The BEST episodes of Quincy, M.E.
Every episode of Quincy, M.E. ever, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of Quincy, M.E.!
Quincy, M.E, a man who must have been a nightmare to work with! Quincy was a crusading Medical Examiner in Los Angeles, an expert at his job he was always capable of finding something that everyone else missed. A small clue that would go against all the rest of the evidence in a case and would lead to him arguing with his boss, Asten, and/or the investigating detective, nearly always Monahan. Quincy started of as a straight forward crime series with a difference, it was a M.E. investigating not a police officer or private eye.As the series went from strength to strength the writers, probably with a little push from Klugman, started bringing in stories about social injustice rather than criminal. Most of the time this worked, in fact it is sometimes interesting to see that some of the things highlighted still have not changed even now! Sometimes it came over a little preachy but the show can never be faulted for trying to enlighten the eyes of its viewers.
#1 - Jury Duty
Season 6 - Episode 12 - Aired 2/18/1981
When Quincy sits on a jury for a homicide case he realizes that there are errors in the evidence, which could lead to the conviction of an innocent man. Not being one to sit by without doing anything he is soon causing uproar in the court with his constant questioning and interrupting.
#2 - Seldom Silent, Never Heard
Season 6 - Episode 14 - Aired 3/4/1981
A young boy, Jeffrey, dies when he falls from a building, after being chased in there. After the autopsy a doctor turns up wanting to have the brain. Jeffrey had Tourette's Syndrome and the doctor wants to try and find out what causes it and how to cure it. This is the only way he can research it as the drug companies don't think they could make enough money to make it worth their while.
#3 - The Last of Leadbottom
Season 7 - Episode 22 - Aired 4/28/1982
Rear Admiral Mckenzie, an old colleague of Quincy's, dies while opening a naval museum named after him. A simple autopsy causes confusion for Quincy and Asten when they encounter a naval commander desperate for the body, 3 Mrs. Mckenzies and the presence of a microchip inside his stomach. Soon Quincy has his Naval reserve status reactivated and finds himself involved in the cat and mouse affairs of espionage and counter espionage.
#4 - For Love of Joshua
Season 7 - Episode 13 - Aired 2/3/1982
A doctor persuades a couple that their new baby, which was born with Down's syndrome, will not have any life outside of hospitals and institutions. The child is then allowed to starve to death, something that causes a second doctor to ask for the original one to be charged with murder. Quincy investigates and finds out more about how children with Down's syndrome are treated in the world. To do this he visits a family that look after six children on their own.
#5 - To Kill in Plain Sight
Season 6 - Episode 16 - Aired 3/18/1981
An explosion kills a man who is discovered to be the advance scout for a hitman. Quincy is in a race against time to find the assassin and thwart the plot to kill a government official at a hotel convention.
#6 - Gentle Into That Good Night
Season 7 - Episode 7 - Aired 12/16/1981
A nineteen-year old boy, with a malignant tumor, dies in a car accident. Quincy does the autopsy and meets the family. He goes to meet Dr. Pendleton, a doctor who deals with people who are close to death, and wants to learn how to deal with people who have just identified a loved one in a more dignified way. He spends some time with the doctor and even takes his place for a while.
#7 - Go Fight City Hall... To the Death
Season 1 - Episode 1 - Aired 10/3/1976
A young woman is raped and strangled on a Los Angeles beach. Further down the coastline a young boy is shot and arrested for her murder. Quincy doesn't think that it would have been possible for the boy arrested to strangle the woman and decides that he is going to go out and begin a little investigation of his own. He visits City Hall where the woman worked to ask some questions and, after a little checking, finds out that there seem to have been a rash of unexplained deaths there.
#8 - Murder by S.O.P.
Season 5 - Episode 11 - Aired 11/29/1979
On his way to a Forensic Pathologist convention in Sacramento, the Sheriff of a small town stops Quincy on the road. He was trying to stay awake by sticking his head out of the window. The Sheriff decides to put Quincy in jail for his own good. That night a fire starts in the cells and four men die. The towns' authorities call all the deaths accidental but Quincy, doing some of the autopsies to help the local Dr. is convinced that one of the victims was murdered.
#9 - An Unfriendly Radiance
Season 2 - Episode 10 - Aired 4/29/1977
Quincy is called in on his day off after a car crash victim is brought in and seems to have an extremely high level of radiation in his body. Ray Sanchez, who was helping out the now dead man, Bigelow, is arrested for manslaughter, even though Quincy is convinced of his innocence and makes no effort to hide his viewpoint. To help Sanchez Quincy decides to look more into the radiation aspect of Bigelow's death and tries to dig into his background and find out where he worked.
#10 - No Deadly Secret
Season 3 - Episode 1 - Aired 9/16/1977
At 4 am one morning Quincy is awoken by the arrival of a man at his boat. He is in a very bad shape and he dies before Quincy can do anything to save him. He takes him to the morgue and does an autopsy on him. The next morning Quincy is surprised to find that his results and slides have not turned up. When he goes to find out why he finds out that they are not all that is missing, so is the body! Without any proof of a body everyone thinks that he must have been mistaken, especially when Monaghan visits the man's workplace and finds him there!
#11 - Crib Job
Season 3 - Episode 13 - Aired 1/6/1978
After dealing with what seems to be an open and shut murder case Quincy is ready to close his findings. Then he receives a request from a friend of his runs a program that helps old and young people work together. It seems that the suspect is one of the boys in his program and he doesn't believe that he could have killed someone. Not only that but the program could lose it's funding if it is true, and this would be detrimental to both the old and young it helps. Quincy promises to look into the matter and see if he can help.
