Airdate: 05/07/1986

Directed By: Michael Landon

Eventually, the second season finale aired—just like the first season—about a month after the preceding episodes. However, unlike the first season, this time the finale doesn’t serve as a conclusion to the characters’ journey. Actually, even the first season finale didn’t truly wrap things up: it was more of a two-part episode in which they threw in everything they had explored during the season—impossible love, family issues, illness and everything.

In contrast, this second season finale is a single, self-contained story about friendship, very plain and simple. So, it’s an episode that could have aired any moment in the season, it doesn’t close anything and it doesn’t feature some of the most of the recurring tropes that had already been used throughout the season (bums, drugs and the rest), nor it combines them as they did on season one. It’s a different approach, and the producers would continue to follow it in the third and fourth season finale as well. There’s nothing wrong with that—anyone can have their preferences about a sprawling, difficult assignment as season finale, or just anything.

Complete show available here.

Assignment: Jonathan and Mark are assigned to help both a shy girl and a hot-headed baseball player learn to be friends of one another.

So, it’s a double assignment: there’s a girl, Jenny, who is generous and kind, and secretly in love with a boy from her school, to the point of keeping pictures of him all over her room.

Here’s how people used to be maniac in those days.

But she doesn’t have any real friend and is extremely awkward in her relationship with other peers due to her weight.

So, Jonathan as her teacher assigns her to tutor that boy in the class.

Except everything, isn’t it.

And the boy is Jack, the stereotypical too-cool troublemaker who skips class, flirts with girls, and even gets into fights with teachers, just because.

And he looks like some young Landon, isn’t it.

So, Jonathan, as their teachers, orders Jenny to tutor Jack to help him graduate. Instead, Jack will have to teach her how kids in the 1980s need to be to look cool.

It sounds like the premise of assignment in the season one finale: two completely different people, an independent woman and a spoiled man, fall in love. Yet this time it isn’t a romantic story: the characters are simply meant to become friends, supposedly.

Just wait until he sees his pictures in her room, and he’ll be done with her.

• Background

As for the setting, Jenny’s address is mentioned as “Langley 243”, which is fictional, though the high school itself is a real one located in Norwalk—so the story likely takes place there.

The timespan is about a couple of weeks, since Jonathan says at the start that he’ll be replacing the teacher just some week.

So, that means they are not going to stay too long. And the episode doesn’t conclude with the kids’ graduation, so it’s likely that it’s set in March or April 1986, or before that moment. Here, the curious part is that it’s unclear when the third season begins: supposedly, it’s summer, but in the first episode the characters have some practice for an upcoming race, which might imply it begins earlier and last until July (when the race is set). If that was the case, then it’s possible this episode is chronologically the season finale, and occurs as the last of the season.

Otherwise, it would be unclear: it could that episode begins right in the summer and the practice doesn’t last as long. In that case, this episode concludes way before summer, so either there’s one or two month blank from the conclusion of this season and the beginning of the next one, or this episode isn’t chronologically the season finale. That wouldn’t be a problem: it has already been mentioned that A Match Made In Heaven might be the chronological season one finale, and the actual finale took place one year earlier (more details about it at the Season 1 overview). In that case, it’d be impossible to figure which episode is the actual season two finale, as all the immediate preceding one never specified the background.

• Characters

Now, in the episode, Mark doesn’t play much of a relevant role. Actually, he has to teach in an totally different class, and he never even meets Jack in the episode. But French wasn’t directing this time, so there was no excuse. It seems like after Heaven on Earth — where he was practically the only character — he basically disappeared for the rest of the season. Perhaps French had other commitments around that time of year — considering he became a boxing promoter in 1985 — so he probably didn’t have as much availability in January and February (for the later episodes of the season) as he did in September or December, in the earlier ones.

That might be further confirmed because something similar occurs in the third season, where the appearances of his characters are way less prominent in the later episodes, and his character almost completely disappears for the last three or four episodes (except the finale). Again, it might suggest there was something (boxing or whatever) that kept him busy more in the Spring than in Fall.

