Copyright ©2015-2016 by Mike Quigley. No reproduction of any kind without permission.
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The show began with a flashback to 1884 where pirates interrupted a state dinner at the Iolani Palace, stealing valuables from the guests, including King Kalākaua (Ocean Waowili), and looting the palace's treasury as well as creating havoc on the streets of Honolulu. I liked the business with the pirates because it was imaginative and accompanied by music which was much better than the usual thud-and-blunder noise. But this was all based on Hawaiian folklore, actually a hoax propagated by the Daily Alta California of 15 December 1884 , described by one expert as "pure fiction" designed to increase the newspaper's circulation -- sort of like Facebook and Twitter now.
This episode was connected to the present after the brutal murder of Keanu Carson (Eric Mead). He had recently purchased the contents of a storage locker full of research material obtained 40 years earlier in 1975 by Nathan Exley, a 48-year-old local history teacher who was writing a book on the pirates. Included in this locker were tapes of an interview with 102-year-old Byron Washburn, the last surviving member of the pirates' crew, which revealed details of where their treasure was hidden on Oahu.
Jerry, who joined the Five-0 team because Kono and Adam were on their honeymoon, surmised that a painting of the Manoa Valley recently stolen from the Bishop Museum by Cindy Patterson (Samantha Lockwood), the great-granddaughter of Washburn, was a "treasure map" revealing the current location of the pirates' buried loot. It did not, though it did solve the mystery of what had happened to Exley, who disappeared back in 1975. He fell inside the cave where the treasure was not to be found, suffering a skull fracture which killed him.
Turns out that Cindy had a criminal history, including marine theft and armed robbery. After finding the stolen painting on a yacht chartered by Cindy and her partner-in-crime Simon Moore (Jay Hector), ostensibly to use for transporting the treasure off the islands, Jerry then analyzed the painting's frame to determine clues to another location where the treasure might be buried. Five-0 arrived at this location, where Cindy and Moore were digging a huge hole in the basement of a house while its occupants were tied up upstairs.
This also turned out to be a bust, with Jerry suddenly appearing at the show's end, saying that the meagre contents of the treasure chest (some silverware and candlestick holders) were items stolen by Washburn years before. Turns out that Washburn was not 104 years old, but a mere 93, so he would have been in diapers when the pirate raid took place in 1884. According to Jerry, the whole treasure hunt was a "giant hoax" (just like it was in real life) so that Washburn could make some money off people like Exley. As executive producer Peter Lenkov commented in a Honolulu Star-Advertiser article: "[M]y real agenda here was to debunk the pirate legend. I figured if anyone ever stumbled upon the same story online, our show would hopefully set the record straight."
This investigation of this crime of the week had the usual red herrings and far too much exposition spoken by the principals.
As far as the rest of the show was concerned, I didn't like it much either. There was a lot of "ohana" nonsense from the two couples Kono/Adam and McGarrett/Catherine, including plenty of banal dialogue. There was also a tedious car discussion (one can hardly call it a "cargument") with Danno and McGarrett, relating to McGarrett finally popping the question of marriage to his now-returned girl friend. You have to wonder how serious this relationship is, though, because despite a heavy smooch at Kono and Adam's "epic" wedding party, the two of them woke up fully clothed in bed at McGarrett's the morning after. McGarrett is taking his time about getting hitched, telling the Five-0 crew after Danno spills the beans, "I want to do this right." Considering a new love interest has been announced for McGarrett a few episodes down the road, something bad is likely going to happen to Catherine, carrying on a tradition with the show.
Obviously we had to continue from last season's finale to see if Kono really did get married (she did), but the subsequent torture of Adam and Kono by Gabriel, in particular Kono getting her tooth pulled out, was just plain nasty. (Will its replacement be covered by the Five-0 dental plan?) And we have another cliffhanger, because Adam turning over to Gabriel the money he was going to give the yakuza in Japan to settle accounts is going to result in a death sentence for both him and Kono.
MORE TRIVIA:
- The show began with a goof. Exley recorded his interview with Washburn on a Betamax tape in October, 1975, but the first home models of this machine, according to Wikipedia, were not sold in the USA until "early November, 1975." There was also some annoying Beta-related blather from Jerry that this format was superior to VHS. This is a matter of opinion as far as the basic models were concerned. If you consult Wikipedia again, you will find there was a very slight difference in resolution between the two formats, with Betamax a bit better. Both formats had improved technologies introduced later, but these required things like special tapes and were not compatible with the very first machines. Considering the mediocre quality of the video from one of Exley's Beta tapes as seen at the beginning of the show, you have to wonder what Jerry is talking about.
- The character of Washburn was played by two separate actors: Wesley Lambert (Washburn as an young man) and Michael de Ycaza (the old Washburn, sporting Freddy Krueger-like makeup).
- You have to wonder how Cindy and Moore could have pinpointed the treasure's basement location so exactly and how they could have dug up the basement so easily by themselves. There is a massive hole in the floor. Cindy does attack McGarrett with some device that looks like a jackhammer before he shoots her dead.
- Prior to going down into the basement to confront Cindy, McGarrett throws a smoke grenade down the stairs, but a couple of minutes later when the other Five-0 members come downstairs, the smoke has almost completely cleared away.
- Kono's tooth is extracted by some associate of Gabriel who wears a V for Vendetta-like white plastic mask, obviously some guy who didn't make the grade at dental school. When Adam, Gabriel and Damon (Gabriel's tech associate) go to the bank to transfer the funds, Kono is able to grab a scalpel used by this guy from the table in front of her. But seemingly within 6 seconds, she manages to cut the ropes binding her right hand to a chair, arrange the ropes so they look uncut and then drive the scalpel into the guy's throat when he is standing beside her. Rather than call the bank or the cops, she jumps into Adam's sports car and drives recklessly downtown through traffic. Of course, she is very pissed off, but really...
- At Carson's house at the beginning of the show, McGarrett points to the TV screen which is full of blood spatter, and says to Danno "Look at that." What is he referring to? There is no picture on the screen, just blue from the videotape machine which has been left on.
- How did Gabriel know that Adam was transferring the money to his father's ex-partner in three days?
- Jerry refers to Cindy as "a twenty-first century Anne Bonny," an Irish woman who became a famous pirate, operating in the Caribbean in the eighteenth century.
- Gabriel gets access to Adam's place pretending to be a delivery man for Trans Hawaiian Parcel.
This was a violent episode which was hard to watch, considering the shooting in Oregon the day before. As well, the script was full of stupid situations, many of which involved bombs, so many that the show started to resemble SCTV's Farm Film Report, where people "blowed up real good."
At the beginning of the show, some cops detonated a bomb in an attaché case in a downtown building with the help of a Remotec Andros robot, an actual device used for explosive ordnance disposal. There is nothing in the case, but, shortly after, a huge explosion outside the cops' command post kills one of the bomb squad. McGarrett suggests the bomb was activated by someone who was watching from nearby.
Following this, another suitcase, possibly with a bomb, is left in a Honolulu TV station. The place is quickly cleared out, but there is nothing significant in the suitcase other than a flash drive which contains a Powerpoint-like presentation featuring Jason Duclair (Randy Couture), the serial arsonist who threatened ATF agent Kathy Milwood (Melina Kanakaredes) last season. The audio for this presentation, which looks not particularly easy to create, has some guy with a creepy voice reciting a variant on the nursery rhyme "Ladybug Ladybug":
Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire, and your children all burn. Except for Duclair who sits in despair, weaving his laces as fast as he can. Release him from prison, or more will be damned.In a meeting at Five-0 headquarters, Chin Ho reels off a lot of blather to suggest the significance of this poem, seemingly cribbed from Wikipedia like much of the material in last season's finale. When confronted by this doggerel in Halawa where he is serving 25 years to life, Duclair scoffs, saying he has a fan. McGarrett calls him a "sick son of a bitch."
Duclair's prison correspondence is analyzed by Five-0. It is pretty banal, but Chin Ho reports that on the back of the stamps on the envelopes, there is some miniscule writing which McGarrett recognizes as "wila writing," defined by one WWW page as "tiny-writing communication method favored by incarcerated gang members." The author of these missives is Tim Richards, a former cellmate of Duclair's who idolizes him. After he is nabbed on the street and taken to the blue-lit room, Richards wants to speak to a lawyer, saying only that he was transcribing the letters for someone else. However, after a bunch of cops knock down Richards' front door with a battering ram and are blown to smithereens (why they did this without casing the place first, considering they are dealing with arsonists and bombers is hard to understand) and McGarrett plays back a recording of a call between Duclair and the creepy-voiced guy saying that Richards has to be done away with, Richards starts co-operating.
McGarrett and Danno return to Halawa, where they physically abuse Duclair without anyone getting excited. Mr. Creepy Voice (MCV) knows McGarrett's cel phone number and calls him, telling him to look out the window, where a projector on top of a car shows the explosion from the previous paragraph. Topographically, the wall where this is projected doesn't make any sense, based on the birds-eye view of Halawa we see in the scene the next morning where MCV gets McGarrett to spring Duclair from jail.
Just so McGarrett doesn't try any funny business, MCV has rigged up a truck full of the explosive nitromethane in front of the Iolani Palace. Chin Ho and Grover rush outside, tell everyone to clear the scene and then, instead of getting far away themselves, start looking in the truck! What is even dumber, after McGarrett and Danno drop off Duclair in the middle of nowhere at a location which Duclair seemingly knows about (and no one taped his call with MCV regarding this), the bomb squad moves in at the location outside the palace, despite the fact that -- as with the first explosion -- it is quite possible that MCV is somewhere nearby ready to push the button. And MCV made no promises that if Duclair was correctly delivered, the bomb would not be set off! DUH!
Through facial recognition, MCV is determined to be an arsonist formerly from California named Jason Trout, who suffers from serious mental and sexual problems and also idolizes Duclair. After McGarrett and Danno leave Duclair in the middle of nowhere, Trout appears, strips off his shirt, shoots Duclair in the leg and douses him with some inflammable liquid from a backpack sprayer. Around this time, Chin Ho, Grover and some cops break into Trout's house without any hesitation (another stupid move, the place might have been booby-trapped -- HELLO!) where they find yet more poetry based on another nursery rhyme, "Who Killed Cock Robin":
Who killed Duclair? I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow. Who'll watch him burn? I, said the tern. With my little eye I'll watch him burn. Who'll make his shroud? I, said the beetle, with my thread and needle. Who will be famous? I, said the fish.McGarrett and Danno hurry back to where they dropped Duclair off, but both Trout and Duclair manage to escape, despite the fact that HPD calls in helicopters, tracking dogs and large numbers of cops. At a fancy Hyatt restaurant later, McGarrett meets Duclair, who is well dressed even though he is bleeding badly from his leg where Trout shot him. (Doesn't anyone in the place notice this?) Duclair says that Trout wanted to be his protégé, but was "unstable." McGarrett listens to Duclair's ridiculous confession: "[Trout] didn't really know anything about me. He didn't know that burning and killing people is who I am, not what I do. [...] You can imagine my disappointment when I realized he wanted to kill me all along. [...] I'm a tortured man, Commander. I realize now I can't escape my thoughts unless I'm locked away, alone, with no opportunity to act on them. In a way, it's ironic. Freedom is my prison." Duclair is promptly arrested and taken back to Halawa.
There is another dumb scene after this, where McGarrett goes to the post office from which Trout's letters were sent and looks in the mailbox Trout was using. Once again we are confronted with a situation where there might be something explosive, but no one takes precautions. McGarrett gets a bottle out of the box which seems to contain some powdery substance like ashes.
The Kono/Adam soap opera continued, with Adam getting a ride home from rehab to Kono's place with Jerry, who complained about his job at Kamekona's shrimp shack and managed to work the expression "poop chute" into the show for the second time. ("[U]nless [shrimp are] butterflied correctly, you're eating their poop chute.") There was a ridiculous scene where Adam with Kono on his lap managed to wheel himself up a very steep ramp that had been installed on her front steps and "cross the threshhold." At this point, I said to myself, "Who does Adam think he is, Rick Hansen (a famous Canadian paraplegic athlete)?" The moment they rolled through the front door, some yakuza types pulled up in front of the house, making you wonder why Kono didn't take Chin Ho's advice of moving to a safe house. Kono ran outside to confront them, not a particularly safe move. Near the end of the show, the same guys pulled up in front of the house again in the middle of the night and Kono ran outside in her undies with a gun, only to find the gangsters dead.
MORE TRIVIA:
- How does the bomber know that the Remotec robot will not blow up the flash drive in the case in the TV station?
- Duclair's inmate number in Halawa is B638011. The address of the prison on one of the letters that Richard sent is 216 Vera Cruz Street, Honolulu 96701, but it actually is 99-902 Moanalua Road, Aiea 96701. The return address of the letters is PO Box 5798, Honolulu 96825.
- Some of the music in this show was grotesquely loud.
- Given the number of characters from past seasons who are being lined up for this one, almost like an "old boys' (and girls') club," is it possible that we will see Duclair and/or Trout again? Hopefully not in the seventh season. (Interestingly, several sites where dubs of this show were available for download had the files tagged as S07E02, meaning episode two of season seven.
- When MCV calls McGarrett during his second visit to Halawa, Duclair says "You're gonna want to take that," similar to Anton Hesse in the pilot episode.
At the beginning of this show (after a total-waste-of-time, 2 minute, 21 second "previously on Five-0" rehash of Kono/Adam and McGarrett/Catherine scenes), Ben Lahinea, the owner of a coral art gallery who goes in the ocean and uncovers long-lost items that have been encrusted in coral and turns them into unique art pieces, finds a gun underwater and puts it in his collecting bag. It slips out of the bag after it tears on some coral and falls on the ocean floor where it discharges (shooting upwards through the water) and kills Lahinea with a bullet in the chest. What are the chances of this happening, statistically speaking? This gun has been sitting there for six weeks and is covered with a thin layer of coral. So STUPID! Yet this is how the crime of the week begins!
After his autopsy of Lahinea, Max determines that this gun was also used to kill a John Doe whose body washed up at Ala Moana Beach six weeks before. McGarrett and Danno go to the area where Lahinea used to dive, the Rock Piles Surf Break, where McGarrett goes underwater and finds the collecting bag and gun relatively easily. On the way there, the duo have a "boat-gument." Amazingly, I didn't mind this that much, because Danno tried to drum some common sense into McGarrett regarding his relationship with Catherine, and because it was happening on a real boat filmed in the real outdoors, unlike the usual carguments which are done on a soundstage in front of a projected background.
The gun Lahinea found and McGarrett recovered is registered to one Eddie Brooks (Jason Mewes), who manages a gun range at Koko Head. He is arrested and interrogated in the blue-lit room by McGarrett and Grover who tell him it is odd that even though this is one of fifteen guns he purchased recently for his collection, there are no guns in his house. They suggest that he is a "straw man" who has been buying guns to peddle to other people. Brooks starts blabbing, confessing that the guy who bought this gun was Miko Mosley (Eric Jabarri Combs).
McGarrett and Grover go to Mosley's apartment where they find expensive clothes including a suit worth $1572, paintings and a printer cranking out counterfeit money (has it been doing this for the last six weeks, or did McGarrett just turn it on?). Further investigation reveals that Mosley tried to rent a place in the pricey Kahala area six weeks before using an online rental service, but his credit card was declined. The place's owner, Philip Kanae, rented it for $5,000 a week, which Mosley presumably paid with the phoney money he made, bleaching the ink off ones, and turning them into hundreds.
When McGarrett and Danno go to Kanae's place, they find him dead in the swimming pool, with a fractured skull and broken kneecaps, along with multiple contusions. Kanae recorded all his renters with a remote camera, except someone deleted a day's worth of footage from around the time Mosley was killed. So, Five-0's speculation is that Kanae witnessed Mosley's murder, the killer found out about this and decided to get rid of all the evidence, including Kanae.
After Mosley was killed and dumped in the ocean, a key from the boat presumably used to do this ended up in the water and was also found by Lahinea. (This makes no sense to me.) The key is traced to a 2002 Strike 35 fishing boat which is registered to a questionable shell corporation. The boat's owner is Aaron James (Michael Maize), who was arrested for drug trafficking, though the charges were dropped a year ago. McGarrett and Kono go to a marina where James' boat is anchored and find out that the ignition has been replaced and inside there is blood all over the wiring inside, either from Mosley's body or from James cutting himself after trying to hot wire the ignition because he dropped the key in the water (the latter is my guess). James is arrested after a far-fetched stunt where McGarrett leaps into James' fleeing boat and then manages to keep it from crashing into a dock. James says he wants a lawyer.
The missing footage from Kanae's surveillance camera is recovered and it reveals Mosley attempting to buy cocaine from James with his counterfeit money. One of James' two companions says the money is faked, and James shoots Mosley in the head, using Mosley's own gun which they took from him. Then on the footage, James makes a phone call to some guy saying that the transaction didn't work out. James is transferred from the blue-lit room to the HPD detention center, but before he can arrive, news arrives at Five-0 headquarters that on his way there, someone hit the HPD transport, killing two officers and freeing James (puh-leeze, not another recurring character?). Chin Ho analyzes James' cel phone records and finds that the person James was calling is none other than Gabriel, Chin's mortal arch-enemy.
In keeping with a trend that I pointed out for last week's show, we had the reappearance of some characters we have seen before.
The first of these was Danno's very annoying nephew Eric Russo (Andrew Lawrence), who just shows up out of nowhere and is starting a new job with the crime lab working with Max on the same day as the end of the last episode when Kono found the dead guys in the middle of the night! Has Eric been hanging out in Hawaii since episode 12 of the third season (we're talking about almost three years ago) and we have never seen him since? Or did he recently return to the islands?
Eric is a forensics genius, both in this show and in his previous appearance. Hopefully he is not destined to replace Charlie Fong, who has been absent for quite a while. Aside from addressing Kono as "Sugar Lips" and pissing off Danno big time because of his wise-cracking attitude (even worse than Danno himself), Eric spewed off a lot of information about a type of algae which was very important to the plot. I'm not going to go back and watch S03E12 again for clues as to why Eric is such a clever guy, so if someone who knows wants to enlighten me, I will add this to my review and give you a credit!
The other recurring characters included Ani, played by Youngaisa. the son of Taylor "Kamekona" Wily, who appeared last season as a computer whiz kid. He was helping Jerry to move into his new "office" in the basement of Five-0 headquarters (formerly a janitor's closet), an office location highly reminiscent of Fox Mulder's on one of Jerry's favorite TV shows, The X-Files.
And then there was Nahele (Kekoa Kekumano), the troubled kid who McGarrett took under his wing after he tried to steal the Mercury Marquis Brougham last season (S05E12). In this show Nahele was entrusted with bringing Catherine's custom engagement ring from the jeweller's to McGarrett in his office, telling McGarrett that he shouldn't be wasting so much money on "an allotrope of carbon."
The Kono/Adam soap opera continued, with Chin Ho trying to buy the couple more time from the revenge of Adam's father's former business partner. One of the items found by Lahinea was a GoPro camera which contained the last known footage of Eli Hoku, a surfer who drowned in 2014. Near the end of the show, Kono shows this footage to Hoku's widow Lani (Sloane Ketcham) and son Keahu (Hunter Reich) in a scene which didn't really have any point.
The big question of this episode for most of its fans was whether McGarrett would pop the question of marriage to Catherine. The two of them woke up relatively naked in bed at the beginning of the show, but things got complicated as Catherine left the room to talk on the phone to someone in Pashto, the national language of Afghanistan. Danno later met Catherine secretly to ask her "Are you gonna stick around for good?" to which she replied, "There is nothing that I want more." But at the end of the show, McGarrett returned home to find Catherine sitting on the steps of his house with her bags packed. A tear-jerking "breaking up is hard to do" scene followed, with her telling him "I have to go away for a little bit," "I need more than what a relationship can give me right now," and "I need to build something on my own." She says she is going to Nepal to help earthquake victims! McGarrett looks like someone hit him between the eyes with a baseball bat, especially since he has the engagement ring in his pocket.
I must admit that the acting during this scene was pretty good, compared to what usually passes for "acting" on the show, especially because Borth was acting both as an actress and as a character who is "acting," hiding her real intentions. She drives away in a limo-like SUV and a montage of scenes of the two of them together is seen, accompanied by appropriately goopy music. Then, as tears pour from her eyes, she gets a mysterious phone call where some guy asks her "What about your cover?" She says, "He didn't question it."
In other words, Catherine was jerking McGarrett around –- just like the people behind this show have constantly jerked the viewers around for the last five seasons!
MORE TRIVIA:
- When Mosley's apartment is seen in a long shot, his name is spelled "Moseley," but his DMV record spells it "Mosley."
- The way Nahele's text messages to McGarrett appeared on the screen was an imaginative touch.
- Jerry has various conspiracy-related memorabilia around his office, including a sign about Area 51, a section of a Nevada US Air Force base which most likely supports development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems, books including Being A Pagan and The Temple of High Magic (both real books), and a 1963 issue of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporting on the Kennedy Assassination.
- Danno mentions his sister Stella, presumably Eric's mother.
- Among the expensive items at Mosley's place is a landscape painting by Hawaiian artist Herb Kawainui Kane (1928-2011) worth over $100,000. Grover also finds a receipt for two items of jewelry in a garbage can; this receipt contains several errors. Presumably Mosley paid $5,000 for the jewelry, but it says but the cash received was $50,000 (as noted by user lisamckinn on IMDb). The items are as follows: CUST. GOLD/PLAT. DIAMOND DIST. INLAY. CUST. ENGRAVED URANI - $1,050; WOMENS DIAM. TEN. BRAC CUSTOM DESIGNED - $2,475. Subtotal for those two items should be $3,525, but it is $4,325. The addition of the incorrect subtotal $4,325 and tax ($203.70) is also wrong, it should be $4,528.70, but it is $4,548.70. Based on this last (wrong) figure, the change of $451.30 from $5,000 (if it should be $5,000) is correct. By the way, it doesn't make sense that if Mosley paid $5,000 in cash, why would he have given them that amount in $100 bills and gotten $451.30 in change? More likely he would have paid $4,600 in cash. See the receipt here. Also note that when Grover leans over to get the receipt, he doesn't actually lean over far enough to reach into the garbage can.
- Eric is far too clever. He says that most of the items from Lahinea's bag "have a crazy amount of porolithon buildup. It's a genus of coralline algae. It makes up the majority of Hawaiian reef structures. Also, it grows very quickly over hard surfaces, leaving a thin layer of coral-like crust. Porolithon. It grows at a rate of three millimeters a month, give or take. So most of these items have been under the water way over a year. However, the gun and the keys have significantly less buildup. My calculations put them under the water the same amount of time-- about six weeks." He is also the one who determines in a relatively short space of time at Kanae's house that 24 crucial hours of footage from Kanae's recording device was deleted. Can we really assume that James, who hardly seems like a geeky guy, could have removed the footage?
- Jerry shows his Five-0 "Special Consultant" business card to Eric. It lists the Five-0 office phone number as 808-555-0171 and the fax as 808-555-0172.
- Mosley's address is 2291 Aku Road, Honolulu 96818. His driver's license is HF321888062, his Social Security number is 743-00-9441. He has no previous criminal history. Kanae's address is 94 Palau Avenue, Honolulu 968165 (this is incorrect, ZIP codes only have five figures); his rental property where Mosley lived is at 836 Olowahia Street, Kahala 96816. Kanae's driver's license is HV0955313L, his Social Security number is 920-67-0208.
- Can Danno really see Kanae's body in the swimming pool when he is looking out through the door of the house?
- The CBS press release for the show mentioned Delaina Mitchell playing Kara Lahinea, presumably the wife of the gallery owner who was shot at the beginning, but there was no such character in the show.
LATE BREAKING NEWS:
There is speculation on some fan forums that the reason Catherine left has something to do with McGarrett's mother, Doris. According to the Five-0 writing team of C/H/Q Paper Products®, this is true. We will find out near the end of the season from McGarrett's mother, who will return to the show, much to the disgust of most fans, that Catherine is really HIS HALF-SISTER! That's all they are willing to tell me. (Speculate on who you think the father is, maybe Joe White?) BUT ... McGarrett and Catherine "did it" ... EWWWWWWWW! Or did they? (This is starting to sound like Luke and Leia.) Maybe McGarrett suffers from impotence because of PTSD (a theme which is yet to be developed, though someone like Executive Producer Peter Lenkov has mentioned it), and they really didn't consummate their relationship? When Doris tells her son this shocking revelation, he will kill himself, and the show will end.
