Airdate: 11/11/1987

Directed By: Michael Landon

It’s a very random episode. In some ways, it’s similar to a season two episode about aliens, but now it has heroes. Even though they are really just angels pretending to be superheroes. Just like when angels play werewolves.

Complete show available here.

Assignment: Jonathan and Mark are assigned to help a grieving family cope with a recent tragedy.

Even though the real assignment is helping a kid obsessed over Landon.

Apparently, at the beginning of the episode, Mark randomly decides to stop by an old friend from the police, Gary. And every time they decide to see some of Mark’s old friends, they always bring troubles into his life. (For example, in season two they randomly went to see that friend’s family by the beach, and they caused the assignment; or in season three, they stopped by another old friend and found out he was having trouble with his family). So, they’d better avoid it.

But they don’t, and that’s precisely what happens here: when they arrive, Mark discovers that his friend has been killed while on patrol, and Gary’s family seems now lost.

So, Jonathan and Mark decide those people need their help.

Or rather, Jonathan will help them by secretly dressing up as a goofy superhero Gary’s son Stevie treats like his friend.

The Halloween Special was two weeks ago.

While Mark mostly stays in the background throughout the assignment: he only helps Stevie’s mother and grandpa with the paperwork, and rarely interacts with the child.

In fact, he even seems oblivious to Jonathan’s secret identity as a superhero by night.

So, this episode is a rather plain family issues assignment: no “his father’s son“, despite having kids involved; no “old folks“, even though the family lives with the grandfather. It’s just family issue.

• Background

There’s no clear indication as to the timespan, but it can reasonably be a week. It takes place in 1987, as indicated by the date on Gary’s grave.

One odd thing: Mark mentions that Gary was too young to die, and Jonathan agrees on that.

Just in case someone has forgotten: Jonathan died even younger than that.

The assignment takes place in Los Angeles, where Gary lives, and that’s problematic: Mark used to be a cop in Oakland. And the series never mentions him having worked for the LAPD before meeting Jonathan. Perhaps his friend moved to Los Angeles sometime before the episode takes place, or perhaps the production simply ignored the distinction and expected viewers not to notice.

• Characters

This episode introduces Gary, yet another lost friend. It’s yet another episode in which they introduce an old colleague from the Oakland Police Force, like Charlie in Plane Death, Sam in Change Of Life, Wes in The Secret and Frank in Love And Marriage—though this time they don’t really see him. It’s more like Charlie in Plane Death: he’s already dead.

And two things to point out here: one, Mark has one friend too many, and yet nobody helped him recover from alcohol.

But you.

It’s been four seasons now, it shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it’s worth pointing out all the same.

The weirdest part is that it happens very much randomly: unlike the other episodes in which he ran into some old colleague always for a reason, whether these cops mysteriously contacted him to ask him something—Charlie in Plane Death to help him with some investigations, Frank in Love And Marriage to invite him to his daughter’s wedding—or they just happen to run into each other by chance (Sam in Change Of Life, for example). By contrast, this episode gives Mark no reason to visit his old friend after such a long time: it just begins with Mark’s voice-over telling Jonathan he feels like seeing an old buddy from his police days.

It is not as though Mark received a letter or heard troubling news (like when he went to see Luke). He just randomly decides to reconnect with someone he apparently has not seen in years. It basically plays out like Oh Lucky Man in season three, beginning with Mark and Jonathan going to see an old friend Mark had arrested years earlier, although that man is not their assignment, and they had no reason to do that. They also did the same thing in A Father’s Faith, but at least on that occasion Mark’s friend later turned out to be the assignment.

Or perhaps that is simply how Mark handles friendships: people disappear from his life for years, only to reconnect completely at random instead of during moments when they need one another. That would also help explain why so many people abandoned him during his years as an alcoholic.

Even though it seems to be the case that all of Mark’s friends do the same thing: disappearing from each other’s life. That would explain why Mark is apparently the only police officer from Oakland attending Gary’s funeral. Up to this point, the series has introduced four cops who were supposedly friends of Mark: excluding Charlie (as he died at the beginning of the episode) the remaining ones are still alive and in some cases are even shown to still be working, such as Sam or Wes. It could have been reasonable that at least some of them would also have known this Gary, yet none of them appears at the funeral.

In fact, the same thing happened in Plane Death, where almost nobody attended Charlie’s funeral either.

At this point, the only way to justify this would be assuming that Gary was only trained in Oakland but then moved out when he began working. That’s plausible, the episode being set in L.A. Or maybe it’s just the way the way people treat their friends in this series: they disappear from your life when you need them. The two cops who inform Gary’s wife about her husband’s death are nowhere to be seen either.

