The numbering system below uses Season/Episode numbers, i.e., S01E01 = Season One,Episode One. It also includes the numbering system found in Karen Rhodes' Booking Hawaii Five-O. These are the numbers in (parentheses).
S02E01 (24) - A Thousand Pardons — You're Dead! (Harry Guardino, Barbara Luna, Barbara Nichols, James Hong, Loretta Swit)
S02E02 (25) - To Hell With Babe Ruth (Mark Lenard, Will Kuluva, Virginia Wing)
S02E03 (26) - Forty Feet High And It Kills! (Will Geer, Sabrina Scharf, Khigh Dhiegh)
S02E04 (27) - Just Lucky, I Guess (Albert Paulsen, John Randolph, Ann Helm, Elaine Joyce)
S02E05 (28) - Savage Sunday (Henry Silva, Tom Nardini, Julie Gregg)
S02E06 (29) - A Bullet For McGarrett (Marianne McAndrew, Eric Braeden, Khigh Dhiegh, Sheila Larkin)
S02E07 (30) - Sweet Terror (Theodore Bikel, Linda Marsh, Philip Ahn, Soon-Tek Oh)
S02E08 (31) - King Kamehameha Blues (Brandon de Wilde, Jennifer Leak, Vincent Eder)
S02E09 (32) - The Singapore File (Marj Dusay)
S02E10 (33) - All The King’s Horses (James Gregory, Jason Evers, Lyle Bettger, Keye Luke, Karen Houston)
S02E11 (34) - Leopard On The Rock (Joe De Santis, Paul Stevens, Titos Vandis)
S02E12 (35) - The Devil and Mr. Frog (Frank Marth, James Hong, William Zuckert, Melody Patterson)
S02E13 (36) - The Joker’s Wild, Man, Wild! (Beverlee McKinsey, Kaz Garas, Eddie Firestone, Lani Kai)
S02E14 (37) - Which Way Did They Go? (William Windom, Phillip E. Pine, Jackie Coogan)
S02E15 (38) - Blind Tiger (Marion Ross)
S02E16 (39) - Bored She Hung Herself (William Smithers, Don Quine)
S02E17 (40) - Run, Johnny, Run (Christopher Walken, Jack Ging, Nephi Hanneman)
S02E18 (41) - Killer Bee (David Arkin, Jeff Pomerantz, Doreen Lang)
S02E19 (42) - The One With The Gun (John Colicos, Julie Gregg, Jack Soo)
S02E20 (43) - Cry, Lie (Martin Sheen, George Petrie)
S02E21 (44) - Most Likely To Murder (Tom Skerritt, Sam Melville)
S02E22 (45) - Nightmare Road (Charles Aidman, Pilar Seurat, Fred Beir, Ronald Long)
S02E23 & S02E24 (46 & 47) - Three Dead Cows At Makapu‘u (Ed Flanders, Loretta Swit, Joseph Sirola, Karl Swenson, Dana Elcar)
S02E25 (48) - Kiss The Queen Goodbye (Joanne Linville, George Gaynes, Christopher Cary)
RATINGS:
★★★★ = One of the very best episodes, a must-see.
★★★ = Better than average, worthy of attention.
★★ = Average, perhaps with a few moments of interest.
★ = Below average, a show to avoid.
Original air date: 9/24/69 — Opening Credits — End Credits Director: Nicholas Colasanto; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writers: Mel Goldberg (teleplay); Paul Harber & Mel Goldberg (story); Music: Morton Stevens
Timings: Teaser: 2:32; Main Titles: 0:57; Act One: 13:40; Act Two: 13:48; Act Three: 9:31; Act Four: 9:31; End Credits: 0:56; Total Time: 50:55.
QUICK PLOT:
Prostitutes involved with a scam to receive G.I. benefits after the death of their bogus husbands are winding up dead.
Click here to read Full Plot.Thanks to Bobbi for her help with the plots in this season!
REVIEW:
Army Sergeant Simms (Harry Guardino), bar owner Betsy (Barbara Nichols) and municipal employee James Watanu (James Hong) all participate in a scam forging marriage certificates so local bar girls who work for Betsy will receive G.I. benefits after soldiers who are their bogus husbands are killed in Vietnam. But Simms, who was the mastermind behind the scheme, later murders the women, motivated by feelings for his soldier brother who died in Nam after an encounter with a gold-digging prostitute. Anna Stockton Shroeder (Loretta Swit) is the most recent victim in the teaser.
After Anna's death, McGarrett grills Betsy, who knows him well. He lights her cigarette and says "I need some answers, Betsy baby." In the Five-O office, McGarrett uses his transparent board. In addition to Anna's name, there are the names of two previous victims — Mary Apu Anderson and Sheila Gordon McKay.
Because it looks like Yoko Collins (Barbara Luna), another of Betsy's girls, is withholding information about her former roommate Anna, Danno goes undercover as a G.I. named Danny Carson. He drinks heavily with Yoko and she takes him home to her apartment where they quite likely "do it." Danno seems to get into his role in a big way, judging by the hangover he has in McGarrett's office the next morning.
Luna gets my nomination as Top Five-O Guest Star Babe — she is totally hot! When the two of them are frolicking on the beach later, she tells Danno, "Don't expect me to act like Miss All-American choir girl from Nebraska ... or wherever it is you're from." Danno gives her several big kisses. When she gets fed up with Danno pestering her with questions that are cop-like, she says, "You had me feeling like I was 16 all over again." Luna in a bathing suit is sexy, but even more so later on with her clothes on as she taunts Simms: "I think I'm in the mood for a screwdriver."
After Kono goes to the Bureau of Records at City Hall where Watanu works and inquires about Anna, Watanu, who gulps medication for a heart condition, starts to freak out. He goes to see Betsy, who calls Simms, saying she doesn't want to have anything more to do with his scheme. Simms later picks up Watanu outside Betsy's, and the camera is at weird angles. He drives Watanu out to a location near Diamond Head which will appear in more than one episode later in both the old and new series. When the nervous Watanu starts to show the signs of a heart attack, Simms takes his medicine and throws it away, leaving Watanu by the side of the road to die.
Later in Sims' office, McGarrett confronts the sergeant regarding Watanu's death with a piece of tire tread which supposedly came off the tire from the Jeep which Sims "signed out at the motor pool." This piece of tread "was found ... less than 100 feet from the dead man." As evidence, this piece of tread makes no sense whatsoever. If such a large piece of tread existed (which makes it look like the tire blew up), then Sims could not have driven the car. The Jeep did not have dual rear tires like used on heavy-duty commercial trucks. How McGarrett connects the tread to the Jeep is not made clear. Maybe he is just bluffing? This sequence would have made more sense if Five-O had matched an impression from near Watanu's body to the Jeep's tire.
Simms reveals himself to be a pretty nasty guy when McGarrett is questioning him. He denies any connection with Watanu, saying "I don't have any Jap friends, Mr. McGarrett." Simms subsequently refers to Watanu as "This Jap ... excuse me, this Japanese gentleman...." McGarrett spars verbally with Simms around a pool table in a classic scene which is very interestingly photographed.
Because Danno's undercover work is a flop because he is too pressing and persistent with his questions to Yoko, McGarrett meets with her, asking her to help them catch Simms. She initially tells him to get lost, but then changes her mind. Subsequently, she meets with Simms at the bar, telling him she wants to "make a little deal": "I know how it worked. Anna told me all about it." When Simms tells her that he can't do the scam because he lost his "contact at city hall," Yoko says, "You don't need a contact ... and it's one less pocket to feed." She shows Simms a marriage license, saying she is "married, all nice and legal," but to a soldier who died in action. ("My hero husband went off and got himself killed and didn't leave me any insurance. Now for some girls that would be a terrible thing but for me, it's a real tragedy.") Five-O obviously had this bogus license created in co-operation with the records bureau at City Hall and the Army, who could provide the name of a soldier who was killed. All that Simms has to do is create the paperwork for the insurance.
Simms does the paperwork, and Yoko gets the money. She picks it up at the American Security Bank and arranges for Simms to come to her apartment to get it. He is supposed to take his share and give Yoko her cut, but he angrily tells her how his brother died for "trash like her" and forces Yoko to leave with him, intending to kill her like the other women.
The cops are waiting for Sims outside. Their blasting of him is unusually violent. Aside from the fact there is no blood anywhere, there are continuity problems with this scene as pointed out by "Betty Boop": "Looks like they had to re-shoot the last scene where Sgt. Simms gets shot (to put it lightly) for whatever reason, and there wasn't time for a change of clothes. His uniform is soaked before ever hitting the pavement. Then, in the scene where he is lying on the ground, his uniform is drier than when he was standing."
There is "crappy rock music" heard during scenes at Betsy's bar, including some featuring a Jimmy Smith-like organ solo. The very effective score for this episode won Morton Stevens an Emmy as did his score for #121, "Hookman" (the only two Emmys which Five-O ever won). The score is both "composed and conducted" by Stevens, according to the end credits.
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
When Sims and Watanu arrive near the Diamond Head tunnel, Watanu tells Sims that he won't spill the beans. Watanu starts to feel pains in his chest and Sims takes his prescription bottle and throws it away, saying, "Oh, a thousand pardons. Here, let me help you find your pills." The expression "A thousand pardons" sounds like something you would hear in a movie about stereotypical Asians like Charlie Chan; as such, this has racist connotations, considering Sims called Watanu a "Jap" when McGarrett was talking to him earlier.
EPISODE PROMO:
Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.
CASUALTY LIST:
Thanks to Bobbi for help with the Casualty Lists in this season. Where someone is injured seriously and they are not confirmed dead, a "best guess" may be made that they died from their injuries.
Death: Anna Stockton Schroeder is knocked out and run over by a jeep.
Death: James Watanu dies of a heart attack after Sergeant Simms throws his pills away.
Death: Sergeant Simms is shot by Five-O and HPD in final confrontation.
MORE TRIVIA:
The episode promo for this show on the second season DVD set (see above) ends with "New Season Next Week," suggesting that it was shown at the end of a rerun of an episode from the previous season during the summer of 1969. These promos, which start this season and will be seen until the ninth, are all approximately one minute long. The one for this show gives away the shoot-out at the conclusion!
As McGarrett drives up to Betsy's club, you can see the used car lot and U-Drive business of sometime Five-O character actor Lippy Espinda in the background — thanks to Mike Granieri for pointing this out. According to the name in the parking spaces beside the bar, they are reserved for Charlie's Taxi. There is a sign seen as Watanu leaves Betsy's saying "Rag Doll Supper Club." Is that the name for Betsy's club, or the place next door?
When McGarrett lights Betsy's cigarette (which is a pink cigarette), does he use his own lighter or one which is on the bar? Probably the latter, considering McGarrett developed a serious dislike of smoking in later seasons. When he is haranguing Sims in his office later, it looks like McGarrett puts something on Sims' desk. What this is is a mystery, since McGarrett wasn't holding anything prior to this.
Careful examination reveals some continuity problems with sand on Yoko's shoulder in the scene with her and Danno on the beach.
A good McGarrett quote to Simms: "Death always bugs me." When Yoko tells McGarrett to get lost, he says "Okay, honey."
In the scene at Betsy's where Anna pours from a bottle of champagne, the shot, including the camera angle up through the table top looking at the champagne glass, is the same as a shot at the end of the pilot episode "Cocoon."
At the end of the show, Chin Ho is shown monitoring a reel-to-reel tape recorder which is bugging Simms' confrontation with Yoko. But if you look at the reels, the tape is moving from right to left. I originally thought this whole scene was flopped (reversed), but it is possible this tape recorder could record in both directions. But even so, why would the tape which is recording be almost at the end of the reel?
McGarrett tells Jenny, the Five-O secretary, to bring Danno a black coffee to help relieve his hangover, but she is not seen.
Anna and Yoko's apartment is #218.
As McGarrett leaves Betsy's place, he reverses his car, and when he stops it, there is a brake-like squealing noise, no doubt thanks to someone a little too overenthusiastic in the sound effects department.
Simms smokes during the show.
When Anna goes to and from Betsy's at the beginning of the show, she takes a Gray Line Taxi.
When McGarrett talks to Yoko about Mary Apu Anderson, one of the other murdered women, he says her name is "Maria."
In the room with the pool table, there is a blackboard on the wall where it says "Attention! Soldier — lights out 2100, police area 0600. Sgt. Sakamoto. Turn out lights before leaving."
"Watanu" is a bogus-sounding Japanese name.
An earlier title for this episode was "With One Stone."
25. (S02E02) “To Hell With Babe Ruth” BOMB – NO STARS!
Original air date: 10/1/69 — Opening Credits — End Credits Director: Nicholas Colasanto; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writer: Anthony Lawrence; Music: Harry Geller
Timings: Teaser: 2:32; Main Titles: 0:59; Act One: 14:37; Act Two: 10:44; Act Three: 15:57; Act Four: 5:19; End Credits: 0:55; Total Time: 51:03.
QUICK PLOT:
A Japanese saboteur escapes from a mental hospital 28 years after Pearl Harbor and seeks to complete his mission to detonate a bomb.
This show is bad, one of the worst. Amazingly, it is directed by Nicholas Colasanto, who helmed the previous episode, one of the best, particularly of this season, though that one was actually done after "Babe Ruth" in production order.
The main problem is actor Mark Lenard who plays the lead guest role of Yoshio Nagata who has escaped from a mental hospital after being held there for 28 years since Pearl Harbor. This is a part which no doubt would have been difficult to cast, since the actor would have had to be (a) Asian/Japanese, (b) in his late 40's or early 50's, (c) agile (capable of ninja-like moves) and (d) convincing in spouting a lot of anti-American, nationalistic-Japanese rhetoric. Unfortunately, the number of Asian or Japanese actors in 1969 who could have fit the bill age-wise was very limited, as can be seen by the producers' desire to employ Ricardo Montalban as a Japanese in season one's "Samurai."
Although a look at Lenard's IMDb page reveals he had a certain penchant for playing "ethnic" parts on shows like Mission: Impossible, and also played Spock's father Sarek and a Romulan Commander on the original Star Trek — roles that would be the ultimate in "alien"! — his attempts to play Nagata are ridiculous, with jerky movements, hideous orange makeup including "slanted eyes" (in some shots he looks more like a burn victim) and a terrible accent (even my Japanese wife had difficulty understanding him when he spoke Japanese).
Lenard is not alone in the bad choice of actors for this show, though. He pales in comparison (no pun intended) beside Will Kuluva, another "ethnic role specialist" who plays Yuko Takuma, the Japanese owner of a clock shop. Kuluva already appeared in Asian guise as Philip Lo in season one's "By The Numbers," an equally wretched performance. In "Babe Ruth," Kuluva doesn't seem to have any Asian makeup at all, similar to David Opatoshu, who played the well-disguised Shen Yu-Lan in the first season's "Face of The Dragon" and then returned in the fourth season's "A Matter of Mutual Concern" with no makeup.
At the beginning of the show, Nagata, wearing a Ninja costume, scales a fence and breaks into a warehouse where he steals eight sticks of dynamite along with fuse and blasting caps. Considering he has been in the mental hospital for years, it is a good question where he got this costume, along with the other clothes that he wears during the show, including a suit. Nagata seems to be biting a strap to keep the pointy Ninja hood on his head. A guard who interrupts Nagata is played by Five-O stuntman Beau Van den Ecker. He has his throat slit by a shuriken, a "throwing star" that Nagata hurls at him. During this opening sequence, we hear the "bonging bell" noise which will be featured with a lot of other musical "orientalisms" in the show's score, which is by Harry Geller.
Five-O and McGarrett are soon on the scene, but they and the coroner (Robert Brilliande) are totally clueless about what is going on, especially what is the shuriken, which they find stuck in a wall. It isn't until they attend a martial arts class led by Jerry Minobe (Tommy Fujiwara, in his first appearance on the show) that they find out what a shuriken — which Minobe pronounces "shuriking — is. At the martial arts studio, Minobe is seen having a match with Chuck Couch, a member of the Five-O stunt team.
Nagata is next seen on the streets of Honolulu. He steals a car where someone has left the keys in the ignition. He uses karate moves to deal with a cop named Naaleu (Vincent E. Eder) who tries to stop him as he is driving the car back and forth, smashing into the vehicles in front and behind him to get out of the parking space. Once on the street, Nagata drives to a house where he presumably once lived, which is all boarded up now. There is a secret room in this house which contains some memorabilia from years ago.
Thanks to a report from the mental hospital, Five-O soon knows that Nagata fits the description of the "kook" who punched out the cop.
Driving very badly, Nagata goes to s clock shop owned by Takuma, who is not there. There is a woman in the shop (Virginia Wing), who Nagata thinks is his wife Komiko. Actually, she is his daughter Heather by Komiko, who has passed away. Nagata starts screaming at her in English and Japanese, and she screams back at him, including "Wakarima...," meaning "Wakarimasen," or "I don't understand." Lenard's pronunciation of his few Japanese expressions which mean "You're so beautiful," "Help me," and "Please, let's go together," are horrible. Nagata pulls a knife and forces Heather to leave with him.
At the hospital, McGarrett and Kono talk to Dr. Lukens (Bruce Wilson, in his first appearance on the show), who tells them that Nagata was confined there for 28 years, admitted December 6, 1941, when he was brought in in a catatonic state. Nagata is descibed as "Acutely psychotic, paranoid, amnesiac ... likelihood of recovery, very slight ... no relatives, friends, nothing ... totally passive with the patients and the other staff."
Five-O goes to the clock shop, where Heather has been reported missing. Takuma, who says he is her uncle, cannot explain why she disappeared, though when McGarrett connects Heather with her abductor by name, Takuma is incredulous, saying that Yoshio was killed during the attack on Pearl Harbor. (It is not mentioned how Takuma knows this or came up with this idea.) Takuma tells McGarrett that Nagata is Heather's father (does this mean that Takuma is his brother?). When questioned by McGarrett for further information, Takuma suggests Nagata might be using the boarded-up house which is "across the Pali on the windward side."
Meanwhile, Nagata has taken Heather to this house where he has her tied up and he is connecting the sticks of dynamite he stole to the mechanism from a clock that he took from Takuma's store. Heather keeps telling him that he is mistaken as to her identity, and he keeps yelling at her, quoting Robert Louis Stevenson and Japanese proverbs as well as referring to "Jesus of Nazareth." He tells her "We will abolish all political parties and restore imperial rule. The words of Jimmu will be the new order in Southeast Asia. Eight corners under one roof." The last sentence is a line from World War II Japanese propaganda, something originally said by Jimmu, the first emperor of Japan, who supposedly lived between 711 and 585 B.C.
McGarrett, Danno and Chin arrive at the house, but Nagata, again wearing his Ninja outfit and carrying two close-combat sword-like weapons known as sai as well as the bomb he has put together, has already left with his daughter. On the wall, they find written "To Hell With Babe Ruth." Prefacing what he says with an "Oh, my God," McGarrett tells Danno, "On the morning of December 7, when the Zeros came in over Pearl, their pilots screamed in their radios: 'To hell with Babe Ruth.' Then they dropped the bombs."
McGarrett checks a map Nagata left behind, which shows Pearl Harbor. To see this, Chin Ho lights a candle which fills the already-bright room with yet more illumination. Having figured out Nagata's plan, McGarrett tells Danno to alert the military to monitor all civilian military installations, saying there are "less than 15 hours to tora, tora [sic]."
For some reason, Danno goes to the clock shop, where he finds Takuma has attempted to commit harakiri (Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment). Takuma is rushed to hospital, where he is not expected to survive. With McGarrett at his beside, Takuma confesses: "My death now is an anachronism. I was trying to rid myself of a ghost. A ghost from out of the past. Nagata was a reminder of all that I had despised in myself, all that I had forced to the darkest part of my mind. When you told me about him, I could not cope with the memories. You see, I too was a Black Dragon. Time can erase the evil of war, but not the evil of personal deeds. It lingers on, eating away. I wanted to take my life honorably. I've been a fool and a coward. I do not deserve to lie with my ancestors." When McGarrett asks what Nagata's mission was to be, Takuma can only utter "Pearl..." before he dies.
Back at the Five-O office, McGarrett, Danno and Kono talk to Captain Barnes (Phil Bolten). He tells them, "Nagata was known to ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence], as well as the FBI and G-2 [the military intelligence staff of a United States Army unit], as a super agent." He confirms that Nagata was a "specialist in sabotage," and the Black Dragons were "a strong-armed gang of political malcontents" who were committed to die trying. McGarrett says this group's "fifth-column activities amounted to pretty much of a bust." Barnes tells him that "not a single act of sabotage was committed by any resident of Hawaii," to which McGarrett replies, "Before, during and after the attack on Pearl, the Nisei were 100 percent loyal." (The Black Dragon Society, or Kokuryūkai, actually existed — it was a prominent paramilitary ultranationalist right-wing group in Japan which expanded its activities around the world in the 1930s.)
All this is nice, but they still don't know what Nagata's target is, though McGarrett guesses that he is after something "vitally strategic." They get a call from Chin Ho who has been examining Nagata's map with Yankee Chang (uncredited), and rush over to another office where arrows seem to be indicating a control tower. But McGarrett, knowing "Japanese high command battle psychology: expose the obvious, then do the reverse," says that the tanks at the Sand Hill oil depot on the other side of the arrows, which are full of gasoline, are where they will find Nagata.
Early the next morning, McGarrett summons a team of army men using high-powered microphones to listen in the area of the oil depot tanks, which is located on a huge property which "goes on forever." The idea is that they will pick up the sound of the clock in Nagata's bomb ticking (seriously). Nagata is on top of one of the storage tanks with Heather as hostage.
This part of this show is stupid. How they can hear the ticking with the din of traffic in the background, not to mention the clump-clump of army boots on the metal walkways, is unbelievable. When they do hear the ticking, the microphone seems to be beside the concrete base of the oil tank, not the tank itself. As well, the microphones can't pick up the loud conversation of Heather and her father.
Nagata is finally located, and McGarrett and Danno engage in a tense standoff with him. Nagata is expecting the Japanese planes to come at 7:55 a.m., but at that time four American jets fly above and then head away, with him denouncing them as "traitors." A sudden rush by both Five-O men knocks Nagata over and McGarrett grabs the bomb, which he disables with his fingernail clipper. Its not-particularly-loud ticking noise, which comes from the battery-powered clock, suddenly stops.
To the end, Nagata cannot escape the delusion that his daughter is his wife, saying, "We shall be as white swans, Komiko, you and I, together on the shore beyond" as the show closes.
There are some interesting parallels between this show and the third episode of Hawaiian Eye (a precursor to Five-O by about 10 years — in fact, the earlier episode was broadcast almost exactly 10 years before). The Hawaiian Eye show, written by Steven Ritch, is entitled "Second Day of Infamy," and it seems impossible to believe that Anthony Lawrence, who wrote "Babe Ruth," was not aware of it. Thanks to Peter Bergman for bringing this to my attention many years ago.
Yatto Mitsuki, a Japanese officer, was part of an espionage team which landed in Hawaii before Pearl Harbor. After a confrontation with the local authorities at the time, he received a head wound which resulted in amnesia. He has been confined to the Oahu Mental Hospital ever since, and when he escapes at the beginning of the show, Hawaiian Eye (a Honolulu detective agency) is hired to find him.
Mitsuki doesn't know that the war is over, and when he sees the the Pacific fleet is no longer in Pearl Harbor, he wants to warn the Japanese authorities, figuring he will be handsomely rewarded. He tries to track down his former contacts, but is unsuccessful, except for his old girl friend Sumiko Natago (played by Miiko Taka, who was the love interest of Marlon Brando's character in the movie Sayonara). Stealing some dynamite from a construction site, Mitsuki tries to blow up a fuel depot, but is stopped in the nick of time.
One big difference with this earlier show is the lead is actually played by a Japanese character actor — Yuki Shimoda, who does a very good job. Five-O regular Doug Mossman also appears in this episode as Marty, the security guard at the Hawaiian Eye office (a recurring part).
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
McGarrett's claim that the pilots attacking Pearl Harbor used the episode's title on their radios is highly debatable. A New York Times article from March 3, 1944, over two years after Pearl Harbor, says "Staff Sgt. Jeremiah A. O'Leary, a Marine Corps combat correspondent, reports that Japanese troops charged the Marine lines here shouting the strange Japanese battle cry: 'To hell with Babe Ruth!' The charge was scored as an error. Thirty Japanese were struck out for good." There is no mention anywhere that I can find that this phrase was used on December 7, 1941. When told about this incident, Babe Ruth was not polite.
CASUALTY LIST:
Death: Guard at armory is killed with a shuriken when he finds Yoshio Nagata stealing dynamite.
Injury: Officer Naaleu is karate-chopped by Nagata when the officer tries to stop Nagata from stealing a car.
Injury: Takuma attempts harakiri but is found by Danno and taken to hospital.
Death: Takuma dies of his injuries.
LOCATIONS:
Fred Helfing tracked down several locations from this episode:
Kapiolani Appliances & Furniture, the store behind the place where Lenard has the hassle with the car he is stealing, was at 1440 Kapiolani Boulevard. There's still a utility box on the lawn in front of the building. You can see a similar one in the overhead shot in the show. The corner to the right of this is where Lenard and Santa Claus pass each other on the street. On the other side of the corner there is now a Kentucky Fried Chicken where the Chevron gas station was. The building directly to the left of the KFC is similar to the one in the episode where the two pass each other. You can see the HVAC units on both. But the main feature is the wall in the back of that building. It zig zags down to the right. You can see that in both.
Nagata's boarded-up house is near 509 Prospect Street, which is on the southern flank of the Punchbowl Crater. The house from 50 years ago is no longer there.
Takuma's clock shop is near a building with a revolving restaurant on the top. This is the Ala Moana Building at 1441 Kapiolani Boulevard. The restaurant, called La Ronde, was the first revolving restaurant in the United States. On the 23rd floor of the building, it was built in 1961, and closed in the mid-1990s. According to Wikipedia, the premises were then converted to office space and the floor was welded into place. The appliance store is directly across the street from this building. It is quite likely the crew was filming the overhead shot above from that location.
The clock shop was in the 1300 block of Kapiolani Boulevard. When Lenard gets out of the car in front of it, there's a building in the background across the street. On the facade of the building are numerous small squares. To see this, turn around completely when viewing the first link in this paragraph. The clock shop is/was a casino now (the Google image is from 2011). The Butterfly Karaoke next door is the building with the brown fence around it in the episode.
The storage tank used by Nagata, marked by a red "X" in the picture, is off of North Nimitz Highway in the Honolulu Harbor area. The walkways connecting the tanks seem to have changed in the last 50 years, or else the show filmed in such a way so that it looked like the tanks were connected.
MORE TRIVIA:
There is no promo for this episode on the second season DVD set. Whether one exists is not known.
On the boxes of dynamite in the warehouse is written "FIFTY POUNDS NET WT SEMI-GELATIN 45%. 1¼″ X 8″ CARTRIDGE. EXPLOSIVE. HANDLE WITH CARE." Nagata has a key to the locked room where the dynamite is stored; where did he get it from?
When Nagata is stealing the car, driving it back and forth to push the cars in front and behind out of the way, there seems to be hardly any space between his car and the other two. But in a shot taken from above once he drives away, there seems to be quite a large amount of space.
Jack Lord's hair looks like it is tinged with red when he is talking to Dr. Lukens.
This is the only Five-O show with references to Christmas. Before Nagata steals the car, he passes a Hawaiian Santa on the street. After Danno and McGarrett examine the shuriken at the warehouse, which Danno says reminds him of "something off the top of a Christmas tree," they remark respectively, "'Tis the season to be jolly," and "Peace on Earth. Goodwill to men." Later, Kono remarks, " If that kook blows Sand Hill [the oil tank farm], it's Mele Kalikimaka [Merry Christmas] to all."
If you look at the sign on the clock shop's front door, it is actually named "Takuma Clock and Art Studio." Whether some of the paintings seen in the show are those of Jack Lord is a good question.
A clock which Nagata knocks over on his way out of the store is a Westclox Big Ben model. Takuma later tells McGarrett that this model is similar to the one which Nagata stole, but that model has no identifying marks on it at all, probably for legal reasons!
The real-life Chief Dan Liu of the Honolulu Police Department (1948-1969) at the time of the show is referred to, but the subtitles say that his name is "Chief Den."
Jenny, the Five-O receptionist, is played by Patricia Tuscano, a tall blonde-haired woman. In the next show, she will be played by Peggy Ryan, the first of her many appearances on the show as this character.
Danny Kamekona (uncredited) plays the doctor attending to Takuma at the hospital.
Original air date: 10/8/69 — Opening Credits — End Credits Director: Michael O'Herlihy; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writers: Robert C. Dennis (teleplay); Ed Lakso and Robert C. Dennis (story); Music: Richard Shores
Timings: Teaser: 2:56; Main Titles: 0:56; Act One: 10:06; Act Two: 14:50; Act Three: 8:27; Act Four: 12:58; End Credits: 0:56; Total Time: 51:09.
Wo Fat engineers a false tsunami warning to cover up the kidnapping of one of world's top genetic scientists.
REVIEW:
Wo Fat is back for the first time since the pilot episode and he has a dastardly plan in the works. Four of his minions break into the Makaha Valley Weather Tracking Station, which is a very large building, much larger than you might expect just to accommodate meteorologists. These four men are identified in the end credits as First to Fourth Chinese — Winston Char, Gary Ah Vah, Milton Mau and Bill Fong respectively — though Number One's name in the show is Ling Po and he has the code name of "Sino-One."
After knocking out and/or chloroforming armed men from Hayes Guard Service who are providing security for this place (not very well), Wo's number one man manufactures a bogus tsunami warning which is sent by telex to all the appropriate recipients.
The purpose of this warning is to disrupt a seminar of genetic scientists being held at the beachfront villa known as The Anderson Estate (Robin's Nest on Magnum, P.I.) at 41-505 Kalanianaole Highway, a location to be featured on several episodes of Classic Five-O.
At the beginning of the show, McGarrett shows up at this place for some unspecified reason, where he greets John Padway (Bill Bigelow), who he knows from their time together in the military in Korea. Padway, who is in charge of security for this gathering, describes the participants as "the free world's ten greatest minds on the subject of genetic engineering."
McGarrett is amused to hear the conversation between the American Harold Lochner (Will Geer) and Dr. Crighton (Wright Esser) from the U.K., as Lochner abuses his fellow scientist, "a fuddy-duddy Englishman" and "a classic example of inadaptability in hormones," for presenting a paper which was like "science fiction."
McGarrett is particularly interested in Victoria Lochner, assistant to her professor father (the stunningly attractive Sabrina Scharf). McGarrett manages to convince her to come with him to a beach on Magic Island where they watch people surfing. He leeringly asks Victoria, "Teach me about genetic engineering," but all she can say is, "I take all his notes. I just don't understand them. I can tell you this, though, that it's the science of expediting the process of evolution by stepping up the favorable mutations … My father's discovered a process which is really secret. In fact, according to him, revolutionary. He's scheduled to deliver a series of papers on it this afternoon."
Their flirty chit-chat is interrupted by a call from Five-O headquarters which has been made aware of the tsunami, with the big wave predicted to arrive in a mere 35 minutes. Victoria and McGarrett head back to the Five-O office. It doesn't take long to determine that the tsunami is a hoax. Chin Ho and Kono go to the weather station where they find the security guards who were overpowered.
At the villa, Padway is busy evacuating everyone. Knowing exactly which roads the scientists will be driven down in their Cadillac limousines, Wo's four men, pretending to be from Civil Defense, set up a roadblock and grab Lochner, who is taken to a room on the docks. When he wakes up from a chloroform-induced sleep, the frazzled-looking Lochner is amused by Wo's grandiose plan to install him as director at the Institute for Genetic Engineering in Peking. Lochner calls Wo "a maniac" and "Mr. Fat," the latter causing Wo to flinch. The wily Lochner tells Wo that it is unlikely his plan will succeed because he is a diabetic who constantly needs insulin. He only has one bottle of the drug on him, which he smashes on the floor under his shoe.
Wo is not fazed by this, sending Ling Po to the villa to grab several bottles of this drug which Lochner had stashed in his room's refrigerator. Danno and Chin Ho also arrive at the villa, acting on a tip from Victoria, and Ling Po is shot as he escapes. Driving erratically back towards the docks, Ling Po stops to phone Wo to say that his mission was not successful. He collapses in the phone booth. Taken to the hospital, all he can tell McGarrett, who visits him there, is that "Wo Fat will kill you." McGarrett defines who Wo is to Victoria: "He's a red Chinese agent. He's in charge of the entire Pacific-Asiatic theater."
