Best Friends Whenever S1 E1

## Plot

Best friends Shelby Marcus and Cyd Ripley, whose name is spelt with a C, are living together in Shelby's house in Portland, Oregon. Cyd is staying there for the next three years while her archaeologist parents are off in Peru. Cyd is a tomboy and Shelby is a girly girl. Shelby's annoying twin brothers, Bret and Chet, are in love with Cyd. In this episode at least. I don't like either of them. They're annoying, unnecessary, and serve no purpose to the plot whatsoever. *And* their actors happen to be main cast members. Ugh. Luckily, they've appeared in very few episodes so far. Cyd's dog Diesel is also living there. Shelby doesn't really like Diesel living inside, or Cyd's messiness, or her taste in furniture. Shelby plans on asking a boy she likes, Cameron, to a dance that day. Before they leave, the girls stop by their friend's RV. He's Shelby's neighbor, Barry. He's a scientist, and his RV is his lab. He's helping Shelby ask Cameron to the dance in a big, elaborate way. Barry's best friend is Naldo, who is a little weird, but more in tune with his emotions than Barry. His name is short for Renaldo. Barry informs Shelby that she has to stand in front of Cameron's locker at exactly 8:46 AM that morning. The PA system will play his favorite song, the vents will release his favorite body spray, and confetti cannons will go off as a projector reads "Will you go to the dance with me?" Barry and Naldo go outside. Cyd is hungry because Shelby wouldn't let her have breakfast. She looks around the lab for food, but accidentally turns on a laser Barry invented. It hits multiple items, bounces off of them, and hits the girls, who are hugging each other. At first, it seems like the machine did nothing, although the laser is destroyed. The girls go to school. They run into Marci, an interesting girl with a lot of quirks. Luckily, she's just a guest star/recurring character, and she becomes more tolerable as the episodes go on. Unfortunately, her actress left after season 1 due to getting a main character role in another Disney Channel show. Cyd distracts her while Shelby tries to get to Cameron's locker. Barry tells Cyd about how they destroyed his laser, and mentions that it could've done anything to them, since it was set to 400, unlike with Naldo, where it was set at two. Shelby slips and falls, and Cameron walks away before she can say anything. Cyd hugs Shelby to comfort her. When they do, they go back in time to that morning. They realize that they can time travel, but they don't know how it works. They see it as a good thing, since they can do the day over again and fix everything that went wrong. Shelby tries asking Cameron to the dance again, but this time he thinks Cyd asked him and says yes. Cyd mentions looking back at this in the future and laughing about it, but they accidentally time travel two years into the future. They wonder if they just have to think of a time and travel there, but it's not that simple. They discover that when they time travel, they enter their bodies from that time, and that's how they appear to everyone else. They discover from Marci that they're no longer friends and haven't talked to each other in two years. They had a fight about Cameron. Shelby told Cyd that she wasn't allowed to go to the dance with Cameron, and Cyd told Shelby that she's too controlling. Cyd even lists specific examples from just that day. She dragged her out of bed and wouldn't let her eat breakfast or hang up her poster. Shelby says it's her room, and Cyd says she thought it was their room now and calls her selfish. Shelby calls her a slob, and Cyd calls her uptight. Cyd storms off, and Marci reveals that she and Shelby became best friends after their fight. Shelby and Cyd being so different has always been what's made them such good friends. Shelby goes to apologize to Cyd after learning that she moved out after the fight. Cyd went to talk to future Barry in his lab. The girls talk to each other and apologize. Cyd didn't go to Peru with her parents because she was worried that they wouldn't be friends anymore, but in this future, they're not friends anyway. She wonders if they're too different and not meant to be friends with each other. Shelby makes a big speech about how neither one of them are perfect, and how they love each other. They hug and go back to that morning again. Cyd mentions that she was thinking about starting today over again. They figure out that they need to think of a time and place, and touch each other to time travel. Instead of asking Cameron to the dance, Shelby helps Cyd put up her stuff. Cameron thinks that Marci asked him instead, and she decides to just go with it. Shelby mentions getting used to this someday in the future, and they hug. They accidentally time travel into the far future. They're in a glowing white lab strapped to operating tables. They hold hands and go back to the present. They need to figure out what it means and how to avoid it. They decide to tell Barry about their new power. Shelby and Cyd's friendship and personalities kind of reminds me of Enid Sinclair and Wednesday Addams from the Wednesday focused television series from Netflix, albeit these two start out as friends instead of having to slowly warm up to each other.

## Review

Surprisingly, I really like this show, this premiere, and the premise. I think that Lauren and Landry are pretty good actresses. I confess to hating most sci-fi books and some movies, because whenever time travel is involved, I don't think they handle it well. There are all sorts of confusing paradoxes that never make sense, and it speaks volumes about how good the writing is on this show that they're able to write scripts that avoid the common complaints of time travel, or offer an explanation as to how time travel actually works in this particular show. I just love it. I was going to complain about the acting of Chet, Bret, Marci, Naldo, and Cameron, but that really has to do with how they're written. Remember, this was still a pilot episode, so they deserve a little more leeway.