The Mourning After begins with a group of college students being subject to hazing rituals in the hopes of pledging a fraternity. One of the rituals involves making the pledges swim across a lake with their hands tied behind their backs, but when one of the young men drowns to death the rest go into cover up mode placing him in the pool back on campus to make it look like an accident. Quincy (Jack Klugman) conducts the autopsy and soon it is revealed that the the victim did not die in the pool but in a lake which calls into question their story. While Quincy and the police try and get to the truth, the family of the victim struggles to cope in the aftermath of the tragedy.
While this episode addresses an important topic that remains relevant to this day in that we still regularly see hazing death stories featured in the news, I can't say that there was one enjoyable aspect of it for me as the story is just flat out depressing and slow. There is absolutely no mystery featured as we see what happened and who was responsible right in the opening scenes, and to fill air time they compensate by delving deep into the psychological trauma and dysfunction experienced by the family afterwards. I've said this in several other reviews for this season of Quincy and I'll say it again here that I'm just over all of the therapy and psychiatry related story lines that we are inundated with in the latter part of this series. Maybe if this episode had aired earlier in the lineup this part of the story wouldn't have annoyed me as much, but I'm just so tired and fed up with the repetitive counseling sessions at this point that feel like I can't watch another.
Overall this is a pretty depressing Season 7 finale episode that does feature an investigation into a cover up but is overshadowed by the grief of the family to the victim and their therapy. As I suspect most Quincy fans are not tuning in for this type of story, I do not recommend this episode.