The show began with a 40-second "previously on Five-0," with those words spoken by McGarrett, focusing on the usual Kono/Adam and McGarrett/Catherine issues, again a waste of time. Do the producers of the show think there are now people tuning in who have never seen the show before?
Following this, McGarrett is sad because Catherine is gone. He sits on his bed and looks across to the bathroom where her toothbrush is still in a glass. Awwww. In the next scene, McGarrett and Grover are going to King's Medical Center where Danno (not seen in this episode at all) is donating some bone marrow to his son. Grover suggests he and McGarrett go out and get really drunk that evening, but McGarrett tells him, "Catherine left -- it sucks, I'm hurting a little bit, but it's happened before."
The crime of the week began with two hippie types, a man and a woman (Brooks Whelan and Kirby Bliss Blanton) who make "beatnik hand cream" according to Grover later, picking some rare plants in the Makua Kea'au Forest Reserve. These two, who arrive in a beat-up-looking Volkswagen bus, find a dead body which is covered with counterfeit $100 bills. Later, they take the money and try to buy a $90,000 sports car and are nabbed by the cops. Grover describes them as "idiots." The color photography of the flowers, one of which retails for $350 an ounce according to the woman, was very nice, but you have to wonder: what is the chance of all these rarities growing in one place at the same time in the middle of nowhere?
The dead body turns out to be the Howard Hughes-like recluse Harrison Crane, heir to a real estate fortune and at "one point … the richest man in Hawaii." He was killed by an arrow shot by an ex-con named Ano Kahue who was in the forest hunting boar and who has nothing to do with the crime of the week.
Fingerprints on the cash are traced to geeky art appraiser Gerard Hirsch (Willie Garson), yet another character being brought back from a previous season. He was seen last year in S05E11 where he had hot pants for Kono. I can't remember what else this guy did in the show. Comments in my review don't help me. They are really scraping the bottom of the barrel for people to bring back, and it is only the fourth show!
McGarrett and Kono find Hirsch doing caricatures in front of the Sheraton Waikiki. He was recently released on parole from Halawa, and is still engaged in fishy activities like accepting counterfeit money from Miko Mosley to buy art works (see last week's show), then turning around and using this cash to buy back an Edward Hopper painting from Crane which he sold to him years before. And this Hopper was a stolen painting to boot!
Enlisted to help Five-0 with their investigation after promises are made to wipe out all previous charges against him, Hirsch, who is inexplicably taken to jail and almost immediately released, further tells Five-0 that he sold the Hopper to Russian crime lord Alexander Kozlov that very morning, and this gangster may be trying to smuggle the painting off the island as they speak. Somehow figuring out where Kozlov is, Five-0 pursues him in a street chase and the painting is recovered even though it is thrown on the street and nearly run over by several cars (as is McGarrett, who grabs it).
Around this time, as Hersch is released from jail, he gets a phone call from a guy who we find out later is named Mikey Barnes (David Turner). He has kidnapped Laura Ioane (Lauren Murata), the daughter of a woman who Crane was romatically involved with years before. Crane was going to give the money he received from Hersch to Barnes to release Laura, but now that Barnes knows that Crane is dead (rumours about this are on the news in Honolulu despite Five-0's desire to suppress this information), he wants the Hopper painting instead.
Hersch, wearing a special wire, is delegated to deliver the painting, but Barnes is pretty clever, making Hersch get a change of clothing to confuse Five-0 who are following him, and using a signal bouncer on his phone which cannot be traced. After he gives Barnes the painting on the beach, Hirsch starts pointing and saying "He's over there." As usual, Five-0 then pursues Barnes after loudly yelling "Hey! Stop right there!" … DUH! Barnes flees in his car which is T-boned, killing him. Barnes' cel phone is examined, which shows that he called his mother multiple times, and it turns out that she is Crane's housekeeper Susan Barnes (Julia Marie Buis), who we met earlier. She came up with the kidnapping plan to benefit her son, saying that they were "never gonna hurt her [Laura]." Laura, who is imprisoned underground, is located by Five-0 and freed and Barnes is arrested.
The end of the episode featured a beery celebration on the beach, designed to cheer up McGarrett, presumably at Rumfire, mentioned by Grover at the beginning of the show. This whole sequence, 3 minutes and 26 seconds long, was another waste of time. It featured a cameo by American football legend Jerry Rice, who said he was excited about the Pro Bowl coming back to Hawaii, and posed for a selfie with everyone.
Kono, looking very attractive, was seen a lot in this show, most of it not with Adam, who was abducted by yakuza at the show's beginning. Surrounded by four of them in an elevator as he was leaving fysiotherapie Hawaii (a real medical treatment center), Adam had a bag placed over his head prior to being taken to some secret location. This did not make sense. Why wouldn't the yakuza wait until Adam was in the car? Anyone who got in the elevator with them or saw them in the parking lot would have noticed the bag and might have called the cops.
In what looked like a warehouse, Adam was forced to try and convince Aaron James (another returning character, also from last week's show) to reveal the whereabouts of Gabriel, who previously had absconded with the money Adam was going to pay to his father's former business partner Goro Shioma. When Adam's efforts punching out James to extract information didn't pay off, James was shot dead by Tom Bishop (Steve Bastoni), one of Shioma's employees.
There were some big fat questions about this episode:
- According to McGarrett, "He [Barnes] probably had Crane under surveillance from the moment he put this thing [selling the painting to Hirsch to get some cash to pay the ransom for Laura] in motion." McGarrett further tells Hirsch, "If that's the case, last night when you went to Crane's house he would have [seen] you leave with the painting." But how did Mikey Barnes know all the details about Crane selling the Hopper painting? Why would the super-secretive Crane have allowed Hirsch to come to his house in the first place? And how would have Barnes figured out who Hirsch was and Hirsch's cel phone number?
- How would Barnes or his mother Susan, the housekeeper, know about Laura? Crane's lawyer Douglas Bates (Kenneth Meseroll) admitted that Laura might have told someone about her relationship with Crane, but also suggested that Laura would have respected Crane's privacy. It is unlikely that Crane would have told anybody about Laura -- even his lawyer was sworn to secrecy. Maybe Barnes' mother was snooping around Crane's room, but she told Five-0 that she hadn't seen her boss for a "few months," she had virtually no contact with him and had never been inside his room at the abandoned-looking residence where he lived. She said, "I leave his meals and laundry by the door to his quarters. If he needs something, he just leaves me a note. As far as I know, no one other than Mr. Crane has ever stepped foot beyond that door [meaning going into his room]." I guess she was lying about some of this.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Hirsch's Social Security number is 904-28-6115. He lives at 712 Noni Drive, Honolulu 96802. On his record which is pulled up by the Five-0 Supercomputer, Hirsch's last name at the top is spelled HIRSCG.
- Bishop tells Adam that "it's been weeks" since Adam started looking for Gabriel.
- When Five-0 is pursuing the crime lord, Chin Ho is driving his classic Mustang. This car is collectible and probably worth a few bucks. Why would Chin risk damaging the car? Despite the fact that he and McGarrett manage to force Kozlov off the road, why shouldn't Kozlov just run into Chin's car and then escape? By the way, there is someone in the end credits playing the character of "Lead Russian"; there doesn't appear to be any such person in the show.
- At the end, Adam is at home with the hand that he used for beating James in what looks like a bucket of ice. Kono doesn't see this when she returns and you would expect that when he touches her face that she would notice that his hand is cold.
The beginning and ending of the show – 2:56 and 4:30 respectively, about 17% of its total time up to the end credits -- were taken up with more "ohana" B.S. as the Five-0 team trained and participated in a "tough mudder" competition under the eye of "Coach" Grover and team doctor Max, who was being annoyingly geeky. Based on what we saw with the resident cast participating, this 12-mile competition, a charity to benefit the usual HPD Widows and Orphans Fund, was more like a "tough mudder for pussies." It didn’t seem particularly tough compared to what you can read on sites like Wikipedia, though Grover promised some real challenges. The actual contest at the end consisted of still photos of the Five-0 team covered with mud and video of them making it to the finish line. While Danno was totally annoying, bitching about just about everything, at least we didn’t see Jerry, and Adam was away at physiotherapy and hiding out from Gabriel. At the end, we heard the Five-0 theme in the background score, relatively rare on the new show.
The crime of the week was sort of interesting, but nearly derailed by the usual "something really stoopid." Kevin Harper (Joseph Palmore) is appearing at a deposition to respond to a lawsuit by partners in his seafood restaurant business. They are suing him because they say he embezzled $800,000 of company funds. Suddenly, a motorcycle rider appears in the lawyer's office on the umpteenth floor, having taken the elevator up there on his bike. He sprays the place with bullets. Harper ends up with a bullet in the head as his wife Jane (Victoria Pratt) and daughter Aubrey (Spencer Locke) watch, horrified. The mysterious killer, who is wearing a blacked-out full-face helmet, then takes the elevator to the roof and, in a scene reminiscent of the latest Fast and Furious movie where a similar stunt was performed with a car, jumps with his bike from this building to the one next door. While the neighboring building is the same height, it seems very far away for someone to do this without plunging to their death (Chin Ho says they would have to be "carrying 60 to 70 miles an hour to make that jump"). As well, there is a wall about three feet high all around the perimeter of both buildings! It should be pointed out that the bike rider is not using a ramp while doing this.
Five-0 is soon hot on the case, despite McGarrett receiving a mysterious hang-up phone call which he thinks might be from Catherine. According to Harper's wife, her husband had received threats from the Samoan mob to whom he owed protection money and he had contracted the services of a security company to protect him from the Samoans. Unfortunately, they did not accompany him that day to the deposition room. The connection with the Samoan mob is a red herring, however, because their bagman Ira Laulu (Siaosi), interviewed in the blue-lit, denies any connection to the murder, and is later vindicated by his ledger which suggests the mob stays away from large businesses.
Five-0 then focuses their attention on a motorcycle gang called the 808 Road Warriors. Chin Ho finds out that some members of this gang drive customized bikes similar to the one used by Harper's killer. Aside from causing mayhem on the streets of Oahu with their stunt-like hijinks, this gang is also suspected of being connected to a series of truck hijackings. These bikers are busted by Chin Ho and HPD, and one of them, Ahe Makino (Christopher Naoki Lee), the group's fence, is released under a bogus pretext to McGarrett who plays "Let's Make a Deal" so Makino will tell him who Iceman (Justin Paul), the boss of the hijackers, is. Iceman is later busted by Five-0 who are waiting to meet him inside a truck which is supposed to be full of laptops. After yet another blue-lit room treatment, Iceman blabs that one of his gang, Tyler Kaheaku (Reid Harper, uncredited just about everywhere), didn't show up for the caper. This testimony, combined with that of Iceman's crew, who say Tyler was present at all of the hijackings until the previous night when he bailed unexpectedly, point to him as being the killer. BUT … it then turns out that Tyler's Facebook page shows a picture of him with Harper's daughter Aubrey and vice versa!
Further investigation by Five-0 reveals that Harper paid $150,000 of the $800,000 he is accused of embezzling to the Maui-based John Messer for consulting services. Nobody in Harper's company has ever heard of Messer, and there is no driver's license or photo ID for him on file, just some bank information. Messer has a legitimate address on Maui and is married with a couple of kids. Kono and Grover go to Maui to check out Messer, and find a photo in his house which reveals that he and Harper are the same person, and that he is living a double life for the last four years and using money from his business to support his second family.
Meanwhile, back on Oahu, Five-0 pursues Harper's daughter, who has gone on the lam with Tyler, in an exciting chase on the freeway which climaxes as their motorbike runs into the side of a truck, with both of them flying through the truck's windows. (This stunt is much better than the previous one.) Tyler is killed, while Aubrey is injured and arrested for complicity in her father's murder. There is no specific reason given why she would have wanted her father dead. Harper's wife says that her husband and daughter "had been fighting a lot recently." Five-0 speculates Aubrey found out about her father's lifestyle around the time his legal troubles began. She got Tyler to kill her father at the deposition, to make it look like it was connected with the lawsuit, so the cops would look into Harper's business dealings instead of his personal life.
But how did she know Tyler in the first place?
MORE TRIVIA:
- As Tyler drives his bike down some narrow alley before entering the building where he kills Harper, you can see the awning of the Jun Bo Chinese Restaurant at 126 Queen Street in the background. Tyler eventually is shown going into an elevator in the Pioneer Plaza ... which, as far as I can determine, based on photos via Google, is not the same building as used in the show where the deposition is taking place.
- The date of Harper's deposition is October 13, 2015.
- Chin gets information about who on Oahu has customized bikes from Mike, an acquaintance at Montgomery Powersports, a real motorcycle dealer in Honolulu. Mike is played by Robbie Knievel, son of the late famous stuntman Evel Knievel. After looking at a surveillance photo of Tyler's bike, Mike describes it as "one tricked-out crotch rocket."
- McGarrett pronounces "Samoan" with the emphasis on the first syllable – shades of Jack Lord's McGarrett!
- Chin tells Makino "you don't have the balls to stick your neck out."
- When he is grilling Iceman, Alex O'Loughlin suddenly has this weird accent like he is from New York or New Jersey.
- "Messer's" address on Maui is 544 Halahala Street, Kahului 96732.
This year's Hallowe'en episode was on par for the course with the previous four (there was none in the show's first season). It was directed by horror/thriller-meister Joe Dante, his third Hallowe'en show. Like the one he directed last year, it dealt in part with a serial killer.
The episode featured a trifecta of annoying characters: Jerry dressed as a vampire visiting Hawaiian United Blood Bank to donate; Max in another Keanu Reeves tribute costume, this time Chevalier Raphael Danceny from Dangerous Liaisons; and Danno's geeky medical examiner nephew Eric.
Danno himself was annoying as ever, though he didn't do anything really stupid like disrespect a Hawaiian burial ground like he did in S02E07 (the other Dante-directed episode). At the beginning of the show, he had a walk-to-the-crime-scene-gument where he bitched to McGarrett, calling him "G.I. Jerk." (Seriously, I don't know why McGarrett doesn't just punch him in the mouth.)
Later, Danno had a cargument with himself when he was driving to a party on the North Shore which Gracie was attending, having lied about where she was going to celebrate Hallowe'en. Having escorted Gracie from the party, embarrassing her in front of everyone, and ranting to her on the way back to town, Danno then ran his car into a guard railing after trying to avoid a boar crossing the road.
On the more positive side, the show featured TWO crimes of the week for the money, though there were script problems with both of them.
The lesser crime of the week related to the blood bank. While Jerry is getting his iron level and blood pressure checked by phlebotomist Lia (Brianne Howley), a heavily armed criminal gang raids the place and steals some very rare blood from the its refrigerator. As per an old Honolulu Star-Bulletin article and Lia in the show, this blood, Jk3-negative, is found in one in 10,000 people in Hawaii -- mainly Polynesians and Asians.
It's later determined that this blood is likely destined for some person who requires it after getting shot and doesn't want to go to the hospital, i.e., a criminal. But there is a problem with the gang's method and logic in stealing the blood. Within 15 minutes of their boss getting shot, the gang can figure out where this blood bank is and that it might contain his rare blood type. What are the chances of finding it in this particular clinic, even though we are on Oahu, where one would expect to find a fair number of Polynesian and Asian people? The fridge they stole the blood from does not look particularly large, to boot.
After checking all the local hospitals and clinics, Kono determines that the only likely place in the nearby area where the stolen blood might be used is The Kalihi Pet Clinic (seriously), and sure enough, that's where the bad guys are forcing the resident vet (George Russell) to remove a bullet from their leader (shades of S02E23). There is a nice firefight with the HPD SWAT team making fast work of the crooks when they try to flee the building with the vet and his receptionist (Sarah Hatfield) as hostages. Chin Ho talks and acts tough, knocking off the boss with a deadly accurate shot, while Kono kicks major ass, disabling one of the guy's henchmen with a knife to the chest.
The major crime of the week was concerned with a serial killer using pieces of women's bodies to reconstruct a replica of his girl friend who had perished in a plane crash in Uruguay three years before.
At the beginning of the show, some kids participating in "a horror campout" find a decaying body in the middle of nowhere. After HPD and Max's office investigate, three suitcases full of body parts are found, which turn out to contain the remains of FOUR women, each with some vital body part missing (arms, legs, head, torso). These bodies are shown in all their gory detail in Max's office, though the women's breasts are all covered up.
The first suspect in the killing, Mark Shepperd (Michael Graziadei), tracked down because his past reveals charges for animal cruelty (a distinguishing characteristic of serial killers) as well as an amulet containing his blood found on one of the bodies, is, of course, a red herring. McGarrett and Grover arrive at Shepperd's place just as he is committing suicide because his girl friend Tamara Craig left him several weeks before. The blood in the amulet was part of an exchange between the couple. Tamara disappeared after she was returning from Hong Kong where she was visiting one of her friends. After he is interrogated in the blue-lit room, Danno describes Shepperd as having "I'm-gonna-write a-really-terrible-love-song-about-the-girl kind of vibe."
Suspicion for the crime switches to airport baggage handler Charles Oakman, who had contact with Tamara as well as British national Kimberley Payne. Payne is tracked down because one of the suitcases containing bodies was a high-end brand belonging to her. Oakman has a degree in mortuary science and worked as an embalming technician at the East Memorial Funeral Home on Oahu. According to Max, some of the women's body parts had traces of formaldehyde on them, which is used in the funeral business.
When Grover and McGarrett go to Oakman's house, they find luggage tags from Craig and Payne, as well as two other women who also disappeared: German national Monica Segert and Amanda Lombard. A photo of Oakman's girl friend Maggie King, who also worked at the funeral home as a receptionist and assistant, is found in the apartment, which leads Grover and McGarrett to her cottage in "a really remote location" (Kipapa Gulch) which is where they figure Oakman is cutting up the bodies.
Predictably, because this is supposed to be a scary show, when they get there, the house is in darkness because the fuse box, which is located outside, has been meddled with. (This does not make sense -- how would Oakman know that Five-0 was going to arrive there and then intentionally disable the electricity?) In the basement, Oakman attacks McGarrett with a knife, stabbing at him like in the game Five Finger Fillet. How McGarrett survives this is literally difficult to see. It is not shown how Oakman is killed. In the basement, McGarrett gets to confront Oakman's handiwork, a mummified woman put together in the manner of Dr. Frankenstein.
I did not care for the show's finale. It should have ended at the point where Max was looking at the file of his biological mother, murdered by the serial killer named Trashman (see S02E20). At the beginning of the show, McGarrett was worried that Max would have difficulty dealing with this grisly case, but Max reassured him "I truly believe that my expertise in serial killers and their modus operandi will be a great asset to this investigation."
Instead, at the end, after Danno had delivered Gracie back to her mother with apologies all around, we got a mawkish scene with Danno and his son Charlie in the hospital giving out Hallowe'en goodies to other kids in the hospital, which at least one WWW site pointed out were really in the children's ward of a Honolulu hospital (identified in the show as Shriners Hospital for Children).
The production values of this episode, especially the photography and editing, were very high. On the other hand, the music was headache-inducing in many scenes.
MORE TRIVIA:
- After McGarrett and Danno find Shepperd hanging from the neck until almost dead, they rush him off to the blue-lit room for the usual intense we-don't-believe-you interrogation. HELLO! The guy almost died! Shouldn't he be taken to the hospital BEFORE getting grilled than after?
- Once again, Five-0 -- specifically McGarrett and Grover -- kick down doors when raiding Shepperd's and Oakman's houses. HELLO! What if the doors are booby-trapped?
- Jerry quite correctly identifies Lia as a "phlebotomist," meaning a person who draws blood like in a clinic or hospital, according to Wikipedia.
- If Oakman is "a guy who's making tips loading people's bags" at the airport, how does he then kidnap the women? The show does not say he is a taxi driver. It is said about one of the victims, that he "must have picked her up somewhere between the airport and the hotel."
- There is a problem with continuity later in the show. We see that it is getting close to sunset, then there is the usual touristy shot of people surfing, not at sunset. We cut to Kamekona's shrimp truck, also not at sunset. Immediately after, in the next scene, Chin and Kono are driving to the veterinary clinic, and it is dark out.
- Kono describes the "horror campout" as "an interactive adventure ... [where p]eople pay good money to spend the night outdoors while a bunch of actors in masks scare the hell out of them chasing them around."
- There is what looks like a goof when Grover is showing McGarrett the identification information of Lombard and Segert on his computer outside Oakman's house. Lombard's information is on the left, with Segert's on the right. Grover describes Lombard first, then he describes Segert, pulling up the same information for her on the right again.
- On the main page of Kimberley Payne's British passport at the bottom where there are typical machine-readable characters, Payne's name is on the first line, but on the second line where her passport number should appear, there is just <<<<< filler and no other information.
- Some dates and stuff. Payne's date of birth: 12 May 1987. Hotel confirmation number 29485793205. Passport dates from 01 March 2012 to 01 March 2022. Her English postal code is SW19DH in London. Oakman's date of birth: 07-18-1973. Segert's date of birth is 8-12-1988. She is 145 cm high, weighs 75 kg, has blonde hair and blue eyes. King's Social Security Number is 932-50-7838, her date of birth is 07-18-1973 (same as Oakman!).
- The veterinary clinic is located at 339 Alohalio Street.
- While Shepperd's girl friend was coming home from Hong Kong, her plane flew from Osaka to Honolulu, which seems odd -- surely there are International flights from Hong Kong to Hawaii.
- While the basement of Oakman's girl friend's place, like the rest of the house, is without power until Grover turns it back on (fuses would usually have to be screwed back in to the fuse box), there is bright light coming from outside through the basement windows. This is not from McGarrett's truck, which has its headlights turned off.
- After figuring out Oakman is the guilty party, McGarrett describes him as a "son of a bitch."
- I liked the scene where Kamekona rolled his eyes as Jerry explained about vampires.
- Has anyone ever done an analysis of how many of the first suspects to a crime on this show have been red herrings? You would figure that Five-0 would just ignore their first choice in every show because it is the wrong one!
McGarrett has a new girl friend. Her name is Lynn Downey and she is played by Sarah Carter, who is a mega-babe (and Canadian to boot, LOL).
Lynn was introduced to McGarrett by his prosecutor friend Ellie Clayton (see S05E05 and other fifth season shows). Lynn works for the Department of Human Services, trying to keep adolescent hard cases and repeat offenders out of jail, so she has something in common with McGarrett, who has had an interest like a social worker in youthful offenders on occasion.
For a first date, McGarrett is taking Lynn to islands 38 miles northwest of Oahu where he always wanted to go with his father, but never made it. Lynn, whose father was a commercial fisherman, says that her grandfather and brother used to take them there, and one island in particular (coincidentally the one she and McGarrett wind up at) was her favorite.
At the beginning of the show, Grover wonders if this date is a good idea, and whether Lynn would rather just go out for coffee (something later echoed by Lynn herself).
When McGarrett and Lynn arrive at this particular island, the two of them go snorkeling in the waters nearby and then explore the place, taking selfies of each other.
Normally, I am not too crazy about this kind of romantic baloney on Five-Zero, but this was nicely done, and, let's face it, McGarrett needs to have some slack cut after his seemingly terminated relationship with Catherine.
But things soon get kind of dumb, as McGarrett and Lynn come across an airplane in the forest. According to McGarrett, "This thing is intact ... I mean, it's pristine. There's no way it could have crash-landed here." This is all very weird, aside from any similarities to "Lost." How the plane got there is indeed a big fat mystery, especially since there is no landing strip on the island.
Suddenly the plane is riddled with bullets from a machine gun fired by Dennis Logan (James C. Burns), a Boston mob boss who has been living on this island for some time and doesn't like visitors. McGarrett and Lynn manage to escape. You might think that Logan's accuracy rivals that of Five-0 when shooting at escaping suspects, but according to one web page, "[A] problem with automatic weapons is their lack of accuracy. Firearms usually have a ‘kick’ when they are fired. This recoil affects accuracy, accuracy is what kills the enemy, not volume of fire or the sound of bullets. A machine gun is inherently inaccurate when fired."
McGarrett and Lynn manage to make their way unscathed back to the shore, where they find their boat has been torched. McGarrett decides to go back to the plane to see if there is anything there they can use. On their way there, they climb up a waterfall where Logan attacks them at the top, injuring Lynn. McGarrett throws him down into the lake below the falls. Logan vanishes, but, of course, he is not dead.
