Dark Angel begins with a veteran LA cop, Tommy Bates (Neville Brand) and his rookie partner, Ed Waters (Michael D. Roberts) pulling their patrol car into an alley to have lunch. Moments later, two strung out teenagers driving a stolen car erratically pull into the alley and slam into them head on. The teenage driver, Billy (Richard Stanley), jumps out of the vehicle and begins attacking the officers before running off only to be chased down and die suddenly when Officer Bates apprehends him. The other teenager claims police brutality lead to Billy's death and Quincy (Jack Klugman) is called in to conduct the autopsy, but he cannot find traces of PCP in Billy's system during initial testing and his findings confirm he died as a result of blunt force trauma. This casts doubt on the police officers, and the media as well as a public rights advocate, Charlie Truesdale (William Daniels), jump all over the case. Quincy suspects there is more to Billy's death than the initial autopsy revealed which leads him to investigate further to get to the truth and hopefully salvage the career and reputation of a good cop.
This is a fairly decent episode where Quincy is back in the coroner lab and a lot of the twists and turns of the story come as a result of his autopsy findings which I like. My only criticisms here are that there isn't much of a mystery as we pretty much know what happened from the opening scenes, and I also found William Daniels' character to be over the top and highly annoying. If you think Quincy is bad when he goes off on a social justice rant, he is nothing compared to the righteous Charlie Truesdale!
Overall, a reasonably entertaining Season 4 episode that is well worth viewing.