After Wo hears about what has happened to Ling Po, Lochner ridicules him, saying "You'd make a very poor poker player, Mr. Wo Fat." When Wo says that McGarrett is the one who foiled his scheme, Lochner says "May his dominant genes replicate." Wo says it should be easy to get more insulin, but the plot thickens as Lochner tells him that "The problem is to get me the right type of insulin. You see, I require a very special sort. Any other sort would affect me just like so much water."
Pretending to give up, Wo finally tells Lochner, "I want to save you. Tell me the kind of insulin you need. You're too great a man to die needlessly. You're free to go. You may leave whenever you like." But Lochner cannot move without his medicine. Surprisingly, after playing mind games with Wo, Lochner gives in and tells him since he has been in Hawaii he got the drug at the Tane Seto Pharmacy.
Wo's number two stooge goes to this pharmacy which is at Campbell and Mooheau Street in the "Japanese section" of town, even though the owner speaks Chinese, and gets enough insulin to keep Lochner alive on the trip to Peking.
Acting on yet a further tip from Victoria, Five-O has already got this pharmacy staked out, and after Number Two picks up the insulin, they are involved in an elaborate pursuit of him as he returns to the docks. McGarrett directs people involved in this chase using his transparent map in the office, but eventually he jumps in a car with Victoria as the stooge reaches his destination.
Lochner is injected with the correct insulin and thinks that he is free to go, but in a severely weakened state, he is again knocked out with chloroform. Arriving at the docks, McGarrett confronts Wo just as Lochner is being loaded on to a ship destined for China in a large wooden box. In a very classic scene, Wo and McGarrett exchange quips (for example, McGarrett tells Wo, "Someone handed you the wrong fortune cookie"), the final deal being Wo will be free to leave if Lochner is released — which, of course happens.
Victoria is overjoyed to see her father again, and Wo is off to China on the ship, soon to be in Hawaii again (much sooner than we might think — only 3 episodes from now).
Aside from a couple of minor goofs discussed below in the trivia section, this is an outstanding show in every way. I don't completely understand why Victoria suddenly freaks out when she thinks McGarrett wants to know details about where her father got his insulin, however. She tells him, "I see your cop mind at work. Your nice cop mind. National security above all else, huh? Better dead than red? ... You can't find my father, and you don't dare let him get off the island alive. So you've only got one alternative: Cut off his insulin supply." She seems to be saying that McGarrett would let her father die for the sake of catching Wo Fat, but he straightens her out pretty quick. This won't be the first time that someone misunderstands how McGarrett works!
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
It refers to the potential height of the phony tsunami which Wo Fat has gotten his men to warn the public about via the weather station's network.
EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Injury: Guard in stairwell of Makaha Valley Weather Tracking Station is chloroformed by Wo Fat's men.
Injury: Guard in operations room of Makaha Valley Weather Tracking Station is hit with sap by Wo Fat's men.
Injury: Guard in operations room of Makaha Valley Weather Tracking Station is chloroformed by Wo Fat's men.
Injury: Professor Harold Lochner is chloroformed by Wo Fat's men as he is kidnapped.
Injury: Ling Po is shot by Danno after he goes to villa to get Lochner's insulin. Fate unknown.
Injury: Lochner is chloroformed/drugged after injection of proper insulin for trip to China.
MORE TRIVIA:
When Lochner gets out of the limousine leaving the villa when it is stopped at the roadblock, Ling Po addresses him as Lochner, but Lochner says he is Crighton from England. Lochner actually has a name tag with a picture of himself on his lapel, but when he gets out of the car, he covers this up with one of his hands. It is very possible that Ling Po has already seen this. Wing Po then looks at a picture which one of the other men has of Lochner to confirm his identity. When he returns to Lochner, Lochner has removed this picture ID, even though there was another of Wo's men standing right behind him. The safety pin holding this ID can be seen on Lochner's lapel numerous times throughout the rest of the show.
After Lochner is kidnapped, we see shots of Five-O freaking out in their office and then McGarrett talks to Victoria. Following this, there is a brief shot of a box being lifted by a crane, the implication being that Lochner is in this box, though we don't actually see it being moved on to the ship that will take him to China. Then there is another brief shot of a warehouse on the docks. I assumed that Lochner was in the box, but later on, Wo Fat gets a call from one of his minions, and I thought he and Lochner were on board the ship at that point, so I thought it odd that there would be a phone on the ship. But later, we see that Lochner is not on the ship, he is in a room on the docks, where there is a phone. At the end of the show, Lochner is put in a box, which makes it difficult for McGarrett to track him down when he comes to the warehouse. (Surely they are not going to keep Lochner in this box all the way to Peking, are they?) When Wo Fat makes his "deal" with McGarrett for safe passage out of the country in exchange for giving up Lochner, we see Wo signalling the guys in the crane to bring the box, which is being lifted up to the ship by the crane, back to the dock. But prior to this when Wo and McGarrett come out of the warehouse, we can see that this is virtually the same shot of the warehouse as before, based on the angle of the shadows and the fact that some guy is standing beside a forklift several feet away in the same place! (In this second shot, you can see McGarrett and Wo Fat just inside the door.)
At the beginning of the show, the four Chinese agents come out of the Diamond Head tunnel, which is at the opposite end of the tunnel from where Watanu had the heart attack in "A Thousand Pardons."
Fred Helfing investigated the location of the weather station at the beginning of the show: The building was inside Diamond Head Crater. It's no longer there. The background mountains in this Google street view are exactly the same as a screen shot from the episode. The weather station must be in one of these areas where foundation remains are seen from overhead.
When Chin Ho captures Ling Po, why does he have to use a dime for the phone to call an ambulance? (Someone suggested this was because in Honolulu at that time you needed a dime to get a dial tone ... not very practical in an emergency! Chin dials five numbers, by the way.)
Mooheau Street, which is in the same area as Campbell, doesn't actually cross it.
If Wo wants to find out the brand of insulin and where Lochner got it, why doesn't he just check the label of the insulin bottle that Lochner smashed? (Lochner does smash it very well, though.)
Herman ("Duke") Wedemeyer appears uncredited very briefly as a police dispatcher. Bill Bigelow is listed in the credits as "William F. Bigelow II." One of the guards overpowered at the beginning of the show is stunt man Chuck Couch.
The car driven from the pharmacy by Wo's second agent has plate number 6942 according to Chin Ho — but when the license is actually seen, it is IB-9694. Steve Voorhees reports a goof in this section: "Chin is staked out at the pharmacy and Wo Fat's agent drives away. In the sequence that follows, drivers are strategically stationed to follow and observe the agent. But Chin, suddenly having become one of these drivers (not the first one), appears in his car, the agent passes him, and Chin follows him for a ways. How could he get in front of the agent if he watched him drive away from the pharmacy? Is the agent taking a scenic route?"
The very first shot in the show as the title is seen is surf coming towards the camera, which has been seen before in the first part of the two-part pilot "Cocoon," as well as in season one's "Up Tight."
McGarrett refers to the May 23, 1960 tidal wave which seriously damaged Hilo on the Big Island. This is historically correct. That tidal wave was 35 feet high and killed 61 people. An earlier tsunami which struck Hilo on April 1, 1946 was 50 feet high and killed 159.
McGarrett tells Victoria that Oahu is "40 miles wide, 65 miles long."
This is the first show featuring Peggy Ryan as Jenny, the Five-O receptionist.
When Lochner is being held in the room on the docks, you can see a box of Sunkist grapefruit in the background. When McGarrett comes into the warehouse with a bullhorn, he walks past a pallet of Libby's sliced pineapple, and when he goes with Wo to find Lochner, there is another pallet of Libby's pineapple juice.
While surveilling Number Two at the pharmacy in the Japanese district where the owner speaks Chinese (and the sign on the door says "closed" in Japanese (but probably also in Chinese), Chin Ho is reading a Japanese magazine.
When McGarrett first sees Victoria, described by Padway as her father's "assistant," McGarrett says that she is "prettier than mine."
When Victoria tells McGarrett where the pharmacy dispensing her father's insulin is located, he says, "Good girl."
After finding out about the approaching tsunami, McGarrett and Victoria get from the beach to the office in about 16 minutes.
Wo Fat smokes a cigar.
Great photography in this episode, where there are a lot of close-ups of the characters.
The driving sequence in which the Chinese henchman is tailed was near the Ala Wai golf course, Waialae, and Kapahulu areas, nowhere near the streets being called out and far from the pier. (Thanks to Tilden.)
Why does McGarrett show up at the villa at the beginning of the show? Was he assigned to go there by the Governor or something? He asks Padway "what's the duty?" but he is referring to Padway's job of providing security.
When McGarrett and Victoria leave the beach in a hurry to get back to the Five-O office, McGarrett's car nearly showers the camera with gravel.
After the tidal warning is received at the villa, Padway follows Lochner's limousine in a jeep, but when the limo arrives at the roadblock and Lochner is taken, Padway is nowhere to be seen.
McGarrett uses his transparent map.
When he is negotiating with Wo at the end of the show to not take Lochner, McGarrett tells him, "Somebody handed you
the wrong fortune cookie." Wo and his men get on the ship at the end to leave, but there was no mention of the men in the "deal" that McGarrett made!
Original air date: 10/15/69 — Opening Credits — End Credits Director: Nicholas Colasanto; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writers: Jay Roberts and Mel Goldberg (teleplay), Jay Roberts (story); Music: Richard Shores
Timings: Teaser: 5:08; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 11:13; Act Two: 12:45; Act Three: 10:37; Act Four: 9:31; End Credits: 0:54; Total Time: 51:03.
QUICK PLOT:
After witnessing the murder of a prostitute, a straight-laced businessman from the mainland is reluctant to testify against her killer in court.
John Randolph plays Marty Sloane, a hardware salesman from Sacramento who is attending a convention in Honolulu. He befriends Angela Carlson (Elaine Joyce), a hooker, and goes with her back to her apartment. He is nervous about "doing it" with her, but before he can get any action, they are interrupted by local gangster and Angela's pimp, Charley Bombay (Albert Paulsen). Bombay wants his "merchandise" from Angela, which we later find out is 2 pounds of heroin. Angela gives Sloane a key and he hides on the terrace of her apartment, only to watch horrified as Bombay throws Angela off the balcony when she refuses to cough up information about the dope.
When the cops and Five-O come to Angela's apartment, McGarrett finds a whiskey glass on the terrace which Sloane was holding. They get the fingerprints from the glass sent to Washington.
Figuring that because Angela was a high-priced hooker living in a $550-a-month apartment and a junkie to boot she has some connection to Bombay, McGarrett goes to visit him, but ends up listening to the usual clichés about how Bombay is "a respectable businessman." After listening to this, McGarrett says he will be back "and the charge is murder one."
Though we don't find out specifically how Sloane is identified from his fingerprints and how they figure out where he is in Honolulu at the time, McGarrett and Danno go to a meeting of the hardware salesmen where Sloane has just been chosen "Man of the Year" for his "hard work and ethical practices." When Sloane sees the two men standing at the back of the hall, he immediately knows that they have come to see him. Sloane leaves with McGarrett and Danno.
Back at the Five-O office, McGarrett starts to work on getting Sloane to help ID Bombay as Angela's killer, telling him that Angela was only 18 years old, which is almost the same age as Sloane's daughter. Sloane, however, has too many issues to deal with such as the relationship with his wife and daughter and his reputation in his community back home as well as with his fellow salesmen.
Sloane does give McGarrett the key which Angela gave him. Danno and Kono go to the Honolulu Airport where they use it to open a locker which contains a plush toy. Inside the doll is 2 pounds of uncut heroin valued at around a quarter of a million dollars.
McGarrett enlists the help of Ann Helm, a policewoman identified only as Joyce, to pretend to be Angela's sister from the mainland, also named Joyce. Memorizing her back story is a complicated task, but Joyce goes to see Bombay and tells him that she has the heroin, which she found via the key to the locker which was included in her late sister's personal effects. After playing "let's make a deal" with Bombay, a price of $100,000 for the drugs is established.
Bombay is still after Sloane, and sends a couple of his hoods after him. When Sloane, thoroughly plastered with his conventioneer friends, wants to get some fresh air, the two thugs follow him and attempt to run him over in the hotel's garage. They also attempt to kill him with a shotgun, but miss.
Sloane rushes to the Five-O office, saying he wants protection, but McGarrett says, "That's very funny, Mr. Sloane. We protect two million a year like you. You come and you go. You play games in that 100 square blocks called Waikiki. Pretty stupid games. Things you wouldn't be caught dead doing back home. But still we protect you. We bust our guts to protect you. But when we need your help, it's a different story, isn't it?" Considering how freaked out Sloane is, McGarrett shows him a picture of Bombay, once again pleading for his co-operation, but Sloane will still not budge.
Meanwhile, Helm is set to meet Bombay at the Ala Moana Mall, but instead he sends a Shoe Shine Man (Robert Costa), a junkie who escorts Helm to meet Bombay, who grabs the bag containing the doll and jumps into a waiting car. However, the place is surrounded by cops and members of Five-O, who shoot at the car and put it completely out of order. Bombay flees from the mall across a busy street to the harbor, where he throws the doll containing the drugs into the water.
Arrested and taken back to the Five-O office, they have nothing on him. Sloane is paraded into the room where McGarrett calls Bombay "a narcotics peddler and a murderer." Bombay in turn refers to Sloane as a "jerk," a "joker" and "Mr. Punk." McGarrett once again asks Sloane once again to identify Bombay as the killer, and once again he refuses. McGarrett has a major attack of speechifying, and Sloane finally cracks, saying "He did it."
Bombay is taken away to be booked for Murder One, threatening to "get" Sloane, who says "I guess I showed him I wasn't a lousy little hardware salesman."
McGarrett, on the other hand, cannot shut up, continuing with his epic speech which even quotes John Donne: ""Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind." Puh-leeze!
When I previously reviewed this show about 20 years ago, I gave it a high rating, and the acting by John Randolph as Sloane and Ann Helm as Joyce the policewoman is very good. I am less enthusiastic about the Ecuadorian-born Paulsen now. He yells his way through much of the part, though his character is admittedly very nasty. McGarrett also raises his voice in several places in this episode as well, particularly trying to get Sloane to identify Bombay.
There were some other things about the show that bothered me this time around:
THE HEROIN:
As Angela is entertaining Sloane at the beginning of the show, Bombay shows up at her room. She sees Bombay through the door peephole and is upset. She gives Sloane the key, which is taped under a table, for the locker at the airport which contains heroin in a doll. She tells Sloane to go and hide on the terrace, then lets in Bombay with his two thugs. The dialogue between her and Bombay goes back and forth between him wanting his "merchandise" while getting more and more threatening, and her not knowing what he is talking about and then telling him she doesn't have it. Finally, saying "What you haven't got is a pretty face anymore," and calling her a "silly broad," he throws her off the balcony.
The question here is, why did Angela have the heroin? Was she a courier for Bombay? If so, why is she hesitant about giving it to him? Considering what a nasty guy Bombay is, why would she try and double-cross him? This is not a big deal, but there could have been some explanation as to why Angela had the heroin in the first place.
Actually, in his office, McGarrett tells us what to think about this issue, answering my questions, albeit in a speculative way: "Maybe she stole it from Bombay? Maybe somebody gave it to her to push? Whatever, that's not the point. The fact is, she had it. Bombay knew she had it. And he wound up killing her for it."
This whole business reminds me a lot of the classic thriller film Wait Until Dark where a doll containing heroin also caused a lot of trouble!
THE WAITER TIPSTER:
Using Sloane's fingerprints, he is identified, perhaps through his military records. With this information, Five-O manages to track him down, maybe combined with information that Chin Ho gets from Lester the doorman (Sam Peters) at Angela's hotel, that Sloane was "in the hardware line." This hotel is the Ilikai Yacht Harbor Tower (thanks to Virginia), which is interesting, because the hardware convention is also at the Ilikai (we see the front entrance to the hotel with a banner advertising the convention). I don't think viewers would realize that Angela's room was also really in the Ilikai; I think the intention was to suggest it was at some other location. Using the same hotel was probably done just for the convenience of filming.
Probably not the next day, because it might take a while to ID the fingerprints, Sloane is seen at a lunch-like meeting for hardware dealers attending the convention (this is not all of the dealers, who number about 1,500 in total). The meeting is chaired by a guy named Willie (Herb Vigran). Sloane seems stunned after what happened at Angela's apartment, but manages to recover when Willie announces that that evening Sloane will be named Man of the Year. Sloane suddenly reverts to a shocked look when he sees McGarrett and Danno at the back of the room. At this point he doesn't know who they are — they could be mobsters connected to Bombay for all he knows.
For some reason, Sloane leaves the raucous meeting and approaches the two from Five-O, saying "You wanna see me?" He leaves with them to go to the Five-O office. They walk past the Canoe House restaurant (which was in the Ilikai, no longer there) and you can see in the distance a red-jacketed waiter making a phone call, quite a distance from where the three of them heading towards the escalator.
This waiter is phoning Bombay to tell him that Five-O left with Sloane, telling him Sloane's name and somehow knowing that Sloane was on the terrace when Angela was murdered. Of course, Bombay is furious, lambasting his men for not checking the place thoroughly.
This doesn't make any sense. While there were two waiters in the room with the salesmen, I don't think one of them is the guy making the phone call, aside from the fact there is no way one of those waiters could have gotten to the phone ahead of McGarrett, Danno and Sloane leaving the building.
How would this waiter know all these details? Even if the waiter had talked to Lester the doorman, who knew that Sloane may have been the last person to see Angela alive, how would the waiter know that Sloane witnessed the murder? Maybe either he or Bombay were just guessing as to the significance of Sloane leaving with Five-O, but this really stretches things. This brings up the trope of "Honolulu was really not such a large town in the late 1960s." Did the waiter hear something from the hotel telephone operator who took Sloane's abandoned request to contact the police regarding the killing (assuming that Sloane was also staying at the Ilikai) ... but this is also speculation!
This would have been handled better if Sloane, who obviously had to leave Angela's apartment sometime after Bombay and his men turned the place upside down (and why hadn't they checked the terrace as well?), had been seen by the waiter or someone from the hotel who had gossiped to the waiter later. Unfortunately, the teaser ends with a freeze-frame of Sloane, hiding on the terrace (where he is not particularly well-hidden), looking distraught, and the first scene after the main titles is of Five-O arriving at the hotel.
THE TELEPHONE CONFIRMATION:
When Joyce the policewoman (who is not actually identified as a "policewoman" until late in the show by Bombay in McGarrett's office) goes to Bombay's, pretending to be Angela's sister Joyce, Bombay wants her to phone the Kaiolu Motel where she is staying and confirm that she made a call to New Jersey, which she told him she did to determine the price of the heroin which she found in her "sister's" airport locker.
Bombay asks "Allen," someone in his front office, no doubt, to get the motel on the line, and then says to Joyce "Tell him who you are, and ask him to give you time and charges on your call to New Jersey." Joyce phones the place and identifies herself — she is staying in room 617. "I want time and charges on a call to Jersey City."
But then we cut to somewhere, I don't think at the motel, where Kono is sitting with a woman who appears to be a telephone company operator (not a "him" at the motel as Bombay mentioned). Bombay takes the phone so he can hear what is said. This operator woman says "Time and charges on long-distance call from room 617 to Jersey City, New Jersey. Four minutes, $12.80 plus tax." (This seems like an exhorbitant amount, though hotels are notorious for jacking up long-distance charges.)
Bombay hangs up the phone, and Joyce asks him, "Are you satisfied?" Bombay replies, "That you made a call to Jersey City, yes." Joyce says, "Well, anything else you wanna know about me, why don't you ask me?"
Suddenly Bombay gets a call, and it is the same operator, telling him "Ready on your call to New Jersey." Obviously someone set up this call, and it seems strange that Bombay doesn't recognize the same operator's voice — or is she the only operator (at the phone company?) who deals with calls to the Mainland?
Anyway, Bombay tells Joyce "I got friends in New Jersey too. And maybe they know something about you that I don't know. Or maybe they don't know you at all, baby." Then he talks to some guy named "Lou," saying "Listen. I wanna find out something, Lou."
We never find out what happens with this conversation to confirm that Joyce's back story checks out, though "Lou" quite likely has to take some time to investigate her.
THE FINALE:
At the mall, the Shoe Shine Man walks with Joyce to the top level of the mall. McGarrett and Danno are not that far behind them, and when Joyce finally meets Bombay, he quite likely could see the two of them. McGarrett warns everyone that Bombay has to have the heroin in his possession before they bust him, so we know that Joyce's bag does contain the doll with the heroin in it.
Bombay grabs the bag and attempts to escape in his car, but it is stopped and Bombay runs away on foot. He escapes to a nearby marina, where he takes the doll out of the bag and throws it into the water. Seemingly, no one bothers to recover it, because at McGarrett's office, he ridicules Five-O's attempts to press charges against him, saying, "Is there an ordinance about throwing dolls in the ocean?"
Sloane is brought into the office and once again McGarrett tries to get Sloane to ID Bombay as the killer. McGarrett comes out with an incredible speech as Bombay is sitting there: "Please, Mr. Sloane, listen. We can put him away for the rest of his life if the charge is murder. Now, will you please help us? Do you think you're protecting yourself, your way of life, the people you love? There is no way you can stay uninvolved. No way. Look at him. He's a cancer that feeds on society. And you're part of that society. Do you think you can close your eyes to what he is and to what he does? You think you can tune up the music and drown out the cries of help from his victims? Kids like your daughter. He hooks girls on dope and gets them into prostitution to feed the habit. He's a procurer, a dope peddler and a murderer. Now, look. Are you gonna let him walk out of here?"
I would like to know whether the whole case against Bombay could be thrown out of court because of McGarrett's persistence in haranguing Sloane to ID a killer who is sitting right in front of both of them. A good lawyer would have a field day dealing with the way McGarrett needled Sloane, trying to break down his resistance to identifying Bombay as the murderer. Danno is a witness to this entire conversation so I don't think McGarrett could get away with something!
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
At the beginning of the show when Marty Sloane is in having a drink with hooker Angela Carlson in her room, the dialogue goes like this:
Sloane: You know something? You could be a model, or anything. How come you...? Never mind.
Angela: So go ahead and ask it. How'd a nice girl like me, et cetera, et cetera?
Sloane: Oh, it's none of my business.
Angela: Well, Mr. Sloane, I was just lucky, I guess. That's a joke. And you're supposed to laugh.
EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Death: Angela Carlson is thrown off her balcony by Charlie Bombay.
Injury: Marty Sloane is chased in his hotel's parking garage by Bombay's two thugs, who are in a car, and shot at with a shotgun. His face is bruised when Danno and Kono pick him up in the garage moments later, probably because, to avoid the thugs, he did this incredible somersault-like move and hit his head either on the ground or another car in the garage.
Injury: Bombay's car is badly damaged when it hits the wall at the Ala Moana Shopping Center. One of the thugs is seen, having fallen out of the car's open door and looking kind of unconscious. When McGarrett looks at this guy, he tells some cops on the scene, "Call an ambulance."
Injury: Bombay is seen bleeding from his head, likely because he was in car that hit the wall, when he crawls out of the car and runs away from McGarrett and Danno by jumping over the parking lot wall, running across a busy street and escaping to a nearby marina.
MORE TRIVIA:
When he is with Angela at the beginning of the show, Sloane is nervously playing around with ice cubes from her bar, saying "I was just admiring your ice cubes." Later when Joyce meets with Bombay in his office, Bombay pours himself a drink and plays around with the ice cubes in it using his fingers, maybe to make her nervous.
A kilogram of pure heroin is worth "a quarter of a million at least," which is somewhat less than in "Six Kilos," where the price was around $666,666.
During the final confrontation with Bombay in McGarrett's office, the shadow of the boom microphone is very visible on the rear wall.
The quote from John Donne at the end of the show is from his Meditation XVII, which also includes the famous expressions "for whom the bell tolls" and "no man is an island.")
When he is prepping Joyce for her undercover role, McGarrett plays an LP in his office which supposedly is the "one and only record" Joyce made as a singer. All we hear from this LP is "Tomorrow never comes." Joyce was a member of AVGA — American Guild of Variety Artists.
Sloane is hanging out with some of his fellow conventioneers in the hotel, but suddenly wants to "take a drive" and "get some air." This seems rather odd, because he is totally plastered. It is a good excuse to get him into the parking garage for the confrontation with the two hoods who try to run him over and shoot him.
After Bombay runs away from the parking lot, McGarrett checks out his badly damaged car, and tells Danno, "We'll take Bombay, come on, let's go," but his voice is not that of Jack Lord. In fact, it sounds like Danny Kamekona!
Smoking includes Joyce (cigarette at McGarrett's desk [!] and elsewhere), Chin Ho (pipe), Sloane (cigarette, rather nervously as if he usually does not smoke, but he takes it out of a pack), and cigars (Willie and other conventioneers).
Original air date: 10/22/69 — Opening Credits — End Credits Director: Reza S. Badiyi; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writer: Palmer Thompson; Music: Don B. Ray
Timings: Teaser: 6:43; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 6:02; Act Two: 13:07; Act Three: 14:23; Act Four: 9:03; End Credits: 0:51; Total Time: 51:07.
QUICK PLOT:
A guerrilla force breaks into an Oahu armory and steals weapons which they intend to ship to their home country to aid revolutionary forces.
This show, the first directed by Reza S. Badiyi who designed the main title, begins after some establishing shots to show that it is Sunday, and contrary to what people may think, members of the Five-O team have the day off. Danno and Kono are taking surfboards off their car at the beach where Kono is abused by a patrol cop about his weight.
Soon after this, the scene changes to the 72nd Battalion Armory where revolutionaries led by Elpidio Acuna (Henry Silva) are breaking in to steal weapons, including M14 rifles. The mediocre security at this place is once again provided by Hayes Guard Service — in fact, Beau Van den Ecker risen from the dead in "Babe Ruth" — and he is quickly overpowered and knocked out.
Exactly where Alcuna and his followers come from is a good question. Their country, which is never named, is 3,500 miles away from Hawaii. 3,500 miles to the east would be somewhere in or close to Mexico, and these people look to be Latin American, judging by their appearance and unsteady accents. It is unlikely they have spent the last 5 years in the jungles of some place in the other direction like Mota Lava or Bougainville islands (both about 3250 miles away), the isolated Pitcairn Island (3510), the Philippines (5445) or Papua New Guinea (4485).
Why they have come all the way to Hawaii to steal armaments is another mystery. Not to make any parallels with Pearl Harbor, but is the security around armories in Hawaii less tight than in their own country?
Quite likely this has something to do with the presence in Hawaii of Manuel "Manny" Morales (Edward Colmans), who runs the Morales Delivery Service (MDS) trucking company. Elipidio's father died in Morales' arms during the last revolution in their country, and he died saving Morales' life. In other words, Morales is a patriot with
strong ties to "the motherland."
Along with Acuna are his wife Marla (Julie Gregg), who, unknown to him so far, is pregnant with his child, Ramon (Tom Nardini), Jose (Gary Camara) and Carlos (Daws Dawson). All of them except Morales are wearing military outfits, which look very well-worn and sweat-stained, so they probably didn't pick them up at the local revolutionary clothing shop.
There is a lot of stuff to steal in the armory, far more than I think they can load into their truck before the guard suddenly comes back to life and pulls an alarm which lets off a siren outside that a couple of cops passing by just happen to hear. (This time the guard is shot, though not killed.) The truck, which is now fully loaded, leaves quickly through a fence while Acuna stays behind shooting at these cops plus others who show up. The men from Five-O hasten to the armory along with McGarrett, who is casually dressed in white.
Acuna is barricaded behind what looks like a metal table wedged into the armory door and showers the forces outside with gunfire. Tear gas is fired inside, but Colonel Sasaki (Ed Fernandez) says this is pointless, since there are 2,000 gas masks inside the building, one of which Acuna will surely find (and he does). McGarrett dons a mask himself and goes through the roof of the building while the forces outside let loose with a barrage designed to cover the sound of him breaking a skylight. Acuna sees him anyway, and shoots at McGarrett as he drops to the floor, missing him. McGarrett eventually confronts Acuna and plugs him in the leg, ending the standoff. At this point, I don't know what is the point of the gas masks, since there seems to be hardly any tear gas in the building.
Acuna is taken to the hospital, where he is kept under guard. When McGarrett goes to see him, he shows McGarrett where he has been "whipped, burned, stabbed and shot." In other words, he's not going to tell McGarrett anything. Telling him he has "committed a crime," McGarrett says, "I promise you'll never leave Hawaii with the arms you stole. I'm gonna close this island tight as a rock, and I'm gonna hunt the people who came with you."
At Morales' company an military olive drab paint-like coating is washed off the white truck they used, and the rifles are placed via secret doors in shipping boxes labelled "farm machinery" which have already been cleared by customs. Two of Acuna's men go to the hospital where they knock out the guard and take their leader out of the place in a laundry basket. When the furious McGarrett shows up, a doctor (John Stalker) tells him "The minute he left this bed, he laid his life on the line ... He moves that leg, he tears the suture," the likely result being "gangrene, and the possibility of general blood poisoning." The doctor gives Acuna 24 hours to live, if that.
With the rifles loaded in a truck along with Acunan and his wife, Morales and the others head to the docks, only to be confronted by a strike. Rather than draw attention to themselves, they return to the depot.
The doctor gives a press conference to let Acuna know that his hours are numbered. Knowing this, Vallios, the consul from Acuna's country, played by Wright Esser, the nasty captain from the pilot episode and Dr. Crighton from only two episodes before this one, comes to McGarrett's office to tell him to forget about pursuing "mad dog" Acuna, just to let him die. In the first of more than one such speech to the representative of some "foreign" government telling him how to do his job, McGarrett tells the Consul, "We have laws here, sir, not dictators. Law. That word, the difference between your police and ours, the difference between your government and mine. It boils down to this, Mr. Consul. In this country, Acuna is entitled to a trial. And he's gonna get it unless he dies before I get to him. And if he does die, it won't be because I stopped looking for him." When he met with McGarrett, Alcuna described Vallios as a "pig, servant to the dictator who bleeds the people of my country to death."
Meanwhile, Morales, back at the depot, wants to call a doctor to tend to his leader's condition. Acuna tells Ramon — who would kill his own father or mother for the success of the raid — to shoot Morales if he picks up the phone, but this is interrupted by a call from the docks saying that the strike is over.
Checking a tread mark left at the armory against the inventory of local tire companies, the truck used by the revolutionaries at the armory is narrowed down to one of four businesses with a possible connection to Acuna's country: "Managos Produce Company, Heurta Meat and Poultry, Morales Delivery Service and Siempras Express Delivery."
HPD is alerted to keep an eye out for trucks from any of these outfits on the move that evening, and sure enough, Morales' van, finally going to the docks, is spotted and pursued. Confronted with a roadblock, Morales runs the truck into a phone booth, and the men in the cab are busted. Acuna in the back along with his wife starts shooting, seemingly through the metal rear door, which would result in bullets richocheting around inside. He tells Marla that they will die together, but when she tells him she is going to have his baby (he replies, "A son?"), saying "If he cannot have a father, in the name of God let him have a mother," Acuna surrenders.
When Marla says to McGarrett, "Thank you for not killing him," he replies, "The decision was easy — we don't like to kill." Acuna and Marla leave in the ambulance.
The music by Don Ray (his first score for the show) is disappointing. You would expect it to be tense and militaristic, and at the beginning of the show it starts out in that direction, but then it becomes very cheerful. In fact, this same perky music is used at the end of "Bored She Hung Herself" as the lead character frolics in the surf. This "perky" theme is heard several times throughout "Savage Sunday," including during the final police chase to the docks.
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
The show takes place on Sunday, and contrasts peaceful scenes at its beginning of people on their day off and going to church with the revolutionaries' leader engaged in a violent and bloody confrontation.
EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Injury: Guard at the armory is knocked out by Acuna; he is shot by Ramon three times after he recovers and pulls the alarm.
Injury: Acuna is shot by McGarrett after McGarrett breaks in through a skylight.
MORE TRIVIA:
At the beginning of the show, to emphasize the fact that it is Sunday, there is a shot, later to become a stock shot, of people going to a church: Kawaiaha'o Church at 957 Punchbowl Street, close to the Iolani Palace. A cop car, #130, is seen turning in front of the church. This car is then seen driving through Waikiki where there is a concrete structure in the background. Thanks to Fred Helfing for IDing these two locations.
Officer Cooper, who makes fun of Kono's weight, is played by Frank Atienza, who is later Danno's friend Chinough Olena who gets killed in S05E04, "Pig in a Blanket."