Upon arriving at the plane, McGarrett suddenly becomes a fount of knowledge after looking at a piece of paper with some flight plan-related information including a date of 1/9/11. He remembers that Logan was being extradited from Manila four years ago (so does Lynn) and that the plane transporting him to the federal prison at Terminal Island near Long Beach, California disappeared near Oahu and was never found. There are numerous questions about all this, discussed below.
McGarrett finds an Emergency Location Transmitter, but the battery is dead. Incredulously, he says that considering Logan and his accomplice have radios (McGarrett heard Logan talking to someone using this method earlier), there must be a power source nearby and he wants to hook up these ELTs to this.
Shortly after, McGarrett and Lynn find themselves near the water opposite a beach where this accomplice, a woman named Vickie Kelly (Danielle Rayne) arrives via a Zodiac boat. McGarrett distracts the two of them by shooting a flare from the plane into a storage shed at Logan's camp, and they start to pursue him while Lynn drags the Zodiac boat from the camp back to the shore. Logan is no dummy about all this, though, and goes back to follow Lynn, who he captures. But McGarrett captures Vickie, and when Logan brings Lynn to the beach, McGarrett gets the drop on him and they take the pair back to Honolulu where some federal marshals are only too happy to escort both Logan and Vickie to jail, charging Logan with murder and bribing federal agents to help him faking his death.
The crime of the week revolved around Jesse Frontera (Jake Nutty), the quarterback for the Kukui High School football team, throwing a championship game against Henry J. Kaiser High (the latter, unlike Kukui, a real Honolulu school). Jesse's father Kai (Gibi del Barrio) has been kidnapped by Oliver Zelenko (Gregory Albrecht), a dope dealer who has fallen on hard times. Zelenko has made a $500,000 bet on Kukui losing. A bet of this size seems unbelievable, even if Jesse is a hotshot player who has interested scouts from major teams watching him. Chin Ho is acquainted with Jesse, probably because before his junior year, Jesse shattered all of Chin's football records.
After the frustrated Jesse, kicked out of the game by the coach, is visited in the visitors' changing room by a couple of thugs, Sean Roberts (Johnny Rey Diaz) and Armando Diaz (Manuel Eduardo Ramirez), Chin Ho and Grover, who are both at the game with Kono, take matters into their own hands, and escort these two guys back to the blue-lit room after finding about the kidnapping plot from Jesse.
There, Chin Ho gets very physical with Diaz, badly punching him in the face, something we would normally expect to see from McGarrett. Kono, on the other hand, acts kind of robotic towards Roberts, who laughs at her. Diaz finally spills the beans about where Jesse's father is being held. Chin and Grover high-tail it there in Chin's Mustang as Kono returns to the game with a squad of HPD cops. (Yet more questions below.) Chin and Grover arrive at Zelenko's place just as Jesse's father is about to be executed and blast all the bad guys, conveniently avoiding the father.
The show ends with Jesse celebrating his win and McGarrett and Lynn walking home from the dock, saying things like "Whoa, that was some first date!", which was kind of cute. I am annoyed to see that Lynn is not appearing in the next two episodes, though. Hopefully they will NOT make her a member of Five-0.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Aside from the fact that the plane being used to take Logan to the mainland landed on this island in the middle of nowhere virtually unscathed, it is really unbelievable that he has been living there for the last four years. Living conditions would be far from ideal. As well, what happened to the agents who were with him on the plane? Did they have help from other people on Oahu or wherever who helped them get off the island? After this, did the agents just vanish into thin air? Was this all planned in advance? As well, what is Vickie's role in all this? Has she been smuggling food to Logan for the last four years with her Zodiac boat? Once again, there are far too many questions concerning something which is totally illogical at the beginning of a show (the plane), yet the whole plot must proceed from that point.
- The time frame for solving the Oahu-based crime of the week is ridiculous. Jesse gets kicked out of the game after 7:14 in the first quarter. Yet Five-0 can bust the two thugs, take them back to Five-0 headquarters, grill them extensively, and Kono can get back to the game before there are 15 minutes or so left in the game. Grover and Chin Ho are driving to Zelenko's house in Chin's car at this point. Grover is watching the game in the car on his computer, which is seemingly being broadcast on local TV. There is a big goof here, because he looks at the screen with 14:11 left in the game and only 3 seconds later, the time suddenly changes to 13:37 left, i.e., 34 seconds have elapsed in 3 seconds. (But there is a goof within a goof, because according to the Wikipedia article about American football, "In high school football, 12 minute quarters are usually played.") At this point, Chin tells Grover they are 30 miles away ("half way there") from Ka‘a‘awa, where Jesse's father is being held. (According to Google maps, this is a drive of 24 miles from Five-0 headquarters, which would take about 45 minutes under normal driving conditions.) Assuming Chin's distance is correct and we are around the 13:30 point left in the game, he would have to drive around 128.5 miles an hour to get there on time, if we include the 30 seconds or so after the game is finished when the bad guys are preparing to execute Jesse's father. At the very end, Chin has 5 miles to go in 90 seconds, which means he would have to drive 200 miles an hour. To top all this off, when the DEA sends information about Zelenko to Grover as Chin is driving, Grover says Zelenko has a place in Ka‘a‘awa, but the DEA don't say what its address is, suggesting that Chin and Grover don't know exactly where they are going.
- The top speed of the original Ford Mustangs (Chin's appears to be either a 1965 or 1966 coupe) was in the range of 105 to 110 MPH. A 1967 Shelby Mustang was reportedly capable of speeds over 150 mph and in one case actually reached 170 mph during a demonstration by Carroll Shelby himself. But, according to Five-O car expert Michael Timothy, "It is not physically possible for Chin's car to be an authentic Shelby because Chin's car is a notchback and ALL Shelbys of '65 to '66 vintage are fastbacks."
- Further information about the time frame of the football game, based on screen shots of the scoreboard and Grover's computer, can be seen by clicking on this link.
- Todd, who is not only a professional poker player, but also had one of the very earliest Five-O WWW sites, had this to say about the $500,000 bet in my site's discussion forum: "There is no way a bet of that size would ever be taken for a high school game, for the exact reason that it's easy to get a player to influence the results. (Also, bookies rarely take bets of that size on any game, unless they have action on "the other side" to cover it.) But putting that little hole aside, even if the $500k bet was taken, there's no way that the guy on the other side of that bet would allow two thugs to intimidate the quarterback to throw the game! He would be just as interested in the results, and would likely not pay the bet if the QB played uncharacteristically badly!"
- The island where Logan is living looks like it's covered with a lot of foliage from immediately above and when seen from above far away. But when McGarrett and Lynn are standing on the shore, there are huge rocky cliffs near them. The scenery looks very similar to that in the classic Five-O's ninth season episode To Die in Paradise (one of that series' very worst shows), where it is supposed to be Kauai.
- When Lynn is pulling the Zodiac from the camp, there is no outboard motor in it, but when she arrives at the beach, there is one, which she is trying to lift up when Logan catches up to her. According to Brendan Keys, manager of GA Checkpoint Yamaha, a Vancouver-area store which sells Zodiacs and outboard motors, the boat would weigh about 150 pounds and a 20 horsepower fourstroke engine would weigh about 120 pounds, a total of 270 pounds. Whether Lynn could really drag this boat as far as she does is questionable.
- When Chin Ho tells Kono outside the change room to keep an eye on Roberts and Diaz, she is not wearing either her holster or her Five-0 badge. But shortly after this, when Grover sits down between the two hoods, telling them that Kono, who is standing behind them, is "an excellent shot" who "can hit a pimple on an elephant's ass from a hundred yards away," she has her hand on the gun on her right hip, and is wearing the badge.
- Twitter user @AboutAlexO, who has a WWW page for the new Five-0, also noticed some goofs: 1) When McGarrett and his girl friend are going to the island at the beginning of the show, you can see someone, presumably a crew member, stand up in the boat next to them; 2) As Grover sits down between the two hoods at the football game and starts munching on their popcorn, he has a cigar in his hand. This cigar disappears and then reappears.
- The teaser consists of the scene where Logan attacks McGarrett and Lynn at the top of the waterfall. It's unusual to see a teaser excerpting something from later on in the show like this.
- When McGarrett and Lynn are hiding from Logan, McGarrett uses his knife as a mirror, but it seems to be at totally the wrong angle. Surely Logan could see the two of them -- they are just behind some bushes.
- As McGarrett is rinsing Lynn's injuries suffered during the attack by the waterfall with coconut water, he tells her that during World War II, this liquid was used instead of glucose to treat injuries. According to some web pages, this is debatable.
- In one of the show's earliest episodes (S01E03), Kukui High School was also connected with a crime.
- When Logan tells McGarrett (via radio) that he is going to kill Lynn, McGarrett replies, "I just met her -- what do I care?" A big deal is not made out of this later, probably because Lynn understood McGarrett's strategy.
- After he captures Lynn, Logan yells out McGarrett's name. How does he knows this? Does Logan have the same kind of encyclopedic knowledge about McGarrett that McGarrett has about him?
- Lynn's Jeep's license plate is LDI 407. Chin's Mustang has the license number LGO 217.
This episode was yet another exercise aimed at fans who approach the show with an attitude of "turn off your brain while watching." There was a complicated plot featuring three different story arcs. I didn't like it very much. The overriding theme of the show seemed to be "all roads lead to Gabriel."
The crime of the week began with Hank Weber (Kristoffer Polaha) and his attractive (read: large-breasted) accomplice Katie Dawson (Natalie Dawson) fleecing people of cameras, jewelry, luggage and more at Honolulu Airport. The way the two were skipping through the crowds in a fast-edited scene brought to mind the movie musical "Oliver" (based on Charles Dickens' book Oliver Twist, where the term "The Artful Dodger," the title of this episode in Hawaiian, originated). I expected the couple to break out into song, but as it was, the background music was The Hawaiian War Chant.
The wisecracking Weber was one very annoying character, annoyingly written and annoyingly acted, so annoying, in fact, that when Danno said to McGarrett, "I never thought I'd meet anybody more frustrating than you ... On irritation level ... you two are very similar," I agreed wholeheartedly.
After Weber and Katie reached their hotel, she continued scamming, seducing men to come up to their room. Weber suddenly appeared, pretending to be her husband, causing the men to flee without their pants and wallets. During the third of these trysts, some masked guy suddenly appeared and shot both Katie and her mark dead.
After getting the call, McGarrett and Danno were quick to figure out who Weber and the dead Katie really were. But this is where things started to get complicated.
Interrogated in the blue-lit room, Weber said that Katie pawned all the items they stole soon after they left the airport. Although they were relieving people of their goods in the blink of an eye, Weber was able to pick out the most of the victims from mug shots which were supplied from surveillance cameras and the Supercomputer. Of the 12 victims, 11 had alibis. The twelfth, Andy Kaelani, "a guy with a shady background," according to Danno, from whom a digital camera was stolen, therefore became the major suspect in Katie's shooting.
There were already some big questions surfacing at this point: How would Kaelani know who stole his camera or where to find Weber and Katie in Honolulu? How would he have found out about the pawn shop to recover the camera?
McGarrett and Danno and with them, inexplicably, Weber, visited the Waiwai Nui Pawn Shop in Chinatown. The owner's apartment was located above the store, where they found him shot to death and frozen in the refrigerator, adding to the suspicion surrounding Kaelani as a suspect.
McGarrett and Danno then went to Kaelani's place, also inexplicably with Weber, who sat in their car, waiting. Once again they kick a door down without anticipating what might be on the other side. They find the missing camera. Outside, Weber supposedly sees Kaelani approaching the place (how convenient that Kaelani is not in the house), and shoots him dead with "Kaelani's" gun, which is the same gun used to kill Katie. (But this is not as it seems ... see below.)
As Weber tells the Five-0 duo about what happened, and McGarrett and Danno thank him for saving their lives, I immediately said "This is bullshit, this is all a setup and Weber is the bad guy." And guess what ... that is what happened!
After Max thaws out the pawn shop owner's frozen body and determines the man was killed four hours before Katie, the solution to the case becomes more solid (no pun intended).
Back at Five-0 headquarters, the team looks at what's on the memory card in the camera, but it is just a bunch of tourist pictures. Grover, having a McGarrett-type brainstorm, suggests that it's not the pictures on the camera which are of significance, to which McGarrett, having a brainstorm of his own, says "There's got to be something embedded on this." Kono takes the memory card to Jerry for analysis. (But hasn't Jerry in the past relied on computer geek friends for this kind of help?)
Anyway, to keep this review from reaching the hideous length of last week's, let me sum up what REALLY happened:
Some time after checking into their hotel room, Weber went to the pawn shop in the blue BMW convertible he rented with one of the cards stolen at the airport. McGarrett says this was to "make it look like Katie drove there," based on the GPS information from the car, though it's pretty obvious to anyone on the street or nearby (including cameras, if they exist) that it is NOT Katy driving ... that is, if anyone cares.
I am assuming here that Katie originally went to the pawn shop as Weber said when he talked to Five-0 after her death and that he went back later on his own, despite there seemingly being no time between Carrie's seduction of men number two and three. If Weber went there with the stolen items to plant them, there is no indication that they were recorded by the pawn shop owner in his books.
Weber then went to a second hotel room he and Katie had booked to use after doing the "married man" scams (because, as Grover says, "you don't sleep where you steal") and made it look like Kealani was there by trashing the place. (But how would Kaelani know about this location?) Weber then went back to the hotel where Katie was "doing it" with the third man and shot them both.
Following this, Weber went to Kealani's house and planted the gun he used to kill Katie outside behind some bushes and planted the camera inside the house, since Kealani seemed to be in his garage or somewhere outside the house itself.
When McGarrett and Danno arrived at Kealani's house, Weber retrieved the gun, shot Kealani (who conveniently still happened to be in his garage, away from McGarrett and Danno), dragged his body in front of the door which McGarrett had kicked down. When McGarrett and Danno came out of the house after hearing the shots, Weber acted like he had just saved their lives because Kealani was going into the house with a gun.
After Five-0 figures out, just like me, that this was all B.S., Weber gets another trip to the blue-lit room where Danno tells him that he's going to be soon rotting in a cell for a very long time. The ever-resourceful Weber has an ace up his sleeve, though, saying that he will testify against the people who he has been working for (huh?). Unbelievably, everything that Weber has done so far was to get Five-0 to insert the memory card into the Supercomputer because it contains a virus, presumably uncovered by Jerry, which "allows you [Weber? Is he a computer genius now?] to spy on our mainframe," according to McGarrett. Doesn't the Supercomputer have some kind of anti-virus protection? Good grief! And who has Weber been working for? GABRIEL WAINCROFT!!! Weber says "an associate," Porter (the guy that Adam unsuccessfully tortured to reveal Gabriel's location in a previous episode), put him in contact with Gabriel, who wired him half a million dollars to start and "Said [Gabriel] was gonna pay [him - Weber] five million when the job was done."
They release Weber so he can cooperate in bringing Gabriel down (though we know there will be serious complications in doing this) and intend to plant false information that the computer virus can relay to the appropriate people.
The episode was bookended with scenes featuring Adam and Kono. At the beginning, after a 1:07 "previously on" segment, Adam is being taken to the Makua Kea'au Forest Reserve to be executed by Goro Shioma's henchman Tom Bishop (Steve Bastoni), who is fed up waiting for Adam to figure out where Gabriel is. Adam escapes, in a very clumsily-staged scene where he kicks Bishop backwards. Bishop falls over some "associate" accompanying him, who then starts firing his pistol up in the air as he struggles to get to his feet, rather than down a nearby hill where Adam is escaping. Adam later breaks this pursuing thug's neck and then hits the also pursuing Bishop with a tree branch which causes Bishop to conveniently fall backwards on a sharp stick that penetrates through his chest. Adam shoots him a couple of times for good measure.
Back at his house, Adam tries to get out of town, but is captured by Shioma's men and taken to meet the yakuza boss, now in Honolulu. Gabriel shows up there, telling him that he paid off Adam's debt to Shioma (Akira Hirayama) and then some. Now Gabriel is working with Shioma. There is no indication how this affects the relationship between Adam and Gabriel; obviously Adam will owe Gabriel "something."
At the end of the show, Adam and Kono go to HPD headquarters, where Adam turns himself in for the murder of Bishop and the other guy in the forest. It should be interesting to see how this plays out, especially since Adam was totally acting in self-defense, but there are no witnesses!
The much-touted guest star for the show was Julie Benz, playing Inspector Abby Dunn, member of a task force created by the San Francisco police department. She is sworn in to Five-0 on a temporary basis because she is going to be "shadowing us [Five-0] for a couple of weeks." This upsets Jerry, who petulantly mutters "She's been in Hawaii 15 minutes and she's already getting sworn in. I've been here for years." Fortunately, Jerry's appearance on the show was very brief. Chin Ho gets to show the blonde Abby around town, leading to speculation that she will be a new girl friend for Chin, rather than McGarrett, who hopefully will be preoccupied with Lynn (see last episode).
She and Chin end up at a crime scene at Pier 39, where several men are found executed inside a container from Shanghai, and four containers from the shipment are missing. It later turns out the dead men were all ex-Chinese military, wanted in connection with illicit arms dealing. There is a suggestion in some Internet forums that there is a connection to the case that Abby is working on, but there is nothing mentioned about this in the show itself. As per McGarrett's instructions, Chin and Abby just happen to end up there, sort of like when Grover took Danno's mother on a tour of "what he does in a typical day."
At the end of the show, while driving with Abby, Chin is pulled over by Gabriel and some of his gang. Gabriel tells Chin that he was the one who was dealing with the guns, that they are "already off the island" and that he "sold them to very motivated buyers." Gabriel reminds Chin that he offered him a part in his criminal enterprises, but Chin refused. Gabriel says that he now has the yakuza backing his every move. Chin tells Gabriel to take a hike, that he is going to wipe the stupid grin off his face soon enough. Whether Chin or Abby make any attempt to note down the license plates of Gabriel's little convoy is not known.
The show was directed by Joel Surnow, described by executive producer in a Tweet as "my mentor," because of their association with "24," which Surnow co-created and also executive produced (Lenkov was co-executive producer for season four of this show). Surnow's IMDb credits list him as director for only two other shows: a movie called Small Time and 3 episodes of the TV series La Femme Nikita.
Julie Benz's appearance was disappointing; her part was boringly written, but she did the best she could with it. Throwing yet another major female character into the show, especially after Sarah Carter's appearance the week before, was asking too much, I guess.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Abby refers to two of her colleagues back in San Francisco, inspectors Stone and Keller. OK, we get the reference to the two characters on The Streets of San Francisco played by Karl Malden and Michael Douglas ... DUH! Hopefully a reboot of this classic series is not in the cards, as has been suggested by comments on some Internet forums regarding this reference.
- While the three men Katie seduces are "married men" as per the end credits, the first man removes his ring when he sees Katie at the bar. The second of them is still wearing his ring while they are fooling around. The third man doesn't have a ring at all.
- The flag seen on the wall of the pawn shop owner's apartment, according to this WWW page is a historical Hawaiian flag, which once was the flag of the Hawaiian admiralty and flown at high seas. The flag survived and it became ke hae o ka mana o nā kānaka maoli, the “flag of the native Hawaiians’ power” (also known as the “kānaka maoli flag” or “Hawaiian solidarity flag”). - thanks to Twitter user @brenda_stlouis.
- Lynn, McGarrett's new girl friend from last week's show, is mentioned briefly when McGarrett gets a phone call and Danno asks if it is her (it is not).
- It looks like the Chinese men connected with the illegal arms were executed inside the container, judging by blood spatter on the walls. If so, this would be very dangerous because of ricocheting bullets!
- The license number of Weber's "rented" BMW is KR3 667.
Danno, who, according to McGarrett, "minored in business at Seton Hall," takes over the job of Elliott Thomas, an economics professor at Oahu State University who is found murdered and partially devoured by pigs on the Murato Ranch in Kaneohe. Because there are limits as to how much Danno, now known as Professor Ben Jeffries, can "relate" to his students, his nephew Eric is assigned to assume a "college idiot persona" and attend Danno's classes in order to find out who "had it in" for Thomas, a teacher who was universally despised by his students on some rate-a-prof web site.
Danno has to contend with at least one of the women in the class wanting to get better acquainted. Purring that she finds Danno "so approachable," Casey Lehrer (Chelsea Ricketts) slides up on his desk in a ridiculous scene where she assumes a pose like some "dame" in a 1940s movie. Considering this is 2015, it would be more realistic if she just locked the door and started removing her clothes.
Even though the pigs were dining on Thomas's remains, thanks to Fusion, a real wireless handheld biometric system similar to the devices used in restaurants for customers to pay their bill, Max is able to almost immediately figure out Thomas's identity after finding a thumb in the pigs' pen. Thomas's remains, as is typical for the show, are depicted in nauseating detail.
Because the bullet which Max figured killed Thomas via a gunshot wound to the heart is missing, and because "swines [sic] will consume their own excrement," Jerry is assigned to keep an eye on the animals and watch for evidence. While reading to them from a copy of Charlotte's Web, a famous children's novel about a pig, one of the beasts poops the bullet out, conveniently visible on top of some shit, and Jerry exclaims, "Take that, Warren Commission!"
This crime of the week was pretty boring and ended around the 38 minute mark, usually a bad sign. More clues about Thomas's murder emerge.
Someone threw a brick through a window at Thomas's house recently, and fingerprints on a note attached to it lead Five-0 to Brandon Aquino (Micah J.K. Ramo), a star basketball player from the school who was doing badly in Thomas's class and therefore in danger of being cut from the team. When confronted, Aquino starts pointing fingers at the team's coach Diggs (Jason Quinn), but Diggs says that despite going to the university's board of trustees and complaining that if the kid was cut, the college would lose the championship -- which resulted in Thomas getting fired, this was Thomas's last year at the college anyway, so there would be no reason to have him killed. End of red herring #1.
It's subsequently discovered via analysis of Thomas's financial records that he recently re-mortgaged his house to spend $145,000 on the Dashing Diva Nail Salon which has hardly any business and the previous owner was foreclosed on. Not only was Thomas able to pay back the mortgage on the place, but he was collecting a $3,500 weekly salary. Alfie Tucker (Samuel Larsen), one of Thomas's students, is an employee at the salon, which is suspected as a front for laundering money. Eric tells Danno that Tucker is a campus dope dealer, so Five-0 figure there is some connection here and the nail salon is actually a grow-op.
When they go to the salon, McGarrett and Grover find Tucker about to torch the place. In the blue-lit room Tucker says Thomas, his "business partner" wanted him to "expand the business" and that didn't go over too well with some of their competitors in the drug trade. One of these "competitors," a tough looking dude (Aikue Kalima) is later dragged into the room. He and his "crew" are revealed to have no connection to the drug business and no knowledge of either Tucker or the professor, though he brings some topicality into the conversation, saying "You talkin' pakalōlō? Braddah, kush is about to be legal. Why waste time with that when this whole island's a garden?" Looks like the end of red herring #2.
But then ballistics connects the pooped-out bullet to a Beretta nine-millimeter registered to the Honolulu Firearms & Range. When McGarrett and Danno go to this place, Tucker's picture is on the wall, holding a gun, and it turns out that he "accidentally borrowed" the gun in question during the time frame when the professor was murdered. Q.E.D.!
By the way, I was sure that when Tucker started talking about his "competition," that the camera was going to focus closely on his mouth and he would say "GABRIEL WAINCROFT."
Adam's ongoing saga was touched on briefly when Kono told everyone that after confessing to the murders of two of Shioma's henchmen including Tom Bishop in the previous show, the prosecuting attorney offered Adam a deal of 24 months in jail despite the fact that Adam was acting in self-defense, trying to escape from being killed. Kono says "It's an opportunity to lock up the son of a Yakuza boss on a double homicide. Self-defense or not, they can still charge him with criminal possession of a weapon." (What are they talking about, the gun belonging to Bishop that Adam used to shoot Bishop dead?) Does this mean that Adam won't be appearing on the show any more, assuming that it does not go to an eighth season (augh)?
