Well. You all knew I just couldn’t help myself.

I watched the first episode of Fuller House‘s second season. It was pretty good. The writing has definitely improved, but I’m still not sold on the original show’s supporting characters ability to legitimately carry a show on their own. But I will say that if you need some pop culture comfort food, you might enjoy “Welcome Back.” It’s completely inoffensive and mildly funny both of which disqualify it from having any place on this blog.

So moving on to the moment we’ve all been waiting for, the aptly titled “Girl Talk.” The episode is number 7 of 13, squarely in the middle of the season like they wanted to make me watch a lot of crap before I got there. But this it the age of instant gratification and I’ve already waited 21 years for this freaking episode! Suffice it to say, I skipped right ahead to episode 7.

The band gets back together in a rather low-key way. Stephanie has written a song and she wants to play it with a full band. Being the successful musician that she is, she decides not to go with any of her connections in the music world, but rather to go with Kimmy Gibbler’s idea of letting Girl Talk take a crack at it. Since their original drummer is now playing in Beyonce’s backing band, they decide to let DJ join. (Apparently, she’s taught herself how to play drums from playing Rockband). Also, Gia IS back and like for some reason I mistook her for Kimmy’s daughter in the preview, so sorry about that. DISCLAIMER: This is not a fake news site, so let this post serve as a retraction from that section of the previous post on Fuller House’s Girl Talk. 

Anyway, DJ can only play the drums when she color codes them like in Rockband. She also has to say all of the colors as she plays. All of the members of the band probably suck too, but no one else can really think enough to play over DJ’s racket. Thus, we don’t really get to find out whether or not Girl Talk still has it. (But they never actually did have “it” so yeah).

Meanwhile, some stupid middle school boy is cyberbullying Kimmy’s daughter. (To be the parent of a child with a smartphone and apps has got to be one of the scariest things ever for a middle class white person.)

Gia and DJ talk about how they never liked each other. DJ thought Gia was a bad influence on Steph (she was) and Gia thought DJ was a dweeb (she so was not!). Also, I don’t remember there being THAT much tension between them. I feel like Gia didn’t care about DJ and DJ just thought of her as an unreliable friend for Steph but wasn’t like moralistically against her. I mean they were all kids. It’s not like DJ was a mom character in 1995 like they’re making her out to be.

But Gia is a soccer mom now who walks for nine different charities! They actually get along until DJ won’t let Gia use her vape pen in the finished basement/rehearsal space. This causes the whole group to devolve into arguing, so Steph disbands them. Aw, kind of anticlimactic. We did get to hear them play their only song, a cover of Ace of Base’s “The Sign,” and it actually sounded pretty good this time. Even DJ finally figured out how to play her instrument without shouting out colors.

Back to the cyberbullying, Kimmy’s daughter has largely recovered from the attack all by herself while the adults in her life played in a band. I usually don’t focus a lot on B-plots in these reviews but with the heavy weight of this subject matter and the “lessons” focus of this show, I’m surprised this wasn’t A and Girl Talk wasn’t B. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for the return of Girl Talk as an A plot, but in that case the cyberbullying plot was best saved for another episode).

The original attack occurred after Ramona turned down a boy in her class. She told him she wasn’t interested in him and he released a video making fun of her, which went viral beacuse people are shit-heads. She mistakenly thought DJ’s oldest son, Jackson, posted it (for reasons which don’t make any sense other than to provide drama in the show) and only learned the truth after the original video poster showed up to confront her.

Confront her about what, you may ask? Well, it turns out that the this boy has also been the victim of cyberbullying. He’s a friend of Jackson’s and it turns out the Jackson decided to cyberbully his friend in order to teach him a lesson about why cyberbullying is wrong…

Hm…okay. Well, there’s a whole lot of mess going on here.

Ramona does have a good line here directed at the OCB (Original Cyber-Bullier), “Just because someone says no to you, it doesn’t give you the right to be a bully.

He says, “Okay, I’m sorry. I just said I’m sorry. I must really like you.” (Uh okay, jackass. I mean you couldn’t possibly be sorry just because you were wrong, could you?)

She says, “Well you have a funny way of showing it.”

Then Jackson’s crush kind of starts liking him because he “stood up” for Ramona by bullying another student to teach him a lesson about bullying Ramona.

THE END. The freaking end.

That 5 minute B plot exchange at the end of this episode feels horribly light for what actually happened in this episode. I mean here we have a boy who bullied a girl because she said no to him and then a kid who retaliated against bullying with MORE bullying. HOW ARE WE NOT TALKING ABOUT THIS???

What happened to both Ramona AND the OCB is horrible. And it unfortunately seems to be happening to kids more and more these days. I guess now I’m seeing what happens when something I feel SHOULD be a very special episode isn’t. I mean I make fun of Very Special Episodes but like hm….I guess it should come as no surprise that I would prefer a Very Special Episode on bullying to bulling-as-a-punchline. (Unless, we’re talking about everything Carla does on Cheers. Then it’s okay.)

On another note, I did only watch 2 episodes, but there were ZERO references to Stephanie being a DJ…so basically I’m taking this as further evidence that the Netflix Fuller House production team probably reads this blog and takes all of my advice.

I can only hope we haven’t seen the very last of Girl Talk, but I won’t hold my breath on another revival any time soon. In the meantime, stay tuned for some Very Special Holiday episodes starting on December 15th!