Then again, it could simply be how the episodes were planned, without any connection to personal commitments. But it would be an odd coincidence.

Then you should be of more help, instead of doing nothing.

Instead, when Jonathan is upset after hitting the hot-headed kid, he brings up that old affliction about angels that shouldn’t lose their temper.

As if he still had to explain Mark and the audience what his job is, after two seasons.

But Jonathan should have learnt by now that even angels can make mistakes, to learn from them (or that’s what Mark taught him).

So, Mark has to reassure him.

He didn’t ask you.

And then he makes an observation.

I bet French did sometimes.

• Production and Setting

The setting is in California: the high school where Jonathan and Mark work at is the real Excelsior High School in Norwalk; at least they used a real high school this time, not like The Torch. Instead, the fictional donuts place Jenny overeats is in Culver City (fittingly, she doesn’t want people to recognize her, so she eats away from everybody).

As for the production, this episode was written by Landon in late February, just three days before starting its production.

No idea how they could all learn this so fast.

Also, the script is marked as the “Story No. 64”, supposedly the last of the season. Now, considering that the last script from the first season was The Right Thing marked as “Story No. 34”, it means that the second season had 30 scripts, and seven of them remained unproduced (that’s because Heaven On Earth was written during the first season but was produced for the second instead).

Anyway, it was filmed between late February and early March, over a week—around the same period when they filmed the first season’s The Right Thing a year earlier. That time, however, they still had to shoot the season finale, which took a couple more weeks. So, production of this season wrapped two weeks earlier than season one.

There might be multiple reasons behind this: one is that the seasons’ production was moved up a few weeks (on July) compared to the first season that stared in early August (excluding the Pilot shot many months earlier). Then, because in the first season, they took a three week break after completing the first half of the season (with Another Song For Christmas) and before they began the second half (with Plane Death), instead for the second season they only took one week break between The Monster and Alone, so by Christmas they were one episode ahead. And then, in the first season most episodes took between one week to ten days to be produced, while in the second season they cut two days — basically every episode took one week or even less in some cases (just Keep Smiling took ten days). So, by starting two weeks in advance and cutting two days from the production of almost every episode, it’s easy to see how they got to conclude the season earlier, and get on holiday sooner. Of course, that doesn’t apply to Jonathan and Mark, they always have to work (angels get no holiday in this series).

Glossary:

Cute: it’s actually one of the rare reverse cute instances. While Jonathan is pretending to do something, Mark reads him the definition of a dead atheist, just to distract him.

And Jonathan is really impressed.

It’s the third reverse cute of the series, a moment Jonathan is the one dropping Mark’s catchphrase: the first time was in One Winged Angels, and the second in The Right Thing, both in season 1. There are some occasional instances in the third season, and then nothing more.

Time-compressing feature: while Jenny and Jack build their friendship, there’s a long one.

So 1980s, and the girl forcibly trying to nod because she can’t talk right now is the most awkward feature of the episode.

From Little House: if the premise of the episode sounds familiar, it’s not a coincidence, or at least not entirely. There are multiple features of this episode that seem to be taken from Little House, and particularly the eight season episode For The Love Of Nancy: on that occasion too, there was a random overweight boy (introduced on that episode and implying he’ll settle in town, although nobody will ever mention him again) who struggles to have friends and who falls in love with Nancy, the local bully. And, of course, she pretends to love him back just to make him do her housework.

So, they are both episodes about friendless kid with weight problem ready to do anything to fit in the crowd at school, and just after suffering multiple humiliations the kid realizes the meaning of true friendship. That’s that’s exactly what happens to Jenny here too, when she wants to befriend Jack’s friend and attends their initiation. Of course, the only difference is that here the overweight girl and the bully are supposed to be friends, while on Little House the bully is just hopelessly bad. But if Jack weren’t considered the bully of this episode — and the bully would be just his girlfriend and her friends — these two episodes become very similar.

