Airdate: 10/28/1987

Directed By: Michael Landon

It’s that time, again: the Halloween special episode. And it’s that one.

After skipping the special in season three, for some reason they decided to come back. Actually, they had skipped it in season one as well, and they won’t do one again in the next season either. Someone must have realized that Halloween specials don’t work particularly well in a religious series.

But Landon couldn’t resist recycling old ideas, so he decided to make one last Halloween special episode in Highway. Unlike the first one, which revolved around a completely new assignment, this episode was envisioned as something more personal: essentially a tribute to his early career.

Assignment: Jonathan is “assigned” to help a child confront his fears during Halloween night.

They went with an approach similar to the season two Halloween special, using a double assignment, although this version is much stranger. On one side, there’s a child who is afraid of practically everything yet still insists on celebrating Halloween going trick-or-treating with his doozy sister.

After his sister scares him, Jonathan tries to help him realize that there’s nothing to fear.

Of course, there actually is something — that’s Landon the werewolf.

At the same time, Mark refuses to participate in the assignment and would rather spend the night watching the horror stuff they pass on TV.

And Jonathan gets back at him by dressing as a werewolf and giving him nightmares.

What.

In some way, the episode resembles the first Halloween special, which also featured a double assignment: helping a conman while simultaneously tricking the Devil to save Mark’s soul. And like that episode, Mark effectively becomes part of the secondary assignment.

The difference, however, is that the two “assignments” (if scaring Mark is considered an official duty) are completely unrelated to each other: Mark never even meets the child Jonathan is helping, and the nightmares with Jonathan the werewolf feel more like bonus material. There is no relation whatsoever with the primary assignment—helping Alan win his fears—they are just a vehicle for Landon to pay homage to his career.

In case the title didn’t make this clear enough, the whole episode is meant to be a tribute to a 1957 horror feature with similar title in which Landon played the titular character—his first role as protagonist in his entire career.

Anyway, this marks the first episode of only two episodes of the series in which the assignment is carried out entirely by Jonathan, without Mark’s involvement or help. (The second episode will be later on in this same season). There were some cases in which Jonathan handled most of the work and Mark didn’t do anything or wasn’t really involved, but at least he was actually there with Jonathan (The Monster and Children’s Children or Heavy Date are some specific examples). This time, he’s just sitting in an empty apartment the entire assignment: he never meets Alan, and he only sees Jonathan twice before falling asleep and hallucinating werewolves.

• Background

Like most holiday specials, the episode takes place over the course of a single night — this time on Halloween — but it is unclear which Halloween it is supposed to be.

That’s because this episode has a cold open which was added after the episode was produced, as it fell too short of the 45-minutes required by the network.

In this short cold open, Jonathan and Mark are driving somewhere and Jonathan refers to the Halloween Special in season two as happening “one year ago” on Halloween.

The problem, of course, is that those events actually occurred two seasons earlier.

There are a couple of possible ways to take this. One possibility is that the Halloween special from season two took place in 1985 (during the timeline of season two), while this episode is set on Halloween 1986 (during season three) but was aired one season later. Admittedly, it would be strange for an episode to be displaced across seasons, but holiday specials are typically meant to air close to the real holiday they depict, so it’s plausible that they were treated as exceptions to the guidelines. (The same applied to the Holiday Specials in Little House, so it’s not that far-fetched as a possibility).

The alternative explanation is that the season two Halloween special was the misplaced episode. In that case, it would have taken place during Halloween 1986 (within season three timeline), while this episode would actually occur in 1987 alongside the rest of season four.

However, this explanation seems less likely for many reasons: the first one is that the season also includes a Thanksgiving special later on, and that episode spans several weeks leading up to the holiday and even encompasses the Halloween Holidays, so the story of this episode. Of course, it is still possible that the two episodes are occurring concurrently, the series has already implied that some assignments take place simultaneously (more about it here); at the same time, it is possible that the Thanksgiving special was misplaced from another season. The stranger issue though is that the first Halloween special also felt like the first Halloween Jonathan and Mark had spent together (they exchanged opinions on the holidays as though they had never celebrated it before, especially when Mark says he likes scary stuff). Yet, if that episode actually took place in 1986 during season three — one year before this episode — then two entire Halloween seasons would remain unaccounted for.

Do you remember that?

