Former Saved By The Bell star and certified chess instructor Dustin Diamond has been convicted on charges of disorderly conduct and carrying a concealed weapon by a Wisconsin court. The charges stemmed from an incident last year, when the professional Screech was accused of stabbing a man who accosted him and his partner at a bar. According to BBC News, the pair were repeatedly badgered by a group of patrons who Diamond attempted to drive off by brandishing a pocketknife, because nothing defuses a tense situation like an embattled former child star waving around a blade. Events then escalated, in a scenario that’s almost exactly like the start of Con Air, except that nobody died or was even badly hurt, despite the fact that Diamond’s potentially deadly weapon was not his hands, honed by years of lethal special forces training, but a knife.
The court did acquit Diamond on charges that he had recklessly endangered the public with his actions, but the actor, reality star, and former enslaver of machine intelligence still faces up to nine months in jail for carrying a concealed weapon. If he is sent to jail—sending a strong message to other former TV stars that they should carry their knives out in the open, like the rest of us—we can only hope his sentence will continue the Con Air parallels by ending with a trip home on a plane stuffed full of dangerous criminals and sympathetic diabetics. Once the trouble starts—as it inevitably must, what with so many dangerous men and so little life-saving insulin onboard—Diamond will have to move fast. Teaming up with the Dustin Diamond-equivalent of John Cusack (Jaleel White), he’ll work to bring the plane down over the Dustin Diamond-equivalent of Las Vegas (Branson, MO), all while accompanied by the Dustin Diamond-equivalent of Trisha Yearwood’s “How Do I Live” (“I Like To Move It (Club Mix),” by Crazy Frog.)