When the armory guard is lying on the ground, the camera shot makes it look like he looks up at Marla, who is on his right, and then continues to turn his head in that direction to see the alarm which is behind him on his left. But if he really twisted his head like this, it would be really obvious to Marla, because he would have to move the rest of his body as well.
Kono is later abused about his girth by both Danno and Chin Ho in the Five-O office in a scene which is not particularly amusing.
The Honolulu Advertiser with the headline "Guerrilla Chieftain Captured at Armory" has a subhead on the article "Barlow Nixed for Police Post." Other headlines on the page are "Moon Orbit Today for Apollo 10," "Nixon, Thieu Face Moment of Truth," "ILWU Oppo[ses?] Official Resi[??]," and "First Lady 2 Nights..."
When McGarrett first meets Alcuna in his hospital room, he misprounounces his name "El-pe-dido."
McGarrett uses his transparent map. The word KOOLAU is featured prominently in large capital letters. This refers to the Koolau Range, mountains paralleling for 37 miles the eastern coast of Oahu.
McGarrett asks Chin Ho for an estimate of how far the revolutionaries have gotten and Chin says, "I haven't got my abacus with me."
A phone number on one of Morales' trucks has only 6 digits: 898571. The GVW of the truck is 5250.
One of the revolutionaries is seen painting a truck white outside Morales', but it was not the truck used at the armory. It strikes me that it would take a pretty long time to clean the olive coating off the other truck; even the top of the truck is colored olive.
A City and County Ambulance takes Alcuna to the hospital at the end of the show.
Bad DVD subtitles: Central Dispatch says Morales' truck is "sighted at Alumonia and Board, moving west on Alumonia," really meaning "Ala Moana." Fred suggests that "Board" refers to "Ward."
GALLERY:
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Original air date: 10/29/69 — Opening Credits — End Credits Director: Paul Stanley; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writers: Anthony Lawrence (teleplay), Jay Roberts & Anthony Lawrence (story); Music: Richard Shores
Timings: Teaser: 4:35; Main Titles: 0:57; Act One: 10:49; Act Two: 9:22; Act Three: 11:37; Act Four: 12:52; End Credits: 0:56; Total Time: 51:08.
QUICK PLOT:
A psychology professor trained by Wo Fat hypnotically programs a policewoman to murder the Five-O boss.
This is the first science-fiction-tinged episode of Five-O. It is written by Anthony Lawrence, who penned the execrable "To Hell With Babe Ruth." Fortunately, Lawrence went on to write episodes which were much better than that one or this one: "Death with Father," "To Kill or Be Killed" and "Three Dead Cows at Makapu‘u."
Just like Lawrence seemed in "Babe Ruth" to be heavily influenced by an episode of Hawaiian Eye which dealt with a Japanese soldier escaping from a mental hospital to exact revenge that he hadn't carried out in December, 1941 (see my review of "Babe"), "A Bullet for McGarrett" seems to be influenced by the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, which starred Khigh Dhiegh as Dr. Yen Lo of the Pavlov Institute in Moscow, a sinister Asian in charge of brainwashing American soldiers during the Korean War. (Khigh Dhiegh is briefly in this episode of Five-O. The film also stars other Five-O actors James Gregory, Henry Silva (as a Korean!), and Albert Paulsen.)
The main guest star in "A Bullet" is Eric Braeden, in his first of three roles on Five-O. He plays psychology professor Paul Farrar, who is teaching at the Pacific Cultural Institute, the educational institution already seen in season one's "Pray Love Remember, Pray Love Remember."
As the show begins, Farrar's class for the day is wrapping up after a lecture. Karen Adamson (Sheila Larkin), one of his students, is leaving, and Richard Han (Winston Char, uncredited), with whom she has had a relationship in the past, wants to get together with her again. When she says she is "busy," he tells her, "I think you're prejudiced." She tells him, "Only against boorish, arrogant people." Han replies, "Stubborn, these Chinese, but hardly boorish and arrogant."
Before Karen leaves, Farrar tells her he couldn't help overhearing their conversation: "You put him down rather hard, didn't you?" Karen says she can't stand Richard and doesn't know why she went out with him. Farrar asks if she is under some kind of strain, to which she replies, "I'm in love with you." She seems confused that she said this.
Soon after, Han is seen outside at the institute's swimming pool. Karen follows him there in a zombie-like fashion and, pulling out a gun which someone left for her in her locker, shoots Han as he jumps backward off the diving board, killing him. She seems very agitated before and after doing this.
Five-O is soon to show up at the scene. They find some clues as to what happened — face powder spilled on the cement near the edge of the pool from when Karen dropped her purse on the ground and Karen's library card which was floating in the pool and is now at the bottom. It is recovered by an uncredited swimmer.
Both of these clues are sloppily handled by the show.
The face powder was originally a certain distance from the edge of the pool and a white line along the edge of the pool. But this is not the same as when McGarrett and the others check it out. The powder is in a different place, and the white line is not beside the powder at all. The powder is beside another line which is not white. As well, there is another "white line" which is at 90 degrees to this second line close to where the powder is now that was not seen before.
As far as the library card is concerned, if you look at some piece of paper, supposedly this card, that Che Fong (Danny Kamekona) is seen "restoring" and he and Chin Ho are examining under a microscope, it is not like her library card which is what we see when we cut to McGarrett holding the card — or is that just information about her library account and perhaps the two things are not related? At least there is some explanation as to how the card got into the pool, because it is windy around the time Karen drops her purse. (And no, the wind did not blow the face powder; if so, there would still be some at its original location.)
Back at the office, Danno already knows that Han was "a brilliant, young Chinese Maoist radical who's involved in a Commie spy ring." They have been keeping their eyes on him for over a month.
On the other hand, according to McGarrett, Karen was "20 years old, Caucasian, psychology major with excellent grades, cheerleader, sorority queen [who c]ame to the islands three years ago with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Harold Adamson of Detroit, Michigan. Parents died. Boating accident three years ago. Lives alone in an apartment on Keoi [?] in Waikiki." Not exactly a professional assassin, though Chin Ho says there is a Chinese saying: "They that shows [sic] no evil will be suspected of none." McGarrett tells him, "Not so far as Five-O is concerned."
Danno goes to the school and talks to Farrar, who says that Han was "a brilliant student" who was "a Maoist, but ... a dove among hawks" and who "was liked by almost everyone." When Danno wonders if Han dated much, Farrar says, "I teach psychology, not sex education." Danno asks if Han specifically took Karen out. Farrar says he saw them together, but can't understand why she should be considered a suspect in his murder.
After this meeting, Danno goes to Karen's locker which he breaks into, presumably without a warrant! He takes some of the face powder out of her compact from her purse, spilling it all over the front of the locker before closing it, duh! The powder is then forwarded to the lab who proves that it is the same as that recovered at the swimming pool.
Now knowing this connection, McGarrett and Danno go to Karen's apartment. Just before they arrive, she gets a phone call. When she answers it, all she hears is this high-pitched goopy New Age music like you might hear on the original Star Trek. Grabbing the gun she used to kill Han, she runs out the back door of her place, which Danno neglected to cover, and into the middle of the street where she runs into a truck driven by Five-O stuntman Beau Van den Ecker and seriously injured.
This "accident" is not well staged. The truck driver has a lot of time to stop as he is approaching Karen on the street, especially as he just came around a corner. Still, he runs in to her, a rather nasty collision, and suddenly there is lots of blood on Karen's right side on her blouse and her leg, which doesn't make any sense.
Karen is rushed to the hospital, but she dies on the way there after babbling incoherently to McGarrett, who is in the ambulance with her: "Mama. Mama. Oh, no. No. Oh, why'd you have to die. No, please don't. Don't let him hit me, Paul. I hate him. I hate him. Oh, no. Please, stop him, Paul. Stop. Don't hit me, Paul. Please. He's not my daddy. He's not... He's not... Paul... Dr. Farrar. Oh, God, where are you? Mama. Mama. Ma... Mama."
To help them investigate further, Five-O enlists the help of another policewoman, and another one named Joyce, this time Bennett, the attractive Marianne McAndrew. Danno is once again concerned that taking on this assignment might be more than a policewoman can handle, but Joyce, who majored in psychology, tells the Five-O team, "I'm fascinated by the idea of going back to school." She is given the usual back story and winds up in Farrar's class, where she comes across as a keener.
Before they can get too involved with each other, Farrar goes to the lookout near the Punchbowl Cemetery where he meets with Wo Fat, who puts in a cameo appearance for about 3 minutes and 20 seconds, suggesting that Khigh Dhiegh was sticking around in Hawaii after his previous role this season in "Forty Feet High And It Kills!" which was filmed only two shows before this one in production order.
It turns out that Wo trained Farrar in hypnotic techniques when the latter was a prisoner of war for three years after he was captured in North Korea. Wo already knows, via his "informants," that Joyce is a policewoman. He also knows that Farrar, his "most brilliant student" and "disciple," can turn Joyce into "a bullet for McGarrett," to eliminate "an enemy whose relentlessness is a constant threat."
Farrar and Joyce hang out eating lunch on campus, and soon end up in a soft-focus scene on the beach where Farrar has her listening to yet more of the goopy music, which she says makes her think of "men on the moon." Played by what looks like a cassette recorder on a blue base that looks like a flying saucer, this music is backed up by some booze which is laced with drugs.
Incredulously, Joyce asks Farrar if he ever took Karen Adamson out, which seems very odd, unless she has been gossiping with the other students. Considering Danno already tried to connect Karen with Farrar when he talked to him, this would be a big clue that Joyce was a cop, aside from the fact that he already knows this!
Farrar starts to probe Joyce's past, asking her questions, particularly about her relationship with a crude man her mother almost married after the death of her father. This man was a drunk who beat her mother up. Whether this is part of the back story which Five-O concocted for Joyce is a good question. Farrar starts to give her the usual "you are getting sleepy" suggestions to put her into a hypnotic trance, showing her a picture of McGarrett and describing him as "the man who hurt your mother, the man you hate."
Meanwhile, Five-O have traced the gun which Karen owned back to Farrar and realize that Joyce is in danger. McGarrett goes to her place where Joyce acts towards him in a hostile manner after he tells her she is off the case, calling him "dangerous" and slapping him in the face. She says, "I know we were wrong in suspecting [Farrar] of being implicated in any crime." Similar to some of the brainwashed characters in The Manchurian Candidate who suddenly return to near-normal even while under extreme stress, Joyce suddenly apologizes to him, saying "I'll lock my door so Svengali won't get me."
McGarrett consults with a Dr. Abrahams (Al Eben, later "Doc" Bergman), staff psychiatrist at Inland Hospital, wondering if someone can be hypnotized to kill. This is a debatable subject, as many web pages will tell you. Abrahamson tells McGarrett this is highly unlikely, though a person who is regressed through hypnotism might be able to get back to a source of the problem that still hangs on from childhood. He says that considering a child's sense of right and wrong is quite different from an adult's, a hypnotist might drag up some childhood traumatic situation and re-create it for the adult, causing them to transfer their hostility to someone the hypnotist tells them is the same one who was the cause of their pain originally. Which is exactly the technique Farrar is using on Joyce, and it seems what he also used on Karen.
After McGarrett leaves, Farrar phones Joyce, once again playing the music over the phone and tells her to come to his office. Subsequently, she goes there and phones McGarrett, sounding like she needs help before she abruptly hangs up the phone. McGarrett goes to meet Joyce, but Farrar has programmed her "to kill the man who is trying to kill your mother." Joyce shoots McGarrett point-blank but he is still strong enough to fight Farrar who is nearby. Considering much of the subsequent action takes place in near-darkness, Joyce takes another shot at McGarrett, but hits Farrar instead, killing him. The tense soundtrack music by Shores is suddenly replaced by the New Age stuff, though whether this is appearing on the soundtrack or emanating from Farrar's tape recorder is not easy to determine.
McGarrett, though seriously wounded and bleeding a lot, manages to calm Joyce down. Fortunately she has run out of bullets. The two of them leave together. It is quite likely that Joyce is going to need some serious therapy to get her back to normal from Farrar "walking around in her mind."
So what is wrong with this episode? Basically, the whole business with hypnotizing people with weird music is stupid. I don't believe it, and the way the music is employed as a "trigger" is inconsistent. (It is also used to get the assassins programmed to receiving this "trigger.") Karen is not "told" to do anything, she just runs away, even though it is unlikely that Farrar would have known that the "big bad wolves" [McGarrett and Danno] were soon to be at her door. And she isn't "triggered" at all prior to shooting Han that we see. Joyce is triggered to kill McGarrett at the end of the show, on the other hand.
There are plenty of parallels to The Manchurian Candidate, a film which has some serious issues with its script, as Roger Ebert pointed out in his review of the film, even though he still gave it four stars and declared it was a "Great Movie." In that film at the beginning, the brainwashing or programming has already been set up (seemingly in the space of only three days), so we don't have to think about whatever technique was employed to get the army men ready.
The scene near the beginning of that film featuring Khigh Dhiegh as the evil programmer from Moscow demonstrating what he has done to the men is brilliant, with the perspective switching from him speaking to a medical theater filled with Russian, Chinese and North Korean Commies to a ladies' garden club discussing hydrangeas and, in the case of the platoon's one black soldier, a black ladies' garden club.
Various web pages suggest that someone can be programmed to commit a crime if that person is a psychopath who would already be predisposed to using violence or murder towards someone else. Neither Karen nor Joyce fall into this category. (Were they the only people who Farrar ever gave his treatment to?)
In the show, Dr. Abrahams tells McGarrett that it is possible to program someone who was treated badly in their childhood to take revenge on a substitute for the person who wronged them back then. There is a suggestion that both Karen and Joyce were treated badly, maybe even abused, when they were children, so they would be more predisposed to fall under Farrar's spell.
At the end of the novel of The Manchurian Candidate, the programmed protagonist, Raymond Shaw, ends up commiting incest with his mother, which is something that obviously could not have been put on screen in 1962, though there is a scene with the mother (played by Angela Lansbury, who was only three years older than her "son," Laurence Harvey!) where she gives him a deep kiss. I have not read this book, by the way, only seen the film.
Quite frankly, I'm amazed I even gave this Five-O show 2 stars!
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
Wo Fat explains to Farrar that he will transform policewoman Joyce Bennett "into a bullet for McGarrett," in other words, an assassin.
EPISODE PROMO:
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LOCATIONS:
Fred Helfing tracked down several locations from this episode:
When Karen comes running out of the building, pursued by McGarrett and Danno, she heads up Kamuela to Kapahulu Avenue, where you can see the truck that will hit her turning (intersection seen today).
She gets hit by the truck in front of some see-through concrete bricks (seen today).
The ambulance taking Karen's body turns left on Kapahulu (seen today). The truck is beside the ambulance. There is a newer Bank of Hawaii in today's picture which replaced the one in the photo above where the truck starts to turn and the bank is barely visible behind a passing bus.
Later on, when McGarrett goes to the campus to meet Joyce, he is seen standing in front of Bingham Hall at Punahou School. (The picture is enhanced to make it brighter.) This is what this scene looks like today.
CASUALTY LIST:
Death: Richard Han is shot by Karen Adamson as he dives into the swimming pool.
Injury: Karen is hit by truck when she is escaping from her apartment after McGarrett and Danno go there.
Death: Karen dies en route to the hospital in the ambulance, accompanied by McGarrett.
Injury: McGarrett is shot by Joyce in the arm.
Death: Farrar is shot by Joyce in the dark when he's fighting with McGarrett.
MORE TRIVIA:
According to McGarrett, Farrar has taught Oriental psychology and has written books on hypnotism and mesmerism. After he joined the UN forces in the Korean action, he was captured by North Korea, where he spent three years as a prisoner of war during which he was tutored by Wo Fat. But what country was he with in the "UN forces"? According to various web pages, if this is Germany, there were no Germans fighting against North Korea!
Marianne McAndrew, who also plays a role in season three's "The Late John Louisiana," was married to Stewart Moss, who played Ned Horvath in the first season's "Not That Much Different." When Moss passed away in 2017, they had been married almost 50 years. McAndrew's character in the show is supposed to be 26 years old; she was this age when the show was broadcast.
Sheila Larken (Karen Adamson) has been most recently seen as mother of FBI agent Dana Scully on The X-Files. Michael Leong plays an attendant in the Physicians Ambulance taking Karen to the hospital, uncredited. Danny Kamekona is again Che Fong, the last time this character will be seen until the role is assumed by Harry Endo for the first of 114 appearances in S02E15, "Blind Tiger."
Adamson lives at 2972 Kalakaua Ave. and has a phone number of 923-9052 according to her library card.
McGarrett addresses Joyce as "honey" three times. He uses the expression "Easy" (especially near the end of the show) 14 times!
It's interesting that Adamson can kill Han jumping off a diving board with a single shot, but Joyce, a policewoman, only wounds McGarrett who is standing right in front of her.
When being prepared for her undercover role, Joyce tells McGarrett, "Only one thing bothers me ... I don't have a thing to wear [as a university student]," which produces chuckles from Chin and Danno.
Doctor Abrahams smokes a pipe.
GALLERY:
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Original air date: 11/5/69-- Opening Credits — End Credits Director: Richard Benedict; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writer:
Robert C. Dennis; Music: Richard Shores
Timings: Teaser: 3:15; Main Titles: 0:57; Act One: 11:42; Act Two: 15:30; Act Three: 9:55; Act Four: 8:53; End Credits: 0:55; Total Time: 51:07.
QUICK PLOT:
A terrorist nicknamed "The Beast" is about to introduce a fungus into the islands which will decimate the sugar cane industry.
As the show begins, Bridger (Dick Cook), a member of the intelligence community, asks the stewardess on a United Airlines plane approaching the Honolulu airport to get the captain to send a message to the control tower which he writes on a notepad. Also on the plane is Erich Stoss (Theodore Bikel), who borrows this notepad and rubs his cigar ash in the indentations which Bridger made when he was writing the message (pressing very heavily, I think) after the stewardess tears off the top page. This reveals "WALTER HENDRICKS DEPARTMENT OF INTELLIGENCE PACIFIC DIVISION." Although this message says virtually nothing, probably because we see only its recipient, not the message itself (assuming there is one), Hendricks (Bill Reddick) in Honolulu wants to talk to McGarrett. This whole procedure, sending a message via the pilot of the plane which is then forwarded from the control tower to Hendricks' office, seems kind of peculiar. Does Bridger have some special relationship to the captain of the plane? The fact that Stoss is smoking a cigar on the plane is pretty nauseating!
As the plane lands, Stoss stabs Bridger through the seat in his back with the sharp tip of an umbrella. Bridger dies immediately. There doesn't seem to be anyone sitting beside Bridger, which is odd, because when people are ready to disembark, there is then a woman beside him who leaves, passing in front of him, despite the fact that Bridger's head is leaning forward, as if he is sleeping. When the stewardess shakes Bridger, who is the last guy on the plane and not moving, his head seems to be further back, and he then falls completely forward. When Stoss stabs Bridger, the guy sitting next to Stoss looks right what is happening, but this guy is later revealed to be Stoss's associate Esteban (Alex McAngus). As well, when Stoss stabs, he has inclined his seat back a bit, so the guy sitting right behind him could see everything that is going on, including the fact that Bridger rose out of his seat when he was stabbed. At least the stewardness does not scream when she figures out that Bridger is dead.
Kendrick, when he meets with McGarrett at the county morgue, says that Bridger was tailing someone, The Beast, "the one he mentioned in the message," but there was no such person mentioned in the message which we saw (perhaps it was further down the page from what is above). "The Beast" is Stoss, one of his six pseudonyms, who is said to be Dutch but more likely "a Nazi who can't go home again" and who is probably "working for the Chinese Communists now." Hendrick starts to jerk McGarrett around like a typical Fed, saying the whole issue of Stoss is surrounded by secrecy, but McGarrett quickly gets him to talk, especially when what is Bridger's passport shows a stamp from Maracaibo, Venezuela. Five days ago in this location "a secret conference, [involving] revolutionary groups from all over the Caribbean ... arranged by a high-level communist" was held. Bridger reported "something big was planned and Stoss was dealing the cards."
The coroner (Robert Brilliande) gives McGarrett the usual mumbo-jumbo explanation of what happened, to which McGarrett replies, "Doc, do you mind telling me, or should I wait and read about it in the medical journal?" The coroner replies that death was caused from "a puncture wound at the level of the lower thoracic spine."
A sketch that Bridger, "a weekend artist," was making of a woman sitting across the aisle from him on the plane was recovered with his other possessions, though it has been folded in three. McGarrett suspects that Bridger knew of some connection between Stoss and this woman, and she indeed turns out to be yet another one of Stoss's associates, the Colombian Mariana de Nava (Linda Marsh)! I wonder why didn't Stoss didn't take this picture (assuming he knew that Bridger was making it) with him, since that is the only thing that enables Five-O to track his group down. There are no mug shots of Stoss immediately available to distribute locally, though one eventually surfaces from "an old passport photograph."
Luggage from passengers on the plane are examined to see if there is something from Stoss, but Danno offers some line about how maybe Stoss's luggage would arrive on a different plane (was this normal?). Stoss, it appears, does not have any luggage at all. All he has is an attaché case. Why this was never checked at customs anywhere along the way is a good question.
In cahoots with Lao (Soon-Teck Oh), whose political affiliations are never fully explained, Stoss goes to visit Professor Quon Li (Philip Ahn, who played the Attorney-General in the series' pilot). His house is "remote, secluded" and Li is willing to help Stoss with his yet-unexplained sinister plot, not because he is a "party member," but, as Li tells us, "Because I have family still living in Shanghai who have been threatened with persecution unless I co-operate." Stoss raises his voice for one of the few times in the show when Li's servant touches his case. Li has a large estate (the house has been seen previously on the show) as well as a sugar plantation. He also has a helicopter which he uses to go to his cane fields.
de Nava is soon enough tracked to a hotel, thanks to a taxi driver, and Danno and Chin follow her to Chinatown after she takes a Gray Line cab there. She goes via several narrow alleys to a Chinese herbal store and asks for "rare" ingredients to be ready at 9 a.m. the next day. The owner tells her these things are expensive, but she says that she is a chemist who knows the price of everything on the list she is giving him. Some guy who has seen Danno and Chin following her comes into the shop and tells the owner, who passes the fact that she was followed along to her, and she leaves by a back door. (I don't understand this at all; like who cares if white guys are following a white woman in Chinatown?) Fleeing from Chin and Danno, de Nava is struck by a taxi as she emerges from yet another alley and ends up in the hospital.
McGarrett visits de Nava there, but she just gives him some banalities about how she is a tourist and the fact that paperwork she had with chemical formulas on it was just "a doodle." Despite the fact that de Nava threatened the owner of the herbal shop, he co-operates with Five-O, telling them the chemicals she was after would just "make purple water." McGarrett figures there are other components involved to which this material would have to be added.
At Li's house, Stoss meets with four conspirators including Lao, Esteban and two Asians. He outlines a sinister plan, which is to commit "an act of sabotage of such magnitude it [might be] considered almost a second Pearl Harbor." The sugar crop in Hawaii will be destroyed to benefit "one of the greatest sugar-producing countries in the world," where Esteban hails from. This is obviously Cuba, though that country's name is never mentioned in the show. Stoss says, "Unfortunately, due to embargoes, an evil institution, there is at present very little market for the product of [this] country."
To accomplish this task, Stoss has four vials of liquids in his attaché case, the contents of which, "judiciously introduced into the cane fields ... will effectively destroy the sugar industry in Hawaii for the next five years ... Every country will have to buy their sugar from us at our prices." The liquid in the vials was to have been activated in combination with the stuff that de Nava was purchasing in Chinatown. Unfortunately, because she is out of commission in the hospital, the plan is in jeopardy.
Pretending to be a doctor, Lao goes to the hospital and threatens de Nava, suggesting she is a traitor to the cause. She gives him the formula for activation and he leaves after giving her a poison pill, ordering her to take it. When McGarrett shows up shortly after, Marianna tells him, "I have nothing to say to an oppressor of the people." However, as the poison pill which she obviously took kicks in, she freaks out and before she dies, she tells McGarrett that Stoss's plot involves destroying the sugar cane fields in Hawaii with a fungus.
At a meeting in the Governor's office, McGarrett meets with various big shots including Leonard Burleson (Bill Bigelow) from the Department of Agriculture, who tells the assembled that Stoss's fungal warfare is quite doable. He says that of the world's raw sugar, 41.6 % is produced in Hawaii. McGarrett tells the group, "For another country to gain that advantage would be a tremendous coup. But for Hawaii to lose, it would be a stab in the heart."
With a resulting directive from the Governor, the objective for Five-O is now to determine how this material is going to introduced into the cane fields. They compile lists of "crop dusting and spraying companies, by island, privately owned crop dusters, rental planes adaptable for crop dusting, private planes adaptable [and] helicopters." Chin Ho has a brainstorm, saying that part of Stoss's plan may be "pressure": "If he could find a grower with family still in China, he's got it," though it has never been 100% confirmed that Communist China is behind Stoss's plot. Kono says, "Give that man a free foo yung, to which Chin Ho responds, "Haole food." Kono says, "Not exclusively, brother."
There are a few more laughs from Chin Ho, who goes to an airfield where he encounters Galen Kam as another guy named "Li." Chin rattles off a few sentences in his native language, to which Kam says, "Sorry, I don't speak Chinese." He finally shows Chin a plane which is a total wreck that he intends to use as a clubhouse for his kids, saying, "Nice plane, huh, honorable cop?" The music at this point has a "Chinese" sound to it. Danno finds a farmer who is about to spray his fields because of some smut (fungus) which has appeared there recently, so they know that Stoss has implemented his plan.
For some unexplained reason, other than just doing his share to track down people who could provide support for Stoss's plan, McGarrett goes to see Li (Ahn), who seems to be an old friend of his, who has lived in the islands for at least 30 years. While the two men are talking, Stoss shows up, betrating McGarrett that the plan is "now mangled beyond repair," first by the murders of Bridger and de Nava, and how McGarrett's interference. Li has been forced to "betray" McGarrett, who is locked up in a storage room.
Stoss tries to make McGarrett an offer for his release, "unharmed in any way," which includes "One, free passage through all checkpoints between here and the harbor. Two, your presence to ensure safe conduct, and three, no interference with the sailing of the ship." McGarrett's response is "No deals!"
Stoss, preparing to leave by helicopter for the harbor where "a ship of sympathetic registry" is available for an escape, tells Lao that "our activities here will have to be temporarily suspended," to which Lao says, "Then we have failed!" Lao is not happy when Stoss tells him the helicopter will hold only two people, himself and Esteban, who will pilot it. Stoss tells Lao, "I'm disappointed in you, Mr. Lao. I would expect a little more fatalism from a man of your race, and dedication. After all, this is your cause, sir, not mine. I'm only a poor mercenary trying to sell his unique talents for a small profit … The situation for you is by no means critical. It should be comparatively easy for you to fade into the local population and eventually make your way to safety once all the hue and cry has died down. [!!!]" When Lao tries to protest further, he is shot dead by Esteban.
With the help of Li, McGarrett manages to overcome the man guarding the two of them and he runs to the helicopter armed with the man's rifle. Stoss stabs McGarrett with the same umbrella tip that killed Bridger almost immediately, yet he suffers no ill effects. Esteban is killed by McGarrett. Danno who was following the helicopter earlier, suddenly shows up.
As Stoss tells McGarrett he expects "justice," McGarrett tells him as Danno applies handcuffs, "You'll get it, Stoss. Life, without parole.
Aside from the fact that the script for this show seems to have a certain element of "we're making this up as we go along," I don't like this episode much because Stoss, the villain, though supposedly a very sinister individual, is arrogant but in a gentlemanly way. Someone with a heavy-handed nickname like "The Beast" conjures up images of terrorists like Carlos and Nazi sadists. Hearing about some nasty exploits like causing a school bus of children to be driven off a cliff or poisoning an entire indigenous village would have added more believablity to "The Beast's" résumé.
The show has an interesting premise similiar to the season's upcoming "Three Dead Cows at Makapu‘u," where a scientist has developed a compound which will wipe out all life on Oahu. However, the believability of both of these shows is seriously compromised by the sheer mechanics of dispensing both the fungus in this one and hostile bacteria in "Dead Cows."
In this show, Burleson says the fungus theoretically would be released "over a remote corner of a cane field, to the northeast, of course, then the trade winds will blow the spores for many miles." But will this blow the fungus to the other islands? In "Dead Cows," the bacteria is showed foaming out of a tiny test tube, and it seems highly unlikely that this could expand in size to kill three quarters of a million people on Oahu.
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
"Sweet" = sugar cane; "terror" = Stoss, "The Beast."
EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Death: Agent Bridger is stabbed with poisoned umbrella by Erich Stoss through airplane seat.
Injury: Mariana de Nava is hit by car as she runs out alley.
Death: Mariana de Nava dies in the hospital after ingesting a poison pill given by Lao.
Death: Lao is shot by Esteban when he prevents Stoss from reaching the helicopter.
Injury: Quon Li is shot in the arm by Stoss' thug.
Injury: McGarrett is stabbed by Stoss with umbrella.
Death: Esteban is shot dead by McGarrett.
MORE TRIVIA:
The assassination of Bridger had a parallel in real life several years later when Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was killed by poison dart filled with ricin and fired from an umbrella in London in 1978.
This is the second show in a row where a woman runs into a moving vehicle.
As McGarrett enters the building where the morgue is, the sign behind him says "Slippery when wet," but it is covering some other sign.
Like McGarrett, Stoss has his own transparent map which is used to plot where the deadly fungus will be introduced to kill the sugar cane.
At the end, McGarrett doesn't seem to be worried that there was poison on the umbrella's tip when Stoss stabs him. Wouldn't someone as evil as Stoss have this device armed with poison all the time?
At one point, Danno is seen doing surveillance, and you can see Danno's face in the mirror on his car door, which probably means he has a nice view of the camera in the rear seat of the car!
Stoss provides a good laugh when he complains, "There used to be a day when they made cars large enough so a man could get in and out with ease." We're talking about a Lincoln Continental!
There's a stock shot of McGarrett arriving at the hospital, and the scenes of burning cane field are probably from season one's "Pray Love, Remember."
A sign on the wall of the Chinese herbalist shop says (in English) "POSITIVELY NO STEALING."
As Stoss and Esteban are going to get in the helicopter at the end of the show, its blades are turning, but that may be because of the wind. This copter, which is the one owned by Li, has the number N8536F.
A plane seen at Pacific Flight Service has the number N47IIZ. The wrecked plane that Galem Kam shows Chin Ho is N5603V.
When McGarrett shows up at Quon Li's house he steps out of the car and looks up, as if there are snipers in nearby trees!
As de Nava leaves her hotel, she asks the doorman to "Hail me a cab, please." You cannot hear what she says, but these words are in the subtitles.
United Airlines gets a credit at the end of the show.
GALLERY:
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Four students decide to steal the cloak of King Kamehameha in the Bishop Museum because they have nothing else to do. These "young people" are Michael Fox-style young people, considering the actors ranged in age from 22 to 27 years old.
The "big brains" of the group is Arnold Potter III (Brandon ("Shane") De Wilde), the "muscle" is Johnny Kalama (Vince Eder, last seen as a cop in "To Hell With Babe Ruth"), the "monkey" (athletic one) is Eddie (Randall Kim, looking younger than in his previous appearances; this is his last on Five-O) and Diana Cole (Jennifer Leak) is ... well, McGarrett later can't come up with a description for her; she is Arnie's girl friend.
As the show begins, Eddie climbs up to the roof just after the museum's closing time when lots of people are around the outside of the place and drops a cat in a sling through a skylight to determine how long it will take cops to respond to an alarm triggered from a carpet near the cloak where Eddie has dropped some catnip. (Obviously the catnip is not sufficiently heavy to activate the alarm.)
The time for the cops to arrive is 64 seconds — but this is during the daytime, not during the nighttime, which is when the cape will be stolen. Five-O also shows up. McGarrett tells Kono, who captures the cat, which is named "Sam", to take the feline down to headquarters: "Tell him his rights and give him some milk and catnip." The expression "book him" regarding the cat is heard twice, once from McGarrett to Danno, once from Chin Ho to Kono.
The next evening, the foursome return. Both Eddie and Johnny climb up to the roof. After rappelling down through the skylight, they assemble a tripod made of pipes, and using a long pole on it, Eddie floats out over the carpet near the mannequin wearing the cloak and grabs it without touching the floor with its alarm.
The cape is not offered for ransom, despite the Governor saying he will give the thieves amnesty over McGarrett's objections. Little kids are seen on a TV show hosted by "Papa Aku" offering pennies from their piggy banks to pay the non-existent ransom.