As for season one, its lack of a Halloween episode could be explained by assuming Jonathan and Mark were occupied with a particularly long assignment and therefore unable to celebrate the holiday. For example, the assignment of Help Wanted: Angel spans two months, so maybe that episode also included Halloween 1984, and that explains the lack of the Halloween Special that year. However, it becomes much harder to justify the complete absence of either a Halloween special or even a passing reference to Halloween during season two—assuming that the Halloween Special in season two actually took place in season three and got misplaced a year.

The series has implied that viewers do not see every assignment Jonathan and Mark undertake, so it is possible they spent Halloween 1985 together off-screen and the season simply skipped over it. The problem is that, in the season two Halloween special, they share their thoughts on the holiday as though they had never had that conversation before. That feels unlikely if they had already been spending Halloweens together for two years by that point.

A third explanation is that the season two Halloween special was itself misplaced from season one. Under that assumption, it would take place in October 1984, while this episode would occur in Halloween 1985 during the timeline of season two, despite being produced as part of the fourth season. While technically possible, it’s extremely unlikely, especially because the idea that the season two Halloween special belonged to season one was already fairly implausible to begin with (more about it at the “Background” entry of that episode)

Instead, by assuming that Jonathan’s statement that only one year has passed is right, the most coherent explanation is that the season two Halloween special truly belongs to season two, while this episode is actually set during season three, despite airing as part of season four. In some way, it compensates the Vietnam episode Another Kind Of War, Another Kind Of Peace in season three, which actually took place in 1988, during season four at least (possibly season five).

There’s yet another possibility to explain the setting of this episode, and it will become apparent later.

Anyway, the cold open continues: Jonathan’s statement on how this night feels familiar helps Mark remembers what the Halloween special in season two was about.

In case people in the audience had forgotten this.

At this point, there’s a flashback featuring scenes from the season two Halloween special. They actually combined two separate parts: they show the scene Mark gets inside the bookstore where the Devil’s assistant operates, and finalizes his deal (trade his soul to save the kid’s). Then, they show the scene in which the Devil (played by Michael Berrymen on heavy make-up) rises from the basement. Even though it occurred at the conclusion of the episode, when Mark wasn’t there.

Anyway, it’s only the second time in the series that an episode includes flashbacks from previous episodes. The first instance was in Love and Marriage —only in the cold open, like this episode. It seems that Landon resorts to flashbacks when his episodes are too short.

Once the flashback is through, Mark gets hungry. And Jonathan is surprised.

Jonathan can’t possibly understand what it’s like being hungry. Just human needs.

So, Mark lays out his plan for the evening.

Because he hasn’t had enough of being scared off on Halloween.

He then buys his sandwich, the cold open is done and the head credits are displayed, marking the beginning of the episode.

One last thing about the background: there is another possibility to explain when this Halloween is set —Jonathan could simply be wrong, as this prologue is a cold open added much later in production. This would not be unprecedented. Something similar already happened with the season three episode Love and Marriage, and possibly with For the Love of Larry as well. In those cases, episodes that ran shorter than the usual runtime, so they were later given new prologues or cold opens. even when those additions created problems with the rest of the series

So, given that this entire dialogue (Jonathan saying the night feels like the Halloween in season two, a flashback, Mark saying he wants to buy a snack) was simply added to the episode one week after finishing it, just as a way to stretch it, then it can be dismissed as unofficial. And it can just be assumed this episode takes place in Halloween two years after season two, which is the right way being this episode part of season four.

• Characters

As for the characters, the episode contains many references involving both Jonathan and Mark. While driving to the assignment, they mention that it is Halloween, and Mark says he enjoys scary things.

Not again.

That is the same thing he said back in season two.

Which may be a reference to French disliking them.

Some habits never change, apparently.

There is also something odd: when Jonathan tells Mark he is going out to watch kids trick-or-treating because it’s amusing — which is already a rather strange hobby — Mark replies that he doesn’t want to, and that it is Halloween and that they have no assignment.

He should know better.

They did have an assignment on Halloween in season two, originally involving straightening out a conman before the story shifted toward helping Mark and the child.

But that is the way it plays: Jonathan handles the assignment while Mark stays home watching Landon’s horror.

And falling asleep before the epilogue.

He was really into it.

Much like when he tried to read that Christmas book in season one.

• References (I Was A Teenage Werewolf)

The most peculiar aspect of the episode is its reference to the actors themselves. While Jonathan is working on the assignment involving the child and the supposed werewolf, Mark is at home watching the titular film on television.

“Turned to a middle aged probationary angel”.

There are two things worth considering: one, what kind of television channel would air a thirty-year-old horror movie on Halloween? Though, admittedly, this was the same series that includes the bizarre radio station broadcasting 1920s songs Mark listens to in his car. (Several times). Nothing should be any more surprising than that.