The relationship between Chin Ho and San Francisco Inspector Abby Dunn (Julie Benz) proceeded at a snail's pace, with her observing at crime scenes and Chin opening a car door for her and Julie telling him that his "chivalry" reminded her of her father. BORING! Whether Julie is going to be around after a break of repeated episodes for the next couple of weeks is a good question. Hopefully she will be given better dialogue to utter than "So we have to wait for the pigs to poop the slug?"
As if there wasn't enough to fill the hour, Nahele Huikala, the kid who McGarrett took under his wing in previous shows, is having emotional turmoil because his father Kaili (James Duval), who he hasn't seen since he was 8 years old when the old man began serving an 8-year prison sentence, has been released recently and wants custody of him. This was a good excuse for the soundtrack to switch to "sad music mode" for scenes between both McGarrett and Nahele and McGarrett and the father where the supposedly rehabiliated dad said things like "I'm a different man now." Kekoa Kekumano, the actor playing Nahele, looks a LOT older than 16, and I'm sure the character could take care of himself. McGarrett quite correctly senses that the kid is not telling him something, and we find out at the end of the show that the father was involved in a murder years before, which the kid witnessed (sort of). Amazingly, we didn't have yet another beers on the beach ending. The show ended with the victim's body being dug up (and without connecting THAT crime to Gabriel as well).
MORE TRIVIA:
- At the beginning of the show, a couple of guys are shown "wiping the servers" of the Supercomputer to presumably remove traces of the virus introduced during the last episode. Hank Weber, the "charming con man" from that show is found murdered at the beginning of this one, stabbed 28 times in jail (supposedly with some connection to Gabriel). In a photo, Weber's face is all white, looking like a Japanese Kabuki actor, maybe because all the blood drained out of his body.
- Seton Hall, which Danno attended, is a private Roman Catholic university in South Orange, New Jersey.
- Eric becomes student "Eric Maloney" at Oahu State. His student number is 41399249, and his student card expires 6/12/16.
- This episode can't make any claims that this is the first time pigs eating murder victims have been seen on TV. A Google search reveals that this kind of plot device was employed on Criminal Minds, CSI and Deadwood.
- Like in the recent football-related show, Kono found herself in the middle of sexist blather between other members of the team. This time it was between Danno and Eric, with Eric saying, "If I were to find myself in a compromising position with one of these coeds and maintaining my cover requires me to satisfy her sexually, that's cool, right?" Kono interjects "Can I smack him?" The three of the them are in the Takahamo Cleaning & Restoration surveillance van which is parked in some location that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the college. You have to wonder about some Kono's dialogue, though. She says "you're gonna have to get in with these kids, you know, embed yourself, and find out who may have had it in for Professor Thomas.
- Thomas is 6'0", weighs 250 pounds, and lives at 26 Pukiawa Place, Honolulu 96818.
- Tiffany Barber, the student that Eric gets hot pants over, was played by Anela Iokia. A look at her Facebook page suggests that she played one of the Victoria's Secret models (uncredited) in S03E09.
- There was another unnecessary "previously on" segment in the teaser.
Another mundane episode in a season which so far has been full of them, and judging by what little we know about the remaining shows, such as the return of "beloved characters" Aunt Deb (Carol Burnett) and Danno's mother (Melanie Griffith), I predict things aren't going to get much better.
There seemed to be some closure to the Kono/Adam soap opera, but I wouldn't put any money on it. Adam finally took a deal which will have him go to jail for 18 months, with unknown perils awaiting him. Kono spent most of the episode having an emotional breakdown, and the finale of the show had the entire ohana showing up to comfort her at the gates of Halawa after Adam was taken inside, with Kono looking very sad.
Kono's usual role, including rattling off exposition, was taken over by Chin Ho's will-she/won't-she girlfriend Abby Dunn, who followed Chin like a puppy dog to crime scenes. Abby's contribution to the show was as dull as dishwater, showing that the writers really have no idea what to do with this character.
The crime of the week was a bit better than usual. It revolved around a World Welterweight Boxing match at the Blaisdell Arena between local contender Luke Nakano (Lewis Tan) and undefeated champion Devon Haynes (Harold House Moore).
Luke's brother Ben (Joseph Kim), who had a shady past including cocaine and other bad things, was found beaten to death after an altercation with Haynes at the weigh-in on the night before the fight. Thanks to the usual far-fetched forensics, Max determined that a fragment of a beer bottle smashed on Ben's head contained a seasonal pumpkin microbrew which was sold in one particular bar in Honolulu, which, of course, Ben had visited in the company of a couple of shady individuals after the altercation.
One of the shady individuals paid the bar tab with a hundred dollar bill, the serial number of which matched money stolen in a recent armored car robbery. With the crime lab on a roll, a fingerprint on a piece of glass from the broken bottle led to Juru Katsu (Kelemete Misipeka), a "Halawa graduate [who] was in there for extortion, robbery, assault" and who was also a friend of Gabriel Waincroft, both of whom were indicted, along with 12 other people on a RICO case ten years before which collapsed when the government's main witness was found murdered.
A tasteless scene followed, where McGarrett was seen dragging Katsu behind a Jet Ski to get him to co-operate, similar to the first season show where McGarrett dangled a suspect over the edge of a roof. Danno, talking to Abby, actually flashes back to this, mentioning it during a discussion of "full immunity and means," suggesting that she probably doesn't want to take this technique back to San Francisco with her.
Katsu coughs up a confession that Gabriel wanted him to get Ben's VIP pass to the fight, either by paying him to get the pass or killing him. After coming up with the latter solution, the pass then ends up in the hands of three Mexican hoods from the Culiacan Cartel who Danno says are "definitely part of Gabriel's crew," and, sure enough, surveillance cameras show Tomas Rojas, Jose Delarosa and Mica Barello entering the arena, even though you would suspect that this pass was only for ONE person. After Jerry finds information that among the other VIPs at the event are yakuza big shot (and Adam's father's former partner) Goro Shioma, Akela Makuakane, acting boss of the Makuakane family and acting boss of the Triads, Wong Yu, McGarrett has a brainstorm that these three guys are all going to be wiped out by the Mexicans during the boxing match as part of Gabriel's big plan to take over crime in the islands.
Giving new meaning to the expression "time compression," Five-0 goes into action and arrives at the arena, where Luke is taking a major beating until he gets inspired by thoughts of his late brother and being ridiculed by Haynes. The three heavily armed hoods are all neutralized, but not before Shioma is wounded. While being transported to hospital, Gabriel suddenly appears in a ridiculous deus ex machina scene where he shoots up the ambulance and knocks off the yakuza boss, with whom he made a deal with only recently. Seriously, there is a limit as to how bad Gabriel can be and how "big" Hawaii is to accommodate his criminal empire.
Trying to avoid advance publicity for this show, which on at least one WWW site included a photo of McGarrett dressed in boxer's trunks, I was dreading that it would somehow rehash elements of Ka Hakaka Maika’i (The Good Fight), the sixth show of season two, where McGarrett particpated in a MMA fight for charity. But, much to his female fans' annoyance, no doubt, McGarrett did not participate in fighting (other than punching out one of Shioma's bodyguards) and kept his working duds on.
On the positive side, the show avoided the usual beery ending, and the production values, especially the photography and the editing of the boxing match itself, were outstanding. Even the music with its slow chordal Lost-like passages accompanying Kono and Adam was effective, though we have heard this kind of underscore many times before.
MORE TRIVIA:
- There is a "previously on Five-0" beginning to the show which segues into what is happening now at about the 39 second mark.
- In a stepping-outside-the-cargument debating which is better, MMA or boxing, McGarrett makes reference to MMA fighter Randy Couture taking out Jim Toney in 3:19 in a 2010 match. This violates some kind of continuum, because Couture was featured in two episodes of the show (including the second show of this season) as serial arsonist Jason Duclair!
- Larry Manetti reappears as Nicky "The Kid" DeMarco, who has taken on the role of Luke's manager. After they find out about Ben's death, Nicky wants to call the match off, but Luke will have none of this, uttering the usual boxing movie clichés like "[M]y brother had his faults, but I loved him more than anyone on this Earth. We talked about bringing home that belt. He wanted this for me. You know what he said? He said the only person that could stop me is myself. I'm not gonna let that happen."
- The guest list for the fight includes Sam Denning, Hawaii State Governor (not seen since S04E08); Nathaniel Wiley, Mayor of Honolulu; Austin Landry, Hawaii Senator District 1, Kimiko Tanner, Hawaii Senator District 1; and the following "celebrities": Abigail Foxworth; Eva Munn; Tricia Humphreys; Bryan Durham; Kenneth Grenier; Terrance Malloy (this is the name of Marlon Brando's character, a failed prize fighter, in On the Waterfront); Percy Rodden.
- To achieve inner tranquility, Adam, with Kono nearby, is shown praying at the Byodo-In Temple, a well-known Oahu landmark which was featured in several episodes of the old Five-O and at least one other episode of the reboot.
- When he tells McGarrett about the crime bosses who are potential victims of Gabriel's scheme, Jerry pronounces "yakuza" with the emphasis on the second syllable.
- When Five-0 arrives at the arena, McGarrett tells Abby to "find the control room, get up on the cameras, [and] see if you can get eyes on Gabriel's people" despite the fact that the place holds almost nine thousand, not to mention there has been no suggestion anywhere that she is familiar with this kind of equipment.
- I found the business with Max showing up wearing a yarmulke and holding a menorah to celebrate Hanukkah and explaining the holiday to everyone a major Puh-leeze Moment (yes, I know the story about Max being adopted).
- While technically speaking this was a Christmas show by virtue of its broadcast date, this holiday was only mentioned briefly by Danno, who told Haynes, "[A]fter what we saw on TV [during the weigh-in], it doesn't look like the two of you'll be exchanging Christmas gifts, you know?"
Three stars is for the story -- including lots of back story -- involving Kamekona, whose full name is finally revealed to be Kamekona Tupuola. The show featured very good acting by Taylor Wily!
The show began with some present-day tourist shots accompanied by Chingy's Right Thurr. Without any logical segue, things flash back 13 years to when Kamekona and his partner Levi Sosa (Maurice Compte) met with two dope dealers, one of whom was Antone “Remy” Remiel (Henry Lee). Remiel disrespects Kamekona, but before anything can happen, Chin Ho and HPD bust in and arrest everyone.
We later find out Kamekona was a criminal informant working for Chin. After a previous search at Kamekona's mother's house had turned up two bricks of heroin connected with his brother Kanoa (Sam Puefua), the Big Guy was persuaded by Chin to help bring down Sosa.
Following the bust, Kamekona ends up in jail for five years, released after two for "good behavior," actually because of the deal with Chin. Kanoa is presumably cleared of any charges as per the deal and disappears to the mainland.
Flash forward to the present. Sosa, who has been serving his jail sentence up until recently, suddenly shows up at Kamekona's shrimp shack, saying he wants the two of them to resume their life of crime. Kamekona says no dice, that he is a changed man. But when Chin tells Kamekona that Ramiel, who also changed for the better, has been found dead and Sosa is the likely killer, Kamekona is convinced to help Chin again, to put away Sosa for good.
Kono, Chin and Grover follow Sosa and the wired Kamekona around in the Takahamo Restoration truck and at one point lose the tail, which results in some tense moments before they catch up to the two in a hotel room where they are meeting with Kanoa. There, Sosa explains that prior to getting out of jail, he "launched an enterprise," hooking Kanoa up with a connect in Cali, Colombia, "working the distribution lines so there'd be product to move when I was released." Sosa wants Kanoa to shoot his snitch brother dead, which, fortunately, he is able to resist, instead knocking off Sosa just as the Five-0 trio break into the room at the last minute.
We also get a glimpse into Kamekona's early life in 1987, when he and his family (mother and brother) were living in a tent on the beach and he and his cousin Flippa were selling bogus souvenirs to tourists until he was made an offer he couldn't refuse by an equally young Sosa.
Elsewhere, Kono visited Adam in Halawa, and there was the usual sad chordal music in the background. Things got ridiculous at the end of the show as Gabriel, amazingly not recognized by anyone in Halawa, showed up in the prison visiting room to see Adam. Threatening Adam with Kono's death if Adam spilled the beans about his presence, Gabriel then asked Adam for help with some unspecified matter which will presumably be resolved in a future episode.
Oh yeah, there was a major section of the show which had to do with McGarrett and Danno spending time at a couples retreat in Maui to work on their partnership issues. Seriously, I am not interested in wasting my time with such crap and lowering the rating of the show; I just fast-forwarded through this.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Prior to Kamekona doing his prison stretch, Chin Ho gives him a copy of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, an actual motivational book, which makes Kamekona decide to become an entrepreneurial type and go straight. He chooses the shave ice business because "Big margins. Water's free, flavoring's cheap."
- During the final confrontation in the hotel room, Kamekona tells Kanoa, "He [Sosa] had you running drugs when you were a kid. Had you do Remy for him so he didn't have to." This is the only suggestion in the show as to who knocked off Ramiel. Five-0 is able to track the killer to a house via his cel phone, but despite Kono in kick-ass mode, the guy is not clearly seen and escapes through the back door.
- When the two of them meet, Sosa says he heard that Kamekona was "working the fry station at Blimpie's, hair net and all that," referring to the fast food chain. When Kamekona offers him a job, Sosa says, "I strike you as the hair net type?"
- Adam tells Kono that he has 539 more days of his sentence to serve. This suggests that he has been in jail only a few days since the last episode, as does Kono's comment "He tried to take out the heads of the Triads and the Makauakane family at the title fight last week."
- Chin's sort-of-girlfriend Abby is not in this episode, having gone back to San Francisco for a few days.
- The hotel room at the end of the show is located at 1360 Kalaheo Avenue, Honolulu 96815.
This episode brought back the "beloved character" Aunt Deb, played by Carol Burnett. You cannot say anything bad about Burnett! She is a comedy legend and I love her old show which, in its original form, has been off the air since 1978. Burnett did a very good acting job.
After a "previously on" introduction to the episode lasting about a minute, Deb brought us up to date, telling us that Leonard, who she married last season (on the show), had passed away. She produced an urn containing his ashes which was given to Kawika (Kala Alexander) to be spread on the waters off Oahu as McGarrett, his sister Mary Ann (Taryn Manning, returning for the first time after more than two years) and his niece and Mary Ann's daughter Joanie looked on -- a scene which was stunningly photographed, by the way.
A transition through oars under water took us to a group of young boys going to a boot camp which looks like it is located in some unknown out-of-the-way place on Oahu. (I thought originally it was the archipelago where McGarrett and his new girl friend hung out a few episodes ago, but later events suggest that is not the case.)
After arriving, the boys are relieved of their cel phones and other technology for the weekend while they take part in a "ho'ike," or "test," going back to the "old ways," learning sacred chants, carving an "ihe" (javelin-like spear), and so forth. Among the adult supervisors for the camp is Keno Nakuluena (Albert Ueligitione), the father of one of the boys. His son Liani (Thiessen Wright) goes to search out wood to make the spear, and ends up inexplicably shot. Despite not having a boat with an outboard motor, Nakuluena manages to quickly get to a tourist-friendly beach. Liani is rushed to Kings Medical Center and, as we find out later, survives.
After the main credits, Chin Ho is called to work, but not before we find out that he and his sort-of girl friend Abby Dunn have been "doing the nasty," though there is some debate between the two as to who initiated this exchange of bodily fluids. I found this kind of hard to take (no pun intended), because Chin has always struck me as the "gentleman" type, a sexy guy, but not overly sexual like McGarrett/O'Loughlin, who women drool over every time he takes off his shirt. Chin experiences post-coitus-interruptus from the office just as he and Abby are about to step in the shower together.
The shooting of Liani is, of course, tied to the crime of the week, which was a confusing and complicated mess. It harked back to earlier episodes of the show with similar cluster-you-know-what plots which probably made the writers think they were being clever, but the only thought I kept having as this show progressed was "Which Wikipedia page did they crib all this from?"
At the crime scene, Kono and Grover discover a World War II munitions bunker which is at or near the top of a hill where there was koa wood which could be used to make the spear (Liani apparently fell over the cliff because he had injuries typical of a "very serious fall"). Because there is a Japanese rising sun flag inside, Kono suggests "After Pearl Harbor, some Japanese Americans sympathetic to the emperor went underground to avoid internment," which doesn't make sense if this was an American bunker, which was presumably used by U.S. forces during the war. Bones of "a mature adult male" are found buried there, along with other evidence nearby like slugs from a Japanese Nambu pistol, a cyanide capsule and tire tracks from a cargo van which look like it contained something heavy when it left the scene.
Captain Conspiracy, a.k.a. Jerry, goes to work on the case and finds out that washi paper, bags and cables found in the bunker were connected with Operation Fugo, a Japanese plan to use the winter trade winds to launch thousands of balloon bombs from Japan, across the Pacific, timed to detonate when they reached the U.S. (this actually happened, though the results were nowhere near as bad as the Japanese hoped -- instead "an epic fail"). Jerry continues: "There's classified Intel that in the summer of 1940 the Japanese government was secretly developing Fugo here on Oahu, with a planned launch coinciding with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. All the necessary supplies were smuggled in, but something happened and it never became operational." Since there were no bombs found in the bunker, it is suspected that is what was taken away in the cargo van, later determined to be a Nissan NV1500 -- and these bombs are "highly unstable."
Max provides a DNA sample from the body in the bunker which is sent to Japan. Incredulously, information is sent back very quickly that the remains are that of 2nd Lieutenant Aki Hiroda, known as Saburo Mori in Hawaii. He was listed as killed in action in a Japanese battle in the spring of 1940. McGarrett speculates that this is an example of "classic espionage stuff" and that his death was faked, and he was sent to Hawaii to work as an agent with a new identity.
Jerry gets access to other classified documents from the forties as well as film of an interrogation of Hiroda's handler, Jiro Takaki, but this turns out to be a red herring. The name of Yuri Musaka, another conspirator, also pops up, identified by Eric from fingerprints on the Nambu gun's bullets. He was an officer in the Imperial Japanese Navy who was sent to Hawaii around the same time as Hiroda. Musaka was using the name Youshi Tamuro.
Takaki was sent back to Japan after the war in a POW exchange and died of cancer two years later. As far as Musaka/Tamuro is concerned, from 1942 to 1946, he was a prisoner at Honouliuli Internment Camp. After the war, he stayed on Oahu, got married, started a construction business and passed away a few days before the show at the age of 100.
Musaka/Tamuro is survived by two daughters, both of whom live on the mainland, and a grandson who lives on Oahu named Kyle Tamuro. According to social media, he and his grandfather are very close.
Suddenly, Kyle shows up at the Five-0 office and is promptly "detained." He tells everyone that he was the guy who shot Liani when surprised cleaning out the bunker to eliminate anything "shameful" that could be connected with his late grandfather, who had murdered Hiroda during a struggle in the bunker years ago. Kyle is very sorry that he almost killed Liani.
Seriously, this plot (which I have seriously condensed) is as Grover says: "Oh, my God, I can hardly keep up."
Compared with this, the ohana part of the show with Aunt Deb was a lot easier to follow. She ticks off several things from a bucket list which she and Leonard compiled before he passed away.
Among these is driving McGarrett's Chevvy Silverado truck very fast down the highway, zig-zagging between cars with the siren going full blast. McGarrett, who is in the passenger seat, gets to experience how Danno (absent from this show) normally feels, looking green around the gills. In fact, Joanie keeps asking him if he is going to puke.
During a meal of very heavily fried food (another bucket list item) at Honolulu eatery J.J. Dolan's, where Deb meets with Nicky DeMarco (Larry Manetti), she tells him that she is not going to be around much longer. Deb is also seen on a shopping spree with Mary Ann and Joanie, and finally winds up at a bank where she wants to talk to someone about an asset transfer.
The next morning, McGarrett comes up to the room in his house where Aunt Deb is sleeping. She wakes up ... and promptly expires! McGarrett looks very sad, and O'Loughlin knows how to do "sad" very well. He finds her bucket list close beside her, and as the show closes, he and Mary Ann help Aunt Deb achieve her final wish of "climbing a really tall mountain" (see below).
Three stars for the ohana stuff on this show, which, as you are probably well aware, I am usually not too crazy about, and two for the crime of the week. Too bad the latter was not a KISS type of plot as we had in the previous show.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Aunt Deb's (and Leonard's) bucket list.
- See the sunrise from the Eiffel tower.
- Drive a police car REALLY FAST!
- See the Pyramids.
- Get a tattoo.
- Go on an epic shopping spree.
- Fried food binge.
- Learn to ski.
- Witness the Northern Lights.
- Make sure Mary & Joan are provided for.
- Climb a really tall mountain.
- As part of his investigation, Jerry needs a microfilm reader to examine some film that he got from one of his contacts. He goes to the local library to borrow one of their machines, but is confronted by a stern librarian played by Lynne Ellen Hollinger, an actress who was featured in 11 episodes of the original Five-O and has been out of the limelight for 35 years, aside from an appearance on a Jake and the Fatman episode in 1990. She grills Jerry about a couple of late books which he has not returned -- The Doubt Factory and Alien Agenda: Investigating Extraterrestrials Among Us. When he tells her that the books were stolen from his house, she says, "Along with your tinfoil hat, I'm sure." She finally lets Jerry take the reader after he lays a heavy trip on her that if she does not, there will be a catastrophe and it will be all her fault.
- Both of Jerry's late books are actual publications. The Doubt Factory is described at Amazon as "a page-turning contemporary thriller which explores the timely issue of how public information is distorted for monetary gain, and how those who exploit it must be stopped."
- McGarrett asks Kono about her jailed husband Adam. She tells him "So far the other inmates seem to be giving him plenty of space. I was worried that he'd be a target in there 'cause of me, but it looks like being the son of Hiro Noshimuri matters a lot more than being married to a cop."
- HPD manages to track down the Nissan van containing the bombs, but the driver (Kyle) flees. The bomb squad shows up, but despite the fact that the truck is stopped in a residential neighborhood and the area has been evacuated, and McGarrett says there may be mass casualties if the bombs are detonated, the Five-0 team watch the deactivation procedure from very close by.
- The kid playing McGarrett's niece at the end of the show is not the same one seen earlier. In response to a posting I made on Twitter, it was revealed that there were multiple children used to portray this part, including the daughter of one of the people commenting. A posting at IMDb from emdoug32 cleared up the question of whether the niece was in a car seat during Aunt Deb's wild ride (she was).
- Kyle tells Five-0 that the area around the bunker was "about to be developed," which is hard to understand, considering it seems to be in the middle of nowhere.
- When McGarrett arrives in his truck at the scene where the Nissan containing bombs was abandoned, his tires make a screeching noise on the pavement, which you would not expect it to do. Shades of the old show, where this kind of thing was common, even to the extent of screeching tires on surfaces other than pavement like sand and grass!
On paper, the press release for this show sounded promising: "While Grover travels to Chicago to finally get a confession from Clay Maxwell [Mykelti Williamson] about killing his wife, Chin and Kono are held at gunpoint by two killers who have no idea they are cops." The business with Grover was a continuation of last season's show number 20, ‘Ike Hānau (Instinct).
But what we got was a major league mess.
First of all, Grover is seen totally out of character (like really out), even given the fact that he has been previously seen on the show as a major league bad-ass.
At the beginning of the show, Grover has broken into Maxwell's Chicago house. He knocks his former partner out, injects him with some tranquilizer to make him docile and then ties him to a chair with duct tape. Using typical Five-Zero "full immunity and means," Grover then turns into an avenging angel, using everything in his power to make Maxwell confess, including bringing up the issue of a large amount of money that Maxwell stole when the two of them were on the Chicago police force together years before.
Grover uses a large sledge hammer to knock holes in the walls of the house to try and find this money, not to mention threaten Maxwell. When Clay's girl friend Leann (Jonell Kennedy) returns home, Grover manages to get her sent away (she just avoids seeing the damage to the walls), but she returns, and Grover ties her up too and starts giving her his intense Guantanamo-like treatment.
At the end of the show, Grover has a brainstorm that Maxwell hid the money in a vintage car in his garage, and guess what ... that's where it is.
Grover then calls police headquarters and tells them to send over "a couple of detectives from Internal Affairs and ... a police union rep too." Do the writers for the show (Peter Lenkov and Eric Guggenheim) seriously think that everything that happened -- breaking and entering, kidnapping, assault, forcible confinement, destruction of property and much more -- will just be swept under the rug and resolved out of the public eye?
But we have not seen the end of this story. There is mention of something in "Philly," that will be likely used against Grover. According to Lenkov, this will be further developed in episode 19.
