By the Death of a Child begins with Quincy (Jack Klugman) being awakened on his boat in the middle of the night by Dr. Asten (John S. Ragin) and two state department officials who come aboard. They tell him about a public health crisis in a small island country in the Caribbean where the children are dying from a mysterious virus and ask him to go there and assist. To make matters further complicated, there is a great deal of political unrest in the country and the U.S. has been providing support, but some of the locals blame the U.S. involvement and a vaccine that was provided to the children as the reason for the illness and fatalities. Quincy and Sam (Robert Ito) travel to the Caribbean nation to help treat the victims and prove that it was not the vaccine that caused the virus.
This is one of those Quincy episodes that strays way off the premise of the show in that we see him going off to some remote location to treat living patients and getting himself involved in a political dispute which he has no business being in. Why would Washington DC officials hand pick the Los Angeles coroner to travel to this country and deal with this crisis? It seems much more plausible that they would send representatives from the U.S. Dept of Health or the CDC which are federal agencies they are in partnership with to deal with this crisis rather than a city coroner. I had a problem with this plot right from the beginning and found it hard to take the rest of the episode seriously.
If you enjoy the episodes where Quincy travels outside of LA and does something out of the routine than you might find this one entertaining, but this is just not the type of story I enjoy and found it to be below average and tedious. Between this and the previous two episodes, Season 5 is off to a very disappointing start.
