Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Saturdays, I will be reviewing Welcome Back Kotter, which ran on ABC  from 1975 to 1979.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!

This week, Freddie gets hooked on pills!

Episode 3.22 “What Goes Up”

(Dir by Jeff Bleckner, originally aired on February 9th, 1978)

At the new, big, how-does-he-afford-that-on-a-teacher’s-salary apartment, Gabe tries to avoid taking out the trash by telling Julie a joke about his Uncle George.  Julia tells Gabe to shut up and take out the damn trash.

Meanwhile, at school, Freddie has a problem.  After injuring his knee while playing basketball, Freddie is given a prescription for pain killers.  But the pain killers leave him feeling groggy so he also starts taking pills to give him energy.  The other Sweathogs are concerned.  Freddie insists that he’s just taking vitamins.  Horshack insists that Freddie would never lie to him.  If Freddie says that the pills that he’s buying in the bathroom and carrying around in his shoe are harmless vitamins than Freddie is telling the truth!

Woodman, however, is concerned.  He tells Kotter that Freddie entered the cafeteria, took off his shoes, and said, “Ho ho ho, I’m the Jolly Black Giant.”  “Is he on the dope!?” Woodman demands to know.

Epstein and Barbarino decide that the best way to handle this problem is to act like they’re on drugs as well so that Freddie can see how dumb he looks.  Epstein tries to act spacey.  Vinnie walks around hunched over and repeating, “Give me drugs …. give me drugs …. give me drugs….”  Freddie doesn’t buy it for a second but then …. what’s going on with Horshack!?  Horshack explains that he took some of Freddie’s special vitamins and then he tries to jump out of the classroom window!

(What the Hell was in those pills?  I pretty much take the same thing for my ADHD and I have never been tempted to jump out a window.)

That’s all it takes for Freddie to realize that it’s time to stop taking the pills.  Gabe encourages him to flush them down the school’s toilet and Freddie agrees to do while the studio audience watches in reverent silence.

Back at the apartment, Gabe tells Julie a joke about his Uncle Luther.  Julie does not care.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this episode.  On the one hand, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs was often underused by the show so it’s always nice when he gets a chance to show off the fact that he was one of the better actors on the show.  That said, the show’s portrayal of drug use was so cartoonish that it ultimately kind of made being a speed freak look kind of fun.  If nothing else, this show left me wondering how a bunch of teenagers in the late 70s could be so naive about drugs.

Of course, if Barbarino had been the one who nearly died, I imagine the audience would have been more upset.  If Epstein had gotten hooked due to Freddie’s lies, it could have led to some drama.  But Horshack?  Eh, who cares?  When the show first started, Ron Pallilo was often given an opportunity to show that there was some hidden depths underneath Horshack’s eccentricity.  But, by the time the third season rolled around, Horshack had become such a cartoonish character that it’s impossible to take anything involving him seriously.

To give credit where credit is due, John Travolta made me laugh with his delivery of “Give me drugs …. give me drugs….”  Travolta appeared to be having a lot of fun in this episode, perhaps because he knew he wouldn’t be on the show much longer.

Anyway, for someone who couldn’t go an hour without popping a pill, Freddie got over his addiction pretty quickly.  That’s good because next week, Vinnie is going to have to deal with the death of one of his teachers and Freddie’s going to have to be there for him.  As for Horshack, this episode ends with him being taken to the school nurse but I assume he’ll eventually make a full recovery as as well.  It takes more than pills to keep the Sweathogs down.