Quincy, M.E.: Season 05 (1979)

Member Rating:

Jack Klugman is back as the titular L.A. County Coroner's Office medical examiner and self-appointed detective and social crusader as Quincy, M.E embarks upon its fifth season. In the opener, "No Way to Treat a Flower," Quincy seeks out clues as to the source of a chemical that brings out the very worst in marijuana. In the next episode, "Dead Last," (which must have been near and dear to the heart of onetime chronic gambler Jack Klugman) Quincy probes the death of a jockey at a race track -- and "clears" the jockey's horse of complicity in the crime. In subsequent episodes, Quincy uncovers a deadly strain of doctored diphtheria vaccine; he draws a bead on a outwardly avuncular middle-aged man who is actually a serial killer of young runaways; he investigates the supposedly drug-induced death of a controversial evangelist; he proves that a jail fire in Sacramento was deliberately set (while he himself in locked up in the same jail); he runs smack-dab into the brick wall of diplomatic immunity while endeavoring to solve the murder of a foreign attaché; and, along with his restaurateur pal Danny (Val Bisoglio), he is held hostage by insurgent prisoners who hope to expose the murderer of one of their own. The season finale finds Quincy in full messianic mode, as he races against time to protect 90,000 innocent people from a botulism epidemic that has broken out in a football stadium during a championship game. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi