User Reviews

Quincy M.E.: Heah Hunter starts early one morning as Los Angeles chief medical examiner Quincy (Jack Klugman) is called to the apartment of murdered air stewardess Elaine Collier (Lynn Herring), there he finds Lt. Monahan (Garry Walberg) & the mutilated corpse of Elaine. Back at the laboratory & Quincy performs an autopsy & discovers Elaine was suffocated & then her stomach was cut open, Quincy suspects she was carrying drugs through customs in her stomach & whoever killed her wanted them. Then the case becomes tricky when narcotics cop Joe Masalla (Eddie Fontaine) is accused by Lt. Sal Drasso (Joseph Sirola) of LAPD internal affairs of killing her & stealing the drugs. With a mans life & career on the line as well as an almost undetectable method of smuggling cocaine to uncover & stop Quincy has to find a way to discover the truth...

Episode 10 from season 6 this Quincy story was directed by Michael Vejar & is an enjoyable episode with quite a lot going on. There's the mystery revolving around the drugs, the murder mystery revolving around Elaine & her mutilations, there's the subplot about the drug smuggling, there's the investigation by internal affairs, there's the effect that the situation has on Joe Masalla as the truth comes out, there's a few good plot twists some of which are actually quite surprising & there's Quincy who is caught up in the middle of everything as one side wants him to prove Masalla was innocent while the other wants him to prove Masalla was guilty. Overall this is a very good episode, my only real complaint is that the murder of Elaine is maybe forgotten about a bit too easily & there's perhaps a touch too much time spent on Masalla, his womanising & whether he is guilty or not. At fifty odd minutes the episode moves along at a good pace, the story has several subplots which all come together quite nicely & Head Hunter is one of those Quincy episodes where there isn't a traditional happy ending & I thought it was both unusual & refreshing to see that Masalla was in fact guilty & Drasso the internal affairs guy who is painted throughout the entire episode as the bad guy who wants to ruin people's lives is actually right which everyone has to grudgingly accept at the end.

Unusually there's a bit of blood in this episode & there are one or two shots of Elaine on the autopsy table although nothing graphic is shown. There's not much humour here, in fact there isn't even a happy cheesy comedy ending at Danny's which is unusual. The acting is pretty good here with Joseph Sirola standing out as the cigar chomping internal affairs guy everyone loves to hate, in the third of his five guest appearances on Quincy he has some good scenes & he & Klugman play off each other very well.

Head Hunter is a good Quincy episode with plenty going on including a solid murder mystery, drug smuggling & cop corruption. I liked it but then I'm a big fan of the show anyway but I do think Head Hunter is one of those episodes that more casual viewers would like too.