Season 2 Overview

Airdate: 12/11/1985

Directed By: Victor French

It’s the last episode of the second season divided in two parts, and finally Scotty and Diane get something too.

Complete show available here.

Assignment: Jonathan and Mark are assigned to help both a quadriplegic lawyer and a disfigured sculptor fulfill their aspirations.

The general assignment remains largely the same: a sculptor with some facial disfigurement falls in love with a blind woman, Rachel, thanks in part to Jonathan (who got them to know each other in the first place).

At the same time, Scotty, the quadriplegic lawyer and friend of Jonathan and Mark from season 1, was revealed to be having trouble both with his job — unable to find any client for his practice due to his condition — and with his marriage to Diane, who apparently had to quit her own job and then unwillingly got it back just for her husband. And they broke up by the end of the episode.

But they weren’t really involved in the assignment, and the only purpose was to have a pretext to show them having domestic difficulties. Because even marriages made in Heaven are problematic — and Scotty and Diane wouldn’t make it, unlike what Mark said at the conclusion of that episode (if it weren’t for an angel and his human friend).

Anyway, Part 1 was basically about the love of Julian and Rachel, and it concluded quite dramatically: she hits her head on a rock after tumbling down a hill (like the random kid at the conclusion of the season 1 finale, or the way Carrie did on Little House, for that matter) and Julian is caught holding her body, so he is arrested for the accident and put to jail.

Now, if part 1 was mostly a love assignment (partially inspired by some fables, like the Sleeping Beauty), for part 2 the assignment is overturned and basically becomes a courtroom one (like A Divine Madness, at least in part).

So, Jonathan finds Julian in jail, professing his innocence to the current attorney.

However, nobody cares about it.

Actually, manslaughter is charged when someone dies by accident, while Rachel is still alive now. That goes to show he doesn’t even know the difference between attempted murder and manslaughter, so he’s either an incompetent or a crook. Maybe he was hired without references, which shows that what Jonathan said in the pilot is wrong.

Anyway, Julian doesn’t want to make any bargain if he’s innocent, so he sends the attorney away. Now, Jonathan and Mark have to find someone willing to defend Julian in the upcoming trial. And that’s where Scotty and Diane get in.

The audience should know him well by now.

And Julian will be the first case of his career.

Now, the episode mostly revolves around helping Julian out.

So, in some way, Julian and Rachel (but mostly Julian) were the assignment in Part 1, while Scotty and Diane (but especially Scotty) become the new assignment, or at least part of it.

• Background

The episode picks up immediately after Part 1 (which seemingly lasted a couple of days), although it’s unclear the timespan of the assignment. Considering there’s a case involved, it has to be realistically of a couple of weeks at least, but there are no indications about it, nor about specific dates.

Instead, the settings remain California, around Murphys (as in part 1 too). Again, the town must be so happy to be depicted like a fearing, superstitious one.

• Characters

This episode marks the fifth appearance of Scotty and the third of Diane in the series — the two most recurring secondary characters of the series. They will come back for another two part episode of season three and then permanently leave the show.

Anyway, the events of this episode lead up to that season three episode. Actually, this episode already drops some hints suggesting what comes next for the characters. In particular, after their reconciliation at the conclusion, suddenly Diane expresses her domestic plans for the upcoming future.

This line is not completely random nor improvised: the episode in the third season in which they are coming back is exactly about that — Scotty and Diane trying to become parents. And it wasn’t something they made just for this episode: in an interview with the Arizona Republic dated 1985, actor James Troesh (who plays Scotty) revealed that, after completing the production of A Match Made In Heaven (which he also wrote with his wife), he approached Landon with the idea for another episode featuring Scotty and Diane becoming parents (at the entry “Production and Setting” of that episode there’s more about this).

So, this part wasn’t written just to dismiss the two characters — and then, when they decided to have Scotty and Diane back in the series, they recycled this idea — because making an episode about them becoming parents had already been considered by the first season. However, for some reason, they put it off and worked on this two part episode instead.

