Season 8 Episode 23: The Legend of Ironhead Haynes

May 1, 1994

Published 05/01/94

Al has reached the end of his tolerance, and his response is to go looking for the last real man he knows of. That man is Ironhead Haynes, who according to Officer Dan lives alone on the tallest mountain in Illinois, and who is played by Waylon Jennings. So Al climbs it, with the NO MA’AM membership waiting at the bottom for the plan of action he is going to bring back down. What he gets instead is the best scene of the episode and one of the more unexpectedly thoughtful things the series ever did. Ironhead listens to the question, reaches behind him for an acoustic guitar, offers to put the answer in a song, and delivers the song in one word. Al’s reaction, and Ironhead’s follow-up about men like them being dinosaurs, is the closest the show came to admitting out loud what it had been arguing for eight seasons. The advice he eventually gives, about what a tyrannosaurus does and why it matters, is genuinely good advice, and Al writes it down. The episode is also a quiet milestone: it is the last appearance of Hill Harper’s Aaron Mitchell, the last of Steve Susskind’s Barney, Al’s friend since season 1, and the last of Roger from NO MA’AM. It is one of the strangest and most sincere episodes of the late run, and the only one in which somebody tells Al the truth about his situation and then tries to make him feel better about it. Waylon Jennings only appears in the one scene, and it is the scene the whole episode exists to reach.

Episode Facts

Original air date: May 1, 1994
Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 23
Overall episode number: 180
Written by: Katherine Green
Directed by: Gerry Cohen
Taped: March 4, 1994
Production note: The final appearance of Hill Harper as Aaron Mitchell, who like Seven simply stopped appearing without explanation.
Production note: Also the last appearance of Steve Susskind as Barney, a character going back to season 1, and of Chris Latta’s Roger from NO MA’AM. Latta died about a month after this aired.
Title note: A play on Johnny Cash’s “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.”