Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Saturdays, I will be reviewing Saved By The Bell, which ran on NBC from 1989 to 1993.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!

Kelly wants to go steady but Zack’s fallen in love with the new school nurse.

Episode 2.13 “From Nurse To Worse”

(Dir by Don Barnhart, originally aired on December 15th, 1990)

Zack has asked Kelly to go steady but, when Kelly finally tells him that the answer is yes, Zack smiles stupidly and says, “That’s great, what was the question?” before wandering off.  Zack has met the new school nurse, Nurse Jennifer (Nancy Valen), and is so busy imagining a future with her that he’s totally forgotten about the fact that he’s supposedly been in love with Kelly for years.

When people talk about Zack Morris being “trash,” this is the type of episode that they’re thinking about.  Zack treats Kelly horribly, all because he’s convinced that new school nurse is going to risk her job by dating a 10th grader.  Of course, Nurse Jennifer doesn’t help by telling him that he’s cute.  When Jennifer finds out about Zack and Kelly, she helps Kelly out by pretending to be crazy.  It perhaps would have been simpler for Jennifer to just tell Zack that it would have been illegal for her to have dated him but then we wouldn’t have gotten the sight of Jennifer pretending to be terrible at her job.

As was typical of Saved By The Bell, Slater’s B-story was actually more interesting than all of Zack’s nonsense.  It’s time for everyone’s flu shot and Slater is scared of needles.  Mario Lopez always did a good job of portraying Slater’s insecurities and there’s something rather endearing about the look of terror on his face when he’s called to the nurse’s office for his shot.

For those of us who are into continuity, this episode was a weird one.  Not only did the new nurse do a lot of stuff that didn’t make sense but the episode itself seems to ignore everything that has happened in Zack and Kelly’s relationship over the past few episodes.  Suddenly, Kelly and Zack are back to dating whether or not to be an exclusive couple.  I thought that had been settled a while ago.  Judging by the episode’s production code, this episode was originally meant to be the second of the season and would have aired right after The Prom episodes.  For whatever reason reason, NBC didn’t air it until late in the season, when it no longer made sense.

Technically, this is the end of season 2.  Whether or not that means anything is debatable because apparently, way back in 1990, season 3 started the very next week.  With Saved By The Bell, one gets the feeling that these things were decided at random.  Well, no matter!  Next week, we’ve got season 3 and The Fabolous Belding Boys!