#12 - Aftermath
Season 4 - Episode 16 - Aired 2/7/1979
A large passenger jet crash-lands 40 miles outside LA. Quincy and Sam are sent out to start the identification of the bodies and to make sure that the crash scene is kept intact. Once the rest of the Coroners team has arrived and the positions of the bodies have been marked out they are all taken back to LA, where an autopsy has to be completed on each and every one of them, all one hundred of them! Quincy eventually discovers that a dangerous flammable gas was being carried by the plane, not illegal but extremely dangerous. He then finds himself with two dilemmas to solve. The first being how to persuade the airlines that transporting this sort of flammable substance is not a good idea and secondly, to get an insurance company to accept that one of the unidentifiable bodies was that of a man they insured so that his wife and family can claim his life insurance.
#13 - Visitors in Paradise
Season 2 - Episode 4 - Aired 2/18/1977
Quincy and Danny go on a fishing holiday to the beautiful lakeside town of Paradise, free from their troubles of restaurant managing and Dr. Asten. Almost as soon as they have started fishing a young woman pulls her boat alongside them and thanks Quincy for coming to investigate her mother's murder! Quincy has no idea what she is on about but is affected by her pleading and agrees to look into it.
#14 - A Good Smack in the Mouth
Season 2 - Episode 8 - Aired 4/15/1977
Asten's wife Melissa picks up a young boy wandering at the side of the road at night. Soon afterwards they are involved in an automobile accident. Quincy is told, Asten is out of town, and he goes and visits Melissa, and the boy. As soon as he sees Joey's bruises he knows that they are not new ones caused by the crash, they are older and look like being beaten caused them. He looks at the x-rays taken of the boy and they confirm his opinion that the boy is being abused, probably at the hands of his parents.
#15 - The Money Plague
Season 5 - Episode 9 - Aired 11/15/1979
‘R.W. Collins', a famous hijacker who escaped by parachuting out of a plane with his money five years ago is found dead, hanging from a tree in the National Park he bailed out over. He died before he hit the ground and has been hanging there, undiscovered, for 5 years now. Quincy and Sam are sent to the scene to see if they can find out whom the man really was. When they reach the park they find that things are a lot worse than they could have imagined, the anthrax particles he used to hijack the plane were released when the body was found and are spreading throughout the area infecting people who come into contact with it.
#16 - Let Me Light the Way
Season 2 - Episode 13 - Aired 5/27/1977
A suspected rapist seeks revenge on Quincy by attacking his friend
#17 - Snake Eyes (1)
Season 2 - Episode 1 - Aired 2/4/1977
Quincy, Lee and Danny are all in Lake Tahoe together. Quincy is there for a forensic Pathologist convention and the others for a weekend break. While they are there the guests and staff start coming down with some kind of strange illness. Quincy and a couple of other Forensic Pathologists are called in to help but when some of the patients start dying they still have no clue as to what is killing them. To make things worse the casino owner does not want to admit that anything is wrong, as it will affect his bookings and profits.
#18 - A Night to Raise the Dead
Season 4 - Episode 9 - Aired 12/7/1978
After four nights of continuous rain a man finds a body by his car. It had been washed down the mountains and ended up in his front yard. Once Quincy has completed the autopsy he announces that the man died of typhoid, an extremely infectious disease. The man had been illegally buried in the cemetery at the top of the mountain very recently. Quincy wants the whole cemetery checked to see if there are more infectious bodies buried up there but he comes up against a barrel load of red tape trying to get this authorized.
#19 - Hot Ice
Season 5 - Episode 5 - Aired 10/18/1979
Two customs officers want Quincy's help in catching arresting a diamond smuggling ring. A courier they were following was killed when a bus at the airport and, as Quincy is going to a Las Vegas to judge a Miss Coroner Contest; they want him to take the couriers place. He has to deliver the diamonds to a known mobster, something he really, really does not want to do!
#20 - The Hot Dog Murder
Season 2 - Episode 9 - Aired 4/22/1977
After a talk at a university a student who wants his advice approaches Quincy. He thinks that a body that was donated to the university was murdered, that he didn't die accidentally as the records show. What makes it worse is that the body came from a top security prison wing, where the man was being held for his own safety at the time.
#21 - Requiem for the Living
Season 3 - Episode 20 - Aired 3/10/1978
While working late at the lab Quincy and Sam are taken hostage by syndicate chief Vincent DiNardi. He has been poisoned and wants the two medical examiners to find out how the toxin was administered. Once he knows that he can make sure arrangements are completed for his revenge before he dies.
#22 - The Death Challenge
Season 4 - Episode 22 - Aired 3/29/1979
A world famous magician comes out of retirement to appear on a live television show after his most famous trick leads to the death of his protege. After the autopsy Quincy has to find out whether or not the first performance was a cover up for homicide or whether it was just an accident.
#23 - House of No Return
Season 4 - Episode 11 - Aired 1/11/1979
Quincy investigates the death of a young man at a home for people who have comitted a crime but are considered mentally incapable and are therefore not sentenced to proper prison. His mother insists that he was forced to fight by the attendants, who run the place like prison warders, in a unofficial boxing contests against other inmates.
#24 - A Blow to the Head ... a Blow to the Heart
Season 3 - Episode 2 - Aired 9/23/1977
After a championship bout a young boxer collapses and dies. His wife thinks that it wasn't an accident and asks Quincy, a friend of her husband's trainer and the coroner on call, to see if he can find out how he really died. Once Quincy has completed the autopsy he begins to wonder if the woman is right, there is certainly something that does not seem to be quite right with the death, something that is made even more certain when Quincy is approached by 4 thugs who tell him in no uncertain terms that he better hurry up and make his report.
#25 - Matters of Life and Death
Season 3 - Episode 14 - Aired 1/20/1978
Quincy is asked to cover for a GP working in a small community north of Los Angeles. There he becomes involved in a case of medical negligence after the death of a local man.