The rest of the show was taken up with a race back to Honolulu between the remaining members of the team who have been surfing at Kaiaka Bay Beach Park near Haleiwa. McGarrett and Danno get back to Five-0 headquarters first by driving like maniacs, so fast that McGarrett doesn't want to stop; he tells Danno to pee in a bottle.
The normally pretty smart Chin Ho gets lost in the middle of nowhere on back roads where he "used to ride ... when [he] was a kid." (Chin actually refers to McGarrett as a "haole," when McGarrett suggests that taking these roads is not a good idea.) Kono is not much help to Chin, considering she was realizing they were getting lost as they were getting lost and never bothered to correct him.
When they stop to check their bearings out in the sticks, Chin and Kono run into a couple of white trash guys. These two guys, highly reminiscent of another duo in the original Five-O, are digging a grave where they want to dump the body of a cop they have murdered (a story tangent which is not explored). The whole business with these two killers was full of clichés, including the end where McGarrett and Danno manage to track Chin and Kono down and save them from being executed.
The only thing I liked about the show (and this is a stretch) was some of the "ohana" dialogue, but then I kept thinking as Kono was slouched in the seat in Chin's Mustang with her feet out the window, "Is she wearing a seat belt?" (not as far as I could see). Chi McBride also deserves mention for his scenery-chewing performance.
But overall, this show was terrible.
MORE TRIVIA:
- When Leann comes home, she walks right past the place where Grover made a hole in the wall while searching for the money. There are what look like some errors connected with this scene; I have posted some pictures. When Maxwell comes home (shots 1 and 2), there is a chair under the picture, as well as drawers to its left. Grover removes the picture in shot 3, and the chair has been moved forward out of the way. I don't know why; why would he care if the chair got damaged if he was making a hole in the wall? In pictures 4, 5, 6 and 7, Grover smashes the wall, making a hole which to me which seems much larger than the picture. After Leann comes home (pictures 8 and 9), the picture has been restored to the wall, which seems undamaged, the chair is back under the picture, and there is something on the chair that looks like a bag or a purse. As Grover smashed the wall, there was a lot of debris produced which would have fallen on the floor and/or the drawers. But it doesn't look like he had time to get rid of this mess when Leann was coming in the house and he was moving Maxwell to the garage.
- At the show's end, Grover does not tell the guy answering the phone at CPD HQ that he is at Maxwell's house.
- There is a "previously on" segment at the beginning, about 40 seconds long, referring back to last season's show.
- Maxwell is bringing home a pizza from Giordano's, a Chicago restaurant famous for its deep dish creations. (I think this place was referred to in the previous show as well.)
- The expression "son of a bitch" is used twice, once when Danno refers to McGarrett as a "cheap son of a bitch" over the issue of who will win the bet about getting back to town faster, and Grover refers to Maxwell as "you lying son of a bitch."
- Grover tells Maxwell that when he finally gets his partner's confession, he is going to light up "a big fat Cuban cigar." How will he do this? According to a US Customs and Border Protection WWW page, "Persons authorized to travel to Cuba may purchase alcohol and tobacco products while in Cuba for personal consumption while there. Authorized travelers may return to the United States with up to $100 worth of alcohol and/or tobacco products acquired in Cuba in accompanied baggage, for personal use only." Has Grover been to Cuba recently?
- When he starts worrying about why Chin and Kono haven't returned to headquarters, McGarrett wonders if this has "something to do with Gabriel." I am glad they didn't go down that road!
- Considering there are only four characters in the show -- Maxwell and his girl friend and the two white trash killers, there is no supporting cast in the end credits.
- The Five-O theme is heard at the end of the show as Kono and Chin are rescued.
I was surprised by this episode. It was much better than I expected. The good parts had little to do with Five-0's crime fighting. There were plenty of laughs as the team discussed their good and bad Valentine's Day experiences, the show taking place around the current Valentine's Day while they were solving the crime of the week:
- McGarrett gets together for some serious romance with his new girl friend Lynn (Sarah Carter), but in his dresser while looking for a shirt, she finds the ring that he was going to give to Catherine. There are questions and she is seriously pissed off. Despite this, they are together at the end of the show, though during a striptease, Lynn sends one of her high-heeled shoes flying into McGarrett's face, producing a black eye which is a running joke throughout the episode.
- Danno buys his girl friend Melissa (Lili Simmons) perfume from Victoria's Secret (which gets major product placement elsewhere) plus flowers. He also prepares her a nice dinner. Unfortunately, his Valentine's Day card doesn't contain the critical words "I love you," which sends Melissa into a rant -- "This is about how much time you make for me" -- but they are together in bed at the end of the show.
- Chin Ho is also ready for some hot action with his girl friend Abby (Julie Benz). He is in bed, naked and pouring champagne for her in their hotel room, when Abby suddenly comes out of the bathroom fully clothed and leaves, saying "I made a mistake." Grabbing a towel, Chin follows her down the hallway, forgetting that the door to the room closes automatically behind him. As a result, Chin has to go downstairs to the front desk clad only in his skimpy towel. On the way there, he meets Duke and Duke's wife Nalani (played by Dennis Chun's real-life partner Laura Mellow).
- Kono is pretty chipper throughout the show, laughing at the stories the others are telling, but at the end of the episode, she is at home, sad because Adam is in jail, and watching a video of her wedding ceremony.
- Grover, who has returned from Chicago without any mention of what happened there, is golfing with chef Masaharu Morimoto when he realizes it's Valentine's Day and has done nothing for his wife Renee (Michelle Hurd). Grover shows up at home at the last minute in a blue crushed velvet suit later described as "MIA since 1972." Danno says it looks like it was out of a dream "that we're all at a Temptations concert." Despite flowers and chocolates, Grover's wife sees through his scheme and tells him to go somewhere else for 24 hours.
- Max is in a good mood because he had a date with his bank teller girl friend Sabrina in the commissary at King's Medical Center where they first became acquainted. Kamekona gets a large box of chocolates from a "secret admirer," and, online, Jerry finds a cute, geeky girl friend (Victoria Current), who meets him at Kamekona's shrimp shack.
Too bad the entire show hadn't turned into a comedy episode, because the plot of the crime of the week was not helped a typical Five-Zero "fatal flaw" thanks to either bad writing or, more likely, bad editing.
Two women, Luana Cruz and Tessa Foxton (Erica Shaffer), have been meeting several times at their husbands' country club to discuss killing each other's spouse. Luana's husband is abusive towards her and Michael Foxton (James Koons) is cheating on Tessa. Later on, when Jerry figures out the connection between Luana and Tessa, he tells McGarrett and Danno that this is a Strangers on a Train scenario, referring to the Hitchcock movie where two people "exchange" murders, with the result that neither will be caught.
Tessa kills Cruz's husband on February 13th with a gun when Luana has an iron-clad alibi of being somewhere else. Luana attempts to murder Foxton's husband on the evening of the 14th at a love nest after Natalie Jacobs (Kamri Lin), a hooker he had sex with, has left the property. But things go sour, and Luana is seriously injured when her gun goes off during a struggle and Foxton escapes. There is no indication how Luana figured out where this "sex pad" is.
Although after this there is no indication in the show that Tessa knows that Luana was shot, ending up in the hospital in a coma, Tessa later tampers with her husband's heart medicine, since obviously he was not killed by Luana as per their plan. Five-0 figures out who Foxton is by tracking him through a purchase of Victoria's Secret lingerie that he gave to Natalie. Danno amazingly recognizes the brand during Natalie's grilling in the blue-lit room, even though he just sees part of her bra. When they arrive at the Foxton house, Tessa's husband is seen running in the background and trying to escape by climbing up a hedge in a dumb fashion at the back of their property, even though Five-0 did not announce their presence in a really obvious way.
When questioned by Five-0 in the blue-lit room, Foxton does not say anything like "I confessed everything that was going on [i.e., his adulterous affairs] to my wife," though he admits killing Luana during the struggle, which he says was "self defense" because she was coming after him with a gun. Foxton collapses from a heart attack and is taken to the hospital -- the same one where Luana is.
Because of the difficulty of making a case against Tessa, Five-0 have to find a way to get her to incriminate herself. When McGarrett and Danno return to her house to tell her that her husband had a heart attack but is OK, they intentionally let it slip that Luana has regained consciousness from her coma with the suggestion that she will soon start spilling the beans as to how she ended up in that state.
But this is stupid. Five-0 has never discussed with Tessa the fact that she was friends with Luana, which they have learned about from Jerry's investigating since their first visit to her house. You would assume that prior to taking her husband away to Five-0 headquarters for questioning they also didn't say that Michael was the one suspected of shooting Luana or even reveal any details about the love nest. But Danno says they want to "make sure that her [Luana's] story matches up with your husband's." Huh? This is obviously a setup to see if Tessa will then go to the hospital and try to knock off the supposedly now-conscious Luana, which is exactly what happens. Why can't Tessa see through this?
When Tessa arrives at the hospital, she quickly locates Luana's room, especially since there are no personnel around who attempt to stop her. Without any indication why she is carrying around a hypodermic needle full of some lethal substance, she injects this into Luana's intravenous fluid, saying she is "sorry." Chin and Kono, who are nearby, arrest Tessa, telling her that Luana died earlier that day; the woman in her bed is just a mannequin.
There were a bunch of clips from old movies, home videos, cartoons and one from Star Trek used at the beginning of each "act" of the show. I suspect most of these, except for the Star Trek one, were public domain material. The opening clip was backed up by Dean Martin singing "Everybody Loves Somebody." There were also songs by Coldplay on the soundtrack:
- Amazing Day - heard in the hotel room before Abby runs out on Chin;
- Adventure Of A Lifetime - accompanies Danno and McGarrett as they visit the Victoria's Secret store on Kalakaua Avenue;
- Birds - behind various tourist shots after the crime of the week is solved; and
- Everglow - heard at the end, as we see the resolution to the team's Valentine's Day dilemmas.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Jerry's on-line moniker that he uses to meet his new girl friend is "BadWarlock82." Her nickname is "PeaceMaiden53"; her real name is Meredith. She is wearing a T-shirt which says "We Are Not Alone," with a picture of a flying saucer.
- When McGarrett sees Grover in his 70's getup, he calls him "Grimace," referring to the McDonald's character.
- The Star Trek clip featured is from the second season episode The Gamesters of Triskelion, where Kirk kisses the green-haired Shahna (Angelique Pettyjohn) and then belts her in the face.
- Grover's wife addresses him by his full name: Louis Purnell Grover.
- Max's girl friend's Valentine's Day card has "To the man who always gets my blood pumping" written on it.
- Jack Cruz's autopsy report is #34-102015. It says that Cruz was 41 years old, 6'0" and weighed 200 pounds.
- At McGarrett's place, Lynn is seen nude from the back before she slips into his shirt. McGarrett is seen deleting Catherine from the contact list in his cel phone later.
- When McGarrett and Danno are tailing Tessa from her house to the hospital (closely in a manner reminiscent of classic Five-O), the camera is actually inside the car, rather than a process shot. When Tessa arrives in the hospital underground parking lot, she seemingly walks right past Grover who is sitting nearby in his car with an open window talking to Five-0.
- Luana Cruz's birth date is 9-4-80. Her attending physician in the hospital is Karen Safford.
DELETED SCENES (will these be on the DVD?):
I was sent an e-mail from the writing team of C/H/Q Paper Products®, who haven't had much to do for the last few seasons of the show. They are not happy that much of the material they provided for this episode ended up on the cutting room floor. For example:
- After Chin Ho locks himself out of his room, a bitchy maid confronts him in the hall, saying that she knows he is trying to steal the towel that he is using to cover himself. She grabs the towel away, leaving the beefy Chin concealing his male parts with just his hand. A sequence follows reminiscent of the Austin Powers movies where Chin's you-know-what is covered up by potted plants, etc. and various elderly tourists scream in horror as he runs through the hotel lobby.
- After the shot of Kono watching her wedding video and crying big tears at the end of the show, we cut to Adam, who is now the "bitch" of some big beefy Samoan guy, and the first male-to-male kiss of the show follows as the two of them get into the shower together (as naked as CBS standards will allow).
- Gabriel is also very sad, because no one has sent him any Valentines cards or boxes of chocolates (of course, what do you expect, because he is a super villain - DUH!!). In Gabriel's hideout, located in some middle-of-nowhere location, we see that he has kidnapped and tied up McGarrett's mother and is threatening to torture her in the most diabolical way possible. This would have been highly preferable to the show's boring ending which showed that Abby, Chin's girl friend, is probably up to no good, which will lead to some utterly mindless tangent in a future episode (but probably not the next one).
- Max has a big glow on his face because he got to hang out with his girl friend Sabrina, who is not seen on the show. The crime of the week should have revolved around an old boyfriend of Sabrina, played by a heavily-disguised Anton Kutcher, who has come to Hawaii recently to stalk her. The plot thickens when Sabrina's father (played, uncredited, by Bruce Willis) tells Max in a shocking scene that not only does her old boyfriend have hot pants for Sabrina, but also ruined his own marriage by sleeping with his wife, resulting in an unpleasant divorce.
This show had potential, but as it went along, it got more and more derailed because of major issues with the script.
There was yet another "previously on Five-0" at the beginning of the show, taking just over a minute with a rehash of plot arcs to do with super villain and Chin Ho's nemesis Gabriel, Chin's deceptive girl friend Abby and the murder of Danno's brother Matt, once again making me wonder if the producers think that people really need this kind of flashback.
We got a silly sub-plot with Danno and his mother, who has come to Hawaii. They are participating in a time-share presentation in order to qualify for a couple of cruise tickets. Danno is pretending to be his father, which is creepy and harkens back to the sexually ambiguous scene in the show's second season where Danno and Lori (the Governor-appointed snoop) were found together in a hotel room handcuffed together with no obvious explanation.
Later on, Danno's mother is summoned to an interrogation by the local FBI office, who have questions relating to a bank account that Danno's fugitive brother Matt set up for her years before. But Danno quickly figures out that it's not his mother that the FBI is after, but him: "Someone's pulling the strings here, I'm just not sure who. This is definitely not about my brother; it's about me, it's about Five-0, it's about the people that I work with."
Something big is coming down, and behind the one-way mirror in the interrogation room is Chin's girl friend Abby, who we saw lying to Chin last week about being back in San Francisco when she was still in Honolulu. She is working with the FBI. The fact that the name of her FBI boss, Robert Coughlin (Ingo Rademacher), is the same as the former HPD Internal Affairs cop who was persecuting Chin Ho, may have some special significance.
The crime of the week revolved around Neil Palea (Joe Egender), described in the CBS press release for the show as having autism, despite the fact that the terms "autistic" and "autism" didn't appear in the show itself. At the beginning of the show, Neil arrives at the Kuakini Medical Center with the body of his best friend Mark Walker, who has been fatally shot.
Mark was involved in a scheme to allow four bad guys to tunnel into a bank through a wall in an underground level of the Keli'i Street parking lot where he and Neil worked. The bad guys obviously saw Mark as a liability, and killed him, just as Mark was ready to leave town to the mainland with Neil. People in the bank are up to no good too, like the manager Howard Fuller (Antonio Leon) who has been laundering almost a hundred million dollars (belonging to Gabriel Waincroft -- surprise, surprise) and the bank's assistant manager Ella Koha (Monica Barbaro), who was the one who tipped off the bad guys that this was happening, her criminal brother being one of them.
McGarrett wants to solve the case as quickly as possible but has to deal with Neil's issues with communication, social interaction, repetitive behavior and so forth. This show was reminiscent of a previous episode (S03E11, Kahu (Guardian)) where there was a "troubled young guy," which required McGarrett to go into "social worker mode." O'Loughlin's McGarrett does this very well, employing lots of patience rather than threatening suspects in his usual manner. Egender's performance was also very good in that it made me realize how frustrated McGarrett must be in dealing with such a person.
Five-0 decides to use Ella as bait for Gabriel, and he comes to her place with some thugs to supposedly recover the stolen laundered money, which she has actually transferred to an offshore account connected with her brother, who was shot dead earlier by Gabriel. This results in a firefight between Five-0 and Gabriel and his men. Chin Ho and Gabriel engage in what is probably the most spectacular kick-ass encounter of the entire series, which climaxes when Chin throws Gabriel out a window on to the roof of an SUV below. But when everyone comes out of the building, Gabriel has totally disappeared!
There was a highly unnecessary guest appearance (his third on the show) by "ex-art-forger-turned-Waikiki-caricature-artist" Gerard Hirsch (Willie Garson), who has decided to get into the restoration business, cleaning up crime scenes. His company is called Crime Clean and his motto is "The early bird gets the blood splatter [sic]." What he did in the show, not including the expected sexist remark to Kono, could totally have been handled by someone else.
Much more welcome was the appearance by a star of classic Five-O, Elissa Dulce, who was seen at the beginning of the show as Janet LaRue, who works at the Noho Hau'oli Assisted Living Facility where Neil has been living for the last five years since his parents passed away. She helps McGarrett persuade Neil to assist Five-0 with their investigation.
Anyway, to the problems with the writing...
- The biggest goof is when Five-0 gets Fuller, the bank manager, to call Gabriel (presumably because he has his phone number - DUH!). Gabriel, who is ensconced in an office in some skyscraper, gets his IT guy to immediately figure out where the call is coming from, which is the "Iolani Palace." Only problem is, unlike the old Five-O, the new Five-0 headquarters is not in the Iolani Palace. It's in the Ali'iolani Hale across the street. (I can't tell whose phone is used to call Gabriel -- is it Fuller's, a Five-0 house phone or some other phone from one of the Five-0 team [I doubt the last]?)
- There are a lot of issues with the time frame for the show, especially relating to Neil's working hours. Some of these have been analyzed on the blog Alex O'Loughlin - An Intense Study. When he is with Neil at the care home, McGarrett says that "Janet was just telling me that ... you go by [presumably meaning "to"] Mark's house every morning before work," and Neil says this was true for that morning when he found Mark's body. (The blog thinks this is a mistake, either in the script or an ad-lib by O'Loughlin.) When he is changing his shirt at the care home, which likely takes place in the afternoon, Neil says that he is "one hour and 47 minutes late for work." But if he was working with Mark up until 6 a.m., just after the men tunneling into the bank left (their time frame was between 8:55 p.m. and 5:00 a.m.), and working a 12-hour shift, this suggests that he would start work between 5 and 6 p.m., not earlier. Later, Neil leads Five-0 to Mark's house, where they find a lot of blood on the floor and other evidence. This is probably in the late afternoon. In the next scene at Mark's house, it is dark out (these days sunset in Honolulu is around 6:30 p.m.). The crime scene is being processed, and Neil is still antsy about getting to work because at 9 p.m. he has to set out the traffic cones to cover access to the P-2 level of the parking garage where the bad guys are digging into the wall of the bank, not realizing that their work is finished. There are questions about whether anyone contacted the parking lot earlier to tell them that Neil was not going to be on time and Mark was not going to be there at all, but when Neil does show up for work, this is seemingly not an issue. There are further questions about the time frame when Kono later says that Mark used his key card to allow access to the men who were tunnelling. On the booth where Mark and Neil work, there is a sign saying "public parking," though it is possible there is some area of this parkade which is used exclusively by employees of an office in the building above, for example, which would require a key card. But it looks like a key card wouldn't restrict people from going to the lower level, which doesn't appear to have a gate. However, after he puts up the cones, Neil unlocks a chain, and there is a gate behind this chain. What is the significance of this gate? Is this an entrance or an exit?
- Ella Koha finds out Fuller was laundering Gabriel's money; it doesn't say how she found this out. She also finds out that he is keeping a list of the phony accounts where this money is deposited in the bank; this list is in a safe in Fuller's office. So she tells her brother, who is a crook (does she know he is a crook?). The brother and 3 other guys tunnel from the parking lot into the bank in SIX DAYS. This would make a LOT of noise, especially if they use jackhammers and/or dynamite, and also create a LOT of dust and other garbage which would have to be disposed of, but no one notices either one. They cut through concrete and very thick steel and finally get into the bank vault, where they manage to get from the inside of the vault to the bank itself. Once they are in the bank, they steal the account numbers from the safe, presumably because Ella gave them the combination to it; then she transfers the laundered money into an offshore account. But this is stupid. Why wouldn't Ella just steal the account numbers herself since she had access to them and do the transfers? Why did her brother do this elaborate plan of tunneling through the wall? Considering that nothing obvious was stolen in the bank (cash, contents of safety deposit boxes, etc.), by virtue of the fact that Ella had access to the safe, it doesn't matter which way this theft was committed, she would be a major suspect! When Fuller and her talk to Five-0 during their initial interview, he says "nothing has been disturbed" in his office, either meaning he didn't check the safe, or he knows it was tampered with and is covering his ass.
- A friend of mine who was a bank manager pointed out a couple of errors with the show, relating to the above comment. First, she said "There is no way there would be another safe outside the vault [the one in the manager's office containing information regarding the accounts where the laundered money was deposited]. That is stupid! The manager may have a file cabinet that locks because he has employee files with private information (like relating to salaries, etc.), but that's it." After all, why would they have a safe there, when they have this large thing called "a vault" where anything can be stored? (This is my comment, not my friend's.) Second, there are large amounts of cash shown inside the vault, which the robbers reportedly didn't touch. Cash would not be left around inside a vault like this. It would be secured in a closed compartment which was "double locked," i.e., two people from the bank with different keys or combinations would have to open this compartment to distribute cash.
- Danno's brother Matt set up an account in a New Jersey bank containing $50,000 after he became a fugitive. The FBI was monitoring this account from the time it was set up, which was in Danno's/Matt's mother's name. The bank called her about two months after Matt died to tell her that the account was there. You would assume that the FBI knew this, but they seem particularly clueless. It seems very odd to me that Matt set up the account after he became a fugitive, yet she only heard about it after he died, which was years later. I have to wonder if the bank had some kind of obligation to notify her about this account which she was unaware of to that point. For example, the account became "stale" (i.e., there was no activity in the account for quite a long time). In that case, she wouldn't have known about it until that point. But when she did hear about the account, didn't anyone tell her that it contained $50,000? Considering Matt was a known felon, this was probably fishy money, and she should have reported it to the authorities ASAP rather than just withdrawing money from it and playing dumb. As Danno escorts her from the interrogation room, his mother says "You would have made me turn him in," which just adds to the confusion, since Matt was already on the run from the law.
- Fred Helfing e-mails me about something he noticed in the parking garage, specifically the wheeled garbage bin which is covering the hole in the wall leading to the bank. He says that you would never see a garbage bin on level P-2 like in the show and probably not even on P-1. Fred says the floors for the parkade in his office building have normal garbage pails for people throwing away their gum wrappers and such. To retrieve large bins, you'd have to send a small pickup type truck to retrieve them so that the regular garbage truck could empty them. A typical garbage truck couldn't go down to P-2 to empty bins there because the truck probably wouldn't fit in the garage and, even if it could, when the bin was lifted up with the fork lifts on the front of the truck, it would hit the ceiling. Large garbage bins like the one in the show would usually be positioned on the outside of the building in the loading dock area. Of course, it is quite possible the bad guys wheeled this bin down from another floor to cover the hole, but then probably after a while it would draw someone's attention (as it does McGarrett's).
- When Hirsch asks Chin Ho at a crime scene where is his "better half," meaning Abby, this doesn't make any sense. Abby was first seen in show #8 of this season; Hirsch was in show #5 . Maybe Hirsch saw her with Chin since, but Chin and Abby didn't get really serious about their relationship (i.e., they "did it") until show #12.
- Hirsch makes a big deal about how, when he was "restoring" the crime scene where Ella's brother was murdered, he found a laptop. HPD had dusted for prints, but they never looked inside the laptop where there is blood spatter and there is another print found which was put there by GABRIEL. Why wouldn't the crime scene technicians have looked inside the laptop? This is totally stupid, suggesting major incompetence on behalf of HPD.
- The big shootout at the end of the show with Five-0 and fight between Chin and Gabriel appears to take place in and around an office building behind Ella's apartment. You have to wonder why Gabriel bothers to come there at all, since he obviously knows this is a setup. Immediately on arrival, he and his accomplices go to the office building where mayhem ensues. There is speculation that after Gabriel landed on the SUV, Gabriel was removed from the scene by "his men," but when Kono sees Gabriel arriving in the alley from Ella's apartment, she says Gabriel is with "four hostiles," three of whom are taken out by McGarrett, Grover and Kono respectively during the firefight.
