The Thigh Bone's Connected to the Knee Bone episode starts off with a security guard being knocked out an excavation site and the assailant collecting bones, a skull, a gun and clothing out of the dirt beneath. Later, a student in Quincy's forensic pathology university class brings in a human bone she also picked up at the site while walking to class. After examining the bone and finding damage consistent with a bullet wound, Quincy brings the class to the site where he halts construction and declares it a crime scene. He also does the same thing later at the city dump causing further disruption to sanitation services and making Lt. Monahan (Garry Walberg) and Dr. Asten (John S. Ragin) irate because they are not convinced that a crime took place. Quincy and his students are undeterred and begin the monumental task of trying to reconstruct the entire body of the victim from a single bone in an effort to help identify him and uncover the truth about his death.
This is overall a good cold case style episode of Quincy, but it is not without flaws as there are a couple of far-fetched elements and technical inaccuracies. First of all, in the opening scene the guard is knocked out at the exact spot where the skeleton and other items are buried and the attacker knows precisely where to dig. How would this be possible when the victim was buried there 20 years ago and the entire lot has been torn up and excavated since?? Another element of the story is that the victim's father was told in 1957 that he was killed while fighting in Vietnam which was should not have been a plausible explanation at the time as the troops were deployed much later.
These issues aside, this episode is quite enjoyable to watch at times and I especially enjoyed the scene where Monahan yells "A bone does not make a crime" and Quincy shuts him down saying "Let me give you a lesson in anatomy! The thigh bone's connected to the knee bone, the knee bone is connected to the shin bone..." as the students snicker in the background. Quincy is a great teacher in this one getting the students out of the classroom and into the field where he inspires young minds, and I can't help but feel like I would have had more of an interest in science had he been my teacher. Look out for a very young Fred Grandy of Love Boat fame as one of the students in Quincy's class.
Sadly, this is the final episode where Lynette Mettey appears as Quincy's girlfriend, Lee. In one particular scene, she calmly advises him to rethink the level by which he is involving the students because this is an official investigation and could prove dangerous. He doesn't heed her advice and one of the students is later attacked. This combination of patience, common sense and quiet resolve was exactly what the Quincy character needed in terms of balance in a female counterpart as opposed to who he ended up with later in the series which I won't get into. I wish Lee would have stuck around instead!