Headscratchers / Girl Meets World

• Why does a school with 1000 children (verbatim from “Girl Meets the Forgotten”) only have one lunch lady on staff? This troper had a school of *maybe* 500 students and remembers having at least 6 or 7 regular cafeteria workers.
  • Maybe the school has a really low budget, or more than likely to save on the costs of hiring extras. The same reason why we rarely see any other staff unless they are plot relevant.
  • To be fair, there is an extra cafeteria worker in the background. It can be safe to assume that there are more.
  • Also, the whole point of the episode is that students have to do a community service requirement as part of their studies and working cafeteria duty can be imposed as a punishment.
  • That cafeteria also clearly cannot fit 1000 students. It is possible (though maybe unlikely given that it's NYC) that the school has open lunch where students can go out of the school. Alternatively, they have multiple lunch periods (or even multiple cafeterias) so there is only a fraction of the total student body in the cafeteria at a time.
• Maya has an obvious crush on Josh, and the feeling might be mutual. Yet, she's supposed to be 14, and he's supposed to be 17. Um...
  • What? You never had a crush on someone older than you were? On Josh's end, he seems more amused by it than anything else.
    • Of course I have. A lot of my celebrity crushes are older actresses. It's just that, he tells Maya, "You grew up gorgeous" (playing with the back of his head for a second before saying it), and then the audience (who were obviously live for this episode) goes "WHOOOO!" And then, at the end, when Shawn invites them along for his next business venture, Maya points at Josh and says, "You're invited, too", prompting a "Cool" from him, and an "Oh, boy" from Riley. It just seems sort of an awkward thing. If a girl three years younger than me had a thing for me (at least, at the ages Maya and Josh are supposed to be), I wouldn't say, "You grew up gorgeous" to her, even in amusement.
  • Five years seems like a big deal when their ages are 12 and 17, but when they're 22 and 27 it becomes less of an issue. Josh might just be looking ahead.
  • In "Girl Meets Game Night", Josh is clearly disturbed by Maya's obsession with him and spends the entire night trying to let her down easy, implying that his calling her gorgeous was just him being a nice guy.
  • In "Girl Meets Master Plan," Maya turns 14, so the age gap isn't quite as drastic (three years compared to five as we were speculating).
    • Which is its own headscratcher, as the girls are in 7th grade and should thus be 12-13. I suppose it's entirely likely that Maya might have been left back a grade at some point.
• So, how in touch are the girls with the extended cast of the original show? Shawn was very, very distant from Riley until the events of the series play out because his emotional baggage kept him away — that much is concrete — but what about the others? Riley knows Eric, and she even knows Eric's Feeny call, but she somehow doesn't know that Eric's been elected mayor of a small town? Cory and Topanga know, and they're not even surprised to see him sporting the "Mr. Squirrels" beard and robe, but Riley is so confused, she literally blows a rape whistle on him at first. How is she so out of the loop? Hell, she recognizes *Feeny* on sight one episode later, despite dialogue indicating that they've never even met before.
  • Well, to start with, Feeny is plastered all over billboards about staying in education, including at least one in the building/subway station that she passes every day on the way to school.
  • It's possible that when Riley first met Eric, the stars were in the proper alignment for him to be "Smart Eric" (ie. he might be "Well-Rested"), and this is the first time she's seen "Plays With Squirrels."
    • Auggie asks why Eric is dressed the way he is in "Girl Meets Mr. Squirrels". He only dresses up as Plays With Squirrels when talking with his townspeople, of whom he was elected mayor only recently. It's very likely nobody's ever seen the Plays With Squirrels getup before.
  • In Girl Meets Rules, why did Farkle get detention? He didn't do anything. He fainted twice, got hit with a Frisbee, got shot with ping pong balls and that's about it. Much like Lucas, he was pretty much respecting the rules. Was it just because he was out of his seat and on the floor when Cory came in? Was it seen as him helping enable Maya?