Second — and more importantly — as the title suggests, the episode serves as a tribute to I Was a Teenage Werewolf, the 1957 horror film in which Michael Landon played the protagonist.

It’s basically about a troubled, ill-tempered and hot-headed teenager (like the guy in Friends) transformed into a werewolf by a mad scientist, after which he begins murdering people by strangling them.

A strangler werewolf. That’s how edgy things were in the 1950s.

Anyway, that role was an important step in Landon’s career before Bonanza, marking the first time he ever got to play the protagonist in a feature production, and the film was also quite successful. In an interview, Landon admitted that he had fond memories of making that feature: he also recalled that, following the film’s success, his producer attempted to capitalize on its popularity by sending him on a four-week singing tour alongside Jerry Lee Lewis back in 1957, the year it was released — although Landon was not a trained singer and only performed “Give Me A Little Kiss” every time. In a 1985 interview on the Los Angeles Herald Examiner he actually joked on the experience: about the people attending the concert, he remarked that he hoped “They had short memories“. He lived in a time when people couldn’t record him.

So, in honor of the film’s thirtieth anniversary, Landon decided to build a Highway episode around it: the “unofficial” second assignment—Mark seeing the horror film and being hunted by Jonathan the werewolf—is meant to be a tribute to that role.

And the network really believed in this: there was extensive promotion behind the episode, including an interview to Landon while making it (only excerpts are currently available, including the one referenced above).

That’s only the third interview to Landon about a specific Highway episode: A Song For Jason had one, and Love At Second Sight another (even though the second case was an “unofficial” documentary shot by someone who was there, not an official thing ordered by the network, conducted by journalists and meant to be televised before the airing to promote the series).

Maybe they believed in this “strong” episode and pushed it as hard as they could. Or maybe they feared it would turn viewers away and tried to offset that with massive promotion.

Certainly, it was a weird show.

You got that right.

• Production and Setting

As for the production, Landon wrote the episode in late August 1987, the third episode he wrote for the season, after the two-part opening one. The production began in late September 1987 for one week, the first episode filmed after a two-month hiatus following the previous production block. That’s because the entire season had an unusually irregular schedule: instead of starting production between July and early August as they did in the other seasons, they began in early May in anticipation of a director’s strike due in July. (A strike eventually happened, but lasted a single day.)

Then, after two months filming, in early July they took a two month summer break and resumed in September with this episode. Basically, instead of taking four months off after the conclusion of the previous season—essentially the whole spring and the first half of the summer as they did between seasons one and two and then seasons two and three again—and shoot episodes for four months straight from the second half of the summer until December, they only had a two month break, then went back to work in May, and then had another two month break the second half of the summer.

But there’s one curious thing. This episode also features a cold open in which Mark reminisces about the Halloween from “one year ago,” yet that scene has virtually nothing to do with the rest of the episode. Much like For the Love of Larry, the sequence was added after the episode had already been completed, once the producers realized it fell short of the required forty-five-minute runtime by the network.

In fact, the production schedule appears to confirm this: in the episode’s first draft originally written in late August 1987, it began with Mark sitting in an apartment watching television.

However, on October 1, Landon revised the script and added the new prologue—actually, the cold open—the one with Jonathan and Mark driving, Mark commenting on the moon and then flashing back to the Halloween Special in Season two.

And by then (October 1), the episode itself had already been filmed (it wrapped one week earlier), meaning the opening scene was written and shot and inserted after production had effectively concluded.

Basically, Landon originally made the episode without that scene, and once it was ready he realized it fell short of the usual 45-minute runtime. So, instead of improving or expanding the actual story, he simply wrote an additional five minute prologue — Mark going out to buy a sandwich and thinking back to the season two Halloween night — to pad the episode out. Because the rest of the episode was already considered perfect as it is. And making a thirty-minute special episode instead was not an option.

Anyway, this marks the third time in the series a new cold open was added to the show after completion of its production: the first time was For The Love Of Larry, for which a cold open was added to the original episode before its airing (the same case as this); the second was Love And Marriage, although in that case, the cold open was produced years later and added only for the syndicated version of that episode.

Anyway, like the other episodes with a cold open, the opening credits begin only after it: they roll the scene Mark is watching TV, which occurs eight minutes into the episode. This marks fourth time in the series that the opening credits roll several minutes into the episode rather than at the beginning, right after the opening introduction: the other episodes were For the Love of Larry and Love and Marriage — in which they played out after their newly added cold opens, like in this case — and The Hero, which was simply an odd case. (There was no cold open on that one).

