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 offers up some clues about his past.

Episode 1.11 “Dust Child”

(Dir by Victor French, originally aired on November 28th, 1984)

Mark and Jonathan’s latest mission finds them in a small California town.  It seems like a nice and welcoming  community …. or, at least, it does if you’re an American.  If you are one of the many refugees from Vietnam who have recently settled in the town, it’s a far less welcoming place.

When Mark goes into a gas station, he witnesses the owner refusing to give change to two Vietnamese kids.  When Mark demands to know why, he’s told that the refugees are coming over and stealing everyone’s jobs.

“It’s a sickness worse than the plague,” Jonathan later says, “But the cure is in every one of us …. love!”  And that may sound a bit simplistic but Michael Landon delivers the line with such conviction that he totally makes it work.

Working as house painters, Jonathan and Mark get a job remodeling the home of Richard Gaines (James Whitmore, Jr.), a Vietnam vet who has just discovered that, as the result of a wartime romance, he has a daughter named Nguyen (Denice Kumagai).  15 year-old Nguyen comes over to America to live with Richard and his wife (Jenny Sullivan) and his teenage son, Brad Gaines (Billy Jacoby).  From the minute she arrives in the town, Nguyen finds herself facing prejudice.  The other kids at school taunt her with derogatory slurs.  Brad resents both the attention that Nguyen gets and the fact that his best friend, Larry (K.C. Martel), now refuses to talk to Brad because Larry’s father was killed while serving in Vietnam.

Eventually, Jonathan introduces himself to Larry and we discover a little bit about who Jonathan was before he became an angel.  Jonathan says that he served in Vietnam with Larry’s father and he goes on to explain that Larry’s father died while protecting a group of South Vietnamese orphans from the Viet Cong.  As Jonathan explains it, Larry’s father viewed the orphans as his own children.  That’s all it takes for both Larry and Brad to see the errors of their ways and to welcome Nguyen into the neighborhood.

(Is Jonathan telling the truth about serving in Vietnam with Larry’s father?  Jonathan’s an angel so I assume that he is.  That, of course, means that this episode’s mission was not to help Nguyen feel at home in America but instead to help Larry overcome his own prejudice.)

As Jonathan and Mark prepare to leave for their next assignment, two kids on bicycles ride by and shout a slur at Nguyen.  They immediately fall of their bicycles and, when they try to get back on, they fall off yet again.  Mark laughs and says that God probably won’t object to Jonathan making that happen.  Of course, if Mark read about what happened to the Canaanites, he would know those two kids got off easy.

Especially when compared to last week’s odd episode, this was an admirably straight-forward episode.  There weren’t any great surprises to how the story unfolded but the story was told with such obvious sincerity that it worked.  It can be easy to laugh at this show’s lack of subtlety but, in an episode like this, the lack of subtlety worked to the show’s advantage.  Personally, I’ve gotten so used to snarky entertainment that it can be a bit of a pleasant surprise to watch something like this that is totally earnest and well-intentioned.  This was a heartfelt episode and, in its old-fashioned way, it still holds up today.