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 is massively confusing.

Episode 4.18 “We Have Forever: Part Two”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on February 17th, 1988)

Picking up from last week, an embittered Jonathan is no longer an angel.  Instead, he’s a mortal man who can’t get a job because he doesn’t have any references.  (The idea is that Jonathan can’t explain that he’s spent the last 40 years working for God.  But, over the past four and a half seasons, he’s had numerous jobs where he helped people out.  Couldn’t he have listed some of those people are references?)  However, Jonathan is happy because he’s fallen in love with Jennifer (Leann Hunley), the woman that he saved from drowning last week.

Meanwhile, Mark is actually making an effort to help people by working at the camp for the blind where he and Jonathan worked earlier in the season.  (Actually, why couldn’t Jonathan ask for a job at the camp?  The more I think about it, Jonathan not being able to get a job makes less and less sense.)

Jennifer, however, has a secret of her own.  At the end of the episode, she leaves Jonathan a note, in which she explains that she’s actually Joan, Jonathan’s late wife.  Jonathan was upset because he felt God was keeping him from seeing Joan in Heaven.  Instead, it turns out that Joan — like Jonathan — has been assigned to work on Earth as an angel.  So, the two months that Jonathan spent with Jennifer was actually God giving Jonathan a chance to spend time with Joan but, for some reason, no one told Jonathan that was what was happening so Jonathan got mad and walked out on God.  But then, Jonathan changes his mind after learning that Joan is Jennifer but instead of asking to work with Joan/Jennifer, Jonathan goes back to working with Mark.

Seriously, I’m having a hard time following some of the logic here.

That said, despite all the lapses in logic, this episode still made me cry.  Admittedly, I’ve been feeling under the weather today so maybe that’s why I was so emotionally susceptible to this episode.  Or maybe it’s just the fact that Highway to Heaven is such an overwhelmingly earnest and sincere show that even the episodes that shouldn’t work somehow do.  All I know is that I was sobbing by the end of this episode.

The important thing is that, at the end of the episode, Jonathan and Mark have a new assignment  and drive off.  Wait, I thought Mark had a job.  Way to abandon all those blind children, Mark!

Perhaps it’s best not to think too hard about this episode and just accept it for being the tear jerker that it was.

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 loses his powers.

Episode 4.17 “We Have Forever: Part One”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on February 10th, 1988)

When Jonathan’s former wife (Dorothy McGuire) dies, Jonathan assumes that God will release him of his duties and bring him to Heaven to be with her.  Instead, Jonathan is told that he is still needed on Earth and that he has an assignment.  Jonathan gets upset and uses some language that one doesn’t always expect to hear from an angel.  God responds with thunder and lightning.

Long story short, Jonathan loses his angelic powers.  He becomes a human again.  But since Jonathan died 40 years ago, shouldn’t taking away his powers cause him to drop dead on the spot?  I’m a bit confused on how this works but then again, it’s also pretty obvious that God is trying to teach him a lesson as opposed to just punishing him.

Jonathan runs away from Mark, refusing to speak to him.  He sees a movie theater that is showing Heaven Can Wait and he proceeds to throw beer bottles at the marquee until all of the letters have fallen.  Jonathan ends up in jail but Mark manages to track him down and gets him released.  Jonathan borrows some money from Mark so that he can go get drunk.

Later, walking along the beach, Jonathan sees a young woman named Jennifer (Leann Hunley) who looks just like his wife did when they first got married.  Jennifer attempts to commit suicide by walking into the ocean.  Jonathan saves her life.  It turns out that Jennifer is suicidal because her boyfriend dumped her.  Jonathan tells her that her boyfriend isn’t going to care that she killed herself.  In fact, he’ll probably brag about it to all of his friends.

Long story short, it’s obvious that Jonathan and Jennifer are falling in love.  Meanwhile, Mark is looking for some way to occupy himself and considers accepting a job at the camp for the blind that he and Jonathan visited earlier in the season.  Finally, this is a two-parter so we’ll see how everything works out next week!

I will say that this was a nice change-of-pace for the series.  Seeing Jonathan finally get mad after four seasons of doing whatever he was assigned to do was interesting and Michael Landon’s anger and sadness felt very real.  Victor French also did a good job of portraying Mark’s sadness over not being able to help his best friend.  This was an episode where Highway to Heaven‘s unabashedly earnest and emotional approach really paid off.