Among Saved by the Bell viewers, Jessie Spano isn’t known for her chill. She was ambitious, competitive, fiercely passionate and more than a little cutthroat. She was an academic overachiever with her sights set on Stanford and an activist committed to environmental and social justice, and she wasn’t above gobbling caffeine pills or punching misogynists to accomplish those ends.
But would she really stoop to murder most fowl? One fan theorist says yes.
In 2016, Redditor iepartytracks described to r/FanTheories a Season Three episode, called “Pipe Dreams,” in which routine maintenance uncovers oil beneath the Bayside High football field. Everyone in school goes full “drill, baby, drill,” prematurely wallowing in the riches it’s unclear why they think would come to them from the revenue earned by government-owned land. The lone holdout against the evil oil company’s proposal is Jessie, who speaks out against drilling the school but doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere until a freak accident causes a spill that decimates the wildlife living in a nearby pond, including a duck that was found, named and immediately worshipped by a biology class earlier in the episode. It was named Becky, FYI. Of course, the entire school flips their position once the news spreads. You can’t just stay the course after losing someone you named Becky.
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As iepartytracks points out, this is pretty convenient for Jessie, isn’t it? “It seems pretty odd that a big company like Cal Star just happens to have an oil spill right after they start drilling,” they argued, citing statistics that reveal fewer than five annual worldwide oil spills in the entire decade of the ‘90s. Sabotage, they argue, is a lot more likely.
But would Jessie really resort to eco-terrorism, specifically duck murder, to convince her classmates of the evils of the oil industry? It’s not like she was ever depicted as much of an animal lover.
In fact, it’s kind of weird how little animal rights figures into her activism. On any other early ‘90s sitcom, a character like that would be a vegetarian with seven rescue dogs, but not Jessie. “What’s to stop a woman like that from sneaking into the drilling site, sabotaging equipment and placing the blame on a trusted business?” they continued. “She doesn’t care whether or not a few ducks, frogs or turtles die in the ensuing carnage.”
As commenter King_Buliwyf pointed out, it’s even possible that “she also may have killed Slater’s lizard.”
To be fair, we have no idea how Slater’s chameleon, Artie, died in the Season Four episode “Slater’s Friend,” and we have no reason to suspect Jessie. Except, of course… now we do.