The break in the case occurs when HPD officer Larry Kai (Barton McCollough) remembers catching Arnie and Jennifer necking outside the museum as the big steal was going on. In particular, he remembers Arnie's car, "a yellow sports job, foreign type" with a university parking sticker (number 9748) on the window.
McGarrett figures out quick enough who these "kids" are, and when he goes to their hangout with a search warrant, he is abused, particularly by Arnie, who has previously described him as "Mr. Cop — from the mainland to Tokyo." Arnie starts making ridiculous accusations of "police brutality" despite the fact there has been nothing of the sort. McGarrett responds, "I'm shaking all over." Diana says of McGarrett: "I love the way he asks all those cute questions." Arnie sings "Aloha Oink" to the tune of "Aloha Oe" as McGarrett is leaving.
Kono, who was searching for the cape with Danno at the hangout, puts a bug in Johnny's ear because of their mutual Hawaiian heritage since Johnny is the only Hawaiian member of the team. Soon, Johnny starts to get antsy about keeping the cape considering they have proved their point that they "knocked the establishment on their status quo."
When the other three decide to get rid of the cloak by throwing it in the harbor, Johnny goes to the Five-O offices and spills the beans. McGarrett hastens to the Ala Wai Yacht Basin where Arnie, Eddie and Diana prepare to go out on Arnie's father's yacht. McGarrett leaps on to the boat and there are some tense moments as Arnie attacks him with a grappling hook. Fortunately, McGarrett prevails and the trio are busted. No amnesty for them!
This is not a particularly interesting episode because the motives for the young thieves are entirely selfish, not connected with some radical cause, and their justification for stealing the cape becomes tiresome.
As well, there are some issues with time frames.
During the night heist, Arnie tells Eddie and Johnny that they have "3 minutes" (without specifying exactly what this covers). It takes them just over four minutes to get to the roof where they open the skylight. The time they go down from the skylight, steal the cloak and return to the skylight (minus the time the cop catches Arnie and Jennifer making out) takes 8:37, and it's another 52 seconds to get back to the ground. Earlier, Arnie said "Every section of the museum gets covered [by the guards] every four and a half minutes."
The athleticism of Johnny and Eddie is questionable, considering they climb up a brick-like face at the museum, then a ledge and finally a drain pipe before getting to the roof. There is never any mention of these two having special abilities in this regard which is like free climbing that people do on sheer cliffs.
The music by jazz musician Mundell Lowe (his only Five-O score) is all over the map, including a sitar, some other plucked instrument I can't recognize (a banjo?), big band sounds, and weird rock music plus some familiar cues from earlier in the series.
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
The people of Hawaii will be "blue" if the cape is not returned or destroyed.
EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
None.
MORE TRIVIA:
There is gimmicky editing between McGarrett's discussion with the museum director and a rap session at the students' pad.
Randall Kim is given less significant billing than the other three students.
There is a plaque on the skylight on the roof of the museum. It possibly says DETECTION SYSTEM BY PACIFIC ALARMS. The plaque seen at the beginning of the show when Eddie is testing with the cat doesn't seem to be the same one when Danno inspects the skylight after the robbery, based on the letters which we can see. As well, at the beginning of the show and Eddie hotwires the alarm, he moves the wire to his right where there is a pipe in the background. The plaque is not there, but it is a few seconds later.
Eddie forgets to remove the hotwire he does after the robbery. This hotwiring doesn't seem as if it should be effective, because Eddie doesn't scrape the plastic off the wire when he reconnects it. And the tape he puts on it makes it very obvious that someone had cut the wire!
When Diana is playing around some kids at the beginning of the show on the museum lawn, it looks like she is grabbing a little girl's hair. Later on the lawn, there are several scenes where you can see Diana's underwear.
Arnie's nickname for Johnny is "Hula."
There is an funny scene at the beach when McGarrett and Danno are watching the four thieves from a distance. Danno, who is wearing his suit, is taking pictures of a hot babe in a white bikini, but he says very loudly (so she could probably hear) "I just wish I had some film." Turns out this babe is a sergeant at HPD!
The Bishop Museum gets thanked in the final credits.
An earlier title for this episode was "The Kamehameha Cloak Blues."
GALLERY:
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Original air date: 11/19/69 — Opening Credits — End Credits Director: Robert Gist; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writer: Robert C. Dennis; Music: Morton Stevens (?)
Timings: Teaser: 2:22; Main Titles: 0:57; Act One: 11:23; Act Two: 15:36; Act Three: 11:38; Act Four: 8:16; End Credits: 0:56; Total Time: 51:08.
QUICK PLOT:
McGarrett goes to Singapore to accompany a woman back to Hawaii who has had a change of heart about testifying against a murderer.
This is a classic episode with something for everyone.
Nicole Wylie (Marj Dusay) fled Hawaii some time ago because she was a witness to a local gangster named Revasco (Daniel Leegant) murdering some guy in a motel near Kailua Beach. She split town because she was scared, worried that Revasco would kill her if she talked.
She ended up in Singapore wearing a platinum blonde wig and working as a hooker — as much as could be hinted at in 1969 — in a club called The Jade I. Crappy rock music plays while she dances with men in a very fluorescent environment. The editing has a lot of fast cutting.
One of her dancing customers is Victor (Dick Brady), a hitman from Revasco who wears a white suit, and who looks like a short-haired version of The Man from GLAD. As she is dancing with this guy, someone cuts in which results in a nasty fight and stabbing.
Nicole flees to her room where she calls McGarrett long distance. The quality of the phone call is terrible. She is fed up with her lifestyle, she wants to come home and testify against Revasco.
Although Danno warns McGarrett this sounds like a setup, the Five-O boss grabs the next plane to Singapore. Soon after arriving, he meets with Inspector Tan, who looks kind of racially ambiguous, though I think he really is Asian. Of course, this guy is corrupt!
McGarrett manages to track down Nicole, who has moved from her place at 12 Fuchao Street to the back room of a bar where yet more crappy rock music is playing with a wild organ solo. As McGarrett leaves the place with Nicole, he runs into the inspector who is with one of his stooges. McGarrett tells the Inspector, "You're Revasco's man." The Inspector replies, "I'm anybody's man. That is, anyone who pays me $50,000." McGarrett pulls the stooge in front of the inspector, who shoots his own man dead. McGarrett and Nicole flee, though he loses his wallet while doing so.
After hotwiring a car, McGarrett and Nicole make it to the docks where, with some bread that Nicole has saved up, they board a ship called the Jeremy Bay, which is heading for the Philippines, pretending to be Mr. and Mrs. Henry Collins, husband and wife.
There are a few passengers on this ship, some of whom are very suspicious. An older woman, Mrs. Gladden (Freda May Bird) cautions McGarrett that her hubby has hot pants for his "wife." Another guy is blind ... or is he?
Of course, one of these guys works for Revasco, it's the one disguised as a priest named Reverend Halloway (Ed Sheehan, uncredited)! He almost throws McGarrett overboard, but the Five-O boss manages to turn the tables, leaving the hitman drowning in the drink. McGarrett and Nicole get chummy, but not to the point where they "do it." They share a kiss, but McGarrett tells her "Another time, another place."
Back in Honolulu, Revasco is not happy, having heard Nicole is on her way home, saying "McGarrett and that girl get back here, it's me that's dead." McGarrett earlier heard the radio man on the ship sending a Morse code message back to Revasco, so he knows that when they arrive in the Philippines, trouble awaits them.
To foil their pursuers, McGarrett and Nicole get off at the port before the one where they are expected to land and where Victor is waiting for them. Chin Ho has been tipped off by one of his all-knowing cousins that Revasco will probably send men to knock off McGarrett, so he flies to the Philippines and with the help of some local cops, is ready for action.
McGarrett is to meet Chin "at the Kyobo shrine just outside of Santa Cristina" which is actually the Byodo-In Temple on Oahu. A gun battle follows, where the bad guys, including Victor, are put out of commission. During this confrontation, McGarrett fires at least 8 shots.
Nicole returns with McGarrett to Honolulu, where she spills the beans on Revasco. Following this, she leaves for the mainland. McGarrett escorts her to the airport where he tells her, "Next time you have a vacation, try Hawaii. This is my beat."
The show is directed by Robert Gist, who helmed 20 episodes of Peter Gunn about 20 years prior to this one. (This was his only Five-O credit.) Gist also acted in 66 films and had a career acting on the stage including a year of performances of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial which may explain why the acting in this show is so good, that the director could explain to his stars exactly what he wanted. In addition, the set design and photography are all top-notch.
The excellent score includes the "memories" theme when McGarrett turns out the light in the stateroom as well as two variations on this (#1 and #2). In a Mar 27, 2021 posting on the Film Score Monthly board, Broughtfan says, "Though Mort Stevens is credited with the score for "The Singapore File" (on imdB as well) the episode includes a number of cues by Shores, the teaser pursuit scene, flight to Singapore montage ... being two salient examples. Also, the sweet guitar "love theme" ["memories"] heard in the scenes while McGarrett and Nicole are aboard the freighter was written for the episode by an uncredited Don Ray. I'm dubious Stevens (or Shores for that matter) composed anything for the episode...but it's a very good "track" job of their respective material."
EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Injury: At the beginning of the show, some guy cuts in between Victor and Nicole Wylie, who are dancing, resulting in a fight. When they end up on the floor, it looks like this guy is going to jump on Victor, who pulls a knife, but we do not see if the guy actually gets stabbed and/or killed.
Death: Inspector Tan’s officer assigned to drive McGarrett is accidentally shot by the inspector during confrontation with McGarrett and Nicole when McGarrett quickly pulls the cop between the two of them.
Death: Inspector Tan is shot by McGarrett.
Death: McGarrett is attacked by "Reverend Halloway" as he is walking on the ship's deck. After Halloway tries to throw McGarrett over the railing, McGarrett pulls himself back on to the deck and fights with Halloway, who falls overboard.
Death: At the temple near the end of the show, one of Revasco’s men is shot by McGarrett and then falls into a pond (see below).
Injury: Victor is shot in the shoulder by Chin Ho.
MORE TRIVIA:
At the end of the show, McGarrett and Nicole arrive at "the Kyobo shrine" where they are to meet Chin Ho. Nicole bongs this large bell for good luck, but the two of them are almost immediately shot at by Victor, the guy in white from the beginning of the show. As they duck down, an Asian guy in a dark blue short-sleeved shirt standing behind a brown railing also starts shooting at them. This Asian guy is Walter Omori, a member of the Five-O "stock company" who appeared in numerous episodes, but was never credited. Victor is very agile the way he starts jumping around. Then another guy, who looks white, wearing a long-sleeved blue shirt and is further away than either of those two, also starts shooting. This might be stunt man Beau Van Den Ecker, it is hard to tell. Victor moves forward and hides (not very well) behind some flowers. The long-sleeved blue shirt guy comes forward, shooting more. There is another white-looking guy, all in black, who is seen very briefly. Walter Omori leaps over the railing and starts running forward, shooting. At this point it looks like he is hit by McGarrett, changing into the white Beau Van Den Ecker in a blue short-sleeved shirt who falls into a nearby pond, probably because he is the "stunt man." But is Walter really shot? Chin Ho now shows up with three Filipino cops and takes charge, saying "Spread out!" The long-sleeved blue shirt guy (who is also wearing white sneakers, but I don't know if this really Beau) gets closer. Note this guy is carrying a Brownie camera in his left hand, perhaps as part of a disguise as a tourist. The black-shirted guy and
Victor keep firing. Chin wounds Victor in the shoulder, and Victor sneaks away, never to be seen again. Beau is then seen in a closer shot wearing the long-sleeved blue shirt and the Brownie camera in front of him. We then see one of the Philippine cops ordering an Asian guy in a short-sleeved blue shirt (again Walter Omori, whose previous character is dead!) to "Freeze" and put his hands up!
Revasco has a bizarre haircut which makes him look like a Japanese samurai.
When McGarrett first meets Nicole, she tells him that she "had to make a living" in Singapore. McGarrett grabs her arms, wanting to check her out for needle marks. He asks, "What about behind the knees?" and she replies, "Check 'em out, cop!" She later tells him, "Whatever you may be, you are not a gentleman."
When Chin is about to leave for the Philippines to help McGarrett, he says he will bring back Revasco's head on a plate, which is rather odd, since isn't Revasco already in Hawaii?
A Capitol LP (same label as the Five-O soundtrack) is seen briefly in the ship's dining room playing on a record player as McGarrett dances with Nicole. The tune, briefly heard, is McGarrett's Theme from the soundtrack album.
McGarrett's hair gets pretty messed up by the end of the show. While he is on the freighter, he shaves without using water first.
At the end of the show as McGarrett waves goodbye to Nicole, you can see the shadow of the crew filming behind him on McGarrett's back and the railing.
Moki Palacio plays the harbormaster who tells Chin Ho where he can meet McGarrett.
In the edition of the Star-Bulletin & Advertiser at the airport, under the large headline "Witness Convicts Ravasco" are two smaller headlines, "astronauts wind up last full work day" and "space exclusive for our readers," both of which are all in lower case.
McGarrett says "honey" five times during the show and "easy" four times.
McGarrett tells Nicole "I just came 5,800 miles to save your life," but the distance from Honolulu to Manila as the crow flies is around 5,325 miles.
The captain of the freighter is played by Al LaBuse, who played Al, the bar owner, in 24 Karat Kill, which also starred Marj Dusay.
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Original air date: 11/26/69 — Opening Credits — End Credits Director: Richard Benedict; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writer: William Robert Yates; Music: Richard Shores
Timings: Teaser: 5:16; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 13:01; Act Two: 12:38; Act Three: 6:51; Act Four: 11:27; End Credits: 0:55; Total Time: 51:06.
QUICK PLOT:
An ambitious lawyer attempts to dredge up the past of a criminal from the mainland who has turned his life around since he moved to Hawaii.
This is a slam-bang show, with not a second to spare.
It opens with a process server (Pitt Herbert) trying to deliver a subpoena to Mike Finney (James Gregory), a former enforcer from Saint Louis who served time for his crimes and who has been running a wholesale flower business in Hawaii for the last nine years. Finney gets his "main man" Rudy (Charles Gilbert) to sic German shepherds whose names are Lobo and Bruiser on the guy.
We cut to poolside at a house where McGarrett is having his palm read by some babe, who he offers to take dining and dancing. McGarrett meets Charles Irwin (Jason Evers), an oily lawyer who has big ambitions about becoming attorney general of Hawaii or even governor, and who is the one who tried to have Finney subpoenaed. He also meets Joe Fletcher (Lyle Bettger), Irwin's equally oily investigator.
McGarrett already did his own investigation on Finney, and determined that he has been a clean-living fellow since he came to the islands, but Irwin will have none of this. Suddenly an assassin nearby takes half a dozen shots at people around the pool, including Irwin, intentionally missing all of them. McGarrett tries to follow this killer, who escapes.
And this is only the teaser!
McGarrett goes to the governor's office, where he meets Senator John Oishi (Keye Luke), the chairman of the state labor committee investigating possible infiltration of criminals into unions. Irwin is the chief counsel for this inquiry.
McGarret goes to visit Finney, to serve him with his subpoena personally on the Governor's orders. Finney is leery of the upcoming hearings because of his past, saying "It'd be the same thing all over again. The good guys against the bad guys. They're going to put me in the hot seat and they'll murder me."
After Irwin calls a news conference and divulges information about Finney which the press gobbles up, McGarrett meets with Oishi to express his concerns, saying Irwin's "tactics stink, and so does his purpose." McGarrett tells Oishi Finney's only crime as of now is that he was once a big name in the rackets. When Oishi says that Finney "still lives like a king off money that came from crime," McGarrett straightens him out, saying "Finney came to these islands flat broke, but he had guts and an idea and he hit the jackpot. Now, he's made big money here, but he made it straight." Referring to how perception of people with an unsavory past can last for years, Oishi points out to McGarrett "In 1941, I was also imprisoned. Interned by the government as an enemy alien. I was a Jap for five years, an Oriental for another ten. Now I'm an American, but it was a long time before people stopped looking at me as if I were still the enemy."
Soon after this, Oishi meets with Irwin, telling him he doesn't appreciate the latter's grandstanding and turning the investigation into a witch-hunt, emphasizing Finney is not on trial. Irwin tells Oishi that he has "names, dates, places of meetings [Finney]'s had with well-known union leaders. The whole package. He's nailed." Oishi replies, "I don't want him nailed, Mr. Irwin. I only want sufficient fact to show he has done something illegal." Irwin later confides to Fletcher and Senator Colt (Jim Demarest) that Oishi is "an old lady." Colt says he has to avoid upsetting "a lot of Japanese voters in my constituency."
Irwin is convinced that because of McGarrett's attitude towards Finney, he is on the take. Fletcher goes to the Five-O offices where McGarrett asks him "How much did you pay ... to stage that phony hit on Irwin?" When McGarrett starts to tape their conversation, Fletcher freaks out, and tries to flee. McGarrett grabs him and pulls a small tape recorder from Fletcher's own pocket. When Danno comes into the office after Fletcher is gone, McGarrett says "Open the windows, Danno. It's rank in here."
Another hitman from the mainland (Nicholas Benedict), hired by some of Finney's old mainland pals who think he "might sing a little," goes to Finney's office where Fletcher sneaks in and starts to leave evidence suggesting McGarrett is on the take. Thinking he is Finney, the killer knocks off Fletcher using a high-powered shotgun.
Danno hustles Finney's daughter Judith (Karen Huston), who he met when he went to Finney's place with McGarrett earlier. He tells her she is under protective custody, but she says she is leaving on a vacation at noon that day. He father picks her up from the school where she teaches handicapped children, and Danno follows them. But the hitman who killed Fletcher is after them and he shoots Rudy dead. Danno is delegated to get Judith on the plane.
Meanwhile, the man who pulled off the bogus assassination attempt earlier and was identified by a woman from mug books as Vince Watson (Morgan Sha'an), a private investigator whose license was revoked and a former bail bondsman for Joe Fletcher, is grabbed by cops on the mainland where he fled earlier and brought back to the Five-O offices. McGarrett tells him, "We've got the weapon you fired, we've got a description of the car you used, and we got a witness who saw you running from the scene of the crime. An eyewitness."
At the courthouse in a hearing room, the inquiry soon takes place, and Irwin peppers Finney with questions about his past, including people he knew back on the mainland, as well as a recent meeting with a syndicate gunman regarding a job to murder a local union head who fought Finney's control to take over his union.
McGarrett interrupts the proceedings to give them details of Watson's confession, that Watson was paid by Fletcher to stage the phony assassination attempt, which was Irwin's idea. After examining the paper, Oishi tells Irwin, "You will get a copy of it, because it will be used as evidence against you. I'm talking about a disbarment proceeding, Mr. Irwin, and possible criminal prosecution."
Unfortunately, the nasty hitman who killed Fletcher and Rudy is present in the hearing room and shoots Finney fatally in the back. McGarrett races after him and kills him on the courthouse steps.
Overall, a top-notch episode with excellent acting by all concerned, which shows another side of McGarrett, that he wants to give someone who has "paid his dues" a second chance.
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
"All the king's horses" comes from the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty: "All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again." Finney uses this expression twice in the show. First, when he meets with McGarrett and Danno: "All the king's horses and all the king's men can't help Mike Finney," and at the end of the show when he expires: "All the king's horses and all the king's men can't put Mike Finney..."
EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Death: Fletcher is shot by assassin from mainland, mistaking him for Mike Finney.
Death: Rudy is shot by assassin after picking up Judith Finney from the school.
Death: Mike Finney is shot in the back by mainland assassin inside courtroom.
Death: Assassin is shot by McGarrett on courthouse steps.
MORE TRIVIA:
McGarrett defines Five-O's role when he tells Irwin: "Five-O's job is the investigation of crime in the state. Governor of Hawaii says so."
When the palm-reader tells McGarrett "You're good for another 30 years," she was pretty accurate, considering Jack Lord passed away in 1998. McGarrett calls her "honey."
After Watson shoots at people at the party, he must run very fast, because when McGarrett goes to the beach, there is no one to be seen for a huge expanse in both directions. It also seems strange that no fingerprints are found on the rifle Watson is using, because he was not wearing gloves when he was firing it.
There is mention of real-life HPD chief Dan.
After Kinney is shot, McGarrett says "easy" three times.
Irwin smokes.
Finney tells McGarrett "Don't bull me."
Watson's mug shot number is Z20313.
Just before Rudy is killed, these things that look like wires are seen on his door of the car. I think these are squibs, designed to give the impression of bullets hitting the door, though this effect was never used.
As McGarrett and the Governor talk on the balcony, there is some mysterious smoke behind the Governor at one point.
When McGarrett figures out that Watson the assassin worked for Fletcher, McGarrett says "Ah so."
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The plane of Utomo Jhakal (Titos Vandis), an Asian dictator regarded by some as "the savior of Asia," by others, the "Asiatic Hitler," is redirected to Honolulu after some mechanical problems are spoofed by the pilot. McGarrett and Five-O are immediately put on the alert because of the possibility of demonstrations against Jhakal, of whom Kono says, "Fidel Castro would be more popular in Miami."
When the plane lands, one of Jhakal's countrymen name Meilang (Daniel Ades) tries to ram it with a Island Fuel Company truck which he has stolen from its driver (stuntman Beau Van Den Ecker, uncredited) after knocking him out. McGarrett is successful in stopping this by shooting out the truck's front tire.
Predictably, Jhakal wants to interrogate Meilang personally, but McGarrett gives not only him but Luang Koryo (Paul Stevens), the obnoxious consul from Jhakal's country, a quick lesson in how American justice functions. Although Jhakal wants to use his stopover for an opportunity to check out Oahu as a tourist, McGarrett says there will be none of this, telling the dictator that he will be put up at a hotel (which turns out to be the Ilikai) under heavy guard. At another hotel where the public thinks Jhakal will be staying, Kono will be standing in for him.
It is an interesting coincidence that not only is there a consulate for Jhakal's rinky-dink country in Honolulu, just like there was for the revolutionaries' country in "Savage Sunday" earlier this season, but the only other man to run (unsuccessfully) for president of Jhakal's country, Akbar Savang (Joe De Santis), lives in Hawaii where he is teaching Eastern philosophies at a local university. Now in exile, Savang is also acting as titular head of a shadow opposition government.
Savang's granddaughter Banu (Cynthia Hull), who lives with him, is furious that he will not speak out against Jhakal, especially considering her mother and father (Savang's son) died in Jhakal's prisons. McGarrett shows up at Savang's place and asks him "not to provoke any kind of demonstrations or disorders." Savang says he cannot do this, but he promises to not make a statement of any kind.
Banu quickly organizes a demonstration against Jhakal at the airport, but a limousine with a police escort which contains not Jhakal, but Kono manages to slip by them as they attempt to block traffic. Later, at the hotel where Kono is playing the dictator and stuffing his face with food, Banu pretends to be a maid who the cops don't check thoroughly because she is hot-looking. After entering the suite she thinks contains Jhakal, she whips out a gun and is just about shoot Kono in the back when he suddenly turns around. As she is taken away by the cops, she says "I could have killed you ... a man I don't even know."
McGarrett is very suspicious of Consul Koryo, and has him followed by Chin Ho, who sees him meeting with two guys who have criminal backgrounds: Malcolm Hood-Clovis (Bruce Wilson) and Earl Walters (Bob Basso), who we met earlier, where it was established they were in cahoots with the pilot of Jhakal's plane.
When Koryo goes to Savang's place, McGarrett gets the two of them, supposedly political enemies, brought to his office. There is a twist at this point. Koryo and Savang are working together because Jhakal has been looting funds from his country's treasury and transferring this money into Swiss bank accounts. On this particular trip, he is carrying 10 million in Swiss francs, pounds and American dollars.
They have enlisted the help of Hood-Clovis and Walters to get this money after knocking out Jhakal and his entourage (not to mention the cops guarding them) with the help of some chemical gas which Walters stole from the Army's 53rd Chemical Warfare Ballation stationed in Utah from which he is currently listed as AWOL. These two merely climb over a garden outside Jhakal's supposedly top-secret suite and introduce the gas through what looks like the keyhole on the sliding door of its patio, which is ridiculous, but not as much as the fact you can see through the curtain on the inside of this window and nobody notices these two guys!
Savang is happy at what happens, saying "Jhakal's theft has been exposed, and the money is safe. We accomplished what we set out to do." He thanks McGarrett for his unsolicited participation in their scheme, but McGarrett tells him and Koryo, "Don't thank me. You're both under arrest. Book them." (It would be interesting to know what the charge is going to be.)
Not surprisingly given the subject matter, this episode's script is pretty "political."
When Banu harangues her grandfather about his indifference to speaking out against Jhakal who murdered his own son and daughter-in-law (Banu's parents), she says that Savang should "demand that the American State Department intern him." The old man cannot be budged and she tells him, "The American government supports anyone who isn't a Communist, including a murderer, a butcher like Jhakal."
After he finds out that Jhakal will be landing at the airport in less than two hours, McGarrett's reaction is kind of extreme, getting his team to check on possible threats to the dictator, something which would typically be done by the FBI (see the "McGarrett Wants" section above). Acting very quickly, Chin Ho soon reports, "The alien registration card shows eight natives of Jhakal's country working here [he doesn't say if this specifically means the airport]. They've been suspended with pay until Jhakal leaves."
When he tries to deal with a "human chain" of students including Banu preventing Jhakal's limo from leaving the airport (actually Kono inside), Danno has to deal with typical 1960s demonstration rhetoric like "Prison for the tyrant, we shall not be moved," "The establishment owns the judges, they own the pigs," and "You [Danno] do his [Jhakal's] bidding."
While the political angle is reminiscent in some ways of season one's "Not That Much Different," the way that Koryo and Savang hire Hood-Clovis and Walter to grab the money does not make sense, because the two crooks talk about MacLeod, the pilot of the plane having "a share" in the $10 million, and that their own share of the money is "bigger." This suggests that "stealing" the ill-gotten money back is not an unselfish act which will return all of it to Jhakal's people and "the money is safe" as Savang says at the end of the show.
The fact that Walter "just happens" to have a connection with some army unit where he stole knockout gas is far too contrived and the two men's entry into Savang's suite is far too easy. If this gas is so effective at knocking people out, why don't Hood-Clovis and Walter wear gas masks when they are introducing it through the door?
There are actually some questions as to whether the door they are using to introduce the gas is the one behind the cop who tells Jhakal McGarrett gave strict orders about keeping him under wraps, though I'm sure someone from inside the room could see them on the balcony. (The cop is played by Frank Atienza, who is later seen as Chinough Olena, the friend of Danno's who gets murdered in "Pig in a Blanket.") When the two men finally enter the room after everyone is knocked out, it looks like each of them enters in a slightly different way.
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
Jhakal's name is a pun which just about anyone can get. If you are being literal about his name, you can't really connect "leopard" to "jackal," because a leopard is a cat and a jackal belongs to the genus Canis that includes wolves, coyotes and the domestic dog. However, if you consider the expression "a leopard never changes its spots," which originated in the Bible and which means it's impossible for one to change their character, even if they try very hard, "leopard" makes more sense, combined with "the rock" as per the McGarrett expression for Oahu. Jhakal is a ruthless egomaniacal dictator who will never change his ways.
EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Injury: Fuel truck driver is knocked out by Meilang so he can steal his truck.
Injury (x6): Jhakal, his entourage and police escorts are gassed by Malcom Hood-Clovis and Earl Walters.
Injury: McGarrett punches Walters in the stomach and then gives him a karate chop to the neck, putting him totally out of action.
MORE TRIVIA:
Considering Jhakal is from "Asia," it is strange that his plane, which is going to Geneva, seems to be flying east going in the direction of Hawaii, rather than west. Maybe there is some explanation for this during a local radio broadcast which says that Jhakal "took off from his nation's capital a little more than five hours ago for a two-week tour of capitals in Latin America and Europe on a goodwill and trade mission."
Because Jhakal and his entourage don't look particularly "Asian," it would have made more sense if he was established as a ruthless Latin American dictator who was flying to Asia for a goodwill tour, perhaps ending up in Geneva. But perhaps Jhakal's country was changed to somewhere in Asia because there was already one "Latin American"-related episode this season ("Savage Sunday").
There are numerous issues with the planes seen at the beginning of the show. According to the radio broadcast, it is "a jet," but it is actually a twin-engine propeller plane. In one shot, you can see the plane is from American Airlines! But in a subsequent shot where the plane is on the ground, it has the number N5509K which was a Convair CV-640 owned by Hawaiian Airlines, also a twin-prop model.
When McGarrett is in his office before he goes to Savang's place at the beginning of the show, he is wearing a dark blue suit. As he rushes down the Iolani Palace steps, he is wearing a light blue suit (a stock shot), and when he arrives at Savang's, the suit is again dark blue. There are other stock shots in the show: taking the corner at Atkinson Drive and Ala Moana Boulevard, driving in front of the "balcony" near the Department of Transportation building and passing in front of the Dillingham Fountain. When the car drives by the last of these, there is only one person in it — McGarrett.
McGarrett has a good line when he is getting a bunch of mouth from Jhakal and Koryo. The latter tells him "I consider this very unprofessional," to which McGarrett replies, "And I consider it a lot of work." Later, Koryo is furious when McGarrett frisks him, saying he has diplomatic immunity. McGarrett says, "As the president says, I am a cautious man."
Hawaiian Airlines gets a credit at the end of the show.
The subtitles say "Helici" for "Ilikai."
As Kono leaves the airport in Jhakal's limousine, the camera rotates 360 degrees.
McGarrett has a brainstorm: "When we dig under
the surface of this thing,
I have a feeling that the pilot
of Jhakal's plane is in on it.
No mechanical failure, pilot plan."
McGarrett also gets poetic in this episode: "When I was a kid, my old man
taught us a rhyme:
'He had six honest serving men,
they taught him all he knew.
Their names were where and when
and what and why and how and who'." This poem is by Rudyard Kipling, and comes from his "Just So Stories."
Daws Dawson plays one of Jhakal's bodyguards.
On the door of the restaurant where Melang punches out Beau Van Den Ecker is a sign for Ajinomoto, a Japanese seasoning product containing monosodium glutamate.
At the end of the show, McGarrett tells Savang his granddaughter "took a shot at the man I had standing in for [Jhakal]," but strictly speaking, this is not correct. She does not shoot at Kono, but when the two cops in the room grab her and her hands are extended up, she fires a shot into the ceiling of the room.
GALLERY:
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Original air date: 12/10/69 — Opening Credits — End Credits Director: Michael O'Herlihy; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writers: Robert C. Dennis (teleplay), Robert Lewin & Robert C. Dennis (story); Music: Stock
Timings: Teaser: 3:11; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 13:01; Act Two: 14:43 ; Act Three: 9:38; Act Four: 8:36; End Credits: 0:56; Total Time: 51:03.
QUICK PLOT:
The abduction of a young boy gets complicated when the kid escapes after ransom is paid and one of the two men who grabbed the boy murders his partner.
I don't know why I gave this show 3½ stars when I first reviewed it nearly 20 years ago. It is not a bad show, but it is hardly a classic.
It begins with Scotty Gainham (Geoffrey Thorpe), a young boy who has been kidnapped, escaping from his captors, Jack Gibbons (Frank Marth) and Pete Colley (uncredited actor). These two men are disguised with Hallowe'en masks as the devil and a frog respectively. When Scotty overhears that he will be killed if his father does not pay a ransom of $300,000 for him, he decides to escape while Colley supervises him going to the bathroom. While pursuing Scotty, Colley slips and falls down a steep cliff.
McGarrett reunites Scotty with his father Daniel (William Zuckert, who played the judge in "Once Upon A Time") after the kid is picked up by a farmer named Takeshima (Arthur Hee with not a very convincing Japanese accent). It sounds like Five-O has been working on this case, because McGarrett seems annoyed when he finds out that the father caved in to the kidnappers and paid the money, contrary to typical recommended procedure. Later, when Five-O finds Colley's body, in addition to a broken leg and some caved-in ribs, he has a bullet in his head.
Gibbons is anxious to get rid of the money, and goes to see money launderer Tot Kee (James Hong) who Colley was dealing with previously. Tot is leery of associating with Gibbons, especially after it is suggested in news reports about the crime that it was Gibbons who knocked off Colley. Gibbons admits to doing this because "I tried to move him, but I couldn't. And I couldn't leave him there." Tot is incredulous when Gibbons expects him to launder the money at a rate of 50%. Tot offers him 10 cents on the dollar.
