"His word against mine' and 'today ends at dawn'

'His word against mine' is an interesting penultimate episode for D4 because it seems like it's really keen to not say what it wants to say, which is, this is the final episode with Gerard Kennedy as Frank Banner. The storyline aside from Banner's resignation (to get married) is a bit slender from a 2025 POV but perhaps it had more impact when it was first broadcast - it's a slightly non-sequiturish story of a local councillor who's accused of being gay and ultimately, well, is. Or is bisexual, rather. He concedes/confesses this to the Ds but he doesn't outright confess to his wife - which isn't the usual D4 way, there's no real closure there, not that we necessarily needed it.

And nor is there any real closure on Frank Banner. We simply end on the three originals in the car driving to do some job or other, I'm not entirely sure what. 

The following episode starring John Stanton still has Kennedy in the opening credits, i.e., they didn't bother making a special opener for what they already knew was a dead show. Stanton's character Tom Morgan is completely brilliant, very non-sexy (but how sexy was Frank Banner?) and more like Columbo than anything else. The character has taken a transfer from Bairnsdale, where he's been a long time, and he has attitude plus. 

The moustache isn't a bad look for Stanton but presumably also he had to distinguish himself from the character of Pat Kelly in Homicide. Those Homicide eps were still screening while this was being filmed. 

I'm 99% certain these images above are from a car park close to the Crawfords Abbotsford premises, somewhere near Duke St. 

Mick Peters here is reading the Age from 16 April 1975 p. 2, probably the article by John Pinkney, below. If the third paragraph in the second column isn't an easter egg, what is?! Add to the mix the fact that John Pinkney (who was married to my aunt) also wrote scripts for Crawfords shows, and you get... um... something added to the mix. I don't know what pen name John used, he didn't use his real name, I suppose it would have been a conflict of interest considering he was also a TV critic.*

Admittedly the episode does end on a rather crappy note with a madwoman wandering alongside the Yarra saying 'boy, where are you boy?' - fairly silly really. But D4 could have gone so much further into the late 70s with Stanton as Morgan, in many ways (from what little we saw) a lot more complex than Banner whose character roots were in tawdry soap opera. 

* Though IMDB says he wrote thousands of episodes of Bellbird so, I don't know.