HAAAAAAAY!
Skinny girl in Transit is BACK like a market woman’s ikebe.
Ndani’s breakthrough web show from it’s 2015 roster (asides Gidi Up of course,) is also arguably Nigeria’s first contemporary comedy with a plus size lead.
All through season one we laughed and cried with Tiwa as she navigated moving from one hunky, bearded beefcake boyfriend to the other (as if) while dealing with a prissy, skinny girl younger sister and an onerous persistent mother (Ngozi Nwosu shows why she is Nollywood royalty in this role,) who continues to harangue her to find a bae.
By the end of season one Tiwa is finally with Femi, her new boo when Kola her old boo (who she isn’t quite over yet) comes to beg for forgiveness and a second chance.
Talk about a cliff hanger.
The first episode finally dropped today and I basically beat my way to a computer to get first chops at the show.
Hide your wife, hide your kids, shit is about go bad very quickly.
I’m almost tempted to ask if there has been a change of management at Ndani, because this episode of S.G.I.T was a mess, plain and simple.
And it shouldn’t be. S.G.I.T is already a well established show, we know the characters and plot and have already made our speculations, we didn’t need a blow by blow account of everything that happened in the ‘three weeks’ since season one ended.
But that was what was handed to us, an excruciating 9 minutes of Tiwa breaking the fourth wall to prattle about inanities that could have been summarized in three sentences.
For the love of all that is holy, that is not how the fourth wall works. You use the fourth wall mostly for comedic purposes or moments of extreme plot exposition.
But nope the writers and director of the show had Tiwa gisting away like the village amebo.
Here’s the gist of it sha, Kola begs Tiwa, Femi punches Kola, Kola faints, Tiwa’s family somehow moves house in that period too. Pretty much.
But while the incessant yammering took up most of the episode, they managed to squeeze in some other stuff like there, like this season’s main rivalries.
Tiwa steps off a treadmill, in the middle of a full gym, blocking the path between two ellipticals to ‘gist’ us what is happening (rolls eyes) and some guy ‘hits’ her out of his way while taking a call. With how badly choreographed that hit was, he might as well have just said ‘madam shift!’ and spared us altogether.
Sha, Tiwa then has the most irrational fit, demanding the guy apologize, when obviously she was in the wrong. Y’know, it’s not as if he could exactly squeeze past her…
But anyhow sha, a trainer has to come pacify her so the man can leave, and if ‘Rumour Has It’ taught us anything, this was most likely a foreshadowing. It was pretty much laid there miles ahead.
We get a throwaway scene where Tiwa goes home to change and intimate us that they’ve had to change sets (Tiwa’s family has suddenly upped and moved.) This scene is saved by cameo by the Cele priest in another of Ndani’s shows, Officer Titus, coming to have a deliverance session with Tiwa’s mom.
Permit me at this juncture to fangirl wildly for Ngozi Nwosu. She manages to deliver deeply introspective performances that make fun of religious Nigerian mothers without becoming stereotype or caricature. She is black girl magic come to full cinematic life.
We are also thrown another expository bone by Tiwa’s sister who tells us she now has a ‘bae’. Honestly at this point, between the fight, and the fourth wall breaking, we don’t even care.
Tiwa gets to the office, and we meet her office crew and new cast member, Indima Okojie as Hadiza, a ‘slutty’, skinny work colleague who serves as ‘villain’ for Tiwa at work. They have a meeting where they announce a new boss, and surprise, its the guy Tiwa fought with that morning at the gym.
WHAT. A. COINCIDENCE.
After work, Tiwa meets up with Femi while ignoring calls, that unconvincingly explains away to Femi (and us) that her mom and family refrains her from answering them. Femi drops her off at home, and in the last unnecessary fourth wall break, she tells us what we already know, Kola has begged his way to a meeting with her. That will end well. And I cant say how relieved I was when the episode finally ended.
Why is the writing so bad this season, across the board? Why the painfully obvious foreshadowing? Why the Nollywood-esque choreography? Why the disastrous scripting?
What is going on?
In the universe of S.G.I.T; if somebody jams you in the gym in the morning, just know that he will become your boss in the afternoon.
No magic, just science.
Semira Bello is lacking in conscience and lives her life on Youtube. When she isn’t watching Iroko TV, she is writing ‘serious’ articles about fashion and pretending to apply make up.
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