McGarrett rounds up the four top money launderers in town in his office: Tot, Ming (Galen Kam — identified in the credits as "Garoyan"), who is too fat to sit in his chair, and the two Humber brothers (uncredited actors). The way some of these characters insist they would never touch stolen money and tell McGarrett he is a great guy is pretty funny.
Gibbons decides to try and get rid of some of the money in crap games, though this means he will only be disposing of $20 or $50 at a time. McGarrett joins one of these games undercover, and confronts a guy named Mike Rader (Mark Le Buse) who he thinks has information about where stolen bills in his possession came from. Rader tells him when you are playing craps, "You don't look at a guy's face, you look at his money."
When two of Tot's men come snooping around Gibbons' boat at the marina near the Ilikai Hotel where it is anchored, trying to find the cash (which he has hidden in a scuba tank that is hanging from his boat by a rope), Gibbons shoots one of them dead, justifying this as taking care of "a prowler." Surprisingly, no one makes a big deal out of this.
After Five-O finds out that Gibbons spent time in San Quentin at the same time and on the same block as Colley, McGarrett and Danno go to visit him at the marina and hassle him, but they find nothing on his boat. They take him back to the office where they get him to read a script to Gainham which contains phrases like the kidnapper used, but this is also fruitless, since it was obviously Colley who was dealing with the old man.
Five-O puts heat on Gibbons by tailing him everywhere. Chin Ho even wears the frog mask to try and freak him out. Considering Tot Kee is not going to deal with Gibbons, and neither are the other money launderers, McGarrett figures there is only one guy Gibbons will turn to and that is Gainham himself who has changed his attitude towards the ransom expressed earlier from "Let them enjoy the money – I hope they burn in hell" to wanting it back.
Gibbons phones Gainham and meets him to exchange the $300,000 for a lesser amount with unmarked smaller bills. Five-O has figured out this location, which is the beach where Gainham delivered the ransom earlier, and they show up. A gun battle ensues, and Gibbons is knocked off.
When Gainham tells McGarrett he was desperate to recover the money, McGarrett says "You're beautiful, you know that?" Gainham offers to "do something" for Five-O, but McGarrett tells him "No chance. You got your money back. All of it. Hope it buys you something. Just thank God your son is alive. Case is closed."
There were a few things I didn't like about this show.
The first was the age difference between the father and son. The actor playing Gainham was 54 years old, the actor playing his son was 8. This seemed very odd, though perhaps Gainham had a relatively young wife, but there is no mention of a wife or what may have happened to her. As well, there is no mention of what line of employment Gainham is in. Is he a banker, an industrialist, or what? $300,000 in ransom money was likely a huge sum for 1969; one WWW site suggests that this would be worth over $2 million today.
Frank Marth as Gibbons is kind of a boring villain, though he is a pretty nasty character who murders his partner who he can't drag back up the hill that he fell down.
James Hong on the other hand, is delightfully oily as Tot Kee, as is his receptionist "Missy," who he seems abnormally chummy with. (She sits on his desk in front of him in a manner which suggests that he would have a good view of her crotch!) She is not oblivious to what her boss is up to, she knows lots of dirt associated with Gibbons, for example. Missy is played by Melody Patterson, who later became James MacArthur's second wife. Contrary to what it said in my previous review (as well as Karen Rhodes' Booking Five-O), Patterson and MacArthur were not married when this show was first seen; according to IMDb, they didn't get married until July 12, 1970.
There is a great sequence near the beginning of the show where McGarrett and Gainham are driving in the Mercury and it's the actual car, not a process shot. There are also some interesting camera angles following this.
However, near the end, Gibbons breaks the seal on a phone outside a warehouse and uses it to call Gainham to arrange for the final exchange of the ransom money. Danno, who is tailing him, sneaks behind a moving forklift and then climbs up and above Gibbons below the roof so he can hear him making this call. This is kind of dumb, since it's hard to see how Gibbons missed seeing Danno climbing up the support beam behind him (James MacArthur without a stunt man!).
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
Kidnappers of a young boy wear Hallowe'en masks of the devil and a frog.
EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Injury: Mr. Frog falls over cliff chasing Scotty Gainham when Scotty escapes.
Death: Mr. Frog, identified later as Pete Colley, is found at bottom of cliff with a bullet in his head, shot by his partner, Jack Gibbons.
Death: Duke Ling, one of Tot's men, is shot by Gibbons when he is snooping around Gibbons' boat.
Death: Gibbons is shot by McGarrett trying to escape with money exchanged with Gainham.
MORE TRIVIA:
When Gibbons arrives at Tot Kee's office, he is holding a copy of the Honolulu Advertiser which has a large headline which says "HRT bus strike averted." There is a smaller headline which says "im [possibly "Victim"] Boy Safe."
Missy smokes.
Karen Rhodes in her book points out how ridiculous it is that Gibbons can shoot the guy snooping around his boat (a stooge named Duke Ling) and sever the rope holding the tank as well as kill Ling with one shot, but at the end of the show when the Five-O team come to the beach and start firing at Gibbons, he cannot hit the side of a barn door. Ling comes to Gibbons' boat in a rowboat along with "Max" who we saw at Tot Kee's office earlier, insisting that he wanted to see Tot right away. After Ling is killed, nothing is said about what happens to Max.
When McGarrett wants Gibbons to read lines in his office to see if Gainham can recognize his voice, he says to "have Gibbons brought up" … but from where? Is there a cell in the basement of the Iolani Palace, sort of like on the rebooted H50?
Kono says that Mr. Devil is "real akamai," meaning "smart."
To make a map trying to figure out where the kidnappers' location is in relation to Takeshima's place, McGarrett uses some of Takeshima's rice crop from a bag on the ground! Takeshima tells him the kid was likely kept at "a sheepherder's cabin."
Che Fong is mentioned in this show, but not seen.
The word "and" in the title of this episode is not capitalized.
GALLERY:
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Jo Louise Mailer (Beverlee McKinsey) and her two boyfriends — Craig Howard (Kaz Garas), her former fiancé from Dallas, and Billy Hona (Lani Kai), a Hawaiian beach-boy type — have an "insane game" involving a deck of playing cards. The idea is to choose a card from the deck while looking at the face side. On the design side are instructions to do something to achieve points. The suitor who ends up with the most points will get Jo Louise as a prize. She tells them "It's a terrible shame there can be only one winner ... but then, I'm only one girl."
As the show begins, Five-O are called to the 19th Quartermaster Ballation where a Jeep has been torched and a crowd of spectators has gathered. Jo Louise, who is a hot blonde bitch, also shows up there. Prior to taking a picture, she bats her eyelashes at McGarrett, calling him "Sergeant." He tells her "Mister will do."
Back at the Five-O office, the team discuss a report from HPD about an "epidemic of fun and games" which has taken place recently including a police car being stolen and a rare 100-year-old royal palm tree being sawed down. They speculate that the Jeep fire is one of this series of pranks.
On her yacht "Daddy's Girl" while sipping champagne, Jo Louise tells her two friends that Billy, who set the Jeep on fire, is now 20 points ahead in the game. Craig draws another card, good for 150 points if he sinks a boat. After he does this, Jo Louise takes another picture, and a witness report of this makes its way back to McGarrett, who connects the dots with his encounter of her earlier.
A sketch is made by the police artist Charlie and distributed, which results in Jo Louise getting picked up. Slouching in McGarrett's office, she says she was recently hanging out with Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. Danno tells her to cut the crap, but she coos, "I like that ... it's so hairy-chested!" When she tells McGarrett, "My, what big teeth you have," he says "Save it for your memoirs, honey." McGarrett refers to her as "angel face" and later "Lucrezia Borgia."
Jo Louise is soon released by her father's lawyer Harlan Davis (Philip Bolton), who shows up with a writ of habeas corpus. Davis tells McGarrett that his client's father is "a very wealthy and influential man, friend of numerous important citizens both here and in Washington." McGarrett says, "You left out his birthday, his shoe size and his personal fortune."
After she leaves, Kono tails Jo Louise, but, driving her Corvette at a very high speed, she soon loses him. Later, he finds her car in front of a camera store, where she dropped off some film for prints, which McGarrett soon shows up to examine. They contain shots of the trio's recent exploits.
Meanwhile, Billy, now behind in the game, has drawn the king from the deck which will give him 300 points for a kidnapping. He finds some down-and-out bum (Eddie Firestone), who he gives the nickname of "Stumbles" and tricks the guy into getting into the trunk of his car.
Back at his office, McGarrett has to contend with Jo Louise's Texas-accented father, Royce Ellington Mailer, on his way to a trip to Manila, who tells McGarrett that he doesn't like the way his daughter is being treated. Like D.J. Georgiade, Bobby George's rich-guy father in "Tiger by the Tail," he figures he can just write a check to cover the damage his daughter has done, but McGarrett tells him "Not this time and not in this state." McGarrett manages to convince him to butt out and let Jo Louise face the consequences for her actions, which is surprising.
Billy returns to the Ala Wai Yacht Harbor where Jo Louise's boat is anchored and shows off his captive Stumbles to her and Craig. Now that Craig is very far behind in points, he goes for broke, choosing the Joker from the pack. The prize for this is 500 points ... for murder. Craig picks up Stumbles, who has just left the trio, and takes him back to Jo Louise's place.
McGarrett and Danno arrive at the yacht harbor where they grab Jo Louise and Billy, who were just about to go after Craig because Billy didn't want him to carry out his final task. Back at Five-O, both Billy and Jo Louise are grilled, but neither of them is talking. Jo Louise in particular keeps showering McGarrett with sarcasm. McGarrett tells them they can go for lack of evidence, but only after getting Chin Ho to put a tracking device on their rented car. Jo Louise tells McGarrett, "Somebody bend the points on your little old badge?"
Danno and McGarrett follow the two of them with some difficulty with a GPS-like flashing light on their dashboard back to Jo Louise's, where Craig is just about to force Stumbles into the swimming pool where he will likely drown. Billy and Craig fight, and Billy is fatally shot. McGarrett and Danno take charge and both Jo Louise and Craig are busted. Stumbles is so rattled by what has happened that he throws the whiskey bottle from his pocket into the ocean.
This episode has a major sexual component, but also has a lot of racist abuse. Billy calls Craig "haole" four times, ridiculing his virility. On the other hand, Craig refers to Billy as "a blackie" and "Black Beauty." Jo Louise, who acts like a referee between the two men, says, "Billy's not black ... he's sort of a ... what are you, Billy? Brown?" Craig also refers to Billy as "hired help" and "boy," telling him, "Even if you won and she was crazy enough to marry you, her father would cut her off without any inheritance." Craig sings a fragment of "Old Man River" from the musical "Show Boat," famous for being sung by the black baritone Paul Robeson — "tote that barge" — as Billy carries a kayak. Jo Louise later tells Billy he's "a born pineapple picker" with no ambition.
While Jo Louise is supposed to be 25 years old, she looks older, more like the 35 years old the actress actually was. Whether this makes her more like a cougar than the young Heather Locklear, who would have been ideal to play this role more recently, is debatable.
I had a lot of trouble with the sequence in this episode where Billy brings Stumbles back to the Ala Wai Harbor, because I was looking at the layout of the streets upside-down. After I got this straightened out, there is still a big question as to how McGarrett and Danno suddenly appear out of nowhere and cut Billy and Jo Louise off just as they are about to follow Craig who has left with Stumbles, intending to kill him. One might also ask why McGarrett and Danno showed up there in the first place.
When we saw Craig back up in his Fiat to pick up Stumbles, there was a white car behind them, not McGarrett's. There is only a 4-5 second window from the time Billy backs up in the Cadillac and starts to leave and McGarrett shows up, and I doubt if he and Danno were doing surveillance on them prior to this from nearby. If so, why didn't McGarrett take off after Craig?
There is yet another question in the next scene where Billy and Jo Louise have been taken to the Five-O offices. While Jo Louise is being grilled, Danno pulls out the deck of cards and starts rattling off the different categories of "points" that have been used already, showing the cards to her, trying to make her crack. So where did he get these cards from? Likely from her purse, but there are issues as to whether you need a warrant or something similar to do this, unless there is suspicion that the purse contains a weapon. There are plenty of web pages where this kind of potentially illegal action by cops is discussed.
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
The Joker in the pack of cards used for the game is the deadliest challenge.
EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Death: Billy is shot by Craig Howard as they struggle for Craig's gun.
MORE TRIVIA:
Near the end of the show when Billy and Jo Louise are being grilled in the Five-O office, Chin Ho tells McGarrett "Jackpot — Billy Hona's prints match the set on the bottle." I didn't understand what the hell he was talking about, thinking he was referring to the bottle of wine that Billy used to bribe Stumbles. But what he means was the bottle used for the Molotov cocktail which torched the Jeep at the beginning of the show, duh! ("Yeah. Jeep was burned by a Molotov cocktail. Che Fong found the remains of the bottle with a set of prints. We photofaxed a copy to Washington.")
There is a scene of gawking tourists with Yankee Chang appearing uncredited as their guide outside the Iolani Palace — this is lifted from the original two-hour version of the pilot episode "Cocoon."
McGarrett 's transparent board with a map of Honolulu in his office is used.
In a long shot, McGarrett drives from right to left in the shade along the Ali Wai Canal. He is also seen driving from right to left in this area from outside his car door, but the background is not the canal. A cop car turns right in front of church seen in "Savage Sunday," but it is not the same shot, and also drives in front of the concrete structure in Waikiki like in that episode. The cop car that picks up Jo Louise outside the bank in Kaimuki is #129 (the one in the previous episode was #130).
Aside from Jenny, there are two women seen in the outer office, one of whom is the babe soon to be seen at McGarrett's birthday party in "Blind Tiger."
When she is in the camera shop, Jo Louise uses the alias of Bonnie Parker (as in Bonnie and Clyde), purring to the owner who helps her escape from Kono through the back door of the place, "Men like you make a girl feel so safe."
At the beginning of the show, three fire engines are seen leaving their hall, responding to the Jeep fire, but later when we see them, there are only two, not including the hook and ladder truck which was the last one in the procession.
Billy smokes.
Although Billy is a major character, the name of the actor playing him — Lani Kai — is in small type in the end credits, likely because he was one of the Five-O "stock company."
The name of Jo Louise's father, Royce Ellington Mailer, who is probably an oil magnate, is similar to oil billionaire John Ellington in the twelfth season's mediocre episode "School for Assassins."
When McGarrett goes to page Jenny, he says her name before he pushes the button on his phone to summon her. He does the same thing with Kono too.
At the end, how does Danno know that Billy is dead? If he is dead, why do they call an ambulance? Wouldn't they call the coroner's wagon?
As McGarrett busts Craig, there is a scratch on the right side of the film.
Five-O has to outwit Ossie Connors (William Windom), a career criminal who, years before, pulled off a robbery of three stores from the Ben Carter jewelry chain in Pittsburgh, which were "knocked over like toys." When he escaped to Hawaii, McGarrett busted him, his "first big arrest," almost as soon as Connors got off the plane, thanks to information circulated from Connors' driver in Pittsburgh who spilled the beans. According to McGarrett, a major feature of this caper was to make the police "look like fools" … like "boobs."
Connors plants a bug in Five-O's ear through Jerry Howe, Five-O's "most reliable informer" (Jackie Coogan, in a teaser cameo). After Howe tells Danno that a major robbery is going to happen the next day at the Bank of Hawaii, King Street, Connors comes back to see Howe, ostensibly to pay him for his services. Instead, Connors' thuggish associate Sanders (Don Mundell) shoots Howe dead.
Five-O works fast, meeting within a couple of hours with the bank president Kaspar, played by Harry Endo, soon to be Che Fong, who has pictures of the bank's interior and a Che Fong-like pointer. (Maybe "Kaspar" is his first name. McGarrett calls him "Mr. Kiyoki" when he meets him in the Five-O office, where Kaspar has fallen asleep.)
Kiyoki rattles off a lengthy explanation about how "burglar-proof" his bank is. It includes "four remote-controlled television cameras, a silent alarm system to the H.P.D., remote-control front door locks and the most modern safe made." McGarrett tells him "One thing I've learned: for every bank vault, somewhere in the world there's a box man who can crack it."
McGarrett has a list of potential suspects who might pull off the robbery, including Connors, who he describes as "daring, cunning, and imaginative," and who is currently visiting Hawaii, having been spotted by the HPD airport detail when he arrived the previous week. Connors is rousted out of bed at 4 in the morning, and brought to McGarrett's office, where he tells the top cop, "You could use a little bit more of the aloha spirit. I think you ought to be friendlier to someone that you put away for 10 years."
McGarrett warns Connors, "If you're here on a hit, I'll put you away for so long that 10 years will seem like a coffee break." Connors, who keeps touching things in McGarrett's office to put him on edge, says, "Now I've convinced everyone that I'm going straight, the warden, the prison psychiatrist, and my parole officer, I just can't seem to get anywhere with you, McGarrett, can I?" Connors gives McGarrett his current address, and says, "Stop in sometime, I'll build you a mai tai with a cyanide float."
A few hours later when the bank opens, the Five-O team are there, acting like employees. But Connors is nowhere to be seen. Instead, he is robbing the currency exchange across the street, Deak & Company (not a made-up name). Connors and Sanders have paid a visit to the home of Toshi Nomuru (Philip Pine), the boss of the exchange, and Nomuru's wife Michi (Darrah Lau) is being held hostage by Sanders as Connors accompanies her husband to his office. Things get nasty when Sanders decides to get "better acquainted" with the wife, who ends up raped and strangled to death after she scratches his face.
At the exchange, Connors takes a cash box full of pounds, francs, yen and other bills worth about $40,000, and changes the delivery labels for three bags of "real money" — half a million dollars — destined for exchanges on other Hawaiian islands which are soon picked up by the Pacific Armored Car service.
Nomuru's wife's body is discovered soon enough, and her husband is distraught and can barely provide Five-O with details about the robbery, especially since both Connors and Sanders were disguised with nylon stockings over their heads. The coroner says she was "criminally assaulted" only after Nomuru insists on knowing what happened to her. Jerry Howe is also found dead, and an alert is put out for the five $20 bills which Danno used to pay him. Howe was murdered with a .38 Police Special, which raises McGarrett's suspicions that Connors is involved because of his penchant for making the police look stupid.
Connors hires another guy named Joe Walker (Robert Harker) to help get rid of Sanders, whose murder of Nomuru's wife has made him a liability. Connors drives Walker to Sanders' place where Walker delivers the money box from the exchange as part of the "payoff." Connors explains: "I want him found with some of the bread so they will take the heat off me." Walker delivers the money, and kills Sanders, but when he returns to Connor's car, he is also shot dead.
Connors puts both Walker and Sanders' bodies into another car which is driven into the ocean and set up in such a way that it looks like the two of them were the ones who pulled off the exchange robbery and then fought over the proceeds. This car is later fished out of the drink by a crane. This entire sequence is lifted from "The Ways of Love" with some subtle editing. When Nomuru is brought to the scene to ID the bodies of the two men, he recognizes the shoes that Saunders was wearing. Connors, who voluntarily came to McGarrett's office earlier and has also been brought there, plays dumb when asked if he knows either of the two men. Later at McGarrett's office, Nomuru cannot identify Walker from an old HPD recording of his voice.
It looks like Connors, who leaves Hawaii for points east – Manila, Hong Kong and Okinawa – has pulled off the perfect crime, but Five-O gets a break when a flower shop contacts them after receiving one of the bills Danno used to pay Howe. The man who paid for a 50 cent flower for his lapel asked for the $19.50 change in quarters, which McGarrett suspects may have been for a "long long-distance phone call." Calls made from the flower shop's pay phone (287-1299) are traced, which includes to a number in Hong Kong.
McGarrett suddenly has a "Eureka" moment when he hears this Hong Kong call was made to one Lee Atsukema.
We suddenly jump to Hong Kong, where Connors visits the L. Atsukema Company, agents for International Bank Express and Pacific Armored Car Service who are bonded shippers. The money bags from the Honolulu Deak & Co. office which Connors changed the address labels for are there, and he picks them up. Before he leaves the place, however, McGarrett suddenly appears out of a back room and tells Connors to "Freeze," accompanied by a shot fired into the ceiling. Connors gives up, but asks McGarrett, "How did you trace me here?" McGarrett tells him, "Only you would have the gall to use an exchange in Hong Kong run by a retired cop. The ultimate contempt."
This is another episode which has some OK things in it. Windom as Connors is charmingly slimy, and the way the Five-O team follows the clues connected with the crimes, most of which lead nowhere, is interesting. But, as usual, I found several things to be annoying:
There really is no reason why this character of Nomuru should be Japanese. Philip Pine is not, and his "Asian" makeup is ghastly. It's more likely his name would be "Nomura"; in fact, both McGarrett and Jenny say "Nomura" once each. If the character was not Asian and had an Asian wife, I really don't think this would have been a big deal.
At one point when Danno and McGarrett leave the office, Danno buys a copy of The Honolulu Advertiser from a box outside the palace. The current issue, under a large headline of "No news in currency heist" has a crudely-drawn cartoon of McGarrett at the Bank of Hawaii, with a stereotypical robber holding a money bag behind him asking "Hey, which way did they go, McGarrett?" Considering there is no mention of Five-O bungling anywhere on the page that we can see (and the other headlines are the usual which have no relation to the major story at all), and there is no issue of Five-O not doing their job well in recent news in the show, this seems very peculiar.
It is clever the way the business with the car containing Sanders and Walker fished out of the water incorporates footage from the earlier show, but this is not a situation where a car suddenly went plunging down a cliff and into the ocean. It is suggested by Danno that the two men were fighting and the car suddenly went off the road, except there are no roads in the area, which instead is bestrewn with rocks. It is unlikely that a car could have gotten up to a speed where it went flying into the water. And who tipped Five-O off that the car was at this location?
When the bodies of Sanders and Walker are put into the ambulance, both Nomuru and Connors are asked to identify their faces. But both of the bodies are covered with sheets in a typical manner. How can they see the faces?
Early on in the show, Connors tells Sanders that he intends to use Pacific Armored Express to help get the money out of the country. After Connors switches the delivery labels on the bags with the big bucks during the robbery, this service shows up, and they take the bags and eventually deliver them to the office in Hong Kong. (You can see the new labels with Atsukema's company name on them if you look carefully.) Later, McGarrett asks Nomuru how much money was taken, and he only mentions the $40,000 in the money box. He says "If Pacific Armored car had not
stopped to make a pickup...
If they had not picked up,
those two men could have stolen
a half a million dollars." Later, in the Five-O office during a post-mortem, Danno says, "Look, they blew half a million dollars to Pacific Armored with bad timing." But the point is, the half a million was stolen. Why didn't Nomuru do a follow-up to see if that money actually got to the places on the other islands where it was intended to be delivered?
McGarrett is pretty clever in the show, thinking that it is far too "obvious" that Sanders and Walker were not the robbers, but why does he suddenly wake up when he finds out about Atsukema being in charge of the Hong Kong currency exchange? Does he know Atsukema? Was he originally from Hawaii or something? How does McGarrett make the connection that Atsukema was a former cop, and how does he suddenly figure out that Connors is using Atsukema's Hong Kong office to transfer the money out of the country?
The way McGarrett makes his trip to Hong Kong at the end of the show is a bit too fast. There are only two and a half minutes left in the episode before he finally figures out what is Connors' M.O. The final scene in the exchange has some bad editing. As Connors is seen talking to Atsukema, behind him are ads promoting the use of ZIP codes — this whole scene is "flopped" (everything is horizontally reversed). Then in a subsequent shot, where Connors has turned at a 90 degree angle, the same background is seen with everything correct (and one side of Connors' collar higher, the opposite of the previous shot). A poster for U.S. Savings Stamps is seen. It looks like the whole sequence was filmed in a sub-post office, especially since the usual "Filmed entirely on location in Hawaii" is still present at the end of the show.
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
A newspaper cartoon ridicules McGarrett in the Star-Advertiser for Five-O's bungling attempt to catch robbers who were busy stealing the money across the street from the bank. (See the section above.)
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EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Death: Jerry Howe is shot by Sanders after Howe gives Five-O bogus tip.
Injury: Sanders' face is scratched by Michi Nomuru when Sanders first attacks her.
Death: Michi is "criminally assaulted" and strangled by Sanders.
Death: Sanders is shot by Joe Walker after money from robbery is left behind.
Death: Walker is killed by Ossie Connors to cover his tracks.
MORE TRIVIA:
When Nomuru and Connors are approaching a parking lot near the currency exchange, they are driving the wrong way down a one-way street.
In the aftermath of Nomuru's wife's murder, Danno asks him, "Is there some place I can drive you?", but Nomuru is already at home.
When Danno is sitting at a desk in the bank, waiting for the robbers who never show up, a sign in front of him suggests the rate for Japanese yen is 370 to the U.S. dollar. How times have changed!
Danno uses the 1940's slang expression "gunsel" ("gunman") twice.
McGarrett says "What've we got?" twice. To the coroner, who gives him some medical bafflegab about how Howe died, he says, "English spoken here, Doc."
The issue of the Advertiser with the cartoon of McGarrett and the large headline "No News in Currency Heist" has a subhead on the right: "Progress Still Is Lacking." There is a large article on the left under "The Diamond Head Issue" with two sections: "Council Gathers For Cliffhanger…" and "…As Diamond Head Case [Defer?]red to Court Monday. Other headlines on the page are "Supreme Court Tackles… [something]", "Clash Over … [something]" and "Powell: 'Faith Restored'."
Another issue of The Honolulu Advertiser is seen later, which Connors reads and laughs at. The headline says "Nomuru Robbery Ends in Shootout," but the two columns under this have sub-headlines of "Asia Arms Buildup" and "Lava Roars Towards Sea — Then Halts."
After McGarrett uses his phone at one point, he hangs up and it falls out of its cradle.
McGarrett mispronounces Wahiawa as "Wahiwa."
The mug shot number for boxman Bill "Mouse" Hakaya is X 30984; Connors' number is X 156997.
An envelope Howe was using to send the money from Danno home to his kid was addressed to Richard Howe, 2060½ Glencoe, Kansas City, MO.
As Connors is on his way to the currency exchange in "Hong Kong," he walks past a store which is selling what looks like Hawaiian leis. He also passes Kam Mau Co. that sells popular Asian foodstuffs, a store which was mentioned in a 1985 Los Angeles Times article about Honolulu.
In Atsukemo's company, a "buy" chart of current currency rates, presumably in Hong Kongs dollars, has UK pounds for 2.30, Fijian dollars for 1.00, Thailand bahts for 2.00 and Australian dollars for 1.06. The "sell" prices are 2.40, 1.10, 2.40 and 1.11 respectively.
In the episode promo, Jack Lord says, "Five-O has 24 hours to stop a multimillion-dollar theft," but it totals only about half a million, according to Nomuru and the time frame is much shorter than that.
Kiyoki's name in the subtitles is spelled "Keokee."
C.C. Hastings, one of the boxmen suspects, is described by Kono as "Junkie, mahu [homosexual], con man."
GALLERY:
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OR...
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Original air date: 12/31/69 — Opening Credits — End Credits Director: Abner Biberman; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writers: Jerome Coopersmith (teleplay), William Robert Yates & Jerome Coopersmith (story); Music: Harry Geller Timings: Teaser: 5:48; Main Titles: 0:56; Act One: 9:12; Act Two: 10:21; Act Three: 10:26; Act Four: 13:29; End Credits: 0:53; Total Time: 51:05.
QUICK PLOT:
Temporarily blinded after a bomb is planted in his car, McGarrett later butts heads in the hospital with a nurse who has been assigned to look after him.
This episode starts with a look at "McGarrett the Human Being," as the top cop arrives at Five-O headquarters and is met by an empty building ... until he goes into his office where everyone is waiting for him with a surprise birthday party. Not only is the team there, but also the Governor and Jenny (who, only having made a couple of appearances, already reminds me already of Lucy Moran, the receptionist on Twin Peaks) plus the uncredited front-office babe who we saw in "The Joker's Wild."
McGarrett gets several presents, including a Hawaiian dictionary. Before he unwraps it, he asks, "It won't explode, will it?" This line has ominous foreshadowing to what will happen in future episodes, not to mention this one very soon.
Outside, a young kid named Poto (Remi Abellira, in his first of 8 appearances on the show) is cleaning the windshield of McGarrett's car. A guy with Coke-bottle lenses (Robert Edwards), shows up to "fix McGarrett's car," telling the kid "A car has to run real well for a man like Mr. McGarrett." We see him putting some sticks of dynamite in the engine area.
After the party, McGarrett puts his presents in his car. When he shuts the car door as he is about to go back to pick up one of the gifts that he dropped, the car explodes, knocking him down. Danno rushes back to help him, and McGarrett says he can't see anything.
McGarrett is rushed to the hospital in stock shots of a City and County ambulance seen in previous shows like "The Big Kahuna." Pending some X-rays, he is pre-diagnosed by a doctor (Tommy Fujiwara, uncredited) as having "Presumable traumatic injury. Slight edema present. No fracture or flesh wound apparent. And some burns." McGarrett can see light, but no details.
Che Fong (Harry Endo, his first appearance in this role) goes over the remains of the car multiple times, but can't find anything out of the ordinary, but one of his assistants produces a piece of metal tubing which doesn't seem to be connected with the car. Che Fong's explanation as to how this might have triggered a blasting cap connected to sticks of dynamite is not entirely convincing.
Danno returns to the hospital to update McGarrett on this discovery, but the guy who planted the bomb is also snooping around the hospital. Dr. Rackman (Bob Gleason) tells McGarrett he has "a slight hemorrhaging in the occipital region, enough to affect the optic nerves." When prompted for "straight answers," the doctor says, "You could regain your vision perfectly, you could regain a part of your vision, or you might not regain your vision at all. The fact that you can perceive light at this point is a very hopeful sign."
McGarrett tells the doctor he is fed up with the never-ending series of tests, saying he doesn't want to sit around "with a tin cup and dark glasses." He wants to put on his clothes and leave, but nurse Edith Lavallo (Marion Ross), who has been assigned to look after him, tells him to get the clothes himself, and to call his office by himself using the phone beside his bed, saying, "Mr. McGarrett can't accept the reality of his situation." He calls her "Florence Nightingale."
After he blunders through the hospital corridor, McGarrett ends up in a visiting area with recovering patients, where he falls down. Realizing that his stubborness is not going to pay off, he tells Lavallo to take him back to his room. Mr. Coke Bottle Lenses is sitting close to where McGarrett fell.
Jenny comes to the hospital to help McGarrett catch up on his correspondence. He is still fighting Lavallo, refusing to use a guide so he can sign letters in the correct place. The Governor also shows up. He tells McGarrett, "You can't run [Five-O] now, Steve. Not until you get well. [Y]ou've got to cooperate with the doctors. I'm simply not giving you any choice." McGarrett says yes, and when Lavallo returns to the room, he agrees to work with her to recover.
Meanwhile, the team is rounding up people who have good reason to knock off McGarrett. A guy named Sam Lee (Bunny Kahanamoku) is dragged into the office because he paid some associate a thousand bucks recently. (It is interesting that 1969 Five-O can get access to this guy's bank account records so quickly.) Lee tells Danno this was to Leo Mahani "to find out who hit your boss." Lee wanted to take personally care of this person because of potential attention towards himself and his bookmaking operations that would result because of the bombing.
Lavallo walks with McGarrett through the hospital as he relies on his other senses to determine what is around him. After they finish, she tells him "Both memory and perception improving."
Danno and Chin Ho go to visit Roger Matheson, a young guy who McGarrett caught beating a tourist senseless to the point where the man ended up in a coma. Roger has an iron-clad alibi for the time of the bombing, though, because Joshua Frank, his probation officer, was visiting his mother and himself and stayed for dinner, talking about a vocation for him in the field of landscape gardening. As they leave, the camera zooms in on a picture of Roger's father. He is the guy who dynamited McGarrett's car.
At the hospital, Kono reports that all Five-O's searching for potential bombers has been fruitless. McGarrett suddenly remembers the kid named Poto who was cleaning his windshield. Poto later looks through some mug books, but cannot find the suspect. Che Fong reports to McGarrett that the piece of tubing they discovered is "used for the torque rod that runs down the steering shaft of the Westphalian Oberland car."
The Five-O team and Poto go to the only dealership in town that deals with this make of car, which is a bogus name (a license plate frame on a car being repaired there says "Volkswagen Pacific" and the cars there are mostly Volkswagens and Porches). The kid recognizes Masterson from a picture on a bulletin board. When Danno breaks into Masterson's locker (again, without a warrant) there is a picture of McGarrett on the inside of the door, the same one that Farrar used in "A Bullet for McGarrett" when he was hypnotizing policewoman Joyce. Danno also finds tubes like the one used to make the bomb.
