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 Freevee and several other services!

This episode features a very good boy.

Episode 3.3 “For the Love of Larry”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on October 8th, 1986)

At the start of this episode, we find Jonathan and Mark on a dangerous assignment.  They’re in the city and apparently, they’re working as undercover cops and trying to catch a local drug dealer.  At least, I assume that the people working with Jonathan and Mark were supposed to be cops.  None of them were in uniform so I guess they have just as easily been a neighborhood vigilante group.  As Jonathan and Mark prepare to confront the dealer, Jonathan says that the scourge of drugs is the greatest threat that American will ever face.

It’s a heavy assignment but it doesn’t really seem like a Highway to Heaven sort of assignment.  Usually, Mark and Jonathan are specifically assigned to help someone.  This time, though, it appears that they’ve just been assigned to help the cops do their job.  Jonathan and Mark don’t really do anything that any other cop couldn’t have done.  Mark gets excited when the dealer tries to shoot him because he’s convinced that God is causing the bullets to miss him.  Only after the dealer is captured does Jonathan reveal that God didn’t do Mark any favors.  Mark just got lucky.

Mark’s earned a break!  He and Jonathan drive off to another one of those small towns that always seem to show up on this show.  They rent a cabin for a few days.  However, Mark’s attempts at relaxation are continually interrupted by a dog.  First, the dog runs in front of the car.  Then, the dog somehow shows up at the cabin.  Even though Mark took the dog to a shelter, the dog somehow managed to get out and track Mark down.

Eventually, Mark and Jonathan figure out that they need to follow the dog.  The dog leads off the main road, to an overturned car that is hidden away in the woods.  A father and a son, both badly injured but still alive, are in the car.  Jonathan and Mark are able to rescue them but then they notice that the dog is in the back seat and was apparently killed in the crash.

The camera pans up to the sky and gets lost in the clouds.  Suddenly, the dog’s ghostly form appears and seems to actually wink at the audience, letting us know that the dog may have died but his spirit stayed on Earth long enough to rescue his owners.  (The Larry of the title is the son of the dog’s owner.)

Did this episode make me cry?  You better believe this episode made me cry!  I’m not even a dog person and I was still sobbing at the end of this episode. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s an earnest sincerity at the heart of this show that makes it effective even when it should be silly.  Having the dog appear in the clouds is the type of thing that a lot of shows probably would have screwed up.  In lesser hands, it would have been too heavy-handed and overly sentimental to work.  But, on this show, it does work.  It helps that the dog was cute.

This was a simple episode but sometimes, it’s the simple episodes that work the best.