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.
Through the Shattered Lens 