No Time to Die: On the 'Scream' Episode of 'Boy Meets World'
Also discussed: the new Bond movie, scary movies, postmodern 90s stuff, making out, sitcom conservatism, high school, the 'monoculture,' transcendent metaphors, timelessness, whether anything ends
Because Halloween is coming up, and we love a good scare as much as the next Substack, we’ve decided to discuss our favorite spooky thing of all-time: the classic Boy Meets World episode “And Then There Was Shawn”, a 20-minute Scream-inspired parody complete with a costumed killer, gruesome deaths, smug meta-commentary, and Jennifer Love Hewitt…
Sam: It’s funny, I always thought of this as the ultimate Halloween episode of Boy Meets World. But it actually aired in February?
Joe: To be fair we only watched the show in reruns, and they probably played this one on Halloween. Or maybe they didn’t, maybe it just feels that way because the show was such a contiguous, unthinking part of our daily lives, our routines—mornings before catching the bus, an episode or two right when we got off in the afternoon—that, like school periods, helped order the day.
Sam: It served as this little buffer between youthful obligations. I genuinely remember never wanting Boy Meets World to end. Rewatching it for this subbie, it returned me to this melancholic feeling—the sense of having to go back to reality, to catch the bus, to turn off the TV and do your homework; to press on, grow up, get older…
Joe: And do what all adults do: pen a hyper-niche Substack.
Sam: It’s different, though, this feeling of TV as coterminous with your life rather than, in the binge-watching era, a totalizing, vacuum-like escape from it. The melancholy of it ending has been replaced with the exhaustion of it never ending.
Joe: For better or worse, there’s no order to content anymore. Which is ironically sort of what this episode is about: Shawn—and by proxy, the audience’s—grappling with the dissolution of Cory and Topanga’s relationship, the reliability of which had been the backbone of the series. After the gang lands in detention, each member of the group gets (comically) picked off by a robed killer until only Cory, Topanga, and Shawn remain alive. But instead of murdering them like the rest of their friends, the killer joins Cory and Topanga’s hands together (much like the officiant of a wedding), takes off his mask, and reveals himself to be a double of Shawn.
Of course, the entire sequence has been a dream. “If you’re not together,” Shawn says, upon waking up at his desk, “I feel like there’s nothing I can depend on.”
Sam: Is now when we talk about mom and dad’s divorce?
Joe: No. But the show, as evinced in this episode, has always been about different notions of family. Cory comes from the prototypical stable home. Topanga’s parents are divorced. Shawn’s mom ran off and his father is erratic. And the show is constantly asking of its characters: Can you escape your fate?
The whole reason Cory broke up with Topanga is because he doesn’t want to always be “the nice guy.”
Sam: And here I thought he was just super into Freaks and Geeks’ Linda Cardellini…
Joe: And Shawn’s central conflict—even in this episode—is about whether he will give in to becoming his father or take refuge in the “family” he’s discovered in Cory and Topanga.
I think these questions of who you are and who you can be are what makes the show so accessible to viewers with one foot still firmly planted at home and the other aching to leave it behind. They’re also what drive long-form television: this mixture of predictability and surprise that ultimately reaffirms whatever a show values.
Sam: Sitcoms function best when lots of things happen but few things fundamentally change (or change very slowly). And this is an essentially conservative quality, is it not? Boy Meets World, which we watched on ABC Family—formerly owned by televangelist Pat Robertson—is especially so in some ways. There’s always a moral to the story, an unambiguous lesson to be learned. For all your talk about different kinds of family, it’s clear which ones are the most valorized. I mean, in this episode, Shawn is sort of symbolically trying to preserve the straight white Christian nuclear family (even though Cory, constantly equivocating and preternaturally nebbish, always struck me, a Jew, as culturally Jewish).
Joe: Not to mention the utter lack of sex on the show—and the fact that the series basically ends when Cory and Topanga get married and consummate their relationship.
Sam: Would you say, Joe, that that’s the moment boy…meets world?
Joe: I’m tryna ‘meet world’ later tonight, if you catch my drift.
Sam: The only drift I’m catchin’ is the new print issue of The Drift, because I love me a magazine of culture and politics.
