Quincy, M.E. Season 4, Episode 22: The Death Challenge

The Last Six Hours

Finally getting to spend a bit of leave time with his latest flame, Barbara, Quincy heads off away from Los Angeles. They nearly get run off the road and then witness an accident. Quincy then finds himself in a life or death race to isolate a mysterious poison, found in the woman's body, that has already claimed two lives

60 min

Speed Trap

After a racing car accident proves fatal for a former Grand Prix driver, Quincy's autopsy brands the crash a possible homicide.

60 min

A Test for the Living

Quincy's powers of persuasion are put to the test when he crusades for a 7-year old boys re-evaluation as an autistic child.

60 min

Death by Good Intention

A patient dies just hours after having had a successful surgical operation. An ‘Affirmative Action' doctor is suspended because of his ‘mistake' and a friend of Quincy's decides that he will take the blame to save him, and the ‘Affirmative Action' program. Quincy soon gets involved to try and save his friends job.

60 min

Images

A fire in a small motel room causes the death of the single woman occupying it. The evidence shows that the identity of the woman is Jessica Ross, the country's top newswoman. As Quincy begins a press conference confirming her death Jessica walks in through the door, declaring that the rumours of her death are unfounded. Quincy and Asten are shocked but soon Quincy doesn't believe that this woman is Ross, and that his original findings were correct. He thinks that the body was Jessica ross and this woman is an imposter.

60 min

Even Odds

Quincy is gravely wounded at the scene of a crime, so it is up to Sam, Asten and Lt. Monaghan to solve the case he was working on and catch the person who shot him.

60 min

Dead and Alive

An apparent murder victim becomes the object of Quincy's thorough investigation and identification when his mother and sister insist that he is still alive.

60 min

No Way to Treat a Body

Quincy's latest ladyfriend moves into a new apartment and accidentally discovers two mummified bodies. He finds himself up against a group of oddball residents when he tries to find out what is going on, who the bodies belong to and where they came from.

60 min

A Night to Raise the Dead

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.

60 min

A Question of Death

60 min

House of No Return

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.

60 min

A Small Circle of Friends

A roundup of prostitutes follows the death of an athlete who contracted a drug-resistant strain of gonorrhea.

60 min

The Depth of Beauty

Quincy delves into the world of cosmetic surgery after he autopsies a woman who killed herself because she hated the scars a botched operation caused. He discovers that the plastic surgeon isn't in fact a qualified plastic surgeon, only a qualified MD. The law allows anyone who has qualified as a doctor to call himself any kind of specialist he likes.

60 min

Walk Softly Through the Night (1)

A top children's TV star, and a friend of Quincy's, is shocked when his son dies of a drug overdose. He had no idea his son was even on drugs and is angry when he finds out that a doctor prescribed the drugs to him. Quincy and the star, Brock, go to visit the doctor and find an enormous queue of addicts waiting outside the surgery. They are all waiting with money in hand to buy a prescription from the doctor. Quincy and Brock set about trying to shut this doctor down and to help a young would be doctor in his attempts to get some sort of drug counseling support system set up in his college.

60 min

Walk Softly Through the Night (2)

Quincy continues in his quest to get close down Dr. Colella's surgery and stop him from continuing to issue prescriptions for drug addicts. This becomes less of a problem though after Marty Herrera, the young would be doctor, is arrested for killing Dr. Colella! Quincy doesn't believe the boy did it but finds that the evidence seems to be pointing straight at him.

60 min

Aftermath

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.

60 min

Dark Angel

Monaghan asks Quincy to push the autopsy of a young car thief to the top of his priority list. The boys' friend is claiming that a police officer chased him down and killed him after they were stopped in their stolen car. When the autopsy is completed it can only confirm that the boy, Billy Harris, died to a bone broken in his neck, and not how it could have occurred. This information is enough to get the press printing stories of police brutality and a Californians for Constitutional Rights lawyer rushing in to defend Billy's friend Steve.

60 min

Physician, Heal Thyself

A seventeen-year old girl collapses and dies after having had an abortion. The family wants an autopsy and tells Asten that they will pay for a private one. Quincy performs it and thinks that her death was caused by the negligence of the doctor who performed the abortion. He visits the doctor and the hospital and finds out that the doctor was drunk when he operated, proving this is hard though as he faces a conspiracy of silence.

60 min

Promises to Keep

Quincy and Sam have to stay late, going over work that was completed by a Medical Examiner who, it turned out, wasn't qualified for the job. This makes Quincy miss yet another date with Lynne, his current girlfriend. When they do get together she proposes to him. He turns her down because he remembers how he treated Helen, his first wife. He was always working and never spending enough time with her. Later he feels guilty and decides to go and see Lynne and propose to her himself.

60 min

Semper-Fidelis

Quincy is asked to do an autopsy on the body of a marine who died in an accident during his training. Harry Collier, a friend of Quincy's wants him to give a second opinion, to stop the press from calling the death a cover up. What Quincy finds though is what he thinks is evidence of a murder and he goes to the base to find out what did happen to cause the young soldiers death, and if necessary who caused it.

60 min

An Ounce of Prevention

While completing the autopsy of a construction worker who fell to his death Quincy spots some unusual abnormalities. He gets Sam to run some further tests to see if there was anything that could have made the man fall. The results show that he was killed by a large amount of pesticides, pesticides that were covering the tomatoes he had for lunch. Follow up investigations show that a dumpsite near the town of Rosewood is leaking. The chemicals are infecting the ground in and around the dumpsite and town.

60 min

The Eye of the Needle

An ailing woman's accidental death outrages Quincy when he discovers that she had been seeing a holistic doctor and had been treated with natural medicines rather than scientific ones. His opinion about the doctor responsible though is affected by his liking for her and it gives him something to think about.

60 min