Airdate: 01/13/1988

Directed By: Michael Landon

It feels like a Little House kind of thing. And the setting sure is. Anyway, here’s the old episode that was delayed for over three months.

Just to give some context: this episode was originally scheduled to air in October 1987 (as this season’s fourth show) but the network decided to preempt the National League Championship Series instead and wound up postponing this for ten episodes and more than three months, until the new year.

Now the fourth season has a chance to improve its ratings, and this episode is supposed to help prove that.

Complete show available here.

Assignment: Jonathan and Mark are assigned to help a country doctor accept his imminent retirement and find a new replacement.

It all starts the usual way: Jonathan and Mark are driving aimlessly somewhere when they spot a man hitchhiking by the side of the road.

It turns out he’s a country doctor on his way to see a patient, and they immediately assume he’s their assignment.

They soon learn that he’s one of the last true country doctors around, those who don’t charge patients and accept foods and work overtime.

That makes him the last of his kind. Truly.

The problem is that he’s getting too old, his health is deteriorating, and yet he’s too doozy to face it and refuses to retire until he finds another country doctor to take his place.

It’s like a town without Charles to make everybody’s day.

So Jonathan and Mark have to help him slow down and realize that he can’t keep going like this forever.

Along the way, they also help the struggling rural community. Actually, most of their work involves helping a kid who can’t accept the death of his father.

Much like the kid in Amazing Man earlier this season—although this time Jonathan won’t be putting on a goofy costume.

Then, there’s an aspiring country doctor who can’t afford his studies.

They also have to help a specialist deal with mandatory retirement.

That’s a pressing issue for Highway which was already partially addressed in An Investment In Caring in season one. And it will be part of a season-five episode too. It’s a fight Jonathan won’t give up on until no worker will ever be forced to retire due to age.

So, he’ll eventually talk the hospital doctor into becoming a country doctor after he’s put into mandatory retirement.

So, if it weren’t for mandatory retirement, this doctor would have remained at the hospital and would have never become a country one. Which means that mandatory retirement is a good thing then.

• Background

The episode’s timespan is one week, at least according to the usual rules. The setting is a mystery, though: they all report to be in Harley County, but that’s fictional.

Given that it was produced in Piru, just suppose it’s there. If the title didn’t make this clear enough, it’s a country town.

Probably one of those places where people trust each other enough to never lock doors. And hire other people without reference for any job.

The perfect town for Jonathan.

• Characters

This episode opens in a very peculiar way for the characters: Jonathan and Mark are driving and talking—nothing unusual so far.

Until Jonathan does something.

And they argue.

Now hold on: Jonathan has just read Mark’s mind and anticipated what he was about to say. This is the first time he does that.

Technically, Jonathan had already displayed mind-reading abilities in the cold open of Love and Marriage.

However, that prologue was added later when the episode was sold to syndication: by the time of the airing of this episode, it hadn’t been made yet, so it’s doesn’t count. Besides, that cold open exists largely as a standalone, making it somewhat unofficial.

More importantly, there have been countless situations throughout the series where reading someone’s mind would have been incredibly useful, yet Jonathan never once used the ability. That strongly suggests the power simply hadn’t been established yet.

And now, suddenly, he’s doing it as if it were the most normal thing in the world—as if he’s always had this ability. But that’s not so.

Yet he keeps doing that.

Stop it.

There have been so many scenes in the series where Jonathan and Mark are driving somewhere and discussing anything that comes to their mind. In those scenes, Jonathan never, ever interrupted Mark every few seconds by peeking into his thoughts the way he does here. Actually, he did it only in the Love And Marriage cold open. But again, that’s an exception. Actually, given that Love And Marriage cold open was produced after this episode, it could be pointed that they copied his ability from here. That explains the reason Jonathan was so obnoxious.

It feels completely random. Almost seems as though the writers realized mind-reading could be useful in future episodes and decided to introduce it here without any buildup. Or maybe Landon had recently played with the idea and thought it was a cool ability, and then realized he hadn’t properly introduced it. So he compensated by suddenly giving Jonathan a new power and passing it as though it were something he has always been capable of, even though it’s unprecedented and doesn’t fit with what has happened in the series so far.

There’s another new detail involving Mark. Early in the episode, a woman goes into labor while the country doctor feels unwell, so he asks whether Jonathan or Mark has ever assisted a woman in labor before. And Mark reveals that during his years as a police officer he successfully did it twice.

This is the first time in the series that Mark reveals that.

Apparently, it is plausible: emergency childbirth is taught and required as part of the police force training, in the US at least. You never know.

So the doctor goes to the hospital and supports the woman over the phone, leaving Mark to do all the job.

And he does. But then the problem begins: when the baby is born alive and well, the doctor takes credit for the whole thing.

What? He didn’t do anything.

And if that weren’t enough, the woman tells Mark she wants to name her son after the man who helped her.

At this point, it’s worth remembering Mark’s wish. In the season-two episode The Monster, it was revealed that Mark dreams to see a baby named after him; then, Diane promised him that if she ever had a baby, she would name one after him.

And Mark longed for that to happen, only to discover in season three that Diane couldn’t have children and chose adoption instead.

So Mark was upset, but at least there was still hope that someone else in his family might honor him that way.

