This episode of Homicide screened on 23 March 1971 and it's sort of interesting not just because of the only time I've ever seen Vivean Gray playing a character with a modicum of sex appeal (although I suppose the characters she was famous for, Mrs Jessup and Mrs Mangel, did have romance storylines).
In this case however the romance that her character, Hilda Mercer, is having is confusing, if it's meant to provide some kind of contrast with the main thrust of the story which is the first I've come across on Homicide that deals reasonably sympathetically with homosexuality.
In the 6 October 1970 episode of Homicide, 'Once a Killer', a fruiterer called Conti eludes the police (specifically, Peter Barnes who's staking out a St Kilda flat) by wearing a flamboyant disguise and walking a big poodle. Barnes says something along the lines of, 'I thought he was just a queer!' So that makes this episode doubly unusual.
Ok, so what happens? A young man called David Whittaker is found dead in his bed. His landlady, Miss Mercer, was out the night before looking after a 'sick friend', but it transpires that in fact she is having an affair with a man whose wife was out of town - put a pin in that, it's not crucial to the story, except that we see a flashback where she confides in Whittaker about the situation and he tells her to seize the day and she asks him something like whether he's ever been in love and he just gives her a meaningful look.
So to cut a long story short it turns out Whittaker had until recently lived in a country town somewhere and his teacher had in some way seduced him (?) (it's never really spelled out, or it's left to the imagination, but the episode is called 'The Corrupter', right).* Rather confusingly the teacher appears to still work at the school, although his wife has left him and the education department has terminated his employment, so whatever. The teacher has driven to Melbourne, tried to get back with Whittaker (he says they could move to Sydney - which is everyone's default on Homicide for getting away from trouble, except very occasionally it's Queensland) and Whittaker has laughed in his face and gotten killed for it.
As is so often the case I'm left wondering. Is the Hilda Mercer storyline thrown in to suggest that love comes in many forms, or that we are not to judge (eg Hilda Mercer, who is a real Jessupmangel in most other respects, would be likely to judge gay people normally but here she is caught in a situation she would not approve of for anyone else), or...? Atypically for Homicide - I suppose they were just dipping their toe in the water - there is no moralising elsewhere; Peter Barnes doesn't say anything about anyone being 'just a queer', neither Whittaker (in flashback obvs) or his killer (Kevin Lang) gives a soliloquy about the love that dare not speak its name; the only character who comes close to editorialising is the character of Whittaker's brother, Don, who expresses his hatred for his brother without really saying why, and since the whole thing is so subtle (to me, anyway, lol) it doesn't have a huge amount of impact.
To further muddy the waters we are really left in the dark about what we are supposed to think about the relationship between David Whittaker and Kevin Lang, and of course in 2022 we would naturally be very down on a teacher-student love affair but in this episode that power imbalance is really not at all discussed. I suppose since homosexuality was illegal anyway in 1971 not to mention highly condemned by most, no-one was really going to split any hairs on pedophilia/age of consent stuff. The Homicide team had enough to contend with, putting together a more or less nonjudgemental storyline about gayness.
I would be interested to see whether this episode got much attention at the time. Certainly there was no particular press preview stuff about it. The above was about all there was in the Age Green Guide on it.
One more interesting thing: Lex Mitchell plays Don Whittaker. Mitchell was of course one of the original detectives in Homicide when it started seven years before, and he was only in it for the first 24 episodes I believe. I gather he is still alive (he is probably in his early 80s) and oddly, considering he was a founder member, one of the few members of the main cast remaining.
*Look it's possible that David Whittaker is meant to be 'The Corrupter', after all, the teacher was a married man. But it's just not made clear, at all. To my mind there's no sense in which the show suggests that David brought his appalling fate on himself.
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