Back at the hospital, Lavallo and McGarrett are in the therapy room, learning how to judge distances and walk with a cane, when Matheson creates a distraction with another bomb in a stairwell nearby, which causes McGarrett's police bodyguard to temporarily abandon him. Matheson makes his way to the therapy room, where he confronts McGarrett with a pistol that has a silencer.
Rather than just shoot McGarrett dead, he goes into a rant about how McGarrett is a cop who wants to send his kid away for five to ten years and ruin his life with "no college, no future, no decent job." Lavallo turns out the lights, and McGarrett, using his new-found "senses," manages to disarm Matheson and end up with him on the floor just as the boys from Five-O arrive. Danno says, "I think I gave you guys a bum steer; I said McGarrett needed help."
The rest of the show is spent with McGarrett eventually regaining his sight. At the end, before he leaves the hospital, he wants to "see" Lavallo, but she avoids him, saying "these hospital relationships don't seem as important after you're home." As he walks down the hallway, he goes right by her in a touching scene where she turns away, looking as if she regrets not saying anything further to him.
This show basically has two components: the attempted murder of McGarrett and Five-O's efforts to track down his assassin, and McGarrett's recovery from blindness in the hospital and his relationship with nurse Lovallo.
There is a serious question about why Masterson gets his nose so out of joint over his son Roger's "first offense," which would likely have been regarded as a felony, since beating a tourist senseless would have been considered a serious crime. Trying to determine how the case would have been handled in Hawaii in the late 1960s, however, is a difficult task. This offense only took place a month before the show, according to Danno, and Roger is currently dealing with his probation officer, which suggests that he may have pled guilty and gotten a suspended sentence for the crime. But it also suggests that the crime worked its way through the justice system pretty quickly! I don't think that Roger was a juvenile when the crime took place, which could have affected the way he was dealt with by the court.
Where Matheson got the dynamite to make his bombs is another good question. I'm surprised that Five-O doesn't try to track down where he got the dynamite like was done in "Strangers In Our Own Land." You would expect the sale and use of dynamite to be pretty strictly regulated.
I also don't understand how the bomb in the engine goes off, because the mechanism as described by Che Fong suggests that a pin will be pulled out of the tube, releasing a spring which hits a blasting cap which then triggers the explosive. This bomb, unlike the one in the hospital, which is much easier to explain, I don't think is connected to the door of the car which is what activates the bomb when McGarrett closes it after putting his presents in the front seat.
The clash between McGarrett and Lovallo is the much more interesting section of the show, being the result of them having very similar personalities. I first thought that Lovallo was being pretty harsh the way she treated McGarrett when he tried to get out of the hospital and go back to headquarters, but nurse Janet Feinberg (Suzan Carney), who he encounters near the end of the show, also had a "my way or the highway" attitude: "I will not have my patients walking barefoot. Now, put your slippers on."
Both McGarrett and Lovallo are highly motivated individuals who want to do the best job possible. It's only after the Governor "orders" McGarrett that he can't run the department and has to co-operate with the doctors that McGarrett does so. He has an about-face, realizing that working with the doctors and learning "ways of getting on in this condition" is more likely to get him released sooner, having regained his vision or not. He even gets to the point where he is flirting with Lovallo over her use of cologne.
Would the two of them have had some kind of a relationship after McGarrett recovered? Unlikely, no more so than McGarrett would have had a relationship with some woman he had met in the course of his daily routine.
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
Because of the explosion, McGarrett is "blind"; according to m-w.com, a "tiger," aside from the animal, can also be "a fierce, daring, or aggressive person or quality" or "someone or something (such as a situation) that is formidable or impossible to control."
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EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Injury: McGarrett is blinded during car explosion.
MORE TRIVIA:
The Hawaiian birthday song being sung at the beginning has the lyrics Hau‘oli lā hānau, but Jenny interjects another song into the middle of this: "You're 21 today, twenty-one today. You've got the key to the door, never been 21 before." This second song was written by Alec Kendal in 1911. What it means: it was traditional in England for the older son or daughter upon reaching 21 to receive a key to the front door of their parents' home, if they were at that time still living there.
During the party, a parcel slips on the floor, and, according to the subtitles, Jenny says, "Oh damn," but this is barely audible on the soundtrack. McGarrett also says "damn" when he is trying unsuccessfully to leave the hospital later and runs into a nurse's desk, also not heard.
"We searched through your Navy and civil-service records and found two different versions of your age. Now, it's true, these versions were only one year apart. So in the interest of honesty and integrity we decided to combine them for the proper number of candles on your cake." The total number of candles is 70. This confusion over McGarrett's age sounds suspiciously like that of Jack Lord himself as witnessed when Lord was called to testify in court. A comment at IMDb suggests the math here doesn't work out, but it would if the ages were 34.5 and 35.5 ... but it is a stretch to think McGarrett is 35!
The same crudely-made sign in the hospital with visiting hour information that was previously seen in "Savage Sunday" is in this episode at the end of the first act.
When McGarrett arrives at the office at the beginning of the show, he wonders "Everybody take off at six?" Outside when he entered the building it was sunny. But in the next scene outside when Masterson is putting the bomb in the car, it seems very dark. After this, back in the office during the party, it is sunny outside. At the end, when McGarrett leaves, going down the palace steps, it is dark again. As he leaves, he tells the people with him "You guys are crazy to spend so much," which suggests he looked at the presents, but they all seem to be still wrapped (noticed by me during my 2018 re-viewing; noticed by A. Fuentes back in 1998!).
Various people are paged in the hospital, but some subtitles are wrong. Dr. Freeman (an in-joke for series creator Leonard) is "Dr. Freedman," and Dr. Chopra is "Dr. Chowfrow."
The book that Masterson's son Roger is reading is Imaginative Small Gardens by Nancy Grasby (thanks to my brother). Neither of the actors playing the son or his mother are credited.
McGarrett's room in the hospital is 409. When he phones the Five-O office, the number is 732-5577.
Nurse Feinberg's name is likely an in-joke referring to actor Ron from season one. When McGarrett sees her, thinking she is Lovallo, the bonging bell noise is heard.
When McGarrett gets his clothes from the closet, trying to leave, assuming the blue suit is the one he was wearing during the explosion, it seems to be in pretty clean condition. During this sequence, we can see that Jack Lord shaved his underarm hair. Anda Thomas e-mailed me, wondering if there was some taboo about underarm hair on TV like happened with belly-buttons, but we have seen underarm hair previously in other episodes.
Many years ago, a guy named Mike e-mailed me, saying "I'm the shorter guy near the end of the episode, my friend Jim and I are orderlies in the hospital and we walk down the corridor, I very dramatically look at my watch, and we get blown up!" (Strictly speaking, they don't.)
Edith Lavallo's full name is sort of similar to that of a very famous British nurse, Edith Cavill.
GALLERY:
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39. (S02E16) “Bored She Hung Herself” ★½ BOOK HIM (2)
Original air date: 1/7/70 — Opening Credits — End Credits Director: John Newland; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writer: Mel Goldberg; Music: Stock
Timings: Teaser: 4:42; Main Titles: 0:56; Act One: 5:35; Act Two: 14:13; Two Bumpers: 0:05 each; Act Three: 16:42; Act Four: 7:49; End Credits: 0:49; Total Time: 50:56.
QUICK PLOT:
The supposed suicide of a prominent psychiatrist's daughter seems to involve her malingering boyfriend who is into New Age pursuits like hanging himself from the neck.
Don Miles (Don Quine) is a New Age hippie type who is into chanting "Hare Krishna," eating natural foods and engaging in other pursuits like hanging by the neck from the ceiling "to reach a certain stage of karma." His girl friend Wanda (Pamela Murphy) says that Don's lifestyle is driving her crazy.
When Wanda is found hanging and dead in their beachfront pad, McGarrett is on the case. At first it looks like a suicide, but the medical examiner, played by casting director Ted Thorpe, says "It's possible she was assaulted," adding, "The victim was already dead when she was hung." She suffered a severe hematoma while being strangled which resulted in her larynx being crushed. (In response to the word "hematoma," McGarrett tells the doctor "Oh, please, Doc, English, huh?")
Wanda's father, psychiatrist Warren Parker (William Smithers), seems very chummy in a creepy manner to Wanda at the beginning of the show when he tries to dry her off with a towel. He obviously has a good practice, because he is later seen driving a Jaguar XKE.
Herman ("Duke") Wedemeyer appears at the crime scene as Lieutenant Grayson. When he shows some drugs he finds in Don's pad to McGarrett, the Five-O boss comments, "Let the good times roll!"
When interviewed by Danno and Chin Ho, 13-year-old Hank Weatherly (Joel Berliner), who lives next door to Don and Wanda and found her hanging, is precocious, full of hip sayings like "Wanda was getting bagged all the time" and "outta sight." He describes Don as "a health freak ... he doesn't believe in dropping anything unless it's organic." Hank's mother Paula (Patricia Herman) tells the two men that she and her husband Charles (Eugene McDunnah) were worried their son would turn into a "dope fiend" because of his association with Don.
Don and Wanda are hardly "hippies," but the usual Five-O version of what a "hippie" was like. Don's hanging technique has nothing to do with yoga or anything similar that I can find; it seems much more related to autoerotic asphyxiation. This in itself may have caused CBS censors to get excited when the show was broadcast.
Don's writer friend Boswell, who provides Don with an alibi for the time of Wanda's death, seems to be hardly the "freak" as described by Parker or the "way-out guy" as described by Hank, though he has a swishy manner. In a line that was cut from the show, Hank described him as "Homosexual; not that he ever made a pass at me."
Boswell's dialogue is interesting: "I loved them both [Don and Wanda]. When I heard about Wanda's death, well, I simply went to pieces. You look closely, you can see the cracks ... I loved Don, and I wouldn't say a word, not a single syllable to hurt him. The poor boy was simply a mess of exposed nerve endings." When McGarrett asks "Is that unusual?" Boswell says that McGarrett is trying to suggest that Don was acting like a man "who had just murdered his girl friend," but McGarrett denies this. Boswell replies: "As a writer, I'm inclined to a slight case of elephantiasis of the imagination. But candidly, I did see a streak of the savage in Don. And Wanda, that perpetual wanton [a sexually unrestrained woman], she could bring out the beast in the best of the worst of us."
When Wanda's father gets heavy with McGarrett, McGarrett says problems Parker was having with his daughter were due to the "generation gap." Parker tries to use some of his psychiatric techniques on Don, going to Don's place and asking a lot of leading questions while recording the conversation. When McGarrett points out that this confession is "ridiculous" and "won't stand up in court," Parker's response is to threaten to get McGarrett fired.
Wanda's killer is finally revealed to be Hank's father. Che Fong (Harry Endo in his second Five-O appearance) determines that fragments of a black cashmere sweater were found under Wanda's fingernails from when she struggled with her killer.
When McGarrett and Danno go to visit Weatherly, he says he owns several black cashmere sweaters, but how does anyone know this? Despite the mediocre quality of the bootleg prints of this banned episode (see below), Weatherly seems to be be wearing a yellow cashmere sweater when he is being interviewed by Danno and Chin Ho early on in the show, but not later when McGarrett is talking to him alone. Prior to this, he doesn't bring up the fact that he owns multiple cashmere sweaters.
When McGarrett suggests that Weatherly killed Wanda, his response is, "Wanda was a great-looking girl. On the beach in that bikini, sure, I noticed her. But what you're suggesting is foolish. Take a look at my office. There are half a dozen girls in there. Now all I'd have to do is crook my finger. Fellas, let's not kid each other. No problems in that area." He pooh-poohs the idea he anything to do with Wanda's death.
However, in a almost-going-out-the-door moment, McGarrett and Danno destroy Weatherly's alibi with times on the night of Wanda's murder with discrepancies between the time he said he left his office with what the security guard there said and the fact that he didn't pick up his son at a neighbor's place as he said he would.
Weatherly falls into their trap, telling them that he didn't go to "pay a little visit to Wanda," as McGarrett suggests. He tells them, "The fact is, if you're really interested in facts, she was making a big play for me. Running around that beach half-naked, coming over here when she knew she'd find me alone. Asking me over to her place to fix her door. She made it clear she was available, all right. Very clear, if you know what I mean."
Danno says, "So that made two of you available." Weatherly continues, "Look, just answer me one thing: if she was willing, why, why did I have to force her? Just answer me that." Danno replies, "Maybe she wasn't willing." McGarrett adds, "Maybe she turned you down ... and when you wouldn't back off, she had to fight you off. And that would account for the black cashmere under her fingernails, wouldn't it?"
In a kind of cringeworthy conclusion, Weatherly says, "I didn't mean to hurt her, I swear that. It's just that she... Look, I've known dozens of girls, as young, as pretty, younger, prettier than Wanda. It's just that she kept leading me on, and then she turned me down." McGarrett tells Danno to call H.P.D. and Weatherly practically collapses.
This episode has never been seen on TV since the original broadcast. According to the late Mrs. Rose Freeman, wife of the series' creator Leonard, speaking to fans at the 1996 Five-O convention in Burbank, CA, some viewer tried the hanging technique used by Don at the beginning of the show at home and died.
This was confirmed by an e-mail exchange I had 20 years later with Joel Berliner, who played Hank, the neighbor's son. He wrote to me: "Somewhere in America, someone hanged themselves after watching the show. Their parents sued CBS, and shelving the episode was part of the settlement. The first [and only] broadcast in January 1970 was the first time Hawaii 5-0 cracked the top 10 in TV ratings. I was 12, and I was dismayed when it didn't rerun that summer."
For people trying to collect a complete set of episodes, the DVD release of season two does not contain this episode. There are bootleg copies of it floating around; some of them look like they were projected on a wall and filmed with a camcorder, not recommended if you are an epileptic because of the strobe-like flickering.
In 2010, a new bootleg copy of this episode surfaced. Interestingly, there are two cards for Viacom at the end as follows: #1 and #2. According to Wikipedia, Viacom was founded May 3, 1971. But Bored was originally aired on January 7, 1970, over a year before. So you have to wonder when did this controversy over the show which resulted in it being banned arise ... assuming that these end cards (which suggest the print was going to be used for syndication) are really supposed to be there and weren't just edited on from another print.
This new bootleg of the episode is better quality than the first one, having been telecined from the same original 16mm print. There is still a considerable amount of dirt and other damage to the print, however, and the audio is only in one of the two channels. The print is kind of faded, but later someone did color correction to it, which did not result in a huge improvement.
★★★NEW!★★★ FIRST DRAFT OF THE SCRIPT FOR THIS EPISODE ★★★NEW!★★★
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
The title of this episode does not make any sense. Wanda is hardly "bored"! Note there is no comma after the first word.
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CASUALTY LIST:
Injury: Wanda Parker slaps Don Miles several times during an argument.
Injury: Don slaps Wanda and she falls onto the floor.
Death: Wanda is found by Hank hanging from a noose. The Medical Examiner says she was strangled, assaulted and dead before she was hung.
MORE TRIVIA:
Joel Berliner ("Hank") has some reminiscences of working on the show.
The actor playing Boswell is uncredited and was rumoured to be played by director of this episode, John Newland. The late James MacArthur identified Newland when shown a picture of him taken from the show, but two other people I asked about this said that this was not Newland. If you look at pictures of Newland and the other actor, I would suggest that it is not.
Near the beginning of the show, Wanda's body is taken away in a Physicians Ambulance. She is not covered with a sheet, which means that when McGarrett looks in the ambulance window, he can identify her (leaving the dead body uncovered in this manner is not standard procedure — as the ambulance drives down the street, people could see Wanda's exposed body).
When Wanda's father pulls up at Don's place at the beginning of the first act, there is a flower on the passenger side of his Jaguar XKE. I don't know if there is any special significance to this.
"Book him" is used twice in the show, first when Don is brought to the Five-O office ("Book him, Kono," which starts Don talking) and the second time, just "Book him" (again to Kono).
There are a couple of stock shots, one from the pilot where McGarrett drives over a bridge-like structure, the second the "balcony" shot near the Department of Transportation building showing McGarrett driving, also from the pilot.
McGarrett mispronounces the word "autopsy" with the emphasis on the second syllable.
Weatherly smokes.
We find out that McGarrett and Parker have worked together in the past on cases.
When Weatherly makes his big confession to Five-O at the end of the show, his wife is nowhere to be seen.
There were rumours that this episode was included in the "complete" Five-O released on DVD in December, 2013. This is not true and was confirmed by the tvshowsondvd.com WWW site. It was also suggested in the Wikipedia article about Five-O that it was included in the Region 4 Australian release of the fourth season. The contents of the set as listed by Australian sellers on Ebay suggested that it was included, but this sounded very similar to information regarding the contents for this set which appeared before it was released in North America, and we found out later that was not true. Fan David Farley contacted me regarding these claims: "I went on Ebay Australia www.ebay.com.au. I emailed two sellers of the Australian R4 release and asked them if there was a disclaimer about a missing episode on the back. Both wrote back to me and said the disclaimer was there. In fact, it matched our R1 release word for word. I was 99% sure Wikipedia was wrong and as far as I'm concerned, this confirms it."
According to an executive at CBS Home Entertainment who I spoke to in late 2011, this episode will not be seeing the light of day officially on DVD — ever. There are "legal" issues connected with this episode. He didn't know specifically what these issues are, but every time he tried to get it released on DVD, the CBS "legal" department had a say in the matter (i.e., NO).
This episode seems to get fans in a tizzy, because they start talking about "freedom of speech" and similar issues, saying things like "There are things much worse on TV these days, so why doesn't CBS release the show now?" These people really don't get it (not even considering the fact that this episode is actually pretty crappy). Based on what we do know, as related by Mrs. Freeman, Joel Berliner and the CBS person above, the scenario is that the upset relatives of the person who reportedly killed themselves contacted CBS and threatened to sue them. In order to avoid litigation, CBS made a deal with the relatives that this episode would NEVER, EVER be seen again. Now, if this show was to be included in a DVD set, this would violate the agreement that CBS made, thus opening them to being sued by the surviving relatives of the person. What is so difficult for people to understand here? If you really want to get a copy of this episode, there are ways to do this. The show was on YouTube for a while, but was taken down because someone like CBS or Viacom complained. It occasionally reappears there. I'm sure it's available via torrents and so forth, but I have never investigated this. End of rant.
John Mala (Nephi Hannemann) is a Hawaiian boy who McGarrett helped get sprung from jail after he stole a car as a prank when he was 18 years old. The condition of his release was he had to join the US Navy, but, as he later tells McGarrett, "I couldn't cut it," and he goes AWOL.
While hanging out in downtown Honolulu, Mala is spotted by two SP (Shore Patrol) cops, Walt Kramer (Christopher Walken) and Fred Waters (Beau van den Ecker). They pursue him to a nearby baseball stadium. Waters, with his gun drawn, encounters Mala on a ramp, the two of them fight and the gun goes off. Waters falls down below, dead and Mala flees.
When McGarrett finds out the predicament his charge is in, he goes to Mala's part of town and talks to his mother Napua (Myrtle Hilo), asking her for help in getting her son to surrender. She balks at doing this, saying that for John, the Navy was "just another jail" where "he felt out of place." McGarrett urges her to help, because the Navy is also looking for him, and unlike the state of Hawaii, they have capital punishment for people convicted of murder.
Although Mala's mother doesn't help, his brother Thomas (Remi Abellira) comes to the Iolani Palace and says he knows where John is, so the two of them drive out to the middle of nowhere where Mala surrenders. In jail, he tells McGarrett "I felt out of whack, just hemmed in. I did my best, I just couldn't cut it. I know I let you down. I knew I should have given myself up and taken my medicine, but I never meant to shoot that guy, Mr. McGarrett."
McGarrett introduces Mala to Dave Bronstein, who will be his lawyer (played by Al Michaels, sportcaster who, at the time, was calling the games of the Hawaii Islanders baseball team as well as doing play-by-play for the University of Hawaii's football and basketball teams and high school football games). When asked what happened, Mala repeats the same story twice: "We were wrestling. And then the gun went off. I heard this noise, like it was whistling past my ear." He insists, "I was just trying to stop him from shooting me. I never meant to shoot that guy."
The coroner (Ted Thorpe) tells McGarrett, "The bullet entered the cranium at about this angle. Smashed the clavicle, deflected, and exited here between the sixth and seventh rib." But the bullet itself is missing. McGarrett sends Kono and Chin Ho back to the stadium to find it, just before he gets some bad news: Mala overpowered two guards and escaped with a loaded .38.
Kramer and several SPs go to Mala's neighborhood where they cause a near-riot searching for him. McGarrett shows up just as the Navy men are hauled away in a paddy wagon from HPD. He later tells Commander Carl Anderson (Jack Ging), who apologizes for the raid: "Just keep them leashed, commander, that's all. Because next time your boys start pushing my people around, it's not gonna be this easy." While at Anderson's office, McGarrett meets Waters' widow Sue (Marcy Brown), who says that Kramer's organizing the search was prompted by him seeing his best friend shot down before his eyes.
Back at the office, McGarrett wants to know "everything there is to know" about Kramer. Meanwhile, Mala is spotted at a naval reserve, and when McGarrett shows up there, Anderson has the troops out in full force to apprehend him. McGarrett climbs up a steep hill and confronts Mala, who takes some shots at him. Then they have a kick-ass fight with McGarrett getting seriously beaten up (and his hair totally messed up to boot!), but McGarrett comes down the hill with Mala, who is taken into custody again. When McGarrett returns to the office, he is a mess.
At the stadium, Kono and Chin determine that the shot that killed Waters was fired from above where Mala and he were fighting. They also manage to find the bullet, which ricocheted after going through Waters' body, then off a nearby garbage can and down to the floor and up into a wooden beam. There is some humor in this sequence when Kono and Chin Ho are trying to figure out the trajectory of the bullet, which took a path similar to the "magic bullet" from the JFK assassination. Kono points his gun at Chin who freaks out, asking if the gun is loaded. Kono replies, "Sure it's loaded!"
When McGarrett talks later to Che Fong, he is told that the bullet, which is very messed up, "looks like it came from the dead SP's .45," but he cannot testify to that fact in court. McGarrett gets a disturbing phone call from the coroner, who asks him why there were no powder burns on Waters' face if the gun was fired at close range?
The scene cuts to Kramer giving Sue Waters a ride home to her apartment. He says that because the Navy has captured Mala, that should make her feel better, but she tells him, "It doesn't." Kramer tells her that he wants to see her the next evening. When she tells him that he should "go out and find a girl and have some fun," he tells her, "I found a girl." She replies, "You shouldn't say that." He says, "We both loved him, but he's dead now. Hey, I can wait. You know how I can wait," as a snippet of the "memories" theme is heard.
When Kramer returns to his Jeep, McGarrett is standing there. He tells McGarrett, "You've appointed yourself big white daddy to John Mala." The two of them take a ride together, which is, of course, amazing because of the way their conversation is staged in a vehicle which is actually filmed on the streets instead of a process shot. McGarrett finds out (though he already knows) that Sue and Kramer grew up together in the same town on the mainland, and Kramer not only introduced her to Waters, her husband-to-be, but was the best man at their wedding. Knowing now how the bullet was fired from above where Waters and Mala were fighting, McGarrett suspects that Kramer intentionally shot Waters dead or, at least, was shooting at Mala and hit Waters by mistake.
When McGarrett tells Kramer his theory that "His [Waters'] gun was over there, you crossed over, took his gun, took out the full clip, exchanged it with the clip from yours. The one with the bullet missing, so that whoever discovered the body would think that Mala had killed Fred with Fred's gun. And that's exactly what happened. That's what everybody bought," Kramer says "Bull! You're just trying to get your Kanaka boy off the hook. That's a theory, man. Lousy, rotten theory."
Then McGarrett pulls the bullet out of his pocket, and Kramer totally changes his tune: "When I come along, along the top of the stand, they were wrestling. So help me God, I meant to hit the Hawaiian. Fred was my best friend. Whatever I felt about Sue, I couldn't have wanted to kill Fred. Could I?"
I totally don't get Kramer's suddenly change of attitude. The bullet is badly mangled, and there is no way that this can be connected with Kramer's gun. There is also no way at this point where Kramer's gun can be checked to see if it had been fired (which is specifically mentioned in the show). And there is likely no way that what Kramer just told McGarrett can be used to clear Mala unless he repeats this at an official inquiry or something like that! While this is kind of a letdown from the last time I reviewed this show, the acting throughout is still excellent, as is the script in the way it shows how the crime was solved.
Despite the reservations in the previous paragraph, Mala is freed, and McGarrett takes him home to his people. He tells McGarrett, "I'll take whatever the Navy dishes out and come up grinning." McGarrett replies, "The Navy dishes out nothing. You get out what you put in."
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EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Death: Fred Waters is shot pursuing John Mala.
Injury: McGarrett is beaten and punched by John. He eventually falls down the mountain twice. His face is scraped.
Injury: John is beaten and punched by McGarrett.
MORE TRIVIA:
When McGarrett and Kramer are driving in the Jeep, there is a shadow on the front of the car — from the camera? As well, near the beginning of the show when McGarrett is driving down the road to Mala's neighborhood, you can see the shadow of someone's arm from the camera crew in the foreground. (This sequence is very similar to one in the yet-to-come "Nightmare Road.")
There is a stock shot of McGarrett running down the palace steps, getting in his car and driving away.
Along with the "memories" theme, music from "Bored She Hung Herself" and "A Thousand Pardons — You're Dead!" is heard.
A closeup shows that Jack Lord had very hairy hands! As well, Lord's hair looks very reddish in a couple of shots. The stuntman who subs for McGarrett during the fight with Mala has curly hair. There is effective hand-held camera work during the fight.
The DVD subtitles translate "Kimo," the name of the HPD cop at the "race riot," as "Kemo."
Kono brings McGarrett some saimin noodles, and he asks where is the "kai," meaning chopsticks. This is not a Japanese term.
When Kono and Chin are trying to figure out the path of the bullet, they see a garbage can with a crease in it, and Kono says "We don't know where the can was sitting on that night," but it was not nighttime when Walters and Kramer were searching for Mala.
GALLERY:
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Original air date: 1/21/70 — Opening Credits — End Credits Director: Paul Stanley; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writer: Anthony Lawrence; Music: Stock
Timings: Teaser: 4:13; Main Titles: 0:57; Act One: 11:33; Act Two: 11:32; Act Three: 13:33; Act Four: 8:26; End Credits: 0:56; Total Time: 51:10.
QUICK PLOT:
To cover up his complicity in murdering members of his platoon in Vietnam, a veteran is intentionally driving another soldier who survived the massacre crazy.
After a young boy is kidnapped, a woman named Emilia Watson (Doreen Lang) visits the Five-O offices, bringing a ransom note which she inexplicably received at her house. Investigation reveals that this woman's last name is really Frazette and she has a son named Ted (Jeff Pomerantz).
According to her, she hasn't seen her son "for several years." She says that he "hates his mother. He always has. [He has] always been sick, from the day he was born ... demanding ... He hung on me like some kind of little animal. I couldn't move without him underfoot, demanding my attention every 24 hours, yelling, screaming when I went out, when I talked to anyone. And then he turned against me when he got older ... doing crazy things to hurt me."
McGarrett, reading from a report, says Ted "at 16 was admitted to the Kula Youth Facility for kidnapping a 7-year-old boy. He was given a year of psychotherapeutic counseling and released. Accepted by the U.S. Army three years later. Spent eight months in Vietnam, wounded and discharged. Admitted to the Army Veterans Hospital neuropsychiatric section shortly after coming back to the islands a year ago. Released in January of this year."
When Danno goes to this hospital, he talks to Dr. Wong (Chapman Lam), who says they thought Ted "was suffering from an acute psychotic breakdown based on a traumatic war neurosis. But [he] was having what we call a schizophrenic reaction of the chronic undifferentiated type: Nightmares, fugue-type amnesia. Islands of memory. He could only recall pieces of his early life. Remembered being in Vietnam, but very little of what actually occurred to him there.
The psychiatric technician dealing with Ted in the hospital was George Loman (David Arkin), who joined the staff just after Ted was admitted there. Investigation by Five-O reveals that in Vietnam, Ted met Loman, and they served in the same division. Loman has "more decorations than Sergeant York and Audie Murphy ... bronze star, silver star, oak leaf cluster." He and Ted were members of the same squad, responsible for a rear guard sweep of a strategic hill held by the Vietcong. Loman came back alone, claiming the entire squad was wiped out moving up the hill, saying he was the only survivor. But then Ted was discovered more dead than alive, remembering nothing. Ted came back to the islands, and was admitted to the army hospital under Loman's care.
It turns out that Loman is intentionally driving Ted crazy, since Ted was the only witness to Loman massacring his squad because Loman was convinced his commander's order to take the hill was "suicide." Loman is making Ted think he is repeating his crime of years before by kidnapping young boys, as well as keeping Ted constantly doped up and haranguing him about his mother. At one point, Loomis even stabs himself to make Ted think that he attacked him.
Ted's mother is probably the most dysfunctional parent in all of Five-O, totally hostile to them. She is estranged from her son because of his past, even to the point of changing her last name and, according to Ted, "never cared about Papa [his father] when he was alive." When asked by McGarrett if she has any pictures of her son, she says she has "lots of them ... all ugly." Later, George tries to reconcile with his mother at his father's grave and when he hugs her, she pushes him away, saying "Don't paw me."
Since Loman used chloroform when he was kidnapping the boys, McGarrett sends Kono to "check every pharmacy on the island" for this drug, which you could buy without a prescription — though one wonders why, since it doesn't seem to have had any "household" uses.
When McGarrett encounters George in the hospital at the end of the show, after having had a brainstorm about George's complicity in Ted's breakdown, he tries to prod Loomis into confessing by yelling, "What did you do to earn those medals, George? Did you make a sweep of some gook-infested hill" while the Asian Dr. Wong is standing right beside the two of them!
While he is trying to escape, George falls over a wheelchair being pushed by a nurse, after which McGarrett further harangues George in a flashback-like sequence where Jack Lord appears in military uniform, similar to season one's "King of the Hill" where he was also trying to talk down a military man with serious mental problems. Loman is taken away, and while Ted was previously brought back to the hospital in a zombie-like state by Loman, Dr. Wong says the medication that they have since given Ted since has taken him out of his catatonia.
Like several other shows in the series, this is a topical one dealing with the Vietnam War and its effect on soldiers. However, there is an overwhelming amount of medical mumbo-jumbo related mostly to Danno by Dr. Wong which makes the story difficult to follow, despite the excellent acting by the leads.
There is a somewhat more serious issue with the script, though. According to three people I asked, the consensus is that it was highly unlikely that Ted would have been able to sign up for the U.S. Army considering his past, especially the very serious felony of kidnapping. However, Ted probably lied through his teeth because he was trying to escape from his toxic mother. The mother, by the way, lives in a huge house which seems far beyond her means. I think the only reason this house was used was for its large low-ceilinged cupboard where McGarrett and Danno examine Ted's footlocker.
One thing that really drove me crazy about this show was the fact that the names of Frazette and Loman were originally Ted Frazer and George Loomis, which is what they are called in the end credits. The subtitles also persist in using the original names, even while the characters are being referred to as Frazette and Loman. There is no explanation for this discrepancy — maybe the episode was based on some real people with similar names and they threatened to sue? Who knows?
Best solution to deal with this is, if you are not totally hard of hearing, don't use the subtitles on the DVD!
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
Dr. Wong at the Veterans' Hospital explains Ted's condition to Danno: "Ted's disorder might be described as similar to the experience of his driving a car with a bee buzzing around his head. At first, the bee was just an annoyance, a minor distraction. But as the bee persisted and threatened Ted with greater harm, more of his energies had to be spent in self-defense and less was left over to cope with the problems of safe driving. When the bee finally stung Ted, he lost control of his vehicle and crashed. I see. It's a useful analogy, despite its descriptive limitations. A schizophrenic is, in one sense, being attacked by a psychological bee. A bee that disorganizes his control over the course of his life." At the end of the show, when Ted is on the road to recovery, the doctor tells McGarrett, "Perhaps the bee hasn't hurt him too much." McGarrett doesn't know what he is talking about, and says "The bee?" The doctor points to Danno, and says, "He knows all about the bee." At the doctor leaves, McGarrett asks Danno, "What about the bee?" to which Danno replies, "The bee's a rare psychological term, Steve, which takes a lot of studying to understand."
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EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Injury: David Emory is chloroformed when kidnapped by George Loman.
Injury: The Wing boy is chloroformed when kidnapped by George.
Injury: George cuts himself to make it appear Ted Frazette attacked him.
Injury: Ted is in a catatonic state after multiple ingestions of drugs given to him by George.
