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 are speech therapists.

Episode 5.11 “The Inner Limits”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on July 21st, 1989)

George (Tim Choate) has spent years speechless and paralyzed.  However, after George’s brother, Paul (Joseph Culp), has a chance meeting with speech therapist Jonathan Smith, it is discovered that George is actually a genius who can communicate through blinking and who hopes to write a book.  Paul goes from wanting to move out of his childhood home and into an apartment with his girlfriend, Jessica (Lorie Griffin) to feeling like he has a duty to spend the rest of his life helping his mother (Julianna McCarthy) take care of George.

I’ve been crying a lot this year.  I lost my Dad in 2024.  Exactly one year later, I lost the aunt who helped to raise me when I was a child.  I didn’t really get a chance to mourn my Dad because I immediately became one of my aunt’s caregivers.  I thought that if I couldn’t save my Dad from Parkinson’s, I could at least save my aunt from Alzheimer’s.  After my aunt passed, I threw myself into the holidays and I dealt with my emotions by buying lots of presents for other people.  It’s only now, in the light of 2026, that it’s all truly hitting me.  I cry very easily right now and I cried while watching this episode.  There’s a sincerity and earnestness to Highway to Heaven that gets to me, despite how corny the show could sometimes be.

That said, this episode had the same flaws as most of season 5’s episodes.  Jonathan and Mark were only in a few scenes and the majority of the episode was carried by Joseph Culp and Julianna McCarthy, both of whom tended to overact during their big emotional scenes.  Culp eventually won me over but McCarthy’s performance was so theatrical and over-the-top that it really did take you out of the story.

That said, I did cry.  Would I have cried if I wasn’t currently in mourning?  I think I would have, actually.  The final shot of a young boy reading George’s book while sitting in a wheelchair earned those tears.  We never really know how many people we help, do we?