After having re-watched all the "Quincy" episodes recently, I have learned that the very best episodes were the early ones. This is because they all were about solving crimes and seeing Quincy using forensics to do this was pretty exciting. However, after a while, fewer and fewer episodes were about crimes and more and more of the time they were about social causes and featured Quincy preaching at the audience about the issue of the week. "Stolen Tears" is one of the best examples of just how far the show had wandered from its original purpose. It comes off as exceptionally preachy and bad--even though the topic (Nazis and Holocaust deniers) are topics I usually might enjoy learned about...but NOT on "Quincy".
Quincy gets to do a bit of forensics when a Nazi war criminal does some killing in 1982. However, this only makes up a tiny portion of the show. Most is an utterly ridiculous story about a Holocaust denier--a guy who writes books and goes on the radio in order to promote his inane ideas. Now why Quincy would get involved in this really makes no sense and the show manages to annoy the audience. This is because in the SANE world, no reasonable person would deny the Holocaust and the show gives such stupid ideas the time of day. Plus, the idea of having Quincy PROVE the Holocaust occurred is pretty offensive and grandiose! It is a fact...no need for Quincy and the gang to spend 50 minutes trying to probe and prove it to the audience. Overall, an embarrassingly bad episode made tolerable only by a nice guest performance by Martin Balsam. Otherwise, a lot of rubbish. There is so much better about this sort of thing than this!