Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and several other services!

This week, Jonathan and Mark enlist in the War on Drugs.

Episode 1.14 “Plane Death”

(Dir by Victor French, originally aired on January 9th, 1985)

In a small town in California, a man named Charlie Down (Robert Ford) drives his big family car down an isolated car.  One thing that that is immediately noticeable is that Charlie has a gigantic pair of fuzzy dice hanging from his rearview mirror.  That’s rarely a good sign.  The other thing that is immediately noticeable is that a remote control airplane is flying over the landscape.  As the audience will soon learn, the people in this town are obsessed with remote control airplanes.  That’s because drug dealer Jack Harm (Michael Bowen), the son of the local sheriff, is using the airplanes to smuggle cocaine.  When one of the planes crashes, Charlie rushes out to it and grabs the cocaine for himself.  He is pursued by Jack and his gang.  Charlie runs away from them.  An off-screen gunshot is heard.

What Jack doesn’t know is that the man that he murdered is an old friend of Mark Gordon’s (Victor French).  For the past few months, Mark has been on the road with angel Jonathan Smith (Michael Landon).  They’ve been taking care of people all over America.  But right now, they are between assignments.  They show up in town so that Mark can see his friend but, shortly after arriving, Mark is informed that Charlie has gone missing.  It doesn’t take Mark long to figure out what happened.  He announces that he’s going to get revenge, “just like in the Bible, eye for an eye.”

Fortunately, Jonathan is there to keep Mark from doing something that he might regret.  Before Mark can drive down to the local bar, Jonathan arranges for the police and the FBI to show up and take Jack and his gang into custody.  Jack’s father can only watch in disappointment as his son is taken off to prison.  When Mark thanks Jonathan for keeping him from making a mistake, Jonathan replies that he’s sure Mark would have stopped himself from killing anyone.  Mark says that he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself and Victor French’s delivery of the line is so somber and serious that there’s little doubt he was prepared to kill everyone in town.

At Charlie’s funeral, his young son (played by David Faustino) announces that he’s going to become a cop so that no other kids have to feel as bad as he feel right now.  Jonathan says that Charlie would be proud to hear that.  Mark asks Jonathan if the country is ever going to be able to win the war on drugs.

“If they don’t,” Jonathan replies, “they’re may not be a country to worry about.”

Yikes!  Setting aside the ultimate futility of the War on Drugs (which far too often became a war on addicts as opposed to war on the people making money off of them), this episode was actually pretty well-done.  Mark’s intense anger was perfectly portrayed, making him a bit frightening even if you understood his desire for revenge.  Michael Bowen’s superficially friendly psychopath was easy to dislike.  This was one of those episodes where the viewer appreciates the sincerity of the show’s emotions even if the legacy of the War on Drugs has ultimately been one of failure.