- Five-0 has a lock on Gabriel's cell phone as he is coming to Ella's apartment. Presumably they got Gabriel's number when Fuller called him. But suddenly the connection to the phone is lost, which tells Five-0 that Gabriel knows this is all a setup. Why would Gabriel have a phone which could be traced at all? Why not use a throw-away phone? I think Gabe should hire another IT guy! And he definitely should not have proceeded to the encounter with Ella.
MORE TRIVIA:
- When Neil arrives at the medical centre, he runs into a Mercedes 420SEL.
- Elissa Dulce tried out for some other parts on the show, but did not get them: the fortune teller Madame Esmerelda in S03E04, the judge at Danno's custody hearing (S03E14) and the librarian who hassled Jerry a few episodes ago (S06E12).
- Fuller, the bank manager, says that the thieves deleted all the security footage taken during the time they were in the bank. But later, McGarrett suggests Fuller was the one who did this, because he recognized Ella's brother. This is obviously a bluff on McGarret's part.
- Grover is nasty to Ella when she is being interrogated in the blue-lit room. After McGarrett accuses her of being involved, she says "It wasn't like that," and Grover then imitates her teary, shaking voice, saying "It wasn't?" Then he switches to his normal voice, saying "Then tell us how it was."
- Danno's mother reminds him that when he was born, she was in labor for 36 hours.
- The names of the men who broke into the bank are Tyson Vargas, Sam Liliha, Leo Cruz and Paul Koha (Ella's brother).
- Janet tells McGarrett that Neil and Mark liked to play konane, a Hawaiian two-player strategy board game.
- The FBI spoke to Danno's mother about Matt on April 19, 2011.
This episode, in keeping with other shows this season, brought back yet more "beloved characters," specifically Odell Martin, McGarrett's barber (Michael Imperioli) and informant Sang Min (Will Yun Lee). Overall, the show was OK, though I got kind of weary of Sang Min's constant facial and vocal mugging, despite the fact that a look back at previous episodes showed that "he has always been this way."
Identified for the first time by his full name of Sang Min Sooh, "Five-0's asset" was released from jail 10 days before the show to help out Five-0 in their investigation of human trafficking. When Sang Min goes to meet with his former partner James Lam, he finds Lam dead and is arrested for Lam's murder after the real killer, later determined to be one Graham Clark, flees from the scene.
McGarrett enlists Odell, who passed the bar when he first moved to Hawaii, to defend Sang Min, even though Odell would rather not, because he became qualified to practice law there only because he needed a loan to open up his barber shop and his father wouldn't give him the money otherwise.
Odell experiences father issues several times through the show, something which no doubt endears him to McGarrett, who tells Odell he regrets the time he didn't talk to his father for a long time "more than anything that's ever happened" in his life.
What followed were some funny scenes with Grover speaking Jamaican patois as he accompanied another co-operating criminal named Bones, played by Ziggy Marley, as well as a mock trial in Sang Min's protected hotel room employing various members of the team as judge (Max), jury (Kamekona and Flippa), prosecuting attorney (Jerry), bailiff (Bones) and witness (Kono).
Bones leads Grover to Rory (Blake Gibbons), who, like Bones himself and Sang Min, is also connected to the world of human trafficking. After some "gentle persuasion," Grover contacts the Five-0 office to report that Rory identified the sketch a police artist created earlier with Sang Min's help of the man who killed Lam as being Clark.
This sketch is also shown to Andrea Sarte (Jocelyn Tecson). She and her brother Carlos are two Philippine nationals who were smuggled into Hawaii recently. Carlos was found floating off Waikiki Beach, a bullet in his head from the same gun used to kill Lam. Andrea cannot identify the person in the sketch. But she says that the man responsible for bringing them to Hawaii phoned her three days before to ask them for more money or else he would report them to the immigration authorities. Andrea identifies a photo of Sang Min as this person, though she says she only talked to him on the phone and never met him face-to-face in the last few days. She suggests to McGarrett that Sang Min was responsible for the murder of Carlos, but this whole plot twist is a red herring, because Andrea is never heard from again in the show, despite the fact that she is described by Odell as potentially the prosecution's "star witness." If she was brought to trial, her testimony could be demolished, because according to Sang Min, he was in jail when she arrived in Hawaii.
There is a fight on the docks as Five-0 tries to track down Clark, which seems like total overkill (no pun intended) considering the fire power which is used. There is some interesting stunt work as a container full of illegal immigrants falls into the harbor; Chin Ho and McGarrett dodge bullets to jump into the water and free them. The only excuse for this scene seems to be to hear that one of Clark's associates can identify him as the person who killed Lam. But this comes to nothing, since this guy has been fatally wounded and dies in surgery at the hospital later.
At the end of the show, the actual trial in front of no-nonsense Judge Gregory Parnell (Geoff Heise, who appeared on the original Five-O) is far too one-sided, with little cross-examination by prosecutor James Chen (Eric Nemoto). Despite the fact that the evidence against him is circumstantial, the Perry Mason-like clincher which reverses the seemingly hopeless case against Sang Min is the fact that his vision is a mediocre 20/100, which would have made it impossible to accurately shoot Lam at a distance, such as happened.
During the trial, Kono seems to be immediately accepted as an expert in marksmanship, without the prosecution having to agree to her being so qualified. She testifies that the gun which Sang Min was using was a Beretta model 86 Cheetah .22, which is unreliable if fired at a distance. Also, Max points out that Lam was not shot from close up, based on the fact there was "no starring around the entry wound." Theoretically, Odell could have brought this up before during the prosecution's questioning of Max, but this was before he had the brainstorm about Sang Min's vision problems.
MORE TRIVIA:
- In addition to Odell and Sang Min, the show brought back two other actors: Eric Nemoto, who was prosecutor Chen in episode eighteen of season one, where his son was blown up in a car explosion, and Helen Kuoha-Torco, who played the hula dancer in the main title sequence of every episode of the original Five-O. She was previously seen in the third show of season one of the reboot; in this episode she was the court reporter.
- The show's writers did their research for this episode well, inasmuch as head trauma can really result in myopia (nearsightedness), as Max establishes during the trial. Sang Min suffered such an injury in the show's first episode six years ago when Chin belted him with an ashtray. There was a flashback to this scene from the pilot, as well as the one where Kono has to strip down to her bra and panties to prove she is not wearing a wire.
- You have to wonder why Clark leaves the Beretta on the ground near where he shot Lam, which Sang Min picks up and uses to shoot at him. You also have to wonder how Sang Min can see Clark during their fight to the extent where he can help the police artist produce the sketch. If you examine the skirmish between the two closely, Sang Min's face is turned away when he is on the ground, and he is probably also dazed from being hit by Clark before Clark turns and runs away. A photo of Clark is shown by Odell to the jury during the trial and identified as Clark by Sang Min, though Sang Min cannot see the picture. The man in both the sketch and the photo is actually surfer and Five-0 stunt man Brock Little (thanks to @SurfBelle2 on Twitter for the correction), who passed away on February 18th.
- Sang Min is in for his share of abuse by others in this episode, being referred to as "big trouble in Little China," a "cartoon character," and "the mullet."
- Danno, who is not in the show, is referenced briefly after a phone call with McGarrett: He and his mother are in New Jersey and going to the bank, after which they will take Danno's brother Matt's money to the FBI. Chin Ho wonders if "this whole thing dragging Clara and Danny in was just a ploy to rattle our cage," to which McGarrett replies, "I think somebody has us in their sites, and I got a feeling this is just the beginning."
- According to some WWW page I accessed, the cost of Sang Min's room, the King Kamehameha Suite at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, is a mere USD $9,500 per room/night + charges & taxes = USD $10,826.
- When Odell shows up to court late because he is having second thoughts about whether he can do the job of defending Sang Min, he should apologize to the judge!
On the "mindless entertainment/don't think too hard about it" scale, this episode would rate high. But once again, there was the dreaded "Five-Zero script flaw," which means at some point, there is something so ill thought out by the writers that it isn't logical for the show to continue from that point. Of course, the show did continue, but it drifted off into even stupider territory.
Chris Dalton (Michael McMillian) is a "cyber strategist" for Sillex Labs Inc., a company with connections to the National Security Agency. His job, according to Kono, is "to protect computer systems from hackers." Dalton befriends Anna Novick (Olga Fonda), a Russian spy posing as a student, in an intimate way. It is not mentioned anywhere how the two of them originally got together. Dalton is kind of a dull and even clueless guy, not the type to hang around bars.
Dalton downloads "black ops intel" from the NSA, with the idea of using this to extort the U.S. government to "make the country a better place." He intends to leave Hawaii soon with Anna, but rather than take the purloined information himself, he gets one Tommy Luana to have the downloaded files, which are on a flash drive, inserted into his (Luana's) body with the help of "backroom" doctor David Yang (Jimmy Borges). There is no indication how Dalton knows Luana, who he sends to Yang, paying for the surgery.
In case you are wondering how Five-0 connects Luana with Yang, Kono is able to pinpoint Luana going to the doctor's office (exactly!) by using "location data" from Luana's cel phone. This is the same Kono who couldn't figure out the owner of an e-mail account in another recent episode because it was "bogus."
According to Yang, Dalton has been to visit him "a few times before." Why Dalton would have used Yang for any "services" is also a mystery, because according to a lengthy and boring expository chunk of dialogue between Kono and Grover in the middle of the show, Dalton is a patriotic type, a former ROTC graduate who is "flying an American flag at his front door"; in other words, he is hardly a criminal type (up until recently, anyway).
Anyway, the big flaw with all this is the flash drive. Luana has a ticket to go to Hong Kong, paid for by Dalton, who will follow a couple of days later. What will happen when Luana goes through the metal detectors at airport security? Right ... BUZZZZZZ!!!
Luana doesn't have to worry about this happening, though, because at the beginning of the show, he is being pursued by Novick, who has somehow found out about the flash drive. Luana tries to hail a cop, but instead gets run over by the patrol car and ends up in hospital. Novick follows him there and impersonates the doctor who is going to be performing surgery on him. She murders people in the operating room including Luana, who she cuts open, removing the flash drive in an extremely gory scene.
After persuading Yang to help them, Five-0 visits Sillex Labs, but Dalton has fled the scene. Kono and Grover go to Dalton's house, but he is not there either. Back at Five-0 headquarters, Chin manages to intercept a text message from Dalton to Novick, and when Five-0 shows up where the two of them are meeting, an incredible firefight results, with not only Novick, but some of her Russian compatriots -- who suddenly appear out of nowhere -- showering Five-0 with machine gun fire.
Though Novick escapes, Dalton is apprehended and taken back to the blue-lit room at headquarters. While he is being grilled by McGarrett and Danno, suddenly gas, in the form of smoke, starts pouring through a grill in the ceiling which knocks all three of them out. McGarrett later suggests this was "fentanyl" (that's what the closed captioning says). This is highly unlikely, since that is an opiate analgesic similar to morphine, typically used to treat patients with severe pain, or to manage pain after surgery.
Not only does this gas knock out the three in the interrogation room, but everybody in the building, including the rest of Five-0 and all the people on the main floor outside the Five-0 offices! Talk about dumb. Novick, wearing a gas mask, walks past all of the bodies (people are only incapacitated for about 40 minutes), and somehow manages to take the unconscious Dalton out of the building without anybody noticing.
Inasmuch as Novick and Dalton have now disappeared, McGarrett has a brainstorm on how to find them. He visits Oleg Larionov, one of Novick's machine-gunning Russkie pals who was wounded during the earlier confrontation, in his secured hospital room where the door is guarded by multiple SWAT team members. To make Larionov reveal the place where Novick and Dalton may be hiding (and, of course, they are), he shoots Larionov, who suddenly spills the beans. The less said about this, the better.
Five-0 and HPD storm the hideout as Dalton is working on the flash drive, which he has encrypted. Amazingly, Novick is only wounded during the confrontation and is taken away, perhaps to live on in another episode. I certainly would not object to this, because she played her part of a hot bitch spy very well, even considering the ridiculousness of the script.
McGarrett has a personal reason to be concerned about Dalton's dirty work. Elliot Brenner (Derek Webster), the boss of Sillex, tells McGarrett that Dalton might want to contact "one of the operatives" that he has a connection to. McGarrett immediately thinks this is Doris, his mother, but Brenner say it is McGarrett's erstwhile inamorata Catherine, who is "involved in a clandestine operation in Kiev" -- making us wonder what kind of information Brenner has access to overall.
The sub-plot with Abby working undercover for Federal Prosecutor Robert Coughlin (Ingo Rademacher) thickened, with Chin's girl friend having second thoughts about what she is doing. She accuses Robert of being on a witch hunt because of the murder of his HPD Internal Affairs cop brother Rex by Gabriel, who was going to testify against Chin Ho. Five-0 has surveillance-type pictures of Robert; there is no indication as to who took the pictures or how they know he is after them.
Robert tells Abby, "These guys [Five-0] keep moving the boundary to where there's no line anymore. This is a different country than it was when this task force was created. Now, we're in a civil war -- the civilians versus anyone with a badge. [M]en like Steve McGarrett have helped erode the trust between what we do and the people who need us. These people have operated by their own rules for too long now. And in my experience, free reign leads to gross misconduct." At the end of the show, it looks like Abby is going to fess up to Chin about her participation in this operation.
Doctor Yang, who lost his medical license 20 years before for selling oxycodone prescriptions and who now runs Shenqi Herbal Medicine, was played by Jimmy Borges, who appeared in 15 episodes of the original Five-O as well as an earlier episode of the new series which guest-starred James Caan. Borges did a good job playing what is perhaps his sleaziest character ever on the show -- and he has played a few, including a pimp, a drug dealer and a gangster. Borges has described this show as his final one, since he is suffering from a reoccurence of lung and liver cancer.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Dalton is obviously based on whistleblower Edward Snowden. At the age of 20, Snowden enlisted in the US Army Reserve as a special forces candidate, but did not complete the training. Around this time, he expressed patriotic feelings over the Iraq War. From March 2012, he worked in Hawaii at the National Security Agency's regional operations center. When he fled from the USA in May 2013, he flew to Hong Kong.
- This show had a major nominee for the greatest dialogue exchange yet heard on Five-Zero: Dalton (decrypting the files on the flash drive near end of the show as Novick is sitting nearby): Was any of it [their life together] real? Novick: Definitely not the orgasms.
- A large chunk of the episode was taken up by "previously on" segments: at the beginning (McGarrett and Catherine's tearful farewell; Danno's interrogation by the FBI -- 2 minutes, 19 seconds); Rex Coughlin grilling Chin Ho two seasons before (33 seconds); and Coughlin getting murdered with Gabriel giving him a pen in the eye from last season (33 seconds).
- There were excerpts from three songs heard during the show; the use of all of these was stupid. The first, Hold Tight by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich was inconguously in the background at the beginning as the ambulance containing Luana rushed to the hospital and in the scene where Novick slashed and stabbed people with a scalpel. Sweet Emotion by Aerosmith accompanied McGarrett and HPD as they went to Dalton's house to apprehend him and Novick near the end of the show. Letting Go by Saint Raymond finished the episode as Abby approached Chin Ho in his office, saying "there's something I need to tell you."
- Dalton meets Novick at the intersection of Iwilei and Pacific, an actual street corner in Honolulu. The address of Skillex, located in Waimanalo, is 157 Ke'eke'e Road, Honolulu 96822.
- When Five-0 ask him whether he knew Luana, Yang invokes doctor-patient privilege. But this would not apply, because Yang's license to practice medicine was revoked. As well, according to Wikipedia, the Federal Rules of Evidence do not recognize doctor–patient privilege in the USA.
- Yang's "clinic" is located at 1159 Maunakea St. in Honolulu.
- Dalton lives at 1214 Cunningham Pl., Honolulu 96825. His Social Security number is 944-13-8882. Novick's birth date is October 28, 1988. Her visa that Five-0 looks at expired April 12, 2015. Her visa registration number is DH78241. Her Russian address is Vyborgskoye Highway #135, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation 194356. Luana's Social Security number is 959-72-5211. He lived at 606 Keli'i Avenue, Honolulu 96816. His driver's license number was HH2526186V. He was patient #39487509482.
- At the end of the show, there was a credit in memory of Brock Little, surfer and Five-0 stuntman whose picture was seen in the previous episode as a human trafficking boss. He passed away recently from cancer.
- Olga Fonda, who plays Novick, was actually born in Russia (October 1, 1982). She is no relation to the famous Fonda family, but adopted the surname out of admiration for the acting dynasty, according to IMDb.
This was a feel-good show and I kind of liked most of it. Yes, I know I'm starting this review on April 1st!
At the end of the last show, which seems to have happened an eternity ago, Abby was about to fess up to Chin Ho about the deception involved with her following Five-0 around, that she was spying on them. In this episode, she threw her San Francisco Police Department badge into the ocean, accompanied by the usual sad Lost-like chordal soundtrack, renouncing her witch-hunt. Later, Abby is just about to leave town when McGarrett appears at her hotel room and, despite Abby telling him "I lied," he offers her a job with Five-0. It looks like she will take it and the show ended with Chin and her having a huge smooch. Awww...
Julie Benz as Abby looked very nice in this show, much less up tight than previously. Or maybe that was her character? But what has happened to her prosecutor boss? He wasn't seen in the show at all. Alas, I feel that Abby is doomed, like many of the other women on the show. (Coughlin will reportedly reappear in the season finale, but then so will Gabriel ... hmmm ...)
Aside from this soap opera, there were two story arcs.
One had Danno traitorously (to Kamekona) eating chicken with his two kids at Koala Moa Rotisserie Chicken, supposedly in Haleiwa on the North Shore, when his car is stolen. Gracie seems to have grown up a lot (I know we have not seen her much recently) and is a lot more mouthy, especially considering her cel phone, which Danno has forbidden her to have while they are out and about. After finding the car missing, the three of them get on a public transit bus, driven by none other than Mamo (original series' star Al Harrington). While on the way back to town, they encounter the two guys who stole the car (kind of a far-fetched coincidence, like meeting Mamo), and Danno orders Mamo to follow them with the bus. He does this a bit too closely (also shades of the old show). Mamo, the kids and passengers on the bus are ordered out while Danno, suddenly figuring out how to drive the bus, pursues the bad guys to some middle-of-nowhere house where he joins up with a local boar hunter named Vance Pekelo (Cooper Andrews), each of them using a bow and arrow to bring the situation under control. Danno admits that his previous experience with archery was at a summer camp in the Catskills.
Somewhat more serious was the "torn from today's headlines" story of two men who escaped from a Thai fishing ship which forced people to work as slaves off the coast of Oahu. (You may recall similar stories about the Thai shrimp industry a few months back.) One of them, Somchai Wattana, drowns, while Eduardo Torres (JB Tadena), the other, who speaks English amazingly well, makes it to shore where he has a very sad and emotional confrontation with McGarrett, Grover and Kono when he wakes up in his hospital room. There are human trafficking connections to episode S06E16 (two shows ago) when Five-0 tracks down local people who have dealings with the fishy fishing ship. Following this, McGarrett, Chin Ho and Abby, all wearing wetsuits, board this ship and free all of the "slaves." At the end of the show, Torres' young daughter, who he has never seen, and his wife are reunited with him in the hospital in a tear-jerking scene.
At this point, I was thinking, "Wouldn't this show be even sweller with a 'beers on the beach' finale?" and ... guess what? That's what happened! Well, it really wasn't "beers on the beach," but "a shrimp feast on the beach" at Kamekona's.
MORE TRIVIA:
- There is some picky stuff to do with "international waters" in this show relating to whether Five-0 boarding the fishing boat is within their jurisdiction (as if anyone cares about issues like this on this show!). These waters are typically defined as 13.8 miles from shore (note at the beginning when the guys are drifting in the ocean, they are 14 miles out), but according to Wikipedia, the Five-0 writers' favorite resource, the USA's "contiguous zone" for international waters ("where they can exert limited control for the purpose of preventing or punishing 'infringement of ... customs, fiscal, immigration or sanitary laws and regulations within [their] territory or territorial sea'") is actually double this amount, 27.6 miles. At the end of the show, the fishing boat is "30 miles west of Oahu," in other words, still outside this limit. BUT ... there is an "exclusive economic zone" which goes up to 230.2 miles where a coastal nation "has control of all economic resources within its exclusive economic zone, including fishing, mining, oil exploration, and any pollution of those resources." Note this does not say anything about crime, and I doubt if Five-0's jurisdiction would go that far. You might think that because some of the Hawaiian Islands are close to each other, there might be an area where there is an overlap relating to "international waters," but according to one WWW page, "Kauai and Oahu are 63 miles apart. Twenty-two miles separate the islands of Oahu and Molokai." So I don't think that is the case, and it's not like the Philippines, where the issue of international waters became complicated by the multitude of small islands and their closeness to each other, which resulted in "international waters" being taken from what looks like the boundary around the outermost islands of that country, including everything on the "inside."
- There is more "torn from today's headlines" relevance with the fishing boat, the Sea Falcon (registry number DH6598), which is described as a "ghost ship," inasmuch as it was decommissioned some 10 years before and should have been scrapped. ("Ghost ships" washing up on the shores of Japan, presumably from North Korea, have been in the news recently.) After Grover pooh-pooh's Jerry's conspiratorial take on such vessels, McGarrett tells him about the USS Hornet, a ship with a "ghostly" reputation. When Grover asks if he is kidding (he actually isn't), McGarrett gives him a sly smile. Perhaps this has something to do with the April Fool's Day broadcast date?
- According to the show, Koala Moa Chicken is in Haleiwa, but it is not. Gracie actually bad-mouths the place to Kamekona near the end of the show.
- At the end of the show, Kono tells Graham Clark, the human trafficker who disappeared in the earlier episode, that he is under arrest for "violation of the Mann Act." Presumably, this refers to his indiscretions from the previous show, because, according to Wikipedia, this act was set up "to address prostitution, 'immorality,' and human trafficking particularly where it was trafficking for the purposes of prostitution," not forcing people to work in slave-like conditions on a fish boat.
- Abby's badge that she chucked says that she was inspector #154.
- The "previously on" flashback at the beginning of the show with Abby lasted just over a minute. This sequence also had a flash-forward to the scene with Danno shooting arrows later in the show, somewhat unusual for Five-Zero.
- Danno uses the expression "son of a bitch" when he can't get a cel phone signal during the bus pursuit. This lack of a signal goes on for several minutes. Are there really that many cel phone dead zones on Oahu?
- In order to get Rand (Patrick Robert Smith), a suspect, to admit to his participation in the fishy fish boat/human trafficking/slavery schemes, Five-0 submerges him underwater with the help of a crane on his own boat. Grover ridicules Rand when he brings up the issue of his legal rights on which Five-0 are obviously trampling.
- Edward Torres was born 4/22/85 in Manila. He disappeared in September 2012 from Davao, also in the Philippines.
- Jerry is seen teleconferencing with his new geeky girl friend.
If you can disassociate yourself from the previous Grover-centric episode (S06E13), which was so horrible that it is the first Five-Zero show I have given a "BOMB" rating to, and approach this one with a don't-think-too-hard-about-it attitude, it was not that bad. Among its saving graces was the fact that it was basically only ONE story, since Danno was off in Las Vegas chaperoning his daughter Gracie's cheerleading team to a competition (i.e., Scott Caan was not in this show). But there were still a lot of problems.
The episode began with a comedic scene of Grover and McGarrett eating pancakes at the Wailana Coffee House. After notorious cheapskate McGarrett paid the bill (with money that he won from Grover!), Grover was suddenly drawn outside to talk to some guy on the sidewalk. McGarrett noticed this, and within the space of 12 seconds as he left the restaurant, both Grover and this guy completely disappeared.
Grover does not respond to Five-0's phone calls, and Kono, using the first of several examples of extreme investigate powers during this show, snoops in Grover's cel phone text messages to see that there is a call coming from a blocked number from around the time McGarrett and Grover left the restaurant. Kono is immediately able to see the actual number and figure out that this call was made by Frank Zagar, the guy on the sidewalk, without any indication as to how she did this. After running his name through NCIC, the National Crime Information Center, Five-0 sees that Zagar works for the FBI in Philadelphia. Zagar was played by Mark Valley, who gave a very good performance.
