High School the Musical: The Musical: The Series‘ Season 3 Finale Continues the Franchise’s Meta Streak of Winking, Exuberant Fun
Photo Courtesy of Disney+
Before we start, let me just say: as a former summer camp counselor (CLV hive rise up!), I do *not* condone Camp Shallow Lake’s approach to a single safety practice. Scheduled roll-calls? None in sight. Trained counselors assigned to cabins full of minors? Nope! Literally any evident policy on screening surprise outside guests (many of them full-on adults)?
To quote Camp Shallow Lake’s breakout theatrical, romantic, and fake documentary lead: don’t get me started.
Distressing lack of responsible adult oversight aside, High School Musical: The Musical: The Series: The Summer Camp Season—which dropped its eighth and extra-long final episode on Wednesday—nevertheless turned out to be a whole heap of meta, theater-kid fun. Who’s surprised? Not this OG critic!
*(Yes, that last linked interview DOES feature me speaking the Summer Camp Season into existence. You’re all welcome!!)
Starring HSMTMTS regulars Sofia Wylie, Joshua Bassett, Matt Cornett, Julia Lester, Dara Renée and Frankie Rodriguez, and featuring seasonal guest players Saylor Bell, Adrian Lyles, Meg Donnelly, and Corbin Bleu (yes, that’s the Corbin Bleu), the fizzy, summer-set Season 3 broke from the large ensemble, school-centric tradition of HSMTMTS’ first two winking seasons and sent a small contingent of the East High Wildcats we’ve come to know and love off on a road trip to Camp Shallow Lake. Yes, that’s the Camp Shallow Lake, the California summer camp that wreaked so much off-screen havoc in Nini (Olivia Rodrigo) and Ricky’s relationship in the run-up to Season 1, and that simultaneously gave Nini such a life-changing boost of confidence that her star’s been streaking away from Salt Lake City ever since.
On which note, let me head everyone who’s not caught up yet off at the pass: no, Rodrigo’s name being missing from the roll call of series regulars above wasn’t a typo. While Nini does have a mini solo arc in the first couple of episodes of this latest season—meeting her biological dad (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and getting a Californian zap of musical inspiration as a result—and while she then also shows up briefly in the finale to deliver her traditional opening night cards to her friends in the Camp Shallow Lake theater kid crew, she ultimately isn’t a part of the core camp action. Like, at all. Not even her absence is a presence in this season’s proceedings!
This isn’t to say that everyone at Camp Shallow Lake spends the season forgetting Nini ever existed. Nini has been an important part of the social fabric shared both by her fellow Wildcats and by the Shallow Lake campers she spent the last many previous summers bonding with, so it’s only natural she comes up in passing conversation. But that’s all it ever is—passing conversation. And then, of course, Nini’s arc in the finale ends with her choosing to walk away from East to make a go at a musical career in California, with her moms and her newly discovered biological dad.
Given the Olivia Rodrigo of it all, this isn’t surprising. Nini’s days on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series have been numbered since Rodrigo broke into global pop stardom the summer after Season 1 wrapped. But given the Nini of it all, the central story shifting so firmly (and organically!) away from her is fascinating. Sure, HSMTMTS, as a show made by, about, and for theater kids, is an ensemble production through and through. But Nini and Ricky were positioned as the show’s A1 romantic leads from jump, with Nini as the character the audience was most clearly meant to emotionally empathize with. Everyone else was fun and interesting—and often, it was clear, more complexly so than we were being given access to at the time—but Nini was the series’ original beating heart. And now she’s made what feels like her official exit, and… it couldn’t feel more natural.
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