Goth Brenda: In Praise Of Shannen Doherty’s Late Period Work On ‘90210’

As a culture, we have a limitless fascination with the bad boys. We can’t stop giving second, third, and fourth chances to the Robert Downey Jr.’s, Charlie Sheens, Mel Gibsons, and Mickey Rourkes of the world. The same can’t really be said for their female counterparts. Apparently being reckless and unhinged isn’t as charming when you’re Lindsay Lohan, Sean Young, or Shannen Doherty.

In a just world, Shannen “Don’t You Know Who I Am?!?” Doherty would be more than a teen soap opera footnote after having pissed away Aaron Spelling’s good will, not just once (when she left Beverly Hills 90210), but twice (when she left Charmed). Back in the early ’90s, Doherty was the kind of drunk hellcat that wouldn’t think twice about throwing a vicious left hook at any chick who accidentally bumped into her at the Roxbury. She was known to be a five-foot powder keg prone to volatile fits of rage, kind of like how Sean Penn used to help the paparazzi get intimately acquainted with his fists. The difference being that now Penn gets to both win and hand out Academy Awards and Doherty most recently made headlines because she got dropped by her health insurance provider while she had breast cancer after her management allegedly failed to make payments on her behalf.

Doherty brought that volatility into her character, Brenda Walsh, on 90210. Ostensibly, Brenda, and her twin brother Brandon, were supposed to interject some of their grounded, middle-class Minnesota heartland values into the decadent Beverly Hills wasteland littered with neglected wealthy teens left to their own decadent devices. Is Kelly Taylor feeling down about former model mom not coming home for three days because she’s on a coke bender with some sleazy dude who is definitely not step-father material? No problem, she can just go over the Walsh house because Cindy Walsh is in the kitchen in some high waisted jeans and a dowdy feathered bob, ready to scoop out some ice cream. Sure, Steve Sanders can tool around all he wants in his black Corvette, but an expensive sports car isn’t going to fill the gnawing void in his soul that only a stern, but deeply concerned Jim Walsh lecture can fill.

Nothing says I’m a sweet girl from the Midwest quite like this matronly sack of a babydoll dress they draped over poor Brenda in the pilot episode.

Here’s the thing about Brenda. She wasn’t sweet. She was petulant, bratty, and impulsive … in the best way. Even when she was arguing with her dad over something as trivial as a curfew, she always brought the intensity of a drug smuggler trying to argue her way out of a trip in front of a Thai firing squad. Her first date with Dylan consists of a lot of screaming and smashed potted plants. Brenda just kind of had that effect on people, given that she was fiery, difficult, and complicated (just like how the woman who played her was fiery, difficult and complicated). Brenda was a bitch who liked to get her way. She made grand, sweeping proclamations, like the time she showed up to school wearing defending this hat that looks like it was stolen off of the Blossom lot by declaring, “It’s not hippie witch, it’s Twin Peaks and it’s very in.”

Unfortunately, Doherty’s volatile behavior and diva antics were known to cause problems on set, as the rest of the cast grew to eventually hate and resent her. It was rumored that Aaron Spelling hated the fact that Doherty got his daughter, Tori aka Donna Martin (graduates!), into her sordid Sunset Strip club scene and was desperate to get Doherty off the show. Doherty’s personal life had gone increasingly off the rails, what with her stormy relationships, mounting debts, and tendency to fuck up every bitch behind a velvet rope just for looking in her general direction. Brenda did eventually depart at the end of the fourth season after her character, arguably the one of the most vibrant and fleshed out on the whole damn show, was quietly downgraded to a supporting role.

All of Doherty’s on-set turmoil combined with her erratic personal life seemed to manifest itself in her final 90210 season for a persona I like to call Goth Brenda. After getting royally screwed over by her boyfriend and her best friend when they hooked up while she was flirting with a young Dean Cain in Paris, Goth Brenda decided to skip town and lick her wounds across the country at the University of Minnesota. After all, where else would Goth Brenda rather be than a desolate town held hostage by nine months of brutal winter, where she can hole up in her dorm and write poems about dead trees.

