Seldom Silent, Never Heard begins with a young man with Tourette's syndrome having outbursts during a movie and another audience member chasing him from the theater. When the chase leads to the young man falling to his death from a building scaffolding, Lt. Monahan (Garry Walberg) initially believes he was struck on the head and murdered, but when Quincy (Jack Klugman) conducts the autopsy and analyzes other evidence he determines that the fall was accidental and caused in part by his condition. Quincy meets a fellow doctor, Arthur Ciotti (Michael Constantine), with a son, Tony Ciotti (Paul Clemens), who is also struggling with Tourette's and their concerns over the lack of drug development to assist those living with this condition leads them to lobby Congress and the FDA.
While this episode begins as a murder mystery, this part of the story resolves very quickly and the focus becomes on Tony and his struggles as well as the efforts to get the drug companies and government on board with developing the pharmaceuticals necessary to help those with Tourette's despite the effort being cost-prohibitive to the companies. I have to say that I was very impressed by the guest star performance of Paul Clemens here to the point where I was wondering if they had hired someone with Tourette's to play the role I found it so convincing. I also thought that Michael Constantine was good as the concerned father struggling between protecting his son and helping him achieve his potential. As someone who has gone toe to toe with big companies over putting the best health interests of the patient over the bottom line in my own career, I appreciated this part of the story as well.
My only criticism of this episode is that we just saw Quincy lobbying Congress on another issue a couple of episodes ago in "Scream to the Skies", so it seems a bit soon for him to be going back to Washington and doing this again. Other than that, this is a reasonably good episode which addresses an important issue and promotes awareness of a condition which there are still misconceptions of to this day.