    • He may NOT have gotten detention. Riley was there. Maya was there. You'd have to pretty much pull a gun on Farkle to keep him from being where his "ladies" are.
• If Lucas helped out during Hurricane Katrina, wouldn't he have only been like, 4 or 5 years old?
• Consider how close they grew through out the original series it seems slight odd that neither Cory or Topanga seemed to know that Angela was married.
  • It could be they just fell out of touch. I mean, at the start of the series, Cory and Shawn hadn't seen each other in 13 years, and they were all but joined at the hip during Boy Meets World.
    • When did they say they hadn't seen each other for 13 years? Riley even said that Shawn had come over for a few Christmases.
  • It's not uncommon when a couple splits up for one member to "inherit" the mutual friends and the other to bow out of the shared social circle. Between Cory and Shawn's air-tight friendship and the fact that Angela broke up with Shawn and left his life abruptly, it makes sense that she'd fall out of touch with Cory and Topanga.
• More nitpicky than anything else, but in a throwaway joke, Turner pokes fun at Cory's "sensible sedan" in the school parking lot. Why, exactly, is there a parking lot in a school that's presumably smack in the middle of Manhattan (where parking is rare, if even available at all), and why does Cory even have or need a car to begin with when he and Topanga can just use the subway whenever they go out? It just really seems like an oversight on the part of the writers, as anyone who's lived in the city knows that owning a car isn't worth it in New York (save for parts of the outer boroughs, where driving is more feasible).
  • Because the writers come from Flyover Country and live in LA?
  • There's no shortage of cars in NYC. It's very common for more affluent families with children to have cars because schlepping multiple children on and off the public transport is kind of a pain. Given the family lives near the Bleecker Street station, which is in Greenwich Village—a very expensive part of Manhattan—it is entirely plausible the Matthews are one of those families. It doesn't explain the school parking lot issue since most parking in the city is street parking, but it could just be phrasing. What is an oversight of the writers, however, is in the pilot, when a big deal is made over Riley getting her first Metro Card. Students in NYC receive a Metro Card to use public transport to get to school and they are distributed to all students in grades 7-12. Riley should already have one, not need to wheedle her parents for one.
    • It's entirely possible that she DID get one, but her parents wouldn't give it to her and let her use the subway.
• Was Riley a bit of an Oops baby? At the beginning of the series, she's 12 and Auggie is 5, putting them 7 years apart, a fairly big gap in sibling ages. And if the time capsule was buried 15 years ago, and she's about 13 at that point, that is pretty young for Cory and Topanga to be having a baby considering they both finished college.
  • Possibly, but the age gap could be easily explained by the fact that both Cory and Topanga would have had to attend graduate school after college; Topanga is a lawyer and would need a J.D., and Cory teaches middle/high school, which can be done with a four-year degree but it is highly preferred to have a Master's. It's plausible they'd both want to complete that before having a second child.
  • Riley's birthday is December 8th, 2001. If we assume that the airdate of the BMW finale roughly correlates to when they left for New York, then Riley would have been conceived just less than a year later. It's reasonable to assume that she wasn't planned, and that they decided to finish their educations before having another.
• In "Girl Meets Boy" Cory confiscates his whole classes' cellphones. How, exactly, is he allowed to do this? As far as I know (at least, this is the case in every school I've seen) teachers can only take their students' phones for the schoolday. What if the students need to get an emergency call?
  • You call the school and the school alerts the classroom over the PA system.
  • The same way they did before cellphones? Plenty of schools have no phone policies.
  • You're correct that he cannot confiscate their phone beyond the end of the school day, and has to return it before they leave campus, but a parent can easily get ahold of their child by calling the school.
• Why the hell didn't they just rename "Shamus Farkle" to "Shamus Minkus" instead of Farkle Minkus?
  • Most likely because they had already filmed scenes where he's spoken of as "Farkle", dubbing just wouldn't work, and a full reshoot with a classroom full of kids on limited work hours (and the extras probably attending regular school themselves) would've put the production behind schedule.