MORE TRIVIA:
After Ted's mother shows up at the Five-O office with the first ransom note, George shows Ted a photo in the newspaper which was taken in the outer Five-O office with Kono behind the mother. This makes no sense at all. I think it is highly unlikely that McGarrett would have tolerated this kind of paparazzi-like photography, and I am surprised that the mother didn't complain about it to McGarrett during her second visit to the offices, assuming she saw the picture. The front-page headline on this paper is "HRT bus strike averted." Right below this picture is a subhead on an article, "Reflects Heady Euphoria."
McGarrett asks Chin Ho: "How are your corns?" to which Chin replies, "Killing me, boss."
Doug Mossman appears as Keoki Daniels, a cop. Jenny tells McGarrett "Will you take a call from Keoko?", which the subtitles spell "Keokee." McGarrett calls him by his correct name during their phone conversation. When McGarrett first meets Daniels in the show, he addresses him as "kiddo" in the subtitles!
Of the two families whose sons are kidnapped, the white Emory family is fully mentioned in the end credits, but the Chinese Wing family is totally ignored. Both of these families have speaking parts.
The goopy hypnosis music from "A Bullet for McGarrett" is heard near the beginning of the show. The bonging bell is heard when Loman is yelling at Ted that he is "Crazy! Nuts!" after Loman stabs himself.
A 1958 Eastwood (compare to "Underwood") standard typewriter is used to type the "kidnap" letters which are sent to Ted's mother as part of Loman's elaborate plot. The Five-O team get into Loman's room (seemingly without a warrant) to compare the letters to the typewriter which Loman owns.
Stock shots of McGarrett's car including the "balcony" near the Transportation building as well as the car turning quickly around a corner.
When Danno and McGarrett are doing surveillance, Danno asks, "Yeah, but why and by whom? Or is it 'who'? McGarrett laughs.
George e-mailed me some interesting trivia: "At approximately 14:40 in Killer Bee you'll see Jack Lord/Steve McGarrett in his 1968 Black Mercury. The footage shows him in profile through the driver's door and you'll see he's wearing an Omega Speedmaster Moon watch on his left wrist. This would have been quite an expensive prop to keep around on set so it seems fair enough to assume it's Jack Lord's personal watch. Perhaps he wore it to work that day and didn't want to leave it lying around?"
GALLERY:
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Peter Corman (Steve Logan), who is visiting Hawaii with his bride of two months on a honeymoon-like vacation, is involved in a high-stakes poker game.
The other players are:
George Byas (Mitch Mitchell), a businessman from Denver.
Del Enright (Arthur Franz), a lawyer from Honolulu.
Larry Puana (Bruce Wilson), the "local representative" from Byas's company (Leitz Aerospace) in Hawaii, where he has worked for 14 years. Although he has a Hawaiian name, Puana is white and has a British accent. Wilson appeared 8 episodes before this one in "Leopard on the Rock."
Sam Quong (Jack Soo). No information is given about him. He is very laid-back.
After losing $3,000, Peter has had enough, and leaves the Waimanalo Beach house where the game is taking place. Before he drives away, he spies a van parked behind some trees. When he goes to it and opens the door, he sees a guy, S.K. Shogi (Tommy Fujiwara), sitting in front of TV monitors. Peter returns to the house, where he is shot 3 times.
After being discovered by a couple of kids swimming nearby who heard the shots, Peter is rushed to the hospital, where he is not expected to survive. His wife Maggie (Julie Gregg) shows up, and she is distraught. Her husband talks to her before he expires. He says "Lorenzo," the name of his brother (John Colicos) who is arriving that day from the mainland, and something else which the subtitles reveal is "left-handed." Maggie tells McGarrett about "Lorenzo," but not about the rest: "I couldn't understand what it was."
McGarrett accompanies Maggie to the airport, where he assures Lorenzo they will get whoever killed Peter. After McGarrett leaves, Maggie reveals the "left-handed" line to Lorenzo.
Back at the crime scene, Danno has uncovered several closed circuit TV cameras which were looking down at the hands in the game. Danno tells McGarrett there are only three companies in town with this kind of "sophisticated equipment."
The owners of these companies are summoned to the Five-O office. One of them, uncredited, is played by Kwan Hi Lim, local character actor in the first of his 25 Five-O roles. McGarrett and Danno interview Shogi, who runs a "Detection and Protection Agency" and is very sleazy. Shogi tells the Five-O duo that it was Peter Corman who hired him, that "Some gamblers had taken him, and he wanted some of his money back, so I helped him." Shogi is taken away and booked.
When Lorenzo shows up shortly after, McGarrett tells him that it is possible his brother was the one who bugged the game. (Strangely, this is right after McGarrett says "I'm not in the habit of giving progress reports to relatives.") Lorenzo does not take this well, saying, "Your witness is a liar, and if you believe him, you're a fool. Anybody accuses Peter of cheating might as well accuse me. The difference is, I'm not dead. The difference is I can fight back." Lorenzo leaves the office in a huff.
Lorenzo goes to visit Shogi, just after the investigator is released from jail. He offers Shogi $1,000 for a name, and Shogi gives him that of Byas, who is on his way back to the mainland. Lorenzo goes to the airport and catches Byas before he leaves. Lorenzo is very menacing, and Byas tells him that Larry Puana, the local representative for his company, was the one that tipped him off about the game. Byas' hands are shaking as he lights Lorenzo's cigarette ... but with his right hand.
McGarrett is interested in the contents of the ashtrays from the poker game. One of them contains a matchbook with the name and phone number (361-2801) of a bar girl, Lilo (Josie Over) who works at a restaurant/cocktail lounge called The Sty (the logo of this place is a pig). Of course, Danno is sent to talk to her. It doesn't take her long before she figures out Danno is a cop, but she tells him that Larry Puana was the guy to whom she gave the matchbook. She is very sexy.
Puana is not at his office. When we see him with Lorenzo, Lorenzo seems to be interviewing Puana for a job, maybe at Puana's house (but how did this get set up?). Lorenzo gives Puana a drink, which he says has been poisoned. Fearful he is dying, Puana tells Lorenzo, "I wasn't there when they shot him, but I can tell you who was. There was George Byas. And Sam, Sam Quong and Enright, Del Enright. They were both there when I left." The drink, it turns out, is not poison, but ipecac, which is a substance which induces vomiting.
Meanwhile, Five-O has done some checking on Lorenzo, who used to have underworld connections. Now he is a successful businessman in Detroit, but 22 years ago he had one conviction for second-degree murder. McGarrett says, "He was an enforcer before he apparently quit the rackets. But he did kill and could kill again."
McGarrett goes to see Maggie, who still will not tell him what her husband told her on his deathbed. After McGarrett leaves, Lorenzo returns and tells Maggie that he has bought a gun "for protection."
Enright visits Quong, saying he wants $2,000 to make up for the money he lost, since it is obvious that, by a process of elimination, Quong is the killer. Later that evening, Lorenzo visits Enright at his home where the lawyer fingers Sam. Unknown to the two of them, Quong shows up. Lorenzo makes Enright pick up a tennis ball, showing that he is right-handed, but, hiding nearby, Quong kills Enright and wounds Lorenzo, who later phones Maggie, telling her to go to McGarrett and say that he is innocent of Enright's murder.
When he comes to her place, Maggie finally tells McGarrett after almost 46 minutes of the show that the killer is left-handed. Wounded, Lorenzo struggles to get to Quong's place. When Quong offers him a drink, he does so with his left hand, but he whips out a gun and has Lorenzo at a disadvantage. Some cops have been following Lorenzo and have tipped off McGarrett and Danno as to his current location. They break down the door and shoot Quong.
Lorenzo is busted, despite him giving McGarrett chapter and verse about how bullets from Quong's guns can prove his innocence. Before Lorenzo is taken away, McGarrett tells him, "One man is dead because you decided personal revenge is more important than due process of law. Too bad you don't know as much about law and justice as you know about guns and bullets."
There some good things about this show: John Colicos is extremely threatening and Julie Gregg is easy on the eyes. However, the script, among other things, leaves a lot to be desired.
It is a good question why Five-O gets involved with this case in the first place. Of the poker game, Danno says, "Neat operation," to which McGarrett replies, "Probably arranged especially for tourists." Of course, the angle of Hawaii's tourist reputation getting besmirched would interest the Governor.
The "big deal" in the show is the fact that Quong is left-handed, but his character keeps flip-flopping between left and right. At the beginning of the show, Quong smokes right handed at the poker game. Later when he gets the visit from Enright, he is watching TV. He picks up the remote with his left hand but pushes buttons on it with his right. He is also smoking with right hand, but switches to his left, then his right, then to the left again, then the right. Later, when Lorenzo shows up, he is using the remote with his right hand. Finally, when he makes Lorenzo a drink of whiskey, he gives it to him with his left hand and then takes the gun out of his pocket with his left hand. It's almost as if Jack Soo kept forgetting how his character should act. Even though this was before VCRs and DVDs where you could check this sort of thing easily, I think people would still have noticed this back in 1970!
Most of the people in this show are lying or trying to cover something up. In McGarrett's office, Shogi says that Peter was the one who hired him, but after he is threatened by Lorenzo, he calls Puana to say that he told Lorenzo that Byas was the one who was the killer. Puana tells Lorenzo about who was at the house that could have shot his brother: Byas, Quong and Enright. But we see two cars leaving the place and each car only has one person in it, which would still leave two people in the house, one of whom shot Peter and the other was theoretically a witness to the shooting!
Too bad we don't get a chance to see all the cameras which are supposedly in the room where the game takes place. I find it hard to believe the one which is in the air conditioner would have much of a view because it wouldn't seem to be able to move around a lot and how can it see what is happening in the room through the grill? This is hardly "sophisticated" equipment. How it transmits information to the van in a "wireless" fashion is not explained and it doesn't look like Quong is wearing a hearing-aid-like earpiece to get information from Shogi in the van. And even if he could get information on the other players, how could he control which cards he was going to receive?
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
Lorenzo buys a gun "for protection" which he intends to use to kill whoever murdered his brother.
EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Injury: Peter Corman is shot three times after he discovers the high-stakes poker game he was in was rigged.
Death: Peter dies later in the hospital.
Death: Del Enright is shot by Sam Quong.
Injury: Lorenzo is shot in the arm by Sam.
Injury: Sam is shot by McGarrett, but is likely alive because after this you can hear Danno in the background phoning for an ambulance. What Danno is saying is barely audible and there are no subtitles.
MORE TRIVIA:
At the beginning of the show, McGarrett is in such a hurry to get to the crime scene that his car almost runs into an ambulance which is also speeding down the highway.
When McGarrett writes on his transparent board with a black felt pen with the camera behind the board, you can't see what he is writing. But when the camera changes its angle to the front of the board, you can see the letters: A, B, C and D.
The bonging bell sound is heard briefly, but not accompanied by the usual music. The "memories" theme is heard when Julie tells Lorenzo that Peter told her about his brother's criminal past.
The fact that Lorenzo was jailed for murder over 20 years before suggests a big gap in age between Lorenzo and Peter, who was only 26 years old when he was murdered.
A display of Japanese Suntory whiskey is seen at the Honolulu airport.
Julie Gregg appeared earlier in the season in "Savage Sunday" as the wife of the head revolutionary.
Another Five-O stock company player making an uncredited appearance is Kimo Kahoano. He plays Tom Hurst, a swimmer who, along with his girl friend Susan Carter, finds Peter's body at the beginning of the show after hearing shots. The girl friend's scream is very loud and leads into the main titles.
There are some laughs in the Five-O office when Kono says "I wish I was as slim as those leads." McGarrett tells him, "Maybe you will be by the time you run them down." Chin Ho pokes Kono's stomach and says, "You pack egg foo yong there," producing big smiles from McGarrett and Danno.
When Shogi leaves the scene of the poker game after Peter is murdered, you can see whatever was written on the back of the van has been covered with paper that looks taped to the door.
Peter's car, seen at the beginning, is a yellow Mustang.
Emma Veary (uncredited) plays Larry Puana's secretary.
McGarrett pronounces Shogi's name correctly the first time he says it, but later prounounces it "Sho-gee."
GALLERY:
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The show begins with a police raid on the apartment of Jerry Amuru (Derek Mau), a dope pusher. When he is busted after the cops and Five-O find 2 ounces of heroin, he starts claiming that he paid Chin Ho $1,200 for "protection" two months ago. McGarrett tells Amuru, "You better be very positive about your information, because a man's good name and reputation is at stake."
It turns out Amuru's accusation is merely the tip of the iceberg, because sleazy lawyer Eddie Calhao (Martin Sheen) has orchestrated a complex scheme to make Chin Ho, McGarrett and Five-O all look bad. Exactly what constitutes this scheme is hard to figure out.
Calhao is in league with Karl Brohme (Larry Ronson), the boss of Brocar Realty, who has invested money in a "project" that Calhao has developed. Brohme, who it is later suggested has some shady criminal connections, doesn't like the "publicity" which has developed around this project as well as the "violence," though we have not seen any violence in the show so far. Calhao ridicules Brohme because he is acting "like an old businessman, afraid to try something new," and that he has "gotta learn to use the media."
Calhao tells Brohme, "(A) the recent scandal with the Public Utilities Commission has got the governor terrified on the whole subject of corruption [and] (B) we learn in law school that the police can only react in a limited number of ways to any given situation. They're predictable. That makes them vulnerable. Ipso facto, Q.E.D. (A) and (B) puts them out of the picture. This project will end when they indict McGarrett."
McGarrett is very disturbed about the accusations against Chin. He is getting a lot of heat from the Governor who refers to the "last mess," which also involved corruption, not to mention Dave Garland (Ed Sheehan — again!), a newspaper reporter, who would like to break this big story.
Chin takes a polygraph, which he passes, smelling "like a rose." Still, most of Amuru's accusations cannot be checked. Despite getting reassurance from his wife that everything will turn out OK in the end, yet more accusations are levelled against Chin from a guy named Vern (Jerry Cox) who supposedly delivered the payments to him. Vern picks Chin out of a lineup. The Governor wants McGarrett to relinquish the investigation and turn it over to another agency.
Reporter Garland tells McGarrett about a tip he got, to check out an account (#5-2081) at the Fifth Charter Bank, Kahala branch in the name of John Lee Sung, which was presumably set up by Chin to deposit his payoff money. The bank president, Austin Summers, is brought to the Five-O office and gives remarkably detailed information about "Sung," even though his account was set up six weeks ago. When McGarrett asks him to identify some of the 74 other people who have set up accounts in the last six weeks, Summers cannot provide similar precise details.
Because the newspapers are screaming whitewash inside Five-O, McGarrett has no choice other than to put Chin on suspension. When Kono berates McGarrett for this decision, the top cop replies, "Kono, if I didn't love you, I'd punch you right in the mouth."
Rattled by McGarrett's questioning, Summers goes to see Calhao, saying he wants out of the scheme. Soon after this, Summers is shot dead by a hitman and while this is going on, the setup against Chin continues as Chin leaves his house to go to a meeting arranged by a guy on the phone who "had some information," but no one shows up. Now Chin is suspected of murder.
After the Governor tells McGarrett he is turning the investigation over to the Attorney General's office, McGarrett decides to play dirty. Armed with knowledge of a connection between Calhao and Brohme, Danno goes to see Brohm, who, according to Kono's sources, "Just got outvoted by the organization." Danno tells Brohme, "We're picking up every peddler, every pusher, every user, every dealer we can lay our hands on. It's costing you money, and it's gonna cost you more. More money and trouble. Because you've got a boy named Calhao who's been leaning on us. So we're gonna lean on you. Now, maybe everyone will get hurt, but when the blood starts to flow, the man in the middle usually gets the worst of it. And that's you. Calhao's using you. Using you for his own personal gains. And when you fall, he'll be right there to fill in that chair. You'll be the one who helped him do it."
McGarrett goes to see Calhao, who is dining at a Japanese restaurant. McGarrett gives Calhao his business card, saying, "My office number's right on the card, but I'll give you my home number too in case you wanna come in and talk [about the] frame on an innocent cop. I just had a talk with Carl Brohme, and I don't think he thinks I'm crazy. But then, you never know about Carl. I've seen him switch right in the heat of battle."
That evening, Danno and Kono, dressed in trench coats and carrying guns, go after Calhao who just found out his office has been tossed. Calhao flees into a building under construction. Predictably Calhao freaks out, and when McGarrett pulls up with several HPD cops, Calhao begs him for protection. McGarrett asks, "From what?" Calhao says "From Brohme." After Calhao is taken away, McGarrett phones Chin and tells him to report for work the next day.
This episode, one of the late Kam Fong's favorites, reveals much about "the human side of Chin Ho," giving us glimpses into his private life, probably more than any other member of the team than McGarrett. He has 8 kids, is about 5'10" and weighs between 200 and 230 pounds. At the entrance to his driveway is a Chinese pagoda, and his house number is 812. He's been a cop for 22 years, has 4 commendations and 2 citations for bravery. He likes to attend the fights on Tuesday night, go bowling, and also go to church. Four of his kids are shown watching cartoons on TV, while his son Tim (Leighton Lee) is hogging the telephone.
The fact that the "project" Calhao and Brohme are involved in is not spelled out in any detail works against the show, though Kam Fong's intensely dramatic performance makes up for this. (Chin is really sweating during his final interrogation by McGarrett.) Brohme is hardly as bad as big-time crooks who will appear on the show like Honore Vashon. You would also think that after Danno and McGarrett work on pitting Calhao and Brohme against each other, the two would quickly be in touch, but there is no indication that this happens.
McGarrett's taking the law into his own hands at the end of the show was obviously a source of inspiration for the new Five-Zero.
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
This is a good question! Please post in the Discussion Forum if you have any suggestions!
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EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Death: Austin Summers is shot by an assassin to protect Eddie Calhao's scheme.
MORE TRIVIA:
The scene where the hitman blasts the bank manager Summers is taken in part from "All the King's Horses" earlier this season. Summers rolls over his desk after the window behind him is blown out with a shotgun, but this is obviously a stunt man, because the color of Summers' hair is quite different than when we saw him in McGarrett's office. Considering the hitman is shooting down, it is hard to explain why the window above Summers, who is sitting at a desk, should suddenly explode. I don't think the hitman is behind this window, because after the glass breaks, you cannot see him standing there, and there is only one window compared to two in the next room, one of which the hitman is shooting through.
The sequence where Danno drives down Kaalawai Place to Brohme's is taken from season one's "Strangers In Our Own Land." Danno is driving a black car when he drives down the hill, but when he arrives at Brohme's house, the car is green.
First Five-O appearance by Glenn ("John Manicote") Cannon who plays lie detector technician Ken Stone.
McGarrett utters the popular phrase "Ain't no big thing" during his opening scene which features Doug Mossman as HPD cop "Keoki"
I don't understand why Chin goes rushing out to meet a man "with information" ... is he so emotionally overwrought that he can't see this is likely a setup? Chin is supposed to meet this guy near the end of the Diamond Head tunnel seen in other episodes.
The front page of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser (a bogus name for the paper at the time of filming which became reality many years later when the two newspapers merged), in addition to the headline "Five-O Accused of Bribe Taking" has several other headlines, all connected with government issues: "Compromise Housing Bill Sent to President for OK," "House Plans Program to Fight Crime," "School Board to Reconsider Teacher Hiring," "Solons Revise Welfare Legislation," and "More Rigid Rules Sought in Fight to Clean City Parks."
The music is stock. When Calhao is running around inside the building at the end, some passages from "A Thousand Pardons, You're Dead" are heard, but the same sequence in the episode promo uses the "Pursuit" cue from earlier shows.
There is a "logbook" where the Five-O team are supposed to sign out (and presumably in). Is this mentioned in any other episode?
In "The One With the Gun," the fact one character is left-handed is a vital plot point. Summers says "Sung," when he set up the paperwork for his account, used his left hand. McGarrett says Chin is right-handed. But when waiting outside the tunnel, Chin looks at his watch and his watch is on his right hand, suggesting he is left-handed.
When Calhao is running around inside the building under construction, you can see the revolving restaurant at 1441 Kapiolani Boulevard seen previously in "Babe Ruth" in the background. The lights on the restaurant look kind of Christmas-y, and there are Christmas trees seen in the background of some shots. I think this show might have been filmed just prior to Christmas, because there is a card on Summers' desk which says "Get your Christmas cards early" which seems to have a connection with some credit card company.
At the end, McGarrett calls Chin a "big pake," meaning "Chinese."
Amuru smokes.
One of the characters in this episode is named Tim Kelly, very close to Tim O'Kelley, who played Danno in the pilot episode, whose name was actually Tim O'Kelly.
GALLERY:
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Original air date: 2/11/70 — Opening Credits — End Credits Director: Nicholas Colasanto; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writer: Robert Hamner; Music: Stock
Timings: Teaser: 2:00; Main Titles: 0:57; Act One: 12:28; Act Two: 9:29; Act Three: 15:32; Act Four: 9:48; End Credits: 0:56; Total Time: 51:10.
QUICK PLOT:
When a cop's wife is murdered, the officer, a friend of Danno for many years, attempts to take the law into his own hands to track down and execute the killer.
Danno gets a call to an murder scene where the victim, a woman, is unidentified. She was strangled. Danno is shocked to find out she is Marjorie Morgan. Danno went to school with her and her husband Lew, who is a cop, who also shows up soon.
Two patrol cops talk to McGarrett, who also arrives, along with Che Fong. One of the cops says, "A guy who kills a cop's wife is no different than a cop killer." They offer to help with the case in their free time.
Later, Morgan appears at McGarrett's office, wanting to help with the investigation, but McGarrett sends him home, saying "Five-O and H.P.D. have made this number one priority."
Danno takes Lew to his place. Lew considers himself to be a loser for not getting promoted upwards at HPD, and also because he couldn't keep his wife from getting interested in other men. He tells Danno, "The only thing I had going for me... was a woman... who loved me. And now..." We get to see inside Danno's apartment, where he has a bar and a photo of Melody Patterson (later James MacArthur's wife) on the dresser. Danno says he will make Lew a "wild Spanish omelet," and drinks a beer. Danno tells Lew he will ask McGarrett the next day if Lew can help.
Chin Ho and Kono have a stakeout that evening at Morgan's house and they catch Lonnie Kahekili (Lanikai), who enters the place using a key that Marjorie gave him. The next day, Lonnie, whose job is "mostly hustling the tourists on the beach," is grilled by McGarrett at the Five-O offices, where he admits that he and Marjorie were having "what you haoles call an affair." He denies killing her, though. McGarrett tells him, "You're doing fine, for a number one murder suspect."
Lonnie mentions that Marjorie had "a number one boyfriend." Fingerprints other than those from Lonnie taken at the scene and sent to the mainland are connected to Gary Oliver, "One very bad customer," according to Chin: "Male, Caucasian, 6'1", 185, light hair, blue eyes, age 24. Six arrests, three convictions. Extortion, assault, assault with a deadly weapon. One suspended sentence, 18 months in Illinois State Reformatory, two years in Joliet."
Oliver (Sam Melville) is tracked down to a local address, but when Five-O shows up, he escapes. McGarrett talks to the woman Oliver was with in the apartment, Annette Barnes (Jennifer Billingsley). She tells him "He's never told me anything about himself." She gives Oliver an alibi for the night of Marjorie's murder, but quickly changes her tune when McGarrett warns her about perjuring herself.
McGarrett and Danno go to Lew's place. McGarrett wonders if Lew knows Oliver, and the answer is no. But McGarrett says that Oliver's fingerprints were all over the house. Danno tells Lew, "That's the way it was, I'm sorry." As they leave, McGarrett tells Danno that while Lew was on patrol the night his wife was murdered, there is a hole in his alibi from 2:31 a.m. to 3:07 a.m.
Back at the office, McGarrett gets a visit from Gloria Warren (Linda Ryan). She is an ex-girl friend of Oliver's, who read about the search for him in the papers. She says, "He put me in the hospital, and I figure one good turn deserves another." She recommends that McGarrett go and talk to a Mrs. Cara Hadwell in Kahala, a high-class society woman who also knew Oliver. Kono is drooling as Warren leaves the office. When McGarrett wonders what he is doing, he replies, "Just watching for the mailman."
McGarrett goes to see Mrs. Hadwell, but she gives him the brush-off, getting her servant (Arthur Hee, uncredited) to say she is not home. Lew goes to see Barnes and roughs her up. She doesn't know anything. He tells her, "If you see Oliver before I do, you tell him Lew Morgan is gonna kill him just like he killed my wife."
Another woman with information about Oliver comes to the Five-O offices. Her name is Shivley (Alice Lemon) and she is kind of a ditz. When Chin Ho says his last name is Kelly, she tells him, "You don't look Irish." Although she describes Oliver as a "rat," her information is not particularly useful.
Danno gets a call from Barnes saying that Lew was visiting her. When he goes to see Lew at the apartment where he is staying, Danno sees Lew has a short-wave radio he can use to monitor police calls. The the two of them have harsh words, with Lew telling Danno to get lost.
Oliver goes to visit Warren, who is lounging around in yellow baby doll lingerie. He tells her "There's nobody else I can trust." As they engage in some passionate smooching, he asks her for some money. She leaves for the bank, but instead, tips off Lew, who soon shows up and shoots Oliver dead. McGarrett is pissed, saying "Every cop on this island has been working overtime to help you, and you just kicked every one of them in the teeth. Now they'll have to work double time to try to prove to the public that they're not all a bunch of killers hiding behind a badge."
As Danno and Lew are driven away from the scene, Danno comments that everything that has happened is "Such a terrible, useless waste." Back at the office, Mrs. Hadwell (Jane Adrian) shows up and tells McGarrett that she could have prevented Oliver's death, because Oliver was with her the night that Marjorie was killed. Brought to the office, Lew admits that he was the one that killed his wife: "They had it coming. Both of them." As Lew leaves, he tells Danno, "I'm sorry. I've been a loser all the way. Even with my friends."
This is an outstanding episode, clearly the best of season two. This is an unusually tense show, no doubt thanks to the large number of closeups as well as hand-held camera work and unusual camera angles at the beginning. The acting is also of a very high calibre from everyone concerned. The direction is interesting like the scene in Danno's apartment where both Danno and Lew are facing away from the camera, and the one later where Lew calls the cops after he shoots Oliver and there is a fan in the foreground.
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
This is a good question! Please post in the Discussion Forum if you have any suggestions!
Dean from Dallas says: I'm guessing the title comes from the idea of failure of the cop/husband Lee Morgan. Even going back to high school he thought himself a failure. So instead of "most likely to succeed," he is "most likely to murder."
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EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Death: Marjorie Morgan is found strangled.
Injury: Annette Barnes is slapped around by Lew Morgan as he looks for Gary Oliver.
Death: Oliver is shot by Lew.
MORE TRIVIA:
When Danno issues an APB after Oliver escapes, the footage of the cop car approaching the First Hawaiian Bank and then turning around is from "The Joker's Wild, Man, Wild!" — you can even see Beverlee McKinsey coming out of the building. The scene where a cop car rounds a corner by a church and another where it is driving past a concrete structure are cribbed from "Savage Sunday." The stock shot with the Park Lane driving from left to right in front of the "balcony" is also seen.
When Warren visits the Five-O office, McGarrett tells Jenny, "Thank you," meaning "Get lost!" Gloria, who is oozing sexuality, gets flirty with McGarrett, and on the way out gives her phone number to Jenny — 737-7913 — who takes it rather matter-of-factly. When Warren sits in the chair in McGarrett's office in front of him, she almost pulls off a Sharon Stone moment.
When Oliver is necking heavily with Warren on the bed at her apartment, there is a freeze frame at the end of their kiss.
Chin Ho smokes a pipe in McGarrett's office — compare this with the later episode "The Defector," where such pollution is a no-no.
Lonnie drives a Mustang with license number W-3470.
The "memories" musical theme is used (almost overused) multiple times in this show.
At the beginning of the show, McGarrett asks Che Fong, "What do you got, Che?", but the subtitles say "What do you got, Jay?"
Both Oliver and Barnes smoke.
At the end of the show, Lew listens to Hadwell's confession, which is on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, though there is no indication as to when this recording was made in the previous scene. When McGarrett turns it off, it looks like he is turning it off from the back, though the switch to do this is plainly on the front. When Lonnie is being interviewed earlier in the show, the same tape recorder is being used, but the tape is playing from the right to the left reel, the opposite of the scene with Lew, because the tape recorder is upside down.
Women are addressed as "honey" four times in the show.
GALLERY:
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Original air date: 2/18/70 — Opening Credits — End Credits Director: John Newland; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writer: Jack Turley; Music: Richard Shores Timings: Teaser: 4:14; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 13:25; Act Two: 8:29; Act Three: 9:03; Act Four: 13:07; End Credits: 0:53; Total Time: 50:09.
QUICK PLOT:
After a research scientist, duped into believing he shot a man, disappears from his government post, foreign agents convince him to leave the country.
Charles Aidman is Dr. John Royce, who is working on a top-secret government project known as Nautical Observation of Submerged Enemy (NOSE). When combined with sophisticated computer circuitry, it can literally sniff through the ocean and detect if a submarine has passed within 100 miles, how long ago, and in what direction it was traveling. This technology is so precise that if someone dips their ring finger in a tank of purified sea water for a few seconds, the detection device's lights will start flashing.
Royce gets a phone call at work from his girlfriend Theresa Dietrich (Pilar Seurat). She says her uncle, who is in the country as an illegal immigrant, is being blackmailed to pay $1,000 to keep this information secret. Royce leaves work and when he arrives at Theresa's apartment, he finds a man named Lo Quan (Gregg Kim) threatening her with a gun, which drops to the floor. Royce picks up the gun and, at Theresa's insistence, shoots Won dead. However, the gun was loaded with blanks. After Royce and Theresa leave in a hurry, her uncle, who is actually a foreign agent named Hans Kreuter (Ronald Long) and a thug named Won See (George Groves) emerge from another room. Lo picks up the gun with a pair of pliers, inserts a real bullet into the chamber and shoots Lo Quan dead, leaving only Royce's fingerprints on the gun. (But then, wouldn't Lo Quan's prints also be on it?)
When McGarrett shows up at the crime scene, he tells Danno he just got a call from the Pentagon and "We're gonna share the honors with the local arm of government intelligence." The head fed already on the case is Merrill Carson (Fred Beir), who is pushy regarding the time frame for Che Fong's forensic work. McGarrett tells Carson he wants a list of "Habits, friends, associates, the kind of work [Royce] was doing." Carson replies, "My agency is willing to cooperate with Five-O to the fullest extent."
Theresa drives Royce to her "uncle's" house, which is a hideout in a relatively out-of-the-way location. Royce wonders if he should go to the cops. Kreuter arrives and tells Royce, "I owe you a great debt," because he has heard on the radio that Royce supposedly saved Theresa's life which was being threatened by Lo Quan. However, it is unlikely the radio reports knew this, instead broadcasting that "a famous and respected scientist is being sought in connection with a [does Kreuter say "her"? — which doesn't make sense] murder."
McGarrett, Danno and Carson go to Royce's lab where Dr. Logan, Royce's associate (Bill Bigelow) shows them how NOSE works. Later, in Che Fong's lab, the revolver used to kill Lo Quan is seen to have marks on the handle from the pliers that were holding it. Danno says this reminds him of when he was a kid and he used to make jewelry using a vice, which made similar marks. McGarrett takes his own revolver and applies a vice-locking pair of pliers to it, which produces the same marks. McGarrett tells Danno and Che, "Do you smell a frameup?"
At the Five-O office, McGarrett figures that someone took advantage of Royce. Kono says "Royce wasn't exactly known as a bigtime playboy with the ladies," to which McGarrett responds, "No, but he was a Ionely one. Weekends at the laboratory, sleeping on a cot, TV dinners. Dr. Royce was ready to be tapped and somebody knew it." McGarrett gets Chin and Kono to put a 24-hour surveillance on Theresa's apartment.
At the hideout, Royce is getting a lot of pressure from Kreuter to choose his plan of action, whether he wants to spend the next 15 or 20 years in prison because of the "murder" of Lo Quan. Kreuter says that Theresa is also an illegal alien, who would be in major trouble if Royce was busted. Royce is very upset to hear this; Theresa says that she was waiting for the right moment to tell him. Royce finally figures out that the "uncle" is an agent, to which Kreuter replies, "Let us just say that I do not have an exaggerated sense of patriotism for a country that would destroy one of its finest scientists ... I have friends in another country. They admire you tremendously. Your splendid work in the science of hydraulics and chemical detection. It is their fervent hope that an unfortunate accident will not rob the world of your genius. In a word, they are concerned and they are willing to back up their concern with help … [They will g]ive you your own laboratory with unlimited funds to carry out your work. A home for you and Theresa. A lifetime of happiness."