Anyway, I think the show manages to have things both ways: on the one hand, if you were prepubescent, the elision of below-the-belt stuff helps you connect with it and generates some aspirational tension—I mean, there’s just so much making out, which is the only sexual thing most middle-schoolers can even conceive of doing. On the other hand, if you have had sex—
Joe: Props…
Sam: —the show is pretty knowing about the limitations its placing on its own characters, and that becomes a sort of in-joke.
Joe: Like the bit in this episode where Shawn says the virgins will be spared from the killer, and Cory says to Topanga, "Thanks for saving me”; and Eric goes, "I'm dead”; and Jack says, "Me too”; and Shawn delivers the kicker: "I'll get as sick as you can possibly get without actually dying." It's an incredible bit of doublespeak, both euphemistic enough to evade the ABC censors (virginity=spared from murder) while also, for those in the know, mocking them.
Sam: High school kids exist in this perfect liminal space between those two poles, of knowingness and innocence. Maybe that’s one reason why so many great horror movies are set in high school. What struck me watching the episode this time around is how much Shawn himself tries and fails to stay ahead of the murderer—he repeatedly alludes to fake scary movies to describe the group's experience (e.g., upon hearing from Eric that blood is coming out of the locker room showers, he remarks, “This is just like that horror film classic...Blood in the Showers"). But about halfway through the episode, when the creepy janitor, whom Shawn is convinced is the killer, shows up dead, he starts to realize that for all his snickering confidence, he can't predict what's going to happen next; in spite of his attempts to lead the group to safety—
Joe: In a deadly library, where Eric is slain by falling books (a great visual metaphor for his denseness, or the trials and tribulations of…academia??)
Sam: —he cedes control of the outcome. I don’t know, there’s something so, for lack of a better word, high school-ish about this brand of hubris—his sardonic attitude, how smug he is about his seeming ability to predict what’s going to happen...it’s as if the put-upon cleverness is a kind of grasping response to the feeling of being on the brink of adulthood, but still in the cocoon of adolescence. Only someone who doesn’t know it all can believe they know it all.
It’s possible to interpret all the murders in this episode—along with the killings in Scream and other horror movies, many of which revolve around a group of high school or college kids—as a kind of elaborate joke: a macabre punishment for thinking you know better.
Joe: Which is refracted back on the audience, who, even if they’re still in high school, really do know better (“Don’t go up there alone!”). The thrill of watching a movie like Scream or Scary Movie—
Sam: Which kind of holds up?
Joe: —is finally being in on the joke, hip to conventions others (younger and less knowledgeable than you) may not be.
“And Then There Was Shawn” is therefore of a piece with a lot of the postmodernism stuff going on in the 90s: the reflexivity of it, the sheer amount of references, the intertextuality. To briefly summarize—
Sam: If I had a nickel for every time Joe “briefly summarized” something…
Joe: —the advancements in technology in the 80s (cable, VCRs, etc.) allowed kids to watch more shit than ever before, so by the time the 90s rolled around, teen audiences were more aware and culturally literate than ever before. By the late 80s, audiences had become exhausted by slasher films, familiar with their conventions; as a result, in the 90s, you get Scream (1996), where Jamie Kennedy’s character is, not unlike Shawn, doling out the “rules” of a horror movie…
Sam: And you get Eric Matthews (Will Friedle) making out with a new girl at John Adams High, who just so happens to be standing outside the detention room during this ep. Her name is Jennifer Love Fefferman (“Feffy”), and she is, of course, played by Jennifer Love Hewitt—who starred in I Know What You Did Last Summer the previous year (and was also dating Friedle at the time of filming).
Joe: But that sort of PoMo—
Sam: Yikes.
Joe: —exists in a different way now. There's a reason the high school sitcom—and soap opera—really picked up steam in the 90s and early 2000s. It was the collision of both an emergent, media-savvy teen audience and, because of politics, because of the way we watched TV back then, the last gasp of a sort of monoculture. We were all at home after school watching the same thing.
Sam: But now the fragmentation of audiences means the only monoculture that can exist is larger than life. It’s less finding the universal in the specific than finding the universal in the…universal.
Joe: I trudged through the first two episodes of the I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot on Amazon—for the sake of Art and our Substack and because there’s something missing in my brain—and found it just so larded with self-seriousness. It played everything so head-on there was no room at all for levity, no joking asides, not the slightest sense of irony or fun.
