Saved By the Bell is remembered as a run-of-the-mill teen sitcom, if that mill somehow produced excessive quantities of cheese, but really, it’s science-fiction. For one thing, Zack Morris literally has the power to stop time. Whenever he wants, he simply calls a “time out” to freeze everyone else, leaving him free to move around and even manipulate objects in the frozen environment.
That’s weird enough, but then there’s the alternate timeline. Zack, his friends Lisa Turtle and Samuel “Screech” Powers, and even Principal Belding were all characters in a previous series, Good Morning, Miss Bliss, in which they lived in Indiana, not Bayside, California. Why would three teenagers, their principal, and their whole families all move across the country at the same time?
One Redditor, dngaay, believes the answer is way darker than anyone believes. After another user posed the question on the correct forum, r/AskScienceFiction, in 2019, they responded, “Belding accidentally murdered Miss Bliss when he pushed her down a flight of stairs. Zack, Lisa, and Screech were the only witnesses.”
Don’t Miss
Now, you may be asking, what could the even-keeled Miss Bliss, played by Hayley Mills in the original series, have done to provoke such an outburst from the affable Belding?
Well, in the second episode of Saved By the Bell, Mr. Belding reveals he’s a Vietnam veteran. Treatment for PTSD being what it was in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it’s not totally implausible that some innocuous comment or gesture caused him to snap. Incidentally, this is revealed when Belding tells Slater, “I never had a date until I was in the army, and even she was with the enemy.” And: “After the war, I was dateless again” because “that Viet Cong girl dumped me.”
He tells him this because Slater has distracted him from one of Zack’s schemes by faking a gender identity crisis. It was a weird show.
Anyway, “to avoid going to prison,” dngaay continued, “Belding bribed them with a ‘scholarship’ to a high school in California, where his shady-ass brother had connections. Wanting to escape the drab Indiana life, the Morrises, the Turtles and the Powerses decided to pack up and move to Beverly… Hills, that is.”
There’s a few problems with that: For one thing, Bayside High is a public school, albeit one prestigious enough that it would still be tempting to average Midwestern students and families, enough that maybe some busy parents wouldn’t ask too many questions about the “scholarship” necessitating the switch. It also doesn’t explain why Zack Morris’ life is completely different, with reunited parents and no siblings, but perhaps the unexpected windfall fixed their marriage.
Maybe Zack had other demands. Hey, Belding killed once. If nothing else, this certainly explains that relationship.