Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Saved By The Bell: The New Class, which ran on NBC from 1993 to 2o00. The show is currently on Prime.
This week, the Gang learns a lesson about not dropping out of school.
Episode 2.23 “The D Stands For Dropout”
(Dir by Don Barnhart, originally aired on December 10th, 1994)
Oh no! Tommy wants to drop out of high school and work full time as an auto mechanic!
Actually …. that might be for the best.
Since the very first episode, Saved By The Bell: The New Class has portrayed Tommy as being an amiable but dumb guy who just happens to have a savant-like ability for fixing cars. It’s been established, in several episodes, that there’s nothing Tommy can’t do with a car. Since Tommy apparently know everything that there is to know about cars and cars are literally the only thing that he cares about and he always seems to be flunking every class that he takes, why shouldn’t Tommy drop out? What’s he going to do in high school or college? He’s already learned everything that there is no to know about how to fix a car and a good auto mechanic will always be in demand. Plus, Tommy’s cute enough that, if he needs to, he can probably find a rich widow in Beverly Hills to pay his bills.
Drop out, Tommy! Drop out!
Still, Mr. Belding and everyone else insists that Tommy is making a mistake when he drops out of school. Belding tells Tommy’s father (Nick Angotti) that he needs to show some tough love so Tommy realizes how difficult it is in the real world. Tommy is kicked out of his house and has to move in with Screech. Tommy is no longer allowed to help his friends with their science project. Tommy has one of those Saved By The Bell fantasy sequences where Screech refuses to hire him because he doesn’t have a high school diploma….
And really, this is when Tommy should say, “But I’m actually already getting paid good money to do the only thing that I care about and the only thing that I’m actually good at so who cares?”
Instead, Tommy reenrolls in high school and helps the Gang win the science fair by building a remote control car. The competition must have been really weak that year.
Poor Tommy. When he’s an adult, he’s going to look and realize he should have just dropped out when he had the chance.