But somehow Mark is there at the funeral—although he arrives late, when everybody else is walking away.

And of course, he brought Jonathan along.

I mean, Mark hasn’t seen these people for years—the last time being when he was still an alcoholic—and now he just comes back into their life with a random man Gary’s family has never seen before.

He really has a peculiar relationship with friends.

Maybe he was suspended for his alcoholic attitude.

The basis of Mark’s assumption is unclear: he hasn’t seen Gary in a long time, he has no way to know how Gary has turned out now—as far as he knows, he may have snapped at some point and turned to alcohol. Which sounds familiar, doesn’t it.

You’re a little too late for that.

Also, the whole idea behind the assignment is quite far-fetched: if Gary has so many friends (the funeral is packed), then how come Mark, presumably one of the few whom he had lost touched with, has to help his grieving family with the paperwork.

Then, as he reveals, Gary was not just a colleague: he was his successor.

Something to add to his biography: he was a trainer to cadets.

There is another detail involving Mark, though it’s a problematic one: while speaking with Jonathan about his old friend, he reveals that Gary already had a son at that time, and the kid is not yet eight now. Considering that the episode is set in 1987 (as revealed by the grave), that would place the Stevie’s birth around 1979 or 1980 at least. However, according to the pilot episode, 1979 was also the year Mark was suspended from the police force because of his alcoholism and moved in with his sister (where he spent five years until 1984, when the series began).

Of course, it is possible that Mark met the child shortly before his suspension, but even then he was clearly not in good condition. Realistically, this old friend probably would not have wanted Mark around his family very much during that period.

• Production and Setting

As for the production, this episode was filmed in late June 1987 and was the final episode produced before the directors’ strike interrupted work that summer. Just to clear out: each season of Highway to Heaven began production sometime between July and August, usually after four months off from concluding the production of the preceding season (Season three started in early July, season two later that same month, and season one in August, with the exception of the pilot.)

However, by spring 1987 the directors’ guild was preparing a strike for the summer, and production couldn’t afford taking four months off: to avoid delays in the broadcast schedule, Landon decided to have an early start— in late spring— and get the first six episodes in the can for September, in order to be covered for at least two months. So, every episode which has aired so far in this season (with the exception of the Halloween Special) was made between early May and July, and this episode was the last one they shot in this early block. Once it was done, they had a two month break and resumed in late September with the Halloween episode. So, if starting from the next episode the actors will look slightly different, it’s just that they had a two month vacation between these two.

The episode was written in late April 1987, before the season three finale, by the same husband and wife behind A Mother And A Daughter in season three. They also made one in season five, amounting to three contributions to the series.

One curious thing: in the original script, the episode was supposed to begin with Gary’s family watching the Cosby Show.

However, the actual episode begins with Jonathan and Mark driving out of Westward Beach talking about pollution. And they look like this.

And then Gary’s family watch the Cosby Show, and learns of Gary’s death. And Jonathan and Mark go to the funeral, now looking like this.

Jonathan, of course, looks exactly the same as always, but Mark appears slightly different: his hair is shorter and the beard is white.

That’s because the first scene at the beach was probably shot way before the rest of the episode. As revealed in the audio commentary on the first DVD release, when the opening of an episode was only loosely connected to the main assignment (generally scenes with Jonathan and Mark alone driving somewhere), the producers would shoot those scenes separately to save time and later insert them wherever needed.

Basically, they’d keep them as “spare” openings for episodes that lacked an introductory scene featuring the two characters. That’s not the case when the opening is actually related to what happens to the episode (like in Man’s Best Friend, to name one), but when the opening is totally unrelated and needed to pad out the episode which would be too short otherwise. For instance, that’s what happened to Heaven On Earth in season two, which began with Mark reading the newspaper and talking about wars. It is extremely likely that they did exactly that here: this scene was not produced for any specific episode, but was simply inserted later into an episode that needed an opening. And they chose this episode, which wouldn’t last long otherwise (without this opening, it would be barely 42 minute long, and the timeslot for a TV series like Highway demands 45 or 46 minutes at least).

Also, according to the script, the ending was meant to be slightly different: after flying around L.A. on Jonathan’s back, Stevie was supposed to wake up in his room, as though everything had always been just a dream in the first place.

Then, he would stand up, walk to the window and glumly stare out at a shooting star. And the episode ended there—leaving it unclear whether it was really just a dream or not (especially the final part, the flight scene).

