User Reviews

Quincy M.E.: Baby Rattlesnakes starts as a 9 year old girl Maddy Billingsley is 'accidently' shot & killed in a gang related drive-by shooting, L.A. coroner Quincy (Jack Klugman) performs the autopsy & is upset by what he sees. He learns that a 14 year old boy named Ethan Kellog (De'vereaux White) has been arrested, he was out on probation & wasn't supposed to be associating with his old gang 'The Ravens'. Ethan claims he was just in the car & didn't fire the shot but with an angry press & Californian public wanting blood justice has to be seen to be done. This one incident could affect the lives of many young men who are being helped by a radical program run by Rick Durado (Gregory Sierra) which aims to straighten out young gang members, but is it working & is it worth saving? Quincy decides to find out...

Episode 1 from season 8 this Quincy story was directed by Georg Fenady & was a pretty lousy way to kick off Quincy's final season. The script deals with the still very relevant issue of juvenile & gang related crime which is fine but time hasn't been kind to it & in the 25 years since Baby Rattlesnakes was made it has become clear that dealing with youth crime using social workers, Government based schemes & giving them astonishingly light sentences because they are 'children' simply doesn't work, personally I think Quincy is sitting on the wrong side of the fence on this one. One of the reasons why juvenile crime is such a problem, certainly here in the UK, is because of these namby pamby schemes & programs & because there is simply no deterrent for offenders. If a kid commits a serious crime & they are ordered to report to a social worker for six months where's the deterrent in that? These people just use the system to their advantage & they know how to get the lightest possible sentence. I know for a 100% fact youth crime is a big problem here & those committing it are literally laughing at our justice system because to them it feels like they can 'get away' with anything totally Scott free except maybe a fine & a slap on the wrist. It's pathetic & I don't care if I sound like a Neanderthal but I firmly believe we, as a society, should come down hard on these people & send them to prison regardless of age because otherwise it becomes a way of life for them, I'm sorry but that's the way I feel. Take New York for instance & the zero tolerance campaign against crime they had, it bloody worked didn't it? It certainly worked a lot better than sending these people to social workers & giving them umpteen chances like we do here. God I'm starting to sound like Quincy going off on another impassioned speech! This Quincy episode focuses on Ethan & the moral issues surrounding his case, the killing of Maddy is given very little screen time, just like in reality all the rights are given to the criminals & the victims are totally forgotten about. This is a poor episode, a misjudged episode & one which won't go down as one of my favourites.

This one sees the introduction of Dr. Emily Hanover & the beginnings of a relation between her & Quincy which will lead to bigger things. Here she asks Quincy his first name & he won't even tell her! A new season also brings with it a slightly revamped & beefier opening theme tune although the actual opening sequence stays exactly the same. Am I the only one who found that Ethan kid extremely annoying?

Baby Rattlesnakes might have had some relevance 25 years ago when it was made but the procedures & schemes which Quincy fights to save in this episode have, in my opinion, been proved not to work & in the long run have ended up doing more harm than good. An extremely dated & for a change a morally wrong episode, a poor start to season 8.