A scene follows reminiscent of the original Five-O where McGarrett gets jerked around by the feds (in this case, the FBI), who won't let him talk to Zagar. The agent was Grover's handler for a case back in 1989 where Grover was "a high-value asset." Undeterred, McGarrett gets the deus ex machina-like Joe White to dig up info, via some contact, that Grover, using the alias Sean Darius, was part of a task force back then that infiltrated the Philadelphia Black Mafia, a street gang "who controlled vice, drugs, even some cops." (Joe White does not actually appear in the show.)
McGarrett has a brainstorm, deducing that two members of this criminal enterprise convicted in 1992 who "had the most to lose" were Aaron Barnes Senior (who died in prison 7/25/2011) and his son Aaron Barnes Junior (released from jail 7/25/2015). Then Chin Ho pulls up "the phone records of everyone with known ties to Barnes Jr., including his attorney, Benjamin Rusk" (seriously!). And guess who has been talking to Rusk? None other than Clay Maxwell, Grover's friend who was sent to federal prison in Marion, Illinois after the previous episode where Grover revealed that Maxwell stole a large amount of money when the two of them were on the Chicago police force together years before. Since that show, there has been no mention whatsoever of all the offenses Grover committed towards Maxwell, including breaking and entering, kidnapping, assault, forcible confinement, and destruction of property.
There is also no indication how Maxwell knew about Barnes Jr. and that his lawyer was Rusk. Presumably Grover told him about this at some point, so it seems Grover planted the seeds of his own destruction by telling his former partner about not only his undercover activities in Philadelphia, but also his witness protection-like existence in Hawaii! DUH!
Meanwhile, Grover and his family are on the run, taking a boat from Oahu to Molokai where they intend to get an FBI-financed flight back to the mainland. But after arriving on Molokai, brainstorms are the order of the day, with Grover quickly figuring out that the FBI agents helping Zagar are bogus (and, in fact, their real life equivalents are dead back on Oahu). A suspensful chase through the back roads of Molokai ensues, with Grover and family in their SUV attempting to run Zagar and his two pals off the road and then escape from them in the jungle.
Having heard that Barnes Jr. (Kasper Nelson) is also on his way to Molokai, back on Oahu, McGarrett and Kono commandeer a helicopter from Makani Kai Helicopters, very similar to the one used on Magnum, P.I., numbered N369MH, and also head to Molokai. Kono's facial reactions during this trip have to be seen to be believed. On arriving at the "Molokai airport" (which has no resemblance to the real thing), they spot SUVs by a nearby "old sugar mill" which is where Barnes Jr. and his pals are waiting for word from Zagar that Grover and his family are dead. Although there is no indication how McGarrett lands the helicopter near this mill without anyone noticing, this happens, and he and Kono sneak up and the usual firefight ensues without Five-0 getting a scratch. Barnes Jr. and his pals are knocked off, and Grover and family manage to take care of the FBI agents, bogus and otherwise, who are after them.
There seems to be a big problem, though. Is all this death and destruction going to be covered up? If not, won't Grover's life be in peril once again? Surely everything will not stop because of Barnes Jr.'s death!
MORE TRIVIA:
- The mug shot for Sean Darius, Grover's undercover alias, shows he was booked on 5/25/1989 with a number of A 74885. Darius' Social Security number is 925-59-7336. His manufactured criminal record shows he was arrested for criminal assault, manslaughter and armed robbery. His Pennsylvania driver's license number was 60 231 19F.
- When Barnes Jr. sends a plane to an airfield in North Oahu as a diversion, McGarrett threatens its pilot with death to make him reveal that the flight was a hoax.
- When Maxwell calls Barnes Jr.'s lawyer from the prison, the phone number is 618-555-0157. Bogus "555" numbers are all over the place in this episode. The numbers that Grover has received text messages from are 808-555-0115, 808-555-0179 and 808-555-0107. Zagar's cel phone number, though blocked, is actually (267) 555-0119. Zagar's FBI agent number is 3984-5720.
- As they leave their house to go on the run, Grover takes all of his family's cel phones and cooks them in the microwave. Later, when McGarrett opens the microwave after he hears its beeping meaning "whatever inside is finished," a blast of smoke comes out. Why didn't McGarrett or Chin Ho smell this when they first came in the place?
- The case against Barnes Jr. was numbered 25459-14085; that against his father was 25422-07764.
- McGarrett uses the expression "son of a bitch."
- Several of the shots at the end of the show as McGarrett and Kono greet Grover and his family on Molokai are in slow motion.
This was another "turn off your brain" episode. I really should revive the separate rating system that I had for this kind of show, hidden remnants of which can be seen by looking at the HTML source code for the Season One reviews.
Things began with a one-minute flashback to Gabriel visiting Adam in prison three months before in S06E11. Following the main titles, Kono met Chin Ho at the Nuuanu Pali Lookout, a popular tourist spot where there was virtually no one around. As the wind swept through Kono's hair, she looked sad and told Chin how she found out from Halawa Warden Grier about this visit which concerned Gabriel wanting to "grow his business" with Adam's help.
One of the two (sigh) crimes of the week started out with a pointless cameo of two NFL stars, the brothers Martellus and Michael Bennett, stuck in a cab during a traffic jam on Waikiki's Kalakaua Avenue -- not good promotion for the local tourist industry, unlike most of the shots of people suntanning and surfing seen on the show. There is suddenly a huge commotion as a rampaging elephant sends people fleeing down the street.
The next morning, as Danno's obnoxious nephew Eric arrives to work, we are introduced to Jerry's "baby sister" Isabel (Zuleyka Silver) who is also on the way to the Five-0 offices. She is kind of a babe, and everyone is incredulous that she could be related to Jerry. So was I, thinking at first she was Asian-looking. But the actress is Mexican-American, Jerry's last name is Ortega, and Jorge Garcia's parents were born in Cuba and Chile, so I guess this is possible.
The topic at the office is the elephant, but everyone is soon called away to Universal Exports in Chinatown where a security guard has been brutally murdered. I am amazed that McGarrett and Danno are both clueless as to the significance of this company's name. Jerry immediately picks up on its connection to the fictional import-export company which acts as a cover for the British Secret Service in James Bond movies.
This company has been making an "indestructible" tactical suit for the U.S. military, for which it has so far incurred $80 million in development expenses. Kono says it reminds her of "Iron Man." (I thought it was more reminiscent of RoboCop.) After the guard was murdered, the suit disappeared. The most likely suspect is Hugh Foster, formerly on the company's research and development team, who was fired eight months before for shopping around specs of the suit to rival companies. But Foster has an alibi: he was at the movies the night before when the suit was being stolen.
Meanwhile, back at Five-0, Isabel has something to tell her brother, especially after Eric digs up information from security cameras that were connected with the elephant. In addition to studying at UCLA to become an attorney, Isabel is also connected with a PETA-like organization called Animals Without Chains, and she was the one who was trying to free the elephant from the Seven Seas Circus when it got spooked by a car horn and fled down the main drag.
Isabel wants Jerry to help her get the elephant, named Mazie, to the docks where she can be shipped to a sanctuary in Thailand. Jerry enlists the help of Kamekona and Max to provide a sedative and a truck.
Meanwhile, the hunt is on to find the stolen Robocop suit, especially after someone wearing it breaks into HPD headquarters and sprays the place with bullets and then steals a key piece of evidence -- a Beretta M9 -- which is supposed to put Luke Waiola, a local crime boss, away in jail at a trial the next day.
Immunity and means comes into play multiple times from this point to the end of the show.
First, McGarrett and Danno threaten the gangster's lawyer, Kelly Akela (Leslie C. Maharaj), because large amounts of money she is connected with have suddenly changed hands just as the gun was stolen, and, of course, she caves in immediately, rather than "going to prison." Five-0 watches as Mr. Robo-Suit meets with Akela at the Laukahi Slope in Waialae, then follows him. Eventually this guy is caught, and revealed to be Foster.
Jerry figures out that Foster doctored his alibi by hacking into the movie theater's security cameras and making it look like he was at the movies when he said he was, whereas he actually was there the previous week. Jerry, still without a Five-0 badge, wonders if he will qualify for immunity and means because of his participation in helping the elephant. McGarrett is noncommittal.
Everything is wrapped up just after 36 minutes of the 42:24 show. The elephant is off to Thailand, the suit has been recovered and in the final instance of someone from Five-0 throwing their weight around, Kono confronts Solomon Tuasopo (Spam Laupola), a guard from Halawa, accusing him of taking money so Gabriel could see Adam. Tuasopo quite correctly tells her to take a hike and, if she has any questions, to talk to Adam himself.
So what was dumb about this show?
- After the elephant escaped, it somehow wound up in Paradise Park, a former botanical and zoological garden north of the Honolulu downtown. When Jerry asks his sister how she got the elephant there, especially since she ditched the truck she was going to use to take it to the docks, Isabel replies, "It wasn't easy."
- The Robo-suit is not only bulky in size, but also very tall. When Foster comes to HPD, its head is almost hitting the top of the frame on the place's front door. I have no idea how someone wearing this suit can get into SUVs like the Chevrolet Suburbans he uses during the show, let alone drive them. After Foster escapes from the encounter at HPD headquarters, he forces a cop to drive him to some place above a residential neighborhood where he jumps over the side of a cliff to some woods below. When McGarrett and Danno arrive a few minutes later, McGarrett can't see where the suit guy is, saying "he could be anywhere."
- It doesn't make sense how Foster knows about the Beretta in the evidence room. Was this something he read about in the newspapers? You would think this is the kind of information which the court would not make a big deal about to keep it from ending up in the papers.
- After he gets the payoff from Akela, Foster's car is T-boned by an HPD SUV (#814) driven by McGarrett. How they are able to predict exactly where Foster's car will be at the moment this happens is not explained.
- At the end of the show, the elephant is put into a closed container for shipment to Thailand. This is just as cruel punishment as being in the circus, because according to one WWW site, this trip will take anywhere from 8 to 23 days!
The music for this show was the usual clichés, and it was bad.
One thing I did enjoy was Taylor Wily's acting in his brief scenes. I loved this guy's comic timing when Jerry was asking to borrow Kamekona's truck and his comment later that he hoped Jerry would "sanitize" the truck after they used it to take the elephant to the docks.
MORE TRIVIA:
- There was an actual incident with an abused elephant escaping from a circus in Honolulu in 1994 where the animal killed her trainer and injured several other people before it was shot dead. This is mentioned in the episode, that Jerry and Isabel's father was supposed to take them to this show, but they did not go because there was a "tsunami warning" (presumably this is something that their father said; this remark is not elaborated on in any detail).
- The music heard as Chin rides to the Pali Lookout is Big Trouble by Outasight.
- Only three episodes before, in S06E17, we had another geeky guy who winds up in a mess of trouble working for some company connected with national security.
- Clark Brighton (Ted King), the boss of Universal Exports, tells Five-0 that information surrounding the theft of the suit was erased via the Tor network, which conceals a user's location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.
- The license number of the stolen Suburban used after the break-in at the HPD evidence room is AVY 721; the one used when Foster meets Akela later is NB7 65F.
- The address of the crime boss, Luke Waiola, is 1240 Melville Road, Honolulu 96817. His Social Security number is 949-74-8803. Leslie C. Maharaj, who played Kelly Akela, his attorney, is an actual attorney based in Honolulu who practices family law.
- Although the suit is supposedly "indestructible," Foster has the wind knocked out of him after his car is put out of commission and McGarrett is easily able to remove the suit's helmet as Foster sits, dazed, in the car's front seat. McGarrett says "son of a bitch" when he recognizes Foster.
- McGarrett gives Jerry two tickets to the circus (value $19 each) at the end of the show for his efforts, which seems kind of inappropriate, inasmuch as the circus were the ones who were exploiting the poor elephant. Why encourage business with them?
- Considering the Robocop look of the suit, it's too bad that Peter Weller didn't direct this show ... but he is actually directing the next one.
There were actually some things I liked about this show. REALLY!
First, there was just one crime of the week with a couple of minor sub-plots: one, where Kamekona's shrimp truck gets a flat tire and another regarding McGarrett's protégé Nahele. I also liked the way Chin Ho was looking after things at the Five-Zero office while the rest of the team were out crime-solving and the way that Adam took charge of his particular situation. And the episode, directed by Peter Weller, had very good production values.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that the script had some snappy dialogue, it was also overwhelmed with stupidities, not just the usual dumb stuff, but real "If U Seek Amy" stupid. Seriously, some of the script for this show was so bad, the writers should be sentenced to hard time in Halawa!
Speaking of Halawa, the show began with a chemical spill forcing evacuation of the prison. There are not enough correctional vehicles to transport over 1,000 inmates out of the place, so they also use municipal buses.
An elaborate scheme is behind the spill and what happens subsequently, supposedly engineered by yakuza types who are pissed that their leader Goro Shioma got knocked off in S06E10. It is suggested that Shioma's successor suspects that Adam and Gabriel are in cahoots to take over what remains of Shioma's empire, though it is debatable as to how anyone found out about all this (I don't want to think too hard).
Shioma's daughter, Michelle (Michelle Krusiec, giving a total bitch performance) is accused by Chin of financing this scheme and bribing Halawa guard Solomon Tuasopo (Spam Laupola), who we encountered in the last episode, to make sure that Adam is on a particular bus.
This bus is on its way to the Marine Corps barracks at Kaneohe Bay where the convicts will be temporarily held when it totally disintegrates because of an IED, which Danno suggests was "remote controlled." Of course there are questions as to how this was all set up, that this particular bus at this exact time and place received this kind of treatment, and no other buses are seen anywhere in the vicinity. After the spectacular explosion, most of the convicts which were on the bus are seen on the road looking like barbecued pork, but Adam, who was "housed in a protective-custody dormitory right next to the maximum-security wing" and five others, who are chained together in pairs, manage to escape relatively unscathed, except for one who has a nasty leg wound.
The six chain gang fugitives are:
- Adam, connected to serial arsonist Jason Duclair (Randy Couture, already seen on the show several times);
- Sleazy lawyer Gerald Burns (Michael Jay Green, also a recurring actor), in jail for first degree murder, chained to serial rapist Bobby Stockman (Justin Welborn);
- Henry Garavito (Richard Brake, giving a truly creepy performance), who slaughtered two families and then ate their bodies, attached to Efrin Aquino (Ari Green), in jail since 2002 for a triple homicide.
An extensive police dragnet with HPD and Five-Zero is launched to find the missing six. Of course, Five-0 are the ones who are closest on the trail of these guys!
The six convicts make their way through the dense Oahu jungle (as swooping helicopter shots of this jungle keep reminding us), finding handy things at a campsite like the implements to make fire and an axe to separate their chains (stooopid!). Garavito falls behind with Aquino, then murders his partner and chews himself free from the chain by eating through the guy's wrist. Later when Kono and Grover find Aquino's body, it sets new levels of grossness for the show. (The whole thing reminded me of a scene in the 1959 movie Ben-Hur where a galley slave who has only one arm is freed from drowning.)
Tensions rise among the convicts, mainly because of Garavito, who later bashes Burns on the head, drowns him and eats his heart when Burns is refilling some water bottles at a nearby stream. According to McGarrett later, Garavito used "a broken bottle" to cut the heart out, but after killing Burns, Garavito took an axe from him which Stockman had given to the lawyer earlier. Whatever he used for this "operation," the writers never considered the fact that the heart is located behind the ribs. When Garavito returns, Adam clues in that something is wrong when he sees a small amount of blood on Garavito's pant leg. There is no blood of significance on Garavito's shirt. Considering that removing Burns' heart by whatever means would produce a bloody mess, it would make more sense that there would be blood all over the cannibal's mouth and shirt at this point. (Later, prior to his encounter with Five-0, Garavito's shirt is covered with blood, quite likely a continuity error.)
Eventually, Adam gets tired of being jerked around by Garavito and Stockman and throws both of them down a hill. He and Duclair go their separate ways, but then suddenly, in the middle of the jungle, two HPD cops who are actually yakuza stooges show up. One of these guys (Keane Ishii), whose name is "Y[oshito]. Shen" according to the name on his shirt, prepares to execute Adam, taking far too much time to do this. The other cop walks far away and suddenly reappears on fire, obviously because of master arsonist Duclair. But how did Duclair do this? Did he pick up a can of lighter fluid on the way or something? Something else you don't want to think about too hard -- DUH!! As if this wasn't stupid enough, Duclair then suddenly appears behind Shen, who is still dithering about shooting Adam, and puts Shen in a sleeper hold.
Duclair frees Adam from his cuffs using a key from the now unconscious Shen. Both of them bugger off from the scene. Garavito then appears, licking his lips as he finds Shen, who is no longer knocked out on the ground but tied to a tree, and prepares to dine on him. (This is totally stupid. Who tied Shen to the tree?) Five-Zero then shows up and Garavito is shot dead.
Adam and Duclair are fleeing together, when suddenly two more yakuza pretending to be cops appear. They shoot Duclair, who may or not appear in a future episode. Adam tackles one of the yakuza, and is about to be shot by the other when Five-0 shows up and saves his bacon. Kono is relieved to see that Adam is OK, and the two of them engage in the usual gushy baloney accompanied by the usual slow moving and sad Lost-like chordal music.
As the show came to a close, despite me writing down "beers on the beach?" and "shrimp from Kamekona?" (the big guy did get to the Waikiki Food Fest where he was going and won a prize), things ended with McGarrett consoling Nahele, whose father was one of the guys fried in the bus explosion. Nice!
MORE TRIVIA:
- There is a 50 second "previously on" segment at the beginning of the show, rehashing some of the Adam/Kono back story.
- The scoop on the escaped criminals, told to the search parties by McGarrett, is as follows:
- Burns, age 61, murder in the first degree, 1 life term, served 2 years, 54 days.
- Stockman, 39, 8 counts of sexual assault in the first degree, 2 counts of sexual assault in the fourth degree, sentence 162 years, served 5 years, 30 days.
- Aquino, 31, 3 counts of murder in the first degree, 3 life terms, served 4 years, 37 days.
- Garavito, 40, 8 counts of sexual assault in the first degree, 2 counts of sexual assault in the fourth degree, sentence 162 years, served 5 years, 30 days (but McGarrett says he has spent the last 15 years of his life in solitary confinement). Note his stats are the same as Stockman's.
- Duclair, 45, 6 counts of murder in the first degree, 4 counts of arson, 6 life terms plus 50 years, served 1 year, 62 days.
- Adam, 39, 1 count of obstruction of justice, 18 months, served 189 days. (McGarrett says that Adam was "forced to go along with the other fugitives," which makes no sense, since Adam is chained to Duclair -- he had no choice!)
- The Social Security numbers of Adam and his chained friends are all shown as Chin checks out their criminal records via the Supercomputer: Burns - 903-02-4872; Stockman - 908-55-0063; Aquino - 915-11-8117; Garavito - 934-83-1870; Duclair - 948-17-9833; Adam - 937-29-8467.
- Michelle Shioma's Social Security number is 957-63-3886; her Hawaii drivers license number is HY7232572B. She lives at 23 Cunningham Dr., Honolulu 96816. Her bank checking account number is 870562234.
- Kamekona's truck which has a flat tire is parked on sand. How can this be fixed using the jack from McGarrett's truck?
- When Garavito tells everyone, in a roundabout way, that he had to eat Aquino, who had supposedly fallen and fatally injured himself, off of the handcuff chain, Stockman calls him "a sick son of a bitch."
- As he and his fellow convicts are escaping through the jungle, Adam keeps dropping beads from this necklace he has on the ground to help Five-Zero find them. (The string from this necklace is used like a tourniquet on Garavito's leg wound.) Adam is dropping the beads in a really obvious way, meaning obvious to the other convicts, though no one notices this. These are Buddhist prayer beads, which likely qualify as "inmate religious property." But prisoners with something like this could hang themselves in their cells or use it to strangle others!
- After the bus explosion at the beginning of the show, one of the yakuza masquerading as HPD shoots convict James Hamasaki (Matt Nelms) dead because they think he is Adam. But the resemblance is not that close!
- A "How's My Driving?" sign from the blown-up bus has a phone number of 1-808-555-0198.
- Why are there no bodies inside the blown-up shell of the bus? And how could the six have survived the blast? Grover says that Hamasaki's survival (and he is horribly burned) was a "miracle."
After last week's show, which mostly featured one main story, this one reverted to the usual two-for-one formula, where the lesser of the two stories, the "comedic" one, was not particularly interesting and had virtually nothing to do with Five-0. Adding to the malaise was the musical score, which was cliché-ridden.
Kamekona decides to be yet more entrepreneurial and start a catamaran business called Kamekona's Inner-Island Booze Cruise. Aside from his cousin Flippa, only McGarrett and Max attend the christening of his ship, named the Thong Magnet, which he obtained at an HPD property forfeiture auction. So what happened to the other members of the Five-0 ohana?
During a subsequent trial run of the catamaran with Max joining Kamekona and Flippa, the ship ends up in the windless doldrums and its battery is dead, making radio contact for assistance impossible. There is a suggestion later that the ship sinks, though there is no logical reason as to why this would have happened.
The threesome manage to get to a location which Max speculates is uninhabited Lehua, a small island near Ni‘ihau and due west of Kauai. They arrive on a beach like on Gilligan's Island. Except they might as well be on Gilligan's Island -- according to one WWW page, "the real 'Gilligan's Island' is in the middle of Kaneohe Bay, located off the coast of Oahu in Hawaii. The SS Minnow set sail from Ala Moana State Park in Wakiki."
After Flippa serenades everyone with a ukulele tune, and the three snuggle down for the night, a bunch of fireworks, similar to those which go off over Waikiki, are suddenly seen and a couple of tourists stumble past where they are "shipwrecked" -- DUH!!
The main plot and crime of the week was somewhat more serious, yet another "torn from today's headlines" story, focusing on three newsworthy topics: Internet child predators, distracted driving and Internet shaming.
After Addison Wells (Cassi Thompson), a senior at Oahu State, is kidnapped while babysitting, Five-0 enlists the help of Five-0's geek-on-call, Adam "Toast" Charles (Martin Starr), to help them track down who did it. He first leads them to Howard Mintz (Scott Paul Robertson), but this guy is a red herring who is engaging in a fantasy pursuit of women on the Internet and has a solid alibi for the time the kidnapping took place. Further investigation by Toast leads them to Jacob Holm (Scott Michael Campbell), a creepy-looking dude who worked in the IT department of a local law firm and turned into a "hacktivist" who downloaded confidential files off his company's server and then released them to the public.
Holm sees himself as an avenging angel who tracks down people "with dark secrets" who have committed and covered up crimes and makes them confess on the Internet. (McGarrett calls him "a vigilante with a God complex.") To help him in his quest (which seems very labor-intensive), Holms has put spyware on the computers of over a thousand people. One of these, a private financial advisor named Jason Putnam (Timothy Antoine Callais) recently admitted to embezzling $800,000, mostly from his elderly clients. After confessing in a live feed, he shot himself in the head.
Wells' secret is that she ran over some guy five years ago in her hometown of Plymouth, Minnesota while texting on her phone, then covered the whole thing up. Held by Holm in some abandoned warehouse-like building full of smoke, chains and water-covered floors straight out of Saw movies, Wells confesses via a video feed on a pseudo-Facebook page. After this, Holm gives her a gun to shoot herself, but she attempts to escape, ramming a long metal bar like those used to reinforce concrete through Holm as he is chasing her. Holm amazingly manages to pull this bar out of himself and is just about to dispatch Wells with it when McGarrett plugs him.
There were some suspenseful scenes in the show straight out of psycho-terrorizes-a-teenage-girl films (though Wells is supposed to be 22 years old). But there were also a couple of head-scratching moments.
For example, at the beginning of the show, Holm manipulates the automated controls of the home network in the house where Wells is babysitting, causing the temperature to drop. When the baby upstairs starts crying, she leaves her cell phone and goes upstairs where everything is OK. When she returns, the phone isn't where she left it, but it is in a darkened room upstairs next to the baby's room. Somehow Holm managed to get it and sneak it up there without her seeing him.
OK, maybe I am being picky about this, because this was possible, though you have to wonder why Wells didn't hear the squeaky door of the next room opening when she was upstairs.
The other puzzlement was a typical Five-0 "fatal script flaw." How did Holm know about Wells' "crime" in the first place, since she told the police that the pedestrian that she ran over just walked in front of her car and she didn't mention anything about her texting? When Holmes has Welles confined and making her confession later, she blubbers that she wrote an e-mail to the man's family telling what really happened, but never sent it. So how would Holm know the true story?
