Suffer the Little Children begins at a group foster home with deplorable conditions where a child dies due to mistreatment and neglect by the staff. Quincy (Jack Klugman) is called in to due to the egregious circumstances of the child's death and pays a visit to the group home where he is outraged at what he finds. He witnesses the brother of the boy who died being disciplined and placed in a cage which prompts him to embark on a crusade to get the home shut down and the surviving brother back with his parents.
I found the first 20 minutes or so of this episode watchable, but as the episode progresses it becomes dominated by Quincy's wife, Dr. Hanover (Anita Gillette), taking over with these in-home psychotherapy sessions with the family in order to help them better communicate and interact with each other. These scenes are such a bore and I just couldn't wait for them to be over. In one particularly ridiculous scene, Dr. Hanover is injured during a family altercation yet fully continues in her micro-managing methods of therapy.
Another scene I could not believe was when Quincy investigates the cage the boy was put into at the home and finds ground water which he determines is contaminated and from a septic tank. He then puts his bare hands in the toxic water and shows everybody the residue on his hands. If you knew it was so contaminated, who would do that?? On a positive note, Tony Dow of Leave it to Beaver fame is a guest star in this episode but only appears very briefly in a couple of scenes. This was a mistake and he was totally underutilized here, the producers should have given him a bigger role.
Definitely not one of the better Quincy episodes as there is no murder investigation here and we have to endure lots of airtime with Hanover and her nonsense.