Airdate: 06/02/1989

Directed By: Michael Landon

Then the series is back. After a three-month abrupt halt by the network, which was originally set to run the season in spring, it was finally decided to move it to the summer, and that’s how the remaining episodes of the series will air.

It’s been a long time, and many things have changed during these months. For one thing, the series had already concluded shooting: the series finale was shot in December, over six months before this episode aired, and everybody was already moving on. So, the first three episodes of this season aired this way, and the rest of it was slated to air in the spring (usually from late March to late May), when the other TV series that had been airing since September were concluding their seasons. However, that wasn’t the case either. For some reason, the producers skipped that window and eventually scheduled the remaining eight episodes of the season for the summer, with little promotion. Essentially, they burned off the season.

So, in terms of ratings, the series was already going to suffer from the interrupted broadcast over the course of the year, the summer slot (usually the season when ratings are at their worst), and the lack of promotion. Not exactly a glorious conclusion.

However, there are other important differences. In particular, French was already seriously ill by the time these episodes aired. Just as a snapshot: around the same time as Highway’s end, he was contacted to direct the movie Rock-a-Doodle and moved to Dublin, where production was set to take place. But shortly after that, he reportedly began feeling unwell, so he went to the hospital and was diagnosed with a severe lung disease attributed to his smoking. Eventually, he quit the production and moved back to Los Angeles to spend the final period of his illness.

By the time this episode aired, he was already in critical condition and would pass away less than two weeks later. So, watch this one carefully. Some parts will hit different.

Overview:

• Assignment
• Background
• Characters
• Production And Settings

Glossary:

• Blooper
• Cute
• Highway Actors
• The Angel and Mark
• Recycles
• Sunday Suits
• The Job
• Ratings

Complete show available here.

Assignment: Jonathan and Mark are assigned to work on Mark’s homecoming party.

The assignment is quite revealing for the characters. At the beginning of the episode, while checking the mail, it turns out that Mark’s classmates are organizing a reunion, but some people are still missing.

Their assignment is to locate them and put everything in place for the party.

And Jonathan will be there as well, even though he never attended that school. But nobody seems bothered by his intrusion.

And part of the process also includes getting involved in the lives of these old friends of Mark’s, of course.

The whole purpose is to see how everybody has turned out 35 years later.

They couldn’t use Facebook back then.

• Background

Anyway, this episode is set in Los Angeles, which makes things a little weird. It seems that Mark attended Lathrop High School, which is supposedly in Lathrop, a town in San Joaquin County, and that makes it strange for a number of reasons.

For one, Mark is an Oakland native and a former Oakland cop, so what was he doing studying in a town more than sixty miles and about an hour’s drive away?

It’s not really hard to believe that he might have studied in Lathrop—at least it’s not as implausible as Los Angeles—but it’s strange that he wouldn’t have attended another school closer to home. Unless this episode is meant to imply that Mark actually used to live in Lathrop rather than Oakland.

That’s one thing.

However, the biggest problem is that this school doesn’t exist. It seems that Lathrop only has two elementary schools and a single high school, which was founded in 2008—over twenty years after this episode was made and more than fifty years after Mark supposedly attended it. It seems that the nearest high school back in the ’50s was in Manteca, not Lathrop. So, that’s a problem.

Actually, there is another Lathrop High School, but that one is in Fairbanks, Alaska—not exactly near Oakland. Besides, it was founded in 1955, after Mark would have finished his studies. So, this school is a mystery.

The odd part is that they didn’t make it up from scratch, like “Twin Rivers” in Oklahoma for Going Home, Going Home or “Deter” in Plane Death both in season one. Instead, they actually used a real town as a reference. Also, most of these people have now moved to Los Angeles, as though Lathrop wasn’t that good.

The background has another important implication. It seems that they are celebrating the thirty-fifth reunion in this episode, and that Mark’s class is the ’54 one.

Then it presumably takes place in 1989, but the series finale is a Christmas episode set during the Christmas holidays of 1988, not later. Either this episode is set in the spring of 1988 and the anniversary is actually meant to be the beginning of a thirty-fifth year, although that admittedly feels like a weird way of putting it, or, more plausibly, this episode really is set in the spring of 1989, making it chronologically the actual series finale.

