Date of airing: June 29, 2001 (Disney Channel)
written by: Nina G. Bargiel, Jeremy J. Bargiel
directed by: Savage Steve Holland
If I get the opportunity to create a new Top [insert number] Episodes of [insert topic], this half hour of television is a good candidate and example of how crazy and nutty environmental people can be, and how good their messaging is sometimes. Plus, it is a must-watch episode when you have a climate change-themed evening going on at your house, or want to put it in a lesson plan about environmentalism for an elementary or middle school curriculum. The writers thought that putting a bit of environmental morale into the show was a good idea (the Ozone layer having a hole was one of the main topics leading to discussions about global warming and climate change during the 1990s), while also making fun of the premise, and it surprisingly worked.
Lizzie’s decision to go vegetarian went over the finish line a little too quickly, however, while the rest of her actions were proper, meaningful, and yes, a little crazy, thanks to the fact that no one was ready to help her out in saving the world and no one listened to her and filed her under “demented.” It is interesting though that this episode written and produced in 2001 managed to somewhat predict the fact that no one gives a damn about environmentalism more than twenty years later. Here I am, living through the horrid times of climate change deniers, all of them nationalists who have no clue what is happening and behave like they do, while at the same time I am trying my best to follow the activism of a Swedish teenager named TIME’s Person of the Year in 2019, watching a 22-year-old television episode going into the topic of how to save your planet, and I realized we did not learn anything in that time and we are still screwing our planet to the brink of death.
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| Earth is running a fever and only one teenage girl is caring about her health. |
Is it possible that this is the first episode of the series with a three-story structure? I cannot remember if it happened before, but Lizzie’s environmentalism, Matt’s hall monitor adventures, and Gordo and Larry’s science Olympics made for a packed episode, almost creating a way to not have a single second of boredom in this half hour, which is always a good thing for a sitcom, especially when you only create two stories and there is a 50 percent chance of you hating at least one story. Yes, a third story might not give enough time to one of the other stories (Matt’s story came out quite short and forgettable by the end), but that way there is less you can do wrong, and when you already do not particularly like the stories, those having less screentime due to having to share screentime with other stories do not make the episode look that bad.
Thankfully for this half hour, it was generally good, even though I still could do it completely without Matt. The kid is too much of a kid to entertain me in a scripted comedy, and I am still waiting for that first episode which has Lizzie and Matt band together to learn something about each other, sharing a moment, creating a bond that lasts and is not just forgotten after Lizzie was paid for her babysitting duties. I am pretty sure I am going to have to wait until the feature film for that premise, because I cannot the writers were that hungry for such a story when it is apparent that Matt was a whole lot easier to write for when he was just a dumb elementary school kid, needing to be fun for an elementary school target audience. Let me tell you that this might be true, but it also makes his character one of the worst of the entire show, maybe even the worst. Matt could easily join Max from WIZARDS OF WAVERLY PLACE as one of the worst characters in Disney Channel history, and that kind of says a lot.
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| Elvis has lain to rest. |
This episode made me wonder if the writers were interested in continuity, but were told “No” by the producers and the network. Lizzie turned into a vegetarian in this episode, and besides serving as part of the episode’s moral of the story, it could have been a new element of her character, about to be turned permanent. Generally speaking, considering this episode’s environmental message, the producers could have decided to go with her vegetarianism, as the show started to be produced in a more environmentally friendly way, beginning a process that could have been followed by more shows or movies in production at the time. But I am pretty sure that did not happen either, as it was the year 2001, and the Disney Channel could not give a damn about anything that did not make them a ton of money to buy movie studios with. This was 2001 when no one even thought about activism for climate protection. Greta Thunberg wasn’t even born yet. The planet was still being beaten up day after day.