But in the season-three episode Jonathan Smith Goes to Washington, it turns out that Mark’s sister Leslie is marrying a man who already has a daughter. Once again, there’s no new child on the horizon.

Now, after years of waiting, Mark finally helps a random woman bring a baby into the world—and he believes he’ll finally see this dream come true.

And this country doctor just reaps all the credit.

And when he asks her what she’s going to name the baby, it’s stunning.

Next time, have that baby yourself lady.

That’s really unfair.

So sorry, Mark.

• Production and setting

As for the production, this episode was actually the third one they shot this season, after the season premiere (a two-part episode). It was filmed in May 1987, more than eight months before it aired. That’s because, in the spring of 1987, a strike was being prepared for the summer, and many TV series, including Highway to Heaven, decided to move production forward to avoid delays in case the strike were to happen. (The strike did happen, although it lasted only one day so there was nothing to worry about.) So Landon had already prepared by beginning production on season four in early May, before season three had even finished airing, instead of waiting until late July as was customary for the show and for most other TV series.

Still, considering how far ahead they were, it’s unclear why they held this episode back for so long. In fact, every season of Highway seems to have one episode produced several months before its eventual broadcast. In season one, it was the Vietnam episode, which was filmed in early August as the third episode of the season, but did not air until late November; in season two, it was The Secret, filmed in late August as the fifth episode and likewise held until late November as the ninth to air. In season three, it was All That Glitters, produced in late September as the tenth episode and unaired until early January as part of the second half of the season.

However, this eight-month span is the longest in the entire series. The reason is probably that it wasn’t always intended to be that way: in the original network lineup published in the newspapers, this episode was scheduled to air in early October 1987 between Fight for Your Life (the Reseda episode) and The People Next Door (the racism episode); those two episodes aired three weeks apart, and this episode was meant to be sandwiched in the second week. But the network also reported that the schedule could be changed to preempt the World Series, and that’s what happened. As a result, the series had a two-week skip instead of a single week-skip that month, and this episode wound up airing more than three months later than originally planned, almost eight months after its completion.

As for the cast, there’s a familiar face: the subject of the assignment is played by Roscoe Lee Brown, who is no Doctor Baker from Little House. But he already had one collaboration with Landon on a Bonanza season thirteen episode. It was the episode in which a child is accidentally killed in a robbery, and Brown played the kid’s grandpa tracking down those responsible for it.

It was the same episode Landon used as inspiration for the last episode of Little House season eight; remember that?

As for the setting, this episode takes place in Piru, a rural town in Cali. They even shot at the real Piru Mansion. Which is still there.

In fact, it is one of the few episodes in the series that remains in California while being set outside Los Angeles. Most episodes are set either in Los Angeles or somewhere in Arizona, such as Tucson or Arivaca. Other California-based examples include Plane Death (set in Tuolumne and Mentryville), One Winged Angels (by Lake Tulloch), and Going Home, Going Home (Copperopolis) from season one; The Monster (Calaveras County) from season two; and Man to Man (the Stanislaus National Forest) from season three.

Also, it will be one of the last of its kind (episodes both produced and set in California out of Los Angeles); just akin to the doctor.

Keep country doctors from extinction; make Jonathan’s dream come true, join the campaign and hire one too.

Glossary:

Doozy: the doctor is real doozy. I mean, he’s a doctor who goes around telling people that he regrets bringing them into the world if they don’t do what he says.

Joey Chitwood: the beginning of the episode is a lengthy Joey Chitwood moment, in which Mark recklessly drives at night until Jonathan has to slam on the brakes.

Friendly Jonathan: when he reads Mark’s mind at the beginning.

He’s lying, he’s not sorry at all.

The Stuff: as for the Stuff, Jonathan uses it twice in the episode. The first time is when he reads Mark’s mind at the beginning. he has now unlocked a new power.

That marks the beginning of everything.

Now it’s hard to follow the rest of the episode, knowing that Jonathan knows everything already.

The second time occurs when he has to take the doctor to the hospital, and Jonathan warns that he’ll have to use “the Stuff”—except he’s not alone in the room.

What must that girl be thinking when she hears them talking about getting away using “the Stuff”? Money? Drugs?

And the doctor hears it too, although he was probably too doozy to pay much attention.

There’s actually a third time at the end, but not that straightforward: shortly before leaving town, Jonathan and Mark bring a letter to the woman whose husband died and whose son is struggling to face it.

The show leaves it open, but it’s unclear whether that letter was really misplaced (as Jonathan says), or if he used the Stuff to obtain it from Heaven, in a way. Or to send it. Which means he’s deceiving them.

Ratings: 28 million audience. 29th weekly TV programs, 4th TV genre show.

The episode aired in early January and performed quite well in the ratings that week. While it lost some viewers compared to its predecessor (which remains the most successful episode of the season), it ranked very high relative to the rest of the season. This seems to confirm that the series tends to enjoy its greatest popularity in January, after the two week Christmas break.

However, this season proved to be something of an exception: the second most popular month for the series is early October, and season four struggled real hard that month to keep up with competing shows, putting the usual January surge in popularity at risk as well.

That risk appears to have been at least partially avoided, but by now the producers should have learned that ratings in this season are unpredictable and that they could easily decline at any time. There is still a long way to go before the finale, and there is no way to guarantee continued success.

And this episode was originally meant to air in October: maybe delaying it that long was a good move. At least for its ratings.