Actually, some part here sounds like recycle from it: on that Little House episode, the teacher asks everybody to write something about the meaning of friendship (on that episode, it served Elmer to realize Nancy didn’t love him and was just using him). Here Jonathan, as his first assignment as teacher, asks to write about the same thing.

Now, what kind of assignment is that: I mean, Jonathan knows Jenny doesn’t have any friend, so what should she be writing about. Unless Jonathan really thought this assignment would be useful to everybody there, as if Jenny’s bully could learn something from it. But she won’t.

The Job: in this episode, Jonathan and Mark are supposed to be teacher.

Of course, there are multiple things that are wrong here: one, it’s unclear which subject they would be supposed to be teaching at school. It seems that Jonathan is an English teacher, because of the writing homework about friendship, but then she asks Jenny to tutor Jack in a different subject.

But it could be possible they teach multiple subjects: for instance, Mark teaches two.

But then he also teaches another one.

Now, a second problem is how they got those jobs in the first place. I mean, on other occasions they only used the Stuff to be qualified enough to get a job, without actually knowing anything about it. Now they have to actually prove to know those things by teaching though. And, considering that Jonathan was born in 1917 (as revealed in Keep Smiling), it’s hard to believe he’s qualified at all — they never even say if he ever attended school as Arthur the man. Although maybe he did attend school, just that it was a long time ago.

And that’s why he asked to write about the same thing Laura did on Little House one century ago.

Or maybe he can teach anything he wants because he receives angelic knowledge by his superior. Although it’s hard to believe that.

Anyway, it wouldn’t explain how Mark got to teach those either: it seems that he received them by his superior (because Jonathan doesn’t know what classes Mark is teaching in), so maybe his superior did that because Mark didn’t know anything about those subjects, and that way he could learn something from it.

Or maybe his superior actually knows those are the subjects Mark was qualified enough.

Is there something you’d like to tell Jonathan?

Either way, it’s the first time in the series Jonathan and Mark have this kind of job, and not the last.

Epilogue: the assignment wasn’t much sprawling as the first season finale, and the only feature that makes this episode feel like a season finale is, of course, the conclusion. After solving the assignment, Jonathan randomly wants Mark to know how much he enjoys this job, and Mark just as randomly wants to inform Jonathan they feel the same way — which feels odd, considering they’ve been working together for two years.

That’s weird: Mark used to say that only in the early episodes of season one, mainly to express gratitude to Jonathan for taking him along — and to remind the audience that the series is about an angel helping people, with his human friend by his side; because it was a new series, they had to clearly state its premise in each episode so the new audience wouldn’t get lost if they started watching it after the Pilot or missed it on TV before. Later, though, he stopped saying it, as Jonathan now knew very well how Mark felt about it — and the series was now popular enough it just didn’t need to explain what it was about in each episode that every episode. Of course, unless it was a special moment, like the season finale, to make it clear it’s a different episode compared to the rest of the shows.

And now they are ready to move on to a new season.

Ratings: 29 million audience. 16th Weekly TV programs, 2nd TV genre show.

This episode aired the first week of May 1986, just one week after the preceding one, and marked the conclusion of the second season, the most popular of the series. But it was the least-watched episode of the second season. Actually, that’s mostly because the season in general was extremely popular and the finale aired in May, a time when ratings are usually lower compared to the rest of the year. In context, it was still quite successful — performing better than the first season’s finale and even surpassing most episodes from that season. Also, they did wait one month from early April before airing the last two episodes of the season (similarly to what they did on season one), but, unlike season one, where the last two episodes where both part of the season finale, this time they are unrelated, which might have confused the audience too.

Anyway, the series was clearly strong enough to continue into a third season, where they are going to meet many old friends, and for the last time; they’ll be moving to many distant places out of California (without ever leaving California, somehow), and they are going to continue their preaching of hiring without references. That’s just one of the many.