The Golden Hour begins with a man (Leonard Stone) picking up his teenage daughter (Heidi Bohay) from high school when they are involved in a serious car accident. The girl appears to be suffering from some broken bones only and is transported to the closest emergency room at Valleyview Hospital, but one of the EMTs (George DelHoyo) seeing the extent of the injuries to the father defies orders and takes him to a more specialized Trauma Center. When the girl later dies, Quincy (Jack Klugman) conducts the autopsy and determines that her death was preventable as the Valleyview staff missed a critical injury which likely would have been properly treated by the Trauma Center. This puts Quincy on a mission to change the rules and allow more flexibility on where patients are transported in cases like this while also trying to help the Trauma Center obtain the funding necessary to keep their doors open.
This is an episode where the focus is trying to bring about changes to the system and there is no crime whatsoever which really aren't my preference. There are a lot of minor flaws as well which distracted me right from the opening scenes with the dialogue between the father and daughter coming across as extremely corny and phony. I also thought that she looked way too old to be playing a high school student, and sure enough when I looked up the actress on here she was in her 20s when this was filmed. It also seemed to me that the EMTs were moving extremely slow at the accident scene which may have been to fill air time, and I was further surprised to hear them mention "Valleyview" as the hospital ER where they were transporting the girl. In the Season 2 episode also called Valleyview, this facility was introduced as a nursing home and convalescent care facility which is not the same thing as a hospital ER! Maybe it was a huge hospital system that housed both, but this just came across as a glaring contradiction after the nursing facility was the entire focus of a previous episode.
While the story is not a complete duplicate of a previous episode, it felt like elements of previous plots were borrowed to come up with this one as we've already seen negligent medical care and patients being rerouted to other hospitals because of bureaucratic issues. Coincidentally, George DelHoyo also guest starred in one of the latter types of episodes in "For the Benefit of My Patients" during Season 5, so this adds to the feeling of this being a recycled story. If you enjoy the Quincy episodes where he is fighting the system to bring about positive change then you may appreciate this early Season 7 entry, but a lot of hospital drama coupled with a bunch of flaws just made this a weak one in my opinion.
This is an episode where the focus is trying to bring about changes to the system and there is no crime whatsoever which really aren't my preference. There are a lot of minor flaws as well which distracted me right from the opening scenes with the dialogue between the father and daughter coming across as extremely corny and phony. I also thought that she looked way too old to be playing a high school student, and sure enough when I looked up the actress on here she was in her 20s when this was filmed. It also seemed to me that the EMTs were moving extremely slow at the accident scene which may have been to fill air time, and I was further surprised to hear them mention "Valleyview" as the hospital ER where they were transporting the girl. In the Season 2 episode also called Valleyview, this facility was introduced as a nursing home and convalescent care facility which is not the same thing as a hospital ER! Maybe it was a huge hospital system that housed both, but this just came across as a glaring contradiction after the nursing facility was the entire focus of a previous episode.
While the story is not a complete duplicate of a previous episode, it felt like elements of previous plots were borrowed to come up with this one as we've already seen negligent medical care and patients being rerouted to other hospitals because of bureaucratic issues. Coincidentally, George DelHoyo also guest starred in one of the latter types of episodes in "For the Benefit of My Patients" during Season 5, so this adds to the feeling of this being a recycled story. If you enjoy the Quincy episodes where he is fighting the system to bring about positive change then you may appreciate this early Season 7 entry, but a lot of hospital drama coupled with a bunch of flaws just made this a weak one in my opinion.