Pointless rambling about a Highway to Heaven -
We (myself and someone other than you) have been watching "Highway to Heaven" lately. Generally, they are uplifting but the last several were insane. Jonathan, an angel, tends to abuse people. Sometimes he abuses the people he’s sent to help.
On one, the Angel, Jonathan Smith, kept telling an old man to act like a man. At one point, the old man was scared and felt bad and he ran off to die on his land. Jonathan and Mark found him and chased the guy up a rocky slope. The man fell and Jonathan thought it was a good time to give the poor guy another dressing down about how he's acting like a selfish jerk. "Nobody cares if you have dementia setting in. Get the hell up and act like a man!"
On yesterday's episode of Highway to Heaven, some kids were selling drugs and Mark decided to go undercover and record the kids breaking the law. They found his wire and the lead kid slugged him on the back of the head and injected him with a ton of cocaine. So I was thinking, "These kids aren't all that bad."
Anyway, Mark went into a coma. Jonathan, the angel, was pissed and went to yell at all the kids while they were gathered in an auditorium at the school. One of the kids, feeling guilty, left to use the boy's room, so Jonathan followed him in and pretended to be Mark. I'm thinking, "Hi, I'm a grown man following a teenage boy into a men's room."
There were no paper towels so the kid punched the paper towel dispenser and got a speech from fake Mark (Jonathan) about the sanctity of paper towel dispensers (I think this is where I wander into 'unreliable narrator' territory so I'll try to get back to what really happened).
The towel dispenser punching kid went back to the auditorium and screamed, "Towel dispensers are sacred!" No one cared so he yelled out who shot up Mark with the cocaine. The cocaine kid pulled a pistol from his pocket and ran out of the auditorium. I noted how easy it was to bring a gun into school in the 80's and thought maybe the teachers were passing them out with books and stuff. Too bad kids today ruined that whole scene so no one can bring arms to school anymore.
Cocaine Boy makes it to his car and drives off. Jonathan shows up in the passenger's seat and the kid freaks out, points his pistol at Jonathan, and fires. Apparently, angels aren't concerned with accidental drive-by shootings. Jonathan freaks the kid out further causing him to drive into a giant dumpster or something and the car explodes with the kid in it.
Jonathan stands in the flames looking righteous. Kind of like an angelic Satan.
So I started laughing my head off.
The stories this week were directed by Michael Landon, so he could have fixed them up. I'm assuming he was some kind of gender nazi by the way he demanded the old guy with dementia to be a man. The angel laughing at the exploding kid is pretty representative of the reagan years when it was decided that people cannot be redeemed. Especially if they do or sell drugs. Despite the kid attempting to murder Mark, you would expect an Angel to have compassion and prefer to see the kid incarcerated. It's one thing to be tough. It's another thing to be tough without love.
The old man in the previous story didn't need to literally be told to man up, either. The man could have been convinced in a much more compassionate way to take action in helping his grandson save horses. The story was about bringing a family together.
A show earlier in the week had Jonathan 'helping' a kid get over the death of his father by lecturing the boy on growing up or something.
Jonathan: "You have to be a man. Your father would have wanted it that way."
Kid: "B-b-but I'm only 7 years old, you dick."
There’s an episode in which God told Jonathan to do a job so Jonathan became angry and broke open a liquor store window and whipped the bottles at a theater Marquee for the film "Heaven Can Wait"
I'm wondering who the hell took those stories seriously enough to learn and become better people from them.
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