However, in the final episode, they changed that: after waking up from the dream, he glumly looks around the room and notices the cap that the bully had stolen from him earlier in the episode and he stole back while flying with Jonathan—strongly implying that the adventure really happened.

Of course, the audience already knows Jonathan was the superhero all along, so it’s more like a confirmation to Stevie. And he’s now gonna grow up believing that superheroes exist.

But this series is one where people immediately believe in angels when Jonathan tells them he is one.

Also, it could still be argued that Jonathan merely entered the child’s dream rather than physically flying with him.

As for the setting, it is just Los Angeles, in some familiar place. In particular, the cemetery where Gary is buried is the Rosedale one, which had already been used in the series.

Many times: in To Bind The Wounds in season two and Love At Second Sight third season

Glossary:

Bins: this episode is not about bins (or pollution, in their extension), but it’s misleading in its prologue. It begins with Jonathan and Mark driving while Mark randomly mentions this.

Not if people like Benson mess it up.

And then Mark decides he’ll go see his old friend.

If this first scene feels off and misplaced, that’s because it is: again, it’s a spare opening. That’s supported by the original script, which lacked this scene. And by Mark’s appearance in the rest of the episode, which is different.

It’s also apparent by the background scenery: the first scene shows Mark driving off Westward Beach.

But inside the car, the landscape from Jonathan’s window looks entirely different.

It may even be a blooper; it is possible to justify this by implying that these two are not exactly consecutive scenes, though.

The most likely explanation remains that they are just unrelated.

Highway Actors and family: as for the cast, the episode introduces two new Highway actors to the series. One is Garrette Ratliff playing Stevie, the subject of the assignment: the kid who lost his dad and stares at a miniature Landon.

That was one of the earliest role in his career: in 1994, he played one of the characters in The Mighty Ducks for Disney.

If he looks familiar, or if the surname sounds old, it’s because he’s not entirely new to the Highway people: he is related to Elden Ratliff, who appeared in the Halloween special two episodes earlier (the werewolf episode).

Actually, he’s Elden’s younger brother.

And sometimes, he looks at the production crew too. Like his brother did.

This marks the third time in the series that related actors appeared in different Highway episodes. The first instance was in season one, which featured three siblings from the Jacoby family in three different episodes; the second was in season three, when the Wallach family appeared together playing a family in A Father’s Faith, and Eli Wallach had already appeared in a season two episode before that.

One curious thing: the Halloween Special was produced later — about two months after this episode— even though the airing order was reversed to make that episode coincide with the Halloween Holiday, of course. So, when they shot this episode, Landon and the production had yet to meet Garrette’s brother.

Anyway, Garrette will be coming back over a year from now, in one of the very last episodes of the fifth season. While his brother Elden from the Halloween Special didn’t.

The second new actor is playing Jason, the bully who steals Stevie’s cap and is later scared off when Jonathan the superhero help retrieve it. He is played by Josh C. Williams, here in one of his earliest roles.

He would return later in this same season, making him one of the few Highway actors to appear twice in a single season — and already the second example this year (Man’s Best Friend’s Brandon Bluhm is coming back one episode from now). Perhaps they were running out of good actors, or perhaps they simply thought he was too good.

Highway Of Mysteries: the way the assignment is handled raises some mysteries of the Highway. Throughout the episode, Stevie plays with the action doll of this fictional, titular superhero—a copy of superman modeled after Landon, essentially.

This prop was one of the most expensive thing of this episode.

And the shadow of the Amazing Man occasionally appears to Stevie and talks to him. But he is the only one who can see this Superman.

Basically like Jeremy and Chester in The Ghosts Of Buxley Hall; yet another connection.

Then, at the end of the episode, it is revealed to the audience that Jonathan was the one disguised as the hero and had been trying to help the boy process his grief.

This is unsettling.

But it’s weird for several reasons. One thing to start with, Jonathan looks exactly the same. I mean, it is basically a Superman-like disguise, where you put sunglasses and nobody can see your true identity Apparently it works on the kid, and he doesn’t seem to notice that his superhero looks like Jonathan.

Then, the episode shows “Amazing Man” appear several times to Stevie, but only at the end they are actually shown together. So, it remains a mystery what happened in their prior meetings.

Most importantly, though, this entire idea behind being a hero is a mystery: the way Stevie gets to own the doll is never explained; he just appears to have it the day of the funeral, and his mother and grandpa can’t explain this.

That seems to imply that Jonathan is behind “Amazing Man”, that he used his power to give Stevie the doll or something like it.