As for the setting, it was shot at Orange Grove Blvd (called “Alden Rd” in the episode).

Two curious things about that: one, it’s a place already used as a spot for a horror story. That’s the same setting where Halloween (that Halloween) was shot nine years earlier.

It’s not exactly the same house, but it’s nearby.

The second thing to point out is that the entire episode (at least Alan’s assignment, not Mark’s dream) was shot there. So, when Alan’s parents worries so much about Alan’s getting lost—and even alert the cops for his disappearance—he’s like 100 feet away from his house.

He lives across the street, Jonathan.

The real danger is crossing the Halloween house though. Maybe Alan watched that Halloween, and that’s why he’s so afraid.

Glossary:

Angel Revelation: the first official one of the season (the Fight For Your Life one wasn’t really one). Now, it’s important to clarify that the season will be more similar to season one in principles than the second and third seasons. Which means that there won’t be an angel revelation each episode. Actually, that only happens three times the entire season.

And middle aged werewolves. Or probationary angels pretending to be them.

Actors’ Easter Eggs and References: on several occasions, the series jokingly references the actors’ careers by distancing itself from them ironically, and one such example had already appeared in the season two Halloween special. They decided to do it again here.

Given that the episode is a tribute to the Teenage Werewolf feature, there are many scattered references to that. And many times during the episode Mark states out loud that the guy in the film looks like a young Jonathan (or a young Landon, for that matter).

In case that wasn’t clear already.

And Jonathan gets offended.

With all the times he treated bad his friend and made fat jokes, that’s nothing.

But that happens multiple times.

Cute, Mark.

It’s hard to believe: Jonathan is an angel, he doesn’t grow any older than he is now (the way he’s been for the past forty years, at least). So, he has no reason to feel offended by this.

But Mark goes on.

Weird.

Then, at the beginning of the episode, Mark refuses to go with Jonathan because he wants to see how the movie ends, and Jonathan wants to spoiler it.

It’s unclear how could Jonathan know, if he had never watched it—Jonathan died in 1948 (as revealed in season two’s Keep Smiling), so he had been working as angel for nine years by the time the movie was released, and he certainly never had the time to watch it. Besides, in the season two’s Halloween special, he clearly stated he disliked horror stuff.

Which was a reference to Landon’s enjoying them.

Anyway, it’s hard to believe that Jonathan, being so busy and not particularly into horror, would even know a 1957 horror movie, even harder that he knows its ending.

Yet, he does, before Mark stops him.

At the end of the movie, the protagonist goes to the see his doctor, who is responsible for his “werewolf mutation”, and kills him (strangling him, like in the instinct of any fierce werewolf). And then he’s shot dead by the cops.

Either Jonathan knows the ending because he is an angel and simply used the Stuff, or the line is another self-reference to Landon’s own acting career.

BBD: the three Landon’s obsessions are back. Although not very prominently, at least in this episode. It’s in a scene involving a girl organizing a party with her mother.

A teen organizing a party with the complicity of the parents. Relatable.

Then she catches two teenagers drinking booze in a spooky corner.

That’s the most horror part of the episode.

And the mother unexpectedly punches one of them right across the face.

That’s what it’s all about.

It all feels so random. Maybe Landon included it to show the younger impressionable viewers that it is possible to have a party with parents in house—without alcohol—and still enjoy yourself.

Perhaps more importantly, he wanted to include a reference to bins and drugs, his two obsessions.

Doozy: everybody is a doozy, especially Alan’s sister.

Friendly Jonathan: the entire dream of Jonathan the werewolf is essentially a friendly Jonathan instance on Mark. And he has a nightmare where he’s chased down by Jonathan the middle aged werewolf.

Unless Jonathan weren’t behind this.

Highway Of Mysteries: there’s no explanation as to Jonathan’s involvement in this nightmare, and to what extent, but it seems that he’s using the stuff to get into Mark’s dream. If that were the case, it marks the tenth time in the series Jonathan uses his power to invade someone’s dream, and the third time he does it on Mark (who was already the victim of Jonathan’s mischievous tricks in Going Home, Going Home and Heaven On Earth).

Also, Mark says he has to wait for Jonathan, although Jonathan is the one responsible for his dreams in the first place. Perhaps Mark is unaware of this. And he thinks that Jonathan can wand off his nightmares.