There’s actually another episode later in the season that is plausibly set in the summer, but the point remains that this episode may take place after the official finale. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the last assignment, either. The series doesn’t conclude with Jonathan’s promotion and departure for Heaven, leaving Mark on Earth, so even though this is one of the last episodes of the series, it doesn’t necessarily represent Jonathan and Mark’s final assignment together before the end of their angelic job.

But it would make for a somewhat fitting finale, too. It’s an episode about Mark and his personal lost friends, an assignment in which he has connections with the people he has to help, about meeting people he already knew at different points in his life, and therefore about a very personal assignment

That last dance is almost like the series’ last dance, too.

Watching this episode knowing that the series doesn’t have a proper finale, it actually feels like a nice way to close the series.

• Characters

This episode will reveal more stuff about Mark’s story.

If this was the 35th reunion and it’s set in 1989, it means that Mark finished high school when he was seventeen, since it was revealed in the past (episode Oh Lucky Man) that he was born in December 1936. It also means that there are ten years unaccounted for in his life: throughout the series, it has been mentioned multiple times that Mark worked as a cop for fifteen years, from 1964 to 1979, and that he spent three years in the Navy before that.

So, this means that sometime between 1954 and 1961, he joined the Navy for three years and then entered the police force. And that leaves the rest of the time before his entering the police force a mystery. In the third season, it was revealed that he didn’t go to college, so it wasn’t that. It was also revealed in the second season that he fought in the Vietnam War, but it was too early for that, either. So, those ten years remain at least a partial mystery for the rest of the series.

Besides all these details, it’s also revealed that Mark used to play football.

Importantly, he was nicknamed “Stick,” just like Brian in Season One.

He’s like: “What about the rest?”

It was revealed in season two and three that his nickname was another one.

And he had a second one in season four as well.

Anyway, this episode introduces a bunch of Mark’s lost friends from Oakland, although this time they really were lost, at least for good: they didn’t simply walk out of each other’s lives when the other needed them most, as happened with some of the other friends introduced so far.

Actually, this is the last episode of the series to introduce new old friends. There is one last episode featuring someone Mark already knew, but that’s a recurring character who had already been introduced earlier in the series. This episode, by contrast, introduces completely new friends.

These include Irvin, a fictional actor who is actually old and out of work and whose stage name is Trevor because it sounds more like an actor’s name.

It’s probably a reference to Landon’s choice, which he admitted in an interview, and the episode is clearly laughing at him for it.

Imagine if he were named Eugene—probably the same result.

Perhaps it is really some prophetic self-reference.

Then there’s a lady who used to be the prettiest girl in school, and who has now aged rather badly.

And chatty Warren, who remembers everybody but whom nobody remembers.

Not even Mark, apparently.

But it seems that nobody ever asks about Luke either: in season three, an old friend of Mark was introduced, and it was revealed they were inseparable blood brothers (as Mark put it), and it was implied they went to high school together and went separate ways when Luke decided to get into the real estate while Mark chose to be a cop.

But if they had gone to school together, then this friend ought to have been invited too. And yet everybody seems to remember that they went to school with a future actor (Irvin), but none of them remembers Luke, nor mentions him. Everybody has a short memory, like Mark. And none of them ever became a cop on Oakland.

Either way, this episode is the last of the series to introduce new friends of Mark’s. The remaining episodes were Plane Death (the dead cop), The Secret (a colleague’s family), Change of Life (another colleague), Love and Marriage (a former colleague), Man to Man (a friend from high school), Oh Lucky Man (a felon he had convicted), A Father’s Faith (his fishing partner), Amazing Man (yet another dead cop), All the Colors of the Heart (yet another former colleague), and, earlier this season, future mayor and now on the run for head of the States Pete, all the way back from the Oakland Police Department. That’s excluding his family, relatives, and recurring characters.

• Production and Setting

As for the production, this episode was produced in late November 1988, making it chronologically the last episode they made immediately before the series finale, even though it aired as the fifth episode. Maybe it was always meant to be scheduled this way, or perhaps they moved it up because they considered it a strong episode that could potentially attract more viewers and prepare them for the beginning of the summer airings. This was the first episode to air after a three-month break following The Silent Bell, and it began the run of the remaining episodes of the season, which aired weekly from this episode through the series finale, with no further cuts or breaks.

