Quincy M.E.: Passing starts in a desert roadside diner as Los Angeles coroner Quincy (Jack Klugman) & his lab assistant Sam (Robert Ito) discuss the coroner's convention they have just attended & returning to LA from, a group of rowdy bikers enter the diner & Sam feels uneasy so he persuades Quincy to leave his hamburger & hit the highway. Outside Quincy notices one of the bikers motorbikes has a human skull mounted on the handlebars, instantly intrigued where it came from Quincy takes a look & sees that the teeth were knocked out to hamper identification & that the person who it belonged to probably died from a massive blow to the head. Quincy buy's the skull from the bikers & calls in facial reconstruction expert Lynn Peters (Zohra Lampert) to rebuild the persons face, after a bit of detective work Quincy becomes convinced the skull belonged to missing trade union president David Lockwood who mysteriously disappeared two years, three months & five days prior after supposedly stealing two & a half million dollars from a pension fund. Now Quincy has to find his killer...
Episode 15 from season 3 this Quincy story was directed by David Alexander this is a good solid Quincy episode. I liked the idea behind the facial reconstruction to identify a body & I would have thought this technique would have been pretty new back in '78, in fact you can tell how dated this episode is when Sam & Quincy are talking in the diner at the start & Quincy says that soon they will be able to identify someone from a single drop of their blood! We've been able to do that for years already. The mystery elements are good & it draws you in although there are one or two issues which I was less satisfied with. For instance Quincy ask's Monahan for a list of people who have gone missing during the past two years, well it turns out Lockwood went missing two years & three months prior so how did he end up on the list? Secondly as soon as Monahan says the name David Lockwood Quincy automatically assumes it's him even to extent where he visits his wife & friends at that point without any proof whatsoever, to be honest Quincy could have picked any name from Monahan's list & stood as much chance of being right so why did he assume it was Lockwood? The very fact he was right is surely a million to one shot? In a way that's like getting a list of the names of 100's of people you don't know or have never heard of, then being told one of them has won the lottery, randomly picking one & being absolutely right with your first guess! I suppose if you get over the huge leap of logic Passing is a fun enough episode with enough mystery, incident & some interesting detective work by Quincy using his medical skills to justify 50 odd minutes of your time.
This one is competently made as usual but rather bland to look at these days. I'm not happy about the plot point where David Lockwood was apparently a black man but was light skinned enough to pass himself off as white, the part of the story where the title Passing comes from. I'm sorry but by definition a black man has dark skin & I find it very hard to believe anyone of that origin could be light enough to pass themselves off as white, even back in '78 I doubt many people were convinced by this part of the plot. The acting is OK, Simon Oakland who played Sal Jarrett makes the first of his four guest appearances on Quincy where he played four different character's in four different episodes ranging from a US senator to a car mechanic!
Passing is a good Quincy episode, your going to have to get over a few plot holes & some rushed logic but overall I liked this one. A must for fans of the show.
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