If that were the case, though, it would be just pointless: in the episode, Stevie spends all his time with the doll, without any friend. And in a way, the doll is shutting him out of the world.

And whose fault is that?

If Jonathan had never given him the doll in the first place, Stevie wouldn’t be so withdrawn from life. Of course, it could be argued that a doll is harmless but it’s the way it’s used to be different. Or that Stevie would feel worse if he hadn’t had the doll to distract him a little. Or that, if that doll didn’t exist, he’d probably be playing with Superman, and it would be harder for Jonathan to get into Stevie’s imagination pretending to be superman rather than Amazing Man. So, the doll might be for his own good. But how did Stevie get it in the first place, and whether Jonathan was told by his superior that he was going to be playing superman for this assignment because that’s the only way to help Stevie heal, that remains a mystery.

One last mystery is the conclusion: when Jonathan is finally revealed to the people as Amazing Man, he tells Stevie that he has to leave.

A couple of things are odd: one, it is unclear whether Jonathan is speaking as Amazing Man or as the angel, but the wording is peculiar. He specifically uses the term “assignment”, usually associated with his heavenly work alongside Mark, instead of something more fitting for a superhero, such as “mission,” “adventure,” or “operation” or whatever.

But if he were talking as Jonathan, then he’d be a liar, because he won’t go helping any other kid for the next few episodes. Unless he meant Garrette’s brother on Halloween night.

Sunday Suits: Jonathan and Mark have them at the funeral.

Of course, the funeral black ones, like those they had in Plane Death back in season one.

It seems like they use the grey ones for their jobs (as teachers or narcs) and the black ones for parties and funerals.

The “Stuff” Powers: after this episode, Jonathan unlocks the power of being a hero. Even though he doesn’t say anything about the superhero disguise to Mark, and it’s unclear whether Mark even realizes that the child is not simply imagining the character, or whether Jonathan explained the situation to him at some point. It is equally unclear why Jonathan does not simply use his powers to give the boy dreams about the hero instead of actually appearing to him as one.

But most importantly, Jonathan’s powers lead to one of the most absurd moments of the series: Jonathan as Amazing Man lets Stevie make one last wish. And it’s not going to Heaven to see his father.

And it is not seeing his father again.

Is that a missile? A bird? A plane? Superman? A probationary angel?

That’s Landon kidnapping a child.

Jonathan flying Stevie around L.A.

That’s very 1980s, and very ridiculous. But that’s Highway.

And that’s where all the budget of the series went to.

This entire scene might even be a reference: in a 1980s TV interview, Landon revealed that, in the 1950s, he used to say his oldest son that he was secretly Superman— and his son reportedly believed him. And he only learned the truth years later.

Maybe this episode is just a way to perpetrate the lie a little longer. Or maybe Landon wanted to turn that lie into the truth by actually becoming Superman. Or his copy. Or an angel pretending to be a hero.

The job: playing superhero, apparently. While Mark deals with the real stuff. There is an odd aspect to the underlying assignment: considering how many friends the police officer supposedly had — including all the people shown at the funeral — it seems very far-fetched that Jonathan and Mark would be the ones helping the family with the paperwork. I mean, the last time they saw Mark he was an alcoholic, and Jonathan is a man they had never met.

This series treats friendship in a very peculiar way.

And they’ll never see you again.

Even though she invites Mark to come back, they are never shown coming back here.

Vacation: at the beginning of the episode (in the “spare” opening), Mark tells Jonathan they can have some time off.

But that doesn’t last long.

Then, they go to the funeral.

A couple of things: one, Mark can’t do anything without his friend anymore.

Second, as Jonathan later reveals, that’s the assignment.

Which basically means he’s not going with Mark out of pure selflessness, but job is involved.

Mark is like: “And if it wasn’t, wouldn’t you be here?

And forces him to work.

Some vacation.

Ratings: 27 million audience. 29th weekly TV program, 5th TV genre show

The episode aired in early November 1987 and performed considerably better in the ratings than its predecessor. That was an encouraging result, especially after the sharp decline caused by the Halloween special, which remains the least-watched episode of the entire series and its impact will probably ripple in the the surrounding episodes.

Even so, the ratings were still not remotely near those reached during the show’s more popular earlier seasons. Still, considering the sudden and unexpected drop, these episodes were holding up reasonably well. Perhaps people were attracted by the promotional materials showing Landon playing a superhero and assumed the episode would be special. Maybe these ratings will lead to a more positive future for the season. However, the ratings next week would suggest otherwise.