It was written in late October by a pair of highwaymen—in particular, David Ketchum, the writer and actor who worked on some Get Smart episodes, and Tony DiMarco, in one of the final scripts of his career.

Also, according to the story number reported at the beginning of each script, this episode was apparently written during season four but remained unproduced by the end of that season, eventually being selected for this final season instead. That isn’t an exceptional case, although it is admittedly rare: in each season of Highway, they wrote more episodes than they produced, and there are at least about eight scripts from each season that were scrapped. Most of them remained unproduced, but occasionally Landon decided to go back to the pile of older scripts and select one to produce for a different season. That was the case with Heaven on Earth, which was written during season one but produced for season two, and The Whole Nine Yards, which was intended for season three but selected for the season four finale. And now it’s happening again.

Actually, this was the last misplaced script of the series. The remaining episodes had already been written and were intended specifically for this final season. Considering that it was late November and the series was about to conclude by the time they shot this episode, perhaps it was selected so late precisely because Landon didn’t have another episode ready and went back to the batch of unproduced scripts from season four and chose this one.

One more thing: in the original script, the episode was supposed to end with Irvin, the actor, introducing his public relations manager to Marjorie and presenting him as his best friend, implying that he had now come to terms with his own aging. But this was cut from the final episode, which instead concludes with Irvin and the lady sweetly dancing their last dance, skipping over how Irvin feels about the man who told him he was yesterday’s news.

Friendly.

As for the setting is Los Angeles, where seemingly everybody has moved after studying in Lathrop. That city wasn’t that nice.

But there’s an old place here: the final dance was shot inside the hall of the Ambassador Hotel, which should look familiar by now.

It’s the same setting used in this season’s opening episode, when Jonathan and Mark were dressed like penguins, and for the final ball in the second season of Cindy before that. Actually, the hotel would be used again a couple of episodes from now.

It really seems like Landon had a knack for recycling old settings. Or perhaps the hotel needed the promotion: apparently, it used to be one of the finest and most respectable places in the state, but in 1969 it became infamously known as the site of Kennedy’s murder, and its popularity declined rapidly. It closed down in 1989, the same year this episode aired. So maybe Landon went there because it was cheap to rent, just one year before its demolition. Keep in mind that it’s late November, by the time they shot this, and the upcoming episodes in which they go to his hotel occurred before this.

Actually, that’s a common fate for Highway’s settings: the Reseda Country Club, used in season four and less prominently in season one, closed down in the late 1990s and then became a church, while the Malibu Castle from season one was burned down in 2008 and sold off. Even some buildings have been torn down over the years, like the house from To Touch the Moon, the one in Heavy Date, and the summer camp in the fourth season (which they’ll go back to later on this season as well). That’s a real curse.

Glossary:

Blooper: there seems to be a blooper right at the conclusion. When Marjorie and Trevor or Irvin are quietly dancing under the spotlight in the room, at some point Trevor’s public-relationship friend appears. Now, that’s already a problem with that: he shouldn’t be there in the first place if he hadn’t attended the same school as Irvin, Mark, and the rest of them. But the actor shouldn’t be there either: he seems to look around awkwardly and rather confused, then suddenly moves to the left and pulls this random blonde woman for a dance.

And that’s definitely not his wife, who has short black hair instead.

More likely, the actor realized that he had accidentally wound up in the scene and that the camera was on him (as he was standing right behind Irvin and the woman dancing), so he just pulled the first girl he could find and pretended to dance with her. It really feels awkward, and like cheating, too. At this point, he could have danced with the garrulous busybody who had been left by everybody and whom Mark had to ask instead.

It’s not the first background problem of the series: there’s the fake clapping in One Fresh Batch of Lemonade and the nosy driver in Catch a Falling Star, to mention just a couple.

But the best part is that people dance lentos all over the place, like 80-year-old people would. Except they’re not 80 yet. I mean, just imagine what people nowadays are going to dance when they reach their 80s, too.

Cute: this episode drops a cute instance when Jonathan jokes that Mark looks too young.

And he does; at least, he looks different compared with the rest of the series: his hair is kind of short, and his beard has turned white. The change was already apparent from season four—it seems like French got himself a new haircut during Christmas 1987, as in all the episodes shot after that date he looks rather different—but now it’s even more noticeable. While Jonathan is always the same.

