Date of airing: April 6, 2001 (Disney Channel)
Now that Lizzie is a professional babysitter, will it become a recurring theme throughout the show? Will she be asked to babysit a few more kids than just Matt and get her piggy bank filled up this way? Will she become rich enough to do impulse purchases that will get her into trouble with the parental units? Because it wouldn’t be wrong at all when the depiction of Lizzie growing up to become a young woman also happens via getting paid to do certain complex chores, like watching over her screwed-up brother with no brain, who apparently heads straight into the twilight zone as soon as he is on a sugar rush. Sitting someone like Matt certainly makes you deserving of a little cash at the end of the day.
By the way, I have no idea why Lizzie’s parents weren’t able to trust Lizzie with watching over her deadbeat little brother for an evening. Yeah, she is 13 years old and Matt is ten (I assume he is because I don’t think his age has been mentioned so far), and while it’s custom to believe that a 13-year-old and a ten-year-old will cause mayhem and do a lot of mischief that will cost the parents a couple of hundred bucks after the destruction of the house has been fixed, it seems logical that Lizzie would collect the first babysitting experience by watching over her brother, which means her parents had all the reason in the world to give it a go. After all, a young teenager’s babysitting experience starts in their own family, right? And it is anything but wrong to give Lizzie the opportunity to experience maturity by letting her watch her little brother. Although as a little brother myself, I have to think about when my sisters were watching me – there have been a few instances I can remember in which the parents were out of the house (during one of them, I cut open my toe and was bleeding on the carpet), but was this ever considered a “babysitting job” with the intent to teach them responsibility?
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| Kate is loaded! |
The episode was okay before it turned into a Disney-fied Y-7 rated version of HOME ALONE without all the gnarly death traps. It had those dumb and annoying sound effects again and all I want for this show is to get rid of those, but the titular misadventures were kind of great to watch and turned out to be slightly comical. Consider me surprised in a positive way when Lizzie turned out to be a solid protector of both her brother and her home when the kids believed a burglar was about to break into a house, and consider me quite stunned that this episode was a zero-budget attempt at a HOME ALONE copy. I’m pretty sure besides Matt quoting THE SIXTH SENSE after the power got out (the show continues its quotations of R-rated movies that the target audience would never have watched before), attempting the burglar story was a surefire way to get another piece of movie culture into the show, to remind the audience that LIZZIE McGUIRE isn’t just for kids, but also for the adults in the room who might have fun recognizing all those movie references.
Just for the “thriller” of Lizzie protecting her brother and friends
alone, I would have wished for the episode to be longer, because the
premise was working. Besides that, the story helped to see Lizzie and
Matt in a different light – they were respecting each other as siblings,
and that happened for the first time just now. He becomes less of an
annoying character and she can turn into more of a mature character. The two became brother and sister for once, and that is a narrative device that should not only have happened sooner, but also more often.
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| Home alone, they have to defend their house against an intruder. |
However, the episode could have worked better if there had been a bridge between Lizzie failing to have control over the house, and getting control over it by “teaching” her father a little lesson when he was escorted by the police to the front door. There was a difference between Lizzie having lost control because Miranda was building a city, Gordo is watching television, Matt is going crazy, and Lizzie taking complete control and going into defense mode. There could have been a moment in which Miranda and Gordo realized they underestimated Lizzie as well and decided to do whatever she was saying they should do, because ... well, a burglar is roaming outside, and that burglar wants to get into the house. What a shame that the writers already used SCREAM as a reference in a previous episode, because the burglar story could have been hilarious with a little outside action of Lizzie’s father trying his best to break in, eventually throwing a patio chair through the window. Ah well, I’m going to watch this episode in my head, where it will exist until I forget I ever thought about it originally.
