The Eyes of Texas

The Eyes of Texas ends the fourth series on a note the programme rarely strikes, and it begins in the usual way, with Harry deciding to sell something. Woodcote Park is losing money, and he wants out. He thinks of buying a nightclub, Hugo's, but a ruthless Scottish businessman, Vic Carpenter, wants it too, and warns him off. In the end Harry and Helen sell Woodcote itself, to be turned into timeshare apartments.

Ken's mind is on something different. He is seriously thinking of moving to Texas with Rebecca Patterson, the American he met in the last episode. She tells him that she is in England to divorce her estranged husband, Terry. He stole nearly £100,000 from his family's firm, fled to America and married her; five years later he left her and came back to England.

Ken offers to help. Terry has been hiding from his brother, but Ken reasons that he will come to his father's funeral, and sure enough he is traced. Ken arranges to meet him late at night at Sneinton Windmill, to get him to sign the divorce papers. Rebecca turns up, shouts that nobody walks out on her, and shoots Terry dead.

For a while the police treat Ken as an accessory, until Sergeant Hatchard, an old friend, speaks for him. The episode closes with Rebecca being brought to the station to be charged with her husband's murder, and Ken feeling that the world has collapsed around him.

Paddy Fletcher and Richard LeParmentier wrote the script and Christopher Baker directs. Pamela Bellwood plays Rebecca, Nicky Henson plays Terry, and Benny Young returns as Hatchard. Over the credits, Dean Friedman's closing song, Handsome Stranger, tells the story from the stranger's side.

The strength of the finale is its refusal to soften. Boon has always allowed Ken to lose a woman, as he lost Bebe McLintock in the second series and Nina earlier in this one, but he has never been left with so little. The woman he was ready to go to Texas for has killed a man in front of him, and he is the person who brought her to the windmill. There is no joke at the end, and the closing song is not used to cheer anyone up.

The weakness is Harry's business story. The sale of Woodcote and the warning from Carpenter are wrapped up quickly to clear space for the tragedy, and Harry's departure from Woodcote is dispatched in a few lines. But as the end of a series it is bold, and it leaves Ken as low as the programme ever allowed him to be.