There’s even a similar “mirror scene,” this time of our wayward lost girl singing along with her punk album in the mirror and growing angrier and angrier until she’s a near homicidal maniac. Thoroughly entertaining & unintentionally hysterical, “Next Stop: Nowhere” ranks as heir apparent to such earlier television gold as the baby in the bathtub episode of Dragnet (“The Big High”) in the tv-designed-to-scare-parents genre, as well as reaching the same camp levels of humor as Streets Of San Francisco‘s “Mask of Death,” featuring John Davidson as the schizoid Carol Channing impersonator/murderer. So for the week of December 1, 1982, the societal “time bomb ticking under our very noses,” as someone in the episode states, is evil PUNK ROCK MUSIC! It turns normal suburban kids into DRUG ADDLED KILLERS! And what’s worse, it only feeds their SELF-DESTRUCTIVE NIHILISM! So, Oscar Madison to the rescue, armed with his psychobabbling shrink girlfriend (Anita Gillette), who’ll try to save the rebellious Abby (Melora Hardin) before she sinks too deeply into the punk world… Quincy‘s original hook may have been how murders can be solved through autopsy science, clues pursued by a lovable curmudgeon Jack Klugman bulldog who is always a step ahead of normal police bureaucracy… but by its final 8th season, Quincy had become a message show – with some different social ill relating to a guest-star murder that needed to be examined anthropologically. Deep from the bowels of arguably the preachiest decade of American television comes the astounding “Next Stop: Nowhere” episode from the final season of Quincy, M.E, the original forensic cop show & antecedent to the current crop of procedural/CSI type mischigoss.
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