User Reviews

Quincy M.E.: Of All Sad Words starts as Los Angeles medical examiner Quincy (Jack Klugman) rushes to the scene of a huge fire which is burning a nightclub down to the ground, there he meets the beautiful Elizabeth Chessler (Darleen Car) who fears that her gangster husband Lou (Borah Silver) may have been inside. Her fears turn out to be true & Lou's dead body is found inside the burnt nightclub remains, after the autopsy Quincy concludes Lou died from heart failure & puts it down as a natural death. Quincy quickly falls in love with the charming & attractive Elizabeth but not everyone believes her story & insurance investigator Aaron Zacharian (Val Avery) is convinced she is a murderer. Quincy seems blinded by his affection for Elizabeth & his friends start to worry as they think he may become Elizabeth's next victim...

Episode 15 from season 6 this Quincy story was directed by Bob Bender & after a hit & miss sort of season six Of All Sad Words has restored some faith & I am pleased to report that there isn't a single moral or social issue or message in sight. Of All Sad Words is a strange episode in a few ways, for a start Quincy falls in love like a schoolboy & he neglects everything in his life that is important to him, his job & his friends in particular which has never happened before in the show. Then there's the sequence when Quincy fixes some laboratory results which might implicate Elizabeth in her husbands murder which I found so out of character I didn't quite know what to make of it. Quincy has always had great integrity, honesty & respect for his work as he fights for justice & truth for the dead, for the dead who can't fight for themselves anymore & for him to alter autopsy tests just seemed a million miles from the Quincy character of the previous five & a half seasons. For a start he should have been sacked immediately when his fake tests were discovered just like Dr. Moore was in the Quincy episode Last Day, First Day (1980) from the start of season six, I mean what was the difference? What makes Quincy different here to Dr. Moore in Last Day, First Day? Yes I know he did it to set Elizabeth up & discover the truth but why didn't he tell anyone else what he was doing? Also Quincy's tampering with equipment affected other test results in the laboratory so by his irresponsible actions another murderer could have gone free & wrong test results obtained. Other than that huge misgiving about Quincy's actions Of All Sad Words is a good episode, there's murder, intrigue, mystery, some good character's & a side of Quincy we have never seen before although I have no idea who Alex was at the end or where he came from!

For those interested the title Of All Sad Words actually refers to a quote by nineteenth century poet John Greenleaf Whitter that goes 'For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest of these, "It might have been!" which is quoted by both Quincy & Elizabeth on several occasions during this episode. The acting is pretty good, Darleen Car provides the glamour & you can see why Quincy falls for her while Val Avery is good as the persistent insurance investigator.

Of All Sad Words is a good murder mystery Quincy episode in which Quincy finds himself in danger when he falls in love but the sequence when he alters laboratory tests to help her just doesn't sit too well with me & is at odds with Quincy's character, his honesty & integrity.

In this episode, Quincy doesn't act like himself. He acts like a character in service of the plot. He also does something very odd at the end. After setting up his new girlfriend to see if she is on the level, he goes alone with her to a remote cabin without telling anybody else where he's going. There he is ambushed by his girlfriend and her accomplice. Why did he go there alone and tell nobody about it when he knew or suspected she was guilty? Did he just want to get into her pants one more time?

Otherwise, anybody who has seen a film noir could predict that the widow was guilty as sin. Unfortunately, I didn't believe that Darlene Carr brought the right quality to the role to make it believable. It was also a mistake to make her nuts at the end, when she has been calculating and in control for the entire episode. She's a psychopath.

I was also disappointed in Quincy for saying he's in love with her even after he realizes that she's a cold-blooded, avaricious murderer.