In “The Bayside Triangle” episode of Saved By the Bell, Lisa Turtle is given a chance to meet with a recruiter from a fashion school and with her friends’ help, decides to put on a fashion show to showcase her designs. While putting the show together, she and Zack become close and eventually kiss, leading her longtime admirer, Screech Powers, to retaliate and sabotage her chances with the recruiter. The episode has all the makings of an outrageously far-fetched Saved By the Bell classic, but what shines through most here and finally gets the attention it deserves is the undeniable, rock-solid chemistry between Lisa and Zack.
The high school culture made famous in the nineties by Saved By the Bell steeped us in neon everything, strategic plots to win concert tickets, and lockers spacious enough to shove a class nerd into. Indisputably, a main focus of the show was its romances, and while there were many over the years at Bayside, we were graced with two stable, consistent duos: social power couple Zack Morris and Kelly Kapowski and we-can-love-despite-our-differences couple Jessie Spano and A.C. Slater. These loves had ups and downs, but were lasting and created iconic moments on the show.
However, the best episode of Saved By the Bell doesn’t highlight either of them. Lisa and Zack seemingly only lasted for this one episode, which is disappointing. But the pair signified so much that the anchor couples of the show did not. It was an interracial romance, which had close to zero representation on television at the time. It centered Lisa, a character normally reduced to being Kelly and Jessie’s sidekick, giving her a story arc, a romantic match (she rarely had any on the show’s run), and diving into her ambitions. Female friendship was allowed to shine and jealousy remained absent, as Kelly gave Lisa her blessing to date her ex-boyfriend (in what reality this ever happens, I don’t know, but it was refreshing to see such solidarity among women). It showed Zack, normally a self-serving character plotting how to get what he wants, not only helping Lisa put her show together, but really championing her talents, in ways we still don’t see men do for women on TV (especially Black women).
Perhaps most importantly, “The Bayside Triangle” drove Lisa to finally confront Screech more seriously about his obsession with her. Current culture finds a lot that was problematic in nineties sitcoms, and a big one is the obsessive, stalking behavior of stereotypically unattractive men. Their refusal to take “no” for an answer when lusting after women who spend years turning them down is cringe-worthy at best by today’s standards, and Screech is an iconic example of this archetype. In this episode, an important shift takes place between him and Lisa. She’s had enough, and rather than laugh off or eye-roll Screech’s creepy behavior, she pointedly and forcefully tells him romance will never exist between them, that his actions stand in the way of her living her life. It’s an empowering moment, and Screech thankfully agrees to stop following her, memorizing her schedule, popping up uninvited, and even physically fighting to “win” her love (he attempts to fight Zack and Zack refuses). He does what all men should do when told “no” and agrees to leave her alone.
Lisa and Zack didn’t last, but a hill I’ll die on is that they’re the most naturally magnetic couple to come out of the Saved By the Bell canon. “The Bayside Triangle” will forever be a perfect and timeless episode to me, for all its outside-the-sitcom-box moments, defying of stereotypes, confrontation of toxic masculinity, and its centering of a character so often reduced to the margins. There isn’t much television from the nineties that would pass today’s social acceptability test, but this episode comes pretty close.
Samantha Duncan is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Playing One on TV (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2018) and The Birth Creatures (Agape Editions, 2016), and her work has recently appeared in BOAAT, decomP, Glass Poetry, Meridian, and The Pinch. She is a prose editor for Storyscape Journal, reads for The Atlas Review, and she lives in Houston.