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 week, we’ve got a two-hour episode of Highway to Heaven.
Episode 3.7 and 3.8 “Love and Marriage”
(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on November 12th, 1986)
It’s Mark and Jonathan’s four-year anniversary!
For four years, they have been traveling around the country and helping people out. Mark is so excited that he makes a cake and decides not to watch the football game so that he and Jonathan can talk about old times.
“I remember the first time I met you,” Mark says at one point.
Later, Jonathan laughs and says that he remembers one really funny adventure they had.
Still later, Mark says, “Remember when Scotty proposed?”
Yay! I thought as I watched all of this unfold. It’s a clip show! This will be easy to review!
However, it turned out that only first 20 minutes of the episode was a clip show. Soon, Mark got a phone call telling him that his niece was getting married and that she wanted Mark to be the head usher. Meanwhile, Jonathan put on his collar and became Rev. Smith, the man who would perform the ceremony.
Unfortunately, not all is well at the wedding rehearsal. When the grandparents of the bride — Clarence (Bill Erwin) and Rose (Mary Jackson) — decide to get a divorce, this leads to the parents of the bride — Frank (Robert Mandan) and Carla (Barbara Stuart) — splitting up as well. Seeing her elders splitting up, Trish Kelly (Anne Marie Howard) decides that there is no way she could marry Brad (Dean Scofield).
It falls to Jonathan and Mark to bring all of the couple back together. Mark invades Clarence’s dreams and shows him how empty his life would have been if he had never married Rose. Jonathan appears to Carla and explains that he’s an angel. He gives Carla a chance to appear to Frank as a totally different woman. Calling herself Ono, Carla dates Frank for a week but Frank eventually tells her that he loves his wife too much to be unfaithful to her. Frank says that dating Ono made him realize how much he loved Carla. It’s a good thing that Carla actually was Ono or Frank probably would have gotten the heck slapped out of him.
Seeing all of the members of her family getting back together inspires Trish to go ahead and give marriage a try. Jonathan performs the wedding but now it’s a triple wedding as the grandparents and their parents join their daughter and renew their vows. Wow, you all, way to hog the spotlight on Trish’s special day.
This episode was a bit too cutesy for its own good. I think if Jonathan and Mark has only been repairing one or two relationships, it would have been fine. But three just felt like showing off and, more importantly, it left the episode feeling a bit overcrowded and overstuffed.
Fortunately, next week’s episode is one that I’ve actually seen before and I can promise you that it’s going to be a huge improvement!
Through the Shattered Lens 