MORE TRIVIA:
- The show was full of excrement jokes relating to a top-selling mobile phone game called Poopie Penguin which Toast created that had 10 million downloads in its first month. (The word "poop" and variants on this, including "Bird Turd," was used 16 times in total.) Danno goes on a stupid rant to Toast about this game, saying that "my kids, Charlie [who is what, just over four years old?] and Gracie, they play this game non-stop," causing him to spend $100 in one month on in-app purchases of "power-ups and boosts." Isn't the Danno we have seen in the past a father who is smart and hyper-protective enough to stop his kids from doing this?
- McGarrett and Danno are seen in the Takahamo Restoration truck as Toast gets information about Holm from a rival geek named Null Legend (Barrett Shuler) who created software which Holm was using to hide his identity. Toast tells Null Legend (also known as Patrick): "I can't believe you're still running Linux on a 32-bit Samurai stack." This is curious, because according to one WWW page, "The Samurai stack is an amazing image slider that will perform astounding 3D effects," which is used in conjunction with RapidWeaver, Web designing software for the Macintosh. I guess the writers looked this term up in The Handbook of Geeky-Sounding Computer Terms or something.
- Toast is on his way to Los Angeles to eat at Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles (an actual restaurant -- and one which is not in Hawaii) when he is unceremoniously yanked off the plane by McGarrett and Danno. Toast refers to Danno and McGarrett as "Jersey" and "McGruff." Later Danno calls Toast and Jerry "Scooby and Shaggy."
- The license plate on Toast's BMW i8, a plug in hybrid car, is PENGO POO$. (Thanks to Brian Jessel BMW in Vancouver for help identifying it.)
- While trying to figure out Holms' location, Toast overrides the feed of Wells' confession with a famous YouTube keyboard cat video for a few seconds.
- When McGarrett is at the house where Wells was kidnapped, he tells Kono to take the babysitter's laptop to the lab, closing it and putting his fingerprints on it.
- Howard Mintz's IP address is 287.160.549.132, which is unrealistic; the components of an address like this should not go over the number 255.
- When stranded on the beach, Max tells Kamekona and Flippa that he tried to join Doctors Without Borders, but that people considered him to be "awkward and off-putting."
- Kamekona has a line similar to Jack Lord's McGarrett when Max blabs some bafflegab which means "there is no wind": "English!"
- When Wells and her friend Eva (Allxzandra Manalac) are carrying on a Skype-like conversation at the beginning of the show, Eva asks how "trashy" is the outfit she wants to wear for that night. Wells replies, "On, like, a scale of from Taylor to Miley, you're, um you're at a Kardashian level of trashiness right now."
- Some of the comments texted after Putman shoots himself: "100% pure evil. Hope you burn in hell"; "get this guy some diapers because he bout to mess himself"; "You're everything that's wrong with the world & i hope your family spits on your grave"; "Eat your heart out; OH YEAH you don't have one"; "i'ma [sic] laugh when this beta blasts his brains out"; "GET THIS GUY GOT"; "Die in a ditch you sad disgusting human being. You make me ashamed to be part of the same species"; "YOU GET WHAT YOU DESERVED YOU FILTHY ANIMAL"; "How would you like it if I took your life savings? Take his money and give it to the people!!!" His suicide seems to take place in a washroom, because there is a sign on the wall saying "Please Kokua! - for your comfort help keep restroom clean." After Wells makes her confession, these are some of the comments: "This girl should get tried in court. Manslaughter is different than murderer [sic]"; "This is crazy. WHO THE HELL DOES THIS!?!"; "Texting while driving reminds me of hmmmmmmm Everyone! Thought she should pay for what she did!"; "Don't do it! It was an accident and you didn't mean it!"; "Ebola, plague, leprosy, being burnt alive, none of these are worthy of you."; "Addison, I don't care what you did, you don't deserve to die"; "She may be a horrible person, but she doesn't deserve this!"
As the sixth season grinds to its inexorable close in what is undoubtedly the worst season of the show yet, we are subject to the usual jerking around of the audience in order to increase interest for the final cliff-hanging show(s). This 23rd episode was yet another example of a let's-throw-stuff-against-the-wall mishmash where the concept of "ohana" (family) was laid on with a trowel.
The show did have a few amusing moments. Kono is assigned to baby-sit Gerard Hirsch (Willie Garson), the annoying recurring character making yet another appearance. While doing his job where a woman named Vanessa Diaz was brutally murdered, the former-art-forger-turned-crime-scene-restoration-specialist finds a panic room in her house. Later, DNA taken from Hirsch's clothing after a confrontation with a guy hiding in this room (!) leads to identifying not only Doug Morrow, a burglar (the guy in the room, the week's red herring, played by Michael Guarnera) but one Jimmy Brigante (Mitchell L. Johnson), the woman's actual killer who is tied to yakuza boss Goro Shioma's daughter Michelle, recently a major element in the current Five-Zero story arc.
Because Morrow saw Hirsch's face as he fled the house, Hirsch becomes worthy of Kono's protection, presumably because they are assuming that Morrow is clever enough to associate Hirsch with his crime-cleaning company, rather than just get the hell out of the neighborhood as fast as possible.
I laughed loudly when the Kono-obsessed Hirsch asked her "If it comes down to it, would you be willing to take a bullet for me?" and she replied "No. But I might have to shoot myself to get out of this assignment." (The assignment was given to her by McGarrett.) Kono finding a painting of herself done by Hirsch in his bedroom and Hirsch's admission that there were "others" to which Kono said, "There better not be nudes," was also pretty funny.
But then Kono started to get a little too chummy with her work assignment, meeting his father Leo (Elliott Gould) who admitted that he was well aware of his son's criminal past (something Hirsch told Kono he had taken pains to hide from the old man). When Kono tells Hirsch that he has a "good relationship" with his father, Hirsch replies that they had previously been estranged for quite some time and he was closer to his mother. The father's health is supposedly "fading," even though there is no sign of this in the show. Kono is sympathetic, because of her own mother's deteriorated condition. At the end of the show, Kono, to show Hirsch how grateful Five-0 is because he helped them solve four cases, is giving Hirsch -- who is wearing an idiotic bathing suit from a hundred years ago -- surfing lessons. Puh-leeze!!
Unlike most criminals that Five-0 deals with on the show, Shioma's daughter totally stonewalls them about her connection to Diaz' murder when she is grilled in the blue-lit room. Even Danno's threats against Michelle's own children doesn't have her batting an eyelash, which is unusual for a typical "suspect." She has all the right answers. Around this time, Michelle's lawyer is upstairs and Five-0 has no excuse to hold her any further. Jerry's efforts to find anything about this connection as well as Diaz herself are also fruitless, yet another example of a script for the show totally going against normal expectations to make the plot move in a certain direction, whereas typically the investigation would bring up all sorts of minutiae relating to the case.
The show's family angle gets even more complicated when Chin is told that Vanessa's surviving young daughter Sara (Londyn Silzer) said her mother told her that she had an uncle named Chin in the police department. When Chin talks to Sara, she says she was named after her aunt Malia (same as Chin's late wife -- Sara's middle name is Malia). It turns out that Vanessa was Gabriel's wife and Sara is his daughter! Quelle coïncidence! Why Vanessa would have jeopardized herself and her daughter by coming to Hawaii a few months ago is a big fat mystery. Chin is seriously conflicted because Sara is "Gabriel's blood" and "Malia's blood too."
Chin takes Sara under his wing, but loses her during a violent shootout and kidnapping on the streets of Honolulu. He suffers some gunshot injuries, though these are "Two shots, through and through, no vitals." Five-0 manages to track the kid down to a house in Waimanalo because she is wearing a bracelet which just happens to contains a GPS (seriously), thanks to a brainstorm by Chin's girlfriend Abby. Meanwhile, Chin gets out of his hospital bed, disconnects his IV and wires attached to his body. Despite various alarms going off, no one in the hospital notices anything about this. Chin somehow manages to track down where Five-0 is preparing to shoot it out with the bad guys who kidnapped Sara. When he shows up in his bullet-riddled car, he says to McGarrett, "Steve, don't ask me to stand down. The little girl's my niece." How stupid!
The music in this episode fell into the usual categories of "cute," "funny" and "sad" far too much. At least Kono was smiling a lot!
MORE TRIVIA:
- Another instance of monkeying around with the script, in this case to drag the show out, occurs at the beginning. Morrow, the burglar, watches from the panic room on the security system's cameras as Brigante threatens and eventually kills Diaz. Morrow takes pictures of the monitors with his cel phone camera because "he wanted evidence to back up his story." When Eric investigates after the murder, he finds that the entire server with footage from the security camera has been "wiped clean." You have to wonder why this is so; it doesn't make sense that a security system would erase everything and recycle its hard drive space so soon. On the other hand, if Brigante had been seen on footage at the beginning of the show, rather than making us wait until Five-0 apprehended Morrow (and they get the cel phone camera shots he took), the show would only have been 20 minutes long.
- The Plaza at Waikiki, where Hirsch's father is staying, is an actual assisted living facility at 1812 Kalakaua Avenue. If you try to look this up via Google Maps, one of the main images shows a vacant lot, because the picture comes from August 2011. Kono later returns alone to this place to talk to Hirsch's father, who wants her to keep an eye on his son. If things in the show are happening in "real time," there is a big gap between the time it looks like the two of them are going to say goodbye and the time Kono actually leaves by the front door (you can see the place's sign behind her as she walks down the street).
- In this show, the process shots (projected backgrounds) as Chin and Abby are "driving" (and Chin is driving later, following the police car containing Sara) are unusually bad. When Abby sends a message to the Supercomputer telling Grover where Morrow is located, the screen says "Incomming [sic] Text from Abby Dunn."
- O'Loughlin's McGarrett has a Jack-Lord-McGarrett-like line when he tells Abby: "Get in touch with every security company on the island that does GPS monitoring of children."
- The horny Hirsch has several "mixes" of music on his cel phone: Crime Scene Mix, On The Run Mix, Driving Mix and Kono Mix. When he prepares Kono a fancy meal at his apartment, he turns on the Kono Mix, which features two-time Five-0 actor Jimmy Borges singing "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" from his recent CD.
- As Hirsch is cleaning up the mess at the beginning of the show, he is listening to his Crime Scene Mix which includes Todd Rundgren's Bang The Drum All Day, though it doesn't sound like the original version of this song. The piece at the end of the show underscoring the touristy surfing shots, prior to Hirsch's lesson from Kono, is Brand New by Ben Rector. There is another song heard when Hirsch pulls up to the crime scene in his truck at the beginning which I cannot identify.
- Hirsch's company, Crime Clean, has the bogus phone number of 808-555-0191.
- At the beginning of the show, Eric, Danno's annoying crime-solving nephew, says that while Vanessa was being murdered, Sara was at a sleepover at a neighbor's house. How would he know this? Her mother is dead!
- Diaz' Mexican passport shows her address as Calle Garcia Robles #302, La Tuna (Mun. Badiraguato), Sin[aloa]., 80627. Her Mexican National number is C52901168F. Her ten-year passport was issued March 1, 2008. For some reason, her birthday is only "12 DE MAYO," there is no year indicated. The state of Sinaloa is notorious for its connection with drug trafficking and Badiraguato is reportedly the birthplace of a powerful drug lord, Joaquín Guzmán Loera.
- Jimmy Brigante's Social Security number is 922-84-7040.
- At the end, Five-0 shoots all three bad guys who are exposed through windows in the house where they are holding Sara. What are the chances of this happening simultaneously? These guys are pretty dumb to expose themselves in this manner!
This show was pretty mindless, but I really liked it a lot. Aside from the fact that it featured two of the lead characters naked in a shower, it reminded me of S02E22, which was basically non-stop action for 43 minutes with a minimum of "ohana" soap opera slop. I was so engrossed by this penultimate show's forward momentum, I actually didn't write anything for minutes at a time.
And there was something else which interested me a lot: the fact that in this show, Julie Benz (Abby) is looking very attractive (already a hot topic of discussion on IMDb). But enough of that...
As the show begins, there is an epidemic of meth use on Oahu, resulting in several deaths from overdosing and because the drug is laced with fentanyl. Some guy (T.C. Smith) is seen reacting very badly to the drug and dieing in a Chinatown meth house in a really gross way. Gabriel has been staying in this joint for a couple of weeks, maybe because the drug helps him overcome the pain from the fall he took in S06E15. (I don't think Gabe would be involved delivering packages of meth; being kingpin of all crime on the island, this would be somewhat beneath him.) Gabe's brains are obviously scrambled, because he leaves his gun lying around so the meth whore girl friend (Katrina Muldoon) of this overdosing dude can pick it up and shoot Gabe. Then she calls the cops because she recognizes him from TV news reports.
Five-0 soon shows up at the scene. But at HPD there is a dispatcher, Natalie Ochoa (Sharon M. Bell), who is helping an army of yakuza connected with Michelle Shioma track Five-0 and Gabriel, based on Five-0's movements. Things are complicated because cel phone reception has been suppressed in the area of the meth house and Five-0's communication with HPD headquarters has also been messed with.
The yakuza mini-army soon arrives at the meth house too. Lots of gunfire follows, with lots of yakuza dieing (the numbers do not add up), and, with no other way to escape, Five-0 goes to the roof where they leap to the building next door across a huge gap above an alley, along with their captive Gabriel. Amazingly, no one has any problems with this Olympic-like stunt.
Then they descend to the street and make their way through the local neighborhood, including the Hawaii Theatre Center, as Jerry tells them where to go based on security cameras in the area.
Grover and the SWAT team rush to the scene, but drive over some spike strips in the street which the bad guys have conveniently placed there, knowing in advance which streets SWAT will take. (These strips seemingly have explosives in them.) Another massive firefight follows and Grover has his ass saved by Abby, who somehow managed to survive an execution attempt by one of the yakuza thugs who was holding her prisoner back at the meth house.
Five-0 commandeers a municipal transit bus which gets destroyed, shot to hell by the yakuza, similar to the one which was blown up three episodes before. Some of the gunplay around this time doesn't make any sense. There are about 6-7 yakuza blasting the bus, and Grover suddenly shows up and kills two of them. The others suddenly stop firing until Chin and Gabriel flee; then McGarrett and Danno finish off the other shooters.
Chin and Gabriel hide out in an nearby apartment building. Jesse (Lanai Tabura), owner of one of the apartments, 2D, immediately lets them in, even though Gabriel is bleeding all over the place. Then they get a neighbor to make a bogus call to HPD so the dispatcher will tell the bad guys to come to 2D, where Five-0 -- having come half a mile from the bus to the apartment building very quickly -- takes them down while Chin and Gabe hide in the neighbor's place (nice move!).
When Five-0 show up later at Michelle's Kahala house to arrest her, she has disappeared through a tunnel. But a tunnel to where? Next door? Somewhere in the neighborhood? (Danno says "El Chapo must have designed her bathroom.") Surely Michelle is related to Wo Fat who was the master of bizarre and illogical escapes!
Oh yeah, after he gets to the hospital, Gabriel dies from cardiac arrest during surgery at King's Medical Center. Mentioned only briefly by Chin Ho to McGarrett, this is an ignominious end to this "master criminal," similar to Wo Fat's capture (though Wo later escaped captivity). Gabe has a touching speech to Chin when he knows his time is up soon, apologizing for killing Chin's father and asking Chin to look after his daughter Sara.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Natalie Ochoa, the dispatcher, is the sister-in-law of Solomon Tuasopo, the Halawa guard who was connected to Shioma and Gabriel in previous episodes. But is there only ONE dispatcher for all of HPD, reminsicent of the old Five-O? Assuming there is not, how is it that calls containing information which she passes along to the yakuza gang all end up on her line?
- At the beginning of the show, meeting at the Moana Surfrider Hotel, Max tells McGarrett that he wants to take a few months off to join Doctors Without Borders. But in the show where he was shipwrecked with Kamekona and Flippa, Max said he tried to join this group before and they weren't too excited about this because he was too quirky. Max says while he is away, Dr. Mindy Shaw, who hasn't been seen on the show since S05E20, will be in charge of the office.
- When Chin asks Max for help dealing with Gabriel's gunshot wound, Max says " Ambroise Paré, the French barber surgeon, who was a pioneer in battlefield medicine, used to cauterize wounds with gunpowder." But Paré's Wikipedia entry says the French surgeon used "a recipe made of egg yolk, oil of roses and turpentine" to cauterize wounds.
- In his office, Max is listening to Beethoven's famous "Moonlight" Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor.
- As Chin drags Gabriel down the street after leaving the bus, there is a lot of lens flare in the camera. When Gabriel grabs Chin's gun in the apartment and acts like he is going to commit suicide, Chin calls him a "son of a bitch."
- There is a "previously on Five-0" at the beginning of the show which lasts for a minute and 20 seconds.
- The bus which Five-0 takes over is the #19, Waikiki Beach and Hotels. Its number is 302.
- The music at the beginning of the show accompanying the scenes the meth house is Enough is Not Enough by Nightstalker. After the main titles, Honolulu by The Everly Brothers is heard behind the default shots of people on the beach.
- Don Pomes, who played the neighbor in the apartment next to the one where Gabriel hid out and later made the call to HPD to trap the yakuza, appeared six times in the original Five-O.
The outbreak of meth-related deaths (11 in two weeks) continues in this show which was also broadcast on the evening of May 13th, following the previous one.
When a 16-year-old pal of McGarrett's ward Nahele named Makaio dies because of an overdose, the Five-0 boss takes things personally, so the team goes to work to find out who is behind importing the dope into the islands. McGarrett gets the name of a dealer from Liko (Adam Zastrow), a strung-out addict, by threatening to give him a potentially fatal dose of the fentanyl-laced drug. Liko quickly gives up the name of his dealer, Michael (Josh Fingerhut). Kono poses as some well-dressed first-time user buying meth off Michael and his expensive car is ridiculously hooked up to a tow truck in about 35 seconds while she makes the purchase. Michael then gives them information after being interrogated by McGarrett and Grover in a scrap yard as Kono trashes his car nearby with an earth mover. This leads them to pilot Nathaniel Francis (David Paluck), who is grilled in the blue-lit room. When he will not co-operate, McGarrett breaks his arm.
Francis sets up a meeting with Dae Won (Sun Kang from the Fast and Furious franchise) who meets McGarrett and Danno in a hanger where McGarrett is pretending to be Evan Raintree, a pilot, and Danno is his mechanic Dave Carson. After overcoming resistance to McGarrett insisting that Danno come along on the flight, Dae Won takes their fingerprints using the gizmo similar to those found in restaurants for credit card payments seen previously on the show, where it was used by Max.
Ignoring questions about whether these devices are available to the general public and whether anyone using them could get access to confidential fingerprint databases, Jerry manages to override the device's searching and instead connects it to bogus identities for McGarrett and Danno. All of which is idiotic, because both McGarrett and Danno have had a very high public profile as crime-fighters for the last six years. HELLO -- I was already bitching about McGarrett's public recognition when he was participating in an MMA fight in the second season, fer chrissakes!
We then cut to McGarrett, Danno, and Dae Won returning from a buy of drugs on the Green Island Atoll (a totally isolated place 1,368 miles west of Oahu not really in use, though according to Wikipedia, since 2010 the Division of Forestry and Wildlife [??] has had a year-round presence there). As they are getting close to Oahu, their plane is attacked by a nasty guy with a machine gun in a helicopter (Yancy Medieros) which has a much lower travelling speed than their plane, according to various posters on IMDb. McGarrett is near-fatally wounded. Of course, we already knew this would happen, because that's what we saw in the teaser at the beginning of the show! DUH!
Danno has to fly the plane back to Honolulu in a sequence reminiscent of 1970s "Airport" movies, talked down by air traffic controllers. He lands it on Waikiki Beach, from which people have been hastily evacuated. This reminded me of an episode of classic Five-O where Kapiolani Park is cleared out in record time so a small atomic flash fire can be set off. Extracted quickly from the plane, McGarrett is transported to the Tripler Army Medical Center. Via the shortest route on Google Maps, this would normally take almost 20 minutes.
While they are waiting for news of McGarrett, after getting information from Dae Won, Five-0 has time to go a location where Mr. Nasty Machine Gun Dude is supervising a lot of people working on the distribution of meth. There is an incredible scene where a helicopter blows up (I don't think it was the helicopter Mr. NMGD was using), and Danno walks past it to (we hope) terminate NMGD ... but he is able to restrain himself.
Business taken care of, Five-0 returns to the hospital, where there is bad news. In order to save McGarrett's life, someone must donate a liver (or part of same). Everyone from Five-0 steps up to the plate, but because Danno has the same blood type, he is the number one candidate, despite the fact that he got kind of banged up in the plane crash and might have an infection of some kind.
During the will-they-(Danno and McGarrett)-live/will-they-die final minutes of the show in a scene which REALLY drags out, much of the ohana is assembled at the hospital. This crowd includes Dog the Bounty Hunter, a totally unnecessary addition, even though he has appeared on the show three times before and has a connection to Hawaii, perhaps saving the producers money on airfare expenses.
Grover tearily remembers what a pain in the ass he found McGarrett to be when he first met him and Chin Ho reminisces about how McGarrett comforted him after his wife Malia's murder (and McGarrett's father provided similar support when his father was killed by Gabriel). In the recovery room, Kono tells the sleeping McGarrett she finally felt part of a real "family" when he invited her to join Five-0 years before.
Of course, both Danno and McGarrett survive the operation. But Danno is pissed because most of the get-well cards are for his partner, and he is ignored. The whole thing ends with a 2-minute hospital room-gument between McGarrett and Danno. Some cliffhanger!
Compared to the previous show, which was like an express train going 100 miles an hour, this one was like a clunky freight train which has to pull over constantly to let fast trains pass.
The show had a pointless diversion in the form of a meeting between McGarrett and Wo Fat's father (George Kee Cheung, identified in the credits only as "Old Man" to avoid spoilers, no doubt -- probably the first time this has ever happened on the show). This meeting took place in Rabat, Morocco. McGarrett is seemingly kidnapped by a couple of CIA guys in Hawaii and taken all this way for the "old man" to seemingly forgive him for his part in Wo's death. These CIA types think McGarrett has no idea where he is, but McGarrett is clever and able to identify the place by various sounds, smells and languages being spoken in a second.
I suspect this business with Wo Fat's father was originally intended to be included if the episode was going to be the last one of the new show, but the writers were caught with their pants down and had no opportunity to rework the material. If they had done this, it would have been a much better show, because far too much time was wasted with this Wo Fat father business (almost 5 minutes, including discussion of what happened later between McGarrett, Chin Ho and Danno) plus the teaser (1:45) as mentioned above.
MORE TRIVIA:
- There are some serious time issues in this show. According to a posting on IMDb, the plane flown by McGarrett was a twin engine Piper PA-31-350 with a top speed of 260 MPH and a cruising speed of 238 MPH. Considering The Green Island Atoll is 1,368 miles away from Oahu x 2 (round trip) = 2736 miles, that is 11.5 hours flying time @ 238 mph. Add 17 hours for McGarrett to return to Hawaii from Morocco = 28.5 hours (presumably he slept on the plane). This leaves 7.5 hours for the rest of the plot up until the plane is shot. By the way, the IMDb posting pointed out the plane was overtaken by a Bell 407 helicopter with a top speed of 161 MPH, but then it was probably coming from Oahu. The ID number of the plane McGarrett is flying is N135PB; the helicopter which attacks them is N407WH.
- Not only is Waikiki Beach cleared off quickly, especially compared to the amount of time the plane takes to land, but Five-0 manages to get there in incredibly fast time from their office.
- The music heard on the show includes Oh Mary by J.J. Cale when Francis brings Dae Won to meet McGarrett and Danno at the hangar, Glenn Frey's Smuggler's Blues (not sung by Frey), where the plane and McGarrett get shot in the middle of the episode and Stand By Me by Bootstraps as everyone waits for the results of McGarrett's and Danno's surgery near the end.
- McGarrett calls drug dealers "sons of bitches" when he is talking to Nahele; Danno calls McGarrett a "stubborn son of a bitch" when the latter is unconscious after the plane gets shot.
- Danno says he has been using his liver for "39 years," giving away his age.
- The special effects of the plane getting shot up and its crash were not that bad.
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