All of which is enough to make you think that maybe in our increasingly balkanized media environment, no one can agree on the same genre conventions anymore; maybe it’s not feasible for a sizable enough audience to understand the “rules.” Or maybe irony itself has become the “rule” that needs breaking, making a return to utter sincerity, seriousness, the only solution. Or maybe it’s just that the the new teen audience hasn’t seen the originals, anyway…
Sam: I feel that. When you watch the trailer (just released) for the newest Scream reboot, something seems to have been lost in translation from the mid-90s: The film appears to approach so straightforwardly a premise the original so shrewdly satirized, as though the knowledge the audience built up about 80s horror-movie conventions has been erased, or discounted, or forgotten, or simply no longer matter.
Joe: I keep thinking that this feels resonant with the end of the new James Bond movie…
Sam: Spoiler alert? Is it time to let loose one of those fuckers?
Joe: ...when Bond is standing at the top of that big military base as though he's in that famous painting I copy/pasted above, waiting for the rockets to blow him to smithereens, and how watching him disappear felt to me like a celebration, the missiles like fireworks. And how James Bond was dead now, but not really dead, because we know he'll be back, reincarnated in another form—like the slasher sequels, like the new Halloween, like the new Scream, all of them constantly being updated and referenced into oblivion.
Even the title —"No Time to Die”— reads to me as both life-sustaining (“I can't die now, I've got to save the world") and purgatorial, vampiric ("There's no time to die, so I'll never be able to die.").
And this links back to the sitcom form, the repetition of it, and perhaps even high school, and our return to it, and also these horror movies, where everyone dies but also no one really does, especially not the killer, or the killer's copycat, the "serial" killer prompting "serial" content prompting new serial killers, and on and on and on….
Sam: What was it Cory Matthews famously said about karma on another episode of Boy Meets World? “What goes around, goes around and around…”?
Joe: Perhaps I’m talking about this exhausting sense of being both constrained by and outside of time. Time and timelessness. Being and Timelessness.
Sam: Look out Heidegger…
I do buy your close read of No Time to Die, though. I found the ending, when Bond gets the nano-bot poison on him from the Russian villain's daddy's toxic garden(?), and the poison is such that anyone he touches, literally touches, will die....I found that to be sincerely moving, a tragic metaphor so oversized it transcends itself. The new Bond movies aren’t just about like, saving 1000 people, they’re about saving Bond’s soul, and thus the soul of the entire franchise.
All of it brings to mind that indelible image from Ad Astra, when Astronaut Brad Pitt watches his Astronaut Daddy drift lifelessly into space, a profound symbol of the impassable distance between father and son rendered painstakingly literal on a massive scale...
Joe: Boy meets…world.
Sam: And I suppose this episode also deals in these kinds of larger-than-life metaphors, with Cory and Topanga's breakup amounting to the literal obliteration of everyone they know and love.
Joe: The horror film as merely…hormonal.
Sam: And yet the emotional conclusion of No Time to Die is ultimately undercut by the knowledge, of everyone in the audience, that while Daniel Craig is no longer playing James Bond, James Bond the character will assuredly live on.
Joe: In this instance, the “monoculture” has become perpetually apocalyptic—the world, a world, is always ending, and from this minor oblivion comes the antimatter for another world, tangentially related to the previous one, and so on and so forth, until we’re not consuming solitary planets but entire galaxies, universes, and the animating question becomes not whether one character, one world, one episode or movie, will die, or end, but what death, or the neat ambivalence of an ending, actually even means, anymore. Again: there’s really just No Time to Die.
Sam: I feel like this very Thing has been discussed ad nauseam with regards to the Avengers movies—where I’ve gathered, from being online, that the apocalypse fails to stick from one movie to the next—but there's an irksome feeling that if the profit motive is substantial enough, it has the power to dull the sharp finality of death, minimize it from an irreversible existential event to a merely tossed-off incident: a dream sequence, not unlike Shawn’s, from which we’ll collectively awaken, so long as we make it to the next installment.
A better analysis than the "Joe Meets World" project that I still have from 5th or 6th (?) grade, but of course not as cute.