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Saved by the Bell: Home for Christmas By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman As I mentioned before, Christmas is one of my favorite holidays. I love everything related to the season. Of all the things that I love during the holiday season, “Christmas episodes” of my favorite shows stand out as some of my favorite things. It must be no wonder why I love the Saved by the Bell episode, Home for Christmas. Not only does it combine 2 things I really like, but it also takes the gold for being campiest holiday TV special I’ve ever seen. Home for Christmas is a rare 2 part Saved by the Bell story. Even though past events and episodes are carried through the Saved by the Bell story arc, this is one of the few times where they hit you with that “To Be Continued” so prevalent in sitcoms from the 80’s and 90’s. Christmas break has just started for the gang and they decide upon meeting at the Morris’ house to celebrate the holidays. Through the kids telling their plans for winter break to Zack’s mom, we learn that most of the gang will be working at the local Bayside Mall (except for Lisa, whose volunteer service at the Bayside Hospital turns out to be an important plot device). Therefore, most of the action in these 2 episodes will be taking place at the mall as well. The episode goes on to establish everyone’s job at the mall and the humorous situations that ensue based on each teen’s personality (ie: Slater lacks the fine motor skills to be decent at gift wrap and Jessie is a bitch to all the children waiting to take a snapshot with Santa Claus). As always, Zack is loitering around while the rest of the gang works. While he’s gallivanting around the mall Zack bumps into a borderline ugly girl, named Laura and is cold shouldered by her as she was running late to work. The fact that he was blown off by a mediocre looking girl is seemingly some sort of challenge in the eyes of Zack Morris. Determined not to let an ugly girl show him up, Zack combs the mall with Screech in hopes of finding Laura again. During their search the boys meet up with a homeless man who stopped at the mall to shave and beg for wrapping paper scraps. Through Kelly, Zack finds that she and Laura work at the same store. By the rest of the gang’s urgings, Zack takes Laura out to lunch and to take a picture with Santa. At this point it’s revealed that there’s something very strange with Laura, as she has even more influence over the general populous than even Zack Morris (as shown by Santa comping their pictures). Towards the end of the episode, the homeless man that Zack and Screech met earlier collapses in front of the gang. Slater springs into action and performs life saving CPR on the homeless man. Soon after, the EMTs arrive and the gang heads over to Bayside Hospital to help Lisa with a Christmas party she’s holding for the children’s ward. While at the hospital the gang decides to visit the homeless man and bring him a small gift. To the teens’ surprise they find Laura with the homeless man, who she introduces as her father. Due to Zack’s inability to cope with the fact that some people may be worse off than him, he begins to slip into an annoying over compensation mode and begins to treat Laura like his personal charity project (much like when he was dating the wheelchair bound girl in the Teen Line episode). Zack even manages to get Laura time off from work so she may be in the mall’s production of A Christmas Carol, with the promise of doing product placement for Laura’s boss (played by Lefty Moriarty from Dick Tracy) during the play to boost his revenue. The gang and Laura then go off to perform the hokiest rendition of the classic Dickens’ novel ever seen on TV (the jokes are so overt and campy they revert back to bad jokes. Most notable are the casting of Slater as Tiny Tim and the Cratchet’s miniscule goose which needed to be spied with a magnifying lens). When the teens return to work, Laura and Kelly’s boss realize that an expensive suit jacket has turned up missing from the store. Their boss then goes accusing Laura of stealing the coat because she’s homeless (and needs the jacket to eat/live in). Seconds after Laura flees the store, it’s then conveniently revealed Kelly had put the jacket aside to purchase it for Laura. This brings up an important question in this storyline. If Kelly is technically the “poorest” of the 6 teens and was working to afford presents for her family; then wouldn’t buying a $300 sports coat leave her with no gift money, since she was only working at Moody’s Store for Men for a couple weeks? Perhaps she has an even bigger “good Samaritan” attitude than Zack (and that’s probably why they really were meant for each other). The episode ends with the kids finding Laura and her father sleeping in a Christmas tree lot and invite them over to the Morris house to have a “real holiday experience.” In true holiday episode style, Laura and her father play carols on the Morris’ piano and Mr. Moody even stops by to give Laura the sports coat for free (possibly as some sort of legal settlement for falsely accusing her of theft and saying “he would have never hired her if he knew she was homeless”). As the episode closes, Zack and his family announce that they will be housing Laura and her father until he’s able to find a job and place of their own. Laura’s family must have bounced back in days, as she and her father were never heard from again.
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