Of course, the pampered, manicured brats of Beverly Hills rubbed off on Goth Brenda and she decided she couldn’t deal with her pedestrian roommate who wears khaki pants baggy enough to smuggle a keg into the dorm (and had probably never even heard of The Damned, to boot!). Goth Brenda left Minnesota faster than Vince Clarke left Depeche Mode after Speak and Spell came out.

Unfortunately, Goth Brenda returned to Los Angeles, and found that her friends had become anesthetized Stepford clones. They all wanted to join a sorority. A sorority! Look at Goth Brenda, glowering like a lone Veronica drowning in a sea of Heathers. Kelly, Donna, and Andrea all seem content to look like Laura Ashley fever dreams while Goth Brenda contemplates four years of Friday nights swilling domestic beer and trying not to get groped at frat parties. If there’s one thing Goth Brenda knows for sure, it’s that that Andrew Eldritch would never be caught dead at a frat party.

How much of the Greek Kool-Aid have her friends drank? Well, Kelly is dressing almost entirely in beige and dumped Balzac-reading Dylan for a frat dude that looks like he’d get booted off his college football team for dealing steroids. This life support system for a jawline was played by actor Paul Johansson, who is probably best known for sexually harassing Joan on Mad Men and allegedly sexually harassing a BuzzFeed reporter in real life. Perhaps it wasn’t really a stretch for Johansson to try and sleep with an underaged A.J. Langer later on in the season.

Still, it’s not like Goth Brenda isn’t trying to have fun at parties, despite being surrounded by meatheads. She’s really trying, yet all she’s thinking about is how she’s going to scream at her dad for accidentally taping over her VHS copy of The Hunger. All she can do is stand against the wall and seethe.

In a weak moment, Goth Brenda tries to go all norm and marry the scion of a real estate empire. Sure, her dress says, “I’m partaking in an impulsive, ill-conceived, tacky Vegas wedding,” but her make-up, hair, and heart all say “Can I really commit to a man who can’t pick Peter Murphy out of a lineup, much less fit into his fishnet body stocking?”

However, Goth Brenda looks deep within herself and learns that she can’t go norm. You know why? Cause Goth Brenda is a fucking artist. Anyone who has seen her play “Lavoine” the Peach Pit waitress while covering one of Brandon’s shifts knows that Goth Brenda is the kind of thespian that brings a Daniel Day-Lewis level of commitment to a role, whether she’s pretending to sling diner food or selling sub-Neil Gaiman lines like “miasma of melancholy” in some avant-garde bullshit the horny trenchcoat dude in her poetry class produced.

Although, this play does look suspiciously like the time Goth Brenda’s synth-pop group opened for Death in June during a college radio set. Well, the Death in June portion of the show was shut down amid student protests due to the band’s appropriation of Third Reich imagery and alleged fascist sympathies. Goth Brenda was unaware of Douglas P.’s troubling ideological affiliations and is still deeply embarrassed.

In the end, Goth Brenda was so committed to her art that she went off to drama school in London where she was never seen again, but was sometimes mentioned in passing. With the exit of Goth Brenda, and Doherty herself, the series most interesting and dynamic character walked out of our lives and the show devolved into a nighttime soap that involved such storylines as Kelly getting “Single White Female’d” into a murder/suicide pact by an obsessed lesbian and Dylan undergoing past life regression and traveling back to the Wild West.

As for Doherty, she moved on to a Playboy spread, a relationship with Judd Nelson, some straight to video erotic thrillers, yet another long-running Aaron Spelling show (which she again left under bad circumstances), a short-lived reality show on deep cable, that 90210 reboot no one watched, and according to IMDB, a forthcoming sequel to Kevin Smith’s Mallrats. Perhaps that last role will be the one that gives us all the Goth Brenda renaissance we crave, even if it’s something we’ll probably never deserve.

[Watch Beverly Hills 90210 on Hulu, Amazon Prime Video or CBS All Access]

Maggie Serota is a Staff Editor at Death and Taxes and a freelance writer who loves TV more than life itself.