It is possible that, by the time they made this episode, the production was already preparing an episode about Scotty and Diane becoming parents, but then realized it was too early — so they wrote this episode instead. It is also possible that the production was already working on such episode about them being parents, while this episode was originally written without them — but later they figured Scotty and Diane could well be part of this assignment, so they made this episode and put off the episode about adoption. Of course, it is even possible the idea of the episode about Scotty and Diane becoming parents wasn’t approved yet, and by the time this episode was made, the production didn’t know whether the two characters would ever come back in the series. If that were the case, Diane’s line is just a way to leave some ground for the future in case they’d ever decide to make an episode about that, but with nothing official yet. Either way, they will come back, and the third season will pick up immediately from here.

Instead, as of Mark, it’s important to point out how completely absent he is in the episode. I mean, his character was already irrelevant in the assignment on part one, he wasn’t even shown interacting with Julian nor Rachel a single time (actually, they don’t even know him), but now he’s really just in the background. Really, he has his first line of dialogue only after Julian is acquitted, like five minutes before the conclusion. And he largely remains behind everybody for most of the times.

He’s in the audience.

Curiously, even in the first episode set in court (it was A Divine Madness), his character basically disappeared for much of the assignment. However, it was likely because that episode was very early in the series, and by that time they still had to figure out what to do with him — whether he was a secondary character to Jonathan or a protagonist of the same importance; eventually, they went for the second one, but in most episodes of season 1 (especially before Help Wanted: Angel and the Christmas Special) he mostly remains in the background.

Anyway, the odd part is that French, as director, had to be there on this episode. So, it’s not like he was unavailable or had schedule conflicts that prevented him from taking part on this show — by the time season two began, he was both the investor and the promoter for a boxe gym in Van Nuys, in addition to be teacher in drama acting classes — it wouldn’t be unlikely that he just couldn’t keep it all together. But that’s not the case here: now, he was actually there all the time. Yet his character isn’t, for some reason.

• Production and Settings

The production took place in Murphys, the town where Julian and Rachel live in the show. Instead, the court was set inside the Calaveras County Historical Museum of Calaveras, (the county of One Winged Angels too).

It still stands now.

The production took place between October 25 (immediately after conclusion of Part 1) and November 1, for one week as usual. Curiously, the production of this episode overlapped with Landon’s birthday — and he probably spent it working here. Anyway, this episode marks the conclusion of the first half of the season (there’s actually one episode left to air, The Good Doctor, which was already produced on September but for some reason got scheduled after this, for late December). Then — unlike what they did to what they did on season 1 — after completion of this part 2, the production only took one week break before resuming for the second half of the season.

By then, they had been working almost every single day from July 14 (when they started A Song For Jason) and produced one episode a week, every week, with no day breaks between them — the only exception was a two week break in August. It was quite a hectic schedule, especially for Landon and French who appear in and direct basically every episodes (although it’s likely that Landon took a three day holiday in The Secret, at least).

Anyway, just like part 1, it was directed by French, his only two part episode as such. And that might explain why his character doesn’t get much time in the episode. Think about it: in the first season he directed six episodes, and in nearly all of them, his character was noticeably sidelined compared to other episodes — particularly in The Right Thing (where he never interacts a single time with the subjects of the assignment), but The Brightest Star too. The only exception is in Plane Death, where he played a much more central role, but it’s basically just that. So, in almost every show as director, he doesn’t have to work much as actor — and the same occurs here, where he remains in the background for the entire episode.

Actually, expanding on this, something similar occurred for his directing work on Little House. Take for instance the first three seasons: in those occasions, he directed three episodes in the first season, and four episodes each in the second and third season. And of all these episodes he directed, he only appeared on two of them (The Bully Boys and Quarantine, both in the third season). However, across those same three seasons, he appeared in over twenty nine episodes that he didn’t direct. And even later, when he came back for the ninth season of the series and appeared in twenty episodes, he directed eight of them — including Marvin’s Garden and Sins Of The Fathers, two of the only three episodes of the season that are coincidentally the only one he didn’t appear.