Theresa goes back to her apartment building, where she picks up mail, including a letter from the US Immigration and Naturalization Service which confirms that she will get citizenship in a few days. Kono is doing surveillance on her place, and he is knocked out by one of Carson's men. When McGarrett hears about this, he is furious, but Carson says it was "an unfortunate error." Kono sports a large bandage on the back of his hair (ouch!). Kono says "It hurts only when I think about it. I think about it a lot." McGarrett tells Carson, "Just remember, this is Hawaii, the 50th state. It is not Cuba or the Dominican Republic or Vietnam or Laos, you dig?"
Theresa was also tailed to the building by Won See, who later found the immigration letter after she returned to the hideout. The uncle tells him that after Royce is "safely removed," then Lo will have to kill Theresa. Meanwhile, Danno has gotten some intel on her: "Theresa Dietrich. Alias Theresa Myer, alias Betty Torrance. Born: Manila, Philippines. Date: Unknown. Age: Approximately 28. Arrested in Hong Kong on passport violation, 1957. Released. Arrested in Saigon, 1962, passport violation. Escaped by bribing prison guard. Suspected member of an intelligence group. Observed in Singapore, 1967, in company of known double agent, Professor Hans Kreuter."
At the hideout, Kreuter needs Royce to make up his mind soon about his future: "Either you turn yourself over to the police and let them destroy your life or you give me the chance to help." Royce says he has to talk a walk to make up his mind. He heads to a pay phone (number 287-1299) nearby and calls Five-O, but before he can give information about where he is, Won See hangs up the phone.
McGarrett, however, was taping the call and with Che Fong, the Five-O team analyze a background sound which is determined to be a pile driver. A call to the city engineer's department gives possible locations where work that uses this kind of equipment is currently being done.
Back at the hideout, Royce gives Theresa a piece of his mind, lambasting her for her participation in Kreuter's scheme: "Why don't you tell your dear uncle just how easy it was to trick a stupid man? To make him believe that a woman half his age was in love with him. Come on. Why don't you tell him how ridiculous I am? How it must have turned your stomach to be with me. Well, come on. Tell him!"
Royce, along with Kreuter and all of Kreuter's stooges head in an Island Star Bakery truck for a rendezvous point where they are to be picked up by a submarine. McGarrett and Danno check out one of the three possible locations where a pile driver is being used, and of course, it just happens to be the right one. In the hideout they find the high-powered marine shortwave which was used to contact the submarine. One of the construction workers nearby remembers the bakery truck, and an APB is put out for it. The Five-O team with the help of HPD locate the truck on its way. Carson and his men are following McGarrett, because there is "no need for McGarrett to have the whole show."
The show ends at a beach where Kreuter and company await the submarine with Royce. Another ridiculous shootout where the bad guys cannot hit the side of a barn door despite having high-powered rifles follows, whereas Five-O avoid getting shot and are much more accurate. Theresa attempts to redeem herself by throwing sand in Won See's face, but Kreuter shoots her dead. A few seconds later, McGarrett kills him. Royce is very sad at Theresa's demise, since obviously, despite her being a bad person who was involved with her "uncle's" scheme, she had feelings for Royce after all.
I liked this show a lot more this time around than the last time I reviewed it. Like "Forty Feet High And It Kills," it has some bad foreigners trying to kidnap or coerce an American scientist to go to a foreign country to work for the presumably evil foreign government there.
Charles Aidman is not a very dynamic actor, aside from his one big outburst, and is pretty deadpan throughout, though this is not unexpected, considering he is playing what is essentially a boring scientist type. The English-accented Ronald Long as Kreuter to me is reminiscent of Victor Buono, who will be seen in the sixth season episode "The $100,00 Nickel."
There are some continuity problems as Five-O follow the bad guys on the way to the beach. McGarrett radios to Chin Ho, and the call is taken by Kono, who not only has no bandage on his hair, but wears a darker suit (he was wearing a light grey one in the office) and seems to be answering with Chin Ho's voice. (Furthermore, Kono answers McGarrett by saying, "Got it, Steve." Kono would be more likely to address McGarrett as "Boss.") In the scene at the beach, Kono again has no bandage, and is wearing the light grey suit again.
Considering the bad guys' hideout is by the freeway near the beach, I really don't understand why, in order to get to the submarine pickup point, they have to drive up and down through Honolulu's residential area!
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
This is a good question! Please post in the Discussion Forum if you have any suggestions!
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EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Death: Lo Quan is shot dead by Won See after he takes part in a scam to make Royce think that he shot Won (Royce's gun contained blanks).
Injury: Kono is bashed on head by one of Merrill Carson's agents.
Death: Theresa is shot by Hans Kreuter.
Death: Kreuter is shot by McGarrett.
MORE TRIVIA:
A copy of The Honolulu Advertiser with a story about Royce's disappearance is seen during a meeting with the Five-O team in McGarrett's office and is also shown to Royce at the hideout. The headline and sub-head are both in lower case type (no capital letters at all): "famous scientist missing ... disappearance is believed linked to murder." The accompanying story is made up of bits and pieces of miscellaneous news items. It starts: "Several members of the youth advisory group who assembled here from all over the country..." Other headlines on the page are "Council's plan gets court OK," and "sailor missing: 2 saved." When Kreuter asks Royce if he wants to see "the mainland papers," they are the same issue of The Honolulu Advertiser.
McGarrett uses a blackboard in his office. Written on the board are some facts about Royce: "Born July 27, 1923, widowed, 1 daughter, does not drink, does not smoke." This would make Royce about 47 years old, not exactly double the age of Theresa (28) as he suggests.
When McGarrett slows the speed of the tape recorder to determine the origin of the knocking noise heard during his conversation with Royce, the reels are turning at exactly the same speed as when the noise was heard in its "normal" state a few seconds earlier. (I like the way when someone rewinds a tape like this, it always stops at exactly the right place.) As well, when he started recording the call, the tape was quite close to the beginning of the reel. When he plays it back later, the call is much further along.
The first shot of the submarine which will take Royce away to a foreign land is obviously a miniature and the water looks phony; the later shots are of a real submarine.
After McGarrett figures out the business with the pliers and the revolver, he snaps his fingers three times.
The phone at the laboratory at the beginning of the show has the same number as the pay phone Royce uses later: 287-1299. The lab phone has five extensions from 1475 to 1479. This location is very weird, it has several "scientists" walking around in this red colored liquid wearing gumboots. Although the building seems to be top secret (there is even a security guard), we can see at the end of the building there is a door where a truck is parked that is open to the street. The phone number 287-1299 is also used in this season's "Which Way Did They Go?"
The show's main theme is heard at the beginning of the show after the main titles in the show itself, which is unusual, especially since it is using the same arrangement. The "memories" theme is heard at the end of the show when Royce is holding Theresa's dead body on the beach.
Kono's business card has the Five-O office number: 732-5577. When McGarrett enters Carson's office to protest Kono getting punched out by Carson's men, the scene has a certain déjà vu to the pilot episode when McGarrett forced his way into Leslie Nielsen's office, even to the extent that the receptionist is trying to keep him out. Carson is much more co-operative than Nielsen's was, though.
The letter that Theresa gets from the immigration people is signed by "James Heinz" — an in-joke referring to the episode's associate producer. This letter is addressed to her at 2120 Kaneheohe Drive, Honolulu 96816, though it does not include her apartment number. This address might exist on Oahu, though it would be far away from Honolulu. When she is reading the letter, she holds the envelope behind it with the reverse of the envelope facing up, but when we see the letter that she is reading, the front of the letter can be seen with the stamp behind it.
When Kono is doing surveillance on Theresa's place, he is in a building under construction across the street. This is the same building seen at the end of the previous episode "Cry, Lie" where Martin Sheen's character is being pursued. The revolving restaurant with Christmas decorations in the background is visible in one shot again in this episode. The building where Theresa picks up her mail is the same as the one where Sheen's office is located in the previous show. This building seems to be the Holiday Village Hotel, and Theresa walks past an office in the building for Carson Building Co., and Carson Imports. I don't know why she throws the envelope from the immigration people on the ground; it is picked up by one of Carson's men and later gets to Five-O as well.
There's a couple of laughs when Chin Ho asks McGarrett what "cherchez la femme" means. Chin says his French doesn't get too far beyond "Parlez-vous français."
When Royce phones Five-O, McGarrett tells Danno to trace the call without putting the call on hold, and Danno gives the phone company instructions in a loud and obvious voice.
GALLERY:
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46 & 47. (S02E23 & S02E24) “Three Dead Cows At Makapu‘u” ★★★½
PART ONE:
Original air date: 2/25/70 — Opening Credits — End Credits Director: Marvin Chomsky; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writers: Anthony Lawrence (teleplay), Leonard Freeman (story); Music: Richard Shores
Timings: Teaser: 3:24; Main Titles: 0:57; Act One: 14:11; Act Two: 11:14; Act Three: 9:28; Act Four: 10:59; End Credits: 0:56; Total Time: 51:09.
PART TWO: Original air date: 3/4/70 — Opening Credits — End Credits Directors: Michael Caffey & Abner Biberman; Producer: Leonard Katzman; Writer: Anthony Lawrence; Music: Richard Shores
Timings: Teaser: 5:05; Main Titles: 0:57; Act One: 15:58; Act Two: 13:04; Act Three: 8:07; Act Four: 7:03; End Credits: 0:56; Total Time: 51:10.
QUICK PLOT:
A microbiologist has developed a mutation which he wants to unleash on Oahu as a protest against the government using it as a weapon.
When a farmer finds three of his cows dead, their bodies "as hard as a rock, as if it's petrified," he gets Five-O's attention. The farmer insists that some kind of biological experiments conducted by the Army, who allowed him to graze his animals on their military reservation, is behind this, similar to an incident two years before where another farmer's herd of sheep was wiped out by some kind of nerve gas.
After the cows are transported to the county morgue where three doctors examine the cows, ending up totally at a loss to identify what killed them, the Army shows up, wanting to take possession. McGarrett tells them to get lost, because this incident happened on his turf. He goes to visit Colonel Sindell (H.M. Wyant), who says "You're taking it too seriously." McGarrett disagrees, saying "You people never let us know these things." The colonel finally admits, "We have conducted experiments here, but it's not something exclusive to Hawaii or the U.S. Or any place else for that matter. It's no secret there are bases doing the same kinds of work all over. Rocky Mountain, Edgewood, Dugway, Fort Detrick ... I swear to you by all that's holy, there's been absolutely nothing here that could have contributed to the death of those animals."
The arrival of Washington bigshot Jonathan Kaye (Joseph Sirola) at the Governor's office moves everything to a higher level. Along with Kaye is Dr. A.L. Benjamin (Dana Elcar), Chief of Operations of the Army Department of Chemical and Biological Warfare at Fort Detrick. In the ensuing top-secret discussion, it is revealed that a brilliant microbiologist specializing in autoimmunity named Dr. Alexander Kline (Ed Flanders) was working on a single vaccine that would render man immune to disease for all of his natural life. But because of a freak accident, Kline developed a "Q strain," a biological mutation which proved to be totally hostile to all forms of life on Earth. Kaye says that substances like the one Kline developed are a "necessary deterrent power," to which McGarrett responds, "You people frighten me."
Kline was persuaded to come and work for the government, to isolate the bacteria and perfect a method of rapid reproduction so this "ultimate weapon" could be produced in bulk. But for over a year, Kline's project seemed jinxed with one accident after another. A security check and then an psychiatric evaluation revealed that Kline was subconciously sabotaging his own project because he was terrified about what he was about to achieve. He was released from his duties lest he would face the threat of a possibly irreparable psychotic breakdown. Almost a year ago, Kline disappeared, and despite the CIA, the Secret Service and a worldwide search network, he was was nowhere to be found until the three dead cows were discovered at Makapu‘u.
An all-out dragnet of police officers is organized to try and find Kline who, unknown to everyone — police, scientists and bureaucrats — is on an Oahu beach where he meets telephone operator Wanda Russell (Loretta Swit). Of Wanda, her best friend Shirley Harris (Lynne Ellen Hollinger) later says that she befriends men like picking up strays: "cats, dogs, birds with broken wings." Kline is philosophical about the many life forms on the beach, some of which are miniscule in size. The "memories" theme is heard for the first of several times in this show.
McGarrett speculates that Kline is carrying on his research in "a place with pretty sophisticated equipment," and this is true — Kline is using the facilities of Advanced Medical Research Laboratory. He has been working there under the name of Arnold Clay for five months. Because Kline is sweating profusely and haggard-looking, Dr. Soong (Yankee Chang), the boss of the place, tells him that he "look[s] like one of the specimens I've seen around here." Kline calls 737-7914 from the lab (the number there is 732-5577) and has problems, so he dials the operator. By a strange coincidence, he gets Wanda, who recognizes his voice.
Kline brushes her off and goes to see the man he was calling, Abel Morgan (Karl Swensson). Kline's relationship with Morgan, who is blind and makes wooden sculptures and ships in bottles, is peculiar. Their conversation is also philosophical, with Kline saying, "War is no longer restricted to battlefields. People don't know, they don't realize. Men who are devoted to saving lives, fighting disease, have been turned into puppets, made to use their knowledge of living things to kill living things."
Wanda comes to Morgan's store, having tracked Kline down from the phone number and other information he gave her. While kind of embarrassed to admit she is stalking him, she takes Kline home because she thinks he is suffering from malaria and tells him to stay there and relax while she goes to work. Before she leaves, Wanda looks at Kline's test tube containing the deadly pathogen as he is hallucinating on her couch.
McGarrett and Danno go to the laboratory where Soong identifies Kline from a picture and tells them that the scientist has been working there on something "secretive." Danno and Kono check out what is supposed to be Kline's home address, but it is a vacant lot. McGarrett gets Benjamin to come to the lab and examine Kline's work area. They find nothing that is helpful other than a whale-tooth scrimshaw which was probably used as a paperweight. Chin Ho manages to track this down to Morgan, who makes things like this, perhaps another example of the trope "Honolulu was not such a big town in the early 1970s." Morgan is not too helpful, other than to say that he senses that Kline is "dying," that he is "a pained man, a Ionely man. He's searching for peace in the certainty of death. A peace that he never found in life."
When Wanda returns to her apartment from work early after saying she was not feeling well, Kline is not at her place. She calls the lab, but he is not there either, and she hangs up before Danno, who is listening in, can trace it, but he thinks she was "the operator." Wanda returns to the beach where Kline is again hanging out. He is very annoyed by her following him, and pushes her into the water. He jumps in to rescue her and keep her from drowning.
McGarrett and Danno go to the phone company where they talk to Wanda's friend Shirley who says Wanda told her she met this "smart" guy on the beach who "talked like some kind of poet or scientist," who is obviously Kline.
Kline uses Wanda's car to take her to Leahi Hospital. When she wakes up, he tells her "to get up out of this bed, get in your car, drive home, pack your bags and leave for the mainland today," because of the impending doom of his bio-weapon. Meanwhile, the hospital has alerted Five-O and the cops that Kline is there. McGarrett and Danno encounter him in the hallway and after pursuing him outside, Kline is taken into custody and confined to a bed in the hospital. No matter how hard anyone tries to persuade Kline of the insanity of his plan to unleash his deadly creation and kill three-quarters of a million people on Oahu as a protest against the evils of this kind of warfare and to show that "the world is on the brink of a terrible catastrophe," he will not listen to them. Sindell says, "The man is a lunatic. He's a criminal. More perverted and dangerous than Hitler." Sindell totally freaks out because his wife is in the same hospital and cannot be moved.
(This is where part one of the show ends; part two begins with a lengthy "Previously On" which extends into the first act.)
McGarrett tries to get Wanda to break through Kline's shell. She is still unaware of Kline's real intentions, and McGarrett straightens her out: "Alex has created a germ, the only one of its kind. A microscopic organism so powerful and so deadly that a thimbleful, one thimbleful, is capable of destroying all life. [He created this] with the help of the government. He's trying to show that the world is on the brink of a terrible catastrophe. He thinks by wiping out all life in Hawaii he can save the rest of the world." However, Wanda's pleas end with Kline screaming at her to get out of his hospital room.
After a phone conversation with someone very high up (likely the President), Kaye decides to call on the services of Dr. Malden (Ken Drake), who has been flown to Hawaii in preparation for the eventuality of seriously dealing with Kline. Malden is rushed to the hospital. He enters Kline's room with a doom-filled aura about him. Kline recognizes Malden, calling him "the great mind bender."
After being tied to his bed and injected with drugs, likely sodium pentothal, Malden goes to work, pretending to be Kline's mother in a scene which is totally creepy. This does not work, because Kline knows that his mother is dead, and he buried her. Malden tries another tack: "Yes, Alex, your mother is gone. She's gone. And you can't see her anymore. But we are going on a little trip now. A little journey through time and space into the very depths of your mind, through all the little corners." This angle does not work either. Malden reports to Kaye and the others that Kline "has a mind like imprisoned steam, the more it is pressed, the more it rises to resist the pressure." Kline does reveal that he has hidden his creation in a test tube under a pier somewhere but does not provide its location.
McGarrett decides on another approach to their dilemma: let Kline leave the hospital. Kaye thinks this is crazy, but McGarrett says, "He may change his mind, he may want to see if the vial is still all right and lead us to it … It's a calculated risk, but at least it's positive. Keeping him confined here is just waiting for the end to come … Now, I'm hoping and praying that if we leave him alone for a while he may come to his senses … If I lose him, Mr. Kaye, you think it really matters?"
Kline is released and tailed by Five-O and HPD. He goes to Morgan's place where the sculptor is waiting for the end. Morgan tells Kline, "Stop thinking with your mind. Start feeling with your heart." Kline leaves and goes to Wanda's place where she tells him that she is going to the yacht harbor to take a boat with some friends to get far away from Oahu.
There is yet more philosophical conversation from Kline, including some that seems left over from the episode "Killer Bee": "A long time ago I had a beehive. And on long summer days, it used to be a place of fascination for me. The buzzing, mixture of smells. And I always had a great respect and fondness for those little creatures, how they hatched out of their cells, each having his own work to do, answering an inborn sense of responsibility, one to the other. (Wanda: People aren't bees, Alex.) No, Wanda. But the person who loves life will answer the same call. He understands the relationship between the living cell and the human body or the bee to the hive. And somehow I've got to do this for the hive."
Kline drives Wanda in her car to the docks, where one of the men named Bill going on the trip recognizes Kline from newspaper photos and starts hassling and eventually punching him. McGarrett and Danno, who are nearby, separate the two. Wanda decides that she is not going on the yacht, telling Kline, "I'd rather die with you than without you." Kline suddenly tells McGarrett that he will take him to the pier where the test tube containing the bacteria is located. It is located "about two miles from Hawaii Kai Road at Coral Cove." However, when they arrive at the pier, the vial is gone.
With only five hours left before the bacteria takes its effect, Chin Ho quickly gets a lead that some surfer was seen around the pier and possibly picked up the test tube (perhaps thinking it was drugs or something). Kaye is annoyed about all this, wanting the vial to be preserved because "it could be the ultimate safeguard of our national defense," but McGarrett does not agree. The top cop already has requested an Army decontamination unit which shows up very quickly. At the shack where Kit the surfer lives (and he did pick up the test tube), he turns off the radio just as an urgent bulletin is about to be read. He then knocks the vial on the floor where the cork gets loose and bubbles appear at its top. (The amount of liquid in the test tube changes from shot to shot in this sequence.)
The leaking liquid has its expected effect, with Kit stumbling out onto a nearby road where he dies looking like the cows at the beginning of the show. He is found by a woman driving down the road who phones the operator from a nearby booth. She coincidentally gets Shirley who then calls Wanda who just happens to be back at her apartment with Kline. The phone booth the woman was calling from was on the Kapua Highway, not far from Wanda's.
Wanda and Kline rush to the scene. The woman who found Kit's body just happens to know that the surfer lived in a nearby shack, and Kline rushes there where he finds the leaking vial on the floor, picks it up and buries it in the sand outside. The team from the army makes short work of the surfer's shack, setting it on fire and destroying it with a flamethrower. Kaye and Benjamin show up, but are restrained by the soldiers. Kaye looks very pissed. Kline who hid the test tube "to gain time to keep it from circulating in the air" (?) suddenly has a change of heart, and tells the soldiers the vial is under the sand, and it is also incinerated.
As McGarrett holds the screaming Wanda back, Kline moves away towards the beach where he expires.
This show, written by Anthony Lawrence and based on a story by executive producer and series creator Leonard Freeman, deals with serious issues and is much better than the season's earlier "Sweet Terror" which also dealt with bio-terrorism. A two-hour slot is almost too much for this show, but it would have been difficult to boil down to just a single episode. Like the method of transmission in "Sweet Terror," I have serious reservations about the way the killer bacteria would have been spread to the entire island of Oahu (not to mention other Hawaiian islands). When we see the liquid escaping from the test tube at the surfer's hut, it seens pretty insignificant, and not in danger of causing an catastrophic effect of some kind.
Most of the show is pretty logical, though with a couple of pretty far-fetched coincidences. I really don't understand where did Kline and Morgan originally get together.
The episode makes reference to actual events, including anthrax experiments with sheep on Gruinard Island in Scotland in 1942, which caused the island to be quarantined until 1990; the Dugway sheep incident," where six thousand sheep near the Army's Proving Ground at Dugway, Utah were killed by nerve gas in 1968; and an incident where Okinawan children suffered skin burns when swimming south of an Army ordinance camp in 1968. (The last two are referred to in a Life magazine article of August 22, 1969.) There is also talk of various real plague-like diseases including Q fever, Rift Valley fever and glanders and a device called a "Firefly detector," which is used to detect life forms in outer space.
The acting in the show is of a high caliber. Loretta Swit gives a touching performance as Wanda and like his character in season one's "Up Tight," Ed Flanders as Kline convinces us that he will not be swayed from his beliefs, as crazy as they may be.
The score is attributed to Shores, but contains several stock sequences, including the "memories" theme at least five times and "crappy rock music" at the shack of Kit the surfer. Kline's toxic substance in a test tube is accompanied by a weird electronic sound like a rattlesnake.
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CASUALTY LIST:
Injury: Wanda Russell is pushed off cliff into the ocean by Kline. She must be injured in some way, or maybe she almost drowned, because he drives her to the hospital in her car after this happens.
Death: Kit the surfer dies of exposure to the "Q Strain."
Death: Kline dies of exposure to the "Q Strain."
MORE TRIVIA:
There is no promo for this two-part episode on the second season DVD set. Whether one exists is not known.
Casting director Ted Thorpe plays one of the doctors who try unsuccessfully to figure out what happened to the animals of the title near the beginning of the show.
Kit, the surfer who takes the toxic test tube from under the pier where Kline hid it, has banners on the wall of his shack which read "Love is your own thing," "Make love, not war" and "Flower power." There is also a poster from Peace Magazine which was featured in season one's "Not That Much Different." Among the food in the shack is what looks like Del Monte relish and bottled Fresca. As McGarrett and Danno try to find Kit, there is one shot of a car with just one person in it followed by another shot of the same car containing both of them.
McGarrett snaps his fingers several times (at least six).
Interestingly, actor Ken Drake who plays the sinister Dr. Malden, served in the navy and marines during World War II and in Korea as a surgical technician on a neurosurgical team.
A scrimshaw, shaped somewhat differently than the one in this show, was also featured in S04E03 of the new Five-0.
Wanda lives in an apartment building at 2466 Waimea Drive which is seen in other episodes, and her room contains hippie-like posters. There is a toy drinking bird at Wanda's place.
The entrance to the morgue in this show is different than the one seen in "Sweet Terror."
When McGarrett and Danno are interviewing Wanda's friend Shirley, she says "Some of the girls said he [Kline] had some kind of contagious disease?", but how would women other than herself (Wanda's best friend) know this? Did Wanda tell this to some of the other women at the phone company?
GALLERY:
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This final season two episode, like the last one for season one, is kind of a letdown. The chemistry between the two lead characters — jewel thief Janet Kingston (a.k.a. Camilla Carver, played by Joanne Linville, the quack doctor from season one's "Once Upon A Time") and the skinny Michael Olson (Christopher Cary, who is highly reminiscent of another English actor, Michael York) — is peculiar, to say the least.
The show begins in New York City, where Kingston comes to a jewellery store where Dietrich (Hans Collin), an "iceman" or stonecutter, has made an exact duplicate of a necklace featuring an emerald known as the Crown of Polynesia, soon to play a major role in the show. After examining it, she shoots Dietrich dead and leaves the store, taking the necklace with her.
In the next scene, Danno is inexplicably at the store (in New York, actually Hawaii) where Lieutenant Carlo (Hal Lewis), an NYPD detective is investigating the murder. I don't understand this at all. Danno says, "McGarrett thought I might be able to find a connecting link beween Dietrich and somebody in Hawaii." The detective does give Danno a couple of preliminary stones where Dietrich tried to duplicate the Queen which he made based on a magazine picture, but is this jewel internationally recognized to the extent that someone would realize its connection with the islands and contact Five-O? We don't find out about Kingston's connection to Dietrich until much later in the episode, when it is revealed that she did time in Illinois and Kansas for jewel theft.
When Danno gets back to Honolulu, McGarrett is nervous about what these duplicates may portend, and when the Governor shows up at his office with Kimo Kohono, president of the Hawaiian Cultural Society (whose name is spelled "Kahoano" in the subtitles, same as the sometime actor on the show), John Sey, curator of the Bishop Museum, and Jim Bradley, representative of the Vandervoort family who currently own the necklace and will soon be presenting it to the state at the upcoming Kamehameha Day ceremonies, McGarrett tries to get them to cancel or delay the show. Predictably, the Governor pooh-poohs this idea, even after shown the paste copies of the necklace that Danno brought back from New York, because "invitations have already been sent out" and "people are coming from all over the world to see that stone."
Kingston returns to Hawaii where she has formulated a plan to grab the Queen with the help of Michael, who has found a "mark" to assist them, Thurman Elliott (George Gaynes), a former Hollywood actor who is down on his luck and short of money. Michael saw Elliott pocketing an expensive bracelet at a party recently. The actor's granddaughter Amanda (Druanne Setlow) is participating in the upcoming ceremonies so he will be attending with her, though this is never mentioned anywhere in the show. They convince Elliott that if he lets Kingston accompany him to the pageant as his date where they can pull off a switch of the jewel, they will not say a word about the stolen bracelet.
McGarrett is in charge of security for the ceremonies and it is a nightmare, because the event is being held at the Makaha Inn, which has at least 20 or 30 entrances and exits. in addition to the Five-O team, there will be 122 cops from HPD present.
Two days later, the ceremony begins and a "historical re-enactment" from the 1850s takes place with a man in a captain's uniform representing Ryker Vandervoort along with a Hawaiian woman (Kanoe Cazimero) playing his bride who is wearing the Queen around her neck. As the two walk towards the platform where the Governor is giving a platitudinous speech over four minutes long, Kingston, who is sitting with Elliott nearby, takes a rose which Michael has poisoned and gives it to the woman, who pricks her hand on its thorns. This causes the woman to pass out briefly, and Kingston rushes to the woman to fan her and make a switch with the phony necklace using sleight-of-hand. This is kind of dumb, because Kingston is the only person at the well-attended event who has any contact with the "bride." Doesn't anyone consider this to be suspicious?
More skullduggery takes place as Kingston slips the jewel to Michael, who is working as a waiter at the party. He has difficulty trying to get past the security and out of the hotel grounds, so he puts the jewels in a tiki mug and Kingston tells Elliott's granddaughter Amanda to take it outside and give it to Michael who will be wearing a cop's uniform. There is no indication how he switches from his waiter's getup to that of a cop; it's not like he knocked out a cop or something, though he is shown getting into a locker with a key.
When Amanda brings the tiki to Michael, he grabs it away from her and flees in a car. McGarrett, having figured out what is going on, is witness to all this, and he jumps in a helicopter used to ferry guests to the hotel and follows Michael as he escapes driving down nearby roads. He fires a couple of shots at Michael, who runs the car into a beach where it gets stuck in the sand. Busted by McGarrett, the two of them return to the party where Kingston is also taken into custody.
The ending of the show is kind of dumb. Elliott feels bad about his role in the theft, though both he and his granddaughter were threatened. Amanda knows that he was in trouble, and she is also aware of the fact that he is not doing well financially, because he was having difficulty scraping together enough money to send her to a school in Maryland like her mother which costs over $4,000 a year. To sort of break the ice, Elliott recites a line to Amanda taken from one of his movies in the late 1930s and she identifies this film immediately. He tells her "The little lady wins herself a free ride on the roller coaster," but McGarrett instead gives her a ride on the hotel's helicopter, which he just returned on!
There are a lot of assumptions in this episode that everything will work like clockwork with Kingston's near-perfect crime: that the girl will prick her finger on the rose, that no one will see Kingston pulling the switch, and that crowds surrounding the fainting girl will keep Five-O from seeing what is going on. And it does work pretty well.
I find the relationship of the financially destitute Gaynes with his granddaughter peculiar, though there is nothing sinister about it. Where are the girl's parents? Is she just visiting him in Hawaii or something?
The most positive thing about the show is the brilliant color of the outdoor photography at the Makaha Inn. As well, this is the first episode where a musical theme (sung by some children dressed in hula outfits, though the children are actually not singing) is introduced that will be heard numerous times in other episodes. I have tried to determine if this is an actual Hawaiian melody, and the general consensus seems to be that it is not, and the tune was created specifically for the show. (This sound clip is revised, and includes the whole cue.)
WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
Kingston is showing the fake necklace to Michael, who is painting the rose thorns with poison. She demonstrates how she can make it disappear, then reappear in his shirt pocket. She tells him, "Kiss the Queen goodbye."
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EPISODE PROMO:
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CASUALTY LIST:
Death: Dietrich is shot by Janet Kingston, a.k.a. Camilla Carver.
Injury: "Vandervoort's bride" is drugged by Kingston when given a doctored rose.
Injury: Amanda, Thurman Elliot's granddaughter, is thrown to the ground by Michael Olson.
MORE TRIVIA:
In a stock shot of New York at the beginning of the show, two movie theatre marquees are shown, one for Flight of the Phoenix (a 1965 film) and the other for The Oscar (from 1966). The shots of New York City at the beginning are very grainy. Lt. Carlo, the New York cop, refers to Hawaii as "Hawaiiya."
After Kingston shoots Dietrich, she leaves her fingerprints all over a phonograph and record which is playing to ostensibly cover up sounds which people upstairs might hear.
In his speech at the ceremonies, the governor makes reference to "golden, friendly, proud people [i.e., native Hawaiians]," not too many of whom are in attendance at the gathering. The Governor mentions "Samuel King," who was a previous Governor of Hawaii in real life.
The Five-O team are nattily attired in servants' uniforms (McGarrett in a red jacket, Danno in blue like a waiter, Kono and Chin in white). When Kono and Chin are in their servants' getup, I wonder why people are always making fun of Kono's weight — sChin seems much tubbier!
The show runs through several stock shots in one sequence: McGarrett and Danno running down the Iolani Palace steps at the beginning of the show (Danno's suit color has changed from what it was in the office), turning the corner (there are three people in the car, rather than two), driving from right to left beside the Ala Wai Canal, and driving from left to right in front of the "balcony." Some of the music accompanying this is "The Chase" from the the Five-O soundtrack album.
The curator of the Bishop Museum is named Yung Sei, spelled John Sey in the DVD subtitles. (I don't know where this information comes from!)
When Kingston and Michael are taken away at the end of the show, the cops are using what looks like a purple muscle car, not a typical HPD squad car.
According to William Miller, "the helicopter in this episode crashed less than four months after the show was filmed. N1450W had an engine failure. No one was killed but the aircraft was destroyed."
An October, 2014 news story says "The Makaha Hotel and Resort in West Oahu, which has been closed for about three years, will be demolished as soon as possible to make way for future redevelopment of the property that may include the rebuilding of a new hotel, the owner of the 40-year-old resort told Pacific Business News Tuesday." The helicopter was seemingly owned by Kenai Helicopters which had branches in both Hawaii and Alaska.
When Gaynes tries to pawn the stolen bracelet (the owner of the pawnshop is played by George Herman), the writing on the wall behind the counter is in Chinese.
A "For Lease" sign seen in a window has the phone number 955-1144.
Jeff Herman says "The last episode of the second season, "Kiss the Queen Goodbye", was apparently remastered with the wrong season's theme. Season One's opening theme is used instead of season two's. All of the other episodes have the correct musical arrangement."
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BOMB – NO STARS!
