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Easily forgotten as a character, Brian Lowe was responsible for a major cliffhanger, some great unintentional laughs, and the merciful removal of a very dreary character. Respect!
Brian Lowe appeared shortly after Anne Reynolds had started frightening letters, including one containing a dead rodent, where he talked about her ending up "like this rat". Various other incidents had also occurred, including an intruder spotted at Anne's house, and a police guard mutilated, who later died. Inspector Rouse had a list of suspects, which included a former boyfriend of Phyllis Hunt (who'd become a vegetable after a severe bashing earlier in the series) called Brian Lowe, who had just come out of prison. Meg had offered to let Anne stay with her, and a police guard was provided.
Brian Lowe ended up shooting the police guard outside the house, tricked his way into the house, shooting the policewoman inside, and took Meg and Anne Hostage.
Furious that he'd only found out about Phyllis when he got out of prison, he forced Meg at gunpoint to drive them to a derelict warehouse. There, he tied up and gagged them, and told them the warehouse had been rigged with tripwires and explosives. And to make sure we got the full horror of the experience, some of the most memorable bad acting was inflicted on us viewers in the next few warehouse scenes.
Meg had started seeing Phil (Dreary) Cleary, and when he could get no reply from Meg's number, he went with Dr Greg to the house, and found the police already there.
The Department had received a ransom demand for $250,000, and as if things couldn't get any more chaotic, they somehow decided to promote bungling Joyce Barry as acting governor.
Back in the warehouse, Meg had removed the gag using a doorknob, and was calling for help, before falling flat on her face onto the (apparently foam rubber) floor. She tried to cut through the ropes on her wrists by rubbing them on something, but clearly couldn't resist another slapstick moment and fell flat on the floor again.
When Brian Lowe phoned the prison about the ransom, the call was traced to a phonebox, where fingerprints confirmed it was him. Dreary Cleary realised he knew the family, and went to visit old mother Lowe, when Brian did his most merciful task for the viewers, by removing the droning American from the series with a gun.
He returned to the warehouse, and made a tape of the women's voices, after telling them he'd killed a friend of theirs. Anne decided, by listening to his footsteps, the bomb mechanism was on the first floor. Meanwhile, large furry rodents were scampering merrily over the women's legs.
After Brian Lowe's next visit, while the ransom drop was being sorted and so on, he inadvertently fell to his death when some stairs collapsed in the building.
Worse still, despite a huge explosion and the wonderfully awful acting of the last couple of episodes, both women made it to live many more episodes.
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