Highway Actors: one old familiar actress is here.

The character of Marjorie is played by Eve Brent, who had appeared twice before in the series: the first time was in The Monster, in season two, as the landlady whom Mark rents the apartment from.

The second was in The Hero, as the woman who tells Joe, the soldier with no limbs, that his check had been paid by someone else. So, both times she played characters totally unrelated to the subject of the assignment, appeared in a single scene lasting less than a minute, and had just two lines. Here, however, she has a much more prominent role, appearing throughout the entire episode and playing one of the many subjects of this rather sprawling assignment.

The angel and Mark: even though Jonathan never attended Mark’s school, he’s there. And he even introduces Mark many times to Mark’s old friends.

Recycles: the last dance was shot inside the hall of the Ambassador Hotel, which should look familiar by now.

It’s the same setting used in this season’s opening episode, when Jonathan and Mark were dressed like penguins, and for the final ball in the second season of Cindy before that. Actually, the hotel would be used again a couple of episodes from now.

It really seems like Landon had a knack for recycling old settings. Or perhaps the hotel needed the promotion: apparently, it used to be one of the finest and most respectable places in the state, but in 1969 it became infamously known as the site of Kennedy’s murder, and its popularity declined rapidly. It closed down in 1989, the same year this episode aired. So maybe Landon went there because it was cheap to rent, just one year before its demolition. Keep in mind that it’s late November, by the time they shot this, and the upcoming episodes in which they go to his hotel occurred before this.

Actually, that’s a common fate for Highway’s settings: the Reseda Country Club, used in season four and less prominently in season one, closed down in the late 1990s and then became a church, while the Malibu Castle from season one was burned down in 2008 and sold off. Even some buildings have been torn down over the years, like the house from To Touch the Moon, the one in Heavy Date, and the summer camp in the fourth season (which they’ll go back to later on this season as well). That’s a real curse.

It could be justified by assuming they are actually place (and they are not trying to pass it as something else). But the examples are growing larger every season more and can’t be dismissed anymore as just the same place.

Sunday Suit: they have their Sunday Suits at the ball, like in basically most episodes by now.

Actually, in this fifth season they wear them more often than their usual clothes, especially Jonathan’s gray one.

The job: tracking down these old buds. One moment to point out: when a woman questions Mark’s job, Jonathan immediately rescues him.

That’s not the case: the moment he ascends, Mark will be out of the job.

Or if he turns renegade, as it has already happened before a season ago.

But he also adds something else.

That’s the closest thing to an angel revelation they leave a character with in the season.

Ratings: 12 – 13 million audience.

It’s early June 1989, the first of the burned-off episodes of the season. And it’s Friday 8:00 pm, two days later than the broadcast the series received until the last part of season four last year.

The ratings are bad, but that’s not really the point, and comparing them with the rest of the season wouldn’t be the right thing to do. For one thing, the series had been discontinued, so it didn’t air consecutively every week, but instead only filled in for a week when another series was skipped. And a series that has been discontinued will always suffer in the ratings.

Then, it aired in the summer and had no promotion whatsoever. Actually, some newspapers don’t even report this season as a season, instead treating these episodes as “specials.” So it’s not equivalent to consider the ratings of these last episodes as part of the rest of the series. Rather, they can be used to see how other midseason replacements were doing.

But again, as Landon stated in an interview before the beginning of the season, by this point he wasn’t making it for the ratings, but rather for whoever was still watching the show and enjoying it. Or for syndication—that’s always something to rely on. The point is that ratings are not a concern anymore.

Besides, the conclusion of the episode feels more emotional now, in a way. It was produced as one of the very few remaining episodes of the series, and after this they moved on to the series finale. So perhaps, at some point, they actually considered making this episode the finale. Mark reminiscing about his past and meeting his old friend can be seen as a way of looking back at his younger days, while the last dance becomes, unintentionally, a kind of conclusion to the series.

Considering that the series never had a proper finale—or, at least, that it’s unknown whether an actual finale was ever being planned (as French passed away before Landon could make new plans for the series)—it gives the episode an additional poignancy. And knowing that, by the time they shot this, he was already ill, despite not being diagnosed until March, it really hits differently now.