But again, it remains unclear whether Mark is simply experiencing a nightmare involving Jonathan, or whether the dream — in which Jonathan himself becomes a werewolf — is somehow real, implying that Jonathan has once again entered his friend’s mind.

That makes it kind of a mystery. Basically, Mark is attacked three times by Jonathan: in the first and second time it is apparent it was a dream, as Mark falls asleep.

And talks in his sleep too.

But the third time (the last one at the conclusion) he’s not shown falling asleep—just clumsily jogging as he waits for Jonathan to come back.

Anyway, That makes it harder to determine whether he fell asleep but that moment wasn’t shown the audience, or whether he didn’t, and Jonathan is a real werewolf right now.

Or maybe he had been asleep all along the episode, and it was a dream in a dream in a dream.

Or maybe Jonathan is not doing anything, and it’s really just a nightmare. Probably just a warning to the young impressionable audience: don’t watch bad stuff if you’re not the appropriate age for it. Or you’ll experience nightmares with Jonathan the werewolf.

Highway Family and Actors: the woman kicking the two kids out of her house is played by Mary Pat Gleason, who will later appears again in the Thanksgiving special in a more prominent role, and once more during the fifth season, though only in a scene like this episode.

In that sense, she resembles Dennis Pratt during the first three seasons: three appearances, although twice in a single scene.

Instead, the subject of the assignment (the official one, not Mark’s) is played by Elden Henson (here credited as “Ratliff”), and he’s from the Highway family.

His younger brother will appear in a couple of episodes from now.

Actually, that episode was shot on June (during the first production’s block in Spring, before the tentative strike), while this Halloween one on September; so, by the time they made this episode, Landon had already met him.

Security: it’s yet another episode of the series in which there’s no security measure. When Alan tells Jonathan his sister was kidnapped by a man in a spooky house, and Jonathan rushes to save her, opening the house door as though it were open.

Maybe Jonathan used the stuff to do that (opening locked doors is a power unlocked back in season one) but it’s more likely that the owners didn’t even lock it in the first place.

And when Jonathan goes away, the owner stands up and goes to the other room.

He’s not going to lock it.

He should’ve gone to lock the door. But he may be following Jonathan’s preaching from the Pilot.

There’s also a weird blooper, though not entirely one: when Jonathan bursts into the house to rescue Alan’s sister, all of the characters are supposed to appear terrified. However, Alan visibly seems on the verge of laughing while glancing toward someone, presumably a crew member.

And he tries so hard to suppress the laughter, but he can’t.

The moment grows more ridiculous as Landon continues trying to play the scene completely straight all the same.

With all the things happening in this episode, that’s nothing.

The “Stuff” Powers: this episode makes extensive use of the Stuff in Jonathan the strangler werewolf.

And when he invades Mark’s mind.

Ratings: 20 million audience. 49th weekly TV program, 11th TV genre show.

This episode aired on Halloween 1987 and boasted a particularly extensive promotion by the network (like the interview to Landon on the behind-the-scenes of the episode). It seems like they really believed in this. Or maybe they didn’t, and tried to sell the episode this way.

Either way, it was all for nothing, and this episode wasn’t successful at all: its ratings dropped even further compared to the first episodes of the season. It actually became the least-watched episode of the entire series. And this was already the second time that had happened in the season — by just the fifth episode. There’s no excuse this time: it’s simply bad.

At this point, they probably had an emergency meeting.

Usually, the episodes with the worst ratings aired toward the end of the season, in spring, when television ratings were generally lower for every show. (That’s apparent even with the third season’s finale, just to name one example.) But seeing this happen in October was extremely unusual, especially since the earlier episodes of the season hadn’t performed well either. It really seemed like Highway was starting to lose popularity by then.

If the low ratings for the boxing episode earlier in the season hinted that the future might look grim — though that could still have been an isolated case — the ratings for this episode seem to point much more clearly to a broader decline during the season. And if the ratings were already this low at this time of year, when they were usually much steadier, then it certainly didn’t look good. (Season three was more popular by this time of the year). There’s still an entire season ahead, but if the ratings had kept falling at that pace, there might not have been another season at all, and the remaining episodes may even be fixed as midseason replacement. (That was the case with Father Murphy: the second season was originally meant to have complete 20 or more episodes, but the first five episodes were so unsuccessful in ratings that the network interrupted its airing, scrapped its second half and scheduled the last eight episodes in the summer.)

It’s hard to justify these low ratings. Maybe it was simply the time of year. That may even have been the reason they skipped the holiday specials in seasons one and three. But if they were going to make another season, hopefully it wouldn’t include another episode like this.