meets World of Terror 3." We already even have the code words. We have Riley in full Rileytown, a Disney Princess who’s grown up reading about Disney Princesses, and modeled her entire worldview and existence accordingly. We have Lucas in full bad boy mode, which is … well, not exactly bad, per the show’s usual back and forth to define just what bad for Lucas meant, but he makes for a solid desperado image as he trades in one romantic ideal (the white knight) for another (the brooding mystery). We have Farkle in Farkle mode, before he outgrew the name and started rocking the black brooding mystery vibe himself with the support of his friends. We don’t have Zay, who without reason to be contacted, is still in Texas.
Only Smackle and Maya surprise, if for different reasons. While I could nitpick the above as being too broad, such is the trope we’re working with. It's easier and sometimes even more fun to see the extremes than it is to engage with the reality. Smackle though simply seems wrong, pushed to uber-nerd territory despite the fact we know who Smackle was before the gang found her. She was cold, she was calculating, she was determined. It seems like a shame to render her a cheap back of the class geek gag.
Maya, meanwhile, is perhaps too successful—for the same reason I suggested before. Maya feels most like a girl you actually might see, or at the least, a character we might still encounter. She’s less in Mayatown mode as she is in delinquent bully mode, played and complicated by Carpenter with a quiet despair we don’t normally get in Mayatown. It’s not particularly easy to feel intimidated by this Maya—but then, the show pretty much admits that flat out intimidation isn’t how she operates best. Mostly she discomfits people, with the sense that you don’t what she’ll do because she doesn't care. She’s getting by day to day only because she has to, not because she wants to.
This ends up being key, as we get to the true heart of the story. While all our characters have been changed by one another in superficial, shallow ways, more important is the way they have been changed in essence. “Meets World of Terror 3” postulates that all the kids, in their own ways, have the potential to have been lonely individuals. I appreciate that outside of Auggie’s attempts to recreate their encounters, the true solution was as simple as that. They were lonely, and they saw that in one another—and even different as they had become, something sparked in them to fix that.
Even in another reality, the secret to life hadn’t really changed. Cory had never articulated it before, but it just had a more roundabout route, as Riley taught him something for a change.
