Luke Perry’s Untimely Death Forces ‘90210’ Fans To Confront A Hard Truth — Brenda And Dylan Will Never Get Back Together

The series premiere of Beverly Hills, 90210 is a remarkable microcosm of everything that made the show an instant sensation back in 1991. A rich but lonely girl throws a decadent party in her absent parents’ home. Blonde queen Kelly is above it all — and especially above attempts by her horny ex, Steve, to get her to take him back by negging her nose job. Freshman nerds Scott and David sneak in and gawk. School newspaper editor Andrea is nowhere to be seen because she’s too uncool to be invited and probably couldn’t get a ride from the Valley anyway. Newly transplanted Minnesota twins Brenda and Brandon can’t quite fathom the teen Satyricon they’ve ended up in. One crucial element is missing, though: Dylan’s not in the episode at all.

Dylan does show up in the next episode, “The Green Room,” to teach Brandon about surfing and Lord Byron and wearing overalls with one strap undone. And while Brenda has already heard tell of his reputation — to wit, that he got a girl pregnant in Paris — the two of them don’t get together for a while. First, we need to spend several episodes learning more about Dylan: he’s an alcoholic, in recovery; he’s also an orphan of his parents’ wealth, living in a five-star hotel suite; he knows about pretentious cuisine, but prefers a humble diner called the Peach Pit.

Brandon is presented as the show’s “nice guy,” even though that series premiere has him lying to his new classmates about having slept with that party’s mysterious hostess, and Season 1 further finds him cheating on a history test; falsely accusing a black student of being an out-of-district ringer for the basketball team; and getting arrested for driving drunk. Considered from the perspective of nearly 30 years’ life experience, Brandon is actually a “nice guy,” but the kind who’ll be the first to tell you, because no one else will say it about him. Dylan, at least in the early going, is a bad boy only by contrast. That he wears an earring and is the son of a white-collar criminal is enough for the Walsh twins’ father Jim to blackball Dylan, but his character has aged a lot better than Brandon’s.

The very first thing we ever see Dylan do, for example, is defend Scott — a dork so dorky he’s wearing a Lakers cap and a Lakers t-shirt — from bullies; whereas Brandon tried to establish himself by lying about his sexual experience, Dylan doesn’t care what anyone thinks about him. Despite the stories of his legendary cocksmanship, Dylan is loyal to Brenda and patient in waiting out her virginity; the report of a French McKay scion is never substantiated. The perspective of nearly 30 years’ life experience also tells us that Dylan has rage and abandonment issues that he’s not dealing with…but as someone who was exactly Brenda’s age when she and Dylan got together, the pot-smashing climax of their first date just underscored how irresistible he was.

No one was taking care of this poor, sad boy! A whole generation was ready to volunteer.

Soap opera characters, in general, aren’t known for their steady temperaments —teen soap characters even less so— and as time went on, Dylan lost some of his lustre: he had an alcoholic relapse; he was mean to his mother; he fooled around with Emily Valentine when he and Brenda were on a post-pregnancy scare break. Then came the Summer of Deception, when Brenda’s parents tried to chill her relationship with Dylan by sending her to study in Europe for six weeks, leaving Dylan’s eye to rove toward Kelly. Lesser shows might have had Brenda immediately hug it out with Dylan and Kelly, but she stayed mad for almost the entire back half of Season 3, and never really got over Dylan. Season 4 closed with her getting ready to go overseas to study again, but first wanting to say a special goodbye to Dylan, who’d broken up with Kelly hours earlier. We’d never know for a fact whether Brenda and Dylan were truly destined, because Shannen Doherty was fired from the show, and though she would return for its late ’00s CW reboot, Brenda and Dylan never shared another scene.

As both a critic and an adult, I (generally) experience the relationships between TV characters with some emotional distance and little rooting interest. But as a 16-year-old, watching a pretty average midwestern girl with heavy brown bangs get the school’s most unattainable dream boy was intoxicating. Brenda and Dylan were my first ‘ship, and Dylan my first real crush, and when I watch those first four seasons of Beverly Hills, 90210 now, well into my forties, I root for them as hard as I ever did. Even though neither Doherty nor Perry had been signed for the just-announced revival, I hoped some kind of deal might still work out to bring them back together for the ending we never got. Luke Perry’s untimely passing is a tragedy both for all the new characters he won’t get to create, but also for the old one ’90s girls still treasure.

Writer, editor, and snack enthusiast Tara Ariano is the co-founder of TelevisionWithoutPity.com and Fametracker.com (R.I.P.), as well as Previously.tv. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great and Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210), and has contributed to New York, the New York Times magazine, Vulture, The Awl, and Slate, among many others. She lives in Austin.

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