So, it is plausible there was a deliberate arrangement with Landon. However, it’s also probable that, unlike Landon who had no problem both directing and acting in the same episodes — maybe French wanted to focus either on acting or directing, not both at the same time. That could also be advanced because the episode The Bully Boys in 1976 was the first show he both acted in and directed, not just for Little House, but of his whole career. And even though by then his career as actor had started more than ten years earlier, his career as director only began in 1974, two years before that. So, it’s likely that he just wasn’t that confident being both, and he didn’t want to be both.

And maybe Landon knew that French was more confident doing one thing at a time, or that he didn’t like doing both at the same time, and he gave him this episode because Mark didn’t appear much. Or maybe any episode French was tasked with directing was selected from those where his character doesn’t really appear that much.

Finally he has a line.

This preference to do one thing at the time could serve as an alternative explanation to the idea proposed in Part 1 that French directed this episode as a nod to his early career, being judged only for his physical appearance (more details about it at the Special: A Earthquake Called Callahan) and leading to him be called only to play the antagonist every time.

Or maybe it’s nothing, and he directed this episode because he had to direct something like one third of the season, so he was set to direct the episode scheduled to begin production by the end of October, and coincidentally this two part episode was it.

Glossary

Bag: when Jonathan and Mark go to pick up Rachel from the hospital, there’s a bag there.

That’s the bag, again!

It’s the same bag Mark was carrying back on Part 1, when he was moving in.

It’s also the same one that Jonathan packed up for him in One Winged Angels back on Season 1 (more details at the entry of “Highway Of Mysteries” in that episode).

They can’t be two different bags, they look too much alike. Maybe the production had multiple bags looking alike, or didn’t have any other bag available, and recycled Mark’s one instead. Or maybe it’s Rachel that wanted to imitate Mark and stole his bag, even though she had never seen him before.

No, that’s yours.

Or maybe those were the bag people used to have in the 80s. Except Jonathan, but he’s a probationary angel.

From Little House: it’s partly a recycle, but not entirely. The courtroom set might look quite familiar to the Little House audience, and that’s because it’s the same one they used on that series on multiple occasions, as either a law firm or a court, just like in here.

That looks strangely familiar.

In particular, they used it for many episodes, including part of the season six episode The Family Tree (as a law firm) and of Blind Justice the following season (as a court, just like Highway now).

So, if they look similar, that’s because those scenes in Little House were also produced in the Calaveras History Museum, although they are supposed to take place somewhere in Minnesota (at least a mountainous version of it). Now, instead, Highway doesn’t try to hide the settings, and they even show it’s actually set in Calaveras; that’s why it’s not really a recycle (if it were, they’d be trying to conceal it as something else.

It’s more likely that Landon knew them from Little House and just asked to go back.

Also, in the a hundred years between Little House and Highway that place likely got an elevator, or it would be hard for Scotty to go upstairs.

Doozy: there’s still Ridley, the doozy kid.

Punchline: at the beginning, of the episode, when Jonathan saves Scotty from drowning, he then scolds him for the attempt and makes reference to a punchline from one season ago.

Nobody is an angel, so it’s hard to follow our own preaching in the first place.

Anyway, this punchline is a reference: it’s what Scotty dropped Deke in One Fresh Batch Of Lemonade part 1, and then he was reminded of that by a fellow random guy on a wheelchair in A Match Made In Heaven too.

Highway Actors: as in Part 1, the characters of Scotty and Diane playing by the same actors as in Part one.

The Job: none, apparently. Because after the accident Jonathan is not shown working as handyman anymore, but helps Scotty out. Instead, Mark remains in the background, as in Part one, for that matter.

Ratings: 39 million audience. 8th Weekly programs, 3rd TV genre show.

Despite airing on December and being nothing about Christmas, the audience probably liked Part 1, and this episode was even more successful, largely improving on it. It also surpassed Bless the Boys in Blue, and became the most watched episode of the series so far. At the same time, it also became the most watched episode directed by French on the series (and it would remain as such), and still holds the spot as the second most-watched episode in the entire show.