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’s episode of Highway to Heaven deals with death and is the best of season 4 so far.

Episode 4.7 “Amazing Man”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on November 11th, 1987)

When a cop who was trained by Mark is killed in the line of duty, his family becomes Jonathan and Mark’s next assignment.  While Lorraine Douglas (Jane Daly) comes to terms with being a widow and a single mother, her young son (Garrette Ratliff Henson) plays with an Amazing Man action figure and seems to be in denial about his father’s death.

This was a surprisingly low-key episode, up until the final few minutes.  That’s when Amazing Man came to life, in the form of Michael Landon wearing a super hero costume.  It says something about the sincerity and the likable earnestness of this show that this episode still worked despite having Michael Landon turn into a version of Superman.  I mean, really, it should have been a ludicrous scene.  It should have made my cynicism go into overdrive.  Instead, I couldn’t help but smile.  Landon’s big heart came through in this episode.

This was a well-done episode and certainly the best of season four so far.  That said, the one-year anniversary of my dad’s death is approaching and this episode was about a father dying and, as a result, it left me feeling rather depressed.  I don’t particularly want to spend too much more time thinking about this episode because, right now, that’s just going to make me more depressed.  That said, the important thing is that show’s the good intentions came through.  This was a sweet episode.  I hope everyone involved with it was proud of the final result because they had every right to be.